Dhunters true identity is actually hero attacks. A lot of its best cards synergizes with hero attacks, it has a 1 mana hp that allows for a hero attack, a lot of its cards buffs its attack (not weapon), and its minions does things with a hero attack. Its so important to the class that getting your face frozen is more devastating to dhunters than to any other class, almost near levels of having to skip the entire turn because of it.
You made some good points on the subject of hero attacks, but what is given to both warrior and rogue are weapons, and things that work with weapons. Your argument that rogue has been 'silently begging' for cards that work with hero attacks is kinda hard to justify, given that rogue cards has often revolved around its weapon rather than the actual attack, like Deadly Poison, Cutting Class, stuff that will do other stuff regardless of whether the rogue actually performs the attack.
But this discussion is fairly academic. The real reason why anyone would want to play a dhunter deck is because they are the only tempo class that can heal and burn, and are the only class that needs* to draw cards to play their turn and they do it better than any other class (mage bs not withstanding). Playing a midrange dhunter is vastly different than playing any other midrange deck, with a good combination of weapons, burn, sustain and card draw that other classes simply do not have.
I think to argue whether a class should exist on the theory of uniqueness alone is often going to end up nowhere because I remember during AoO it was largely accepted that dhunters were simply doing the same things both hunter and rogue were doing, but better. That doesn't mean that hunters and rogues were necessarily obsolete. Metas change, and so does class playstyle, part of the reason why most of us really love the first expansion after rotation.
I consider the distinction between weapon synergy and hero attack synergy to be quite superficial, though not without merit. For the most part weapons are a way to give your hero an attack value, so the two things are in no way decoupled. The fact they have always associated rogue's synergy with the weapons themselves in no way means they couldn't have chosen to attach it to your hero attacking if they wanted to switch up the playstyle of rogue for an expansion cycle. The point being that the choice to make DH do it doesn't mean DH needed to exist for the archetype/playstyle to exist.
The matter of how different classes combine different strengths and weaknesses is a much more compelling argument for why DH ought to exist. At it stands I'm not sure DH's class identity is quite there yet though. Perhaps if it could seriously mix big demons into its decks (I'm on the fence over whether to count Illidari Inquisitor here, given every other deck is running the new Alexstrasza anyway), then it would be bringing a fresh mix of tools to the table. So far though, DH always feels either like hunter/rogue + healing, OR a warlock. They are never really mixed, and I suspect the outcast mechanic is a large part of why.
It is a valid question whether giving healing to a tempo class switches things up enough to justify it. I'm leaning towards no, especially as they have been trying to make tempo priest work for years, and if they could just manage that we'd have a tempo deck + healing anyway. However, there is no objective answer here so won't pretend there is.
None of this is to say I don't think DH has the potential to easily justify its place. The devs just need to give it a bit of a rework to get it there. The sigils are definitely a good start.
There are more than nuances, a lot of that stuff other classes can do and overlap with others. Which is a good thing.
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At the moment, DH just lacks a spark in this sense. It just fails to give me a compelling reason why I would choose over another class, except that the specific card I'm interested in happens to be in DH.
I can understand this point however I don't think saying things like it doesn't justify it's existence as a class. It has positives like strong draw, discounts (with skull), copying effects (Zai). As well as powerful disruption with Star Student Stelina and Glide. It can also be very fast out the gate with it's hero power and many attack buffs. None of this is completely unique sure but it's not inconsequential.
It's also okay that the class doesn't appeal to everybody. I know people who dislike Warlock or only play Mage. It doesn't mean Demon Hunter doesn't have it's place in the game.
As for sigils, I like the idea. It's a secret that the opponent knows and reacts too. Very neat idea.
I guess my issue is that there is an opportunity cost associated with DH existing: it's not like we are getting the DH variants of decks for free, because it has reduced the number of neutral cards we get. Some of those losses would have created archetypes themselves, and often quite unique ones when you look at janky neutral epics of previous years (we had 9 neutral epics each expansion before DH arrived, and only 3 since, so this makes quite a big difference). With that in mind, DH does have to do more to stand out imo.
As for your example description of what DH can do, you could write almost exactly the same paragraph for rogue. Only the disruption part is missing, though the secrets go some way towards it (especially Shenanigans).
As I said though, there is hope and I don't hate the class. I'm just waiting to find it novel.
