Re: Warlock - my point was more that warlock has been viable for like a week before it's kicked back into the corner again. It simply amused me.
Re: Apothecary, we'll have to disagree on this one. Increasing the mana point by one isn't going to have a significant functional effect on how it plays against most decks - the only matchups it'll really hurt are midrange ones, most of which are eating nerfs here too. It's not like the rogue archetypes using it care about tempo much - they're about the swing turn, and that turn coming a turn later really isn't going to make much of a difference.
Now, if it'd gone to six mana, that might be something - it'd stop on-curve Apothecary into Whelp. But, y'know, it didn't.
A series of entirely unnecessary nerfs; the one card that needed a beating (Apothecary) wasn't really hurt all that much.
The Fiendish Rites nerf made me laugh, though. Conjured pictures of Gul'dan finally about to climb out of a hole, only for Blizz to kick him right back down into it again.
Mage is fine. Getting tired of saying it, but tech for your meta. If you're getting rolled by a lot of deathrattle decks, tech in some silences and time your Zephrys properly. If you're getting rolled by aggro, pick up some standard anti-aggro tools (hell, we got some good ones this expansion). Highlander Mage is in a solid position in the meta right now, not top but certainly not poorly placed, and highlander decks are incredibly easy to tech.
As to the other mage archetypes you listed, Secret Mage has been abusively strong in Wild for some time now and is a strong indicator as to why the deck as it is there simply shouldn't see Standard play. Mage doesn't really have access to an OTK right now (and in fact, most decks don't), but Freeze Mage is actually back to being viable as an archetype for the first time in years, so you're kinda wrong there. Tempo Mage has never really existed, it was just a lazy name attached to a deck that had no real defining trait (if it was made today it'd have been termed Flamewalker Mage I suspect) - but regardless, so many of Mage's good cards (particularly evergreen ones) are either slow or reactionary that it would be bizarre if they had any kind of viable tempo-based archetype. And finally, Cyclone Mage was only viable so long as it was supported by Giants/CC cheese, and without that it's just another 'let's make a bunch of random cards and hope for the best' deck.
None of those decks really scream 'make me good' to me, or apparently to Blizzard. Though if you want to talk about other archetypes not existing, I'd be significantly more receptive - Mage feels almost as vulnerable as Priest is to complaints of a poor class identity...
I'm going to post a rebuttal, and since this is an area I believe in passionately, I'm probably going to get a little heated. I apologise in advance.
In my view, people who complain about netdecking are people who either don't understand how the internet works, don't understand how communities work, or who actively want the game to be weaker than it is.
Think about what you do when you make a deck you really enjoy. You post it online, or you talk to your friends about it, or what have you. That is a natural human action, something we picked up when we stopped roaming the savannah and started squatting in mud huts - we like to share things. We get pleasure from knowing that someone else enjoyed something we made or did. And, inevitably, when someone shares something they enjoy with you, you'll want to try it for yourself. That is a borderline inevitability in any game with a strong community.
Take that to its rational conclusion. The internet allows millions of people to share decks with one another. People, as a general rule, want to win; therefore, they will tend towards the decks that win more often than the ones that don't, all else being equal. This then leads to the strongest decks becoming better known, and becoming popular. Even if pro play didn't exist, the existence of the internet will lead to netdecking. It will happen with absolute certainty.
Then factor in the person making the deck. The vast majority of decks you'll see will be made by strangers, and you have no frame of reference as to whether that person has any idea what they're talking about. So, of course, when professional play exists, players will lean towards decks made by professional players because they have credentials. Again, this encourages a trend of netdecking.
But of course, none of this explains why netdecking is actually a good thing, other than (I suppose) the community effort to find and play good decks. And yet it is - netdecking is actually healthy for the game. It encourages a higher skill cap, enables balance changes to happen, and provides easy points of reference for people discussing the game.
"Higher skill cap? What?" I hear you say. "You don't have to make your own deck, that's lowering the skill cap!" I wholly disagree. Firstly, of course, because teching a deck to your tastes and to your local meta after netdecking it is a strong skill in and of itself, and it's one most people seem to be pretty terrible at. But more importantly, because concepts like hand-reading and gamestate knowledge cannot exist without semi-transparency of what an opponent's deck is. It's simply not possible to get any kind of real hand-read on an opponent if you have no idea what their deck is. The best you can make is a vaguely educated guess. And even that educated guess wouldn't really be possible without an established net-based metagame, since you have no idea how good your opponent really is - without knowing someone's skill level, they could have decked literally anything with faulty reasoning.
