That's some awesome response, thanks! I might try Wrenchcalibur instead of Ancharrr just to get a feeling for Pirate Warrior before I decide to craft it. But I fear that the lack of draw will weaken the deck too much.
If you're going aggro, play Livewire Lance instead of Wrenchcalibur. The bombs are only good in a longer matchup as it deactivates highlander, and you can wait out the rng draws. Pirate warrior plays its cards and hope to win from burst, games tend to be short and without Ancharrr the extra few lackeys can be decisive.
Ive been grinding up ladder with control bomb warrior, and can safely tell you that Ancharrr is very good, but far from the best card in most combo warrior decks. Its actually only very good because it tutors our your Risky Skipper, which in turn makes it very good vs dhunters, and just about any other swarm/aggro decks but is not a good weapon vs value like priest and mage. But if you don't have it but still want to go warrior, just go ahead and have a feel for it yourself. Of course, if you dont have ancharrr then the other weapons like Livewire Lance and Wrenchcalibur are mandatory to play warrior.
Stealth rogue is better because it closes games and develop better tempo than secret rogue. Against tempo dhunter, all you need is to run double Frozen Shadoweaver and that games in your favor, something not so guaranteed with secret rogue. Secret rogue does better against druids, but in my opinion struggles a little with other decks compared to stealth. That nerf to Blackjack Stunner is more than significant since its less justification to play this instead of Sap, and the hanar health from 5 to 4 means you cant just play it on 2 anymore.
When they finally get those fancy new servers so they can stop messing around with hearthstone's.
I dont know about you guys, but I've been experiencing plenty of disconnects, slowdowns and whatnots in hearthstone proper, coincidentally when battlegrounds gets new updates.
Alright, so I finally got round to finishing the adventure. Here's a few thoughts;
- The rhymes are neat, and I'd imagine it couldn't have been easy to write and make it work. There's some hit and misses but overall, I'm a little impressed. Unfortunately, its one thing to hear a rhyme, its quite another to hear the same fucking thing over and over each time you're forced to restart. They just get in the way of your game and there are some sequences that last more than my patience can take. Wish blizz would just get rid of all the dialogue on the second time playing.
- Its not a dungeon run where you build your deck, so that's a little less interactivity there. But it does mean that team5 has better control of what you get so you're not facing Jaraxxus with a bs deck that can never win. But it also means there's less stakes involved. You can easily just cheese each battle by restarting until you get the perfect hand i.e. mostly if you can get a 2 drop on 2, or get one of your outcasts heros you're pretty much going to win (if you can get karnuk to spawn that imprisoned antaen on curve, the match is heavily in your favor from there). Also it eliminates most of the replayability, since you're essentially playing the same deck on the same boss.
- Story is bland, like really bland. Spoilers ahead, so if you don't care about the story just click below.
Show Spoiler
So we follow the adventures of Arrana, sister to Elise Starseeker, who for reasons only known to her, travels to the dangerous world of outland to do…something…and on her travels saves, meets, and groups together with alleged outcasts of various races/species and for very unconvincing reasons decides to ride to the black temple to accomplish…uhhh…power and success? a place to call home? to have a cup of coffee? Self evident reasons, I guess.
Half way down the line, Baduu, who by the way just joined up like 2 missions ago, decides that she doens't want to join up with Illidan (probably because she recognizes how vacuous the idea seems to be) and leaves. And the way the game portrays this is to fix it so she is drawn into your hand on turn 5-6 (cant remember) and is promptly removed from your hand. And if you lose that fight, you get to see this over and over again until you win. I don't get why this isn't handled outside of the battle or at the end of the battle so technically you're only going to see this once. As it stands, I've seen her leave like 3 times in my playthrough, so whatever emotions I have for her (which is nill, since we only seen her like twice. I've never even got to play her for fuck sake) is just dragged through the mud until I just wanted to get it over with.
Then you meet Illidan, and he trains you to be dhunters. Apparently the process involves you fighting each other until you lose your eyes and sprout horns on your head. I'm no lore expert in WoW, but I'm pretty sure this is not how one becomes a demon hunter.
