By the way, anyone else no longer receiving daily and weekly quests since the latest patch? Not really a big issue for me yet, but I would like to have a full board of the highest XP quests lined up when the next expansion goes live in December.
Nope. I've still been getting mine, but the quests for the Hallow's End event disappeared once I finished that track, so maybe they have now coded it so it won't bother giving quests to people who have finished the rewards track?
If so, hopefully they built in a mechanism so they return shortly before the expansion launches so you can store up quests like the rest of us.
To be fair, with day 1 DH the option was basically to be "that guy" or to lose, so I suspect some of those "that guy"s were not actually "that guy"s but just people who didn't want to pull their hair out in rage every game.
Iirc, I noped out of it altogether and played some Wild instead :P I'm pretty sure the Shadowjeweler Hanar + Cheat Death combo kept me happy while Illidan destroyed Standard.
What's kind of weird with the effort put towards diamond cards is that the large majority of it goes towards skins for legendary mercs. Many of these fly under the radar because they're not exactly easy to obtain, though to their credit, they do hand a decent number of them out through merc events so they aren't completely missed. I actually have a bit of a problem though because my laptop tanks badly if I use multiple diamond mercs simultaneously, so I tend not to use them even when I own them. (I make an exception for my diamond Valeera, but I may be a little bit biased there...)
Frankly, I'm surprised we haven't had either diamond C'thun of N'zoth for a complete WotOG set yet, since we already have diamond-ified versions of their original art.
Rattlegore's Babbling Book task is a nightmare to prepare for i dont know what to even do
Since the final fight forces everything to be casters (kinda), you don't need to worry too much about your own role balance, so long as you have a team able to reach the end. Having ways to switch to fighters will help though (I used Garona and Tess for this).
Otherwise, having a team that can cast every spell school (Arcane, Fel, Fire, Frost, Holy, Nature and Shadow) will obviously harm your ability to make an especially synergistic team. I started by looking at the naga, since they have a whole 'use lots of spell schools' sub-theme, but couldn't get everything in it. An even bigger problem is actually that you need a way to switch your mercs in and out - or otherwise wait for them to be killed - to use all the spell schools. Again, Garona helped since she can bounce out at the end of each turn.
In the end, I used the following mercs, each listed with the spell schools they provide:
Garona (Shadow, Nature, and Holy is often offered in her 3rd ability due to her draenai heritage)
Tess (Shadow, Arcane, and can principle steal others too, but I didn't do that)
Vashj (Nature, Fel)
Khadgar (Arcane, Frost, Fire)
Balinda (Frost, Fire)
Natalie (Holy, Shadow)
That gave me multiple options for every spell school except Fel, so I had to make sure Vashj didn't die on the way there. In the end, I only used Garona, Tess, Khadgar and Vashj in the final fight. Tess was mainly helpful because she can become a fighter like Garona, meaning I could get through the fight pretty efficiently, but Natalie would be 'safer' to fill in the Holy school in case Garona doesn't discover one. Either way, just make sure Vashj gets the Fel ability off and you shouldn't have too much trouble filling in the rest. Thankfully the fight itself doesn't require any super specific plan to win.
I guess it could be being tracked in the background, or be possible to retroactively calculate (the game does already track everything that dies for res effects, even when you don't hard run those cards), so I assume the effects should work normally. It should be a common enough occurrence that Blizz won't have missed it and would hopefully not choose to make it a feels bad moment every time you somehow get a corpse-counting card.
Whether they have the counter appear for the player in this instance is another question altogether. Ideally it would, of course, but we might just have to wing it and estimate/remember the count for ourselves.
Of course not every theme goes in every deck, and you are right that several other classes have 2 sides that barely overlap. Warlock is the one I normally think of for that. My point here with DH is that its separate sides each mirror other classes a bit too closely, meaning at a deck/archetype level DH's overall distinct design loses a lot of its distinctness. On paper it's great to have something like rogue/hunter with access to AoE - that's clearly different - but if that doesn't really apply to archetypes then it is debatable whether it counts.
