Sykomyke's Avatar

Sykomyke

Grand Crusader
Joined 05/30/2019 Achieve Points 780 Posts 985

Sykomyke's Comments

  • Sykomyke's Avatar
    Grand Crusader 780 985 Posts Joined 05/30/2019
    Posted 3 years, 8 months ago

    Yea but the big problem is the 1 drop discounter.  I don't care about the 5 cost one.  Aldor Attendant just provides too good of an opening curve and stats.  They honestly just need to stop printing 1/3 1-drops for ALL classes.  1 Drops used to indicate you were aggro/midrange decks, as control couldn't afford to run 1 drops due to deck space.  Not to mention Paladin's First Day of School...

    If I had to target 2 cards it would be paladin's early game.  Make Hand of Adal cost 3.  Make Aldor Attendant be a 1/2.

  • Sykomyke's Avatar
    Grand Crusader 780 985 Posts Joined 05/30/2019
    Posted 3 years, 8 months ago

    I agree.  Librams will probably be hit if I had to guess.  They nerfed the secrets portion, but the other portion is just that librams are too damn good.  

  • Sykomyke's Avatar
    Grand Crusader 780 985 Posts Joined 05/30/2019
    Posted 3 years, 8 months ago
    Quote From OldKeith
    Quote From slychd

    I guess I will keep playing No-Minion Mage, I almost never got Deck of Lunacy before turn 6 as it was.

    there's one thing to play it for 2 or 1 mana on turn 6, another thing to pass the whole turn to play it.

    Generally speaking, it is probably stronger for mages to play it on 4, then 2.  Turn 2 is when aggro develops their board so most mages had to choose between lunacy (and pray for good RNG results) or removing early chip damage.  Also with incanters flow, if you draw into lunacy it's gonna have a reduced cost, so it may end up being a situation where you end up playing lunacy for it's "original" 2 cost anyways.

    Overall, it just slows the deck down, but isn't going to largely affect it.  Wanna know why?

    The deck has HIGH swings and LOW swings.  It's countered by Tickatus lock, and it's countered by hyper aggro.  People just like to complain when they get killed by a nagrand slam, but don't count the situations where they killed the lunacy mage that had 4 (useless) Idol of Y'shaarj in their hand, 2 Sprints, and 0 cards left in deck (fatigue).

     

  • Sykomyke's Avatar
    Grand Crusader 780 985 Posts Joined 05/30/2019
    Posted 3 years, 8 months ago
    Quote From Firestarter

    I agree 100%. It's nothing less than a disgrace. I hope more focus will come on this so it might change in the future.

    The reason you are getting downvoted is because it's not a disgrace.  You are completely unaware of software lifecycles.  (I've worked for 3 different companies that develop private sector software.)  While I'm not a developer myself (I work in IT), I'm aware of the needs of the company.  It boils down to simply you don't need "dozens" of developers to ship a project, at least not in Hearthstone.  When you start getting into things like Skyrim, Fallout, Jedi Fallen Order, etc.  Yes, those "triple A" games have way bigger teams for a few reasons:

    1) They generally put forth a ton of initial effort with huge teams for a period of a few years.

    2) Those members are generally contracted out from other companies for the duration of the project, or they are "permanent" members of the originating IP companies staff that are shifted around to projects and then once the project is finished they are rotated to a new project.

    3) Once those games are developed they are generally maintained by a skeleton crew for bug fixes and maybe small ramp ups for content releases or expansions, but other than that those games are considered "finished".  

    Ongoing games like Hearthstone that have regular content release cycles, along with expansions, rotations, balance changes, etc....

    The dev team is actually much larger than a "normal triple A game" dev skeleton crew.  And as this article pointed out, they shift people around depending on the need.  You don't need to hire 1 card design guy, 1 flavor text guy, 1 balance guy, when you can have the card design and flavor text guy be the same person.  (Kind of a bad example but I hope you get the gist of what I'm saying).  

    It's way more economical for them to just retain or hire people who can shift around as needed, then having huge dev teams of people with high specialized positions, but no flexibility.

