Varden has to compete with Jaina for the frost mage spot. I suspect they'll shift Jaina to something else to try to push Varden's theme, but I'm not sure I'd support it (not that it matters much).
Jaina is actually confirmed to be a boss. I belive it was from the IGN interview.
The example path they showed had King Mukla as the final boss, and we know he's also a playable mercenary, so it looks like we will unlock characters after defeating them as bosses.
I think it's worth considering other characters for each class, and expect they will not overlap with each other. For most classes we only know we'll get the Barrens mercs plus the basic hero, which isn't a lot to work with but is something.
Rogue is the class that we have the most information for, since the Mercenaries key art depicts all of Scabbs, Valeera and Captain Eudora (who was our rogue character in The Dalaran Heist). Furthermore, Valeera's dagger is dripping with poison, so a sensible guess would be that they fill the WoW rogue specs like so:
Valeera = assassination
Eudora = outlaw
Scabbs = subtlety
That would be a bit out of character for Valeera to be honest, since she's a subtlety rogue in Heroes of the Storm and I don't think she ever used poisons lore-wise, but the poison in the art easily outweighs those issues.
They could also go beyond WoW specs and focus on HS class mechanics. I'd be surprised if there wasn't a thief merc, for example. And who knows, maybe Scabbs' time as a chef will be represented inn his abilities? He is holding a meat cleaver in the key art after all.
Thoughts on a few other classes:
Rexxar will definitely be the guy with a beast pal (most likely Misha if he doesn't have multiple friends), so I doubt Tavish will do that. He could definitely be a gunslinger though. I assume King Krush is representing big beasts, and Mukla will have some banana gimmick.
Varden has to compete with Jaina for the frost mage spot. I suspect they'll shift Jaina to something else to try to push Varden's theme, but I'm not sure I'd support it (not that it matters much).
Similarly, Thrall is like THE elemental guy, but maybe they choose to focus on his association with Doomhammer since a windfury character would be likely somewhere.
Until we know how gameplay works in Mercenaries it's difficult to really say what any of these would actually mean of course.
My thought is, why Hearthstone decided to use emotes at all, if it's gonna be like what @Modalko said? Why not stick with casual chat? The platform obviously can support it. If it turns out that the opponent is toxic, then mute them, (or better, report them)
Sticking with emote is not a friendly way to say hi, or say thanks to someone without being taken as sarcastic. (And it happened often enough)
Emotes aren't without problems, but there's also quite a lot to be said for them. Even when they are used to frustrate the opponent, their ability to cause offense is practically nil. By limiting players to a handful of relevant emotes, they save Blizzard's customer support from needing to deal with a flood of reports of petulant children swearing at each other.
Plus the emotes are a huge part of what the hero cards and portraits are. Jaraxxus wouldn't have nearly the following he has if it wasn't for his emotes. Other gimmicky heroes (Morgl, Sir Annoy-o, N'Zoth, Hazelbark etc) would lose the most, but even the more tame heroes have a lot of personality bundled up in their emotes that makes Hearthstone a richer experience. Even during friendly matches where I am talking to my opponent through chat, I still use the emotes because they are often just a better way to express some things than a bit of silent text will be.
Finally, I know I wouldn't communicate with my (unknown) opponent at all if it wasn't for the emotes. I'm happy to click 'greetings', 'wow' and 'well played' at appropriate times during a game, but I'd feel much less inclined to say anything if I have to express it in my own words. So the anonymity that encourages some players to be annoying is also what makes it easier for shy players to be friendly. That friendliness might fall on deaf ears most of the time, but not everyone is so jaded that they automatically assume the worst.
I would take what @Modalko said a step further, and argue that most of the time the player's timing is a bigger contributing factor to passive-aggression than the emotes themselves. While there are definitely some heroes that couldn't sound genuine if they tried, and the intonation of the 'wow' emote is often purposely filled with sarcasm, there are also many that sound fine on their own and are only interpreted as passive-aggressive by association with years of players using them at the 'wrong' time.