Balance-change wise - having established decks allows for statistics to be gathered on card performance much more easily. If everyone is playing random garbage they put together, the metrics are nowhere near as consistent and trends are more difficult to identify. You might not think that's an issue - and admittedly I'm on record as being strongly against the change-heavy tendencies lately. But think about the most obnoxious decks that have been changed and consider that if fewer people are playing those decks they're less likely to be spotted and changed.
I could go on - at length - but I'm sure nobody's reading at this point besides you. So, closing para:
To complain about netdecking - aside from lacking a basic understanding of human nature - is a fundamentally selfish action. You want to make your own decks - you can do so. You can do so all day long, and nobody doing anything is going to stop you. What you're complaining about, really, is not being able to win with the decks you've made because other people are playing better decks they've found elsewhere. So, in essence, you're upset because other people make better decks than you do, and give them out to people in the same way you do. And while I can understand how that would be upsetting, it's probably not something I'd go around broadcasting, personally.
Oh for crying out loud. Absolutely no changes necessary as far as I'm concerned - the only card/deck which is in any way problematic right now is Necrium Apothecary and that can be dealt with through tech cards and correct deck choice. Getting pretty sick of this, honestly - it's impossible for a meta to stabilize if they're going to nerf something every few weeks.
'fraid I don't watch videos much, so without a transcript I can't comment on any conclusions you may have drawn.
What I will say, though, is that I worry Noxus will provide some extremely potent aggressive strategies to other decks while having very little identity of its own once the ball gets rolling. Some of Noxus' pure aggro cards (Legion Rearguard et al) provide substantial brute force which can be added to most aggressive shells to fill them out. The first deck I'm planning on putting together when LoR comes back online will be abusing precisely that.
Also in said deck will be the only other Noxian card of any significance - Katarina. Kat is being grossly underrated by the community right now simply because people haven't realised how powerful Ready Your Attack is as an effect. Particularly on a champion who is basically impossible to actually get rid of outside of targeted removal.
Re: Crimson - it has potential, but it will remain only potential for some significant time simply because it's no more than a shell at the moment. There just aren't enough cards to support it, and the benefits to doing so are limited. What it looks like to me, rather than an archetype, is a prototype of what they want an archetype to look like when first introduced. Put in a small shell, see if it makes any waves, then tentatively add support on a per-expansion basis to avoid breaking anything. Assuming that's what they're doing - and they're using Crimson as a test - you could expect to see more support when they add more cards... but that's just hyperbole on my end.
Hm... having spoken about it though, maybe I should put my LoR deck together now and float on the site for ideas...
Never actually seen it, but it's just another type of cheese. The kind of deck that looks unbeatable on the rare occasion it actually gets the right cards, but three games out of four they'll be conceding without putting up any real fight.
My guess had actually been 28-29. Not sure I buy into your reasoning, but if you are correct it's a week sooner than I'd hoped, so I for one certainly won't be complaining.
Been shadowing the discussion for a while, and the conclusion I've drawn is that there's no point to changing the Galakrond Invoke/HP. You'd just be poking at a symptom.
The underlying disease, to continue the metaphor, is the lack of direction and theme underlying the Priest class, which has been widely acknowledged by both community and developers. Shadow is hard to really sell in card form - is it targeted removal, card theft, mind control, direct damage? - and healing simply doesn't work as a unifying class identity. Hypothetically healing could work, if it were reworked to be more effective on minions and (more importantly) Inner Fire were HoF'd so as to remove potential abuse cases (so as to promote the board-centric conservative gameplan which looked to be the original design philosophy) but it'd be awkward and anachronistic in today's rush-heavy, board-interactive Hearthstone.
Thus, the problem. With no idea where to take the class, how can you pick an effective hero power? If the class's cards are schizophrenic, how can any hero power support them properly without simply ignoring most of them? In the end, the solution chosen was a shrug and hand-wave - the reason the current HP is underwhelming is that it doesn't actually aim to synergise with anything. It plays the middle ground - if your cards are schizophrenic, generate a lot of them and sooner or later you'll get some cards that work together, right?