So with better powers she fights through the rusted legion, defeats Jaraxxus with the power of friendship, and ONLY THEN she realised that Illidan's a bit of a nutter. She then fight him, and depending on your luck she might actually beat him but I've heard it doesn't really matter (I did it on my first try, so I couldn't confirm if its a supposed to lose fight) and by her stark powers of reasoning actually made him see the error of his ways. Which is entirely bs to be honest.
The best way to describe the story is that it feels safe. It pulls no punches and takes no risks. Suffice to say you're the good guy fighting the bad guys. No attempts have been made to make Arrana or the other outcasts even slightly relatable, likable, or unique. It almost feels disney-esque; a heroine (because of course it is) with a rag-tag group of diverse races, genders and religions complete with mascot-like comedic sidekick for that sweet merch sales, fighting against a self-evident and proudly villainous bad guy.
Edit: Okay, I realised after a second reading that I didn't mention the famous fight against Baduu prime. Let's be honest. It'd be a better for the story had the fight been against an un-primed Baduu, and for Arrana, who would be depicted as full of hate and lust for power, after defeating her to see the error of her ways. Lets go even further and suggest that Arrana had to beat Baduu, then beat her again with Baduu's hero portrait changed to depict severe injury to push the narrative that she's doing EVERYTHING she can to stop Arrana. But that would mean Arrana would be less of a pure hero and wavering around the realms of anti-hero. We just can't have nice things, can we?
- Arrana as a character is paper thin and about as relatable as a piece of cardboard. Her motives to become a demon hunter is almost nonexistent; her motives in general for risking life and limb in outland is nill, other than the vague "must be better than my sis" thing. Almost no effort has been made to make Arrana feel weak or remotely human; she literally becomes leader of a group of similar cardboard cutouts from the outset, beats foes with merciless ease, highly intelligent, and even manages to out-argue the lord of angst himself. From this adventure, it seems like Aranna can do anything. And we are led to believe that her sister Elise can do even more. One wonders why they haven't just team up and be queens of Azeroth yet.
- Is it fun? Well, its something. I confess its not entirely bad or boring. But I won't be coming back for more, unfortunately. Its not as engaging as the final boss battle against Hagatha in Witchwood (probably the best way a story is handled in hearthstone), not as fun as Rastakhan's adventure (which I think the character Rikkar is a better character and features a better story than this), and there's no fun villain like in KotFT and Naxx.
Quite a forgettable experience, but hey at least its free.
3 nerfs and still standing on top of the charts in hsreplay.
4th nerf and tempo dhunters go down? Not likely. It will falter in win rates for the first 2 weeks, but then someone will figure it out and before we know it it'll be on top all over again. Considering that this change barely registers as a nerf, I'm doubly sure of this.
Best thing to happen to an aggro deck is when everyone underestimates it.
The change was necessary in some respects. It was getting a little too much, since its nearly impossible to play any 1-2 drops on turn 1-2 without risking it being destroyed with a zero mana spell.
The change doesnt prevent activating cards like satyr overseer and glaivebound adept on turn 3 and 5, since its possible to just hold on to a weapon, but at least its possible to see it coming now. Still, the change does make dhunter's burst damage potential kinda a little too high at first glance, and I won't be too surprised to see dhunters highroll themselves into victory from otherwise unwinnable states more often now.
Honestly, all they needed to do was to make it so second slice goes back to hand at the end of the turn. This merely solidifies dhunter's aggro potential even further, not even mentioning the damage potential this thing can actually get. One good skull turn with altruis and this thing might as well just win the game outright from there.
On the other hand this basically means their early game tempo is nerfed somewhat so dhunters don't just dominate early turns immediately. So hey, there's an actual chance for totem shaman and murloc paladin to win this matchup now.
Dhunters was intended to be a class that play relatively powerful minions with low health and high attack, draws instead of generating cards, and is weak to board clears. So it shouldn't take a genius to figure out that its just an aggro class all the way.
