A small comment on Dinotamer Brann and highlander hunter's supposed strength. In all honesty, the deck would've been fine if polkelt didn't exist. The real problem was how easy it was to unleash king krush at turn 7 followed by Dragonbane or something like Kill Command. Unlike the other problems above, this one could've been solved simply by printing a good taunt minion, but I think team5 is still reeling from that brief Giggling Inventor meta to do it.
There are plenty of good neutral taunt minions in standard, with Khartut Defender being the obvious example as something to block a turn 7 Brann. I suspect DH's ability to just silence or ignore them altogether pushed them out of the meta, and the decks that stuck around were ones that either wouldn't use taunts or used a lot of them, as with paladin. So yeah, I guess hunter just got lucky that everything else in the meta ended up pushing the taunts out.
I could take aim at DH and say they just shouldn't be given good ways to ignore the taunt problem - which is probably true - but that's a discussion for another time. Right now, highlander hunter has been floating near the top spot for much longer than we've had Polkelt, and it deserved to at least be on Blizz's nerf radar.
It has become clear as the year has gone on that DH weapons need to be made weak by themselves to compensate for how easy it is to add to their attack. Hopefully they learn from this and don't print baseline strong weapons for the class in the future.
An incomplete set of nerfs is not the same as a useless set of nerfs. If evolve shaman ends up needing a nerf they can just nerf it later.
I don't really see why you think the nerfs will leave more classes "dead in [the] gutter" than there are currently. It is clear that these nerfs will help out the current worst classes (druid, priest, mage and warlock) because whatever happens to the meta, it must slow down at least a little bit. Certainly it does those classes no harm, and a shift in the top decks might well do them more good than the mere improvements to win rates against DH and hunter.
In the end, something will be the OP top deck that people complain about, and that happens whether you nerf cards or buff them, and even if you have perfect foresight when doing so. All that really matters is that nothing is so dominant that it suppresses half the classes simply because they have inherently bad match-ups against the dominant deck/class.
Saturday C'Thuns = Saturday (morning) cartoons. Getting up that morning to watch Dragonball Z and the like; used to be a big thing for kids/teens in the 90s and early 00s, here in the US, but they eventually died off. Don't know if that was a thing anywhere else.
Don't know what it has to do with the Hero Power's mechanics, though lol
Thanks for the explanation. I was confused by the hero power's name too.
Saturday morning was definitely prime time for kids TV here in the UK, but I never encountered 'Saturday cartoons' as a phrase of any significance.
What is the total exp you can gain from achivements?
1480
That can't be right. Did you include some that had multiple tiers (like "Deal 50 damage with Tonk" then becomes "Deal 100 damage with Tonk" for example)? If it's really only 1480 all together, that's pretty crappy
Well each class has 2*100+500+2*200 = 1100, so it is certainly higher than 1480. 14800>10*1100 sounds plausible though.
I assume the two down-votes you have at the time I'm writing this come from people who don't know why you have made a thread about a deck everyone already knows is super strong. Rather than join their silent protest, I'll use a quote from the Warlords of Draenor cinematic to show my feelings about the deck.
As someone who is only a few wins away from 3000 with rogue, I could definitely appreciate a fancy hero power border to show that my lovely Cap'n Valeera portrait shows off a mere third of my experience with the class.
Since there is such a tiny calling for it from the community I wouldn't say this is something Blizzard have "messed up" on. Nevertheless, I do think it is an elegant and efficient way to add cosmetics for high numbers of wins without needing to bother commissioning 10 new pieces of art every 500 wins.
I should reach level 50 by the very end of this weekend, only 16000 XP short of level 50 currently. I wonder how many levels boost we will receive with the Rewards Track update on December 15th. I can probably calculate it myself, but I would like it to be a surprise.
As a sidenote, which hero portrait will you all choose? Demon Hunter would probably be my most logical choice since I only have 88 wins with that class, but some of the others look nicer though.
I am half way between levels 40 and 41, so I still have some way to go yet, but when I get there I'll pick Valeera. No doubt about it. It's the coolest imo, I play rogue most, and something has to make up for rogue's lack of hero portraits.
To be honest, I'm not sure I'd really use any of the other ones. I'm not that keen on some of them, and for the rest I either prefer the basic portraits or I much prefer alternative heroes for the class anyway. E.g. the Illidan and Garrosh ones look cool, but I will always prefer Aranna and Magni, especially once voicelines are considered.
Is this mini-set for sure going to roll out in regular Darkmoon Faire packs? Maybe that was mentioned somewhere and I missed it. Just curious about the confirmation.
Quote From clawz161
I dont even think they said it wouldnt even be a PvE where you have to pay money for it and have cards you cant craft like gala awakening
I'm pretty certain they said the cards would be added to the normal DMF packs. I don't remember exactly where the devs said it, but there is no way people would be thinking that if the devs hadn't, simply because that's not something we would expect otherwise.