The further problem is that this issue goes all the way to the root of the class. It's not something you can actually fix with expansion cards - even if you did manage to create a new class identity (which seems unlikely) it's still a temporary fix until the cards rotate. I don't particularly like the idea, but I'm forced to agree with others on this board and conclude that the only thing that will really fix Priest is a complete redesign from the ground up.
The deck was marked 'just for fun', so pretty sure it's more the latter. My pointers were more about refining the deck while keeping the core concept alive, but not really a problem if certain cards are judged as important for flavour.
My sleep cycles are out of whack right now so I can't promise anything, but if the mood strikes me when I get off work I'll do a bit more tweaking and give it a spin - I've not played Wild in a couple months so my ranking should be low enough to allow for some experimentation. The further thought occurred a moment ago that it probably needs an additional bounce since you need one to finish quest (for some reason my brain was still keyed to quest needing 4x rather than 5x plays). Maybe drop a Sap for it, as I seem to recall it underperforming in Wild. Will see after some playtesting.
But yeah, if the deck makes me smile - which it will accomplish if I manage to relive some Quest Rogue glory days without getting stomped too badly in the process - I'll post and cross-link.
- This will obviously be in Wild, and Wild is not a place for unrefined decks. If you're going to be playing a slow game plan (which you are, given the concept behind the deck) you need both strong anti-aggro tools and some board resets for when the broken stuff starts happening.
- Your fundamental concept (i.e. permanently re-summoning Recurring Villains) is as much late-game as you need, in theory at least. N'zoth is a good emergency-slash-boardfill, so that's fine. However, a number of your other cards are unnecessary greed that doesn't actually get you to your win condition, and so should be dropped.
- If you use Lab Recruiter properly, you will never need to worry about fatigue. Equally, bounce effects are far more reliable than shuffles to complete quest. As such, your shuffle effects are unnecessary, in my opinion.
- Galakrond is cute and all, but while having a 4/4 on-demand is useful it's nothing compared to some of the dirty things you can do with Valeera in a Quest Rogue deck. She's also your gateway (alongside Lab Recruiter) to never having to worry about fatigue. Drop Galakrond for Valeera and never look back (especially since you're not running Invokes and have no room or need to add them).
Schemes are unnecessary, as above, and Stowaway's card draw becomes less reliable (and generally unnecessary anyway) as a result. Vanish is integral to redeeming otherwise irreparable boardstates, and although nerfed Prep is still extremely helpful in either getting it off in time or allowing you to build tempo on the same turn.
-1 Galakrond +1 Valeera
As above.
-1 Necrium Blade -2 Cheat Death +2 Fan of Knives +1 Recurring Villain
The Cheat Deaths should be unnecessary, since one Raiding Party is getting you to your quest completion anyway. I'm also not sold on having two Necrium Blades - one is fine to be drawn with a Raiding Party, but past that I don't really think it's adding enough (it's removal, sure, but the DR trigger isn't doing a huge amount - either summoning a 4/4 or triggering a small heal). Better to add a couple of FoKs for cycle (and more to the point, removal). I would also add a second Recurring Villain purely because it's the centrepiece of the deck and so getting it out reliably feels like a good idea (I'm not sure it's optimal, technically, but the deck isn't supposed to be wholly optimal so much as optimised, no?).
One further change I've considered but unsure on at the moment would be to drop one of the Raiding Party for a Mimic Pod - the second Raiding Party is going to be dead, but on the other hand, having two copies would significantly improve reliability. Mimic Pod is very nice for resource generation, though.
Final thoughts - no room for Giggling Inventor or Zilliax makes me sad. Still, give the above a try and see if it's any stronger.
If they did confirm January (and that would explain the bizarre certainty I have over it despite having no firm evidence to support it) I'd be pretty happy to at least have that much. Any chance you can remember the source?
Honestly, though, I didn't start the thread to beg for news - it's just an expression of impotent frustration. This is why I don't usually play betas - I hate feeling like I'm sat around waiting for something.
EDIT - nvm, found something. Linked here if interested.
This thread has no purpose. I just want to moan about wanting to play LoR and it not being released.
I want LoR and I am sad.
