You might as well just rub that 'tradeable' keyword out of sight because what fool will ever trade this for a card when its literally the one thing shaman has been screaming for since Whispers of the old gods.
You'd want to trade it away if you don't have any/much overload in hand to work with. It's good, but still situational, making it perfect to have the tradeable keyword.
I know it's not Warcraft canon, so I wasn't being super serious. But still, maybe dragging in someone 20 years gone is a bit awkward when the year is trying to mirror the early days of WoW at least reasonably closely.
That said, I would have been behind it if they were just keen to represent the characters in the statues outside Stormwind. They chose to use the Rat King instead of Alleria though for hunter, so that doesn't seem to be the case.
Hmm, I guess it fits that Blizz would mess up the time they advertise a card showing a character who should have died long before the events of the expansion. Maintaining a consistent timeline never was Team 5's strong suit.
It's arguable that I use online gaming as an outlet for the more immature sides of myself. I work in an industry where I have to be patient and responsible with ppl who are often immature (or crazy). I have to choose my words carefully and do everything holding myself in outstanding dignity.
I really have no empathy for ppl being annoyed by it. I've lived a life where unfortunately people have been very disrespectful to my face and I couldn't do much about it. I grew a tough skin against it so as not to be hurt anymore. In real life I am respectful of other people to a fault because it is the same way I'd like to be respected.
I feel that most Hearthstone ppl haven't had that same background and generally shrink from any confrontation. I just can't condone that because it defies all logic: making nothing into something. Roping? Sure that IS annoying. BMing? I honestly find it amusing.
Think about how silly it sounds that anyone can be bothered AT ALL by six preset sentences. Really, it's mind boggling.
It sounds to me like you are reflecting frustrations from real life back at the world through online BMing. It is good to have an outlet for that, and I agree that emote spamming in HS is a long way from the most damaging approach, but there must be better options that don't drag strangers into something that had nothing to do with them?
It really doesn't matter whether you are confused by their response to BMing. All that matters is that you know it does cause negative responses in some people, so you are knowingly passing your own frustrations onto other people. Maybe that makes you feel better, but shifting annoyances around like this doesn't improve things at a societal level.
In fact, the odds are quite high that the people annoying you at work are doing exactly the same thing: someone annoys them but for whatever reason they cannot resolve it with the people initially at fault, so they pass their annoyances to you by being immature when they encounter you. You then pass it on to people playing HS, who then pass it on to someone else in some other way. Eventually the cycle might come all the way back around to you. It's basically all a diffusion of frustration through society, with each step in the process more tame than the last, but spread to more people. That would be fine if little annoyances didn't accumulate in a way that makes someone as angry as if a single massive thing happened, but they can and they do.
The way to stop this cycle is simply to find ways to vent frustrations that don't pass them onto someone else. For me that might be going for a walk if I just need to calm down a little, or drumming for a while if I need to really thrash it out of me. Do whatever you like for it, just don't keep pretending BMing online is a good solution simply because you don't empathise with the people who find it annoying.
Anyway, I'll stop my side of this discussion there. Hopefully you give some of this stuff some proper thought (especially the comparison between BMing and bullying, which was made independently by 3 people), even if you still end up disagreeing with me.
1) There is a huge difference between BMing in online games and BMing in real life. I'm actually the nicest person you'd ever meet who is even soft and practical when other ppl are out of control.
2) However on games it's a different story. I love playing the part of the irate gamer and though it's not that I am hoping to make anybody upset, I couldnt care any amount less that they do. You should see me on League...
3) It's a game. Grow a thicker skin. Take it as an opportunity to challenge yourself not to be offended so easily and, hey, maybe even improve your sense of humor.
4) Don't you guys see how sad it is getting offended by someone you will never know? Think about it for once. The problem is with you not the BMers.
(I added numbers to each sentence to make it easy to address each individually.)
1) I'm glad to hear you are nice irl, but that's no consolation to anyone who has to encounter your online persona. I also challenge you to explain what the "huge difference" is between BMing online and irl? You've got to justify that if you want to convince anyone of it.
2) I'm curious about why you wouldn't care about making someone upset (or more likely annoyed) online? Is it just an 'ignorance is bliss' scenario where you don't actually know if any given player is annoyed, so you can treat it like no one is? Should that matter?