  • Sykomyke's Avatar
    Grand Crusader 780 985 Posts Joined 05/30/2019
    Posted 3 years, 8 months ago
    Quote From meisterz39
    Quote From Sykomyke

    I was playing a no minion mage earlier today against a Druid.  A tree/token druid.  Watch the replay.  By turn 7 I was down to 4 health.  If I was playing ANY OTHER DECK other than Lunacy Mage, I would have lost 100%.  

    The challenge for me with this explanation is the idea that the game would have played out the same - with you down at 4 health by turn 7 - if you were playing any other deck. I don't even really believe that outcome was inevitably true in the game you've linked to.

    With the exception of an early Combustion, you spend the first six turns doing very little to interact with your opponent's board. Take your turn 5, for example, when you could easily have used your Fireball to take out one of your opponent's minions, but you dropped a Trick Totem instead. That right there was 4 damage you didn't have to take. And that would have set you up to Apexis Blast their remaining buffed taunt, which also has about a 27.7% chance of getting you something to further deal with the board (18.5% taunts, 9.2% rush minions)

    My aim here is not to criticize your plays, but rather to point out that the game could have played out differently if you had interacted more with your opponent's minions. And there are other cards you could have run to deal with aggro decks more effectively in the early game that didn't show up in your deck list (e.g. Ice Barrier and Cone of Cold) which would have probably changed the outcome quite a bit.

    So it's hard to believe that any other deck would have lost the game. Certainly, any other deck would have lost from that position - down to 4 HP against aggro on turn 7 - but most other decks wouldn't have let the game get there in the first place.

    That's fair.  And thanks for the feedback.  On the one hand, interacting with the board "more" is not the no-minion goal though.  Inherently, even if no minion mage wasn't running DoL, the first 5 turns would play out just the same.  Hell, let's pretend for a second I was playing watcher/ping mage.  The watch towers? At that point do hardly nothing since he plays out his early actual minions before the 2 mana watch tower would have come into play. He a few more minions but nothing that would have posed a threat.  The 3 mana watch tower would have spawned 2/2's that he could handily take care of with his buffed minions.  And the watch tower itself doesn't pose a threat.  

    And for a button mage, at that point in the game under *ideal* circumstances, what would the best play be?  The 4 drop that casts hero power on all enemies with a 1 or even 2 copies of wildfire previously played (which to do so, would mean pretty much doing nothing on turn 2 and turn 3.

    So ultimately ANY prominent mage deck (either no-minion or button) would have under ideal circumstances done the same first few turns.

    I understand that aggro's goal is to overwhelm early before the enemy stabilizes.  My counterpoint is this:  Why is it ok for aggro decks to have such power available to them, but when a control deck is able to RNG into a win condition against them semi-consistently, suddenly it's "unfair".

    If you recall, the aggro deck just needs to pray that the opponent doesn't draw into AoE/Removal, and/or heals/armor gains.  (which statistically for mage is exceedingly rare).  Imagine if I was running Ice Barrier.  What good would that REALLY do?  8 armor stall.  That's 2 minion attacks.  Cone of Cold, stall for one turn into the hopes that I draw my flamestrike before he kills me?  Again, the aggro deck just needs the control player to brick because control decks HOLISTICALLY only have a FEW answers to aggro.  They are COUNTING on control decks to brick and not have the tool that they need in order to stabilize.

    Deck of Lunacy takes that scenario and says "I'm going to turn all your spells into RNG spells, which statistically higher cost spells have such powerful effects that they are most likely going to help you, but you won't know what spells you have, and you'll have to draw them".  It gives the no minion mage deck an ACTUAL shot at dealing with aggro and winning.  As opposed to the 1% chance of winning that they normally would have without Deck of Lunacy and just PRAYING that they draw their stall/aoe clear cards.

    The latter is NOT fun.  There's NOTHING fun about a control deck losing to an aggro deck because the aggro deck can just play pretty much anything and the control deck is going "well, there he goes just smorcing me while I pray for heals/stall/clears".  

