Finishing this in duels as priest is relatively easy, since the health pool is smaller and priest can easily just kill all the boars themselves. Just be quick to aim at face so even if they concede the achievement will still come up if you're fast enough. Got mine there myself.
Hitting the conditions is good enough. If you reach the final reward you should be rewarded with a good board swing, and 5 mana is fine, not too high or too low. Besides which putting it to 7 mana will likely just make it Mutanus chow.
The key is that there are three reward tiers, so even if it takes till turn 10 that should be reasonable considering the power level of the reward. At present its really just completed too fast, otherwise the quests decks are relatively balanced.
Perhaps in the midset we'll get something that resets the quest counter or just flat out prevents it from progressing while the minion is still alive. That might be an interesting set of disruption.
While I appreciate that trying to balance the game is harder than it looks, I really think team5 shot themselves in the foot with the design of the stormwind quests. Its simply too easy to finish, features 2 reward tiers, and the final reward is so powerful the game just turns one sided from there.
At time of writing its actually possible to finish the quest by turn 5-6 consistently for most. The quests designed in the past were not only slower (compare two very similar quest conditions; The Marsh Queen with Rise to the Occasion) but the rewards were also weaker i.e. finishing it provides an advantage, but doesn't just outright win the game in the next 1-2 turns. Powerful game ending rewards should also be harder to reach; Seek Guidance is a good example of that. Not a turn 6 finish followed by a game over courtesy of The Demon Seed
I really think that eventually we'll eventually be seeing some tweaking on the quest conditions, not merely for more diversity in the meta, but also because I feel that the power creep generated by the quest decks and its hyper aggro counters have gone so far compared to the barrens meta that for the next expansion to see any play at all it'll have to ramped up even higher. We've already been through this with the DKs in KotFT, and honestly even the DKs look like shit compared to the quest rewards in this expansion. Perhaps the next expansion power creep will give control so much health gain and disruption that the quest decks dies out but in turn recreates the bs meta that was RoS warriorstone and every aggro game lasts 14 turns on average.
If they want to implement it, I'd say just go for the double xp and change the requirements from 'win' to 'play'. The point of this is to award bonuses, in exchange for player satisfaction and increased game time. Making winning as a requirement will almost certainly turn many heads away, and after looking at the tavern brawl this week I think its fair to say that forcing players to win games that they might not have the cards for will only aggravate, not help.
As for double stars, Im not a fan. But I can understand why others would want it. Might be a good time to reach legend and get that free legendary. But star inflation is something Im not sure I want to suffer myself.
Still considering wether to dust the epics or not (except Darkglare which I don't own). It seems like all of them should still be good or playable, right? I feel like Kolkar Pack Runner maybe took the greatest hit but I can hardly imagine any non-SMORC Hunter deck without them.
I am considering 2x bb as way too inefficient now. You can't just drop bb on 6, that's just asking for death, and if you can't draw then having 2 of them in the deck is just 1 dead card in hand most of the time.
Will be trying quest paladin again, it might be that the meta is slow enough to support it now. We'll see.
I watched hearthstone all the way from the beginning, from the unofficial world champion till now, but I didn't actually start playing until the old gods expansion.
My initial idea was to play arena, because the idea was good and its significantly less expensive than ranked. Those were pretty much the dark days of hearthstone in terms of f2p; you start with basic cards, you get like 10 classic packs if you finish off all the quests, beyond that there wasn't anything else. I couldn't even play face hunter until ungoro started, that was how bad it was.
Hearthstone only became better for me once I actually had all the rares from classic and can play up ranked for once. Did took all the way to K&C though. And its been fun for me ever since.
Kolkar Pack Runner makes the coin very dangerous. If it gets off early on with coin and Adorable Infestation or Wound Prey its very likely you're going to win unless your opponent has a convenient board clear, that is if they can clear the pack runner as well too.
Of course, I don't agree with this change myself, because I never really got the opinion that this card is causing any trouble. Its only very strong now because no one plays any early board removal, and everyone is jamming Cult Neophyte and Far Watch Post instead. But I expect that to change after mage gets nerfed.
But I can see why people dont like it. It not only snowballs in a very aggressive match already, it also plays for tempo well enough that face hunter can get away with just going face with their minions every turn. The nerf will kill it, in my opinion, unless they overhaul the deck entirely.
Not touching the quest conditions or the rewards is very surprising to me, because if there's any reason why a slower meta can't exist is because of how powerful the rewards are and how quickly they can be assembled.
