Here's a useful extension to your options: leave until you get an urge to play again. Your account and collection aren't going to disappear, so stopping playing doesn't waste previous investment (even ignoring the sunk cost fallacy).
It may be that you are happy to never come back, when the sunk cost fallacy will tell you that is fine, or you do come back and nothing was lost anyway. Either way, taking a break from HS is not a commitment to leave forever, so you don't need to feel like it is.
We'll see how it plays out over the coming expansions, but I wouldn't be surprised if DH becomes the cockroachiest cockroach class because it is designed to be good or great at what I consider all the primary mechanics of the game:
strong minions (both big and small);
high tempo;
single target removal (big and small);
AoE (big and small);
face damage;
healing/taunt;
and card draw.
All of their weaknesses are secondary mechanics that usually provide less reliable alternatives to primary ones (e.g. card generation instead of card draw, buffs instead of independently strong minions, or stall/freeze instead of removal).
Meanwhile every other class either has major weaknesses in the primary mechanics (e.g. rogue's lack of healing/taunt and AoE), or they are mediocre at most of them (e.g. shaman having tools for most situations, but they're normally worse than the versions in other classes), which is usually what keeps them from becoming too dominant.
That is not to say a particular DH deck has no counters, but that if a counter arises it is relatively easy for them to swap in strong class cards to improve the match-up, whereas other classes have to settle on using weaker neutral cards or decide to just accept it will always be a tough match-up.
Maybe I'm wrong and some of what I call secondary mechanics are more important than I think, so that DH's weaknesses will seriously hinder the class one day. If so then great! Otherwise it is not difficult for Blizzard to change the class identity a bit, especially when the class gets enough cards to branch out into doing other, more janky things.
Once upon a time (towards the latter end of MSoG, just before Un'Goro, if I recall correctly) there was a meta deck called 'Water Rogue' which mixed pirates and murlocs. The murlocs weren't technically pirates, but if you want to think of them as part of the crew then go ahead!
OK, so I fully appreciate the situation Wild-only players might be in, and what follows is not intended to debunk your point of view: the whole matter of the right approach is subjective. Nevertheless, I would point out:
Show Spoiler
In a general setting, it is not for the people who take part in a challenge to set the rules. Indeed, a large part of any challenge is the set of rules involved, and to change them is to attempt a different challenge than the one set before you.
Note limiting yourself to a subset of allowed cards (e.g. Standard in an adventure that allows Wild decks) does not violate existing rules, but extending the set of allowed cards does.
The whole thing is free, so there is no difference between not playing it and it never having existed in the first place. I have never understood why people complain about free stuff, except when it is actively doing harm…
… excluding Wild cards could be discriminatory if there was a reward that affected gameplay outside of this adventure. However, since the only reward is a golden version of a card everyone is given for free, neither of which can be disenchanted, that side of the argument does not really apply here.
Perhaps the discrimination of being able to complete the adventure itself is the more important part? Certainly I wouldn't expect it to be possible to beat with only Basic cards, so is every new player being discriminated against? Should we lower the difficulty to allow for that? No, obviously not because then it would be too easy to be enjoyable by everyone else.
This final point is a bit facetious I admit, but it actually holds the central argument: Blizzard cannot make a challenge mode that is a worthwhile challenge for everyone. It will always end up too difficult for some and too easy for others, because they have players whose collections range from (not even the full) Basic set up to every card in the game. What they CAN do is:
not have any rewards tied to it that give an advantage to some payers over others, and
set a difficulty that they think will present an enjoyable challenge to as many players as possible.
In this case the Wild-only players (which is not at all the same thing as Wild players) will find it more difficult than they had done previously. OK, but if they allow Wild cards the encounters either have to be easy with them or too difficult for Standard-only players. There is no way of winning here. They made a different choice than usual, but that does not invalidate their choice.
Tl;dr: your opinion is not wrong, but your initial suggestion that it needs "fixing" is.
I can confirm you are not the only one. I have been thinking these things should always have been made standard anyway because wild has too many things that trivialise the whole adventure.
I am not even sure what people are complaining about. I beat all but the final boss with a few unmodified homebrew decks I had lying around, so it's not like it's that difficult even without wild decks banned.
