Be careful what you wish for. Frostbite being burst means that you actually CAN react to it for a lot of decks. Because it is burst, you can attack-buff your unit in combat after it has been frostbitten. If frostbite spells were fast and played first thing in combat, they would resolve last, meaning your unit would have 0 power no matter what.
Agreed. Frostbite cards not being Burst would mean they would be countered by Deny, but not by the dozen cards that already counter them.
Regarding The Rekindler, I don't think it would be appropriate to nerf it unless you can come up with a couple of other decks where it's truly oppressive.
If Hecarim is pretty much the only time Rekindler is a problem, that points to the real problem being Hecarim. In fact, Rekindler could make a good canary in the coal mine for detecting troublesome Champions in general.
I don't think that's a good barometer, personally, because all you'd be identifying is champions that give a lot of value/inevitability. The only reason Trynd isn't being played alongside Rekindler is Freljord's late game push got nerfed badly after closed beta.
Judging new champions by merit of 'does this make Rekindler broken' basically means new champions stick to 5 mana or below and are either stat-sticks or understatted value, tbh.
Personally very skeptical about including Chain Vest in any list. Seems like a very inefficient card in a deck lacking a draw engine. I also wouldn't be running Detain, personally, as the deck is horribly vulnerable to removal as it is - doubling down seems odd.
@Pezman - Yup, Razorgore can pop off in a big way. For Deathwing shenanigans, Sottle has been posting a few tweets of what Deathwing has been doing for him - he posted one screenshot of getting (iirc) top 4 with just a Murloc Tidecaller and a Rat Pack on his board. Then posted another which didn't use Rat Pack just to show he could.
@PopeNeia - I don't think I'd put Reno in tier 1 simply because of his atrocious early game. He has to make it through to find the aforementioned minions and then find the relevant stuff to synergise with it before he really does anything - and given how fast games are ending right now that's far from guaranteed. Ysera I'd consider giving Tier 1 to, but she has a similar late game issue (though she has more reliability in the early and midgame at least).
@Skorpionex - It's a valid point, but whether that's reliable or not is another question. I find Annoy-o-Module in particular to be irritatingly rare.
Is that luck, or is it something else? Plenty of external factors could affect that (not least your own drive, alertness, tilt factor etc.).
I find my luck to be fairly consistent in LoR with occasional spikes of excellence, but I'd imagine that'll change when I start actually trying to grind ranked...
Dropping his health would, in my opinion, be massively impactful and likely disproportionate. Even going down to five health would be huge, because Hecarim needs to be on the offensive and anything that limits his ability to simply attack every turn is going to be swingy. Attack reductions would be less damaging. Honestly, Overwhelm is the part of the card that could most easily go without damaging the Hecarim vision or breaking the playstyle. I don't honestly know why they gave him Overwhelm at all; you're already wanting to chump-block the 3/2 spawns, so it's unlikely you'd have more chaff to block the pony with as well.
The above is predicated on the assumption that you actually think he needs a nerf, of course, which I absolutely do not. I think over the course of the past month roughly a third of the champions in the bloody game have had someone on here wanting nerfs to them.
That said - Rekindler does need a nerf, and has needed a nerf for a long time. When I first saw that card I was utterly flabbergasted that it even got printed - the level of value represented is just absurd. It's not even locked into a 'Play' effect, so you can resummon the damn thing to repeat the effect. It.. It should not be...
If I may add my take - I'd estimate that you'd only need 75% of that to pick up the cards you'll actually play with. It'll be top-heavy because you'll probably want all the champions, but realistically there's going to be cards that you won't want to use in any given region, either because they never make it into a deck worth playing or just because they don't fit the kinds of archetypes you like to play. And that's assuming that LoR -doesn't- have the kind of filler that HS tends to see.
- Games are a lot faster now, because there's a lot more 4- and 5-cost minions that exist to be fat bodies rather than amplifiers. Smacking someone for 20 damage meant you utterly stomped them, previously, while now it just means Razorgore and a couple of other fat dragons stuck around
- Deathwing is being oddly underrated given he can go from early to late game with two Rat Packs on his board and nothing else :P
- Ysera is late-game-oriented but feels disgustingly strong due to her reliability with a Dragon comp
- Dragons in general are being overplayed, along with Beasts, meaning you can pick up high placements by running Demons and Murlocs simply because people won't go for them unless they got stuck with a railroaded hero - this is pretty much just because they're new, so take advantage of it in the short term
- Mechs feel really weak right now, probably because both Dragons and Murlocs can pull their Divine Shield signature (and do it with minions that don't fold the second a light breeze hits them without their shield up)
- Speaking of Divine Shield, George is MUCH more powerful now. Not only did his hero power get buffed, but adding DS synergies into the game gave him a huge amount of relevance
I could go on, but most of you probably stopped reading already. Your experiences?