P.S. My mental estimate is end of Jan for the next playtest. I have literally no basis beyond the cryptic 'early Q1' they've offered, so when I'm inevitably wrong I will be even more disappointed.
In a game where spells are so high costed and so valuable, having the ability to just completely waste your opponent's entire turn for just 3-mana is ridiculous.
Fiora also seems kind of busted so maybe they're gonna nerf her stats to make it harder to upgrade her.
The issue with Deny isn't really the card itself, I feel. Sure, you can counterspell a high-cost card, but that's equally true for most counters in card games. Hearthstone is probably the only exception simply because by playing a secret you telegraph that it could be Counterspell.
The issue, I would argue, is that due to LoR's central deckbuilding mechanics, it's region-locked. Many, if not most, decks have no access to that effect or anything even similar. Which, in turn, makes it harder to build or play around. It's also trickier to get a read on the card being in hand due to the game's mana-storage mechanic - tricky to tell if your opponent is floating 3 spell mana for a Deny or simply because they don't have a spell worth throwing.
Of course, at the end of the day, the meta should self-balance around such things. Expensive spells are expensive, less so because of the spell mana mechanic, and the further variable in the equation is how prevalent Deny is in the meta. If lots of people are running Deny, fewer expensive spells get decked.
Re: Fiora - I don't actually feel like she's busted at all, and even cards like Riposte (which are all but required, really, to get her to do anything) are fair given it's a slow grind to get the 4 procs. What I do think needs changing is the fact that Fiora + Judgment is an instant win if you can't block it with something. Kinda goes against the design of the card in a lot of ways and winds up with a big of an unsatisfying ending.
To underline, since these articles are rather light on the lore:
It's easy for those unfamiliar with the background lore to assume Demacia is 'the good guys' and Noxus are 'the bad guys' - in much the same way that someone who hasn't played World of Warcraft will assume the Alliance are good and the Horde are bad. In truth, both sides are as bad as each other (in both examples). The main difference is simply the core tenet of their respective societies.
Demacia is all shining armour and knights because the central theme is order. Demacia has low crime rates, for example, but it's because their civil governance borders on police state in some ways. Society is rigid and inflexible, and even in LoR this can be seen in some of the flavour text. For example, Tianna Crownguard's flavour text has her speaking scathingly to Lux - her daughter - about her unquestionably potent Light magic, in part over family honour and in part over tradition.
Noxus, by contrast, is all about personal freedom. Of course, the downside is that when people are allowed to do whatever they want, that often involves being unpleasant to other people (as can be seen in a few isolated examples such as 'the internet' and 'a significant proportion of human history'. The only thing stopping Noxus from being a true Anarchy is the simple truth that its rulers are the biggest and baddest around, so you better do as they say. Which then goes on to paint the Noxians' invasion of their neighbours in a subtly different light - it becomes less a matter of 'warmongering expansionist' and more a matter of 'the easiest way to ensure your citizens fall in line is to give them a common enemy'.
I'd go on, but frankly I don't know enough to do so, having not really followed League's lore for quite a few years now - the above is just the basics. Still worth covering, though, in my opinion.
Re: trade-off - well sure, but irrespective of meta there's unlikely to be any decks for the foreseeable future that could build greedily enough to make so many boards as to require that many board clears, while also lacking the tempo to severely punish such a slow turn. N'zoth is back in his vault, after all.
Re: the second paragraph - 'fraid I don't see that as a reasonable argument. Pretty much anything looks big when you make the assumption you'll get a +3/+3 on it, and any game plan which includes the words 'and hope my opponent doesn't remove it' tends toward failure.
At the end of the day, I struggle to believe this deck needs an additional discovered removal option (it definitely doesn't need another Mass Rez). There just isn't a deck in the meta that merits it - the closest you'll get is Highlander Mage, and that's more about frequent medium-sized boards rather than a few huge ones. And once you mentally align with the idea that the Dynamo is something you want rather than something necessary, then you have to stop and ask - do I want a 3/4 or a 5/12 in my resurrect pool?
It's down to matchups, I think. My suspicion is that the deck was coming in at the tail end of the Shaman meta where aggro was everywhere - this deck is very strong into aggro.
The meta is starting to shift towards slower strategies now, though, which is going to hurt winrates. Though I do find it performs well into highlander rogue &c.