To anyone reading this: how have you strategised your pack opening? So far I've opened just enough to get all the rares. I'm holding back in case there are more desirable legendaries or epics in the mini expansion. Am I overthinking this; it feels stifling not opening all my packs immediately.
I’m still sitting on 70 packs, feels pretty shitty.....
70 is surely overkill. I don't know exactly how many rares there will be, but if it has the same number as Galakrond's Awakening (12) you'd be pretty much guaranteed to get all the commons and rares in 24 packs.
In the end you (probably) won't be able to control whether you get new epics / legendaries, so there doesn't seem much point in holding onto more than 24 packs unless you already have nearly all the high rarity cards.
Of course I am on the patient side but I am also looking at the other side of the coin, did Blizzard did this kind of thing just to get praises about them fixing the problem and making us forget about the long time pain?
If they were aiming for that they clearly didn't reckon on the scale of the anger it triggered, and there is no way the frankly limited praise they are getting now overturns those effects.
I'm leaning towards not thinking that was their plan. If it was they wouldn't have spent 3 weeks being silent about it. They would have put out the improvements much sooner to both stem the bleeding and probably get more praise out of it. No, the timescale screams of the issues big corporations face when having to work out changes, agree on them, pass them by other departments, agree on when to implement them, and finally make an announcement about it. This was likely compounded by the challenges of the pandemic.
There is absolutely no doubt Blizz could have handled this whole thing much better, but I don't think their stated intent is quite as far from the truth as many believe.
That's great, except if the analogy held up the man's house would be completely fine at the end of it, and maybe even benefited a little.
What I find most amusing about your stance is that your central point is that the man is oblivious to having moved the goalposts, while not-so-subtly referring to a debacle where the still-angry community has moved its goalposts, and it is the now-content members who are consistent with their original stance (namely that the Rewards Track is fine so long as players aren't worse off than they were before).
You can still fault the cost of the game, but that's a separate issue from the introduction of the Rewards Track.
The leveling system after level 50 being changed is a good change, but I would argue that there should be no level cap rather than a level 350 cap, even if it's virtually impossible to get to the level cap right now, because on the off chance you do reach the level cap, you'll have zero incentive to keep playing.
I'm pretty sure you are doing something wrong with your life if you make it all the way to level 350 with the rewards as your only incentive for playing. You must either enjoy the game a heck of a lot to play it that much, or you should spend most of that time doing something else. Even the people who go AFK or use bots to maximise daily XP without actually playing are shooting themselves in the foot because it still costs power (and therefore money) to do that.
We actually managed to do it. Took only 4 tries to queue into each other, and from then with clever deckbuilding and careful gameplay, it was actually a piece of cake. And as a bonus, it was a TON of fun.
The actual rank doesn't matter, so long as both players are down to zero bonus stars so the matchfinder uses the number of stars rather than the hidden MMR.
Both press 'Play' at the same time, synchronising this by the start of a new minute on the clock.
Immediately concede and repeat step 4 until we were playing against each other.
It only took us a handful attempts.
Now it is a friendly match, but on ladder so counts towards achievements!
Get BOTH players down to 1, 2 or 3 health.
Wait to draw Cho.
He'll be in the bottom 2 cards for both players (because of course he is).
Now play Cho, make a few back-ups with Sathrovarr, play Oh My Yogg!, and kill off the Elekks to refill the decks with junk spells.
Finally, with 1 Cho alive on the board, each player takes the following turn:
Play a 0 mana spell. This will be turned into a random 0 mana spell (probably useless), and pass to the opponent by Cho.
Play Oh My Yogg!, giving the opponent another copy too.
If Cho is targeted by Silence or Forbidden Words, just play another one (that's why we had back-ups).
Repeat until someone's spell is finally transformed into Raise Dead and kills that player.
Both players will get the achievement, even the player who killed themselves with the opponent's secret.
Both players thank each other.
Having done all of this nonsense, I actually think it was my favourite achievement by far. Is it stupidly unlikely to happen naturally? Yes. Is it stupidly difficult to set up? Yes. Do I feel like I really earned it? My goodness yes! It truly was an achievement to be proud of.
Genuine question: Why even try to be competitive in Hearthstone?
Because losing isn't fun.
[...]
Not for Spikes no, but losing isn't actually a problem for many. I know I am perfectly fine with losing as long as the game itself was interesting, either because I at least got to do what my deck was built for or the opponent does something unexpected. Really I'm even more relaxed than that: as long as my deck's main goal comes within sight - even if I don't quite piece it together - then that at least gives me hope that I might manage it soon. There's also the side where some players just feel icky using a strong meta deck to win, and the emotional cost of using them is worse than the cost of losing with something else.