3) Oh don't worry, my skin is thick enough and I don't get upset or offended by it myself. However, I will say that everyone plays games because they want to have fun. In a game with a competition element, such as Hearthstone, you go in knowing you might lose and maybe even get salty about that. Fine. You sign up for that when you click 'Play'. What you don't sign up for is some idiot on the other side doing their best to annoy you by spamming emotes or roping. That's an abuse of the tools HS has, not part of the game we're actually there to play.
4) I'm not really sure offending people is the problem here since emotes are designed in a way that means nothing personal is said. BMing can annoy people, but that's not the same as being offended.
As for the victim shaming in "The problem is with you not the BMers", I hope you realise the logic behind that is the same as saying it is the fault of the child being bullied when they get picked on at school. It's not illegal for people to be bullies, right? So surely everyone should just put up with it? Or maybe, just maybe, it is actually the bully's fault when they play out their pathetic little power fantasy and knowingly make someone else upset.
BMing in Hearthstone is much more tame than playground bullying, and I don't normally bother making comments about it because of that, but that doesn't mean it isn't fundamentally the same thing. They are both one person deriving fun from the negative emotions of someone else, even if they are only in your imagination.
In the end, your emote spamming may only be a minor inconvenience for the opponent, but that is still an inconvenience you have knowingly set upon them. The nicest thing I can say about it is that it is selfish.
Thumbs up on revisiting Razorpetals and making them meaningful. Razorpetal Lasher was an OK card, but Blizz wasted the opportunity to make razorpetals an archetype-defining mechanic back in Un'Goro.
That depends entirely on the nature of the fun. When you have fun at the expense of others, that's not healthy unless its with a close friend/family member who you have a rapport with and who will interpret it as friendly banter (and even then you have to know their personality well enough to be sure they'll take it well). Maybe it's different in different cultures, but here in the UK trolling or mocking anyone else is viewed very negatively on the troll.
Now, squelchable emote spam might be at the least insidious end but it is still a negative, or 'unhealthy'. If you believe otherwise then I invite you to do it to strangers in real life when you aren't protected by the anonymity of the internet. Let me know how that works out... Or, if you recognise that's a bad idea, then please also recognise that what is healthy or not doesn't change just because the internet gives you a mask to hide behind.
I think quests are a fundamentally slow design, but that's OK. They've worked fine in the past (I don't agree with Aesan that they have generally been unsuccessful). The real issue is not that there is a category of decks that is weak against aggro, but that the devs have done a horrible job of establishing a good balance between aggro, control and combo over the past year. As a result everything has to be able to beat aggro, rather than being able to carve out its place by beating some other part of the meta.
By far my biggest hope for this expansion is that it can redress the balance between archetypes, not just to allow questlines to shine, but to give players more freedom over what to play more generally. I used to play Standard and Wild fairly equally, both getting to upper platinum/diamond ranks. Now I've become so disinterested in Standard that my season star multiplier has dropped to 3 stars. 3! It takes some serious apathy to not even rank up enough to use up your bonus stars, especially when against players whose MMR is way lower than mine would be if I actually cared.
Now we've returned to Quests that are somehow even slower than Uldum, require multiple conditions that give you, let's be honest, laughable mini-rewards and still make you play a 5-cost card that doesn't immediately impact the game (at least not the ones so far).
The devs have said at least some of the quest rewards will have an immediate impact. What I think matters most though is how well the effect synergises with the deck construction. Part of the reason OG quest rogue worked is that your deck is naturally filled with tiny minions to finish the quest with, so a slow 5 mana card (ignoring prep...) that didn't even have a 7/7 body was plenty because your deck needs to buff its minions in order to pose any kind of threat.
Meanwhile, a lot of other quests (both in Un'goro and Uldum) had a tenuous connection between their conditions and rewards. That hindered them because so much of the deck is geared towards generating a reward that doesn't amplify the deck's core gameplay, despite being independently powerful.
At least the rewards for the two questlines we know are clearly synergistic with their requirements, so that's a good sign.
I agree that there's a discussion to be had over whether it is fighting for the same spot as Armor Vendor, especially in the current iterations of warlock.
I'm not sure what the Questline deck will look like in the end (I've never been very good with the class), but if competition between the Vendor and the new spell exists there, I'd expect the spell to win simply because you won't often be playing the Vendor on turn 1, so the body won't be worth nearly as much as it usually is.
There's also the fact that this card is practically useless later on in the game when minions tend to have higher health, or your opponent can play around this card by simply playing no minions.
I don't think either of these points really apply, despite having a grain of truth behind them. People still draw/summon small minions in the late game, and most decks need to play minions to win so not playing them is usually not an option.