It doesn't matter if fixed AI decks can use Wild cards if they are still balanced around being a reasonable challenge for Standard decks. The longstanding issue with heroic/challenge mode was that Wild cards often made them easy because they couldn't be balanced assuming everyone owns cards from 5 years ago.
As for neither Kael'thas being disenchantable: they were free so I don't really mind. Though I admit it is true that having both is redundant, and the normal version especially is looking pretty pointless now.
Time is money, and nowhere is that more true than with the Classic set...
Seriously though, the problem with hero portraits is people actually care about them, despite them just being gifs with voicelines. You can bet there will be some fairly new players with far from complete Classic collections that see it, really like it, and then spend money to expedite the growth of their classic collection primarily to obtain the hero.
Arguably that is not a bad thing: certainly Blizzard would love them to, and with the non-duplicate rule in place it isn't even that inefficient anymore. But I do think it is ethically dubious to present an enticing reward that you know will encourage a small number of people into spending a significant amount of money, when a throwaway one like a card back would be plenty to appease everyone.
Besides, the golden and 1000 win hero portraits are already there as the rewards for veteran players.
I used 'everything' in the viewpoint of whoever implemented the reward when the Basic and Classic (or 'Expert set' as it was back then) sets were everything. I would not even assume someone with a full Classic set has any other set complete.
Regardless, I'm not sure handing out significant rewards for finishing a set is even in good taste since it puts a major pay wall in front of most players. Granted the Classic set is a special case in this regard as simply playing the game for a long time will eventually get you there, especially with the recent extension of the no-duplicate rule.
That is not to say I would be against them handing out a card back for it: maybe a version of the Classic card back with the gold a little more shiny. Card backs are so minor that people wouldn't care that it rewarded those who already have large collections, but a hero would be a bit too much.
To be fair, when that achievement was added (i.e. beta I believe) the only things you could get were gold, dust and classic packs, none of which are very important when you have everything. I am not sure if the Legend card back was around before release, and certainly alternative hero portraits weren't. At least they gave you the resource you could put towards Arena.
Sure they could have updated it later on, but something is better than nothing, which would be a legitimate reward for someone who already has everything.
We might at least get a little more when real achievements are added later this year
In fairness, 41.9% win rate in a Tavern Brawl is fine. It is high enough that it feels like you have a reasonable chance in each game, and you'd only really notice the sub-50% win rate if there was something tracking it, which there isn't.
If Casual was filled with decks that have a 40% win rate on ladder, I'd be messing around enjoying HS quite a bit more than I do with the status quo...
I did not mean to impose my opinions on anyone else, and my interest in a survey above was a genuine one so I had a fair idea of whether I am an outlier or not.
I don't mind aggro decks or even aggro metas. My frustration stems from aggro classes already existing, and if they ever gave rogue any burst beyond Leeroy and Eviscerate they could easily have made a DH-like deck without the fanfare and complications of a new class. Of course rogue doesn't have the lifesteal, AoE, minion sacrificing and big demons, but hey, warlock has all of that stuff.
I guess I'm just frustrated that an entire expansion cycle is overshadowed by the addition of a new class that has to be balanced slowly, when more or less the same decks could have been achieved by giving rogue and warlock a few cards. Then if they are a problem, we know very well how to balance that quickly without having to incrementally adjust 15 different cards.
I know WoW has a PvP aspect, but for much of that game classes are not in direct competition with each other. Yes you might want to optimise your characters for high level raiding, but if you are avoiding PvP one class being overpowered does not make the other classes weaker.
Meanwhile HS is almost entirely PvP and 1 dominant class does directly impact how successful you can be with the others, and there are few options to avoid that problem. So Blizzard tradition or not, the approach of making a class overpowered to guarantee use while you balance it is much more destructive than it is in WoW.
Now, I don't mean to suggest DH is always going to be a problem (although I do think it's core design elements are very risky, especially mixing aggro with so much card draw), and I'm sure in the long run it will wax and wane like the other classes do. But so far I haven't seen a good reason for it to exist beyond generating a short-term spike in interest, which ended up being a very short-term spike because of how quickly it frustrated players.
