I actually thought the Tombs of Terror (Saviors of Uldum's dungeon run version) was by far the best one. It allowed for the most deck building choices thanks to Bob's Bazaar and the different starting decks and treasures, it introduced some incredibly fun and versatile treasures (both as cards and as passives), the Plague lords not regenerating health in between runs was a great way to to get the maximum amount of potential out of your deck and it also made your runs not feel useless (unless the 6th or 7th boss did some unfair bullshit, which was the mode's biggest downside for me), the passive effects present in each different 'tomb/area' were versatile enough but also not gamebreaking and even allowed for some cool synergies, and finally anomaly mode allowed for some of the craziest interactions Hearthstone has to offer.
I'm sorry to hear that Kaladin. I'm by no means an expert on BG's but maybe the following advice can help you:
- In the first ~5 turns there is very little decision making as there are very few opportunities to reroll. My advice for these turns is just to buy the highest quality minions (usually those that have the most stats) and try to go for doubles if they are offered to you, since tripling low tavern tier minions is relatively easy. Going to a higher tavern tier before playing a tripled minion is generally also a good idea because you can get some high quality minions or build enablers from higher tiers.
- Looking at your screenshot, I'd say you're holding on too much to minions that are good standalones in earlier turns but fall off quickly if they don't complement your build. Spawn of N'zoth is one of the best tavern 2 cards, but becomes less powerful as the game goes on especially if you don't triple it or if you don't have baron rivendare. The same can be said for security rover. It's really good relatively early in the game since it can usually survive 1 or 2 hits, but quickly falls off if you don't buff it or if you're not playing a mech build. If you feel like your build is starting to become weak then you should start buying key minions that are necessary for other builds so that you can transition into one of those.
If you're still struggling I would actually follow Alfi's advice and watch a youtuber or streamer like Kripp and look at how they play. Sure a lot of Kripp's videos are highlights of crazy games but those can still be useful. When watching a youtuber or streamer try to think what you would do in their situation and look at what they do differently and maybe you'll discover weaknesses in your playstyle.
BG is unfortunately, more luck based than skill. If there's any skill involved, its usually either positioning, or the ability to tell when its time to start switching strats (like transitioning from menagerie to murlocs, pirates etc.). Just be aware that there's a limit to the minions available, so if there's like some person going murlocs hard I usually start avoiding that tribe until I see him die. That's really the extend, in my opinion, of your control over the game.
There is no cunning strats. If RNG starts giving you murlocs then you play murlocs. If it shits on you then I guess you lose. Its not worth it to try and break this game. Most of the time the best way to end up in top 4 is to not get into a coma midgame and hold on tight to your lucky monkey paw or rabbits foot.
There is much more strategy to BGs than just positioning and knowing when to transition to other builds. This includes knowing when it's a good time to tavern up, knowing which minions to look for and when, knowing which minions you should replace, and knowing which minions should get targeted buffs or get taunt. Some of these may seem easy but the answers are really not as obvious as you might think.
I really like the idea of all minions only doing 1 damage, although something else (like lowering total hero health) would probably have to done to compensate. Regardless of what they will do, at least something has to be done so you aren't able to just randomly take absurd amounts damage because you happened to go against a guy who just powerspiked, or because a bunch of your opponent's high tier minions happened to survive with a sliver of health.
You seem to forget that Aurelion Sol is not always played on T10.
Freljord offers ramp and other decks pull him out with Thresh and keeps reviving him after that.
He can be played on t6-t10.
You're right, but in that case you shouldn't see Aurelion Sol as the problem, but rather the ramp cards and/or Thresh. 10-cost cards should not be made weaker just because there are other cards that allow you to play/summon them earlier.
Don't you just love it when you're in the top 2 in Battlegrounds, and your opponent first wins with a 4.8% chance, and the round after he kills you with a 9.6% chance, while all you needed to kill him was one win?
I like this idea, but it seems a little weak. The two mana hero powers should be on the level of a 0 cost card (like moonfire, or wisp). The 1 mana HPs should be half the value of a 0 cost card (compare DH HP to pre-nerf/buff twin slice). Considering [[Power Word: Shield]] exists, I recommend making the hero power 1 mana if you give +1 to a stat.