Changes to incanter's flow and flesh giant are subtle but very impactful change, in standard at least. A lot has to happen to get the flesh giants out early, and one mana will mean all the difference whereas for incanter's flow, its harder to justify keeping it in hand because you can't coin into it and there's no natural cards that follow before and after flow.
Before anyone start crying about ilgynoth, I can say that all this change will do is to make it impossible to win by turn 7, and that's a good thing. You don't need to severely reduce ilgynoth's mana cost to win, you just need to spread the discounts across more cards. It does mean that the quest is a mandatory requirement for the deck to work now, but I don't think that'll bother anyone.
Overall, I'd expect mage and dhunter to take a hard hit to their win rate, hopefully enough that we stop seeing too many of them. As for the rest, kolkar pack runner might be removed from face hunter, warlock has plenty of lists that will still work even with the darkglare nerf, paladin will still run both Battleground Battlemaster and Conviction (Rank 1) because that's basically the only win condition they have other than stats on board, Granite Forgeborn mulligan winrate will take a hit but otherwise its still going to feature as a strong card.
A slower meta is expected with mage and dhunter nerfs, but not likely enough to ever make quest priest work. But might be slow enough for quest warrior, quest hunter and quest rogue to make a rise. Likely to be on top: Quest shaman, face hunter, questlock, handbuff pally, quest rogue. Likely to start annoying the shit out of others: Garrote rogue. Likely to make some sort of comeback: rush warrior, deathrattle dhunter, quest hunter.
The quests are still going to be playable even if they tweak it a little, and are marquee cards, so the idea that everyone would just dust the quests and never come back is not likely to happen. If nothing else, we can take it like a 2 weeks demo for all the quests available, which would honestly raise satisfaction and interest within the game.
I also believe that team5 would hesitate to do something so drastic, but at this point some of the quests are looking so good Im having trouble thinking how team5 can design around this for the next 1.5 years when they eventually rotate. A little dust party is a small price to pay, compared to power creeping over this mess.
- Quest rewards bumped to 6 or 7 mana. Or have their conditions tweaked. The problem we are having right now is really that the quest rewards are game winning and that the quest itself is easily completed. So what we have here are games finishing before or around turn 8. Whether its mage finishing everything by turn 5 (absolutely doable) or warlock completing all three tiers and tamsin played on the same turn 5, the problem remains the same: quest rewards are game winning and finished quickly, and rewards are played comfortably. Making it harder to play, or the conditions more difficult to complete will balance the quests properly and slow the meta down a little. Im not saying we do it for all, but certainly for some cough* cough* mage warlock
- Battleground Battlemaster cost from 5 to 6, stats from 5/5 to 3/3. Its a little ridiculous how easily games are stolen because of this thing. But Im still somewhat convinced that the only reason this card sees play at all is because we're in a meta that doesn't care for early game minions, so most people just play stealth minions or go big to cheat a few wins off warlock and mage. Once warlock and mage are taken care off, there's an argument to be made if 2x bb is still going to be as popular.
- Incanter's Flow to 3 or 4, or just straight up make it reduce cost of cards but no less than 1 mana. I mean this is the 2nd time we're seeing this card raise hell, are we really going to ignore this? Just print some good cards for mage, don't keep supporting this bs. Buff Sanctum Chandler to 4 mana, because I much rather play and play against a mage that doesn't just scam a win because they drew that* card or score rng points.
- Garrote no longer benefits from spell damage. That's really it honestly. Without spell damage the card only deals 8 damage, which will skew it far away from handing anyone a turn 6 death note.
- Stealer of Souls? Not sure. Any nerf will nuke the card. Perhaps lowering its health to 4 or mana cost to 5? Or we just nuke it because how'd this card get past the design stage is beyond me. Absurd amounts of mana cheat, and now the downside is an active upside.
Make a few changes now, have a feel, then we'll come back to the topic again 6 weeks later.
Edit: Maybe nerf Felscream Blast to only targetable on enemies? It might kill the entire deck. But maybe its time to retire old Il'gynoth and bring in the lion frenzy OTK deck.
If its any consolation, I think this is perhaps one of the better GM weeks Ive had the pleasure of watching (and listening because its hearthstone) in quite a long time. I think its because the meta is so filled with combo decks that no one knows what to ban, and unlike other metas we're seeing only warlock being the class everyone is bringing.
Mage is busted like hell, as expected. But not many GM are bringing it, perhaps because nearly everyone is teching against mage. Cult neophyte being pasted everywhere.
