I agree you need to take the surrounding pool of cards into consideration when deciding whether a deck is good, but I think you can still treat the card's effect and the card pool independently for the purposes of saying whether an effect is strong or not.
Essentially I judge an effect by its potential in a hypothetical environment where it can reliably achieve what it is designed to do, even though any deck it is used in must of course be judged with the actual card pool in mind. So by my approach, all the cards that are fundamentally strong in Wild but barely used in Standard are truly strong cards that are limited by the card pool in Standard.
Really it's all just a difference in how we define things, but I do like that my approach lets me maintain 1 evaluation of each card across game modes, which feels right since the card itself doesn't change. I admit it leads to me insisting a lot of cards are good even if they have never had a meta presence, but I stand by that being the deck's fault, not the card's.
All this is exactly why I have reverted back to burgle rogue as my go-to deck for years (going way back to Karazhan, and even to TGT if I'm honest). As a weird midrange/value/tempo/meme hybrid mess that gets decent support in most expansions, it manages to put up acceptable win rates against pretty much every archetype because it has a little of everything already in the deck, and has the chance to generate more for you. It also has the pleasant feature that it is practically designed to ensure all games are a little (or a lot) different.
Praise Tess for that one archetype keeping me entertained between flashes of inspiration for more goofy - and almost universally less successful - homebrews.
But ultimately it's a game and there's no point in playing it if you are not enjoying it. It almost doesn't matter what the reasons are, and I would still encourage leaving (either for a while or permanently) even if you couldn't specify what you disliked about it. So if you are fed up with it, then I wish you good luck with whatever you end up doing instead :)
Does that make much difference to aggro though? I don't think people are too bothered about it in more value oriented decks where your suggested change will make a big difference.
It might not be. This seems to be separate from expansions, likely with a class getting one each month (perhaps except months where new sets are released, which would help the 10 classes span 12 months). It still looks possible to have a proper SA adventure next month, and I hope we do as the cards themselves don't really address the darker side to the school properly.
Well, consider whether making it a 3 mana 1/1 with the same effect would be a buff or a nerf. That would make it the most broken card in the game's history by a huge margin, but I only equated 1 mana for 1/1 in stats right?
Moving something from 9 to 8 mana has more implications than just costing 1 less. It lets you fit in 2 mana cards or a hero power alongside it, and in Willow's case removes the somewhat awkward part where you wanted to just play the 8 mana demon on turn 8 anyway, which would often leave you without a demon in hand for turn 9.
Also her effect isn't 'meh': the pool of big demons in Standard is, and that is subject to change as expansions come out.
So we can expect heroes as they looked in their early years, pre-HS base hero look. OK, so that's Malfurion without the antlers, Garrosh without the chip on his shoulder, and Anduin with a literal baby-face...
To combine the two philosophies above: it's upsetting that I have only managed to get 3 boots in the Pandaria garden once in 6.5 years of playing the game, and even more so that it happened when we were both playing aggro decks and there wouldn't have been nearly enough time to achieve that in if my opponent didn't rope me every turn for no reason.
It's one of the community's favourites from the early days when there was a small enough number of card backs that they felt more significant, even if they weren't any better than newer ones. As such there's a decent amount of nostalgia for a lot of the card backs from the first year or so, and there's a decent number of players who will have started early enough to see these being used a lot but just too late to get them for themselves.
There are also players who could have got them but missed them for other reasons. E.g. not feeling their collections were good enough to play in ranked instead of casual, which in hindsight is silly since you couldn't lose stars between ranks 25 and 20, and you only had to reach 20 to get the card back, but whatever.
In short: some players regret missing it, and optional cosmetic purchases don't harm anyone so why not?
She's training to become a Druid, although she still hasn't mastered the shifting part.
Since you cannot make it cost 2 mana, you could consider making it only affect choose one minions, since the real danger with the card is with spells. Minion choose one effects are more tame because some of the mana goes into stats, and hence getting both is a lot more reasonable for 1 mana than spells.
Making Assassinate stronger is absolutely fine, especially as recent years have set up rogue as the class with the best unconditional single target removal, but it feels wrong to keep it unchanged in Basic while adding Simple Kill to Classic. Why not just buff Assassinate directly and add something else to Classic?
I'd say keep hold of anything you think is genuinely quite likely to get nerfed (which doesn't always include OP cards if they are central to their class identity), but don't feel too reluctant to dust the rest since most won't be nerfed and being able to craft something you are interested in sooner is worth something.
If it helps make the risk of lost dust feel less bad, you can ask "am I happy trading this extra copy I cannot use for the usual amount of dust?" If the answer is yes then whether or not you would get more dust later doesn't change the question and the answer is still yes.
