Whether Librams are fine or not is up for debate, but my point that there are players who dislike them stands. You'll find a few questions of why Paladin wasn't included on the list in the comments below, for example, and let's face it, Paladin is completely dominated by Librams right now.
The biggest problem at the moment though is Demon Hunter, which needs serious nerfing. It is not going to be clear whether most of the other classes even need a buff until DH has been nerfed, since it is warping the meta so much.
Bazaar Burglary was a much better design trying to achieve a similar thing.
yes because 2 mana fiery war axe they hit you in the face with every turn after completing their quest on turn 2 is good game design....
Hit face? That's not how that deck is played at all. Besides, the fact it has never been a meta deck shows the effect is completely fair given the requirement of the quest.
It must be nice living in a world where every deck you play against isn't degenerate that plays shit just to play shit an hits you in the fact every single opportunity. I wish i lived there.
I'm sorry, what? You encounter burgle rogue every game and the people playing it are misplaying by punching your face instead of hitting minions most turns? I'd take that over Demon Hunter beating my face in every game. Seriously, that weapon should pretty much always be used as removal unless there are no minions to remove or the opponent is at low life already. I guess if they know you're an OTK deck they should ignore the board too.
I appreciate the whole burgle thing isn't everyone's cup of tea, but I really don't see where your grudge against Bazaar Burglary comes from.
I dont see the issue of the powercreep not when like half classes are really bad ,there i 100% think buffs are way better then nerfs.
But half of the classes are only weak relative to the classes that have seen the most powercreep. They are not inherently weak, and it is equally valid to say the other classes are too strong. The two viewpoints would be equivalent except that powercreep gives us a more fixed reference point. It is still subjective whether it is good or bad, but I personally would like my old cards to remain relevant for as long as possible, and hence would like powercreep minimised.
Quote From Zyella
And the good/best balance INVOLVES NERFS AND BUFFS. And for buffs over nerfs I'd say for msot people in general it feels better to have stuff buffed (especially that wasn't very good/good at all before) vs seeing something nerfed.
While I agree it feels good to see some cool but underused cards get buffed, players often have seriously strong feelings of dislike towards OP cards and they are happy to see them nerfed. Also, buffing cards can end up fulfilling the saying "You either die a hero, or live long enough to become the villain." Remember Luna's Pocket Galaxy and now Librams? Both were considered cool while they were weak, but after being buffed a decent chunk of the player-base came to hate them.
Quote From Zyella
And for buffs not being something that sees play i think that's not always a bad thing
Agreed. Again this links into the whole 'becoming a villain' thing. If cards don't become big in the meta, they don't tend to become hated, so you just have a net win of making a cool deck a bit more playable. While this is an absolute win, the fact it doesn't impact the meta means you still have the same problem where players want the meta to change. So you need some buffs to be relevant in the meta
Bazaar Burglary was a much better design trying to achieve a similar thing.
yes because 2 mana fiery war axe they hit you in the face with every turn after completing their quest on turn 2 is good game design....
Hit face? That's not how that deck is played at all. Besides, the fact it has never been a meta deck shows the effect is completely fair given the requirement of the quest.
So the best way to do this achievement is: try to queue up with a buddy at the very same time in Ranked, put both heroes to 10- health while keeping the board clear, cast Oh My Yogg!, wait for the opponent to cast a 10 mana spell (preferably as a Mage, as Mages have the most 10 mana spells (2) so it's easier to draw them) and pray to Yogg. Repeat if failed.
If anyone is up for this shit, feel free to add me. Always an optimist.
Honestly, if you could guarantee playing against a friend on ladder (very tricky btw, since you need a similar MMR, and be on the same server), then I'd try using Lorewalker Cho to keep passing around Oh My Yogg! and a 0-cost spell, e.g. a coin. Eventually you'll land on Raise Dead. It might need a few backup Chos in case of Silence.
If you are on EU I'm happy to try this with you (it is the last difficult achievement for me too), but otherwise all I can say is good luck while I quietly put the secret in every Paladin deck for the next year in case I ever manage it.