Will certainly be watching until the end. TJ and Lorinda actually being good for a change, though it did took about an hour for them to start going.
Card trading is definitely something worth exploring, though its very likely to be impossible because it'll likely make the game cheaper to enjoy and thus I am 100% certain the design document will never get approved. But if there is even a chance of something like this happening on a limited basis, it might have an upside of increasing satisfaction.
Also, if we're going to get a death knight class at all, can the portrait be this Arthas? Looks perfect.
Its an interesting concept in theory, but in practice means not only do you need to balance and design around 9 classes, there's now an added consideration of possible bans strats. Its just adding more work for very little benefit.
There's also the problem that the experience will be very much linear for certain classes. The current most hated class right now is likely either warlock or mage, so does that mean most of the time the two classes will simply be a mirror match? Just think of the barrens meta. How many players will actually genuinely match against a priest, if a ban was possible? Chances are priest will eternally be matched up either against spell mage, deathrattle decks, control warrior, or a mirror match. Why'd anyone even want to play priest at all then?
Not exactly excited about this. Though I really wish I can just ban mage out of my experience right now, I'd much rather the devs just balance the game rather than hand me a couple of blinders.
If the goal is to just finish up your daily quests, just play a hyper aggressive burn deck and either burn your opponent off or yourself. Spell mage (no quest) in standard can already easily do that, and its basically one of the cheapest decks available.
We're pretty much stuck with this unfortunately. Just remember that the threshold is 15 health, you dont have to die to finish up the win x games quests.
There's this weird theory (unconfirmed) that the stream have to be open and active, meaning you cant just leave it in one tab and work on another. Just for added good measure, dont mute youtube, mute the browser instead.
I personally watch on and off, got my pack. 2 more hours to go.
It looks easy but in practice its a lot harder than it seems. Ive played through the first few days with quest dhunter and its really not easy finishing the quest tiers while navigating through the possible useless or useful cards you have in hand, on top of keeping in mind the possible lethal outside of the usual Felscream Blast combo.
But hey, at very least there's no more 'how to activate skull on 6' casting. So there's something fresh if nothing else.
Finishing this in duels as priest is relatively easy, since the health pool is smaller and priest can easily just kill all the boars themselves. Just be quick to aim at face so even if they concede the achievement will still come up if you're fast enough. Got mine there myself.
Hitting the conditions is good enough. If you reach the final reward you should be rewarded with a good board swing, and 5 mana is fine, not too high or too low. Besides which putting it to 7 mana will likely just make it Mutanus chow.
The key is that there are three reward tiers, so even if it takes till turn 10 that should be reasonable considering the power level of the reward. At present its really just completed too fast, otherwise the quests decks are relatively balanced.
Perhaps in the midset we'll get something that resets the quest counter or just flat out prevents it from progressing while the minion is still alive. That might be an interesting set of disruption.
While I appreciate that trying to balance the game is harder than it looks, I really think team5 shot themselves in the foot with the design of the stormwind quests. Its simply too easy to finish, features 2 reward tiers, and the final reward is so powerful the game just turns one sided from there.
At time of writing its actually possible to finish the quest by turn 5-6 consistently for most. The quests designed in the past were not only slower (compare two very similar quest conditions; The Marsh Queen with Rise to the Occasion) but the rewards were also weaker i.e. finishing it provides an advantage, but doesn't just outright win the game in the next 1-2 turns. Powerful game ending rewards should also be harder to reach; Seek Guidance is a good example of that. Not a turn 6 finish followed by a game over courtesy of The Demon Seed
I really think that eventually we'll eventually be seeing some tweaking on the quest conditions, not merely for more diversity in the meta, but also because I feel that the power creep generated by the quest decks and its hyper aggro counters have gone so far compared to the barrens meta that for the next expansion to see any play at all it'll have to ramped up even higher. We've already been through this with the DKs in KotFT, and honestly even the DKs look like shit compared to the quest rewards in this expansion. Perhaps the next expansion power creep will give control so much health gain and disruption that the quest decks dies out but in turn recreates the bs meta that was RoS warriorstone and every aggro game lasts 14 turns on average.
Playhearthstone website?
https://playhearthstone.com/en-us/cardbacks/
If they want to implement it, I'd say just go for the double xp and change the requirements from 'win' to 'play'. The point of this is to award bonuses, in exchange for player satisfaction and increased game time. Making winning as a requirement will almost certainly turn many heads away, and after looking at the tavern brawl this week I think its fair to say that forcing players to win games that they might not have the cards for will only aggravate, not help.