I had a quick look at Blizzard's 'customer support interaction policy' and it all looks quite sensible. As with all of these things it is in place to protect their staff from misuse of the support system.
It looks most likely that your efforts to send the ticket multiple times made you violate the 'Harassing the GM staff' part. Since I don't know the full context I won't take sides, but hopefully you understand why they would deter people from sending the same ticket over and over again, and that the only deterrent they can actually use is to ban you from playing the game(s) for a while.
Regarding pity timers, I have seen plenty of claims over the years that they are not working but never any actual evidence for it. Usually the answer is a simple over-counting of packs or counting packs of different expansions together when it applies to each pack type separately. Hence you could open up to 2*(40-1)=78 packs before seeing a legendary if you were opening both Classic and Scholomance packs, for example.
Well, Tornado is funny at least. Doing it 21 times means you can actually use the statistical average as a decent measure of how it works: deal 2 damage 10.5 times to enemy minions and overload (10.5). So basically, it kills the enemy board and your next turn in most instances. Is that good? Maybe it would find some use if Volcano wasn't added too. Yes it is one-sided so in principle a more minion-centric deck can use it, but instances where both players have significant board presence are probably too rare for it to be worth it over Volcano even then, especially in the class that has the evolve mechanic to make good use of minions after they have taken damage by clearing enemy minions.
Honestly, I really like Tornado as an expansion card, but probably not in Classic. Similarly, I think Volcano is pushing it as a Classic card. I never disliked it, but boy was I glad when it rotated and you no longer had to worry about shaman opponent's having 1 card to remove both tall and wide boards (and mixtures too) in 1 card. It is far from trivial to have more than 15 health on the board, and it feels a bit like adding it is going to restrict shaman in a similar way that Brawl does to warrior currently.
I take it you were keen to remove Lightning Storm, and that is what i'm most interested to see the motivation for, since the problem most people have with it is fully in line with your RNG strength.
Solo content has always given xp to class levels, so it's not that outlandish a suggestion.
There is also no doubt the devs actually want us to play the solo stuff from time to time since they put plenty of effort into it. What matters is that the rate of gaining xp isn't higher than when playing PvP game modes (and indeed I'm pretty sure you get less class xp in solo content than in constructed), so if you wanted to be efficient at gaining xp you would go to constructed, but you could still earn something playing a chill solo adventure.
Anyway, neither pessimism nor optimism are really worth anything at this point, and it's better just to get on with other things until the battle pass is formally announced with details on how it will work.
Not necessarily. Even the existing class levels give xp based on number of cards played as well as wins, and they only have to make the new system do the same and it will already encourage control more than the current 10 gold for 3 wins does. Also, since they changed nearly all daily quests to only require you to play games, and not have to win them, I doubt they are going to lock xp behind wins.
If you focus on the first sentence instead you'll see the intent is to make sure you don't get less than you do now, so yes, you should be able to get your 8k gold.
I understand the desire for concrete numbers but it is highly unlikely the Battle Pass is finalised yet, so 'concrete numbers' wouldn't actually be any more precise than saying 'similar' is, even if you knew exactly how many games you play each day in each game mode.
That mentality is exactly what pushes power creep and is why I generally oppose buffs. Cards are in Standard for 16-24 months, and often find a home sooner or later. If you push everything to be viable in their own expansion then they are ridiculous when the decks that would have made use of them without needing buffs arrive. To deal with that while making all the new expansion's cards viable forces rampant power creep.
I disagree - wanting the cards I buy to be of any relevance is not a mentality that hurts the game. I don't think the cards need to be outright busted. Rather, I would like to see changes to game modes, more ways to acquire cards etc. The main power creep reason, in my opinion, is to make people buy cards. But that's not really what this topic is about so let's leave it at this.
Buffs are the most direct form of power creep you can conceive of: they literally increase the power of cards. You cannot decouple the two things. That is not to say buffs will always have a detrimental effect on the meta in either the near or far future, but they absolutely can and we have already seen it happen where they need nerfing again.
While wanting every card to have some relevance sounds sensible, you have to be clear on what you mean by 'relevant'. Not all cards are designed with the constructed meta in mind, and even those that are won't suit everyone's play style. Cards like Tess Greymane are far more relevant to me than, say, Blazing Battlemage, even though it is much more relevant to the metagame than Tess ever was.
Before I am willing to support any buffs, I first need evidence that the cards in question aren't serving any purpose to anyone. There are some examples that I would absolutely support buffs for. E.g. Holomancer was awful for absolutely everyone. Even Treachery combos left you with a whopping 2 mana to work with! But buffing cards that are OK and already have potential either for the meta or for meming, is exactly the sort of thing that I personally want to avoid, especially when there is a growing trend of expansions being released with some seriously broken cards already, which mask how solid a lot of cards are.
