Good golly, we're targeting Blizz for advertising their products now are we? Granted, all the worthwhile concerns have been discussed to death at this point and there's not much more to say until Blizz gives another response, but normal advertising is not something that needs arguing over to pass the time.
Wrong lol. We want gold instead of those. Literally most people who complain about the new system DON'T WANT old packs instead of gold. 100 gold is always a pack, but a pack value is not always a 100 gold.
The free legendary and 3 packs are also bonuses in new expansions that you used to get on expansion launch, so lol@ adding it to the pass as if it's a new thing to trick naive users like you.
Tavern tickets also aren't something everybody wants. Events always used to be a thing, they keep going downhill if anything. From double gold at it's best and gold dust to I don't even remember what the last event did, that useless arena thing?
If the new system is better than it should award more base gold than the old system. You can literally play 30 mins in 2 days only doing quests and getting 100 gold guaranteed. Now and especially in the later levels you aren't guaranteed anything, and the weekly quests are very time consuming.
I will reply to a few points below, but first and foremost, can you please use a more respectful tone when making your arguments? You are not going to convince anyone of anything if you start calling them naive and use absolutes like only your opinion is valid. The best discussions often arise through disagreement, but they only work if both sides respect each other.
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Anyway, regarding Tavern Tickets: at absolute worst these amount to a pack of the most recent expansion plus a small amount of dust or gold. And that's what you'll get it you commit 5 minutes to building a deck and just conceding 3 games. If you actually try, you can get a decent amount of extra gold / dust. Now, I'm not saying Arena /Heroic Duels rewards are perfect (I mean, who wants those non-golden commons... seriously?), but the rewards are absolutely what players want, even if they wouldn't normally spend 150 gold on the game modes involved.
You are also portraying XP like it is worthless unless it pushes you over a level there and then, which is nonsense. Rewards in the progression track are more spaced out than the old trickle of gold, but the XP that gets you half way through a level is just as important as the XP that gets you over the level threshold. There is a clear psychological effect with many players where accumulating, say, 200 gold over time feels better than waiting to get it in 1 lump, but unless you are using that gold as you collect it there isn't an actual difference there. Now, what Blizz should do is just show the XP being added after each game, so you can see what it has earned you.
Finally, are weekly quests really that time consuming? Because they are often restricted to specific game modes it is fair to say different players will take longer on different ones, but let's use the default "Get 7 wins in ranked" quest as an example. Assuming 50% win rate, that's 14 games, or 2 a day. That's less than the daily quests ask for, so no, they are not really time consuming once you recognise they are spread across the week.
Druid: Keeper of the Grove (not great, but arguably better than the Owl at least)
...
As someone that has played a lot of druid this year, which includes quest druid, gonk druid, taunt druid, lucentbark druid. I can say that Keeper of the Grove is not a card one should EVER consider putting into their deck unless they invent a time machine first. After you play your 4 mana 2/2 against one big paladin minion, they'll just play liadrin or some other dumb shit and beat you down with that instead. All while you waste 4 mana to silence a minion and summon a 2/2 they can easily ignore on board when they resume to hit you in the face, while laughing at you all the way until you hit that concede button.
The only viable option for silence is mage or shaman or demon hunter(because demon hunter is supposed to be good at everything don't ya know). And blizzard has made sure of that. tinkmaster overspark is one of my favorite cards and he's a meme.
Alternatives would be using [Hearthstone Card (sylvanas) Not Found] and Play Dead and Nine Lives in wild https://hsreplay.net/replay/dNgxu2NaUp7c2fwrFda2YB#turn=5b
Well I did say Keeper of the Grove was not great. To be honest, it wouldn't help against libram pally even if it was still a 2/4, not because it would be a bad card, but because druid removal is utter garbage and silencing 1 thing isn't going to get you very far in that match-up if you cannot clear multiple big minions.
I do think you are undervaluing the ability of rogue and priest to deal with libram pally though. I admit I'm not an expert on priest, but I have a lot of experience making libram paladins cry just by running some hard removal in my rogue decks, e.g. 2x Coerce, Flik Skyshiv and 2x Sap. True, none of those are actual silences, but there are few cards in the game against which they don't do just as well.