I will always argue that the worst part of any card game is the players: just as Spikes produce a meta on ladder that grossly over-represents a tiny fraction of what Hearthstone can be, passive-aggressive uses of emotes make us forget honest uses exist. The cards themselves don't force metas to arise; it is the way players (and Spikes in particular) choose to use them. Nevertheless, we act like Hearthstone is the meta, and we likewise respond to emotes based on their most common uses, even if they aren't inherently like that.
Regarding complex emotes like Nightslayer Valeera's "What is sharper- your wits or your blades?", I agree with you there. It is something that has become frustrating as they have added more and more skins, all trying to have unique ways of saying things. The 'greetings' and 'well played' emotes have been most affected by it (the 'threaten' emote is complex by it's very nature so I am ignoring any trend there), and often you have to stop and interpret what they have said just to draw the link.
I guess the intent behind "What is sharper- your wits or your blades?" is that Valeera is used to very sharp weapons, so comparing the opponent's wits to that is a compliment. I.e. she's saying they have a sharp mind. That works fine against a rogue, warrior or DH, but falls down a bit against classes that aren't known for using sharp blades. It could be an outright insult to paladins who mostly use laughably blunt hammers.
The one that annoys me most though is Illidan's greetings (especially as it is on a basic hero portrait): "Evil draws close." That is not a greetings. A greetings is something said specifically to someone else. I don't mind if it is friendly or patronising, but muttering "Evil draws close" under your breath is not a substitute for saying hello. It doesn't even make sense against the large number of heroes who are not evil, even from Illidan's perspective. Grumpy and misguided(?) as he is, he was never actually of the belief that the usual 'good guys' of Azeroth are evil. To him they are just unwilling to make necessary sacrifices.
I did all three Hunter, Druid and Warrior, but now I´m stuck at Rogue, cause I didn´t check the cards first and now I´ve found out that I´m missing two key epics: Potion of Illusion and Bamboozle. Now I´m having a dilemma - is it worth to craft them in order to complete the puzzle and get the cardback? I don´t play the Rogue class at all, Potion of Illusion might be worth a craft, but I´m not really convinced to use 400 dust for Bamboozle. I was thinking about putting dicovering cards in the quest deck to find them, but it could take ages to get them that way. Might as well wait if I open them in packs? Does anyone know it I could possibly open the two in recent Year of the Phoenix packs? :/
You could open them in Phoenix packs, yes, although the odds are slim unless they're the last epics you need to get.
The good news is that neither of those cards are especially difficult to discover, provided you have Shadowjeweler Hanar and Keywarden Ivory who each have fairly small card pools (9 rogue secrets and 24 dual class spells). Without them you have to contend with discovering from the full Wild pool of spells in rogue (or mage with Wand Thief), which is certainly possible but will take a lot longer.
I was actually looking at the cards' watermark (called it tag) in Legacy set, it still differs for former Promo cards. But yeah, it's probably just Classic format cards that matter.
Yeah, the watermarks in the Legacy set are confusing. In my collection it looks like everything that wasn't in the original Classic set (promo cards and Hall of Fame replacements) has the Legacy watermark, but the cards that were originally in Classic could have either that or the old Classic swirl. I assume they want everything to have the Legacy watermark but things bugged out a bit.
All the Classic format version have the correct watermark though.
I don't know the exact answer to your question I'm afraid. But I can tell you that I have diamond Ragnaros and do not have Elite Tauren Chieftain or Gelbin Mekkatorque.
I suspect that is because you got the achievement for all legendaries in the old Classic before the recent changes. So I'm thinking they probably 'moved the goalposts' when they messed around with the Classic and Legacy sets, but didn't strip anyone of their achievements.
Quote From Ethardoth
Edit: I also counted legendaries with Classic tag, there are 33 of them. ETC, Gelbin and Old Murk Eye have promo tag, but I my assumption was that they are also required, since I have the murloc and the numbers fit.