    Maybe I'm biased, but aggro ALWAYS has the upper hand against other decks.  (Which it shouldn't even be that way.  The holy trinity of counters SHOULD be Aggro>OTK>Control>Aggro.) But instead in Hearthstone it's just Aggro>>>>>>>Everything else 99% of the time unless the other decks get lucky.  

  • Sykomyke's Avatar
    Grand Crusader 780 985 Posts Joined 05/30/2019
    Posted 3 years, 8 months ago
    Quote From meisterz39

    The Fireball was only 3 mana thanks to an earlier Incanter's Flow - he could ping the 4/1 Toad of the Wilds and Fireball a second minion in the same turn. Instead he floats a mana and drops Trick Totem.

    I agree he should have played Font of Power prior to Deck of Lunacy for the options, but I think otherwise it seemed like the right play to drop Deck of Lunacy rather than float a mana.

    You could maybe argue that he should have played Font of Power into the randomly generated Firebrand into Deck of Lunacy with the hopes of killing the Bonechewer Brawler with the spellburst, but the average outcome is that their Bonechewer Brawler becomes a 6/1 and their Toad of the Wilds dies. Then they'd play their new Toad and Mark of the Spikeshell on the 6/1 and go face for 8 (rather than trade with the 3/4 like they did). Now you're starting turn 5 at 16 health instead of 22, but you can trade on board with the Brawler and Apexis Blast the last minion on board. Ultimately that's probably better than what happened, since the Trick Totem didn't stop any incoming damage, leaving him at 14 at the start of turn 6.

    I'm not sure that's better than just Font of Power into Fireball like you've suggested, but I'd always play the Deck of Lunacy there at the end of turn 4 regardless.

    (Notably, I'm assuming all random card generation would have played out exactly the same as it did - maybe order matters and would have changed the results without Deck of Lunacy being played first.)

    Oh I'm sure I didn't play perfectly.  Ultimately why I chose not to use fireball on the minion was that 1) I was hoping that the Trick totem would absorb some damage, or remove damage from the board (it didn't really).  And that the fireball would be for a bigger threat and/or burst.  As it turns out, even though I may have misplayed a little; I ultimately still ended up being able to win purely on my opponent's misplay as well (they didn't kill trick totem,  if they had, I would have had nothing to buff with the power word card, and thus would have lost by not being able to clear his board). 

     

  • Sykomyke's Avatar
    Grand Crusader 780 985 Posts Joined 05/30/2019
    Posted 3 years, 8 months ago
    Quote From iWatchUSleep

    This really isn't a hot take as it's pretty known among the better players that paladin is the deck with the oppressive win-rate. Mage's winrate is 'just' tier 1 but ridiculously overplayed for some reason.

    The reason why it's a problem is exactly as you described. Because it has a card that boosts its winrate to toxic levels if played early, much like Keleseth. Nothing wrong with the deck being strong, if it's got counters, which it does, and doesn't generally rely so heavily on drawing a single card.

    And then there's the fact that people are turned away from the game simply because once every three games they'll face a mage. Even if the deck isn't the strongest, the fact that it has made standard this boring while we're only a week in isn't healthy for the game. We've had a similar scenario with Barnes in wild a few years ago. The deck's nerf is justified, even if it's not a meta tyrant.

    That's fair.  I know that sometimes Blizzard nerfs deck purely out of community perception, and less on the actual statistical power.  It's just one of the few times in recent history that a control deck has had that opportunity.  But yea, Paladin's winrate made mage's winrate look like nothing.  

  • Sykomyke's Avatar
    Grand Crusader 780 985 Posts Joined 05/30/2019
    Posted 3 years, 8 months ago

    Hot Take:  Lunacy is *popular* for sure, but isn't actually winning matches at a statistically higher rate than other decks have in the past.  If you look at the stats for the past few expansion releases, you'll see other decks had HIGHER winrates than No-Minion/Lunacy mage.

    Yes, I enjoy no-minion mage, but even with a turn 2 Deck of Lunacy play, there's no guarantee the deck will win.  Sure it's favored to win, but saying "if you play deck of lunacy on turn 2, your chances go up" is the same exact thing that happened back in the KOTFT meta with Prince Kelesth Rogues.  The deck could still win without Prince 2 on turn 2.  But if he was played (and they had shadowsteps) then the chances of the rogue winning went up dramatically.