To be honest I'm not a fan of the first one because compared to the mage hero power, not being able to target heroes seems like too little of a downside for having it cost only half as much.
If I had to pick one out of the ones you proposed, I'd say option 4 with it only being able to hit minions. You could also make it target 2 different enemy minions to make it a little less random.
The class itself sounds neat though. But I was thinking that if it's a class based around minions, why not make the hero power interact more directly with the stats of a minion? If you want to keep it simple you could do something like "2 mana: give a minion +1 health*, but if you're willing to make it a little less simple you could have it do something different depending on if the targeted minion is friendly or an enemy (example: 2 mana: give a friendly minion +1 attack, or give an enemy minion -1 attack). If you don't like permanent buffs you could play around with temporary buffs as well.
To be honest I'm really not sure how long it's been. It feels like I've been having it for about a week, but it could very well just be three days. It's good to know that I'm not the only one who's experiencing it though.
So I don't know if anyone else is experiencing this, but for about a week now my game has to update every time I start it. It's not a long update so it's really not that big of a deal, but it's long enough to be slightly annoying compared to the usual startup time, and I'm curious if it's just me or if this is also the case for other people.
@Meisterz39 I think you're making a lot of good points, but I also feel like you're being a bit too harsh towards Riot. The game is still relatively new and there is a lot of room for Riot to try different balancing and card design approaches if their current ones don't end up having the effect they wanted. I agree that changing cards too often is bad if you want a stable meta to develop, but I still think it's much more desirable than what we used to have in Hearthstone where blatantly overpowered cards have remained completely untouched for waaay too long (e.g. Patches the Pirate) or sometimes forever (e.g. Prince Keleseth). On the other hand, now Hearthstone balance patches sometimes happen within a week of the expansion launch, while LoR patches happen a good few weeks later at which point it is much more clear which cards are in need of balancing.
Of course each individual will have a different preference for how they want a game to be balanced and designed. Riot's approach obviously isn't perfect, but since they have shown that they are willing to make changes if its necessary I do believe that the game is in good hands if they continue to have this mindset. With that said I do hope a Rioter will find and read your posts because I think it's good for them to have different perspectives on their game design and balance, and to know what the negative sides are that (could) come with it.
I can't say what the actual new player experience is like, but I would probably suggest any new player to first stick to normal, labs, and expeditions so that they can build up their collection. Like FenrirWulf said, a lot of players at low ranks (myself included) are just players that aren't interested in ranking up. The reason they do occasionally want to try out a deck in ranked is probably to see if a certain deck holds up or because they want to see how different the ranked experience is from normal.
given that the progress is pretty fast in general i would not say that the system needs to be changed. We are 3 days into the expansion and i am already level 20 in targon what is easyly doable if you play some expansions. I know many players dont play expansions but even then... you should be around level 8 at least already with a decent card pool available for being just 2 days into the expansion. After 1 week you should have access to every deck you want to play even if you started from 0 and if that is not generous enough for you... well then you should go play dota :)
I'm not saying the game isn't generous enough, I'm saying the expansion launch experience is flawed. Whether the developers want to change that is up to them, but I think there are possible solutions worth trying out. And you can't really say people 'should' be at certain levels, because the time people can/want to spend on the game differs a lot from person to person.
I think the point most people are missing here is that there is still a big difference between getting a whole bunch of random but new cards (from packs, chests, etc.), and crafting specific cards. In Hearthstone the first few days of an expansion are exciting (granted you have a reasonable amount of gold to spend on packs) because opening your packs gives you a whole bunch of new cards to play with without burdening you with the choice of which cards to craft, but you can still craft some cards you're missing for decks you're sure you want to play. In LoR, you can only get a small amount of new cards from the region rewards on the first expansion day, and after that you either play your old decks or you use your resources to craft almost an entirely new deck.