As for double stars, Im not a fan. But I can understand why others would want it. Might be a good time to reach legend and get that free legendary. But star inflation is something Im not sure I want to suffer myself.
Just dust them, it really doesn't matter because if you need it you can always just craft it back for the same cost. Better now than never.
Haven't seen mage at all so far, but Flesh Giants and Battleground Battlemaster is still good enough to see play.
I am considering 2x bb as way too inefficient now. You can't just drop bb on 6, that's just asking for death, and if you can't draw then having 2 of them in the deck is just 1 dead card in hand most of the time.
Will be trying quest paladin again, it might be that the meta is slow enough to support it now. We'll see.
I watched hearthstone all the way from the beginning, from the unofficial world champion till now, but I didn't actually start playing until the old gods expansion.
My initial idea was to play arena, because the idea was good and its significantly less expensive than ranked. Those were pretty much the dark days of hearthstone in terms of f2p; you start with basic cards, you get like 10 classic packs if you finish off all the quests, beyond that there wasn't anything else. I couldn't even play face hunter until ungoro started, that was how bad it was.
Hearthstone only became better for me once I actually had all the rares from classic and can play up ranked for once. Did took all the way to K&C though. And its been fun for me ever since.
Kolkar Pack Runner makes the coin very dangerous. If it gets off early on with coin and Adorable Infestation or Wound Prey its very likely you're going to win unless your opponent has a convenient board clear, that is if they can clear the pack runner as well too.
Of course, I don't agree with this change myself, because I never really got the opinion that this card is causing any trouble. Its only very strong now because no one plays any early board removal, and everyone is jamming Cult Neophyte and Far Watch Post instead. But I expect that to change after mage gets nerfed.
But I can see why people dont like it. It not only snowballs in a very aggressive match already, it also plays for tempo well enough that face hunter can get away with just going face with their minions every turn. The nerf will kill it, in my opinion, unless they overhaul the deck entirely.
Not touching the quest conditions or the rewards is very surprising to me, because if there's any reason why a slower meta can't exist is because of how powerful the rewards are and how quickly they can be assembled.
But admitably changing stuff like Darkglare, Flesh Giant, Incanter's Flow, and Il'gynoth will result in some changes to the meta, though not necessarily make the meta slower.
Changes to incanter's flow and flesh giant are subtle but very impactful change, in standard at least. A lot has to happen to get the flesh giants out early, and one mana will mean all the difference whereas for incanter's flow, its harder to justify keeping it in hand because you can't coin into it and there's no natural cards that follow before and after flow.
Before anyone start crying about ilgynoth, I can say that all this change will do is to make it impossible to win by turn 7, and that's a good thing. You don't need to severely reduce ilgynoth's mana cost to win, you just need to spread the discounts across more cards. It does mean that the quest is a mandatory requirement for the deck to work now, but I don't think that'll bother anyone.
Overall, I'd expect mage and dhunter to take a hard hit to their win rate, hopefully enough that we stop seeing too many of them. As for the rest, kolkar pack runner might be removed from face hunter, warlock has plenty of lists that will still work even with the darkglare nerf, paladin will still run both Battleground Battlemaster and Conviction (Rank 1) because that's basically the only win condition they have other than stats on board, Granite Forgeborn mulligan winrate will take a hit but otherwise its still going to feature as a strong card.
A slower meta is expected with mage and dhunter nerfs, but not likely enough to ever make quest priest work. But might be slow enough for quest warrior, quest hunter and quest rogue to make a rise. Likely to be on top: Quest shaman, face hunter, questlock, handbuff pally, quest rogue. Likely to start annoying the shit out of others: Garrote rogue. Likely to make some sort of comeback: rush warrior, deathrattle dhunter, quest hunter.
The quests are still going to be playable even if they tweak it a little, and are marquee cards, so the idea that everyone would just dust the quests and never come back is not likely to happen. If nothing else, we can take it like a 2 weeks demo for all the quests available, which would honestly raise satisfaction and interest within the game.
I also believe that team5 would hesitate to do something so drastic, but at this point some of the quests are looking so good Im having trouble thinking how team5 can design around this for the next 1.5 years when they eventually rotate. A little dust party is a small price to pay, compared to power creeping over this mess.