The promo tag doesn't exist anymore. They are either Classic (for the Classic format only) or Legacy. I believe the achievement now refers to the Classic format set, where there are indeed 36 legendaries, including the old promo ones.
I have to admit, that's a pretty unfortunate change for most players.
The argument that control is out because of Tickatis is incomplete. Dean said previously that they plan to keep supporting control warlock and were willing to address Tickatus if need be because of that alone. So control tools are still on the menu for all relevant classes. I think it's pretty clear Tickatus is going to be hit sooner or later. I just wish they'd stop waiting for it to become a 5% larger problem and just change him already so the discussion can turn somewhere else (fingers crossed for next week).
Tickatus aside, warlock would still win a value war at the moment because of Jaraxxus and Rustwix. That's fine for other control decks as long as warlock is still iffy against aggro. It's only when warlock becomes a proper counter to aggro that other control decks will lose their niche in the meta.
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I also don't want to see burn decks get buffed. With Doomhammer being shaman's main approach right now, I doubt they'd be the target anyway.
As for elementals, I expect they are things that are waiting on support in the mini-set or later expansions. Whether that is that case or not, the elementals shaman got this expansion lean more towards midrange than aggro, with all of them being somewhat reactive, which is a step in the right direction. I'm not even sure it is towards the more aggressive end of midrange. It is only Arid Stormer that goes in that direction, and I'm pretty sure that would be the last one to get a buff.
So would I classify elemental shaman as a tempo deck? Not really. The definitions of aggro, tempo and midrange are all blurry enough that you can, but I think it's more representative to call it midrange. Especially as it gives you the tools that could be used for aggression or control, and not just trying to maintain a board.
His answer still makes it possible none of the caravans gets buffed. We can blame the wording of the question for that, although I suspect Dean wouldn't have answered if it hadn't asked about all caravans together.
Personally, I'd rather shaman's buff(s) didn't go towards murlocs. The game doesn't really need more viable aggro/tempo decks.
If they are more or less equal except for the control vs control matchup, then yes one will be squeezed out. But there's normally space for coexisting control decks as long as they have different pros and cons against other decks.
For example, much of the time between Frozen Throne and Descent of Dragons was underpinned by a battle between control decks that had enough dominance over aggro that they could turn it into a value competition instead of who beats aggro best. That let aggro back into the scene and forced control decks to choose who to counter.
I guess the moral of the story is a value deck is a control deck that stopped trying to beat aggro, and lost the right to call itself a control deck. So coexisting control decks ends up meaning a spectrum of decks on the control <--> value axis.
Hero Power Mage comes to mind first because that deck is just impossibly slow despite having some pretty decent payoffs. Not even entirely sure how that one could be buffed outside of making Wildfire 1-mana (to scam more out of Wandmaker and also because it's actually unreasonably clunky to actually play the thing without just losing on tempo).
Good gravy, no! Wildfire at 1 mana will just make Odd mage without the odd restriction, and it's not like it's lacking an alternative to Jan'alai. I don't think it is unreasonable at all to pay 2 mana to deal >>3 additional damage over the course of the game. It just needs a bit of a slower meta to have time to do that.
I'd much rather they helped out the control decks that could slow down the meta - automatically helping every low tempo deck in the process - than ensure every deck is high tempo. When tempo is the answer to tempo we get locked into a positive feedback loop that hurts diversity, even if it superficially increases the number of viable decks.
The mercenary flavour texts in the form ["blah blah blah" - Merc. name] hinted at the cards you need to trigger the puzzle. Beyond that I assume they just have to work with what the ??? cards give them.
I had a mind to try to working things out for myself, but it looks like it would be more effort than I really have time for if doing it all from scratch, which is kind of a shame because I can't really feel like I solved any of it.
Yeah, they're pretty good. It's like she's training the opponent: she's mostly disapproving of their actions, but sometimes they do something to make her proud.
I'm curious to hear the other characters' emotes. If they covey an interesting personality not yet seen in their respective classes, I'm likely to consider choosing them next.