Edit: I just saw your BattleTag. I can add you later. We can try to arrange something via private messages :)
There are two issues with buffs over nerfs (though I'm not trying to say they are always worse). First, it is harder to know if they will have any impact on the meta. You can buff a weak deck into an OK deck and still nobody would play it. Compare to nerfs, where you have a much better idea of what will change.
The second issue is that impactful buffs tend to amplify power creep, while nerfs help to keep it in check. At a time when the cost of the game is a cause of many complaints, I'm not sure fully adopting a strategy that enhances power creep (and thereby pushes people to buy even more packs) is really a good idea.
That said, buffs can be done well, and I agree with you that several of the cards on the list are fine to leave until they rotate out.
Drakkari Trickster was a perfectly fine counter to kingsbane rogue where they drew their entire deck to have just kingsbane at the end, and that came out in the same expansion. Not to mention when leeching poison got nerfed the meta was full of combo decks. Meaning endless sustain did not matter. Also, yeah weapon removal exists, guess what exists a second spectral cutlass which they all run.
The Trickster came out in Rastakhan's Rumble, the Cutlass is Witchwood, Kingsbane in K&C, and Leeching Poison in Frozen Throne. Not a single one of them was in the same expansion. Certainly the Trickster came out way after Leeching Poison was nerfed, so it never had anything to do with countering OG Kingsbane rogue. Perhaps you meant a different card?
K&C was not riddled with OTK decks, it had combo-control decks like CubeLock where endless sustain absolutely did matter. It meant rogue could punch through endless massive taunts, heal up for well over twice the damage taken, and eventually be left with full health, a 17 attack weapon and as much time as it took to just whack the opponent's face in. If the sustain didn't matter, the deck wouldn't have disappeared when Leeching Poison was made a 1-time heal.
Regarding the second Cutlass: a good use of weapon removal makes sure the rogue buffs the Cutlass first, so even if they have a second one it is still weaker than without weapon removal. Plus, you still have the option of running multiple weapon removal too, so it is still completely counterable. To be clear, I do dislike the design of the Cutlass, because like OG Kingsbane rogue it easily makes games unwinnable for the opponent if they don't run weapon removal and they aren't an OTK deck. Bazaar Burglary was a much better design trying to achieve a similar thing.
He is still Wild only, but I think I recall them mentioning him earlier this year before asking if there were any other cards we'd like to see added to Classic. So there is a bit of hope he will be made evergreen in April.
Leaching poison got nerfed because blizzard hated control rogue with kingsbane except for their version of burgle rogue where you endlessly discover bullshit to win the game. Leaching poison got nerfed and next expansion they release spectral cutlass, which is complete hypocrisy.
And you know what happened with kingsbane after the nerf? it became even more degenerate aggro fodder. With pirates and weapon buffs and coldlights and you get what you deserve.
While the comparison with Spectral Cutlass is obvious, is isn't entirely fair because once you use weapon removal on the cutlass it is gone completely and the rogue has to start over again with a new one. So you can easily deal with it if you want to. That was not true with a lifesteal Kingsbane until DoD added Kobold Stickyfinger.
I don't see any hypocrisy in there, just a refinement of the original idea into one that can actually be countered.
Also, for the record, I don't think Blizzard 'hates' control rogue so much as the core class mechanics don't make any sense with the control archetype. Burgle rogue is not a control deck and never has been; it is a value-tempo deck that eats control for breakfast and only beats aggro by seizing board control early on and beating them up faster than they beat you up. OG Kingsbane rogue sticks out like a sore thumb as the only deck in rogue's history that can seriously be considered a control deck, because it reliably had both massive AoE and healing. I am a strong advocate of maintaining class identity so I just don't think rogue should have been allowed both of those things in a form that could not be countered, and that's coming from a rogue main!