I'm certainly not arguing against changes to game modes and more ways to acquire cards, though that is genuinely off-topic in a buff suggestion thread...
I agree you need to take the surrounding pool of cards into consideration when deciding whether a deck is good, but I think you can still treat the card's effect and the card pool independently for the purposes of saying whether an effect is strong or not.
Essentially I judge an effect by its potential in a hypothetical environment where it can reliably achieve what it is designed to do, even though any deck it is used in must of course be judged with the actual card pool in mind. So by my approach, all the cards that are fundamentally strong in Wild but barely used in Standard are truly strong cards that are limited by the card pool in Standard.
Really it's all just a difference in how we define things, but I do like that my approach lets me maintain 1 evaluation of each card across game modes, which feels right since the card itself doesn't change. I admit it leads to me insisting a lot of cards are good even if they have never had a meta presence, but I stand by that being the deck's fault, not the card's.
All this is exactly why I have reverted back to burgle rogue as my go-to deck for years (going way back to Karazhan, and even to TGT if I'm honest). As a weird midrange/value/tempo/meme hybrid mess that gets decent support in most expansions, it manages to put up acceptable win rates against pretty much every archetype because it has a little of everything already in the deck, and has the chance to generate more for you. It also has the pleasant feature that it is practically designed to ensure all games are a little (or a lot) different.
Praise Tess for that one archetype keeping me entertained between flashes of inspiration for more goofy - and almost universally less successful - homebrews.
But ultimately it's a game and there's no point in playing it if you are not enjoying it. It almost doesn't matter what the reasons are, and I would still encourage leaving (either for a while or permanently) even if you couldn't specify what you disliked about it. So if you are fed up with it, then I wish you good luck with whatever you end up doing instead :)
Does that make much difference to aggro though? I don't think people are too bothered about it in more value oriented decks where your suggested change will make a big difference.
I can't quite put my finger on how, but I'm sensing you are not the biggest fan of Darkglare.
It might not be. This seems to be separate from expansions, likely with a class getting one each month (perhaps except months where new sets are released, which would help the 10 classes span 12 months). It still looks possible to have a proper SA adventure next month, and I hope we do as the cards themselves don't really address the darker side to the school properly.
Well, consider whether making it a 3 mana 1/1 with the same effect would be a buff or a nerf. That would make it the most broken card in the game's history by a huge margin, but I only equated 1 mana for 1/1 in stats right?
Moving something from 9 to 8 mana has more implications than just costing 1 less. It lets you fit in 2 mana cards or a hero power alongside it, and in Willow's case removes the somewhat awkward part where you wanted to just play the 8 mana demon on turn 8 anyway, which would often leave you without a demon in hand for turn 9.
Also her effect isn't 'meh': the pool of big demons in Standard is, and that is subject to change as expansions come out.
It's not too hard just to get the 30 wins before it is changed on Tuesday.
So we can expect heroes as they looked in their early years, pre-HS base hero look. OK, so that's Malfurion without the antlers, Garrosh without the chip on his shoulder, and Anduin with a literal baby-face...
Yeah, using 2 female gnomes was perhaps not the best choice.
To combine the two philosophies above: it's upsetting that I have only managed to get 3 boots in the Pandaria garden once in 6.5 years of playing the game, and even more so that it happened when we were both playing aggro decks and there wouldn't have been nearly enough time to achieve that in if my opponent didn't rope me every turn for no reason.
It's one of the community's favourites from the early days when there was a small enough number of card backs that they felt more significant, even if they weren't any better than newer ones. As such there's a decent amount of nostalgia for a lot of the card backs from the first year or so, and there's a decent number of players who will have started early enough to see these being used a lot but just too late to get them for themselves.
There are also players who could have got them but missed them for other reasons. E.g. not feeling their collections were good enough to play in ranked instead of casual, which in hindsight is silly since you couldn't lose stars between ranks 25 and 20, and you only had to reach 20 to get the card back, but whatever.
In short: some players regret missing it, and optional cosmetic purchases don't harm anyone so why not?
Since you cannot make it cost 2 mana, you could consider making it only affect choose one minions, since the real danger with the card is with spells. Minion choose one effects are more tame because some of the mana goes into stats, and hence getting both is a lot more reasonable for 1 mana than spells.
Making Assassinate stronger is absolutely fine, especially as recent years have set up rogue as the class with the best unconditional single target removal, but it feels wrong to keep it unchanged in Basic while adding Simple Kill to Classic. Why not just buff Assassinate directly and add something else to Classic?
