... better to give some hope for curselock now than to see it never played.
Given how often I was encountering it before the changes, it felt like it was one of those bad decks that people enjoy and will play anyway, and it doesn't really need to be above tier 4 to be considered 'successful'. Honestly, it's the sort of gameplay that I'd try my best to keep in tier 4 if I was one of the designers.
I'm waiting for the day warlock gets a slow deck that isn't built upon something fundamentally un-fun for the opponent. It's been a while :P
It's a terrible card now at face value, but it has to be analysed alongside the questline, and it wouldn't be the first time an awful cards has been important in the meta. The unfortunate part is that you'd now never run it anywhere except the questline.
I very much understand disliking curse-lock, but on the scale of warlock decks that suck to play against, it's pretty good. At least it produces some interesting games where you maintain a full hand and block their win condition. I'd take that over The Demon Seed every day.
I'd say the rogue questline was well designed too, though for very different reasons. It's quite fast to complete, but requires minions to live for a turn do do much, so the opponent has options for countering it. The small pool of SI:7 cards - alongside the small pool of gizmos - also let Blizz completely control how it would play, which is probably why it feels fun and fair. There's really no way for players to make a toxic version of it! Despite that, it manages to avoid feeling too same-y as most SI:7 cards are there primarily to interact with the opponent's board, so decisions naturally change from game to game, while the other SI:7 cards are end-game bombs serving as alternate win conditions if Scabbs himself doesn't cut it. Finally, the gizmos do a diverse array of things while sticking to the deck's themes of stealth, board presence and removal, again presenting lots of routes through games.
I wouldn't want many decks to be set in stone so much by the design team, but the rogue questline does demonstrate that it has its advantages.
I'll contest that the priest questline looks like a badly designed card, but is actually kinda masterful. It can never win (at least not by using the quest) before turn 10, and in practice it's usually several turns later. So most decks have plenty of time to beat it. Also, the whole way along you have to decide between what's optimal and what progresses the quest, especially once you have missed a turn, but sometimes even when still playing on curve. There's even genuine opportunities for counterplay since you can't play Xyrella the turn you complete the questline, so she's vulnerable to disruption, and you can't play the shard for at least 1 turn after that either. So overall, I agree with every statement that it looks dumb, but never that it is dumb.
Regarding your last paragraph, I would argue the Behemoth fits very well with priest mechanically: a big value minion with lots of healing and effectively a destroy effect is very on-brand for the class. Not every priest archetype will want to use it of course, but there's no doubt it fits the class. However, it does suffer from priest already having good healing, so other classes might be happier to generate a Behemoth than priest is to run it.
I guess rogue's current position is a great demonstration of how heavily success depends on the meta, and not just on how good your own cards are. Rogue's Year of the Gryphon archetypes were all left incomplete upon rotation, and VSC only pushed pirates, hence why that class is stuck with only 1 deck atm, and double-hence why a class that's usually extremely resilient in the meta is now so beholden to it. Priest is much less resilient than rogue, and often finds itself in the dumps. That's relevant here because it means it's often not a problem of priest cards being weak so much as the class's overall design being easily countered (and then everyone hates it when it's top dog...). So to me it looks like people are making Behemoth the scapegoat for much wider priest problems, and doing so for no better reason than that it's the latest set's flagship card.
On a broader comment about the colossal cards, I think they have dug themselves a bit of a hole with them. Most of them are serious power creep over previous big minions, and I definitely count Behemoth in that already. (It's so much better than Ragnaros, Lightlord is almost upsetting :P) I'm always very conservative with my thoughts on power creep, but we should still be mindful of what benchmark we are comparing them and future cards to. I feel like perhaps 'Nellie is too strong' should be the narrative here, not that Behemoth is too weak.
In my experience, it has actually been strongest when I'm a decent way behind, just not quite so overwhelmed that the opponent will still have lethal the next turn. In those cases, they have to divert attention to killing it lest it just heals everything back up again, and it ends up like this big removal (and often pseudo-AoE as minions trade into it) that also heals for a ton. I certainly don't count that situation as 'winning already', and I wouldn't call it a win more card. Rather, it's priest's best way to turn a losing game into a winning one. It's not even bad against slow decks: sure the healing matters less, but it still goes at least 2-for-1 every time.
Deep down, I think there's a philosophical aspect to choosing which cards to buff. If you have a bad deck and only one card in it that ends up with a positive played win rate (and it isn't an OTK card since that would seriously skew it), then that card should be the last one you consider buffing. Otherwise you're actively pushing power creep and making the deck super reliant on finding that one card at the right time.
