It's an advantage in the first game or two, but after that, aggro will never beat a control deck, period. And there are plenty of people playing control.
Except that there aren't "plenty of people" even playing Duels, which is why the queue times are getting longer every day.
Hoarding packs for the mini-expansion was always kind of dumb, though. The no-duplicates rule was always going to allow you to get the new stuff with minimal gold expenditure anyway.
Still need Darkmoon cards? Open your packs and fill out your collection.
Don't need Darkmoon cards? It doesn't matter that you've saved them; they are dust either way.
TBH, they should have spent a LOT more time on hero powers for several classes, and Warlock was far from being the one that needed it most.
But since that's the class we're talking about, sure, let's do this. Life Tap is based on an old Warlock ability from WoW that wasn't that great, certainly not iconic, and isn't even in the game anymore. I can see why they would have second thoughts about making it such a prominent part of the Hearthstone class.
Some better ways to reflect the WoW Warlock's play style in Hearthstone might be:
Create a (random?) Demon card in hand from a fixed pool that matches the summons in WoW
Maybe the casting cost is health instead of mana
Maybe they cost mana, and the power stops working in Fatigue
An affliction effect similar to Curse of Rafaam
Summon a 0/1 Imp that casts spells like Trick Totem, but from a limited pool
pool might include a ping, a buff or two, a debuff or two
these would target friends or enemies only, as appropriate
(how Paladin became the Hearthstone "pet" class is beyond me)
Eye of Kilrogg: peek at one card in opponent's hand
Just spit-balling here, and some of these would have affected other parts of the overall design, but there are plenty of ideas they could have tried. Again, I personally would have worked on other heroes before trying to change Warlock.
Wouldn't it be lovely if they started pricing all expansions this way? A simple bundle containing all the cards for a fixed price?
I would definitely be first in line if they kicked off the new Hearthstone year like that. If they had more people paying a reasonable price to get all the cards in each major expansion, it would probably make up for the whales who normally shell out the big bucks for hundreds of random packs, and the game would be a LOT more accessible.
Yeah, there's no way any Shaman will be able to rely on any weapon until Boggspine rotates out. The nerf wasn't enough to keep people from playing it, which means everyone else is going to tech against it until the end of time.
No, you were telling me my opinion and disagreeing with that.
As I said, I actually don't care about XP, but I pointed out Blizzard's position because someone was wondering about it. So then you decided THEIR opinion was something other than what THEY stated.
If you never actually believe what the other person is saying, you're not "sharing" anything. You're just being belligerent.
I think the concept of replacing him in the Classic set may not even make sense. They say he's rotating out, but also that the Hall of Fame will no longer exist. To me, that implies that we're finally getting a "core set" implementation, and that Classic will no longer exist as one monolithic evergreen headache. Some Classic cards will go out, and eventually some will come back in, probably along with other cards from old expansions.
So yeah, this was a good excuse for a "Rogues Gallery" lore piece, but I'm pretty sure the question isn't even relevant.
It's not a slot machine fiesta. The cards count as Darkmoon Faire cards, so the no-duplicate rules apply.
I would expect maybe 1 or 2 legendaries, and maybe a handful of epics in such a small set. Collecting all the commons and rares will require 20 packs at most -- 15 if you're extremely unlucky and get only one epic and no legendaries. Hopefully you've saved some dust if you think the rarer cards are going to be important to you. You already know a legendary drop is pretty unlikely -- but I suppose there's always a chance they'll hand out the legendary for free. I wouldn't be surprised if they made it part of a bundle.
Don't get me wrong -- I do think the blind pack system is outdated and predatory, but I don't think the mini-expansion is the time to be angry about it. Save your rage for when they announce the "big changes" coming with the new Hearthstone year. They claim they are going to make the game more accessible to small-budget players, but I'm not sure I believe the Activision overlords are going to let them do anything too revolutionary.