I remember reading somewhere that DH was developed with the same amount of time and resources as an expansion, which is probably why it doesn't feel like something that was intended to be added to the game since the start (I think Ben Brode even stated at one point that they weren't going to add any more classes). In the videos that they showed about DH's development, the design team said that they initially wanted to have a "Fury" resource that was unique to DH, but later in development they decided it was too complicated and changed the HP to first "Gain 1 Attack. You can use this one more time this turn" and eventually just the 1 Mana Hero Power we know today. From that history, it seems like they initially had some ideas for how to make DH feel unique and necessary, but they ultimately scaled back the complexity and made it more similar to the existing classes. Honestly I think it's kind of sad that they went in the direction of making it simple and somewhat redundant, but I can understand the choice as fitting HS's design philosophy of simplicity and being new-player friendly. As for what they've done with DH since its release, I think the most promising aspect is Token DH, but they haven't really supported it and the cards that they've made to synergize with it are all currently unplayable, so this unique identity isn't really expressed in actual games.
Yeah, I was conscious of the mechanic they scrapped during development when writing. Didn't they say they scrapped it partly because not all decks would use it, so it would be wasted in some metas? I would argue that's a non-issue to begin with because there will always be casual players that used it even when the surrounding deck was weak.
I agree Token DH had some potential because it was set up such that you wanted to trade your minions away. With Wrathscale Naga now in Wild they're going to have to work quite hard to bring that back.
You can apply your logic to any class because there is overlap regardless of how you look at it. Let's take Warrior as an example:
Weapon/aggro: Rogue with more armour.
Control via hard removal: Mage & Warlock.
Control via health gain: Priest and maybe Warlock.
Control via board sweeps: Mage, Priest & Warlock.
Midrange board-based buffing: Paladin. Granted, Paladin does this with spells while the minions are on board and Warrior does this without spells.
Handbuffs: Hunter & Paladin (from MSoG).
Recruit: Paladin & Priest.
Forcing uniqueness is only going to limit design space. Why should anyone care if two mechanics in two classes are vaguely similar? Mage is supposed to be the spell damage class, but nobody cared when they started branching that off into Shaman (they did the same thing with freeze too). Your issue is not an issue as long as the decks feel fundamentally different to play. The word "archetype" literally dictates that the decks have the same goal and gameplan, but the process used to achieve it is different. Rogue, Hunter, Warrior, Warlock and DH all have aggressive decks, but you're lying if you say they're the "same thing", in the same way that you can't say Control Mage, Warlock, Priest and Warrior are the same. If all the decks start to become homogenous, then that is a problem, but as long as the cards are different, each deck has its own unique feel to it, and therefore they cannot be classified as the same.
At a mechanical level, warrior absolutely has one thing the other classes don't: it cares about damaged minions. That is particularly apt right now because of the frenzy keyword, which makes so much more sense in warrior than any other class because of it. (The fact frenzy warrior isn't a meta deck is a separate matter.)
Of course most mechanics will be shared with other classes in some sense. I am not faulting DH for that. The point is more that it should find something that makes people choose to play DH over another class because its something only DH allows, not just because DH happens to do it a bit better than the other classes do. Until then it doesn't feel like DH is really adding any meaningfully different options.
Maybe the sigils will be the answer, and I'm looking forward to more of those being announced.
I understand the idea of wanting a class to be a unique shining star. To have something no one else has. But that's not the direction Blizzard went with any of the classes. Why should Demon Hunter be different? Mechanics being similar allow for neutral and dual class cards to be better targeted. Different archetypes in a class allow for diversity in builds. Sure maybe most DH are OTK right now but the next set dropping a good deathrattle or two could push the Barrens cards into the spot light. Even if it doesn't overtake the meta build letting these exist is still healthy. Heck I've been enjoying deathrattle DH in wild a lot. It's silly sure but it still wins and it's fun to play and refine that deck.
To me the game would be boring if every class was predetermined by some magical unique thing they needed to do. Fighting that one Recruit paladin in the sea of Secrets is refreshing and fun in my daily climb. Don't you agree?
The thing is, the other classes DO have at least something unique from other classes, and they had many of them since Classic so we cannot even argue that it took a long time to find them. As an incomplete list based solely on what they had in Classic:
Druid: mana ramp
Hunter: err... (Admittedly hunter struggles in this regard nowadays because it was originally the only class that was structured around a tribe, which is no longer central enough nor unique enough to count.)
Mage: mass freezing
Paladin: debuffs instead of true removal
Priest: steal cards/minions
Rogue: minion bouncing
Shaman: totems (0-attack utility minions)
Warlock: self-sacrifice/discard
Warrior: cares about damaged minions (on both sides of the board)
There's a certain amount on nuance in there, since a few cards do exist for many effects scattered across the other classes and neutral. But it is never enough that you would choose a class other than rogue to, say, bounce a minion a few times.
I fully get that not everyone cares if each class has their own unique aspect, but I still think it is good for the game design for them to have something. I guess it's most important from a (casual) deck-builder's point of view. When a new card is released these mechanics set the scene for how I think of the possibilities. Will bouncing it in rogue make it bonkers? Maybe druid could play it early enough for it to actually stick?