Hope to see big dhunters takes the stage next expansion, but Im not optimistic. The current tempo dhunter list is just one of those decks that can squeeze a win out of nowhere so its hard competition for anything else. In fact, I go far as to say that any list that can't make Altruis the Outcast work isn't going anywhere.
Its identity is just too strong towards aggro and nothing else. Unless they get some value cards like some discover cards, I can't see it going anywhere else other than tempo.
I personally find battlegrounds less skill reliant, takes up more time to play, and the rewards aren't great neither. At its apex (around few months after launch) it was kinda interesting but over time battlegrounds was that thing I click to pass my time away.
Maybe its more casual to play BG and thats why its more enjoying, but then again the real question should be why play this when there's other autochess games out there.
The one thing, the only thing that prevented me from being interested in the PlayStation 3 and onward that Sony has yet to catch on to? One of the things that made the PlayStation 2 what it was and such a roaring success?
Backwards compatibility.
Seriously, it isn't hard to just program stable emulators onto new hardware that can interact with physical discs :\
I don't get, why people always demand backward compability.
If you are interested in old games, you probably have the old consoles still. if not, you don't need it. so why the fuzz?
because like most things, consoles dont tend to age very well.
My old ps1 served me for like 20 odd years and now wouldn't run even if I hooked it up on life support and gentle massages. Would be nice if, well, the latest ps unit would be able to run my old ps1 games, which I paid not an insignificant amount of money for.
I mean, its like if steam had that bs microsoft thing where you can only install your games on specific pcs. We'd all be rightly ditching that shit for even the likes of epic if it didnt do that.
Yeah, so backwards compatibility is, if nothing else, important so you dont have to buy a second copy of a game in case your old unit just cant cut it anymore from old age.
Probably the most disappointing to me was that bloodborne pc remastered wasn't a confirmed thing.
Oh, and the other games shown were alright I guess. No real gameplay seen though, so as usual take it with a huge pinch of salt. Im actually surprised to have seen strayed, considering that after seeing it for the first time 2 years ago I thought it would never see the light of day. Looking forward to it, and hope they take the simulation to a whole new level.
And lets also mention that the price tag for this warmachine is around $700, which I believe is enough to get a midrange pc that will still probably be more powerful than ps5 ever can be and fully upgradable to boot.
Really, the only reason at this point to get a ps5 is the exclusives. I waited 5 freaking years for bloodborne, and even if the rumoured pc remastered actually turned out false I would still consider my decision to avoid pricey consoles the right decision.
If you put a side by side comparison, Im sure dragon are just better in the late game against murlocs, simply because they can tech unstable ghoul, then give their own stuff divine shield via that one level 6 minion. Obviously, its harder to pull off, but its possible, and I've had my golden team buffed with double megasaur beaten by that combo.
Besides which, without brann murlocs never gets to those utterly broken levels of health and attack. And megasaur is hard enough to come by, divine shield + poisonous is not a given. Plus, they have to actually get rid of one slot to play this, then rebuild that last slot from scratch.
Im more persuaded by the argument that the actual colors in this world should in no way depict, equate, or be associated with any race, religion or gender.
Black is in reference to the color of mana of the creatures (think of them kind of like the classes of Hearthstone). In total there’s 5 colors, red, white, black, blue, and green.
I dont play MTG myself, but something tells me that 2 of those colors are going to be changed to purple and bright pink, colors that doesnt come anywhere remotely near resemblance to human skin tones at present.
Its always slightly amusing to me how the entertainment industry is always reacting to world events by washing away all hints of cultural/gender/religious/political themes in their product so everything is as safe as it can be in a vain hope of keeping all sides happy and free from potential boycotts.
I'm a little curious. Does these industry even care enough to ask minorities if they are even slightly offended by depictions, themes, and images of what can only be a sliver of resemblance (if at all) to what they are or practiced?
The entertainment industry is strangely coming close to the disney romance where all minorities are universally adapted into heroic positions while all villains are as absurdly generalized as possible from any racial/religious hints.
Sure, knock yourself out.
https://outof.cards/hearthstone/decks/16206-bomb-attrition-gameplay
Lol I was wondering the same thing why chat was spamming that Amaz banned thing.