There's definitely scope for this state to improve if DH gets more one-sided AoE like Glaiveshark so it doesn't mess up the small minion side of the class. Now I think about it, that card is another good example of where DH IS mixing identities in a unique way. So I'm not saying DH can't be worth its weight, just that still it needs more work to convince me. It doesn't help when the 'new' things in the class are like the Barrens' deathrattle package, which could easily have been copy + pasted into either hunter or rogue without being out of place. But that's on the set design team more than the overarching class design.
As for DH's attack buffs being closest to druid... yes, I should have remembered that. It's notable druid sits alongside rogue and hunter with AoE weaknesses and a focus on small minions, so on paper DH's hero attacks + minion aggro really sits in the space between pirate rogue and a hypothetical token druid with hero attack synergies, or even an aggro/token hunter with more weapon use than normal. The question is whether that space is wide enough to need an extra class to explore, especially while not really using the parts of DH that those three classes don't have? Perhaps if token DH leaned more heavily on the token sacrifice side then I'd be all for it, but for now those cards don't make up enough of the deck to really set it apart.
I think team5 have made very good and successful attempts at making dhunter distinct. Quest dhunter, and the current vomit dhunter are distinct playstyles that has no other comparisons. Even its true weakness; freezing face, is something no other classes suffers quite as badly as dhunter does.
Aside from the fact Quest DH could functionally have been in any class with tons of card draw (most notably supporting a miracle rogue variant), and vomit DH is arguably just the latest iteration of disco-lock... at a time when warlock also has discard synergies so it's not even taking up the mantle so warlock can branch out elsewhere. (I assume disco-lock will be supported in the next expansion, else the Core set choices were very weird.)
Anyway, the main reason for splitting hairs here is that each class entails a bunch of extra effort to maintain. It's another class to balance, and I don't recall anyone ever saying the first 9 classes weren't already diverse enough, especially as they picked up new archetypes over time. People just discuss(ed) getting new classes because it's flashy and an interesting design discussion. So in my mind, unless each additional class explores completely new areas of design space, they're just adding complications for relatively minor gains and aren't worth the trouble.
I'm not saying DH is a badly designed class, at least not these days. Taken in isolation it's perfectly fine. It's also difficult to say how well handled the game would have been without it, since we don't live in that universe. It could be it made all the same mistakes and DH was just a purely positive extra option, but I have my doubts.
Part of the issue is that those aspects don't all go together. At all. E.g., most DH decks don't run the symmetrical AoE, and those that do are remarkably close to warlock, which also has symmetrical AoE, lots of lifesteal for healing, and whose big demon synergies are near identical. And do we really think Il'gynoth and the surrounding OTK deck would have looked out of place in warlock? No. Sure, DH attacks with the hero even there, but when it's primarily being used as removal it's not functionally much different to using the removal spells like warlock does.
On the other side of things, DH's token synergies would be perfectly reasonable in hunter, where they could make virtually the same deck. Indeed, Swarm of Locusts existed before DH turned up, and token hunter is very much a thing currently. Meanwhile, a lot of the focus on attack buffs and synergies with hero attacks have long existed in rogue (though I appreciate there is a functional difference between 1-turn buffs and weapon buffs), as has combining "low-impact cards with incredible card draw".
As it stands, the only place DH genuinely combines the attack buffs alongside token cards is with Kurtrus, Demon-Render's hero power, but you could easily make a hunter card do functionally the same thing through direct face damage instead. Meanwhile, in RR rogue was encouraged to make an even-cost token pirate deck utilising hero attacks to spawn tokens with Sharkfin Fan and converting the wide board into damage with Cannon Barrage. The issue was, well, it was RR so it was really weak.
Don't get me wrong, I don't dislike DH like I did in 2020, I just feel like its selling points always end up being things that either already exist elsewhere, or only don't exist because the devs have always half-arsed it in the other classes. The Kurtrus hero power was the sort of thing the class needs to be doing more of, or truly unique things like sigils which would have worked well alongside a dormant for X turns theme. FWIW, I find outcast too limiting for slow decks to give it as much attention as a class keyword should get.