Also, for the record, there is at least 1 thing Demon Hunters are bad at: buffing minions. That Redeemed Pariah achievement would be a whole lot easier if they were any good at it. Then again, perhaps this is just the same as saying Demon Hunters are strong against silence... Hmm.
To use a cliche: keep calm and carry on. There is definitely still time to reach legend this month, but you might benefit from a mental shift to being OK whether you make it there or not, mostly to suppress nerves. Legend will still be around to reach next month anyway.
I don't want my experiences to hijack the thread, but you might find my own story from last Friday reassuring. I, like you, had just reached Diamond 3 for the first time, but I had the major difference that I was there largely by accident: I was only planning on completing the 'IT'S SO FLUFFY' achievement so I had made a deck to get good use out of Prize Plunderer. The deck list is below in case you're interested.
I ended up on a 9-win streak that took me to Diamond 1 3-stars (i.e. 1 win away from Legend), and because my primary goal was to make progress on an achievement I didn't focus too much on whether I was going to reach Legend or not. Of course once I was 1 win away I started taking it seriously and made a few misplays, losing the next 3 games. But I persevered, knowing if I got that far I can definitely make it over the final hurdle as long as I stayed calm, and I think it was about 10 games later I made it.
Importantly, I went from Diamond 5 to Legend in a single evening. Yes, I was very lucky with that win streak, but the point is you can definitely do it in the week left before the season ends. Plus, to reach Diamond 3 in the first place you need a positive win rate, so you know you have it in you to keep going.
Sadly I'm not much help with tips on playing match-ups because I don't really play meta decks (there's a good reason I hadn't reached Legend in 6.7 years of playing this game). Hopefully someone else can help with that side of things.
If you have the cards this deck works perfectly. I could do it on second try (I missplayed), finished on 5th try
I have almost everything, just missing 1 Psychmelon and U.I., which I replaced with other card draw. In the end it didn't matter because my opponent was AFK the entire game so I could just go through the motions by myself (I'm not sure if a bug meant they were unable to do anything, but the game didn't end like it normally would from a disconnect). It was therefore a hollow victory, but since I have never liked playing combo druid I will take that gladly.
Just got the achievement in wild with double battlecry Shaman. 60 damage is a lot against any opponent, even with a board full of healthy minions. It did take a LOT of tries, but eventually i got it against a big priest. It's a really tough achievement that takes a lot of time, but it's certainly do-able. (Their are WAY harder achievements, like the "Win in BG after AFk-ing your 3th turn with AFK" achievement.
I'm glad to hear the double battlecry approach works. I was worried it would count each battlecry separately. It looks like I have some quest C'Thun shaman to play...
It is a little more nuanced than just giving them the XP they missed. How much XP for missed dailies, since different quests award different amounts? Do they know exactly how many quests each player missed, or do they just know which players were/could be affected?
Even if they know all of that, this is a moment when they could really do with rebuilding player trust, and providing more compensation than the quest XP would be an appropriate acknowledgement that affected players are angry and there's some emotional cost to make up for. If I recall correctly, Blizz has awarded packs worth more than lost gold to players affected by similar issues in the past.
It sounds like a diamond in a bucket of manure at this point, but "determin[ing] the right way to compensate them" is not something to be cynical about. Let's just hope that diamond doesn't end up being a plastic rhinestone.
Yeah, it is pretty silly how librams have completely taken over paladin to the point where I don't consider 'libram paladin' to be its own thing anymore. I think it is clear you have a class design issue when the auto-include cards are also the primary win condition, thereby making every archetype in the class much too similar.
I have thought about this before (mostly regarding ways to deal with Rattlegore but it is the same story for librams), and if you actually break it down by what each class has it looks fine overall:
Demon Hunter: Consume Magic as well as Magehunter if you really want to silence lots of stuff.
Druid: Keeper of the Grove (not great, but arguably better than the Owl at least)
Hunter: Freezing Trap (unreliable for this purpose, so I only include this for the sake of completeness)
So 5 of the 10 classes have viable ways to remove librams, druid has a more versatile alternative to the Owl, and the rest have a neutral option if they feel they need it. That sounds like good class design to me.