That's the problem though, I think most people, myself included, don't want to have to decide so early on which deck they're going to craft. It can be hard to know which cards are going to be good or even which cards are going to be fun for you. I experienced the latter when I crafted a Nautilus deep deck when Rising Tides was released. I thought I was going to enjoy deep decks the most, but I actually got tired of them pretty quickly and instead I enjoyed keg control or twisted fate focussed decks much more.They solved part of the problem with the premade decks in the current labs which allow you to try out some stuff before crafting, but those are still not as fun as making your own decks, playing them and tweaking them as you learn its strengths and weaknesses.
Don't get me wrong, I think LoR does a way better job at being free to play friendly than HS, but so far their expansion launches are just not as exciting as they could be. I think allowing players to hoard some experience could be a possible solution. I don't know about you guys but my weekly vaults have contained almost nothing but shards and wild cards for the past ~2 months, although giving up that free champion wild card every week would also kind of suck. Maybe they could allow you to save the exp that normally goes into your region rewards when you've already completed those, or if you choose not to continue them?
I love this. One of my favorite things to do during new Hearthstone releases was to queue up with Whizbang the Wonderful (R.I.P.) just to binge-play new cards that I didn't actually own.
Same for me! This is also a great way to try out cards that you're not sure you want to craft. It also solves the problem that I had when Rising Tides came out, which is that I had to play my older decks (or expeditions) to get newer cards, which felt weird because when a new expansion comes out you don't want to play with decks that have no new cards in them, and I didn't feel like crafting an entire deck before having at least a decent amount of the cards needed.
Lack of card variety means many cards are simply unplayable and decks feel all the same.
Heavy reliance on Champions as win conditions means a lack of variety in deck archetypes.
Low health + no overheal + large deck size = aggro is king and control is mostly non existent or heavily reliant on good RNG card draw. I realize this is likely by design, as it is in most card games (because if control is consistently good, everyone will play control), but it's just far too prevalent in LoR.
Following up on the last point, there isn't really any good AOE or removal for early game.
No summoning sickness means if you fall behind in tempo, you're behind pretty much the entire game.
Straight up broken cards (don't remember the name, but the one that gives "cannot take damage or die")
Event rewards are both very difficult to acquire and not even worth the effort.
Cannot buy cool cosmetics except through real money (what am I supposed to do with 45k shards and 35 Expedition tokens??)
What are the BGs perks that you have to pay for? I thought it was a free mode.
The BGs perks are:
- You can choose between 4 heroes instead of 2 at the start
- You can use emotes
- You can see your statistics
- I believe you also get 4 arena tickets
I have to admit, most of the issues you're having with LoR are not ones I'm experiencing (or at least not a lot), and I also think some are just present because the game is still pretty new. Though it is important to note that I mainly play casual play and labs because I don't care about ranking up.
When LoR came out I quit Hearthstone, but while I still play LoR I've started to play some Hearthstone again since Scholomance came out. My experience has been very mixed so far. I've definitely been enjoying some of my older decks that I often used to play (especially those including Yogg because they unnerfed him), but I've had some bad experiences as well. The worst one by far was when my opponent (druid) played coined Barnes on turn 4 which pulled Kael'thas Sunstrider, and he was immediately able to draw over half of his deck and kill me while I was at almost full health. At least kael'thas is getting a big nerf that should stop this kind of stuff from happening, but when it happened I just couldn't believe anything like that was even allowed to happen in the game and it almost made me quit Hearthstone again. The other bad experiences are mostly just dumb rng stuff that made me lose games because I lost a coin flip. These probably frustrated me more than usual because I had gotten used to this type of rng not existing in LoR, and I realized that I still prefer that game because of it. However, at the same time the imo better type of rng, like random card generation, is also what makes Hearthstone games feel more different each time. Although this is probably also caused by the much larger amount of cards present in Hearthstone compared to LoR.