I merely brought up the possibility that there are opinions out there that may differ from those expressed in this column, and that no one knows how many people hold each opinion. I thought I made it clear that I was not assuming one way or the other.
Blizzard explained why there are two buckets of quests when they changed it so that 60g quests would always reroll into 50g quests. They said they assumed if you are rerolling a more rewarding quest, it must be because you wanted something easier to complete. This is stated in the patch notes here, but I'm pretty sure a developer was more explicit about it in social media.
On the contrary, they are giving you fair warning that you should go ahead and dust cards that have been nerfed recently.
If they hadn't mentioned this, a bunch of people might have held on to the nerfed cards and then not gotten the free HoF dust. THAT would have felt more like cheating people out of dust.
But in the end, it's important to remember that with any big change will come some edge cases where someone's particular situation becomes slightly worse even though the change is a good one for most people. You can obsess about the bad stuff if you want to, but you won't get much sympathy when things are obviously better overall.
If the upcoming changes to the reward track are any indication, I think it's safe to say that Blizzard isn't trying to make the game less accessible. Given how hyper-aware everyone is about gold and dust, they know they can't get away with screwing people over in the ways you seem to be imagining.
Of course, all of this could have been avoided if they had never gone down the treacherous free-to-play path, but that's a discussion for a different day.
Seems like they intend to abolish the Hall of Fame. Since Edwin is rotating then this pretty much means that the entirety of the classic set is getting rotated.
Seems like a fair assumption.
No, it doesn't. They could easily rotate out specific cards without rotating the entire Classic set. In fact, I think the odds are extremely low that they would rotate out all of Classic at the same time. That would be far too disruptive -- and far too much dev work trying to fill in the gaps it left.
The official Blizzard response to this is that there are casual players who appreciate having quests that are easier to complete.
Note that such players are the least likely to visit or post on fansites (or official forums, for that matter), so we have no way of knowing how many of them exist. Just don't assume everyone else in the world shares your opinions. Hearthstone is the kind of game that can easily have a silent majority.
I personally don't care too much about the XP. I reroll quests only when they ask me to do something I don't want to do (like play Murlocs or Battlegrounds).
If you think they care about keeping the entire player base happy, you might want to be careful about tossing around words like "delusional."
Blizzard cares about keeping paying players happy. They've never shown a ton of concern about free players unless they do something that creates enough bad press to spill over and affect the opinions of non-free players.
By and large, the more you spend on Hearthstone, the less you probably care about the rewards track. That's why they are doing their best to change things just enough to look like they care without actually doling out a bunch more gold. If they wanted to appease free players, they would have made the game a lot more free-friendly a long time ago.
That said, even the whales can agree that the game has always cost way too much. However, this reward-track hill is the wrong place to fight that battle. If you want the game to cost less, it's time to start a completely different conversation about monetization, blind packs, etc. As long as people keep letting Blizzard pull the discussion back to this specific PR booby trap, they will never get the message they actually need to hear about the state of their game.
Anyway, Blizzard knows all too well that totally random packs are better for them. They'd never go for a plan that cuts down on the number of packs people have to buy to get the cards they want.
There's nothing entitled about consumers asking for more
This is true when they are paying consumers. People who don't pay for anything but still ask fordemand more are the very definition of entitled.
Don't get me wrong -- I completely agree that Hearthstone is way too expensive. But the rewards track is not the place to fix that. If people would quit losing their shit over this trivial nonsense and instead complain about the loot-box foundations of the Hearthstone business model, maybe some actual meaningful change could have occurred.
But no, people fell for the reward track scapegoat ploy, and now Blizzard gets to keep its greedy random-pack system while still appeasing the free players (who never mattered to Blizzard in the first place).
Would rather be given $100 a day, every day, or $5,000 at the end of the month? The "feel" of daily rewards may be different, but it's not worth complaining about if you are getting more overall.