Re: Warlock - my point was more that warlock has been viable for like a week before it's kicked back into the corner again. It simply amused me.
Re: Apothecary, we'll have to disagree on this one. Increasing the mana point by one isn't going to have a significant functional effect on how it plays against most decks - the only matchups it'll really hurt are midrange ones, most of which are eating nerfs here too. It's not like the rogue archetypes using it care about tempo much - they're about the swing turn, and that turn coming a turn later really isn't going to make much of a difference.
Now, if it'd gone to six mana, that might be something - it'd stop on-curve Apothecary into Whelp. But, y'know, it didn't.
A series of entirely unnecessary nerfs; the one card that needed a beating (Apothecary) wasn't really hurt all that much.
The Fiendish Rites nerf made me laugh, though. Conjured pictures of Gul'dan finally about to climb out of a hole, only for Blizz to kick him right back down into it again.
My body is ready. Don't hold back, Rito.
Mage is fine. Getting tired of saying it, but tech for your meta. If you're getting rolled by a lot of deathrattle decks, tech in some silences and time your Zephrys properly. If you're getting rolled by aggro, pick up some standard anti-aggro tools (hell, we got some good ones this expansion). Highlander Mage is in a solid position in the meta right now, not top but certainly not poorly placed, and highlander decks are incredibly easy to tech.
As to the other mage archetypes you listed, Secret Mage has been abusively strong in Wild for some time now and is a strong indicator as to why the deck as it is there simply shouldn't see Standard play. Mage doesn't really have access to an OTK right now (and in fact, most decks don't), but Freeze Mage is actually back to being viable as an archetype for the first time in years, so you're kinda wrong there. Tempo Mage has never really existed, it was just a lazy name attached to a deck that had no real defining trait (if it was made today it'd have been termed Flamewalker Mage I suspect) - but regardless, so many of Mage's good cards (particularly evergreen ones) are either slow or reactionary that it would be bizarre if they had any kind of viable tempo-based archetype. And finally, Cyclone Mage was only viable so long as it was supported by Giants/CC cheese, and without that it's just another 'let's make a bunch of random cards and hope for the best' deck.
None of those decks really scream 'make me good' to me, or apparently to Blizzard. Though if you want to talk about other archetypes not existing, I'd be significantly more receptive - Mage feels almost as vulnerable as Priest is to complaints of a poor class identity...
I'm going to post a rebuttal, and since this is an area I believe in passionately, I'm probably going to get a little heated. I apologise in advance.
In my view, people who complain about netdecking are people who either don't understand how the internet works, don't understand how communities work, or who actively want the game to be weaker than it is.
Think about what you do when you make a deck you really enjoy. You post it online, or you talk to your friends about it, or what have you. That is a natural human action, something we picked up when we stopped roaming the savannah and started squatting in mud huts - we like to share things. We get pleasure from knowing that someone else enjoyed something we made or did. And, inevitably, when someone shares something they enjoy with you, you'll want to try it for yourself. That is a borderline inevitability in any game with a strong community.
Take that to its rational conclusion. The internet allows millions of people to share decks with one another. People, as a general rule, want to win; therefore, they will tend towards the decks that win more often than the ones that don't, all else being equal. This then leads to the strongest decks becoming better known, and becoming popular. Even if pro play didn't exist, the existence of the internet will lead to netdecking. It will happen with absolute certainty.
Then factor in the person making the deck. The vast majority of decks you'll see will be made by strangers, and you have no frame of reference as to whether that person has any idea what they're talking about. So, of course, when professional play exists, players will lean towards decks made by professional players because they have credentials. Again, this encourages a trend of netdecking.
But of course, none of this explains why netdecking is actually a good thing, other than (I suppose) the community effort to find and play good decks. And yet it is - netdecking is actually healthy for the game. It encourages a higher skill cap, enables balance changes to happen, and provides easy points of reference for people discussing the game.
"Higher skill cap? What?" I hear you say. "You don't have to make your own deck, that's lowering the skill cap!" I wholly disagree. Firstly, of course, because teching a deck to your tastes and to your local meta after netdecking it is a strong skill in and of itself, and it's one most people seem to be pretty terrible at. But more importantly, because concepts like hand-reading and gamestate knowledge cannot exist without semi-transparency of what an opponent's deck is. It's simply not possible to get any kind of real hand-read on an opponent if you have no idea what their deck is. The best you can make is a vaguely educated guess. And even that educated guess wouldn't really be possible without an established net-based metagame, since you have no idea how good your opponent really is - without knowing someone's skill level, they could have decked literally anything with faulty reasoning.