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Anyway, coming back to the original matter of whether Aldrachi Warblades need nerfing: I don't think they do. For one thing, DH is meant to have healing so @RavenSunHS's comparison to Leeching Poison isn't fair. The Warblades are also actually a kind of crappy weapon by themselves, so I think we should be targeting the cards that break them (I'm looking at you Il'gynoth). However, it is apparent they probably shouldn't be in the Basic set so we have to deal with ridiculous healing in DH until the end of days.
Armorsmith has been chilling as a good card since Classic, but was never close to problematic until the Skipper arrived. I personally wouldn't nerf the Skipper (as a midrange/control player I rarely care if the warrior gets a bunch of armour), but I certainly wouldn't be targeting Armorsmith.
I played him as a priest, I was at 23 HP, two taunts and DH had no board no weapon.
And then he just killed me, with nothing I could do about it. For 9 mana, in standard, from 23 lives with no enemy board.
This really is not OK.
(I'm assuming Il'gynoth was involved. If he wasn't, that just further motivates my final comment.)
Yeah, I was hammering out the Il'gynoth achievement yesterday with a bad deck (using lots of cards no one else uses), playing badly, and not even trying to win, but I still won most games out of nowhere because the whole set up is just too easy to pull together. I hadn't put Il'gynoth on my nerf list last time, but now I have actually used him it is clear he needs a serious mana increase.
You'll be pleased to hear I retired the deck asap and have no intention of ever touching it again.
What's really worrying is that I'm pretty sure Il'gynoth isn't even the most unfair thing in DH. I'm certainly sick of playing against the class and most of the time I don't even see the card.
I had 2 great opportunities to finish the No Pathetic Cards achievement which is very challenging to set up and in both cases my opponent chooses to concede instead. All other games in between were just mission impossible cause they are simply overpowered, but hey Blizzard decided that this should be done in ranked mode, so thanks a lot for wasting my time!
I had this same problem with the one that has you destroy your opponent with fatigue. (That one's not worth XP, so there have been no posts about it, but it's common for opponents to concede instead of let you get it.)
It definitely feels like the HS playerbase needs to be a bit more achievement-friendly when they see their opponent is trying a wacky "just for the achievements" combo.
I think it is best to just let some of them happen naturally. Sooner or later you'll kill someone through fatigue without trying. I'm certainly resigned to that approach with the one that requires you to get lethal with Oh My Yogg!, because setting up all of:
the opponent is on very low health;
the opponent does not concede;
the opponent does not heal or gain armour;
the opponent is willing to play a spell;
Oh My Yogg! gets the very small chance of getting a damage dealing spell;
AND that spell hits the opponent
is just way too much hassle. I even thought of using Millhouse Manastorm because Raise Dead is just about the most reliable way to do it, so forcing a 0-mana spell seems helpful. But if you are ever resorting to using Millhouse you should probably just give up.
I'm thinking much the same as you, although there was one time when I was trying to get an achievement so I wasn't attacking the opponent, and then they turned up on turn 6. Maybe that person was exploiting the system 'honestly' by just starting games and going AFK for them, hopping back every so often to start a new game.
On the bright side, I think you do still get a bit more XP for wins. One day Blizz might tell us how much more...
For it to achieve something you'd need to remove the King's Ransom without playing it. All I can think of is to transform it while it is in your hand after playing Illucia, but even though there are a few cards that could do that, I don't think you can rely on having them because you have your opponent's hand.
The only thing I can come up with is to have played Marin the Fox, kill the chest when you have your opponent's hand, then hope to get the Golden Kobold to transform all the cards in the hand. But that's a lot of hoops to jump through to probably give your opponent a better hand.
OK, so it (sometimes/always?) casts choose one cards 3 times. It least it is easy to home in on the problem.
To be honest, it's a risk I am willing to take, and no doubt the Lord Yogg will be looking on us with disappointment if we were afraid of a little chaos.
I'm not sure if mentioned somewhere already, but doubling C'Thun's battlecry with Shaman quest reward won't count towards the "kill from full health" quest. Learned it the hard way...