Just as some classes have to accept they won't get strong AoE or healing, some classes have to accept they won't have strong silence options. Whether the rest choose to use their silences (or equivalent) is up to them, but that is not at all the same as there being "no viable silence card in Standard".
I've seen several threads about specific achievements, but not a dedicated forum for sharing tips and seeking help (perhaps I missed it?). So here goes: If you are looking to share or obtain helpful ideas about the new in-game achievements, here is a place to do so.
I'll start with a PSA: I completed the Demon Hunter one where you need a 10-attack Redeemed Pariah, and I tried to cheat using Abusive Sergeant. It did not work. You need to actually play 8 Outcast cards to buff his attack to 10.
So who else has a tip to share or needs some help?
I should correct this PSA: I believe it needs 10 permanent attack (unlike the temporary buff of Abusive Sergeant). I completed it in Wild using the Lantern of Power from the OG Arch-Thief Rafaam. I would have used other buffs but Demon Hunter is terrible at buffing minions so this seemed like the simplest route. Note it can be done in 1 turn with a single trigger of Emperor Thaurissan.
Minor edit: fixed the spelling of 'Lantern' (the fact I defaulted to lanturn shows I have played too much Pokemon over the years).
Overall, I have fewer qualms with these changes than I usually do. Perhaps that is because there isn't the issue of class identity to disagree over.
The Good
I really like the Sky Daredevil and Floating Eyebat cards.
I have something of a soft spot for Sergeant Sally since I made a whole series of story-driven decks around her. So I can say - probably with more authority than the vast majority of players - that she has just the right amount of potential synergies to balance out her baseline low power and thereby make her a worthy inclusion in the Classic set.
I am similarly happy to see Gazlowe (who is one of a group of legendaries that I put together in a 1-mana spell rogue deck every few expansions). He'd be especially interesting in Standard because the pool of mechs will change with time.
Where stats were buffed, I agreed with them, except for 1 instance (see below).
The bad?
Not much to say here. Just a couple of points where I would be (overly?) cautious.
I wouldn't include Illuminator because 3 of the 4 secret classes are designed to be bad at healing, and I'd worry that this card violates that too much. I remember mage used this card quite a lot back in the day, but then again, perhaps secret mage and hunter are too aggressive now for it to matter much. Still, that can change quickly with set rotations.
I have a slight reservation about Blazecaller. I appreciate a bit of permanent elemental synergy, but perhaps the big burn card was not the best choice given the 2 primary elemental classes (mage and shaman) are both notorious for just needing a little extra burn to be pushed over a dangerous threshold. Again, I might be a bit stuck in the past with this mentality, and such decks just aren't as dangerous anymore, especially if they have to squeeze elementals in.
The outrageous
I'm sorry, but I have to protest about Magma Rager being replaced by/buffed into Ice Rager. His icy brother is still never going to be played, but at the cost of being a bit better it loses out on 1-health synergies, memes, and the lesson to new players about why 1 health is bad. For the record, I'm fine with the change to Silverback Patriarch because it retained its primary problem of having only 1 attack so the essence of the card was not lost.
It would be awesome if the level 25 reward was a guaranteed Old God. Hell, they should have made the legendary you get at the start of the rewards track an Old God. I still don't understand why they couldn't give players a free Old God at the expansion's launch. I'm just lucky I got Yogg-Saron, Master of Fate as my golden legendary from the bundle.
They were so generous with gifting us all the Galakrond cards in Descent of Dragons last year so it's reasonable that players feel shafted right now. But then again, that was right after the Blitzchung controversy so Blizzard probably gave them away for free just to appease the fanbase. My hunch is they never really intended to make the Galakronds free too.
The Galakronds were a seriously special case, because they were there in addition to the usual 25 legendaries. They, like the original C'Thun, are also distinct from the new Old God cards in that there was a significant fraction of the set that only worked with them and was basically text-less without them. Meanwhile, the new Old Gods work with cards that function by themselves, or in C'Thun's case, are generated without needing anything else.