I broadly agree with you, though my concerns are more long-term than the inevitable balance catastrophe at the start. If DK is going to be worth adding, it needs to feel truly distinct from all existing classes. Obviously it will overlap mechanically with a few - that's fine - but it needs to combine these mechanics in ways that make it unique to play. It can't just throw together freeze effects and deathrattle minions, for instance, because Skeleton mage is already doing that.
To me, DH's biggest problem was always that it never really felt like it fused the different aspects of rogue, hunter and warlock very well. Rogue and hunter are already close together in many ways, so decks that just mix them don't actually add much new. Then it suffers from inheriting tools from warlock that don't make much sense in those decks, and rarely get used together. The end result being some decks that could easily have been put in either rogue or hunter with minimal changes, and some that could have been put in warlock. The small differences DH does bring to these decks is hardly worth the upkeep of an entire class imo.
Quote From AngryShuckieThe good news is, I beat the bounty and can legitimately give you a winning strategy. The bad news is I took my favourite meme team of the female rogue characters:
I see no bad news here. While that's not a team I would have come up with, it worked, and on the first try!
Valeera snagged an Assassinate 2, and Tess picked up a Darkmoon Rabbit; both of those were very helpful.
Mask of Rage is the equipment that Garrosh provides, and now it is mine, thanks to your good advice.
I'm glad they did their job so effectively :)
I find that team to be a perfect counter-example against the people who talk like Mercs (PvE) only encourages a few optimised teams. In reality you can find success throwing together all sorts of mercs, even in max-level heroic bounties, so there is nothing stopping us just messing around with what we find fun, rather than what's efficient.
That said, there were some refinements along the way, with Maiev and Hooktusk being left out for a reason. Maiev's issue was that she was a bit too slow, since Maestra and Valeera really wanted someone to have a speed 3 attack to avoid tripping over each other. Hence why Vanessa + Dreadblades was so important. Also, while Maiev does have some of the usual rogue role changing and bench bouncing to fit that theme, hers are are a bit awkward to make good use of in PvE.
As for Hooktusk, she's all about role changing, which is redundant in a team that already changes its own roles so much. So she just never felt needed, and Aranna took her place. Ending with a nice balance of 2 protectors, 2 fighters and 2 casters, with 1 of each being able to change roles on a whim.
With the coin changes coming, I thought I might try and collect a few missing equipments. Maestra has me stuck. She's supposed to be on a team beating Heroic Garrosh.
With an orc comp, I can barely beat Garrosh on Normal. Dragons also got their tails handed to them. What else should I try?
It had been a while since I last went against Garrosh, so I just went and did this bounty (heroic) to remind myself of what he's all about. Clearly, he's teched pretty hard against most spell-heavy teams, so I understand picking something attack-heavy like orcs, especially since Maestra is herself an orc.
The good news is, I beat the bounty and can legitimately give you a winning strategy. The bad news is I took my favourite meme team of the female rogue characters:
Tess (using Steadfast Convictions equipment)
Vanessa (using Dreadbaldes; maxed to get Burgle Barrage to speed 3, which is important for combo reasons with both Maestra and Valeera)
Valeera (using Unnatural Smoke)
Garona (using Shadowstep)
Maestra (using Mask of Mimicry; hopefully that's not the one you get from completing this bounty!)
Aranna (using Iambic Pentameter; yes I know she's a DH, but she was a rogue before that and she fits the theme!)
The team is very... shananigans-y. There's lots of bouncing around and changing positions, not to mention tons of role changing. It also has stealth, speed changing, attack debuffs and discovering abilities. Frankly, it's a lot of fun, and avoids the usual problem of becoming boring by just using the same abilities over and over because it's so damn janky you have to change plans on the fly. I finish so many fights with this team thinking "well that was a scrappy mess, but somehow it worked" :P
As for how well it fared against Garrosh... well, both Maestra and Valeera managed to pick up Assassinate 2 along the way, so I insta-killed 2 enemies before the fight began. That trivialised it somewhat, and means I don't really know how well they'd fare normally. But it's worth noting the team can actually do that, and usually getting just a single Assassinate 2 will make things much, much easier. So it's definitely a real advantage. It does mean you'll want to brave the elite encounters to get it though.