Balance-change wise - having established decks allows for statistics to be gathered on card performance much more easily. If everyone is playing random garbage they put together, the metrics are nowhere near as consistent and trends are more difficult to identify. You might not think that's an issue - and admittedly I'm on record as being strongly against the change-heavy tendencies lately. But think about the most obnoxious decks that have been changed and consider that if fewer people are playing those decks they're less likely to be spotted and changed.
I could go on - at length - but I'm sure nobody's reading at this point besides you. So, closing para:
To complain about netdecking - aside from lacking a basic understanding of human nature - is a fundamentally selfish action. You want to make your own decks - you can do so. You can do so all day long, and nobody doing anything is going to stop you. What you're complaining about, really, is not being able to win with the decks you've made because other people are playing better decks they've found elsewhere. So, in essence, you're upset because other people make better decks than you do, and give them out to people in the same way you do. And while I can understand how that would be upsetting, it's probably not something I'd go around broadcasting, personally.
Oh for crying out loud. Absolutely no changes necessary as far as I'm concerned - the only card/deck which is in any way problematic right now is Necrium Apothecary and that can be dealt with through tech cards and correct deck choice. Getting pretty sick of this, honestly - it's impossible for a meta to stabilize if they're going to nerf something every few weeks.
'fraid I don't watch videos much, so without a transcript I can't comment on any conclusions you may have drawn.
What I will say, though, is that I worry Noxus will provide some extremely potent aggressive strategies to other decks while having very little identity of its own once the ball gets rolling. Some of Noxus' pure aggro cards (Legion Rearguard et al) provide substantial brute force which can be added to most aggressive shells to fill them out. The first deck I'm planning on putting together when LoR comes back online will be abusing precisely that.
Also in said deck will be the only other Noxian card of any significance - Katarina. Kat is being grossly underrated by the community right now simply because people haven't realised how powerful Ready Your Attack is as an effect. Particularly on a champion who is basically impossible to actually get rid of outside of targeted removal.
Re: Crimson - it has potential, but it will remain only potential for some significant time simply because it's no more than a shell at the moment. There just aren't enough cards to support it, and the benefits to doing so are limited. What it looks like to me, rather than an archetype, is a prototype of what they want an archetype to look like when first introduced. Put in a small shell, see if it makes any waves, then tentatively add support on a per-expansion basis to avoid breaking anything. Assuming that's what they're doing - and they're using Crimson as a test - you could expect to see more support when they add more cards... but that's just hyperbole on my end.
Hm... having spoken about it though, maybe I should put my LoR deck together now and float on the site for ideas...
Never actually seen it, but it's just another type of cheese. The kind of deck that looks unbeatable on the rare occasion it actually gets the right cards, but three games out of four they'll be conceding without putting up any real fight.
My guess had actually been 28-29. Not sure I buy into your reasoning, but if you are correct it's a week sooner than I'd hoped, so I for one certainly won't be complaining.
Been shadowing the discussion for a while, and the conclusion I've drawn is that there's no point to changing the Galakrond Invoke/HP. You'd just be poking at a symptom.
The underlying disease, to continue the metaphor, is the lack of direction and theme underlying the Priest class, which has been widely acknowledged by both community and developers. Shadow is hard to really sell in card form - is it targeted removal, card theft, mind control, direct damage? - and healing simply doesn't work as a unifying class identity. Hypothetically healing could work, if it were reworked to be more effective on minions and (more importantly) Inner Fire were HoF'd so as to remove potential abuse cases (so as to promote the board-centric conservative gameplan which looked to be the original design philosophy) but it'd be awkward and anachronistic in today's rush-heavy, board-interactive Hearthstone.
Thus, the problem. With no idea where to take the class, how can you pick an effective hero power? If the class's cards are schizophrenic, how can any hero power support them properly without simply ignoring most of them? In the end, the solution chosen was a shrug and hand-wave - the reason the current HP is underwhelming is that it doesn't actually aim to synergise with anything. It plays the middle ground - if your cards are schizophrenic, generate a lot of them and sooner or later you'll get some cards that work together, right?