If your tweet link is true, then emphasis on the 'any issue' is really real here. Wonder how many sad nights he'll be having because of this tweet.
If you're going aggro, play Livewire Lance instead of Wrenchcalibur. The bombs are only good in a longer matchup as it deactivates highlander, and you can wait out the rng draws. Pirate warrior plays its cards and hope to win from burst, games tend to be short and without Ancharrr the extra few lackeys can be decisive.
Ive been grinding up ladder with control bomb warrior, and can safely tell you that Ancharrr is very good, but far from the best card in most combo warrior decks. Its actually only very good because it tutors our your Risky Skipper, which in turn makes it very good vs dhunters, and just about any other swarm/aggro decks but is not a good weapon vs value like priest and mage. But if you don't have it but still want to go warrior, just go ahead and have a feel for it yourself. Of course, if you dont have ancharrr then the other weapons like Livewire Lance and Wrenchcalibur are mandatory to play warrior.
Stealth rogue is better because it closes games and develop better tempo than secret rogue. Against tempo dhunter, all you need is to run double Frozen Shadoweaver and that games in your favor, something not so guaranteed with secret rogue. Secret rogue does better against druids, but in my opinion struggles a little with other decks compared to stealth. That nerf to Blackjack Stunner is more than significant since its less justification to play this instead of Sap, and the hanar health from 5 to 4 means you cant just play it on 2 anymore.
Metamorphosis is straight up mandatory to play in any dhunter decks right now. Tempo dhunters need that extra boost to get to the finish line, since its mostly dropping Priestess of Fury. The 4 most important cards in tempo dhunters now are Metamorphosis, Altruis the Outcast, Warglaives of Azzinoth, and Glaivebound Adept. Without any of those its going to be pretty nasty climb. Kayn Sunfury is good, but easily replacable.
When they finally get those fancy new servers so they can stop messing around with hearthstone's.
I dont know about you guys, but I've been experiencing plenty of disconnects, slowdowns and whatnots in hearthstone proper, coincidentally when battlegrounds gets new updates.
Alright, so I finally got round to finishing the adventure. Here's a few thoughts;
- The rhymes are neat, and I'd imagine it couldn't have been easy to write and make it work. There's some hit and misses but overall, I'm a little impressed. Unfortunately, its one thing to hear a rhyme, its quite another to hear the same fucking thing over and over each time you're forced to restart. They just get in the way of your game and there are some sequences that last more than my patience can take. Wish blizz would just get rid of all the dialogue on the second time playing.
- Its not a dungeon run where you build your deck, so that's a little less interactivity there. But it does mean that team5 has better control of what you get so you're not facing Jaraxxus with a bs deck that can never win. But it also means there's less stakes involved. You can easily just cheese each battle by restarting until you get the perfect hand i.e. mostly if you can get a 2 drop on 2, or get one of your outcasts heros you're pretty much going to win (if you can get karnuk to spawn that imprisoned antaen on curve, the match is heavily in your favor from there). Also it eliminates most of the replayability, since you're essentially playing the same deck on the same boss.
- Story is bland, like really bland. Spoilers ahead, so if you don't care about the story just click below.
So we follow the adventures of Arrana, sister to Elise Starseeker, who for reasons only known to her, travels to the dangerous world of outland to do…something…and on her travels saves, meets, and groups together with alleged outcasts of various races/species and for very unconvincing reasons decides to ride to the black temple to accomplish…uhhh…power and success? a place to call home? to have a cup of coffee? Self evident reasons, I guess.
Half way down the line, Baduu, who by the way just joined up like 2 missions ago, decides that she doens't want to join up with Illidan (probably because she recognizes how vacuous the idea seems to be) and leaves. And the way the game portrays this is to fix it so she is drawn into your hand on turn 5-6 (cant remember) and is promptly removed from your hand. And if you lose that fight, you get to see this over and over again until you win. I don't get why this isn't handled outside of the battle or at the end of the battle so technically you're only going to see this once. As it stands, I've seen her leave like 3 times in my playthrough, so whatever emotions I have for her (which is nill, since we only seen her like twice. I've never even got to play her for fuck sake) is just dragged through the mud until I just wanted to get it over with.