At the moment, DH just lacks a spark in this sense. It just fails to give me a compelling reason why I would choose over another class, except that the specific card I'm interested in happens to be in DH.
There is definitely hope, however. If sigils become a common thing they could definitely provide DH with its own approach to things: set it up over two turns.
I want to start by saying I don't mind Demon Hunter at the moment. Its power is fine now that Twin Slice and Blade Dance are gone, so I don't harbour any of the hate I had for the class that I did throughout the Year of the Phoenix.
Nevertheless, I still keep wondering why the class needs to exist, especially from an archetype/mechanics viewpoint. I had hoped that within a year it would be given something that makes it feel truly distinct, but as it stands everything it does is just a slight twist on what other classes could do if they were given the tools, if they don't already do basically the same thing. Let's break down DH's archetypes and mechanics to see what I mean:
It wasn't long before rogue and warrior were given a hefty weapon package in Scholomance, and in DMF shaman joined in with their Enhancement cards. Come Barrens, and rogue has massive weapons that look and feel a lot like DH's attack buffs.
Even without all the fancy stuff, rogue's hero power has been silently begging for cards that synergise with your hero attacking since 2014. Blizzard just never made the cards. It's not a class identity thing either, because most of DH's weapon attack synergy cards would look perfectly sensible in rogue.
Big demons
Warlock...
OK, so you could argue that warlock's class identity prohibits it from getting the burst damage that many of DH's big demons do. Fine, but they don't really need to be demons. You could make exactly the same cards with the beast tribe instead and hand them to hunter. Or maybe make them mechs, or elementals, or dragons etc. Its not difficult to find another appropriate class for the effect if you just switch out the tribe.
Token decks
Surprisingly not druid, because druid's token decks always use mass board buffs and minions buffs are one of the few things DH can't do.
However, what other class has token decks but (almost) no board buffs? Hunter! We can ignore the fact Unseal the Vault buffs the whole board because you usually only press that button once so it's really just 1 big bit of burst damage. What we can't ignore is that Swarm of Locusts is literally just a slightly bigger Command the Illidari, or that they shared token synergy cards in Scholomance.
Tempo deathrattles
The Barrens deathrattle cards could easily have been given to rogue or hunter, and no one would have been shocked. We would all have just gone "Ooh, deathrattle rogue/hunter has a new look."
Lifesteal burst/OTK
OK, so here I admit the other classes with lots of lifesteal would be very weird with Il'gynoth, since all of paladin, priest and warlock are awful at burst damage (at least in Standard). That said, Il'gynoth really just makes an OTK deck, and to be honest it doesn't matter much that the lifesteal keyword is involved. It still follows the process of: stay alive; draw the deck; play ~5 cards and win.
Basically what I'm saying here is that we didn't need DH for another OTK archetype to exist. It could have just been re-branded to fit the theme of another class and the world would turn much the same.
Soul fragments
Warlock... (I don't even need to add anything this time.)
Outcast
Finally, something truly unique to DH! It has one teeny tiny problem though, and is the main reason big demon DH never took off and bonkers cards like Coilfang Warlord are never played: outcast strongly disincentivises playing anything expensive. The end result that outcast isn't a DH mechanic so much as it is an aggro DH mechanic. The trouble is, when the strongest staple cards have outcast (as they would be because the very point of outcast cards is that they are powerful when the condition is met), all DH decks are going to want to use them, rendering entire supported archetypes worthless.
Outcast would be so much better as a mechanic used infrequently to support aggro decks without being central to the class. At that point it could easily be slipped into one of the other classes as their flavour for a year or so. So rather ironically, I think the one thing that truly does set DH apart would be better off as something that didn't.
Concluding remarks
Sadly, the most I can say to justify DH's existence at this point is that at least it meant the other classes could be pushed in other directions. They often went in roughly the same direction anyway, but I suppose that's not DH's fault.
I'm not optimistic about the class' ability to diversify this year while it is still dominated by the staples and design choices from the Year of the Phoenix, but maybe next year the rotation will herald a new era in which HS has 10 meaningfully different classes.
For me the bigger issue than having enough sigils in the deck is that they are so situational you often don't even want to play them when they are in hand. I'm still at least trying to win when I play them, so I save them for the best time, but that slows the process down.
They should really stop making grindy achievements for cards whose effectiveness is strongly dependent on what your opponent does. It wasn't fun to hope the opponent used card draw for the Shenanigans achievement, and it's not fun to throw out sigils with no expectation that they'll do anything useful. If we're going to have grindy achievements, at least make them all for cards that can be central to our own game plans.