So I guess I would refine "losing isn't fun" to "failing to achieve what you set out to do isn't fun". That keeps the same meaning for Spikes who only intend to win so losing amounts to failing, while also accounting for Johnnys and Timmys getting enjoyment out of a loss so long as they are realistic and don't expect to win every game.
This is why I dislike aggro metas. I don't dislike aggro decks themselves, but when they are dominant you are not given much freedom on what you can realistically try to do. It is also why I hate Tickatus, since he's bound to crap on anything I'm trying to do if the meta slows down. I'm pretty pessimistic about the enjoyability of Standard for the next year or so, not because I will lose games, but because I won't even be allowed to try any of my usual shenanigans.
I must be as blind as Woop was when they first designed The Fifth Horseman, because I don't see why it would be "disgustingly overpowered". If it required summoning minions then sure, but actually playing 5 of them in a turn is pretty tough to do.
I am currently at level 34. I had some bad luck with the dailies recently and so I didn't play much to not accidentally complete them because I wanted to reroll.
...
I would be curious if anybody else has made similar observations, in my perception the official statement was that there should be no difference between win or loss as far as xp is concerned (supposedly leading to an increase in bots and roping).
I have wondered about whether it is worth waiting to not complete 800 xp dailies, since you are losing xp from time spent playing in the process. I suppose this is one thing that actually makes it nice to not complete dailies in all game modes, since you could leave it to re-roll while messing around in other game modes.
There are plenty of good neutral taunt minions in standard, with Khartut Defender being the obvious example as something to block a turn 7 Brann. I suspect DH's ability to just silence or ignore them altogether pushed them out of the meta, and the decks that stuck around were ones that either wouldn't use taunts or used a lot of them, as with paladin. So yeah, I guess hunter just got lucky that everything else in the meta ended up pushing the taunts out.
I could take aim at DH and say they just shouldn't be given good ways to ignore the taunt problem - which is probably true - but that's a discussion for another time. Right now, highlander hunter has been floating near the top spot for much longer than we've had Polkelt, and it deserved to at least be on Blizz's nerf radar.
It has become clear as the year has gone on that DH weapons need to be made weak by themselves to compensate for how easy it is to add to their attack. Hopefully they learn from this and don't print baseline strong weapons for the class in the future.
An incomplete set of nerfs is not the same as a useless set of nerfs. If evolve shaman ends up needing a nerf they can just nerf it later.
I don't really see why you think the nerfs will leave more classes "dead in [the] gutter" than there are currently. It is clear that these nerfs will help out the current worst classes (druid, priest, mage and warlock) because whatever happens to the meta, it must slow down at least a little bit. Certainly it does those classes no harm, and a shift in the top decks might well do them more good than the mere improvements to win rates against DH and hunter.
In the end, something will be the OP top deck that people complain about, and that happens whether you nerf cards or buff them, and even if you have perfect foresight when doing so. All that really matters is that nothing is so dominant that it suppresses half the classes simply because they have inherently bad match-ups against the dominant deck/class.
Thanks for the explanation. I was confused by the hero power's name too.
Saturday morning was definitely prime time for kids TV here in the UK, but I never encountered 'Saturday cartoons' as a phrase of any significance.
Well each class has 2*100+500+2*200 = 1100, so it is certainly higher than 1480. 14800>10*1100 sounds plausible though.
I assume the two down-votes you have at the time I'm writing this come from people who don't know why you have made a thread about a deck everyone already knows is super strong. Rather than join their silent protest, I'll use a quote from the Warlords of Draenor cinematic to show my feelings about the deck.
* Grommash Hellscream grabs the cup of Mannoroth's blood from Gul'dan *
Gul'dan: "Drink, Hellscream. Claim your destiny. You will all be conquerors."
Grommash: "And what, Gul'dan, must we give in return?"
Gul'dan: "Everything."
* Grommash tips the demon blood onto the ground *
As someone who is only a few wins away from 3000 with rogue, I could definitely appreciate a fancy hero power border to show that my lovely Cap'n Valeera portrait shows off a mere third of my experience with the class.
Since there is such a tiny calling for it from the community I wouldn't say this is something Blizzard have "messed up" on. Nevertheless, I do think it is an elegant and efficient way to add cosmetics for high numbers of wins without needing to bother commissioning 10 new pieces of art every 500 wins.
I am half way between levels 40 and 41, so I still have some way to go yet, but when I get there I'll pick Valeera. No doubt about it. It's the coolest imo, I play rogue most, and something has to make up for rogue's lack of hero portraits.
To be honest, I'm not sure I'd really use any of the other ones. I'm not that keen on some of them, and for the rest I either prefer the basic portraits or I much prefer alternative heroes for the class anyway. E.g. the Illidan and Garrosh ones look cool, but I will always prefer Aranna and Magni, especially once voicelines are considered.