In this case, I think people are just targeting the Behemoth because it's a colossal and that's the flagship cycle of cards this set, so it is the first card people think of. It's the same with Xhilag, though that card actually is weak at least.
Am I alone in thinking Blackwater Behemoth is actually great already? Practically every time I play it it puts in some serious work, and I recall Zeddy looking through the colossals and recognising the card actually had a good win rate, but the surrounding decks didn't. I.e. the problem is that it is only one card in a weak deck, and the deck would be better served by being made stronger elsewhere.
It's not strictly the focus of their lawsuit, but ultimately they're suing because of "over $300 on Hearthstone between 2019 and 2021". So, basically the kid bought less than the small pre-order each expansion for a few years, and the parent has enough disposable income to not even notice in that time? I don't know how old the kid was, but either they shouldn't have been let anywhere near a credit card, or they were old enough to know to spend 5 minutes Googling the odds and the whole argument that they were too young to understand the odds is utter bs.
HS should always have listed the odds in the client somewhere, but if that was a serious issue they would have been forced into adding this long before 2019. So to me it just looks like a stereotypical American conjuring up lawsuits about anything and everything.
Yeah, but those moments are balanced out by the times when you are holding onto Mutanus (or maybe even Savory Deviate Delight because you're a madman who's prepared to deal with it before turn 7), and they play him the same turn they complete the questline anyway :(
Man, I'd love to see the hunter quest utterly destroyed. Not because it's terribly overpowered, but because it was the single worst card design in all of HS imo. Things like The Caverns Below and The Demon Seed were mistakes, but at least they tried something new and it wasn't immediately obvious they would be a problem. Meanwhile, Defend the Dwarven District just trivialised Raza-priest which was doing well in Wild just before UiS, so it's not like players couldn't still enjoy it. So why create a deck that does exactly the same thing, but is utterly devoid of interesting gameplay for the opponent? Grr.
I'm stuck at Murlocs vs Popsicooler. A team that's half Murlocs and half Dragons just isn't good enough to take these things down. Didn't get anywhere with Fire or Nature either.
I try to reduce the health of the cart first, but the damage from the rest of the bosses wipes out my team.
Gonna try Orcs next, I guess. Am I missing something?
I managed it with murlocs and fire, thanks largely to Murky getting the Assassinate 2 treasure from Elite encounters (it makes no sense thematically, but he does). As long as he hits something useful it makes things a lot easier. Obviously he can hit the boss itself, but for me he hit the fighter ally, which simplified my choices as I only had to defend against casters afterwards. So if you weren't already using him, you can try switching your murlocs up to include Murky.
I was also running Chi-ji to simultaneously provide fire damage to keep the ice cream cart's health low and keep the team alive. Popsicooler is pretty limited in what it can do while the cart is on low health, so I just ground it out slowly without taking any risks once the allies were taken out.
Slightly related topic: I feel like they said there was no non-duplicate rule for Mercs, but I have yet to unpack a repeat Merc, and I only get portraits for rares and epics, which I already own all. Every time I am lucky enough to unpack a legendary, it's a new one. Am I just super lucky? Or is there in fact a non-duplicate rule after all?
There is a non-duplicate rule, but it's kinda convoluted. I'm pretty sure there are two distinct things you need to look at in each pack: the merc slot and the coin slots possibly being replaced with mercs.
The merc slot will be a legendary once every 20 packs (with no pity timer, grr), an epic once every 5, and a rare otherwise. If you don't own all the mercs of whatever rarity you land on, it will do non-duplicate things and give you one you don't own. If you do own them all, I think it picks one completely at random, giving a portrait if you don't have all of them for that merc, and coins otherwise. Note it doesn't go through any non-duplicate process when picking mercs in this case.
As for the coin slots, they have some small chance of being turned into a merc, either a portrait or a base version if you happen to not have it yet. There's no duplicate protection here though, and you very probably get a few portraits this way before owning every merc of the corresponding rarity. When this happens it looks like duplicate protection is broken, but it's actually fine and just doesn't apply here.
That task involving Corrupted Viscera looks tough. Anyone manage that trick yet?
I will try it out later, but I guess we can let Cookie fill the opponent's board with harmless fish while we buff up minions big enough to do 100+ damage at once.
All this means is you cant use the naaru shard to do anything useful . A fairly trivial requirement with nature bros. Otherwise you might have to rely on alternative healing sources like anacondra, alexstrasza, etc.