This, so much this. While slamming down borderline-playable minions over and over again definitely feels stupid, the sort of "your opponent needs to do this for you to have any chance" is even more frustrating. I don't think I will do the sigil one just because 200 times??? WTF Blizz.
While I do like achievements in general, Blizzard is definitely doing them wrong if you ask me. There are a lot of "non-achievements" that require you to grind stuff just because all classes need to have achievement and the total xp earned from them needs to be same than last expansion. That's not how it should be done in my opinion; if there are not sensible achievements for a set of cards, then make none. Grinding does not equal achieving in my eyes.
Agreed.
Overall, the achievements this time have been a strange mix of successes and failures. On the one hand rogue's are great: the 'grindy' one is actually just a genuine achievement with different tiers (6, 9 and 12 cards in a single turn), while the Yoink! achievement is a pseudo-grind which is short and varied enough to feel fine (and also requires a bit of finesse to get the rogue hero power).
On the other hand you have things like triggering (not even playing) 200 sigils and a few that don't seem to have anything to do with the Barrens cards (e.g. why is priest being asked to start with a full hand?).
A lot of the grinds could easily be re-cast as something more engaging, without needing to remove the grind aspect that is simplifying XP allocation. Playing 200 sigils could easily change to "destroy X minions with sigils", which is something you can speed up by destroying your own minions if you want. It doesn't even need to be self-destructive, as I had a lot of fun using Magtheridon + Sigil of Flame (the one good thing that came out of the process).
So there's definitely room for improvement for how they do them, but I suppose it's still early enough that I'm willing to accept it's just teething problems. At least fewer of them require legendaries this time, and some of those that were clearly designed with legendaries in mind can easily be done without them.
I suspect it is partly because Sorcerer's Apprentice is involved, and everyone knows the devs don't want to nerf her despite her being the root cause of countess problems over the years. I think they dug themselves a hole when they made Exodia mage a real thing, because now they cannot meaningfully change the card without killing all variants of that archetype and angering all its fans.
Other than Apprentice, you could look at Refreshing Spring Water, which deserves to be toned down, but I don't think it would really solve the APM mage problem. However they change it, it will still be efficient for a deck that has 25 spells, so mage will still be above the critical mass of efficient card draw that is allowing APM mage to function.
VENGEANCE...Next turn: I hate it! Grinding at it's best.
Lorewalker Cho: I've never thougth he would important for anything, but for the achievments he is the MIP
In this case, Educated Elekk is your real friend, if you own him. You can play him turn 3 along with the 0 cost sigil, or turn 5 with both of them, and they will get back to you deck. This is how I did it.
For me the bigger issue than having enough sigils in the deck is that they are so situational you often don't even want to play them when they are in hand. I'm still at least trying to win when I play them, so I save them for the best time, but that slows the process down.
They should really stop making grindy achievements for cards whose effectiveness is strongly dependent on what your opponent does. It wasn't fun to hope the opponent used card draw for the Shenanigans achievement, and it's not fun to throw out sigils with no expectation that they'll do anything useful. If we're going to have grindy achievements, at least make them all for cards that can be central to our own game plans.
yeah i wouldnt try poison rogue not to mention is basically a buff weapon ignore everything else and go face. i mean they even run cloack of shadows just so that they keep ignoring the match and keep going face, like its the most basic of aggro, in comparison face hunter takes a bit more skill to it at times
It is worth saying that you can take a deck that works, then switch out a few cards to change its direction to better suit the player's preferences. It comes at a cost to win rate, but you normally still do OK because the core of the deck is sound, and it can make a deck much more enjoyable to play.
In the case of poison rogue, the simple fact they don't usually run Apothecary Helbrim shows there's scope for a slower version that doesn't just smorc. With Paralytic Poison around there's plenty of potential for weapons to be used primarily for removal, you just have to make a deck that wants to do that.
Unfortunately the ability to experiment and discover is little to none.
It's there, but it is certainly very limited compared to Standard and Wild, and you might just get flamed for trying. I made an Alarm-o-Bot Druid, and got flamed by a Freeze Mage who had the gall to say I was an idiot for playing it (you can guess who won that game...).
Equipped with the power of hindsight, I'm glad I had a far-from-complete collection back in the day because it was the inability to play most meta decks that made deck building interesting. I'm even more glad my pals down below rank 15 had incomplete collections too :P
I think that now the super tier 1 is Face hunter. Mage ( warlocks cannot survive enough and paladin need a very good draw to compete.