These calculations everyone is so hot about are VERY suspect. There is no way anyone outside of Blizzard has all the information necessary to predict what things will look like 3 months from now. If daily gold is all you consider, you are not painting a fair picture at all.
Well, good news -- they are also doing events (which were planned all along), which give a lot of additional rewards that the rabble-rousers didn't and couldn't include in their calculations.
It's an advantage in the first game or two, but after that, aggro will never beat a control deck, period. And there are plenty of people playing control.
Except that there aren't "plenty of people" even playing Duels, which is why the queue times are getting longer every day.
Hoarding packs for the mini-expansion was always kind of dumb, though. The no-duplicates rule was always going to allow you to get the new stuff with minimal gold expenditure anyway.
Still need Darkmoon cards? Open your packs and fill out your collection.
Don't need Darkmoon cards? It doesn't matter that you've saved them; they are dust either way.
TBH, they should have spent a LOT more time on hero powers for several classes, and Warlock was far from being the one that needed it most.
But since that's the class we're talking about, sure, let's do this. Life Tap is based on an old Warlock ability from WoW that wasn't that great, certainly not iconic, and isn't even in the game anymore. I can see why they would have second thoughts about making it such a prominent part of the Hearthstone class.
Some better ways to reflect the WoW Warlock's play style in Hearthstone might be:
Just spit-balling here, and some of these would have affected other parts of the overall design, but there are plenty of ideas they could have tried. Again, I personally would have worked on other heroes before trying to change Warlock.
Wouldn't it be lovely if they started pricing all expansions this way? A simple bundle containing all the cards for a fixed price?
I would definitely be first in line if they kicked off the new Hearthstone year like that. If they had more people paying a reasonable price to get all the cards in each major expansion, it would probably make up for the whales who normally shell out the big bucks for hundreds of random packs, and the game would be a LOT more accessible.
Yeah, there's no way any Shaman will be able to rely on any weapon until Boggspine rotates out. The nerf wasn't enough to keep people from playing it, which means everyone else is going to tech against it until the end of time.
You'd rather play against rez?
No, you were telling me my opinion and disagreeing with that.
As I said, I actually don't care about XP, but I pointed out Blizzard's position because someone was wondering about it. So then you decided THEIR opinion was something other than what THEY stated.
If you never actually believe what the other person is saying, you're not "sharing" anything. You're just being belligerent.
I think the concept of replacing him in the Classic set may not even make sense. They say he's rotating out, but also that the Hall of Fame will no longer exist. To me, that implies that we're finally getting a "core set" implementation, and that Classic will no longer exist as one monolithic evergreen headache. Some Classic cards will go out, and eventually some will come back in, probably along with other cards from old expansions.
So yeah, this was a good excuse for a "Rogues Gallery" lore piece, but I'm pretty sure the question isn't even relevant.
Also, it's Mathias Shaw, OF COURSE.
It's not a slot machine fiesta. The cards count as Darkmoon Faire cards, so the no-duplicate rules apply.
I would expect maybe 1 or 2 legendaries, and maybe a handful of epics in such a small set. Collecting all the commons and rares will require 20 packs at most -- 15 if you're extremely unlucky and get only one epic and no legendaries. Hopefully you've saved some dust if you think the rarer cards are going to be important to you. You already know a legendary drop is pretty unlikely -- but I suppose there's always a chance they'll hand out the legendary for free. I wouldn't be surprised if they made it part of a bundle.
Don't get me wrong -- I do think the blind pack system is outdated and predatory, but I don't think the mini-expansion is the time to be angry about it. Save your rage for when they announce the "big changes" coming with the new Hearthstone year. They claim they are going to make the game more accessible to small-budget players, but I'm not sure I believe the Activision overlords are going to let them do anything too revolutionary.
I will thank you not to tell me what I assume.
I merely brought up the possibility that there are opinions out there that may differ from those expressed in this column, and that no one knows how many people hold each opinion. I thought I made it clear that I was not assuming one way or the other.