Sure there are some niche scenarios where you can chip the opponent down without minions, but that often takes a few turns and if warlock is still playing soul fragments that might end up backfiring as much as playing the minions would.
I have pondered whether changing Renew to discover a minion instead of a spell would be better. Changing its cost to 2 wouldn't be that big a deal in long games where priest feels horrible to play against, but changing it to a minion messes up a lot of things: you are much less likely to discover one of the obnoxious minions than get the umpteenth copy of the usual bunch of spells, and it will interfere with Raise Dead too.
It would still be a solid card at face value, but it would no longer play its part in the infinite chain of generated cards.
We kept Basic cards when they moved to Legacy, so the precedent is that we keep them. I could imagine new players needing to craft them if they start playing after they have already left Core though.
The surprise MVP for me was Healing Totem, which always stops your minions from dying to Mini-Rag. (Note Rag does still gain attack when he reduces your minions to 0 health, but the totem brings them back to 1 health afterwards.) It was so good I went out of my way to make Odd Shaman just to guarantee I had one of these guys around.
In fairness fireball isn't the gold standard for removal. Knockout is still weaker than (buffed) Assassinate, and the quality of warrior's removal is typically OK, so it being a bit worse than rogue's option looks about right to me.
If so, I'd expect them to start with the Witchwood heroes because there's only 4 of them
I doubt the Witchwood heroes would get ladder portraits, since they use the same art as the actual minions.
True, but I'm not sure that matters much now those cards are in Wild, and only Tess really gets used there. If they insist on having different artwork, they can just commission some. 500cats' point that they are fully voiced stands, so it's still less effort than other skins would be.
One thing that miffed me to no end regarding hero portraits was the they made a whole bunch of fully functional ones for the Year of the Dragon PvE content and then......... just never used them for anything else. Theres good money i'd be 100% willing to spend on getting to take Ol' Barkeye or Rakanishu into the ladder
Didn't Iksar recently say they were considering doing this? If so, I'd expect them to start with the Witchwood heroes because there's only 4 of them so it's not such a big jump from the sizes of bundles of past portraits, and because they were the first different characters we got to use in solo content (ignoring things like the White King in Karazhan).
On the bright side, it's entirely possible that the third expansion's portrait will be Garona Halforcen. She had a weird cameo as the final boss in Xyrella's chapter, and (assuming the set is Alterac Valley) I don't think there's very many notable characters there unless they want to really piss people off and choose Drek'thar.
Good catch. Lore-wise, I guess Garona is being controlled by Cho'gall and the Twilight's Hammer at this time*, so maybe they're going to be dragged into it too? That's starting to pull in a lot of parties trying to get the naaru shards, so they might ret-con it for HS so Onyxia's controlling Garona (although that opens up so many extra questions...). Either way, I'm beginning to think the 3rd expansion will be a lot more messy than just Horde vs Alliance, with more important lore characters than just Drek'thar there. At least I hope so. No skin would be worse than another orc shaman at this point.
* Going by the timeline in the comics which cover the story of Valeera, Varian and Broll dealing with Onyxia, and later Cho'gall. (See Valeera's Book of Heroes.) The timeline in HS looks to be roughly the same, with only minor tweaks. Note it is different to in-game WoW, primarily by when Onyxia is killed relative to the Dark Portal reopening.
You'd want to trade it away if you don't have any/much overload in hand to work with. It's good, but still situational, making it perfect to have the tradeable keyword.
I know it's not Warcraft canon, so I wasn't being super serious. But still, maybe dragging in someone 20 years gone is a bit awkward when the year is trying to mirror the early days of WoW at least reasonably closely.
That said, I would have been behind it if they were just keen to represent the characters in the statues outside Stormwind. They chose to use the Rat King instead of Alleria though for hunter, so that doesn't seem to be the case.
Hmm, I guess it fits that Blizz would mess up the time they advertise a card showing a character who should have died long before the events of the expansion. Maintaining a consistent timeline never was Team 5's strong suit.
I've gotta be honest, when they hyped up the priest questline I was expecting something a little more creative than "play on curve -> insta win".
I'm sure the deck building side to it is actually reasonably interesting, but I was hoping for more shenaniganry.
It sounds to me like you are reflecting frustrations from real life back at the world through online BMing. It is good to have an outlet for that, and I agree that emote spamming in HS is a long way from the most damaging approach, but there must be better options that don't drag strangers into something that had nothing to do with them?