I have laughed every time I've seen someone call Kat weak. People horribly underrated Rally in the opening stages of the game, and honestly it's still underutilised.
Answer to OP - Frostbite, removal, tempo. The first two have already been covered in the thread, and the third has been touched on.
Kat isn't really a Champion. I mean... she is, technically, but the way she works means she's more akin to a damaging spell with Rally built in. If your opponent is spending 4 mana repeatedly on a Shunpo that you can block with any old chump, you respond by flooding the board. Kat produces aggression by giving her player multiple attacks in any given turn, what she doesn't really give is value. She has no response to a board full of 3/3s.
Heimer and Flash of Brilliance is practically all you need anyways. Don't forget that Heimer technically generates 9 diffferent cards, which is basically half the requirement already, as long as you have enough spells of different mana costs
Yeah, I've made a few decks that ran Catastrophe, but honestly when you get right down to it most of the time they were just Heimer decks with an emergency fall-back plan. Never needed Karma, just Heimer plus the standard Expedition deck breadth was plenty.
There is ONE card that benefits from a highlander build and it's Purrsuit of Perfection.
(you can run 3 copies of that..) but why would you ruin your deck for it.. you could also play heimer/karma and be able to fulfill the requirement eventually.
Add in a few cards like Back Alley Barkeep + recall effect and you're not even delayed all that much really - the problem is just the utter lack of consistency :P
Aside from there not really being much point, as you noted in your post, there's also the issue that the LoR card pool is really quite small as it is. If you try to go full Highlander with it, you're going to be forcing yourself to take some pretty badly suboptimal cards for no real reason. You'll also have a pretty unfocussed deck that doesn't really have any kind of clear game plan.
I don't think it's viable to do so at this stage, but possibly in the future. Then again, there's enough cards, so if you really want to then go for it.
I'm going to hazard the fairly confident guess that any expansion launch would also include additional progression methods alongside the regional unlock system (or just add to it). There's no way they won't be expecting most people to have finished most of their regional unlocks by the time they get around to launching an expansion.
Longer answer: Most stuff is fixable by uninstalling and reinstalling, if you're willing to take that amount of time to get in. Blizzard has indicated that they're aware that they basically broke everything with the patch and that they're working on a resolution.
I don't think it'd be beneficial to HS in the slightest, but I can see significant benefit in getting some distance for HSBG - being inextricably tied to HS closes a lot of design doors. It's very difficult for them to release interesting new minions for HSBG when they're inevitably required to 'work' in the context of HS itself (even if they don't actually exist in HS). There are all kinds of mechanics they could use for minions - such as, for example, having an effect which triggers if you lost the previous round - which they can't really use so long as HSBG is required to be a reflection of HS.
I'mma just quote myself here because apparently I was all kinds of wrong. Oops.
I was very careful ALL throughout my post to say that this wasn't a salt thread and I'm not turning on the game or anything like that. I was very careful to point out that I'd be over all of this when the new expac came out and I'd be pumping lots of cash into the next expac when it drops.
Not touching most of this argument, but just to note - an awful lot of salt-threads start with the poster claiming that it isn't a salt thread ;)
Agreed. Frostbite cards not being Burst would mean they would be countered by Deny, but not by the dozen cards that already counter them.
I don't think that's a good barometer, personally, because all you'd be identifying is champions that give a lot of value/inevitability. The only reason Trynd isn't being played alongside Rekindler is Freljord's late game push got nerfed badly after closed beta.
Judging new champions by merit of 'does this make Rekindler broken' basically means new champions stick to 5 mana or below and are either stat-sticks or understatted value, tbh.
Personally very skeptical about including Chain Vest in any list. Seems like a very inefficient card in a deck lacking a draw engine. I also wouldn't be running Detain, personally, as the deck is horribly vulnerable to removal as it is - doubling down seems odd.
@Pezman - Yup, Razorgore can pop off in a big way. For Deathwing shenanigans, Sottle has been posting a few tweets of what Deathwing has been doing for him - he posted one screenshot of getting (iirc) top 4 with just a Murloc Tidecaller and a Rat Pack on his board. Then posted another which didn't use Rat Pack just to show he could.
@PopeNeia - I don't think I'd put Reno in tier 1 simply because of his atrocious early game. He has to make it through to find the aforementioned minions and then find the relevant stuff to synergise with it before he really does anything - and given how fast games are ending right now that's far from guaranteed. Ysera I'd consider giving Tier 1 to, but she has a similar late game issue (though she has more reliability in the early and midgame at least).
@Skorpionex - It's a valid point, but whether that's reliable or not is another question. I find Annoy-o-Module in particular to be irritatingly rare.
Is that luck, or is it something else? Plenty of external factors could affect that (not least your own drive, alertness, tilt factor etc.).
I find my luck to be fairly consistent in LoR with occasional spikes of excellence, but I'd imagine that'll change when I start actually trying to grind ranked...