I'm pretty certain they said the cards would be added to the normal DMF packs. I don't remember exactly where the devs said it, but there is no way people would be thinking that if the devs hadn't, simply because that's not something we would expect otherwise.
70 is surely overkill. I don't know exactly how many rares there will be, but if it has the same number as Galakrond's Awakening (12) you'd be pretty much guaranteed to get all the commons and rares in 24 packs.
In the end you (probably) won't be able to control whether you get new epics / legendaries, so there doesn't seem much point in holding onto more than 24 packs unless you already have nearly all the high rarity cards.
Hey man, as long as it's a rogue hero... Gallywix is exactly like Santa right?
It just a shame the last rogue hero was a tauren so no one was able to find him.
If they were aiming for that they clearly didn't reckon on the scale of the anger it triggered, and there is no way the frankly limited praise they are getting now overturns those effects.
I'm leaning towards not thinking that was their plan. If it was they wouldn't have spent 3 weeks being silent about it. They would have put out the improvements much sooner to both stem the bleeding and probably get more praise out of it. No, the timescale screams of the issues big corporations face when having to work out changes, agree on them, pass them by other departments, agree on when to implement them, and finally make an announcement about it. This was likely compounded by the challenges of the pandemic.
There is absolutely no doubt Blizz could have handled this whole thing much better, but I don't think their stated intent is quite as far from the truth as many believe.
That's great, except if the analogy held up the man's house would be completely fine at the end of it, and maybe even benefited a little.
What I find most amusing about your stance is that your central point is that the man is oblivious to having moved the goalposts, while not-so-subtly referring to a debacle where the still-angry community has moved its goalposts, and it is the now-content members who are consistent with their original stance (namely that the Rewards Track is fine so long as players aren't worse off than they were before).
You can still fault the cost of the game, but that's a separate issue from the introduction of the Rewards Track.
I'm pretty sure you are doing something wrong with your life if you make it all the way to level 350 with the rewards as your only incentive for playing. You must either enjoy the game a heck of a lot to play it that much, or you should spend most of that time doing something else. Even the people who go AFK or use bots to maximise daily XP without actually playing are shooting themselves in the foot because it still costs power (and therefore money) to do that.
So yeah, the 350 level cap is really a non-issue.
No no. Thank YOU!
I literally just detailed the process for others to follow if they want in the general achievement hunting thread: https://outof.cards/forums/hearthstone/hearthstone-general/6756-achievement-tipsstrategies-sharing
So @viczone and I managed to set up the YoggChamp achievement (which requires getting lethal with Oh My Yogg!) via the following steps:
Having done all of this nonsense, I actually think it was my favourite achievement by far. Is it stupidly unlikely to happen naturally? Yes. Is it stupidly difficult to set up? Yes. Do I feel like I really earned it? My goodness yes! It truly was an achievement to be proud of.
Not for Spikes no, but losing isn't actually a problem for many. I know I am perfectly fine with losing as long as the game itself was interesting, either because I at least got to do what my deck was built for or the opponent does something unexpected. Really I'm even more relaxed than that: as long as my deck's main goal comes within sight - even if I don't quite piece it together - then that at least gives me hope that I might manage it soon. There's also the side where some players just feel icky using a strong meta deck to win, and the emotional cost of using them is worse than the cost of losing with something else.
So I guess I would refine "losing isn't fun" to "failing to achieve what you set out to do isn't fun". That keeps the same meaning for Spikes who only intend to win so losing amounts to failing, while also accounting for Johnnys and Timmys getting enjoyment out of a loss so long as they are realistic and don't expect to win every game.
This is why I dislike aggro metas. I don't dislike aggro decks themselves, but when they are dominant you are not given much freedom on what you can realistically try to do. It is also why I hate Tickatus, since he's bound to crap on anything I'm trying to do if the meta slows down. I'm pretty pessimistic about the enjoyability of Standard for the next year or so, not because I will lose games, but because I won't even be allowed to try any of my usual shenanigans.
I know. I have now replaced 'you' with Woop to remove the ambiguity in what I wrote.
I must be as blind as Woop was when they first designed The Fifth Horseman, because I don't see why it would be "disgustingly overpowered". If it required summoning minions then sure, but actually playing 5 of them in a turn is pretty tough to do.
I have wondered about whether it is worth waiting to not complete 800 xp dailies, since you are losing xp from time spent playing in the process. I suppose this is one thing that actually makes it nice to not complete dailies in all game modes, since you could leave it to re-roll while messing around in other game modes.
The official statement did say we get more for wins (see "winning matters" at the start of Dean Ayala's post here: https://outof.cards/hearthstone/2196-hearthstones-new-progression-system-the-reward-track-has-time-based-experience-xp-per-hour-no-daily-cap-yet), but of course they gave no details about how much.