I may have forgotten what the Mi'da boss involved, and took a fire team with all its healing coming from Chi-ji... who was the one merc I foolishly let die on the way there. Fortunately you can whittle Mi'da down entirely with the naaru shard while only healing with its nature ability, but it's not advisable :P
I obviously understand why players would be glad of that, but I don't see what would motivate Blizz to implement it. There was already a negative feeling associated with 'upgrading' to golden at nearly full cost. Meanwhile nobody is unhappy to open a golden version instead of a normal one since it is objectively better, and at worst a wildcard for any card of that rarity. So your suggestion isn't fixing a problem so much as it is asking the question of how much more generous the dust economy can be. I'm not going to argue HS is super generous here (it's not), but it is something Iksar has repeatedly said they don't plan on changing, as they'd rather just give players more cards (e.g. through the rewards track).
The way I assume you want that to work would basically mean offering a full dust refund for every golden card as though they were nerfed, assuming you use some of that to re-craft the normal version. There's no way that would ever happen for obvious reasons. The only reason the golden upgrade is OK is that no-one gains any competitive or resource benefit out of the process; it just no longer feels bad when you open a card you planned on crafting golden anyway.
But hey, you're free to downgrade golden cards to normal all you like at no cost! You even get a nice 10 dust bonus for commons (I never understood why that was...).
It didn't work when I tried it either, and I was definitely in Ranked. Not that it mattered much since I had a lot of attempts to get there in a single battlecry while doing the Fires of Zin-azshari achievement.
Hello again. I just looked through the Naxx and Legacy sets to gauge how much is different from August 2014. The good news is Naxx is completely unchanged after Undertaker's nerf was reverted.
For the Legacy set, Druid got hit pretty hard, so you might struggle to replicate OG Naxx experiences with that class. It's not all nerfs, as there have been a couple of buffs and a couple of nerfs were reverted (Nourish and Ancient of Lore), but I feel like 3 mana Wild Growth, Innervate for 1 mana crystal, and a completely different Force of Nature will undermine any authenticity there.
The other classes are probably close enough to where they were back then, with only Fiery War Axe feeling like a massive hit when I went through it. They're mostly a mix of nerfs, buffs, and partially reverted nerfs that put the overall power pretty close to 2014. If anything it's weaker, so the changes won't have removed the challenge. Most importantly, the tools available still essentially the same, so the problem solving aspect is unchanged.
So I'd suggest just building decks out of Naxx and Legacy cards only, and seeing how it goes. If you kept track of which cards were Hall of Fame replacements (and hence not around in 2014) then exclude them, but they're all tame enough that it won't matter much.
Given how often I was encountering it before the changes, it felt like it was one of those bad decks that people enjoy and will play anyway, and it doesn't really need to be above tier 4 to be considered 'successful'. Honestly, it's the sort of gameplay that I'd try my best to keep in tier 4 if I was one of the designers.
I'm waiting for the day warlock gets a slow deck that isn't built upon something fundamentally un-fun for the opponent. It's been a while :P
It's a terrible card now at face value, but it has to be analysed alongside the questline, and it wouldn't be the first time an awful cards has been important in the meta. The unfortunate part is that you'd now never run it anywhere except the questline.
I very much understand disliking curse-lock, but on the scale of warlock decks that suck to play against, it's pretty good. At least it produces some interesting games where you maintain a full hand and block their win condition. I'd take that over The Demon Seed every day.
I'd say the rogue questline was well designed too, though for very different reasons. It's quite fast to complete, but requires minions to live for a turn do do much, so the opponent has options for countering it. The small pool of SI:7 cards - alongside the small pool of gizmos - also let Blizz completely control how it would play, which is probably why it feels fun and fair. There's really no way for players to make a toxic version of it! Despite that, it manages to avoid feeling too same-y as most SI:7 cards are there primarily to interact with the opponent's board, so decisions naturally change from game to game, while the other SI:7 cards are end-game bombs serving as alternate win conditions if Scabbs himself doesn't cut it. Finally, the gizmos do a diverse array of things while sticking to the deck's themes of stealth, board presence and removal, again presenting lots of routes through games.
I wouldn't want many decks to be set in stone so much by the design team, but the rogue questline does demonstrate that it has its advantages.