It really doesn't matter whether you are confused by their response to BMing. All that matters is that you know it does cause negative responses in some people, so you are knowingly passing your own frustrations onto other people. Maybe that makes you feel better, but shifting annoyances around like this doesn't improve things at a societal level.
In fact, the odds are quite high that the people annoying you at work are doing exactly the same thing: someone annoys them but for whatever reason they cannot resolve it with the people initially at fault, so they pass their annoyances to you by being immature when they encounter you. You then pass it on to people playing HS, who then pass it on to someone else in some other way. Eventually the cycle might come all the way back around to you. It's basically all a diffusion of frustration through society, with each step in the process more tame than the last, but spread to more people. That would be fine if little annoyances didn't accumulate in a way that makes someone as angry as if a single massive thing happened, but they can and they do.
The way to stop this cycle is simply to find ways to vent frustrations that don't pass them onto someone else. For me that might be going for a walk if I just need to calm down a little, or drumming for a while if I need to really thrash it out of me. Do whatever you like for it, just don't keep pretending BMing online is a good solution simply because you don't empathise with the people who find it annoying.
Anyway, I'll stop my side of this discussion there. Hopefully you give some of this stuff some proper thought (especially the comparison between BMing and bullying, which was made independently by 3 people), even if you still end up disagreeing with me.
(I added numbers to each sentence to make it easy to address each individually.)
1) I'm glad to hear you are nice irl, but that's no consolation to anyone who has to encounter your online persona. I also challenge you to explain what the "huge difference" is between BMing online and irl? You've got to justify that if you want to convince anyone of it.
2) I'm curious about why you wouldn't care about making someone upset (or more likely annoyed) online? Is it just an 'ignorance is bliss' scenario where you don't actually know if any given player is annoyed, so you can treat it like no one is? Should that matter?
3) Oh don't worry, my skin is thick enough and I don't get upset or offended by it myself. However, I will say that everyone plays games because they want to have fun. In a game with a competition element, such as Hearthstone, you go in knowing you might lose and maybe even get salty about that. Fine. You sign up for that when you click 'Play'. What you don't sign up for is some idiot on the other side doing their best to annoy you by spamming emotes or roping. That's an abuse of the tools HS has, not part of the game we're actually there to play.
4) I'm not really sure offending people is the problem here since emotes are designed in a way that means nothing personal is said. BMing can annoy people, but that's not the same as being offended.
As for the victim shaming in "The problem is with you not the BMers", I hope you realise the logic behind that is the same as saying it is the fault of the child being bullied when they get picked on at school. It's not illegal for people to be bullies, right? So surely everyone should just put up with it? Or maybe, just maybe, it is actually the bully's fault when they play out their pathetic little power fantasy and knowingly make someone else upset.
BMing in Hearthstone is much more tame than playground bullying, and I don't normally bother making comments about it because of that, but that doesn't mean it isn't fundamentally the same thing. They are both one person deriving fun from the negative emotions of someone else, even if they are only in your imagination.
In the end, your emote spamming may only be a minor inconvenience for the opponent, but that is still an inconvenience you have knowingly set upon them. The nicest thing I can say about it is that it is selfish.
Thumbs up on revisiting Razorpetals and making them meaningful. Razorpetal Lasher was an OK card, but Blizz wasted the opportunity to make razorpetals an archetype-defining mechanic back in Un'Goro.
That depends entirely on the nature of the fun. When you have fun at the expense of others, that's not healthy unless its with a close friend/family member who you have a rapport with and who will interpret it as friendly banter (and even then you have to know their personality well enough to be sure they'll take it well). Maybe it's different in different cultures, but here in the UK trolling or mocking anyone else is viewed very negatively on the troll.
Now, squelchable emote spam might be at the least insidious end but it is still a negative, or 'unhealthy'. If you believe otherwise then I invite you to do it to strangers in real life when you aren't protected by the anonymity of the internet. Let me know how that works out... Or, if you recognise that's a bad idea, then please also recognise that what is healthy or not doesn't change just because the internet gives you a mask to hide behind.
I think quests are a fundamentally slow design, but that's OK. They've worked fine in the past (I don't agree with Aesan that they have generally been unsuccessful). The real issue is not that there is a category of decks that is weak against aggro, but that the devs have done a horrible job of establishing a good balance between aggro, control and combo over the past year. As a result everything has to be able to beat aggro, rather than being able to carve out its place by beating some other part of the meta.