So the nerf succeded ... but there will be a new one soon to keep the control decks viable
I have to say, I can't stand the constant whining about the viability of "control" every single meta. There is always a viable control deck, multiple viable control decks right now even. What people mean to say when they complain about the viability of control is they want long winded fatigue matches back. You are not getting them. You can play control priest, warlock or big warrior right now. All of which are capable of reaching high legend. Get over it. Accept that you will have bad match ups and that the meta does not revolve around your play style.
It's also funny given control priest poops all over the "super tier 1" face hunter. You haven't a clue what balance is. You just want fatigue matches to be the norm.
All wise words, but it is not unreasonable to want the speed of the game to change from time to time. After a year of aggro dominating and correspondingly short games, a slower meta would be welcome. And the reverse is true too after prolonged periods of slow metas.
I couldn't care less about the viability of control personally (it is primarily concerned with surviving, which you can work towards in any meta). Instead, I just want a meta that isn't overly hostile to janky midrange-value decks so I can actually use a lot of cool cards/combos. Too much aggro stifles my ability to even try.
None of this would be a problem if there was a place I could escape the meta, but since Casual is basically the same as Ranked, no such place exists (playing against friends doesn't really count because I cannot rely on them being available). If we cannot escape the meta, we are justified in asking for the meta to cater to different parts of the player-base every so often.
I never said I thought Shadowform would be good. I'm down with it being part of a low tier archetype only played by casuals, just so long as there's some motivation to play it.
The comparison with Wildfire is a little more delicate than it first looks, because priest is not mage. I'm not sure the different context works in its favour, but it wouldn't be the first time that a sub-par card has been an important part of a deck.
Regarding Shadowform, I'm willing to wait for the other sets this year before judging the changes to it. It's not the only card in the Core set that currently lacks support, and I assume everything in the Core set will make sense by the end of the year.
It's only because they wanted to keep all 3 of warrior's Classic epics, and didn't want inconsistent rarity gems for the Legacy and Core versions of the same card. I guess it really doesn't matter when the Core set is given out for free anyway.
If you are active on twitter you could suggest it to the devs, e.g. in Iksar's AMAs. It seems like exactly the sort of thing that would boost the sense of community if there was a special quest for 500-1000XP for playing 3 games with Noz in your deck.
It's important to know that A: she always steals 1/1 and B: that she steals attack and health independently. This way the targets health and attack should always be halfed, while Serena Bloodfeather will always be +1/+1 bigger than the target.
That is not quite right. The case of a 0/1 target leads to a 1/2 Serena and a 0/0 target, for example. I think she'll end up +1 higher if the target had an even stat, and +2 higher if the target had an odd stat (because they have equal values at some point in the process, so stealing 1 more stat makes a difference of 2).
The easiest way to calculate the target's final stats is to half their initial stats, then round down. Mathematically, a target with attack A and health H will end up with floor(0.5*A) attack and floor(0.5*H) health. Serena herself therefore ends up at 1+A-floor(0.5*A) attack, and likewise for health.
It changes if Serena has been buffed in the hand, so they have to go through while loops in practice, but that's rare enough in priest to ignore most of the time.
I'm not sure quite how many packs you need to be able to craft everything with the dust from duplicates. I suspect it's somewhere around 200 packs these days.
On a good day a pack averages to 100 dust, but only if you are dusting epics and legendaries, which obviously won't be the case if you only open 100 packs. You also expect 5.5 legendaries from 100 packs (accounting for the 10-pack pity timer), and 4 were given out for free this time (Vol'jin + Rewards Track). So you are at 9.5 out of 25 from 100 packs in F2P. There's no way there's enough dust to craft the rest.
Beyond that it depends what type of player you are. If you don't care about owning half the set, then 100 packs will be fine. But if you want more or less all of it, then the big pre-order + saved gold pretty much does the job. Of course you could use up old dust reserves, but that's not something you'll be able to do every expansion unless you open ~200 packs.
Wherever you stand on this though, people can at least stop saying they don't get the full set from the pre-order(s), because they do once gold and dust are counted. The non-duplicate rules have made things so much better!
When did the big pre-orders become a "useless amount of packs"? I fully understand people not having/wanting to to spend the money on it, but it's certainly not "useless".
I consider the distinction between weapon synergy and hero attack synergy to be quite superficial, though not without merit. For the most part weapons are a way to give your hero an attack value, so the two things are in no way decoupled. The fact they have always associated rogue's synergy with the weapons themselves in no way means they couldn't have chosen to attach it to your hero attacking if they wanted to switch up the playstyle of rogue for an expansion cycle. The point being that the choice to make DH do it doesn't mean DH needed to exist for the archetype/playstyle to exist.