I'll contest that the priest questline looks like a badly designed card, but is actually kinda masterful. It can never win (at least not by using the quest) before turn 10, and in practice it's usually several turns later. So most decks have plenty of time to beat it. Also, the whole way along you have to decide between what's optimal and what progresses the quest, especially once you have missed a turn, but sometimes even when still playing on curve. There's even genuine opportunities for counterplay since you can't play Xyrella the turn you complete the questline, so she's vulnerable to disruption, and you can't play the shard for at least 1 turn after that either. So overall, I agree with every statement that it looks dumb, but never that it is dumb.
Yeah, but Secret Passage is gone, which was the entire reason the Gnoll was played early enough to be a problem. It'll be fine.
Regarding your last paragraph, I would argue the Behemoth fits very well with priest mechanically: a big value minion with lots of healing and effectively a destroy effect is very on-brand for the class. Not every priest archetype will want to use it of course, but there's no doubt it fits the class. However, it does suffer from priest already having good healing, so other classes might be happier to generate a Behemoth than priest is to run it.
I guess rogue's current position is a great demonstration of how heavily success depends on the meta, and not just on how good your own cards are. Rogue's Year of the Gryphon archetypes were all left incomplete upon rotation, and VSC only pushed pirates, hence why that class is stuck with only 1 deck atm, and double-hence why a class that's usually extremely resilient in the meta is now so beholden to it. Priest is much less resilient than rogue, and often finds itself in the dumps. That's relevant here because it means it's often not a problem of priest cards being weak so much as the class's overall design being easily countered (and then everyone hates it when it's top dog...). So to me it looks like people are making Behemoth the scapegoat for much wider priest problems, and doing so for no better reason than that it's the latest set's flagship card.
On a broader comment about the colossal cards, I think they have dug themselves a bit of a hole with them. Most of them are serious power creep over previous big minions, and I definitely count Behemoth in that already. (It's so much better than Ragnaros, Lightlord is almost upsetting :P) I'm always very conservative with my thoughts on power creep, but we should still be mindful of what benchmark we are comparing them and future cards to. I feel like perhaps 'Nellie is too strong' should be the narrative here, not that Behemoth is too weak.
In my experience, it has actually been strongest when I'm a decent way behind, just not quite so overwhelmed that the opponent will still have lethal the next turn. In those cases, they have to divert attention to killing it lest it just heals everything back up again, and it ends up like this big removal (and often pseudo-AoE as minions trade into it) that also heals for a ton. I certainly don't count that situation as 'winning already', and I wouldn't call it a win more card. Rather, it's priest's best way to turn a losing game into a winning one. It's not even bad against slow decks: sure the healing matters less, but it still goes at least 2-for-1 every time.
Deep down, I think there's a philosophical aspect to choosing which cards to buff. If you have a bad deck and only one card in it that ends up with a positive played win rate (and it isn't an OTK card since that would seriously skew it), then that card should be the last one you consider buffing. Otherwise you're actively pushing power creep and making the deck super reliant on finding that one card at the right time.
In this case, I think people are just targeting the Behemoth because it's a colossal and that's the flagship cycle of cards this set, so it is the first card people think of. It's the same with Xhilag, though that card actually is weak at least.
Am I alone in thinking Blackwater Behemoth is actually great already? Practically every time I play it it puts in some serious work, and I recall Zeddy looking through the colossals and recognising the card actually had a good win rate, but the surrounding decks didn't. I.e. the problem is that it is only one card in a weak deck, and the deck would be better served by being made stronger elsewhere.
It's not strictly the focus of their lawsuit, but ultimately they're suing because of "over $300 on Hearthstone between 2019 and 2021". So, basically the kid bought less than the small pre-order each expansion for a few years, and the parent has enough disposable income to not even notice in that time? I don't know how old the kid was, but either they shouldn't have been let anywhere near a credit card, or they were old enough to know to spend 5 minutes Googling the odds and the whole argument that they were too young to understand the odds is utter bs.
HS should always have listed the odds in the client somewhere, but if that was a serious issue they would have been forced into adding this long before 2019. So to me it just looks like a stereotypical American conjuring up lawsuits about anything and everything.
Yeah, but those moments are balanced out by the times when you are holding onto Mutanus (or maybe even Savory Deviate Delight because you're a madman who's prepared to deal with it before turn 7), and they play him the same turn they complete the questline anyway :(
Man, I'd love to see the hunter quest utterly destroyed. Not because it's terribly overpowered, but because it was the single worst card design in all of HS imo. Things like The Caverns Below and The Demon Seed were mistakes, but at least they tried something new and it wasn't immediately obvious they would be a problem. Meanwhile, Defend the Dwarven District just trivialised Raza-priest which was doing well in Wild just before UiS, so it's not like players couldn't still enjoy it. So why create a deck that does exactly the same thing, but is utterly devoid of interesting gameplay for the opponent? Grr.