I'd say keep hold of anything you think is genuinely quite likely to get nerfed (which doesn't always include OP cards if they are central to their class identity), but don't feel too reluctant to dust the rest since most won't be nerfed and being able to craft something you are interested in sooner is worth something.
If it helps make the risk of lost dust feel less bad, you can ask "am I happy trading this extra copy I cannot use for the usual amount of dust?" If the answer is yes then whether or not you would get more dust later doesn't change the question and the answer is still yes.
I had a quick look at Blizzard's 'customer support interaction policy' and it all looks quite sensible. As with all of these things it is in place to protect their staff from misuse of the support system.
It looks most likely that your efforts to send the ticket multiple times made you violate the 'Harassing the GM staff' part. Since I don't know the full context I won't take sides, but hopefully you understand why they would deter people from sending the same ticket over and over again, and that the only deterrent they can actually use is to ban you from playing the game(s) for a while.
Regarding pity timers, I have seen plenty of claims over the years that they are not working but never any actual evidence for it. Usually the answer is a simple over-counting of packs or counting packs of different expansions together when it applies to each pack type separately. Hence you could open up to 2*(40-1)=78 packs before seeing a legendary if you were opening both Classic and Scholomance packs, for example.
Well, Tornado is funny at least. Doing it 21 times means you can actually use the statistical average as a decent measure of how it works: deal 2 damage 10.5 times to enemy minions and overload (10.5). So basically, it kills the enemy board and your next turn in most instances. Is that good? Maybe it would find some use if Volcano wasn't added too. Yes it is one-sided so in principle a more minion-centric deck can use it, but instances where both players have significant board presence are probably too rare for it to be worth it over Volcano even then, especially in the class that has the evolve mechanic to make good use of minions after they have taken damage by clearing enemy minions.
Honestly, I really like Tornado as an expansion card, but probably not in Classic. Similarly, I think Volcano is pushing it as a Classic card. I never disliked it, but boy was I glad when it rotated and you no longer had to worry about shaman opponent's having 1 card to remove both tall and wide boards (and mixtures too) in 1 card. It is far from trivial to have more than 15 health on the board, and it feels a bit like adding it is going to restrict shaman in a similar way that Brawl does to warrior currently.
I take it you were keen to remove Lightning Storm, and that is what i'm most interested to see the motivation for, since the problem most people have with it is fully in line with your RNG strength.
Solo content has always given xp to class levels, so it's not that outlandish a suggestion.
There is also no doubt the devs actually want us to play the solo stuff from time to time since they put plenty of effort into it. What matters is that the rate of gaining xp isn't higher than when playing PvP game modes (and indeed I'm pretty sure you get less class xp in solo content than in constructed), so if you wanted to be efficient at gaining xp you would go to constructed, but you could still earn something playing a chill solo adventure.
Anyway, neither pessimism nor optimism are really worth anything at this point, and it's better just to get on with other things until the battle pass is formally announced with details on how it will work.
Not necessarily. Even the existing class levels give xp based on number of cards played as well as wins, and they only have to make the new system do the same and it will already encourage control more than the current 10 gold for 3 wins does. Also, since they changed nearly all daily quests to only require you to play games, and not have to win them, I doubt they are going to lock xp behind wins.
If you focus on the first sentence instead you'll see the intent is to make sure you don't get less than you do now, so yes, you should be able to get your 8k gold.
I understand the desire for concrete numbers but it is highly unlikely the Battle Pass is finalised yet, so 'concrete numbers' wouldn't actually be any more precise than saying 'similar' is, even if you knew exactly how many games you play each day in each game mode.
Buffs are the most direct form of power creep you can conceive of: they literally increase the power of cards. You cannot decouple the two things. That is not to say buffs will always have a detrimental effect on the meta in either the near or far future, but they absolutely can and we have already seen it happen where they need nerfing again.
While wanting every card to have some relevance sounds sensible, you have to be clear on what you mean by 'relevant'. Not all cards are designed with the constructed meta in mind, and even those that are won't suit everyone's play style. Cards like Tess Greymane are far more relevant to me than, say, Blazing Battlemage, even though it is much more relevant to the metagame than Tess ever was.
Before I am willing to support any buffs, I first need evidence that the cards in question aren't serving any purpose to anyone. There are some examples that I would absolutely support buffs for. E.g. Holomancer was awful for absolutely everyone. Even Treachery combos left you with a whopping 2 mana to work with! But buffing cards that are OK and already have potential either for the meta or for meming, is exactly the sort of thing that I personally want to avoid, especially when there is a growing trend of expansions being released with some seriously broken cards already, which mask how solid a lot of cards are.
I'm certainly not arguing against changes to game modes and more ways to acquire cards, though that is genuinely off-topic in a buff suggestion thread...