Here's my take:
- Quest rewards bumped to 6 or 7 mana. Or have their conditions tweaked. The problem we are having right now is really that the quest rewards are game winning and that the quest itself is easily completed. So what we have here are games finishing before or around turn 8. Whether its mage finishing everything by turn 5 (absolutely doable) or warlock completing all three tiers and tamsin played on the same turn 5, the problem remains the same: quest rewards are game winning and finished quickly, and rewards are played comfortably. Making it harder to play, or the conditions more difficult to complete will balance the quests properly and slow the meta down a little. Im not saying we do it for all, but certainly for some cough* cough* mage warlock
- Battleground Battlemaster cost from 5 to 6, stats from 5/5 to 3/3. Its a little ridiculous how easily games are stolen because of this thing. But Im still somewhat convinced that the only reason this card sees play at all is because we're in a meta that doesn't care for early game minions, so most people just play stealth minions or go big to cheat a few wins off warlock and mage. Once warlock and mage are taken care off, there's an argument to be made if 2x bb is still going to be as popular.
- Incanter's Flow to 3 or 4, or just straight up make it reduce cost of cards but no less than 1 mana. I mean this is the 2nd time we're seeing this card raise hell, are we really going to ignore this? Just print some good cards for mage, don't keep supporting this bs. Buff Sanctum Chandler to 4 mana, because I much rather play and play against a mage that doesn't just scam a win because they drew that* card or score rng points.
- Garrote no longer benefits from spell damage. That's really it honestly. Without spell damage the card only deals 8 damage, which will skew it far away from handing anyone a turn 6 death note.
- Stealer of Souls? Not sure. Any nerf will nuke the card. Perhaps lowering its health to 4 or mana cost to 5? Or we just nuke it because how'd this card get past the design stage is beyond me. Absurd amounts of mana cheat, and now the downside is an active upside.
Make a few changes now, have a feel, then we'll come back to the topic again 6 weeks later.
Edit: Maybe nerf Felscream Blast to only targetable on enemies? It might kill the entire deck. But maybe its time to retire old Il'gynoth and bring in the lion frenzy OTK deck.
If its any consolation, I think this is perhaps one of the better GM weeks Ive had the pleasure of watching (and listening because its hearthstone) in quite a long time. I think its because the meta is so filled with combo decks that no one knows what to ban, and unlike other metas we're seeing only warlock being the class everyone is bringing.
Mage is busted like hell, as expected. But not many GM are bringing it, perhaps because nearly everyone is teching against mage. Cult neophyte being pasted everywhere.
Will certainly be watching until the end. TJ and Lorinda actually being good for a change, though it did took about an hour for them to start going.
Card trading is definitely something worth exploring, though its very likely to be impossible because it'll likely make the game cheaper to enjoy and thus I am 100% certain the design document will never get approved. But if there is even a chance of something like this happening on a limited basis, it might have an upside of increasing satisfaction.
Also, if we're going to get a death knight class at all, can the portrait be this Arthas? Looks perfect.
Its an interesting concept in theory, but in practice means not only do you need to balance and design around 9 classes, there's now an added consideration of possible bans strats. Its just adding more work for very little benefit.
There's also the problem that the experience will be very much linear for certain classes. The current most hated class right now is likely either warlock or mage, so does that mean most of the time the two classes will simply be a mirror match? Just think of the barrens meta. How many players will actually genuinely match against a priest, if a ban was possible? Chances are priest will eternally be matched up either against spell mage, deathrattle decks, control warrior, or a mirror match. Why'd anyone even want to play priest at all then?
Not exactly excited about this. Though I really wish I can just ban mage out of my experience right now, I'd much rather the devs just balance the game rather than hand me a couple of blinders.
If the goal is to just finish up your daily quests, just play a hyper aggressive burn deck and either burn your opponent off or yourself. Spell mage (no quest) in standard can already easily do that, and its basically one of the cheapest decks available.
We're pretty much stuck with this unfortunately. Just remember that the threshold is 15 health, you dont have to die to finish up the win x games quests.
Yup got it, one down one more to go.
There's this weird theory (unconfirmed) that the stream have to be open and active, meaning you cant just leave it in one tab and work on another. Just for added good measure, dont mute youtube, mute the browser instead.
I personally watch on and off, got my pack. 2 more hours to go.
The last few times it was granted after two hours. But it did made us wait 3 days the first time it was implemented.
It looks easy but in practice its a lot harder than it seems. Ive played through the first few days with quest dhunter and its really not easy finishing the quest tiers while navigating through the possible useless or useful cards you have in hand, on top of keeping in mind the possible lethal outside of the usual Felscream Blast combo.
But hey, at very least there's no more 'how to activate skull on 6' casting. So there's something fresh if nothing else.