Otherwise, you'd be surprised how effective this team ends up being when you get used to using it. Every merc is independently good, and while there isn't lots of obvious synergy, they do work well together. The attack debuffs help with survival as you quickly punch the enemy. Also, by being an attack-based team, it should be OK against Garrosh.
Defensively, the team is weirdly tanky. Valeera hides in stealth; Aranna can bounce out of there, obliterate the enemies' attack stats and switch places to redirect attacks; Garona can draw all the fire from protector-heavy teams, using Shimmering Toxin to tank all/most of the damage before yeeting herself back to the bench; while Tess provides some healing while simply having the best base stats of any merc, plus she can easily change her role to remove weaknesses. Vanessa often attacks first and returns to the bench when Maestra swaps in, so she rarely takes much damage. Maestra herself is often the only one in much danger of dying, but between gaining role advantage and helping nuke enemies faster than they can kill us back, she's normally fine.
I could go on, but it's such a weird team you're probably best off just trying it out and learning the rest of its quirks for yourself. I highly doubt it's the optimal way to beat Garrosh, but I do know it works, and most of all, it's a lot of fun.
"Huge" is overplaying it a bit, don't you think? You could previously complete 4 of these at once with the other 2 slots being used for whichever choice of merc you use to easily beat up Xaravan (I usually used Varian or Y'Shaaraj, and the other 5 mercs don't matter much). Now... you can still do exactly the same. Sure, you might not manage to complete 6 of these tasks simultaneously very easily, but getting 4 done is fine.
So, if you are seeing this as a "huge nerf" I suggest you invest a little in Y'Shaaraj (who only needs coins to max out Defiled Attack and Mark of Y'Shaaraj) or Varian (just max out Retaliation and War Banner), and you'll be able to do this just as easily as before.
I always feel like the point in the undead is that they are denied death, so it is actually out of flavour for DKs to want their minions to fully die, hence reborn makes way more sense than deathrattle does as a class mechanic. So while I'm not sure whether they'd bring back the reborn keyword for the class, it would certainly fit well and alleviate the issue of having too many deathrattle classes.
Alternatively they could have cards akin to Infiltrator Lilian, which moves between the living and undead states via her deathrattle. She's like a middle ground between deathrattle and reborn, allowing for the 2 parts to have different effects. I expect that would lead to fairly normal deathrattle synergies though.
Kinda, but then I'd have to spend the same amount on the paid rewards track. It's certainly an improvement, especially if I'd done that at the start of the expansion, but still not worth it.
Between FitB boring me, UiS making me hate the game, other matters taking priority in life, Runestones and general weariness from 8.5 years playing HS, I've lost a lot of interest in the game and find it much easier to argue against spending anything. I went into Nathria knowing I main rogue so much I really don't need cards from most classes, so only opened ~60 packs then called it a day. Turns out that was the right choice as I haven't felt like I've been missing anything important, indeed I don't think I've played anything other than rogue and DH this expansion, so extra packs would have been pretty meaningless. The end result is even all those extra goodies on the rewards track - including the extra XP - have next to no value to me. Hence 2000 Runestones (~£16) for a friendly Aranna skin and a Maiev skin I'll never use just isn't worth it in either bundle.
Breaking bundles up into individual items would definitely help, especially here in the UK where it is still drastically cheaper to buy Runestones in batches of 500 than anything else. So to get a 2000 Runestone bundle I need to go through the "is this worth it?" debate a whole 4 times more than I would if it was straight cash!
I had already gone back to F2P for the Nathria expansion due to a lot of my focus being elsewhere, but unless something changes the Runestones will cement that as a permanent choice. It's a shame, because I really do like that Aranna portrait, and I was a dolphin who wouldn't have needed much of a nudge to get it previously.
The Aranna skin is the perfect 'friendly DH' skin I've been waiting years for. If only it wasn't bundled up with a Maiev skin I'd never use and behind Runestones providing extra stages to let my doubts win the debate. Better luck next time Blizz.