Given that, I don't think there is any reason to believe they were ever planned to be collected in packs. There is certainly room for them to be more generous, but I don't think the Galakronds are a great comparison point here.
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As for my thoughts on whether the reward track feels too grind-y, I am not too fussed about it. I have never been someone who needs rewards to make it feel like it was worth my time: I am playing the game because I enjoy the games themselves, no so much for the tangible rewards along the way. So I'm not going to lose motivation to play the game at the higher levels when it takes a while to level up.
I have just reached level 25 (no Tavern Pass), which took me about 9 days. Cumulative XP-wise level 25 is about a fifth of the way to level 50. Even being conservative and assuming I get XP at half the speed from now on, that's about 4*18=72 more days to get to level 50. That honestly doesn't sound like a daunting slog to me, especially since I knew going into it that it would be something spanning 4 months.
so ... nothing really worth to spend time to achieve ... tks
That's about right. Do note that some of them (Darkmoon and Duels based ones) reward actual XP, but everything else is just bragging rights, I guess. This bugged me a quite a bit at first too.
I always view achievements as one of the best developments in gaming history, because they simultaneously encourage players to explore a game to its fullest without forcing them to do anything they don't want to do. They are completely win-win: the developers get to know none of their hard work goes unnoticed, and (many) players get to enjoy aspects of the game they might otherwise miss.
Perhaps my opinion is biased by growing up first with an Xbox and then an Xbox 360, when achievements that gave you worthless points were added to every game, so I have always thought of achievements that way.
I opened 240 packs and was a little short of having everything, so I purchased another 60 and so it took about 300 packs to get everything from this expansion. I have my wooden coin, lmao.
Ashes of Outland was the last expansion I tracked and it was about $280 to get every card. So this one was a bit more. Price is going up.
Any difference with AoO is purely statistical because there are the same number of cards of each rarity (or most importantly here, the same number of legendaries). If there was no legendary in the smaller pre-order then that makes a difference of 1 legendary, but even that is compensated for by there being 2 of them on the reward track.
Where it actually will get more expensive is with the mini-set, but that has nothing to do with your count above,
Also, it is not super clear from your post, but did you open every card from packs without using any dust? Expensive as the game may be, it would be disingenuous to count the cost of the game without taking dust into account.
This seems jolly optimistic but sure, if I encounter someone who is clearly not attacking me, then I'll let them get on with whatever they're doing. I don't anticipate this ever actually coming up but hey, a few people have humored me in the past while I messed around so I'll pay it forward.
Adding to @Brandon's comment, these are often instances where there are multiple valid ways of ordering the damage and healing. In their Eye for an Eye and lifesteal example, should the lifesteal healing happen before or after the damage from the secret? Both trigger off of the damage dealt, so they should both happen simultaneously, but the game has to show one before the other. So in practice, whenever multiple effects have the same trigger, they will all resolve before the game checks if a minion or hero dies.
In the Soul Fragment example, the hero power has to draw a card as well as damage you, and either could happen first. So both fully resolve, leaving you taking 2 damage AND healing 2, before the check for the hero's death occurs.
Tl;dr: the game behaves such that both the healing and damage happen simultaneously, but has to show them one-by-one so people can keep track of what happens.
All treasures are broken, but not necessarily with the surrounding deck. Lunar Band is a good example: it is OP enough to be removed, but also weak if you have few deathrattles. While that doesn't stop some treasures being baseline stronger than others, it does highlight that if you want all Duels runs to have comparable power you'd need to offer treasures to suit the decks, rather than randomly. There are good arguments for that, but I would hate it because then the whole thing becomes too predictable and undermines the rogue-like nature of the game mode.
Rogue-like games are always about starting off weak and trying (and sometimes failing) to become as broken as possible as you go along. Sometimes you are given the nuts, other times you have to muddle through with treasures which aren't best suited to your deck.
The existence of 1 anti-control card doesn't necessarily spell doom for control, so long as warlock isn't dominant. The bigger hurdle is probably just that tempo/aggro was strong coming into the expansion and, aside from a few flashy finishers (i.e. the Old Gods), DMF has fairly limited support for control. You would think the corrupt cards help, and to some extent they do, but they are slow by design so they are not great substitutes for good on-curve removal.