Probably should've guessed it.
Then I'm doubly happy to have just helped out a Shaman who was planning on doing it that way, but didn't have to after I left my board empty.
Does anyone know if the 'YoggChamp' achievement can be fulfilled by killing you as well as your opponent? It only says "deal lethal damage". If anyone has any good ideas of how to rig it I'd love to hear them. At the moment it looks like the toughest one to do since you really have no control at all aside from putting the opponent as very low health and praying.
Soul DH's reach probably needs to be cut back, but minor nerfs to single cards that give you attack, e.g. Soulshard Lapidary, might not do much since there are so many of them. I'm conscious that Twin Slice is in the DH Initiate set, which rotates out of Standard in April, so they might just wait until that fixes the reach issue automatically.
So better targets in DH are probably Bladed Lady or Blade Dance (the latter is also in the Initiate set, but hitting removal might have a bigger impact than attack buffs).
I think they should also undo the buff they gave to Aldor Attendant, putting it back to a 2 mana 2/3. We know Libram Pally works really well at this point, and First Day of School gives the class the 1-drop it lacked when the Attendant was buffed.
OK, so I have been sitting out of the whole discussion for a long time because while I don't agree that the rewards track was ever really that bad, I am also unimpressed with how Blizzard has handled it so they deserved a bit of an uproar. However, it has reached the point where I'm actually leaning towards the community's handling of it being worse than Blizz's. To help say why, let's break down the gold acquisition in rewards track for me personally:
Show Spoiler
I used to get about 8k gold in the 4 month expansion cycle, which from what I have seen is fairly typical. Up to level 50 in the rewards track you get 4950 gold (plus other stuff that everyone counts differently so I will ignore it completely). To make up the 3050 gold deficit I need an extra 21 levels, putting me at 8100 gold.
The total XP up to level 71 is 284000, so the question is whether I expect to get this much in 4 months of playing. Well, I'm currently just at level 33, which took 73800 XP to reach, or 26% of the way to level 71. Note I don't have the Tavern Pass, but I do have enough cards to make serious progress on achievements.
The crudest calculation would take the number of days I took to get here and multiply XP accordingly. Equivalently we can just look at the fraction of 4 months 16 days is. Calling 1 month 365/12 = 30.4 days, that is 16/(4*30.4)=13%, about half the fraction of the way to level 71. So in this crude calculation I should shoot way past level 71 and get lots more gold than I did before.
Of course that calculation is crude for a reason: I have been playing more than I normally would because it is the start of an expansion, and I got additional one-off XP from achievements. Even so, the fact I have so much more XP than the target 13% needed at this point is reassuring, and that's before considering events that will likely grant more XP.
Now, I know that just because the numbers are kind to me, it doesn't mean they are so kind to everyone. But if I put myself in the devs' shoes and saw the community rage despite the numbers actually being perfectly fine, I know I'd be keeping quite quiet too. What else can you do?
Tell the community they are wrong? Even if that is true it would only provoke further anger.
Perhaps they decide the community is completely right and the game should be made cheaper, but that change cannot come overnight and they cannot make promises before they know what they will do, so they cannot announce anything there either.
If they take the middle ground and say "we have heard the concerns and are discussing them but don't propose any changes yet", then the community accuses them of being out of touch anyway.
So where are we? We have a community holding pitch-forks angry about changes that, by my calculations, don't deserve nearly so much anger as they are still generating. And a dev team that messed up by lack of communication, and have got themselves caught in a tough spot where almost anything they say will spark more anger (seriously, even if they finally told us how much XP per hour we get in each game mode, you can bet people will be angry they haven't also announced a 'fix' to the whole system), as will saying nothing.
I went into this affair being neutral because I wanted to experience everything for myself before making a judgement. Now I'm neutral because, quite frankly, neither side has handled it well enough to deserve my support.
Took a while but managed to do it, thanks for the tip.