You can be offered the rogue hp if you don't currently have it. The easiest route is to use Yoink! twice in the same turn, so the second has a 33% chance to offer the rogue hp.
Yes, it is bugged and being looked into by Team 5. Aside from unable to claim any hero portrait, the calculation is also a bit off. It currently says I am at cumulative level 466, but it should be 468 instead (350 + 118 = 468). I guess they have not tested this new feature properly, but that is the quality of what we have seen for quite a lot of recent patches now.
I wonder if you/we are missing 2 levels because we start at level 1 with 0XP, so level 1 doesn't contribute. In that case, I'd blame the silly choice to start at level 1 instead of level 0, rather than a bug.
Agreed, it's a little pocket of design space where the discretisation of the game makes it very difficult to make a 'strong but fair' card. Start of turn effects have to be at low mana costs to ever work, but low mana means every +/-1 stat is much more significant, and can make or break a card with no 'Goldilocks value' available.
Now we start to see why Yu-Gi-Oh made the silly choice of making their stats at least a hundred time larger than they needed to be.
That would certainly help Vashj, but I'm not sure how much it would do for shaman as a whole given you need good draw to reliably find her twice in the first place. So it depends on what the goal is: if you want Vashj to be stronger, then sure; if you want shaman to be appreciably stronger, then I'd look elsewhere.
Btw, what would people think of turning Tickatus into an 8-drop, but just...removing the corrupt (and obviously changing the effect to post corruption)?
There's about a 0% chance of this happening. Pretty much every keyword gets a legendary version, and Tickatus was corrupt's one (Y'shaarj and Xanesh don't count because they don't get corrupted themselves, so they aren't really showing off a big fancy corrupt effect).
That might not constitute a good reason, but it is definitely a factor here.
Vashj Prime - Literally the only Prime minion with garbage stats and no immediate impact on the board.
Having made a thread about the failings of Akama Prime just yesterday, I can't not chime in on this statement. I mean really? How did Akama get classified as having an immediate impact? It couldn't even be given taunt if it wanted to. Akama just has to hope it survives a turn to do anything, which is surprisingly difficult considering his whole purpose is to be tough to kill. Meanwhile, at least the spells Vashj draws can do something right away.
Anyway, I think Vashj Prime's main problem is that, as a prime card, you have to draw on average 75% of your deck to see her (helped out a little bit by possible extra copies from Primordial Studies). By that point, how many worthwhile spells are even left in your deck? And you certainly cannot plan for specific ones. Reducing her to 6 mana wouldn't really fix much, other than the rare times you draw her early.
I think shaman is better off getting a new OK bit of card draw (preferably one that draws 2+ cards) than patching up existing options.
A good comparison is Rattlegore. He's another card that many classes just cannot deal with without playing a weak neutral tech card. And he's much easier to play at a relevant time than Akama Prime, especially with Commencement around. But does anyone complain about Rattlegore? No. So I just don't buy that making AP a 6/7 would cause any problems.
While i understand where you are coming from, the comparison is not as close as you want to make it out to be. Having or not having the option to silence the problem card is a pretty big difference imho.
Fair point, although I would counter it by saying that, unlike Rattlegore, you don't really need to silence Akama Prime. You just need to find some way to do destroy him once, either through chipping his health down or hard removal. There are several neutral options in both directions, and from experience AP damages himself by taking trades quite often, so we should not ignore the potential contribution from any old minion, especially those with taunt.
Perhaps more importantly though, most slow decks don't need to run any tech cards to deal with AP because they already have answers by default. So there isn't even a need for tech cards like there is with Rattlegore.
In the end, experience shows that AP is just too easy to remove at the time he is played, which is a shame for a card whose entire purpose is to be difficult to remove. I'm fine with 'weak but cool' cards - they are my HS bread and butter! - but AP dies so often that you quickly come to doubt the 'cool' part.
The example path they showed had King Mukla as the final boss, and we know he's also a playable mercenary, so it looks like we will unlock characters after defeating them as bosses.