It was definitely a move that can be justified, but it has had the unfortunate effect of making a lot of players dislike DH instead of being interested in a new class, at which point you have to question whether adding the class has backfired.
If it had been fairly weak everyone would have understood why and would have rooted for it as it improved over time. Instead, DH was immediately so powerful that a large section of the player base turned against it right from the start, and we've just been waiting for the class to be slowly brought in line ever since.
I would be interested to see a survey of how many players enjoy the game more/less now that DH is here. I know I personally find it harder to muster the motivation to play than I did last year.
I'm mostly interested to see what they do with Outcast. It's a neat mechanic, but it's lame that 4/6 cards that use it are literally just card draw.
Also, I love the identity of drawing lots of cards (it really gets the "agile" fantasy), but it dooms them to never having a value deck. I'd like something in the future to semi-reliably restock their deck, or just any slow value generation tool.
Having lots of draw doesn't prevent them being given value cards (rogue has a ton of both), though their stated identity did explicitly say value generation would be weak, probably to keep them from having too much in common with rogue.
I too want to see what interesting stuff they can do with outcast, especially with cards that would support a slow deck where moving cards to the edge is actually a challenge worthy of the outcast bonus. At the moment the outcast mechanic just rewards aggressive decks who don't have a big enough hand to have to work for the bonus, which is a shame.
Beyond that, I just hope DH can find something unique to do (outcast doesn't count, I'm interested in the effects not the trigger). Just doing draw-heavy aggro-tempo or cheating out big demons doesn't add much when rogue and warlock already exist. Currently the only real signs for this are the swarm-sacrifice cards, but if the class is sticking around there's plenty of time for things to turn up.
I'm not sure Shadows meant it as anything other than a harmless joke, similar to how friends can mock each other without meaning any offense. I guess the casual way he wrote it does rather mask it, but that's British humour I suppose.
On a related note, even with US spelling often making sensible choices to make words look like they sound, all forms of English have serious inconsistencies with how to spell a sound, especially with its use vowels. E.g. gone, bone and one really shouldn't all use o-n-e to make different sounds if we were serious about spelling. Personally I blame the fantastic choice of not using accents, despite having way more than 5 vowel sounds.
My personal favourite alphabet blunder is that once upon a time the English used the thorn rune alongside the Latin alphabet to give us a 'th' sound, which is jolly sensible given how common the sound is in English. For one reason or another it phased out, leaving us with the relatively esoteric 'th'. A greek theta would do too, but no, we've made our bed and I guess we're going to stubbornly lie in it.
Tl;dr: unless you're an etymologist all English spelling is rubbish, so we should be happy to joke about any and all variants of its spelling, whether that targets the version across the pond or whichever side of it you grew up on.
I had been assuming they were syncing everything up with the tavern brawl and was willing to give them a pass for making week 1 of the felfire festival 8 days long. Now I'm just confused about their scheduling.
Nothing. I have never, and probably will never, play it. The fact that they spent development time on this rather than on features people wanted (I don't recall anyone asking for battlegrounds, and why would they when, in my opinion, better alternatives already exist in the form of TFT and Overlords) never sat well with me.
Besides the fact that the entire autobattler concept has never appealed to me due to it being even more RNG reliant card games.
Nothing against you if you enjoy BG, you do you. I just strongly dislike it.
BG is not my cup of tea either, but having such strong opinions about something you never even tried seems a touch extreme.
I think the fact people do like it and play it a lot justifies its existence, regardless of whether the HS player-base was asking for it. I can't begin to guess how many great things have been made throughout human history when no one knew they wanted them. Heck, from my atheist viewpoint absolutely no one asked for any of the natural wonders of the universe, but we're still glad they'e there.
Anyway, while I rarely play BG because I prefer to play HS with a specific gimmick in mind, I can also appreciate one thing BG has going for it that other HS game modes do not: the ability to change your build in response to what your opponent is playing. Yes there's RNG in what you are offered and how things end up attacking, but you nevertheless have more agency overall than in ranked where deck matchups and draw order can often decide games by themselves (especially if one or both decks are aggressive).
English is renowned for having inconsistent spelling, even before different versions of English (e.g. British or American) put stress in different places or have different pronunciations. So who's to say what Aranna sounds like?