It felt amazing and bad at the same time, as I somehow managed to take control against an aggro druid and would've won the match, but an achievement hunter must do what an achievement hunter must do. I had plenty of minions on board and I rotated the giant as the only minion of my opponent while having 8 health and counter lethal on board for next turn. My opponent took their chance, I got the achievement pop-up even before seeing any arrows indicating an attack.
I just managed to finally assemble the combo and play it (after losing quite a few games), and rather than attack me, my opponent just used their own removal spells on the giant.....I'm pretty sure my opponent was playing for the Cascading Disaster achievement (they thanked after playing one for three kills), making me all the more annoyed that they didn't attack. Seems like it could have been a mutually beneficial game.
EDIT: I managed to complete this, but not with the full combo. I eventually found an Odd Paladin, stalled a ton, and gave them an Arcane Giant with Silas Darkmoon and played Shadow Clone. They could have attacked with a buffed Silver Hand Recruit for lethal and denied me the achievement, but they didn't. Despite dying when they attacked, the secret still triggered and I still got the achievement.
Yeah it's always pretty annoying when you are clearly messing around but the opponent gets suspicious and thinks you have some master plan that will ruin them, so they do the opposite of what you need them to.
Yesterday I forced the 'Yogg, take the wheel' achievement with a Demon Hunter decks that had nothing but removal, card draw, Yogg, Blur and an Eater of Secrets to clear off any possible Ice Blocks or Evasions (I did it in Wild so there was less aggro). The plan was simple: stall to play Blur and Yogg into Rod of Roasting for a guaranteed OTK (5% of the time). There was no point in me attacking the opponent so I never did, yet they still sometimes conceded just before I could play Yogg :(
For anyone daunted by needing to summon a whopping 200 Greyboughs, I managed it in a few hours earlier with this deck:
It not a cheap deck, but if you have the pieces it is well worth trying it out. It was the most fun I have had playing druid in a long long time, and can gladly say Elise the Enlightened was an absolute star, doubling key pieces meaning you can press through several waves of board clears. I had a mammoth game against a Big Priest that ended up summoning 99(!) Greyboughs, where we both went down to fatigue after shuffling lots of cards into our decks (2 Psychic Screams, several Excavated Evils, and a ton of resurrected Reliquary of Souls). It truly was a game of the unstoppable force vs the immovable object.
I don't think this actually makes a difference, because if you claim the XP now you'll reach level 35 faster, and get the boost on the XP you would otherwise use to get to 35. Basically you are changing which XP you get the boost on, but your total should sum to the same.
Whether Librams are fine or not is up for debate, but my point that there are players who dislike them stands. You'll find a few questions of why Paladin wasn't included on the list in the comments below, for example, and let's face it, Paladin is completely dominated by Librams right now.
The biggest problem at the moment though is Demon Hunter, which needs serious nerfing. It is not going to be clear whether most of the other classes even need a buff until DH has been nerfed, since it is warping the meta so much.
I'm sorry, what? You encounter burgle rogue every game and the people playing it are misplaying by punching your face instead of hitting minions most turns? I'd take that over Demon Hunter beating my face in every game. Seriously, that weapon should pretty much always be used as removal unless there are no minions to remove or the opponent is at low life already. I guess if they know you're an OTK deck they should ignore the board too.
I appreciate the whole burgle thing isn't everyone's cup of tea, but I really don't see where your grudge against Bazaar Burglary comes from.
But half of the classes are only weak relative to the classes that have seen the most powercreep. They are not inherently weak, and it is equally valid to say the other classes are too strong. The two viewpoints would be equivalent except that powercreep gives us a more fixed reference point. It is still subjective whether it is good or bad, but I personally would like my old cards to remain relevant for as long as possible, and hence would like powercreep minimised.
While I agree it feels good to see some cool but underused cards get buffed, players often have seriously strong feelings of dislike towards OP cards and they are happy to see them nerfed. Also, buffing cards can end up fulfilling the saying "You either die a hero, or live long enough to become the villain." Remember Luna's Pocket Galaxy and now Librams? Both were considered cool while they were weak, but after being buffed a decent chunk of the player-base came to hate them.