I think you can view juries like democracies. Few voters know much about running a country, yet we still let them decide who should do it. That doesn't guarantee the population ends up liking the government, or even that the government does a better job than a monarch who's been trained for it all their life would, but most of the world has agreed it's still the best approach overall.
For what it's worth, jurors don't actually need to know anything beyond what illegal activity the defendant has been accused of. All they are being asked to decide is whether the defendant did it or not, and the judge decides how to apply the law from there.
The Gilneans only got the worgen curse quite recently (so Tess didn't inherit it), and she was never bitten like her dad was. So she's just a normal human. There was a quest where she wanted to become a worgen to better understand her people when she becomes queen, but didn't go through with it in the end (see https://wowpedia.fandom.com/wiki/Tess_Greymane#Battle_for_Azeroth).
Aww, Tess is playing with everyone's favourite Witchwood good boy, Blink Fox. That's adorable, and I'm taking it as confirmation that Blink Fox is basically her pet.
Nope. I've still been getting mine, but the quests for the Hallow's End event disappeared once I finished that track, so maybe they have now coded it so it won't bother giving quests to people who have finished the rewards track?
If so, hopefully they built in a mechanism so they return shortly before the expansion launches so you can store up quests like the rest of us.
To be fair, with day 1 DH the option was basically to be "that guy" or to lose, so I suspect some of those "that guy"s were not actually "that guy"s but just people who didn't want to pull their hair out in rage every game.
Iirc, I noped out of it altogether and played some Wild instead :P I'm pretty sure the Shadowjeweler Hanar + Cheat Death combo kept me happy while Illidan destroyed Standard.
In a word, yes. See my answer here for how I did it: https://outof.cards/forums/hearthstone/game-modes/mercenaries/18130-beat-that-bounty-boss?page=7#comment-233804
What's kind of weird with the effort put towards diamond cards is that the large majority of it goes towards skins for legendary mercs. Many of these fly under the radar because they're not exactly easy to obtain, though to their credit, they do hand a decent number of them out through merc events so they aren't completely missed. I actually have a bit of a problem though because my laptop tanks badly if I use multiple diamond mercs simultaneously, so I tend not to use them even when I own them. (I make an exception for my diamond Valeera, but I may be a little bit biased there...)
Frankly, I'm surprised we haven't had either diamond C'thun of N'zoth for a complete WotOG set yet, since we already have diamond-ified versions of their original art.
Since the final fight forces everything to be casters (kinda), you don't need to worry too much about your own role balance, so long as you have a team able to reach the end. Having ways to switch to fighters will help though (I used Garona and Tess for this).
Otherwise, having a team that can cast every spell school (Arcane, Fel, Fire, Frost, Holy, Nature and Shadow) will obviously harm your ability to make an especially synergistic team. I started by looking at the naga, since they have a whole 'use lots of spell schools' sub-theme, but couldn't get everything in it. An even bigger problem is actually that you need a way to switch your mercs in and out - or otherwise wait for them to be killed - to use all the spell schools. Again, Garona helped since she can bounce out at the end of each turn.
In the end, I used the following mercs, each listed with the spell schools they provide:
That gave me multiple options for every spell school except Fel, so I had to make sure Vashj didn't die on the way there. In the end, I only used Garona, Tess, Khadgar and Vashj in the final fight. Tess was mainly helpful because she can become a fighter like Garona, meaning I could get through the fight pretty efficiently, but Natalie would be 'safer' to fill in the Holy school in case Garona doesn't discover one. Either way, just make sure Vashj gets the Fel ability off and you shouldn't have too much trouble filling in the rest. Thankfully the fight itself doesn't require any super specific plan to win.
I guess it could be being tracked in the background, or be possible to retroactively calculate (the game does already track everything that dies for res effects, even when you don't hard run those cards), so I assume the effects should work normally. It should be a common enough occurrence that Blizz won't have missed it and would hopefully not choose to make it a feels bad moment every time you somehow get a corpse-counting card.
Whether they have the counter appear for the player in this instance is another question altogether. Ideally it would, of course, but we might just have to wing it and estimate/remember the count for ourselves.