I think it's worth considering other characters for each class, and expect they will not overlap with each other. For most classes we only know we'll get the Barrens mercs plus the basic hero, which isn't a lot to work with but is something.
Rogue is the class that we have the most information for, since the Mercenaries key art depicts all of Scabbs, Valeera and Captain Eudora (who was our rogue character in The Dalaran Heist). Furthermore, Valeera's dagger is dripping with poison, so a sensible guess would be that they fill the WoW rogue specs like so:
That would be a bit out of character for Valeera to be honest, since she's a subtlety rogue in Heroes of the Storm and I don't think she ever used poisons lore-wise, but the poison in the art easily outweighs those issues.
They could also go beyond WoW specs and focus on HS class mechanics. I'd be surprised if there wasn't a thief merc, for example. And who knows, maybe Scabbs' time as a chef will be represented inn his abilities? He is holding a meat cleaver in the key art after all.
Thoughts on a few other classes:
Until we know how gameplay works in Mercenaries it's difficult to really say what any of these would actually mean of course.
Emotes aren't without problems, but there's also quite a lot to be said for them. Even when they are used to frustrate the opponent, their ability to cause offense is practically nil. By limiting players to a handful of relevant emotes, they save Blizzard's customer support from needing to deal with a flood of reports of petulant children swearing at each other.
Plus the emotes are a huge part of what the hero cards and portraits are. Jaraxxus wouldn't have nearly the following he has if it wasn't for his emotes. Other gimmicky heroes (Morgl, Sir Annoy-o, N'Zoth, Hazelbark etc) would lose the most, but even the more tame heroes have a lot of personality bundled up in their emotes that makes Hearthstone a richer experience. Even during friendly matches where I am talking to my opponent through chat, I still use the emotes because they are often just a better way to express some things than a bit of silent text will be.
Finally, I know I wouldn't communicate with my (unknown) opponent at all if it wasn't for the emotes. I'm happy to click 'greetings', 'wow' and 'well played' at appropriate times during a game, but I'd feel much less inclined to say anything if I have to express it in my own words. So the anonymity that encourages some players to be annoying is also what makes it easier for shy players to be friendly. That friendliness might fall on deaf ears most of the time, but not everyone is so jaded that they automatically assume the worst.
I would take what @Modalko said a step further, and argue that most of the time the player's timing is a bigger contributing factor to passive-aggression than the emotes themselves. While there are definitely some heroes that couldn't sound genuine if they tried, and the intonation of the 'wow' emote is often purposely filled with sarcasm, there are also many that sound fine on their own and are only interpreted as passive-aggressive by association with years of players using them at the 'wrong' time.
I will always argue that the worst part of any card game is the players: just as Spikes produce a meta on ladder that grossly over-represents a tiny fraction of what Hearthstone can be, passive-aggressive uses of emotes make us forget honest uses exist. The cards themselves don't force metas to arise; it is the way players (and Spikes in particular) choose to use them. Nevertheless, we act like Hearthstone is the meta, and we likewise respond to emotes based on their most common uses, even if they aren't inherently like that.
Regarding complex emotes like Nightslayer Valeera's "What is sharper- your wits or your blades?", I agree with you there. It is something that has become frustrating as they have added more and more skins, all trying to have unique ways of saying things. The 'greetings' and 'well played' emotes have been most affected by it (the 'threaten' emote is complex by it's very nature so I am ignoring any trend there), and often you have to stop and interpret what they have said just to draw the link.
I guess the intent behind "What is sharper- your wits or your blades?" is that Valeera is used to very sharp weapons, so comparing the opponent's wits to that is a compliment. I.e. she's saying they have a sharp mind. That works fine against a rogue, warrior or DH, but falls down a bit against classes that aren't known for using sharp blades. It could be an outright insult to paladins who mostly use laughably blunt hammers.