Dropping his health would, in my opinion, be massively impactful and likely disproportionate. Even going down to five health would be huge, because Hecarim needs to be on the offensive and anything that limits his ability to simply attack every turn is going to be swingy. Attack reductions would be less damaging. Honestly, Overwhelm is the part of the card that could most easily go without damaging the Hecarim vision or breaking the playstyle. I don't honestly know why they gave him Overwhelm at all; you're already wanting to chump-block the 3/2 spawns, so it's unlikely you'd have more chaff to block the pony with as well.
The above is predicated on the assumption that you actually think he needs a nerf, of course, which I absolutely do not. I think over the course of the past month roughly a third of the champions in the bloody game have had someone on here wanting nerfs to them.
That said - Rekindler does need a nerf, and has needed a nerf for a long time. When I first saw that card I was utterly flabbergasted that it even got printed - the level of value represented is just absurd. It's not even locked into a 'Play' effect, so you can resummon the damn thing to repeat the effect. It.. It should not be...
If I may add my take - I'd estimate that you'd only need 75% of that to pick up the cards you'll actually play with. It'll be top-heavy because you'll probably want all the champions, but realistically there's going to be cards that you won't want to use in any given region, either because they never make it into a deck worth playing or just because they don't fit the kinds of archetypes you like to play. And that's assuming that LoR -doesn't- have the kind of filler that HS tends to see.
So, thoughts on the new Battlegrounds additions?
So far, for me:
- Games are a lot faster now, because there's a lot more 4- and 5-cost minions that exist to be fat bodies rather than amplifiers. Smacking someone for 20 damage meant you utterly stomped them, previously, while now it just means Razorgore and a couple of other fat dragons stuck around
- Deathwing is being oddly underrated given he can go from early to late game with two Rat Packs on his board and nothing else :P
- Ysera is late-game-oriented but feels disgustingly strong due to her reliability with a Dragon comp
- Dragons in general are being overplayed, along with Beasts, meaning you can pick up high placements by running Demons and Murlocs simply because people won't go for them unless they got stuck with a railroaded hero - this is pretty much just because they're new, so take advantage of it in the short term
- Mechs feel really weak right now, probably because both Dragons and Murlocs can pull their Divine Shield signature (and do it with minions that don't fold the second a light breeze hits them without their shield up)
- Speaking of Divine Shield, George is MUCH more powerful now. Not only did his hero power get buffed, but adding DS synergies into the game gave him a huge amount of relevance
I could go on, but most of you probably stopped reading already. Your experiences?
I have laughed every time I've seen someone call Kat weak. People horribly underrated Rally in the opening stages of the game, and honestly it's still underutilised.
Answer to OP - Frostbite, removal, tempo. The first two have already been covered in the thread, and the third has been touched on.
Kat isn't really a Champion. I mean... she is, technically, but the way she works means she's more akin to a damaging spell with Rally built in. If your opponent is spending 4 mana repeatedly on a Shunpo that you can block with any old chump, you respond by flooding the board. Kat produces aggression by giving her player multiple attacks in any given turn, what she doesn't really give is value. She has no response to a board full of 3/3s.
Also to note - as a long-time Quest Rogue player, the idea of calling one 4/4 a turn 'infinite' is laughable :P
I mean... if you're being optimistic?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kintsugi
Yeah, I've made a few decks that ran Catastrophe, but honestly when you get right down to it most of the time they were just Heimer decks with an emergency fall-back plan. Never needed Karma, just Heimer plus the standard Expedition deck breadth was plenty.
Add in a few cards like Back Alley Barkeep + recall effect and you're not even delayed all that much really - the problem is just the utter lack of consistency :P
Aside from there not really being much point, as you noted in your post, there's also the issue that the LoR card pool is really quite small as it is. If you try to go full Highlander with it, you're going to be forcing yourself to take some pretty badly suboptimal cards for no real reason. You'll also have a pretty unfocussed deck that doesn't really have any kind of clear game plan.
I don't think it's viable to do so at this stage, but possibly in the future. Then again, there's enough cards, so if you really want to then go for it.
I'm going to hazard the fairly confident guess that any expansion launch would also include additional progression methods alongside the regional unlock system (or just add to it). There's no way they won't be expecting most people to have finished most of their regional unlocks by the time they get around to launching an expansion.
Short answer to thread: Yes, mobile issues.
Longer answer: Most stuff is fixable by uninstalling and reinstalling, if you're willing to take that amount of time to get in. Blizzard has indicated that they're aware that they basically broke everything with the patch and that they're working on a resolution.
I'mma just quote myself here because apparently I was all kinds of wrong. Oops.
But on the other hand... better or worse than just straight up random packs?
jeez dude, was just pulling your leg there, chill!
Not touching most of this argument, but just to note - an awful lot of salt-threads start with the poster claiming that it isn't a salt thread ;)