Agreed. Again this links into the whole 'becoming a villain' thing. If cards don't become big in the meta, they don't tend to become hated, so you just have a net win of making a cool deck a bit more playable. While this is an absolute win, the fact it doesn't impact the meta means you still have the same problem where players want the meta to change. So you need some buffs to be relevant in the meta
Hit face? That's not how that deck is played at all. Besides, the fact it has never been a meta deck shows the effect is completely fair given the requirement of the quest.
Honestly, if you could guarantee playing against a friend on ladder (very tricky btw, since you need a similar MMR, and be on the same server), then I'd try using Lorewalker Cho to keep passing around Oh My Yogg! and a 0-cost spell, e.g. a coin. Eventually you'll land on Raise Dead. It might need a few backup Chos in case of Silence.
If you are on EU I'm happy to try this with you (it is the last difficult achievement for me too), but otherwise all I can say is good luck while I quietly put the secret in every Paladin deck for the next year in case I ever manage it.
Edit: I just saw your BattleTag. I can add you later. We can try to arrange something via private messages :)
There are two issues with buffs over nerfs (though I'm not trying to say they are always worse). First, it is harder to know if they will have any impact on the meta. You can buff a weak deck into an OK deck and still nobody would play it. Compare to nerfs, where you have a much better idea of what will change.
The second issue is that impactful buffs tend to amplify power creep, while nerfs help to keep it in check. At a time when the cost of the game is a cause of many complaints, I'm not sure fully adopting a strategy that enhances power creep (and thereby pushes people to buy even more packs) is really a good idea.
That said, buffs can be done well, and I agree with you that several of the cards on the list are fine to leave until they rotate out.
The Trickster came out in Rastakhan's Rumble, the Cutlass is Witchwood, Kingsbane in K&C, and Leeching Poison in Frozen Throne. Not a single one of them was in the same expansion. Certainly the Trickster came out way after Leeching Poison was nerfed, so it never had anything to do with countering OG Kingsbane rogue. Perhaps you meant a different card?
K&C was not riddled with OTK decks, it had combo-control decks like CubeLock where endless sustain absolutely did matter. It meant rogue could punch through endless massive taunts, heal up for well over twice the damage taken, and eventually be left with full health, a 17 attack weapon and as much time as it took to just whack the opponent's face in. If the sustain didn't matter, the deck wouldn't have disappeared when Leeching Poison was made a 1-time heal.
Regarding the second Cutlass: a good use of weapon removal makes sure the rogue buffs the Cutlass first, so even if they have a second one it is still weaker than without weapon removal. Plus, you still have the option of running multiple weapon removal too, so it is still completely counterable. To be clear, I do dislike the design of the Cutlass, because like OG Kingsbane rogue it easily makes games unwinnable for the opponent if they don't run weapon removal and they aren't an OTK deck. Bazaar Burglary was a much better design trying to achieve a similar thing.
He is still Wild only, but I think I recall them mentioning him earlier this year before asking if there were any other cards we'd like to see added to Classic. So there is a bit of hope he will be made evergreen in April.
While the comparison with Spectral Cutlass is obvious, is isn't entirely fair because once you use weapon removal on the cutlass it is gone completely and the rogue has to start over again with a new one. So you can easily deal with it if you want to. That was not true with a lifesteal Kingsbane until DoD added Kobold Stickyfinger.
I don't see any hypocrisy in there, just a refinement of the original idea into one that can actually be countered.
Also, for the record, I don't think Blizzard 'hates' control rogue so much as the core class mechanics don't make any sense with the control archetype. Burgle rogue is not a control deck and never has been; it is a value-tempo deck that eats control for breakfast and only beats aggro by seizing board control early on and beating them up faster than they beat you up. OG Kingsbane rogue sticks out like a sore thumb as the only deck in rogue's history that can seriously be considered a control deck, because it reliably had both massive AoE and healing. I am a strong advocate of maintaining class identity so I just don't think rogue should have been allowed both of those things in a form that could not be countered, and that's coming from a rogue main!