Blizzard explained why there are two buckets of quests when they changed it so that 60g quests would always reroll into 50g quests. They said they assumed if you are rerolling a more rewarding quest, it must be because you wanted something easier to complete. This is stated in the patch notes here, but I'm pretty sure a developer was more explicit about it in social media.
On the contrary, they are giving you fair warning that you should go ahead and dust cards that have been nerfed recently.
If they hadn't mentioned this, a bunch of people might have held on to the nerfed cards and then not gotten the free HoF dust. THAT would have felt more like cheating people out of dust.
But in the end, it's important to remember that with any big change will come some edge cases where someone's particular situation becomes slightly worse even though the change is a good one for most people. You can obsess about the bad stuff if you want to, but you won't get much sympathy when things are obviously better overall.
If the upcoming changes to the reward track are any indication, I think it's safe to say that Blizzard isn't trying to make the game less accessible. Given how hyper-aware everyone is about gold and dust, they know they can't get away with screwing people over in the ways you seem to be imagining.
Of course, all of this could have been avoided if they had never gone down the treacherous free-to-play path, but that's a discussion for a different day.
No, it doesn't. They could easily rotate out specific cards without rotating the entire Classic set. In fact, I think the odds are extremely low that they would rotate out all of Classic at the same time. That would be far too disruptive -- and far too much dev work trying to fill in the gaps it left.
The official Blizzard response to this is that there are casual players who appreciate having quests that are easier to complete.
Note that such players are the least likely to visit or post on fansites (or official forums, for that matter), so we have no way of knowing how many of them exist. Just don't assume everyone else in the world shares your opinions. Hearthstone is the kind of game that can easily have a silent majority.
I personally don't care too much about the XP. I reroll quests only when they ask me to do something I don't want to do (like play Murlocs or Battlegrounds).
If you think they care about keeping the entire player base happy, you might want to be careful about tossing around words like "delusional."
Blizzard cares about keeping paying players happy. They've never shown a ton of concern about free players unless they do something that creates enough bad press to spill over and affect the opinions of non-free players.
By and large, the more you spend on Hearthstone, the less you probably care about the rewards track. That's why they are doing their best to change things just enough to look like they care without actually doling out a bunch more gold. If they wanted to appease free players, they would have made the game a lot more free-friendly a long time ago.
That said, even the whales can agree that the game has always cost way too much. However, this reward-track hill is the wrong place to fight that battle. If you want the game to cost less, it's time to start a completely different conversation about monetization, blind packs, etc. As long as people keep letting Blizzard pull the discussion back to this specific PR booby trap, they will never get the message they actually need to hear about the state of their game.
"Hurt"? Really?
Let's say "very mildly inconvenienced" at worst.
Where did this 1-3 classes data come from?
Anyway, Blizzard knows all too well that totally random packs are better for them. They'd never go for a plan that cuts down on the number of packs people have to buy to get the cards they want.
This is true when they are paying consumers. People who don't pay for anything but still ask for demand more are the very definition of entitled.
Don't get me wrong -- I completely agree that Hearthstone is way too expensive. But the rewards track is not the place to fix that. If people would quit losing their shit over this trivial nonsense and instead complain about the loot-box foundations of the Hearthstone business model, maybe some actual meaningful change could have occurred.
But no, people fell for the reward track scapegoat ploy, and now Blizzard gets to keep its greedy random-pack system while still appeasing the free players (who never mattered to Blizzard in the first place).
Would rather be given $100 a day, every day, or $5,000 at the end of the month? The "feel" of daily rewards may be different, but it's not worth complaining about if you are getting more overall.
These calculations everyone is so hot about are VERY suspect. There is no way anyone outside of Blizzard has all the information necessary to predict what things will look like 3 months from now. If daily gold is all you consider, you are not painting a fair picture at all.
Well, good news -- they are also doing events (which were planned all along), which give a lot of additional rewards that the rabble-rousers didn't and couldn't include in their calculations.