The matter of how different classes combine different strengths and weaknesses is a much more compelling argument for why DH ought to exist. At it stands I'm not sure DH's class identity is quite there yet though. Perhaps if it could seriously mix big demons into its decks (I'm on the fence over whether to count Illidari Inquisitor here, given every other deck is running the new Alexstrasza anyway), then it would be bringing a fresh mix of tools to the table. So far though, DH always feels either like hunter/rogue + healing, OR a warlock. They are never really mixed, and I suspect the outcast mechanic is a large part of why.
It is a valid question whether giving healing to a tempo class switches things up enough to justify it. I'm leaning towards no, especially as they have been trying to make tempo priest work for years, and if they could just manage that we'd have a tempo deck + healing anyway. However, there is no objective answer here so won't pretend there is.
None of this is to say I don't think DH has the potential to easily justify its place. The devs just need to give it a bit of a rework to get it there. The sigils are definitely a good start.
I guess my issue is that there is an opportunity cost associated with DH existing: it's not like we are getting the DH variants of decks for free, because it has reduced the number of neutral cards we get. Some of those losses would have created archetypes themselves, and often quite unique ones when you look at janky neutral epics of previous years (we had 9 neutral epics each expansion before DH arrived, and only 3 since, so this makes quite a big difference). With that in mind, DH does have to do more to stand out imo.
As for your example description of what DH can do, you could write almost exactly the same paragraph for rogue. Only the disruption part is missing, though the secrets go some way towards it (especially Shenanigans).
As I said though, there is hope and I don't hate the class. I'm just waiting to find it novel.
Yeah, I was conscious of the mechanic they scrapped during development when writing. Didn't they say they scrapped it partly because not all decks would use it, so it would be wasted in some metas? I would argue that's a non-issue to begin with because there will always be casual players that used it even when the surrounding deck was weak.
I agree Token DH had some potential because it was set up such that you wanted to trade your minions away. With Wrathscale Naga now in Wild they're going to have to work quite hard to bring that back.
At a mechanical level, warrior absolutely has one thing the other classes don't: it cares about damaged minions. That is particularly apt right now because of the frenzy keyword, which makes so much more sense in warrior than any other class because of it. (The fact frenzy warrior isn't a meta deck is a separate matter.)
Of course most mechanics will be shared with other classes in some sense. I am not faulting DH for that. The point is more that it should find something that makes people choose to play DH over another class because its something only DH allows, not just because DH happens to do it a bit better than the other classes do. Until then it doesn't feel like DH is really adding any meaningfully different options.
Maybe the sigils will be the answer, and I'm looking forward to more of those being announced.
The thing is, the other classes DO have at least something unique from other classes, and they had many of them since Classic so we cannot even argue that it took a long time to find them. As an incomplete list based solely on what they had in Classic:
There's a certain amount on nuance in there, since a few cards do exist for many effects scattered across the other classes and neutral. But it is never enough that you would choose a class other than rogue to, say, bounce a minion a few times.
I fully get that not everyone cares if each class has their own unique aspect, but I still think it is good for the game design for them to have something. I guess it's most important from a (casual) deck-builder's point of view. When a new card is released these mechanics set the scene for how I think of the possibilities. Will bouncing it in rogue make it bonkers? Maybe druid could play it early enough for it to actually stick?
At the moment, DH just lacks a spark in this sense. It just fails to give me a compelling reason why I would choose over another class, except that the specific card I'm interested in happens to be in DH.
There is definitely hope, however. If sigils become a common thing they could definitely provide DH with its own approach to things: set it up over two turns.
I want to start by saying I don't mind Demon Hunter at the moment. Its power is fine now that Twin Slice and Blade Dance are gone, so I don't harbour any of the hate I had for the class that I did throughout the Year of the Phoenix.
Nevertheless, I still keep wondering why the class needs to exist, especially from an archetype/mechanics viewpoint. I had hoped that within a year it would be given something that makes it feel truly distinct, but as it stands everything it does is just a slight twist on what other classes could do if they were given the tools, if they don't already do basically the same thing. Let's break down DH's archetypes and mechanics to see what I mean:
Hero attacks
Even at the time DH appeared, multiple classes had direct synergy for the hero attacking: warrior had Hack the System, Armored Goon and Galakrond, while druid had Secure the Deck and Gonk, the Raptor had only just rotated out.
It wasn't long before rogue and warrior were given a hefty weapon package in Scholomance, and in DMF shaman joined in with their Enhancement cards. Come Barrens, and rogue has massive weapons that look and feel a lot like DH's attack buffs.
Even without all the fancy stuff, rogue's hero power has been silently begging for cards that synergise with your hero attacking since 2014. Blizzard just never made the cards. It's not a class identity thing either, because most of DH's weapon attack synergy cards would look perfectly sensible in rogue.
Big demons
Warlock...