In any case the Innkeeper says it how I would, except for the rolling r which he is wont to use but I never do.
They are not saying 'Destroy all black creatures' is racist. They are acknowledging MtG is not free from the wider social context in which it exists, and in that context having something called 'Cleanse' with the command to destroy all black creatures is dangerously close to real racist activity.
It is also not possible to say "Oh, but it's just a card game. No one interprets it that way." because subliminal messaging exists, so even if no one ever takes offense or treats it as a call to racist action, there will still be subconscious effects further cementing racial prejudices. When this is unintentional, it is a failure of card design to not account for this. When it is intentional it is outright racist. In both cases the card should be changed.
Internal racism within a game is fine. Take Warcraft: no one has a problem with the copious racism there because it is using story points entirely within the Warcraft universe.
The issues arise when a fantasy world stupidly brings in racist elements from the real world, like the crusades, Jihads or the KKK. They don't need to be there and they only drag real world racism in, which is obviously going to cause real offense.
Here's a useful extension to your options: leave until you get an urge to play again. Your account and collection aren't going to disappear, so stopping playing doesn't waste previous investment (even ignoring the sunk cost fallacy).
It may be that you are happy to never come back, when the sunk cost fallacy will tell you that is fine, or you do come back and nothing was lost anyway. Either way, taking a break from HS is not a commitment to leave forever, so you don't need to feel like it is.
We'll see how it plays out over the coming expansions, but I wouldn't be surprised if DH becomes the cockroachiest cockroach class because it is designed to be good or great at what I consider all the primary mechanics of the game:
All of their weaknesses are secondary mechanics that usually provide less reliable alternatives to primary ones (e.g. card generation instead of card draw, buffs instead of independently strong minions, or stall/freeze instead of removal).
Meanwhile every other class either has major weaknesses in the primary mechanics (e.g. rogue's lack of healing/taunt and AoE), or they are mediocre at most of them (e.g. shaman having tools for most situations, but they're normally worse than the versions in other classes), which is usually what keeps them from becoming too dominant.
That is not to say a particular DH deck has no counters, but that if a counter arises it is relatively easy for them to swap in strong class cards to improve the match-up, whereas other classes have to settle on using weaker neutral cards or decide to just accept it will always be a tough match-up.
Maybe I'm wrong and some of what I call secondary mechanics are more important than I think, so that DH's weaknesses will seriously hinder the class one day. If so then great! Otherwise it is not difficult for Blizzard to change the class identity a bit, especially when the class gets enough cards to branch out into doing other, more janky things.
Once upon a time (towards the latter end of MSoG, just before Un'Goro, if I recall correctly) there was a meta deck called 'Water Rogue' which mixed pirates and murlocs. The murlocs weren't technically pirates, but if you want to think of them as part of the crew then go ahead!
OK, so I fully appreciate the situation Wild-only players might be in, and what follows is not intended to debunk your point of view: the whole matter of the right approach is subjective. Nevertheless, I would point out:
This final point is a bit facetious I admit, but it actually holds the central argument: Blizzard cannot make a challenge mode that is a worthwhile challenge for everyone. It will always end up too difficult for some and too easy for others, because they have players whose collections range from (not even the full) Basic set up to every card in the game. What they CAN do is:
In this case the Wild-only players (which is not at all the same thing as Wild players) will find it more difficult than they had done previously. OK, but if they allow Wild cards the encounters either have to be easy with them or too difficult for Standard-only players. There is no way of winning here. They made a different choice than usual, but that does not invalidate their choice.
Tl;dr: your opinion is not wrong, but your initial suggestion that it needs "fixing" is.
I can confirm you are not the only one. I have been thinking these things should always have been made standard anyway because wild has too many things that trivialise the whole adventure.
I am not even sure what people are complaining about. I beat all but the final boss with a few unmodified homebrew decks I had lying around, so it's not like it's that difficult even without wild decks banned.
It doesn't matter if fixed AI decks can use Wild cards if they are still balanced around being a reasonable challenge for Standard decks. The longstanding issue with heroic/challenge mode was that Wild cards often made them easy because they couldn't be balanced assuming everyone owns cards from 5 years ago.