The one that annoys me most though is Illidan's greetings (especially as it is on a basic hero portrait): "Evil draws close." That is not a greetings. A greetings is something said specifically to someone else. I don't mind if it is friendly or patronising, but muttering "Evil draws close" under your breath is not a substitute for saying hello. It doesn't even make sense against the large number of heroes who are not evil, even from Illidan's perspective. Grumpy and misguided(?) as he is, he was never actually of the belief that the usual 'good guys' of Azeroth are evil. To him they are just unwilling to make necessary sacrifices.
You could open them in Phoenix packs, yes, although the odds are slim unless they're the last epics you need to get.
The good news is that neither of those cards are especially difficult to discover, provided you have Shadowjeweler Hanar and Keywarden Ivory who each have fairly small card pools (9 rogue secrets and 24 dual class spells). Without them you have to contend with discovering from the full Wild pool of spells in rogue (or mage with Wand Thief), which is certainly possible but will take a lot longer.
The question is: how patient are you?
Yeah, the watermarks in the Legacy set are confusing. In my collection it looks like everything that wasn't in the original Classic set (promo cards and Hall of Fame replacements) has the Legacy watermark, but the cards that were originally in Classic could have either that or the old Classic swirl. I assume they want everything to have the Legacy watermark but things bugged out a bit.
All the Classic format version have the correct watermark though.
I suspect that is because you got the achievement for all legendaries in the old Classic before the recent changes. So I'm thinking they probably 'moved the goalposts' when they messed around with the Classic and Legacy sets, but didn't strip anyone of their achievements.
The promo tag doesn't exist anymore. They are either Classic (for the Classic format only) or Legacy. I believe the achievement now refers to the Classic format set, where there are indeed 36 legendaries, including the old promo ones.
I have to admit, that's a pretty unfortunate change for most players.
The argument that control is out because of Tickatis is incomplete. Dean said previously that they plan to keep supporting control warlock and were willing to address Tickatus if need be because of that alone. So control tools are still on the menu for all relevant classes. I think it's pretty clear Tickatus is going to be hit sooner or later. I just wish they'd stop waiting for it to become a 5% larger problem and just change him already so the discussion can turn somewhere else (fingers crossed for next week).
Tickatus aside, warlock would still win a value war at the moment because of Jaraxxus and Rustwix. That's fine for other control decks as long as warlock is still iffy against aggro. It's only when warlock becomes a proper counter to aggro that other control decks will lose their niche in the meta.
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I also don't want to see burn decks get buffed. With Doomhammer being shaman's main approach right now, I doubt they'd be the target anyway.
As for elementals, I expect they are things that are waiting on support in the mini-set or later expansions. Whether that is that case or not, the elementals shaman got this expansion lean more towards midrange than aggro, with all of them being somewhat reactive, which is a step in the right direction. I'm not even sure it is towards the more aggressive end of midrange. It is only Arid Stormer that goes in that direction, and I'm pretty sure that would be the last one to get a buff.
So would I classify elemental shaman as a tempo deck? Not really. The definitions of aggro, tempo and midrange are all blurry enough that you can, but I think it's more representative to call it midrange. Especially as it gives you the tools that could be used for aggression or control, and not just trying to maintain a board.
His answer still makes it possible none of the caravans gets buffed. We can blame the wording of the question for that, although I suspect Dean wouldn't have answered if it hadn't asked about all caravans together.
Personally, I'd rather shaman's buff(s) didn't go towards murlocs. The game doesn't really need more viable aggro/tempo decks.
If they are more or less equal except for the control vs control matchup, then yes one will be squeezed out. But there's normally space for coexisting control decks as long as they have different pros and cons against other decks.
For example, much of the time between Frozen Throne and Descent of Dragons was underpinned by a battle between control decks that had enough dominance over aggro that they could turn it into a value competition instead of who beats aggro best. That let aggro back into the scene and forced control decks to choose who to counter.
I guess the moral of the story is a value deck is a control deck that stopped trying to beat aggro, and lost the right to call itself a control deck. So coexisting control decks ends up meaning a spectrum of decks on the control <--> value axis.