Of course not every theme goes in every deck, and you are right that several other classes have 2 sides that barely overlap. Warlock is the one I normally think of for that. My point here with DH is that its separate sides each mirror other classes a bit too closely, meaning at a deck/archetype level DH's overall distinct design loses a lot of its distinctness. On paper it's great to have something like rogue/hunter with access to AoE - that's clearly different - but if that doesn't really apply to archetypes then it is debatable whether it counts.
There's definitely scope for this state to improve if DH gets more one-sided AoE like Glaiveshark so it doesn't mess up the small minion side of the class. Now I think about it, that card is another good example of where DH IS mixing identities in a unique way. So I'm not saying DH can't be worth its weight, just that still it needs more work to convince me. It doesn't help when the 'new' things in the class are like the Barrens' deathrattle package, which could easily have been copy + pasted into either hunter or rogue without being out of place. But that's on the set design team more than the overarching class design.
As for DH's attack buffs being closest to druid... yes, I should have remembered that. It's notable druid sits alongside rogue and hunter with AoE weaknesses and a focus on small minions, so on paper DH's hero attacks + minion aggro really sits in the space between pirate rogue and a hypothetical token druid with hero attack synergies, or even an aggro/token hunter with more weapon use than normal. The question is whether that space is wide enough to need an extra class to explore, especially while not really using the parts of DH that those three classes don't have? Perhaps if token DH leaned more heavily on the token sacrifice side then I'd be all for it, but for now those cards don't make up enough of the deck to really set it apart.
Aside from the fact Quest DH could functionally have been in any class with tons of card draw (most notably supporting a miracle rogue variant), and vomit DH is arguably just the latest iteration of disco-lock... at a time when warlock also has discard synergies so it's not even taking up the mantle so warlock can branch out elsewhere. (I assume disco-lock will be supported in the next expansion, else the Core set choices were very weird.)
Anyway, the main reason for splitting hairs here is that each class entails a bunch of extra effort to maintain. It's another class to balance, and I don't recall anyone ever saying the first 9 classes weren't already diverse enough, especially as they picked up new archetypes over time. People just discuss(ed) getting new classes because it's flashy and an interesting design discussion. So in my mind, unless each additional class explores completely new areas of design space, they're just adding complications for relatively minor gains and aren't worth the trouble.
I'm not saying DH is a badly designed class, at least not these days. Taken in isolation it's perfectly fine. It's also difficult to say how well handled the game would have been without it, since we don't live in that universe. It could be it made all the same mistakes and DH was just a purely positive extra option, but I have my doubts.
Part of the issue is that those aspects don't all go together. At all. E.g., most DH decks don't run the symmetrical AoE, and those that do are remarkably close to warlock, which also has symmetrical AoE, lots of lifesteal for healing, and whose big demon synergies are near identical. And do we really think Il'gynoth and the surrounding OTK deck would have looked out of place in warlock? No. Sure, DH attacks with the hero even there, but when it's primarily being used as removal it's not functionally much different to using the removal spells like warlock does.
On the other side of things, DH's token synergies would be perfectly reasonable in hunter, where they could make virtually the same deck. Indeed, Swarm of Locusts existed before DH turned up, and token hunter is very much a thing currently. Meanwhile, a lot of the focus on attack buffs and synergies with hero attacks have long existed in rogue (though I appreciate there is a functional difference between 1-turn buffs and weapon buffs), as has combining "low-impact cards with incredible card draw".
As it stands, the only place DH genuinely combines the attack buffs alongside token cards is with Kurtrus, Demon-Render's hero power, but you could easily make a hunter card do functionally the same thing through direct face damage instead. Meanwhile, in RR rogue was encouraged to make an even-cost token pirate deck utilising hero attacks to spawn tokens with Sharkfin Fan and converting the wide board into damage with Cannon Barrage. The issue was, well, it was RR so it was really weak.
Don't get me wrong, I don't dislike DH like I did in 2020, I just feel like its selling points always end up being things that either already exist elsewhere, or only don't exist because the devs have always half-arsed it in the other classes. The Kurtrus hero power was the sort of thing the class needs to be doing more of, or truly unique things like sigils which would have worked well alongside a dormant for X turns theme. FWIW, I find outcast too limiting for slow decks to give it as much attention as a class keyword should get.