The further problem is that this issue goes all the way to the root of the class. It's not something you can actually fix with expansion cards - even if you did manage to create a new class identity (which seems unlikely) it's still a temporary fix until the cards rotate. I don't particularly like the idea, but I'm forced to agree with others on this board and conclude that the only thing that will really fix Priest is a complete redesign from the ground up.
Update - tried it some. Just too slow to win games in an environment where people are actually trying to win.
The deck was marked 'just for fun', so pretty sure it's more the latter. My pointers were more about refining the deck while keeping the core concept alive, but not really a problem if certain cards are judged as important for flavour.
My sleep cycles are out of whack right now so I can't promise anything, but if the mood strikes me when I get off work I'll do a bit more tweaking and give it a spin - I've not played Wild in a couple months so my ranking should be low enough to allow for some experimentation. The further thought occurred a moment ago that it probably needs an additional bounce since you need one to finish quest (for some reason my brain was still keyed to quest needing 4x rather than 5x plays). Maybe drop a Sap for it, as I seem to recall it underperforming in Wild. Will see after some playtesting.
But yeah, if the deck makes me smile - which it will accomplish if I manage to relive some Quest Rogue glory days without getting stomped too badly in the process - I'll post and cross-link.
My opinions, as a long-time Quest Rogue player:
- This will obviously be in Wild, and Wild is not a place for unrefined decks. If you're going to be playing a slow game plan (which you are, given the concept behind the deck) you need both strong anti-aggro tools and some board resets for when the broken stuff starts happening.
- Your fundamental concept (i.e. permanently re-summoning Recurring Villains) is as much late-game as you need, in theory at least. N'zoth is a good emergency-slash-boardfill, so that's fine. However, a number of your other cards are unnecessary greed that doesn't actually get you to your win condition, and so should be dropped.
- If you use Lab Recruiter properly, you will never need to worry about fatigue. Equally, bounce effects are far more reliable than shuffles to complete quest. As such, your shuffle effects are unnecessary, in my opinion.
- Galakrond is cute and all, but while having a 4/4 on-demand is useful it's nothing compared to some of the dirty things you can do with Valeera in a Quest Rogue deck. She's also your gateway (alongside Lab Recruiter) to never having to worry about fatigue. Drop Galakrond for Valeera and never look back (especially since you're not running Invokes and have no room or need to add them).
So, how do my suggestions change the deck?
-2 Togwaggle's Scheme
-2 Stowaway
+2 Preparation
+2 Vanish
Schemes are unnecessary, as above, and Stowaway's card draw becomes less reliable (and generally unnecessary anyway) as a result. Vanish is integral to redeeming otherwise irreparable boardstates, and although nerfed Prep is still extremely helpful in either getting it off in time or allowing you to build tempo on the same turn.
-1 Galakrond
+1 Valeera
As above.
-1 Necrium Blade
-2 Cheat Death
+2 Fan of Knives
+1 Recurring Villain
The Cheat Deaths should be unnecessary, since one Raiding Party is getting you to your quest completion anyway. I'm also not sold on having two Necrium Blades - one is fine to be drawn with a Raiding Party, but past that I don't really think it's adding enough (it's removal, sure, but the DR trigger isn't doing a huge amount - either summoning a 4/4 or triggering a small heal). Better to add a couple of FoKs for cycle (and more to the point, removal). I would also add a second Recurring Villain purely because it's the centrepiece of the deck and so getting it out reliably feels like a good idea (I'm not sure it's optimal, technically, but the deck isn't supposed to be wholly optimal so much as optimised, no?).
One further change I've considered but unsure on at the moment would be to drop one of the Raiding Party for a Mimic Pod - the second Raiding Party is going to be dead, but on the other hand, having two copies would significantly improve reliability. Mimic Pod is very nice for resource generation, though.
Final thoughts - no room for Giggling Inventor or Zilliax makes me sad. Still, give the above a try and see if it's any stronger.
If they did confirm January (and that would explain the bizarre certainty I have over it despite having no firm evidence to support it) I'd be pretty happy to at least have that much. Any chance you can remember the source?
Honestly, though, I didn't start the thread to beg for news - it's just an expression of impotent frustration. This is why I don't usually play betas - I hate feeling like I'm sat around waiting for something.