What Battlegrounds is concerned, I have still continued playing it every now and then even after LoR came out. Recently I've been enjoying it even more, probably because I decided to concede whenever I would not like my hero options and this has led me to be at a much lower rating where the game is less competitive and thus I'm able to play more fun and different builds. The BGs meta has actually not been in a good spot at all lately (but buffs and nerfs have just arrived!) because 1) cannon, a tier 2 card that fits into any early game build, was way too op and because of that the early rounds were mostly decided by which players got a cannon, 2) damage dealt was at an all-time high which led to very short games 3) one hero (Eudora) was by far the strongest hero and was able to kill people very early, which made getting matched against her in powerspike turns feel very bad, and 4) most players have figured out how to transition to murlocs, which led to most endgame matches being decided by "who gets brann + megasaur first and is lucky enough to get divine shield and poisonous".
As I already mentioned however, a lot of nerfs and buffs for BGs have just arrived this week which should adress most of these issues. Although we can't be sure, I actually think BGs is going to be in a good spot after these changes. The only problem might be that with the removal of megasaur, murlocs might end up being too weak throughout most of the game.
With all that said, I think you should give both Hearthstone and BGs a try if you're truly getting bored with LoR. Of course, LoR is getting a new expansion soon so I would also suggest giving it another chance once that comes out. You could also play both games at the same time and transition between them when one or the other is frustrating or boring you.
Btw you still need to pay with gold or real money for the BGs perks, but imo those are not worth it because they're temporary (there's a reset whenever a new expansion comes out) and they cost way too much for what you're getting.
I actually thought the Tombs of Terror (Saviors of Uldum's dungeon run version) was by far the best one. It allowed for the most deck building choices thanks to Bob's Bazaar and the different starting decks and treasures, it introduced some incredibly fun and versatile treasures (both as cards and as passives), the Plague lords not regenerating health in between runs was a great way to to get the maximum amount of potential out of your deck and it also made your runs not feel useless (unless the 6th or 7th boss did some unfair bullshit, which was the mode's biggest downside for me), the passive effects present in each different 'tomb/area' were versatile enough but also not gamebreaking and even allowed for some cool synergies, and finally anomaly mode allowed for some of the craziest interactions Hearthstone has to offer.
I'm sorry to hear that Kaladin. I'm by no means an expert on BG's but maybe the following advice can help you:
- In the first ~5 turns there is very little decision making as there are very few opportunities to reroll. My advice for these turns is just to buy the highest quality minions (usually those that have the most stats) and try to go for doubles if they are offered to you, since tripling low tavern tier minions is relatively easy. Going to a higher tavern tier before playing a tripled minion is generally also a good idea because you can get some high quality minions or build enablers from higher tiers.
- Looking at your screenshot, I'd say you're holding on too much to minions that are good standalones in earlier turns but fall off quickly if they don't complement your build. Spawn of N'zoth is one of the best tavern 2 cards, but becomes less powerful as the game goes on especially if you don't triple it or if you don't have baron rivendare. The same can be said for security rover. It's really good relatively early in the game since it can usually survive 1 or 2 hits, but quickly falls off if you don't buff it or if you're not playing a mech build. If you feel like your build is starting to become weak then you should start buying key minions that are necessary for other builds so that you can transition into one of those.
If you're still struggling I would actually follow Alfi's advice and watch a youtuber or streamer like Kripp and look at how they play. Sure a lot of Kripp's videos are highlights of crazy games but those can still be useful. When watching a youtuber or streamer try to think what you would do in their situation and look at what they do differently and maybe you'll discover weaknesses in your playstyle.
There is much more strategy to BGs than just positioning and knowing when to transition to other builds. This includes knowing when it's a good time to tavern up, knowing which minions to look for and when, knowing which minions you should replace, and knowing which minions should get targeted buffs or get taunt. Some of these may seem easy but the answers are really not as obvious as you might think.
I really like the idea of all minions only doing 1 damage, although something else (like lowering total hero health) would probably have to done to compensate. Regardless of what they will do, at least something has to be done so you aren't able to just randomly take absurd amounts damage because you happened to go against a guy who just powerspiked, or because a bunch of your opponent's high tier minions happened to survive with a sliver of health.
You're right, but in that case you shouldn't see Aurelion Sol as the problem, but rather the ramp cards and/or Thresh. 10-cost cards should not be made weaker just because there are other cards that allow you to play/summon them earlier.