I broadly agree with you, though my concerns are more long-term than the inevitable balance catastrophe at the start. If DK is going to be worth adding, it needs to feel truly distinct from all existing classes. Obviously it will overlap mechanically with a few - that's fine - but it needs to combine these mechanics in ways that make it unique to play. It can't just throw together freeze effects and deathrattle minions, for instance, because Skeleton mage is already doing that.
To me, DH's biggest problem was always that it never really felt like it fused the different aspects of rogue, hunter and warlock very well. Rogue and hunter are already close together in many ways, so decks that just mix them don't actually add much new. Then it suffers from inheriting tools from warlock that don't make much sense in those decks, and rarely get used together. The end result being some decks that could easily have been put in either rogue or hunter with minimal changes, and some that could have been put in warlock. The small differences DH does bring to these decks is hardly worth the upkeep of an entire class imo.
I'm glad they did their job so effectively :)
I find that team to be a perfect counter-example against the people who talk like Mercs (PvE) only encourages a few optimised teams. In reality you can find success throwing together all sorts of mercs, even in max-level heroic bounties, so there is nothing stopping us just messing around with what we find fun, rather than what's efficient.
That said, there were some refinements along the way, with Maiev and Hooktusk being left out for a reason. Maiev's issue was that she was a bit too slow, since Maestra and Valeera really wanted someone to have a speed 3 attack to avoid tripping over each other. Hence why Vanessa + Dreadblades was so important. Also, while Maiev does have some of the usual rogue role changing and bench bouncing to fit that theme, hers are are a bit awkward to make good use of in PvE.
As for Hooktusk, she's all about role changing, which is redundant in a team that already changes its own roles so much. So she just never felt needed, and Aranna took her place. Ending with a nice balance of 2 protectors, 2 fighters and 2 casters, with 1 of each being able to change roles on a whim.
It had been a while since I last went against Garrosh, so I just went and did this bounty (heroic) to remind myself of what he's all about. Clearly, he's teched pretty hard against most spell-heavy teams, so I understand picking something attack-heavy like orcs, especially since Maestra is herself an orc.
The good news is, I beat the bounty and can legitimately give you a winning strategy. The bad news is I took my favourite meme team of the female rogue characters:
The team is very... shananigans-y. There's lots of bouncing around and changing positions, not to mention tons of role changing. It also has stealth, speed changing, attack debuffs and discovering abilities. Frankly, it's a lot of fun, and avoids the usual problem of becoming boring by just using the same abilities over and over because it's so damn janky you have to change plans on the fly. I finish so many fights with this team thinking "well that was a scrappy mess, but somehow it worked" :P
As for how well it fared against Garrosh... well, both Maestra and Valeera managed to pick up Assassinate 2 along the way, so I insta-killed 2 enemies before the fight began. That trivialised it somewhat, and means I don't really know how well they'd fare normally. But it's worth noting the team can actually do that, and usually getting just a single Assassinate 2 will make things much, much easier. So it's definitely a real advantage. It does mean you'll want to brave the elite encounters to get it though.
Otherwise, you'd be surprised how effective this team ends up being when you get used to using it. Every merc is independently good, and while there isn't lots of obvious synergy, they do work well together. The attack debuffs help with survival as you quickly punch the enemy. Also, by being an attack-based team, it should be OK against Garrosh.
Defensively, the team is weirdly tanky. Valeera hides in stealth; Aranna can bounce out of there, obliterate the enemies' attack stats and switch places to redirect attacks; Garona can draw all the fire from protector-heavy teams, using Shimmering Toxin to tank all/most of the damage before yeeting herself back to the bench; while Tess provides some healing while simply having the best base stats of any merc, plus she can easily change her role to remove weaknesses. Vanessa often attacks first and returns to the bench when Maestra swaps in, so she rarely takes much damage. Maestra herself is often the only one in much danger of dying, but between gaining role advantage and helping nuke enemies faster than they can kill us back, she's normally fine.