Then you meet Illidan, and he trains you to be dhunters. Apparently the process involves you fighting each other until you lose your eyes and sprout horns on your head. I'm no lore expert in WoW, but I'm pretty sure this is not how one becomes a demon hunter.
So with better powers she fights through the rusted legion, defeats Jaraxxus with the power of friendship, and ONLY THEN she realised that Illidan's a bit of a nutter. She then fight him, and depending on your luck she might actually beat him but I've heard it doesn't really matter (I did it on my first try, so I couldn't confirm if its a supposed to lose fight) and by her stark powers of reasoning actually made him see the error of his ways. Which is entirely bs to be honest.
The best way to describe the story is that it feels safe. It pulls no punches and takes no risks. Suffice to say you're the good guy fighting the bad guys. No attempts have been made to make Arrana or the other outcasts even slightly relatable, likable, or unique. It almost feels disney-esque; a heroine (because of course it is) with a rag-tag group of diverse races, genders and religions complete with mascot-like comedic sidekick for that sweet merch sales, fighting against a self-evident and proudly villainous bad guy.
Edit: Okay, I realised after a second reading that I didn't mention the famous fight against Baduu prime. Let's be honest. It'd be a better for the story had the fight been against an un-primed Baduu, and for Arrana, who would be depicted as full of hate and lust for power, after defeating her to see the error of her ways. Lets go even further and suggest that Arrana had to beat Baduu, then beat her again with Baduu's hero portrait changed to depict severe injury to push the narrative that she's doing EVERYTHING she can to stop Arrana. But that would mean Arrana would be less of a pure hero and wavering around the realms of anti-hero. We just can't have nice things, can we?
- Arrana as a character is paper thin and about as relatable as a piece of cardboard. Her motives to become a demon hunter is almost nonexistent; her motives in general for risking life and limb in outland is nill, other than the vague "must be better than my sis" thing. Almost no effort has been made to make Arrana feel weak or remotely human; she literally becomes leader of a group of similar cardboard cutouts from the outset, beats foes with merciless ease, highly intelligent, and even manages to out-argue the lord of angst himself. From this adventure, it seems like Aranna can do anything. And we are led to believe that her sister Elise can do even more. One wonders why they haven't just team up and be queens of Azeroth yet.
- Is it fun? Well, its something. I confess its not entirely bad or boring. But I won't be coming back for more, unfortunately. Its not as engaging as the final boss battle against Hagatha in Witchwood (probably the best way a story is handled in hearthstone), not as fun as Rastakhan's adventure (which I think the character Rikkar is a better character and features a better story than this), and there's no fun villain like in KotFT and Naxx.
Quite a forgettable experience, but hey at least its free.
3 nerfs and still standing on top of the charts in hsreplay.
4th nerf and tempo dhunters go down? Not likely. It will falter in win rates for the first 2 weeks, but then someone will figure it out and before we know it it'll be on top all over again. Considering that this change barely registers as a nerf, I'm doubly sure of this.
Best thing to happen to an aggro deck is when everyone underestimates it.
The change was necessary in some respects. It was getting a little too much, since its nearly impossible to play any 1-2 drops on turn 1-2 without risking it being destroyed with a zero mana spell.
The change doesnt prevent activating cards like satyr overseer and glaivebound adept on turn 3 and 5, since its possible to just hold on to a weapon, but at least its possible to see it coming now. Still, the change does make dhunter's burst damage potential kinda a little too high at first glance, and I won't be too surprised to see dhunters highroll themselves into victory from otherwise unwinnable states more often now.
So its basically a more efficient Eviscerate now.
Honestly, all they needed to do was to make it so second slice goes back to hand at the end of the turn. This merely solidifies dhunter's aggro potential even further, not even mentioning the damage potential this thing can actually get. One good skull turn with altruis and this thing might as well just win the game outright from there.