As for neither Kael'thas being disenchantable: they were free so I don't really mind. Though I admit it is true that having both is redundant, and the normal version especially is looking pretty pointless now.
Time is money, and nowhere is that more true than with the Classic set...
Seriously though, the problem with hero portraits is people actually care about them, despite them just being gifs with voicelines. You can bet there will be some fairly new players with far from complete Classic collections that see it, really like it, and then spend money to expedite the growth of their classic collection primarily to obtain the hero.
Arguably that is not a bad thing: certainly Blizzard would love them to, and with the non-duplicate rule in place it isn't even that inefficient anymore. But I do think it is ethically dubious to present an enticing reward that you know will encourage a small number of people into spending a significant amount of money, when a throwaway one like a card back would be plenty to appease everyone.
Besides, the golden and 1000 win hero portraits are already there as the rewards for veteran players.
I used 'everything' in the viewpoint of whoever implemented the reward when the Basic and Classic (or 'Expert set' as it was back then) sets were everything. I would not even assume someone with a full Classic set has any other set complete.
Regardless, I'm not sure handing out significant rewards for finishing a set is even in good taste since it puts a major pay wall in front of most players. Granted the Classic set is a special case in this regard as simply playing the game for a long time will eventually get you there, especially with the recent extension of the no-duplicate rule.
That is not to say I would be against them handing out a card back for it: maybe a version of the Classic card back with the gold a little more shiny. Card backs are so minor that people wouldn't care that it rewarded those who already have large collections, but a hero would be a bit too much.
To be fair, when that achievement was added (i.e. beta I believe) the only things you could get were gold, dust and classic packs, none of which are very important when you have everything. I am not sure if the Legend card back was around before release, and certainly alternative hero portraits weren't. At least they gave you the resource you could put towards Arena.
Sure they could have updated it later on, but something is better than nothing, which would be a legitimate reward for someone who already has everything.
We might at least get a little more when real achievements are added later this year
In fairness, 41.9% win rate in a Tavern Brawl is fine. It is high enough that it feels like you have a reasonable chance in each game, and you'd only really notice the sub-50% win rate if there was something tracking it, which there isn't.
If Casual was filled with decks that have a 40% win rate on ladder, I'd be messing around enjoying HS quite a bit more than I do with the status quo...
I did not mean to impose my opinions on anyone else, and my interest in a survey above was a genuine one so I had a fair idea of whether I am an outlier or not.
I don't mind aggro decks or even aggro metas. My frustration stems from aggro classes already existing, and if they ever gave rogue any burst beyond Leeroy and Eviscerate they could easily have made a DH-like deck without the fanfare and complications of a new class. Of course rogue doesn't have the lifesteal, AoE, minion sacrificing and big demons, but hey, warlock has all of that stuff.
I guess I'm just frustrated that an entire expansion cycle is overshadowed by the addition of a new class that has to be balanced slowly, when more or less the same decks could have been achieved by giving rogue and warlock a few cards. Then if they are a problem, we know very well how to balance that quickly without having to incrementally adjust 15 different cards.
I know WoW has a PvP aspect, but for much of that game classes are not in direct competition with each other. Yes you might want to optimise your characters for high level raiding, but if you are avoiding PvP one class being overpowered does not make the other classes weaker.
Meanwhile HS is almost entirely PvP and 1 dominant class does directly impact how successful you can be with the others, and there are few options to avoid that problem. So Blizzard tradition or not, the approach of making a class overpowered to guarantee use while you balance it is much more destructive than it is in WoW.
Now, I don't mean to suggest DH is always going to be a problem (although I do think it's core design elements are very risky, especially mixing aggro with so much card draw), and I'm sure in the long run it will wax and wane like the other classes do. But so far I haven't seen a good reason for it to exist beyond generating a short-term spike in interest, which ended up being a very short-term spike because of how quickly it frustrated players.
It was definitely a move that can be justified, but it has had the unfortunate effect of making a lot of players dislike DH instead of being interested in a new class, at which point you have to question whether adding the class has backfired.
If it had been fairly weak everyone would have understood why and would have rooted for it as it improved over time. Instead, DH was immediately so powerful that a large section of the player base turned against it right from the start, and we've just been waiting for the class to be slowly brought in line ever since.