Don't you just love it when you're in the top 2 in Battlegrounds, and your opponent first wins with a 4.8% chance, and the round after he kills you with a 9.6% chance, while all you needed to kill him was one win?
Yeah good point, 1 mana would probably be better.
To be honest I'm not a fan of the first one because compared to the mage hero power, not being able to target heroes seems like too little of a downside for having it cost only half as much.
If I had to pick one out of the ones you proposed, I'd say option 4 with it only being able to hit minions. You could also make it target 2 different enemy minions to make it a little less random.
The class itself sounds neat though. But I was thinking that if it's a class based around minions, why not make the hero power interact more directly with the stats of a minion? If you want to keep it simple you could do something like "2 mana: give a minion +1 health*, but if you're willing to make it a little less simple you could have it do something different depending on if the targeted minion is friendly or an enemy (example: 2 mana: give a friendly minion +1 attack, or give an enemy minion -1 attack). If you don't like permanent buffs you could play around with temporary buffs as well.
To be honest I'm really not sure how long it's been. It feels like I've been having it for about a week, but it could very well just be three days. It's good to know that I'm not the only one who's experiencing it though.
So I don't know if anyone else is experiencing this, but for about a week now my game has to update every time I start it. It's not a long update so it's really not that big of a deal, but it's long enough to be slightly annoying compared to the usual startup time, and I'm curious if it's just me or if this is also the case for other people.
@Meisterz39 I think you're making a lot of good points, but I also feel like you're being a bit too harsh towards Riot. The game is still relatively new and there is a lot of room for Riot to try different balancing and card design approaches if their current ones don't end up having the effect they wanted. I agree that changing cards too often is bad if you want a stable meta to develop, but I still think it's much more desirable than what we used to have in Hearthstone where blatantly overpowered cards have remained completely untouched for waaay too long (e.g. Patches the Pirate) or sometimes forever (e.g. Prince Keleseth). On the other hand, now Hearthstone balance patches sometimes happen within a week of the expansion launch, while LoR patches happen a good few weeks later at which point it is much more clear which cards are in need of balancing.
Of course each individual will have a different preference for how they want a game to be balanced and designed. Riot's approach obviously isn't perfect, but since they have shown that they are willing to make changes if its necessary I do believe that the game is in good hands if they continue to have this mindset. With that said I do hope a Rioter will find and read your posts because I think it's good for them to have different perspectives on their game design and balance, and to know what the negative sides are that (could) come with it.
You're welcome :)
It means that your opponent will be able to see the card you chose.
I can't say what the actual new player experience is like, but I would probably suggest any new player to first stick to normal, labs, and expeditions so that they can build up their collection. Like FenrirWulf said, a lot of players at low ranks (myself included) are just players that aren't interested in ranking up. The reason they do occasionally want to try out a deck in ranked is probably to see if a certain deck holds up or because they want to see how different the ranked experience is from normal.
I'm not saying the game isn't generous enough, I'm saying the expansion launch experience is flawed. Whether the developers want to change that is up to them, but I think there are possible solutions worth trying out. And you can't really say people 'should' be at certain levels, because the time people can/want to spend on the game differs a lot from person to person.
I think the point most people are missing here is that there is still a big difference between getting a whole bunch of random but new cards (from packs, chests, etc.), and crafting specific cards. In Hearthstone the first few days of an expansion are exciting (granted you have a reasonable amount of gold to spend on packs) because opening your packs gives you a whole bunch of new cards to play with without burdening you with the choice of which cards to craft, but you can still craft some cards you're missing for decks you're sure you want to play. In LoR, you can only get a small amount of new cards from the region rewards on the first expansion day, and after that you either play your old decks or you use your resources to craft almost an entirely new deck.
That's the problem though, I think most people, myself included, don't want to have to decide so early on which deck they're going to craft. It can be hard to know which cards are going to be good or even which cards are going to be fun for you. I experienced the latter when I crafted a Nautilus deep deck when Rising Tides was released. I thought I was going to enjoy deep decks the most, but I actually got tired of them pretty quickly and instead I enjoyed keg control or twisted fate focussed decks much more.They solved part of the problem with the premade decks in the current labs which allow you to try out some stuff before crafting, but those are still not as fun as making your own decks, playing them and tweaking them as you learn its strengths and weaknesses.