Since there's an achievement attached to killing an opponent from full health with C'Thun, the last thing I am going to do is deny them that just so I can save myself a few seconds.
I do, however, fully agree the C'Thun animation should speed up to be as fast as the old one.
I understand where you are coming from, but keep in mind Duels is meant to be PvP Dungeon Run, and if they nerf treasures too much you lose the entire premise of the game mode. The treasures were always what set it apart from being an odd mix of constructed and arena.
Good golly, we're targeting Blizz for advertising their products now are we? Granted, all the worthwhile concerns have been discussed to death at this point and there's not much more to say until Blizz gives another response, but normal advertising is not something that needs arguing over to pass the time.
I will reply to a few points below, but first and foremost, can you please use a more respectful tone when making your arguments? You are not going to convince anyone of anything if you start calling them naive and use absolutes like only your opinion is valid. The best discussions often arise through disagreement, but they only work if both sides respect each other.
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Anyway, regarding Tavern Tickets: at absolute worst these amount to a pack of the most recent expansion plus a small amount of dust or gold. And that's what you'll get it you commit 5 minutes to building a deck and just conceding 3 games. If you actually try, you can get a decent amount of extra gold / dust. Now, I'm not saying Arena /Heroic Duels rewards are perfect (I mean, who wants those non-golden commons... seriously?), but the rewards are absolutely what players want, even if they wouldn't normally spend 150 gold on the game modes involved.
You are also portraying XP like it is worthless unless it pushes you over a level there and then, which is nonsense. Rewards in the progression track are more spaced out than the old trickle of gold, but the XP that gets you half way through a level is just as important as the XP that gets you over the level threshold. There is a clear psychological effect with many players where accumulating, say, 200 gold over time feels better than waiting to get it in 1 lump, but unless you are using that gold as you collect it there isn't an actual difference there. Now, what Blizz should do is just show the XP being added after each game, so you can see what it has earned you.
Finally, are weekly quests really that time consuming? Because they are often restricted to specific game modes it is fair to say different players will take longer on different ones, but let's use the default "Get 7 wins in ranked" quest as an example. Assuming 50% win rate, that's 14 games, or 2 a day. That's less than the daily quests ask for, so no, they are not really time consuming once you recognise they are spread across the week.
Well I did say Keeper of the Grove was not great. To be honest, it wouldn't help against libram pally even if it was still a 2/4, not because it would be a bad card, but because druid removal is utter garbage and silencing 1 thing isn't going to get you very far in that match-up if you cannot clear multiple big minions.
I do think you are undervaluing the ability of rogue and priest to deal with libram pally though. I admit I'm not an expert on priest, but I have a lot of experience making libram paladins cry just by running some hard removal in my rogue decks, e.g. 2x Coerce, Flik Skyshiv and 2x Sap. True, none of those are actual silences, but there are few cards in the game against which they don't do just as well.
Also, for the record, there is at least 1 thing Demon Hunters are bad at: buffing minions. That Redeemed Pariah achievement would be a whole lot easier if they were any good at it. Then again, perhaps this is just the same as saying Demon Hunters are strong against silence... Hmm.
To use a cliche: keep calm and carry on. There is definitely still time to reach legend this month, but you might benefit from a mental shift to being OK whether you make it there or not, mostly to suppress nerves. Legend will still be around to reach next month anyway.
I don't want my experiences to hijack the thread, but you might find my own story from last Friday reassuring. I, like you, had just reached Diamond 3 for the first time, but I had the major difference that I was there largely by accident: I was only planning on completing the 'IT'S SO FLUFFY' achievement so I had made a deck to get good use out of Prize Plunderer. The deck list is below in case you're interested.
I ended up on a 9-win streak that took me to Diamond 1 3-stars (i.e. 1 win away from Legend), and because my primary goal was to make progress on an achievement I didn't focus too much on whether I was going to reach Legend or not. Of course once I was 1 win away I started taking it seriously and made a few misplays, losing the next 3 games. But I persevered, knowing if I got that far I can definitely make it over the final hurdle as long as I stayed calm, and I think it was about 10 games later I made it.