EDIT - nvm, found something. Linked here if interested.
This thread has no purpose. I just want to moan about wanting to play LoR and it not being released.
I want LoR and I am sad.
P.S. My mental estimate is end of Jan for the next playtest. I have literally no basis beyond the cryptic 'early Q1' they've offered, so when I'm inevitably wrong I will be even more disappointed.
The issue with Deny isn't really the card itself, I feel. Sure, you can counterspell a high-cost card, but that's equally true for most counters in card games. Hearthstone is probably the only exception simply because by playing a secret you telegraph that it could be Counterspell.
The issue, I would argue, is that due to LoR's central deckbuilding mechanics, it's region-locked. Many, if not most, decks have no access to that effect or anything even similar. Which, in turn, makes it harder to build or play around. It's also trickier to get a read on the card being in hand due to the game's mana-storage mechanic - tricky to tell if your opponent is floating 3 spell mana for a Deny or simply because they don't have a spell worth throwing.
Of course, at the end of the day, the meta should self-balance around such things. Expensive spells are expensive, less so because of the spell mana mechanic, and the further variable in the equation is how prevalent Deny is in the meta. If lots of people are running Deny, fewer expensive spells get decked.
Re: Fiora - I don't actually feel like she's busted at all, and even cards like Riposte (which are all but required, really, to get her to do anything) are fair given it's a slow grind to get the 4 procs. What I do think needs changing is the fact that Fiora + Judgment is an instant win if you can't block it with something. Kinda goes against the design of the card in a lot of ways and winds up with a big of an unsatisfying ending.
To underline, since these articles are rather light on the lore:
It's easy for those unfamiliar with the background lore to assume Demacia is 'the good guys' and Noxus are 'the bad guys' - in much the same way that someone who hasn't played World of Warcraft will assume the Alliance are good and the Horde are bad. In truth, both sides are as bad as each other (in both examples). The main difference is simply the core tenet of their respective societies.
Demacia is all shining armour and knights because the central theme is order. Demacia has low crime rates, for example, but it's because their civil governance borders on police state in some ways. Society is rigid and inflexible, and even in LoR this can be seen in some of the flavour text. For example, Tianna Crownguard's flavour text has her speaking scathingly to Lux - her daughter - about her unquestionably potent Light magic, in part over family honour and in part over tradition.
Noxus, by contrast, is all about personal freedom. Of course, the downside is that when people are allowed to do whatever they want, that often involves being unpleasant to other people (as can be seen in a few isolated examples such as 'the internet' and 'a significant proportion of human history'. The only thing stopping Noxus from being a true Anarchy is the simple truth that its rulers are the biggest and baddest around, so you better do as they say. Which then goes on to paint the Noxians' invasion of their neighbours in a subtly different light - it becomes less a matter of 'warmongering expansionist' and more a matter of 'the easiest way to ensure your citizens fall in line is to give them a common enemy'.
I'd go on, but frankly I don't know enough to do so, having not really followed League's lore for quite a few years now - the above is just the basics. Still worth covering, though, in my opinion.
Re: trade-off - well sure, but irrespective of meta there's unlikely to be any decks for the foreseeable future that could build greedily enough to make so many boards as to require that many board clears, while also lacking the tempo to severely punish such a slow turn. N'zoth is back in his vault, after all.
Re: the second paragraph - 'fraid I don't see that as a reasonable argument. Pretty much anything looks big when you make the assumption you'll get a +3/+3 on it, and any game plan which includes the words 'and hope my opponent doesn't remove it' tends toward failure.
At the end of the day, I struggle to believe this deck needs an additional discovered removal option (it definitely doesn't need another Mass Rez). There just isn't a deck in the meta that merits it - the closest you'll get is Highlander Mage, and that's more about frequent medium-sized boards rather than a few huge ones. And once you mentally align with the idea that the Dynamo is something you want rather than something necessary, then you have to stop and ask - do I want a 3/4 or a 5/12 in my resurrect pool?
It's down to matchups, I think. My suspicion is that the deck was coming in at the tail end of the Shaman meta where aggro was everywhere - this deck is very strong into aggro.
The meta is starting to shift towards slower strategies now, though, which is going to hurt winrates. Though I do find it performs well into highlander rogue &c.