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Anyway, coming back to the original matter of whether Aldrachi Warblades need nerfing: I don't think they do. For one thing, DH is meant to have healing so @RavenSunHS's comparison to Leeching Poison isn't fair. The Warblades are also actually a kind of crappy weapon by themselves, so I think we should be targeting the cards that break them (I'm looking at you Il'gynoth). However, it is apparent they probably shouldn't be in the Basic set so we have to deal with ridiculous healing in DH until the end of days.
Armorsmith has been chilling as a good card since Classic, but was never close to problematic until the Skipper arrived. I personally wouldn't nerf the Skipper (as a midrange/control player I rarely care if the warrior gets a bunch of armour), but I certainly wouldn't be targeting Armorsmith.
(I'm assuming Il'gynoth was involved. If he wasn't, that just further motivates my final comment.)
Yeah, I was hammering out the Il'gynoth achievement yesterday with a bad deck (using lots of cards no one else uses), playing badly, and not even trying to win, but I still won most games out of nowhere because the whole set up is just too easy to pull together. I hadn't put Il'gynoth on my nerf list last time, but now I have actually used him it is clear he needs a serious mana increase.
You'll be pleased to hear I retired the deck asap and have no intention of ever touching it again.
What's really worrying is that I'm pretty sure Il'gynoth isn't even the most unfair thing in DH. I'm certainly sick of playing against the class and most of the time I don't even see the card.
I think it is best to just let some of them happen naturally. Sooner or later you'll kill someone through fatigue without trying. I'm certainly resigned to that approach with the one that requires you to get lethal with Oh My Yogg!, because setting up all of:
is just way too much hassle. I even thought of using Millhouse Manastorm because Raise Dead is just about the most reliable way to do it, so forcing a 0-mana spell seems helpful. But if you are ever resorting to using Millhouse you should probably just give up.
At least I really like that secret I guess.
I'm thinking much the same as you, although there was one time when I was trying to get an achievement so I wasn't attacking the opponent, and then they turned up on turn 6. Maybe that person was exploiting the system 'honestly' by just starting games and going AFK for them, hopping back every so often to start a new game.
On the bright side, I think you do still get a bit more XP for wins. One day Blizz might tell us how much more...
For it to achieve something you'd need to remove the King's Ransom without playing it. All I can think of is to transform it while it is in your hand after playing Illucia, but even though there are a few cards that could do that, I don't think you can rely on having them because you have your opponent's hand.
The only thing I can come up with is to have played Marin the Fox, kill the chest when you have your opponent's hand, then hope to get the Golden Kobold to transform all the cards in the hand. But that's a lot of hoops to jump through to probably give your opponent a better hand.
OK, so it (sometimes/always?) casts choose one cards 3 times. It least it is easy to home in on the problem.
To be honest, it's a risk I am willing to take, and no doubt the Lord Yogg will be looking on us with disappointment if we were afraid of a little chaos.
Then I'm doubly happy to have just helped out a Shaman who was planning on doing it that way, but didn't have to after I left my board empty.
Does anyone know if the 'YoggChamp' achievement can be fulfilled by killing you as well as your opponent? It only says "deal lethal damage". If anyone has any good ideas of how to rig it I'd love to hear them. At the moment it looks like the toughest one to do since you really have no control at all aside from putting the opponent as very low health and praying.
Soul DH's reach probably needs to be cut back, but minor nerfs to single cards that give you attack, e.g. Soulshard Lapidary, might not do much since there are so many of them. I'm conscious that Twin Slice is in the DH Initiate set, which rotates out of Standard in April, so they might just wait until that fixes the reach issue automatically.
So better targets in DH are probably Bladed Lady or Blade Dance (the latter is also in the Initiate set, but hitting removal might have a bigger impact than attack buffs).