Importantly, I went from Diamond 5 to Legend in a single evening. Yes, I was very lucky with that win streak, but the point is you can definitely do it in the week left before the season ends. Plus, to reach Diamond 3 in the first place you need a positive win rate, so you know you have it in you to keep going.
Sadly I'm not much help with tips on playing match-ups because I don't really play meta decks (there's a good reason I hadn't reached Legend in 6.7 years of playing this game). Hopefully someone else can help with that side of things.
Good luck!
--------------------------------
My deck:
I have almost everything, just missing 1 Psychmelon and U.I., which I replaced with other card draw. In the end it didn't matter because my opponent was AFK the entire game so I could just go through the motions by myself (I'm not sure if a bug meant they were unable to do anything, but the game didn't end like it normally would from a disconnect). It was therefore a hollow victory, but since I have never liked playing combo druid I will take that gladly.
I'm glad to hear the double battlecry approach works. I was worried it would count each battlecry separately. It looks like I have some quest C'Thun shaman to play...
It is a little more nuanced than just giving them the XP they missed. How much XP for missed dailies, since different quests award different amounts? Do they know exactly how many quests each player missed, or do they just know which players were/could be affected?
Even if they know all of that, this is a moment when they could really do with rebuilding player trust, and providing more compensation than the quest XP would be an appropriate acknowledgement that affected players are angry and there's some emotional cost to make up for. If I recall correctly, Blizz has awarded packs worth more than lost gold to players affected by similar issues in the past.
It sounds like a diamond in a bucket of manure at this point, but "determin[ing] the right way to compensate them" is not something to be cynical about. Let's just hope that diamond doesn't end up being a plastic rhinestone.
Yeah, it is pretty silly how librams have completely taken over paladin to the point where I don't consider 'libram paladin' to be its own thing anymore. I think it is clear you have a class design issue when the auto-include cards are also the primary win condition, thereby making every archetype in the class much too similar.
I have thought about this before (mostly regarding ways to deal with Rattlegore but it is the same story for librams), and if you actually break it down by what each class has it looks fine overall:
So 5 of the 10 classes have viable ways to remove librams, druid has a more versatile alternative to the Owl, and the rest have a neutral option if they feel they need it. That sounds like good class design to me.
Just as some classes have to accept they won't get strong AoE or healing, some classes have to accept they won't have strong silence options. Whether the rest choose to use their silences (or equivalent) is up to them, but that is not at all the same as there being "no viable silence card in Standard".
I should correct this PSA: I believe it needs 10 permanent attack (unlike the temporary buff of Abusive Sergeant). I completed it in Wild using the Lantern of Power from the OG Arch-Thief Rafaam. I would have used other buffs but Demon Hunter is terrible at buffing minions so this seemed like the simplest route. Note it can be done in 1 turn with a single trigger of Emperor Thaurissan.
Minor edit: fixed the spelling of 'Lantern' (the fact I defaulted to lanturn shows I have played too much Pokemon over the years).
While here, I should link to my own PSA on the Forbidden Jutsu achievement: https://outof.cards/forums/hearthstone/hearthstone-general/6702-forbidden-jutsu-psa
Overall, I have fewer qualms with these changes than I usually do. Perhaps that is because there isn't the issue of class identity to disagree over.
The Good
The bad?
Not much to say here. Just a couple of points where I would be (overly?) cautious.
The outrageous
I'm sorry, but I have to protest about Magma Rager being replaced by/buffed into Ice Rager. His icy brother is still never going to be played, but at the cost of being a bit better it loses out on 1-health synergies, memes, and the lesson to new players about why 1 health is bad. For the record, I'm fine with the change to Silverback Patriarch because it retained its primary problem of having only 1 attack so the essence of the card was not lost.
The Galakronds were a seriously special case, because they were there in addition to the usual 25 legendaries. They, like the original C'Thun, are also distinct from the new Old God cards in that there was a significant fraction of the set that only worked with them and was basically text-less without them. Meanwhile, the new Old Gods work with cards that function by themselves, or in C'Thun's case, are generated without needing anything else.