Don't get me wrong, I think LoR does a way better job at being free to play friendly than HS, but so far their expansion launches are just not as exciting as they could be. I think allowing players to hoard some experience could be a possible solution. I don't know about you guys but my weekly vaults have contained almost nothing but shards and wild cards for the past ~2 months, although giving up that free champion wild card every week would also kind of suck. Maybe they could allow you to save the exp that normally goes into your region rewards when you've already completed those, or if you choose not to continue them?
"Why it could work: It has Swole Squirrel."
Same for me! This is also a great way to try out cards that you're not sure you want to craft. It also solves the problem that I had when Rising Tides came out, which is that I had to play my older decks (or expeditions) to get newer cards, which felt weird because when a new expansion comes out you don't want to play with decks that have no new cards in them, and I didn't feel like crafting an entire deck before having at least a decent amount of the cards needed.
OH BOI they did not disappoint with this one. Aurelion sol is everything I had hoped he would be and more!
The BGs perks are:
- You can choose between 4 heroes instead of 2 at the start
- You can use emotes
- You can see your statistics
- I believe you also get 4 arena tickets
I have to admit, most of the issues you're having with LoR are not ones I'm experiencing (or at least not a lot), and I also think some are just present because the game is still pretty new. Though it is important to note that I mainly play casual play and labs because I don't care about ranking up.
When LoR came out I quit Hearthstone, but while I still play LoR I've started to play some Hearthstone again since Scholomance came out. My experience has been very mixed so far. I've definitely been enjoying some of my older decks that I often used to play (especially those including Yogg because they unnerfed him), but I've had some bad experiences as well. The worst one by far was when my opponent (druid) played coined Barnes on turn 4 which pulled Kael'thas Sunstrider, and he was immediately able to draw over half of his deck and kill me while I was at almost full health. At least kael'thas is getting a big nerf that should stop this kind of stuff from happening, but when it happened I just couldn't believe anything like that was even allowed to happen in the game and it almost made me quit Hearthstone again. The other bad experiences are mostly just dumb rng stuff that made me lose games because I lost a coin flip. These probably frustrated me more than usual because I had gotten used to this type of rng not existing in LoR, and I realized that I still prefer that game because of it. However, at the same time the imo better type of rng, like random card generation, is also what makes Hearthstone games feel more different each time. Although this is probably also caused by the much larger amount of cards present in Hearthstone compared to LoR.
What Battlegrounds is concerned, I have still continued playing it every now and then even after LoR came out. Recently I've been enjoying it even more, probably because I decided to concede whenever I would not like my hero options and this has led me to be at a much lower rating where the game is less competitive and thus I'm able to play more fun and different builds. The BGs meta has actually not been in a good spot at all lately (but buffs and nerfs have just arrived!) because 1) cannon, a tier 2 card that fits into any early game build, was way too op and because of that the early rounds were mostly decided by which players got a cannon, 2) damage dealt was at an all-time high which led to very short games 3) one hero (Eudora) was by far the strongest hero and was able to kill people very early, which made getting matched against her in powerspike turns feel very bad, and 4) most players have figured out how to transition to murlocs, which led to most endgame matches being decided by "who gets brann + megasaur first and is lucky enough to get divine shield and poisonous".
As I already mentioned however, a lot of nerfs and buffs for BGs have just arrived this week which should adress most of these issues. Although we can't be sure, I actually think BGs is going to be in a good spot after these changes. The only problem might be that with the removal of megasaur, murlocs might end up being too weak throughout most of the game.
With all that said, I think you should give both Hearthstone and BGs a try if you're truly getting bored with LoR. Of course, LoR is getting a new expansion soon so I would also suggest giving it another chance once that comes out. You could also play both games at the same time and transition between them when one or the other is frustrating or boring you.
Btw you still need to pay with gold or real money for the BGs perks, but imo those are not worth it because they're temporary (there's a reset whenever a new expansion comes out) and they cost way too much for what you're getting.