I could go on, but it's such a weird team you're probably best off just trying it out and learning the rest of its quirks for yourself. I highly doubt it's the optimal way to beat Garrosh, but I do know it works, and most of all, it's a lot of fun.
"Huge" is overplaying it a bit, don't you think? You could previously complete 4 of these at once with the other 2 slots being used for whichever choice of merc you use to easily beat up Xaravan (I usually used Varian or Y'Shaaraj, and the other 5 mercs don't matter much). Now... you can still do exactly the same. Sure, you might not manage to complete 6 of these tasks simultaneously very easily, but getting 4 done is fine.
So, if you are seeing this as a "huge nerf" I suggest you invest a little in Y'Shaaraj (who only needs coins to max out Defiled Attack and Mark of Y'Shaaraj) or Varian (just max out Retaliation and War Banner), and you'll be able to do this just as easily as before.
I always feel like the point in the undead is that they are denied death, so it is actually out of flavour for DKs to want their minions to fully die, hence reborn makes way more sense than deathrattle does as a class mechanic. So while I'm not sure whether they'd bring back the reborn keyword for the class, it would certainly fit well and alleviate the issue of having too many deathrattle classes.
Alternatively they could have cards akin to Infiltrator Lilian, which moves between the living and undead states via her deathrattle. She's like a middle ground between deathrattle and reborn, allowing for the 2 parts to have different effects. I expect that would lead to fairly normal deathrattle synergies though.
Kinda, but then I'd have to spend the same amount on the paid rewards track. It's certainly an improvement, especially if I'd done that at the start of the expansion, but still not worth it.
Between FitB boring me, UiS making me hate the game, other matters taking priority in life, Runestones and general weariness from 8.5 years playing HS, I've lost a lot of interest in the game and find it much easier to argue against spending anything. I went into Nathria knowing I main rogue so much I really don't need cards from most classes, so only opened ~60 packs then called it a day. Turns out that was the right choice as I haven't felt like I've been missing anything important, indeed I don't think I've played anything other than rogue and DH this expansion, so extra packs would have been pretty meaningless. The end result is even all those extra goodies on the rewards track - including the extra XP - have next to no value to me. Hence 2000 Runestones (~£16) for a friendly Aranna skin and a Maiev skin I'll never use just isn't worth it in either bundle.
Breaking bundles up into individual items would definitely help, especially here in the UK where it is still drastically cheaper to buy Runestones in batches of 500 than anything else. So to get a 2000 Runestone bundle I need to go through the "is this worth it?" debate a whole 4 times more than I would if it was straight cash!
I had already gone back to F2P for the Nathria expansion due to a lot of my focus being elsewhere, but unless something changes the Runestones will cement that as a permanent choice. It's a shame, because I really do like that Aranna portrait, and I was a dolphin who wouldn't have needed much of a nudge to get it previously.
The Aranna skin is the perfect 'friendly DH' skin I've been waiting years for. If only it wasn't bundled up with a Maiev skin I'd never use and behind Runestones providing extra stages to let my doubts win the debate. Better luck next time Blizz.
I think you can view juries like democracies. Few voters know much about running a country, yet we still let them decide who should do it. That doesn't guarantee the population ends up liking the government, or even that the government does a better job than a monarch who's been trained for it all their life would, but most of the world has agreed it's still the best approach overall.
For what it's worth, jurors don't actually need to know anything beyond what illegal activity the defendant has been accused of. All they are being asked to decide is whether the defendant did it or not, and the judge decides how to apply the law from there.
The Gilneans only got the worgen curse quite recently (so Tess didn't inherit it), and she was never bitten like her dad was. So she's just a normal human. There was a quest where she wanted to become a worgen to better understand her people when she becomes queen, but didn't go through with it in the end (see https://wowpedia.fandom.com/wiki/Tess_Greymane#Battle_for_Azeroth).
Aww, Tess is playing with everyone's favourite Witchwood good boy, Blink Fox. That's adorable, and I'm taking it as confirmation that Blink Fox is basically her pet.