Given that, I don't think there is any reason to believe they were ever planned to be collected in packs. There is certainly room for them to be more generous, but I don't think the Galakronds are a great comparison point here.
------------------------------------
As for my thoughts on whether the reward track feels too grind-y, I am not too fussed about it. I have never been someone who needs rewards to make it feel like it was worth my time: I am playing the game because I enjoy the games themselves, no so much for the tangible rewards along the way. So I'm not going to lose motivation to play the game at the higher levels when it takes a while to level up.
I have just reached level 25 (no Tavern Pass), which took me about 9 days. Cumulative XP-wise level 25 is about a fifth of the way to level 50. Even being conservative and assuming I get XP at half the speed from now on, that's about 4*18=72 more days to get to level 50. That honestly doesn't sound like a daunting slog to me, especially since I knew going into it that it would be something spanning 4 months.
I always view achievements as one of the best developments in gaming history, because they simultaneously encourage players to explore a game to its fullest without forcing them to do anything they don't want to do. They are completely win-win: the developers get to know none of their hard work goes unnoticed, and (many) players get to enjoy aspects of the game they might otherwise miss.
Perhaps my opinion is biased by growing up first with an Xbox and then an Xbox 360, when achievements that gave you worthless points were added to every game, so I have always thought of achievements that way.
Any difference with AoO is purely statistical because there are the same number of cards of each rarity (or most importantly here, the same number of legendaries). If there was no legendary in the smaller pre-order then that makes a difference of 1 legendary, but even that is compensated for by there being 2 of them on the reward track.
Where it actually will get more expensive is with the mini-set, but that has nothing to do with your count above,
Also, it is not super clear from your post, but did you open every card from packs without using any dust? Expensive as the game may be, it would be disingenuous to count the cost of the game without taking dust into account.
This seems jolly optimistic but sure, if I encounter someone who is clearly not attacking me, then I'll let them get on with whatever they're doing. I don't anticipate this ever actually coming up but hey, a few people have humored me in the past while I messed around so I'll pay it forward.
Adding to @Brandon's comment, these are often instances where there are multiple valid ways of ordering the damage and healing. In their Eye for an Eye and lifesteal example, should the lifesteal healing happen before or after the damage from the secret? Both trigger off of the damage dealt, so they should both happen simultaneously, but the game has to show one before the other. So in practice, whenever multiple effects have the same trigger, they will all resolve before the game checks if a minion or hero dies.
In the Soul Fragment example, the hero power has to draw a card as well as damage you, and either could happen first. So both fully resolve, leaving you taking 2 damage AND healing 2, before the check for the hero's death occurs.
Tl;dr: the game behaves such that both the healing and damage happen simultaneously, but has to show them one-by-one so people can keep track of what happens.
All treasures are broken, but not necessarily with the surrounding deck. Lunar Band is a good example: it is OP enough to be removed, but also weak if you have few deathrattles. While that doesn't stop some treasures being baseline stronger than others, it does highlight that if you want all Duels runs to have comparable power you'd need to offer treasures to suit the decks, rather than randomly. There are good arguments for that, but I would hate it because then the whole thing becomes too predictable and undermines the rogue-like nature of the game mode.
Rogue-like games are always about starting off weak and trying (and sometimes failing) to become as broken as possible as you go along. Sometimes you are given the nuts, other times you have to muddle through with treasures which aren't best suited to your deck.
The existence of 1 anti-control card doesn't necessarily spell doom for control, so long as warlock isn't dominant. The bigger hurdle is probably just that tempo/aggro was strong coming into the expansion and, aside from a few flashy finishers (i.e. the Old Gods), DMF has fairly limited support for control. You would think the corrupt cards help, and to some extent they do, but they are slow by design so they are not great substitutes for good on-curve removal.
Since there's an achievement attached to killing an opponent from full health with C'Thun, the last thing I am going to do is deny them that just so I can save myself a few seconds.
I do, however, fully agree the C'Thun animation should speed up to be as fast as the old one.
I understand where you are coming from, but keep in mind Duels is meant to be PvP Dungeon Run, and if they nerf treasures too much you lose the entire premise of the game mode. The treasures were always what set it apart from being an odd mix of constructed and arena.