I would be interested to see a survey of how many players enjoy the game more/less now that DH is here. I know I personally find it harder to muster the motivation to play than I did last year.
Having lots of draw doesn't prevent them being given value cards (rogue has a ton of both), though their stated identity did explicitly say value generation would be weak, probably to keep them from having too much in common with rogue.
I too want to see what interesting stuff they can do with outcast, especially with cards that would support a slow deck where moving cards to the edge is actually a challenge worthy of the outcast bonus. At the moment the outcast mechanic just rewards aggressive decks who don't have a big enough hand to have to work for the bonus, which is a shame.
Beyond that, I just hope DH can find something unique to do (outcast doesn't count, I'm interested in the effects not the trigger). Just doing draw-heavy aggro-tempo or cheating out big demons doesn't add much when rogue and warlock already exist. Currently the only real signs for this are the swarm-sacrifice cards, but if the class is sticking around there's plenty of time for things to turn up.
I'm not sure Shadows meant it as anything other than a harmless joke, similar to how friends can mock each other without meaning any offense. I guess the casual way he wrote it does rather mask it, but that's British humour I suppose.
On a related note, even with US spelling often making sensible choices to make words look like they sound, all forms of English have serious inconsistencies with how to spell a sound, especially with its use vowels. E.g. gone, bone and one really shouldn't all use o-n-e to make different sounds if we were serious about spelling. Personally I blame the fantastic choice of not using accents, despite having way more than 5 vowel sounds.
My personal favourite alphabet blunder is that once upon a time the English used the thorn rune alongside the Latin alphabet to give us a 'th' sound, which is jolly sensible given how common the sound is in English. For one reason or another it phased out, leaving us with the relatively esoteric 'th'. A greek theta would do too, but no, we've made our bed and I guess we're going to stubbornly lie in it.
Tl;dr: unless you're an etymologist all English spelling is rubbish, so we should be happy to joke about any and all variants of its spelling, whether that targets the version across the pond or whichever side of it you grew up on.
I had been assuming they were syncing everything up with the tavern brawl and was willing to give them a pass for making week 1 of the felfire festival 8 days long. Now I'm just confused about their scheduling.
BG is not my cup of tea either, but having such strong opinions about something you never even tried seems a touch extreme.
I think the fact people do like it and play it a lot justifies its existence, regardless of whether the HS player-base was asking for it. I can't begin to guess how many great things have been made throughout human history when no one knew they wanted them. Heck, from my atheist viewpoint absolutely no one asked for any of the natural wonders of the universe, but we're still glad they'e there.
-------------------------------------------------------------
Anyway, while I rarely play BG because I prefer to play HS with a specific gimmick in mind, I can also appreciate one thing BG has going for it that other HS game modes do not: the ability to change your build in response to what your opponent is playing. Yes there's RNG in what you are offered and how things end up attacking, but you nevertheless have more agency overall than in ranked where deck matchups and draw order can often decide games by themselves (especially if one or both decks are aggressive).
English is renowned for having inconsistent spelling, even before different versions of English (e.g. British or American) put stress in different places or have different pronunciations. So who's to say what Aranna sounds like?
In any case the Innkeeper says it how I would, except for the rolling r which he is wont to use but I never do.
They are not saying 'Destroy all black creatures' is racist. They are acknowledging MtG is not free from the wider social context in which it exists, and in that context having something called 'Cleanse' with the command to destroy all black creatures is dangerously close to real racist activity.
It is also not possible to say "Oh, but it's just a card game. No one interprets it that way." because subliminal messaging exists, so even if no one ever takes offense or treats it as a call to racist action, there will still be subconscious effects further cementing racial prejudices. When this is unintentional, it is a failure of card design to not account for this. When it is intentional it is outright racist. In both cases the card should be changed.
Internal racism within a game is fine. Take Warcraft: no one has a problem with the copious racism there because it is using story points entirely within the Warcraft universe.
The issues arise when a fantasy world stupidly brings in racist elements from the real world, like the crusades, Jihads or the KKK. They don't need to be there and they only drag real world racism in, which is obviously going to cause real offense.