I managed it with murlocs and fire, thanks largely to Murky getting the Assassinate 2 treasure from Elite encounters (it makes no sense thematically, but he does). As long as he hits something useful it makes things a lot easier. Obviously he can hit the boss itself, but for me he hit the fighter ally, which simplified my choices as I only had to defend against casters afterwards. So if you weren't already using him, you can try switching your murlocs up to include Murky.
I was also running Chi-ji to simultaneously provide fire damage to keep the ice cream cart's health low and keep the team alive. Popsicooler is pretty limited in what it can do while the cart is on low health, so I just ground it out slowly without taking any risks once the allies were taken out.
There is a non-duplicate rule, but it's kinda convoluted. I'm pretty sure there are two distinct things you need to look at in each pack: the merc slot and the coin slots possibly being replaced with mercs.
The merc slot will be a legendary once every 20 packs (with no pity timer, grr), an epic once every 5, and a rare otherwise. If you don't own all the mercs of whatever rarity you land on, it will do non-duplicate things and give you one you don't own. If you do own them all, I think it picks one completely at random, giving a portrait if you don't have all of them for that merc, and coins otherwise. Note it doesn't go through any non-duplicate process when picking mercs in this case.
As for the coin slots, they have some small chance of being turned into a merc, either a portrait or a base version if you happen to not have it yet. There's no duplicate protection here though, and you very probably get a few portraits this way before owning every merc of the corresponding rarity. When this happens it looks like duplicate protection is broken, but it's actually fine and just doesn't apply here.
I will try it out later, but I guess we can let Cookie fill the opponent's board with harmless fish while we buff up minions big enough to do 100+ damage at once.
I may have forgotten what the Mi'da boss involved, and took a fire team with all its healing coming from Chi-ji... who was the one merc I foolishly let die on the way there. Fortunately you can whittle Mi'da down entirely with the naaru shard while only healing with its nature ability, but it's not advisable :P
I obviously understand why players would be glad of that, but I don't see what would motivate Blizz to implement it. There was already a negative feeling associated with 'upgrading' to golden at nearly full cost. Meanwhile nobody is unhappy to open a golden version instead of a normal one since it is objectively better, and at worst a wildcard for any card of that rarity. So your suggestion isn't fixing a problem so much as it is asking the question of how much more generous the dust economy can be. I'm not going to argue HS is super generous here (it's not), but it is something Iksar has repeatedly said they don't plan on changing, as they'd rather just give players more cards (e.g. through the rewards track).
The way I assume you want that to work would basically mean offering a full dust refund for every golden card as though they were nerfed, assuming you use some of that to re-craft the normal version. There's no way that would ever happen for obvious reasons. The only reason the golden upgrade is OK is that no-one gains any competitive or resource benefit out of the process; it just no longer feels bad when you open a card you planned on crafting golden anyway.
But hey, you're free to downgrade golden cards to normal all you like at no cost! You even get a nice 10 dust bonus for commons (I never understood why that was...).
It didn't work when I tried it either, and I was definitely in Ranked. Not that it mattered much since I had a lot of attempts to get there in a single battlecry while doing the Fires of Zin-azshari achievement.
Hello again. I just looked through the Naxx and Legacy sets to gauge how much is different from August 2014. The good news is Naxx is completely unchanged after Undertaker's nerf was reverted.
For the Legacy set, Druid got hit pretty hard, so you might struggle to replicate OG Naxx experiences with that class. It's not all nerfs, as there have been a couple of buffs and a couple of nerfs were reverted (Nourish and Ancient of Lore), but I feel like 3 mana Wild Growth, Innervate for 1 mana crystal, and a completely different Force of Nature will undermine any authenticity there.
The other classes are probably close enough to where they were back then, with only Fiery War Axe feeling like a massive hit when I went through it. They're mostly a mix of nerfs, buffs, and partially reverted nerfs that put the overall power pretty close to 2014. If anything it's weaker, so the changes won't have removed the challenge. Most importantly, the tools available still essentially the same, so the problem solving aspect is unchanged.
So I'd suggest just building decks out of Naxx and Legacy cards only, and seeing how it goes. If you kept track of which cards were Hall of Fame replacements (and hence not around in 2014) then exclude them, but they're all tame enough that it won't matter much.
Good luck, and happy hunting :)