On the other hand this basically means their early game tempo is nerfed somewhat so dhunters don't just dominate early turns immediately. So hey, there's an actual chance for totem shaman and murloc paladin to win this matchup now.
I dont know whats worst; creating an account or actually using it for a 1 in a million chance jackpot that doesnt leave me a millionaire.
Dhunters was intended to be a class that play relatively powerful minions with low health and high attack, draws instead of generating cards, and is weak to board clears. So it shouldn't take a genius to figure out that its just an aggro class all the way.
Hope to see big dhunters takes the stage next expansion, but Im not optimistic. The current tempo dhunter list is just one of those decks that can squeeze a win out of nowhere so its hard competition for anything else. In fact, I go far as to say that any list that can't make Altruis the Outcast work isn't going anywhere.
Its identity is just too strong towards aggro and nothing else. Unless they get some value cards like some discover cards, I can't see it going anywhere else other than tempo.
Im actually equally curious.
I personally find battlegrounds less skill reliant, takes up more time to play, and the rewards aren't great neither. At its apex (around few months after launch) it was kinda interesting but over time battlegrounds was that thing I click to pass my time away.
Maybe its more casual to play BG and thats why its more enjoying, but then again the real question should be why play this when there's other autochess games out there.
because like most things, consoles dont tend to age very well.
My old ps1 served me for like 20 odd years and now wouldn't run even if I hooked it up on life support and gentle massages. Would be nice if, well, the latest ps unit would be able to run my old ps1 games, which I paid not an insignificant amount of money for.
I mean, its like if steam had that bs microsoft thing where you can only install your games on specific pcs. We'd all be rightly ditching that shit for even the likes of epic if it didnt do that.
Yeah, so backwards compatibility is, if nothing else, important so you dont have to buy a second copy of a game in case your old unit just cant cut it anymore from old age.
Probably the most disappointing to me was that bloodborne pc remastered wasn't a confirmed thing.
Oh, and the other games shown were alright I guess. No real gameplay seen though, so as usual take it with a huge pinch of salt. Im actually surprised to have seen strayed, considering that after seeing it for the first time 2 years ago I thought it would never see the light of day. Looking forward to it, and hope they take the simulation to a whole new level.
And lets also mention that the price tag for this warmachine is around $700, which I believe is enough to get a midrange pc that will still probably be more powerful than ps5 ever can be and fully upgradable to boot.
Really, the only reason at this point to get a ps5 is the exclusives. I waited 5 freaking years for bloodborne, and even if the rumoured pc remastered actually turned out false I would still consider my decision to avoid pricey consoles the right decision.
If you put a side by side comparison, Im sure dragon are just better in the late game against murlocs, simply because they can tech unstable ghoul, then give their own stuff divine shield via that one level 6 minion. Obviously, its harder to pull off, but its possible, and I've had my golden team buffed with double megasaur beaten by that combo.
Besides which, without brann murlocs never gets to those utterly broken levels of health and attack. And megasaur is hard enough to come by, divine shield + poisonous is not a given. Plus, they have to actually get rid of one slot to play this, then rebuild that last slot from scratch.
All that...was surprisingly mellow. No vengence?
Ostkaka?
I thought he retired ages ago?
I guess some people can just never let go of hearthstone
Im more persuaded by the argument that the actual colors in this world should in no way depict, equate, or be associated with any race, religion or gender.
I dont play MTG myself, but something tells me that 2 of those colors are going to be changed to purple and bright pink, colors that doesnt come anywhere remotely near resemblance to human skin tones at present.
Its always slightly amusing to me how the entertainment industry is always reacting to world events by washing away all hints of cultural/gender/religious/political themes in their product so everything is as safe as it can be in a vain hope of keeping all sides happy and free from potential boycotts.
I'm a little curious. Does these industry even care enough to ask minorities if they are even slightly offended by depictions, themes, and images of what can only be a sliver of resemblance (if at all) to what they are or practiced?
The entertainment industry is strangely coming close to the disney romance where all minorities are universally adapted into heroic positions while all villains are as absurdly generalized as possible from any racial/religious hints.