By far my biggest hope for this expansion is that it can redress the balance between archetypes, not just to allow questlines to shine, but to give players more freedom over what to play more generally. I used to play Standard and Wild fairly equally, both getting to upper platinum/diamond ranks. Now I've become so disinterested in Standard that my season star multiplier has dropped to 3 stars. 3! It takes some serious apathy to not even rank up enough to use up your bonus stars, especially when against players whose MMR is way lower than mine would be if I actually cared.
The devs have said at least some of the quest rewards will have an immediate impact. What I think matters most though is how well the effect synergises with the deck construction. Part of the reason OG quest rogue worked is that your deck is naturally filled with tiny minions to finish the quest with, so a slow 5 mana card (ignoring prep...) that didn't even have a 7/7 body was plenty because your deck needs to buff its minions in order to pose any kind of threat.
Meanwhile, a lot of other quests (both in Un'goro and Uldum) had a tenuous connection between their conditions and rewards. That hindered them because so much of the deck is geared towards generating a reward that doesn't amplify the deck's core gameplay, despite being independently powerful.
At least the rewards for the two questlines we know are clearly synergistic with their requirements, so that's a good sign.
I agree that there's a discussion to be had over whether it is fighting for the same spot as Armor Vendor, especially in the current iterations of warlock.
I'm not sure what the Questline deck will look like in the end (I've never been very good with the class), but if competition between the Vendor and the new spell exists there, I'd expect the spell to win simply because you won't often be playing the Vendor on turn 1, so the body won't be worth nearly as much as it usually is.
I don't think either of these points really apply, despite having a grain of truth behind them. People still draw/summon small minions in the late game, and most decks need to play minions to win so not playing them is usually not an option.
Sure there are some niche scenarios where you can chip the opponent down without minions, but that often takes a few turns and if warlock is still playing soul fragments that might end up backfiring as much as playing the minions would.
I have pondered whether changing Renew to discover a minion instead of a spell would be better. Changing its cost to 2 wouldn't be that big a deal in long games where priest feels horrible to play against, but changing it to a minion messes up a lot of things: you are much less likely to discover one of the obnoxious minions than get the umpteenth copy of the usual bunch of spells, and it will interfere with Raise Dead too.
It would still be a solid card at face value, but it would no longer play its part in the infinite chain of generated cards.
We kept Basic cards when they moved to Legacy, so the precedent is that we keep them. I could imagine new players needing to craft them if they start playing after they have already left Core though.
The surprise MVP for me was Healing Totem, which always stops your minions from dying to Mini-Rag. (Note Rag does still gain attack when he reduces your minions to 0 health, but the totem brings them back to 1 health afterwards.) It was so good I went out of my way to make Odd Shaman just to guarantee I had one of these guys around.
In fairness fireball isn't the gold standard for removal. Knockout is still weaker than (buffed) Assassinate, and the quality of warrior's removal is typically OK, so it being a bit worse than rogue's option looks about right to me.
True, but I'm not sure that matters much now those cards are in Wild, and only Tess really gets used there. If they insist on having different artwork, they can just commission some. 500cats' point that they are fully voiced stands, so it's still less effort than other skins would be.
Didn't Iksar recently say they were considering doing this? If so, I'd expect them to start with the Witchwood heroes because there's only 4 of them so it's not such a big jump from the sizes of bundles of past portraits, and because they were the first different characters we got to use in solo content (ignoring things like the White King in Karazhan).
Good catch. Lore-wise, I guess Garona is being controlled by Cho'gall and the Twilight's Hammer at this time*, so maybe they're going to be dragged into it too? That's starting to pull in a lot of parties trying to get the naaru shards, so they might ret-con it for HS so Onyxia's controlling Garona (although that opens up so many extra questions...). Either way, I'm beginning to think the 3rd expansion will be a lot more messy than just Horde vs Alliance, with more important lore characters than just Drek'thar there. At least I hope so. No skin would be worse than another orc shaman at this point.
* Going by the timeline in the comics which cover the story of Valeera, Varian and Broll dealing with Onyxia, and later Cho'gall. (See Valeera's Book of Heroes.) The timeline in HS looks to be roughly the same, with only minor tweaks. Note it is different to in-game WoW, primarily by when Onyxia is killed relative to the Dark Portal reopening.
That's very likely. If not the devs have gone positively loopy!
He still could have been made into a hero portrait though...