OK, so you could argue that warlock's class identity prohibits it from getting the burst damage that many of DH's big demons do. Fine, but they don't really need to be demons. You could make exactly the same cards with the beast tribe instead and hand them to hunter. Or maybe make them mechs, or elementals, or dragons etc. Its not difficult to find another appropriate class for the effect if you just switch out the tribe.
Token decks
Surprisingly not druid, because druid's token decks always use mass board buffs and minions buffs are one of the few things DH can't do.
However, what other class has token decks but (almost) no board buffs? Hunter! We can ignore the fact Unseal the Vault buffs the whole board because you usually only press that button once so it's really just 1 big bit of burst damage. What we can't ignore is that Swarm of Locusts is literally just a slightly bigger Command the Illidari, or that they shared token synergy cards in Scholomance.
Tempo deathrattles
The Barrens deathrattle cards could easily have been given to rogue or hunter, and no one would have been shocked. We would all have just gone "Ooh, deathrattle rogue/hunter has a new look."
Lifesteal burst/OTK
OK, so here I admit the other classes with lots of lifesteal would be very weird with Il'gynoth, since all of paladin, priest and warlock are awful at burst damage (at least in Standard). That said, Il'gynoth really just makes an OTK deck, and to be honest it doesn't matter much that the lifesteal keyword is involved. It still follows the process of: stay alive; draw the deck; play ~5 cards and win.
Basically what I'm saying here is that we didn't need DH for another OTK archetype to exist. It could have just been re-branded to fit the theme of another class and the world would turn much the same.
Soul fragments
Warlock... (I don't even need to add anything this time.)
Outcast
Finally, something truly unique to DH! It has one teeny tiny problem though, and is the main reason big demon DH never took off and bonkers cards like Coilfang Warlord are never played: outcast strongly disincentivises playing anything expensive. The end result that outcast isn't a DH mechanic so much as it is an aggro DH mechanic. The trouble is, when the strongest staple cards have outcast (as they would be because the very point of outcast cards is that they are powerful when the condition is met), all DH decks are going to want to use them, rendering entire supported archetypes worthless.
Outcast would be so much better as a mechanic used infrequently to support aggro decks without being central to the class. At that point it could easily be slipped into one of the other classes as their flavour for a year or so. So rather ironically, I think the one thing that truly does set DH apart would be better off as something that didn't.
Concluding remarks
Sadly, the most I can say to justify DH's existence at this point is that at least it meant the other classes could be pushed in other directions. They often went in roughly the same direction anyway, but I suppose that's not DH's fault.
I'm not optimistic about the class' ability to diversify this year while it is still dominated by the staples and design choices from the Year of the Phoenix, but maybe next year the rotation will herald a new era in which HS has 10 meaningfully different classes.
Agreed.
Overall, the achievements this time have been a strange mix of successes and failures. On the one hand rogue's are great: the 'grindy' one is actually just a genuine achievement with different tiers (6, 9 and 12 cards in a single turn), while the Yoink! achievement is a pseudo-grind which is short and varied enough to feel fine (and also requires a bit of finesse to get the rogue hero power).
On the other hand you have things like triggering (not even playing) 200 sigils and a few that don't seem to have anything to do with the Barrens cards (e.g. why is priest being asked to start with a full hand?).
A lot of the grinds could easily be re-cast as something more engaging, without needing to remove the grind aspect that is simplifying XP allocation. Playing 200 sigils could easily change to "destroy X minions with sigils", which is something you can speed up by destroying your own minions if you want. It doesn't even need to be self-destructive, as I had a lot of fun using Magtheridon + Sigil of Flame (the one good thing that came out of the process).
So there's definitely room for improvement for how they do them, but I suppose it's still early enough that I'm willing to accept it's just teething problems. At least fewer of them require legendaries this time, and some of those that were clearly designed with legendaries in mind can easily be done without them.
I suspect it is partly because Sorcerer's Apprentice is involved, and everyone knows the devs don't want to nerf her despite her being the root cause of countess problems over the years. I think they dug themselves a hole when they made Exodia mage a real thing, because now they cannot meaningfully change the card without killing all variants of that archetype and angering all its fans.
Other than Apprentice, you could look at Refreshing Spring Water, which deserves to be toned down, but I don't think it would really solve the APM mage problem. However they change it, it will still be efficient for a deck that has 25 spells, so mage will still be above the critical mass of efficient card draw that is allowing APM mage to function.
For me the bigger issue than having enough sigils in the deck is that they are so situational you often don't even want to play them when they are in hand. I'm still at least trying to win when I play them, so I save them for the best time, but that slows the process down.