I think they should also undo the buff they gave to Aldor Attendant, putting it back to a 2 mana 2/3. We know Libram Pally works really well at this point, and First Day of School gives the class the 1-drop it lacked when the Attendant was buffed.
OK, so I have been sitting out of the whole discussion for a long time because while I don't agree that the rewards track was ever really that bad, I am also unimpressed with how Blizzard has handled it so they deserved a bit of an uproar. However, it has reached the point where I'm actually leaning towards the community's handling of it being worse than Blizz's. To help say why, let's break down the gold acquisition in rewards track for me personally:
I used to get about 8k gold in the 4 month expansion cycle, which from what I have seen is fairly typical. Up to level 50 in the rewards track you get 4950 gold (plus other stuff that everyone counts differently so I will ignore it completely). To make up the 3050 gold deficit I need an extra 21 levels, putting me at 8100 gold.
The total XP up to level 71 is 284000, so the question is whether I expect to get this much in 4 months of playing. Well, I'm currently just at level 33, which took 73800 XP to reach, or 26% of the way to level 71. Note I don't have the Tavern Pass, but I do have enough cards to make serious progress on achievements.
The crudest calculation would take the number of days I took to get here and multiply XP accordingly. Equivalently we can just look at the fraction of 4 months 16 days is. Calling 1 month 365/12 = 30.4 days, that is 16/(4*30.4)=13%, about half the fraction of the way to level 71. So in this crude calculation I should shoot way past level 71 and get lots more gold than I did before.
Of course that calculation is crude for a reason: I have been playing more than I normally would because it is the start of an expansion, and I got additional one-off XP from achievements. Even so, the fact I have so much more XP than the target 13% needed at this point is reassuring, and that's before considering events that will likely grant more XP.
Now, I know that just because the numbers are kind to me, it doesn't mean they are so kind to everyone. But if I put myself in the devs' shoes and saw the community rage despite the numbers actually being perfectly fine, I know I'd be keeping quite quiet too. What else can you do?
So where are we? We have a community holding pitch-forks angry about changes that, by my calculations, don't deserve nearly so much anger as they are still generating. And a dev team that messed up by lack of communication, and have got themselves caught in a tough spot where almost anything they say will spark more anger (seriously, even if they finally told us how much XP per hour we get in each game mode, you can bet people will be angry they haven't also announced a 'fix' to the whole system), as will saying nothing.
I went into this affair being neutral because I wanted to experience everything for myself before making a judgement. Now I'm neutral because, quite frankly, neither side has handled it well enough to deserve my support.
Yeah it's always pretty annoying when you are clearly messing around but the opponent gets suspicious and thinks you have some master plan that will ruin them, so they do the opposite of what you need them to.
Yesterday I forced the 'Yogg, take the wheel' achievement with a Demon Hunter decks that had nothing but removal, card draw, Yogg, Blur and an Eater of Secrets to clear off any possible Ice Blocks or Evasions (I did it in Wild so there was less aggro). The plan was simple: stall to play Blur and Yogg into Rod of Roasting for a guaranteed OTK (5% of the time). There was no point in me attacking the opponent so I never did, yet they still sometimes conceded just before I could play Yogg :(
For anyone daunted by needing to summon a whopping 200 Greyboughs, I managed it in a few hours earlier with this deck:
It not a cheap deck, but if you have the pieces it is well worth trying it out. It was the most fun I have had playing druid in a long long time, and can gladly say Elise the Enlightened was an absolute star, doubling key pieces meaning you can press through several waves of board clears. I had a mammoth game against a Big Priest that ended up summoning 99(!) Greyboughs, where we both went down to fatigue after shuffling lots of cards into our decks (2 Psychic Screams, several Excavated Evils, and a ton of resurrected Reliquary of Souls). It truly was a game of the unstoppable force vs the immovable object.
I don't think this actually makes a difference, because if you claim the XP now you'll reach level 35 faster, and get the boost on the XP you would otherwise use to get to 35. Basically you are changing which XP you get the boost on, but your total should sum to the same.