Good gravy, no! Wildfire at 1 mana will just make Odd mage without the odd restriction, and it's not like it's lacking an alternative to Jan'alai. I don't think it is unreasonable at all to pay 2 mana to deal >>3 additional damage over the course of the game. It just needs a bit of a slower meta to have time to do that.
I'd much rather they helped out the control decks that could slow down the meta - automatically helping every low tempo deck in the process - than ensure every deck is high tempo. When tempo is the answer to tempo we get locked into a positive feedback loop that hurts diversity, even if it superficially increases the number of viable decks.
The mercenary flavour texts in the form ["blah blah blah" - Merc. name] hinted at the cards you need to trigger the puzzle. Beyond that I assume they just have to work with what the ??? cards give them.
I had a mind to try to working things out for myself, but it looks like it would be more effort than I really have time for if doing it all from scratch, which is kind of a shame because I can't really feel like I solved any of it.
Yeah, they're pretty good. It's like she's training the opponent: she's mostly disapproving of their actions, but sometimes they do something to make her proud.
I'm curious to hear the other characters' emotes. If they covey an interesting personality not yet seen in their respective classes, I'm likely to consider choosing them next.
You can be offered the rogue hp if you don't currently have it. The easiest route is to use Yoink! twice in the same turn, so the second has a 33% chance to offer the rogue hp.
I wonder if you/we are missing 2 levels because we start at level 1 with 0XP, so level 1 doesn't contribute. In that case, I'd blame the silly choice to start at level 1 instead of level 0, rather than a bug.
Agreed, it's a little pocket of design space where the discretisation of the game makes it very difficult to make a 'strong but fair' card. Start of turn effects have to be at low mana costs to ever work, but low mana means every +/-1 stat is much more significant, and can make or break a card with no 'Goldilocks value' available.
Now we start to see why Yu-Gi-Oh made the silly choice of making their stats at least a hundred time larger than they needed to be.
That would certainly help Vashj, but I'm not sure how much it would do for shaman as a whole given you need good draw to reliably find her twice in the first place. So it depends on what the goal is: if you want Vashj to be stronger, then sure; if you want shaman to be appreciably stronger, then I'd look elsewhere.
There's about a 0% chance of this happening. Pretty much every keyword gets a legendary version, and Tickatus was corrupt's one (Y'shaarj and Xanesh don't count because they don't get corrupted themselves, so they aren't really showing off a big fancy corrupt effect).
That might not constitute a good reason, but it is definitely a factor here.
Having made a thread about the failings of Akama Prime just yesterday, I can't not chime in on this statement. I mean really? How did Akama get classified as having an immediate impact? It couldn't even be given taunt if it wanted to. Akama just has to hope it survives a turn to do anything, which is surprisingly difficult considering his whole purpose is to be tough to kill. Meanwhile, at least the spells Vashj draws can do something right away.
Anyway, I think Vashj Prime's main problem is that, as a prime card, you have to draw on average 75% of your deck to see her (helped out a little bit by possible extra copies from Primordial Studies). By that point, how many worthwhile spells are even left in your deck? And you certainly cannot plan for specific ones. Reducing her to 6 mana wouldn't really fix much, other than the rare times you draw her early.
I think shaman is better off getting a new OK bit of card draw (preferably one that draws 2+ cards) than patching up existing options.
Fair point, although I would counter it by saying that, unlike Rattlegore, you don't really need to silence Akama Prime. You just need to find some way to do destroy him once, either through chipping his health down or hard removal. There are several neutral options in both directions, and from experience AP damages himself by taking trades quite often, so we should not ignore the potential contribution from any old minion, especially those with taunt.
Perhaps more importantly though, most slow decks don't need to run any tech cards to deal with AP because they already have answers by default. So there isn't even a need for tech cards like there is with Rattlegore.
In the end, experience shows that AP is just too easy to remove at the time he is played, which is a shame for a card whose entire purpose is to be difficult to remove. I'm fine with 'weak but cool' cards - they are my HS bread and butter! - but AP dies so often that you quickly come to doubt the 'cool' part.