They should really stop making grindy achievements for cards whose effectiveness is strongly dependent on what your opponent does. It wasn't fun to hope the opponent used card draw for the Shenanigans achievement, and it's not fun to throw out sigils with no expectation that they'll do anything useful. If we're going to have grindy achievements, at least make them all for cards that can be central to our own game plans.
It is worth saying that you can take a deck that works, then switch out a few cards to change its direction to better suit the player's preferences. It comes at a cost to win rate, but you normally still do OK because the core of the deck is sound, and it can make a deck much more enjoyable to play.
In the case of poison rogue, the simple fact they don't usually run Apothecary Helbrim shows there's scope for a slower version that doesn't just smorc. With Paralytic Poison around there's plenty of potential for weapons to be used primarily for removal, you just have to make a deck that wants to do that.
It's there, but it is certainly very limited compared to Standard and Wild, and you might just get flamed for trying. I made an Alarm-o-Bot Druid, and got flamed by a Freeze Mage who had the gall to say I was an idiot for playing it (you can guess who won that game...).
Equipped with the power of hindsight, I'm glad I had a far-from-complete collection back in the day because it was the inability to play most meta decks that made deck building interesting. I'm even more glad my pals down below rank 15 had incomplete collections too :P
All wise words, but it is not unreasonable to want the speed of the game to change from time to time. After a year of aggro dominating and correspondingly short games, a slower meta would be welcome. And the reverse is true too after prolonged periods of slow metas.
I couldn't care less about the viability of control personally (it is primarily concerned with surviving, which you can work towards in any meta). Instead, I just want a meta that isn't overly hostile to janky midrange-value decks so I can actually use a lot of cool cards/combos. Too much aggro stifles my ability to even try.
None of this would be a problem if there was a place I could escape the meta, but since Casual is basically the same as Ranked, no such place exists (playing against friends doesn't really count because I cannot rely on them being available). If we cannot escape the meta, we are justified in asking for the meta to cater to different parts of the player-base every so often.
I never said I thought Shadowform would be good. I'm down with it being part of a low tier archetype only played by casuals, just so long as there's some motivation to play it.
The comparison with Wildfire is a little more delicate than it first looks, because priest is not mage. I'm not sure the different context works in its favour, but it wouldn't be the first time that a sub-par card has been an important part of a deck.
Regarding Shadowform, I'm willing to wait for the other sets this year before judging the changes to it. It's not the only card in the Core set that currently lacks support, and I assume everything in the Core set will make sense by the end of the year.
It's only because they wanted to keep all 3 of warrior's Classic epics, and didn't want inconsistent rarity gems for the Legacy and Core versions of the same card. I guess it really doesn't matter when the Core set is given out for free anyway.
If you are active on twitter you could suggest it to the devs, e.g. in Iksar's AMAs. It seems like exactly the sort of thing that would boost the sense of community if there was a special quest for 500-1000XP for playing 3 games with Noz in your deck.
That is not quite right. The case of a 0/1 target leads to a 1/2 Serena and a 0/0 target, for example. I think she'll end up +1 higher if the target had an even stat, and +2 higher if the target had an odd stat (because they have equal values at some point in the process, so stealing 1 more stat makes a difference of 2).
The easiest way to calculate the target's final stats is to half their initial stats, then round down. Mathematically, a target with attack A and health H will end up with floor(0.5*A) attack and floor(0.5*H) health. Serena herself therefore ends up at 1+A-floor(0.5*A) attack, and likewise for health.
It changes if Serena has been buffed in the hand, so they have to go through while loops in practice, but that's rare enough in priest to ignore most of the time.
I'm not sure quite how many packs you need to be able to craft everything with the dust from duplicates. I suspect it's somewhere around 200 packs these days.
On a good day a pack averages to 100 dust, but only if you are dusting epics and legendaries, which obviously won't be the case if you only open 100 packs. You also expect 5.5 legendaries from 100 packs (accounting for the 10-pack pity timer), and 4 were given out for free this time (Vol'jin + Rewards Track). So you are at 9.5 out of 25 from 100 packs in F2P. There's no way there's enough dust to craft the rest.
Beyond that it depends what type of player you are. If you don't care about owning half the set, then 100 packs will be fine. But if you want more or less all of it, then the big pre-order + saved gold pretty much does the job. Of course you could use up old dust reserves, but that's not something you'll be able to do every expansion unless you open ~200 packs.
Wherever you stand on this though, people can at least stop saying they don't get the full set from the pre-order(s), because they do once gold and dust are counted. The non-duplicate rules have made things so much better!
When did the big pre-orders become a "useless amount of packs"? I fully understand people not having/wanting to to spend the money on it, but it's certainly not "useless".
I just checked, and no, it doesn't synergise. I shot a Lord of the Arena, did 10 damage to that and 1 damage to face.