    I was playing a no minion mage earlier today against a Druid.  A tree/token druid.  Watch the replay.  By turn 7 I was down to 4 health.  If I was playing ANY OTHER DECK other than Lunacy Mage, I would have lost 100%.  

    https://hsreplay.net/replay/ZfE5dpF2dRXXVyT4vzobWn

    Yet, people are saying that Lunacy is a problem?  Why is it ok for tree/token druid to be able to generate that much threat/damage but mage can't?  I'm ok with balance changes, I'm even ok with people going "I don't like facing this deck" (trust me, I'm the same way about Tickatus).  But why is it fair for "aggro" decks to ALWAYS be strong in metas, but the one time a no-minion control mage deck gets popular everyone cries for nerfs?  

    What exactly is the problem with a control deck ACTUALLY having a foothold in the first week of the meta? I know this sounds like a gripe, but this is the FIRST TIME in an expansion release that I didn't get overwhelmed with yet another damn aggro/smorc Hunter deck.  IT was *SO* refreshing to be able to play games and actually feel like there was play and counterplay by both sides instead of just "me hunter, me go face" at the beginning of every expansion.

    So I repeat.  What exactly is the problem people have with a control deck ACTUALLY being good in the first week of an expansion?  And one that isn't even consistent.  I've had so many games where lunacy bricked and gave me *TOO* much draw to the point that half the cards in my hand were draw that I couldn't use or do anything with cause my deck only had 2 cards left.  I get that it's a "crazy" RNG deck, but isn't that the point?  Yes, it's gonna have crazy wins, but it has crazy losses too.  You just never see them because when you win against a lunacy mage, you usually have no idea what crappy cards he/she ended up getting.

    Thanks for listening and will answer replies when I can.

  • Sykomyke's Avatar
    Grand Crusader 780 985 Posts Joined 05/30/2019
    Posted 3 years, 8 months ago

    The durability matters very little.  The weapon rarely ever swings for that many turns anyways.  Or gets destroyed immediately if someone happens to have an ooze.  At that point in the game,  the damage per swing is more relevant.  Reducing durability on his Blood Fury weapon would literally do nothing. 

    There are only 3 real choices on nerfing Jaraxxus.

    • Reduce weapon damage from 3 -> 2
    • Reduce Hero Power (Infernal) statline from 6/6 - > 5/5
    • Increase cost of Jaraxxus from 9 -> 10.

    Possibly 1 or 2 of these at the same time.

    I'm also not a fan of crabrider.  I think it's too strong considering how insane murlocs tend to scale.  Remove the windfury and I think he's fine.  

    Lastly I don't think Lunacy is that insane.  It's no different than Prince Keleseth decks that played him on curve back in the day.  And it's an RNG swing.  There are some great spells.  But there are also some serious brick spells (Survival of the fittest for a deck that doesn't run any minions, Guardian Animals, etc)  Without spells like Box of Yogg Saron, or other good 8/10 costs, the deck can whiff on some of it's high cost cards.  This provides an inherent "risk vs reward" but based on RNG (did you get good RNG or not).

    And if people are complaining that a lunacy mage cast 3 Nagrand Slams in one game, then they have to realize that somewhere out there, another lunacy mage just got 3 Survival of the Fittest cards, that will do nothing but clog their hand).

    As I said on reddit:  If we can survive for 4 months and 3 rounds of nerfs for aggro and soul-demon hunter dominating the meta, we can survive for more than a week calling for nerfs on a meme RNG deck.

  • Sykomyke's Avatar
    Grand Crusader 780 985 Posts Joined 05/30/2019
    Posted 3 years, 8 months ago

    Honestly I'd probably prefer Xaril's toxins.  They were all 1 mana, and had great utility.  Don't mind the fact that I have a gold Xaril.  That has *nothing* to do with my opinion...yup.  :D

  • Sykomyke's Avatar
    Grand Crusader 780 985 Posts Joined 05/30/2019
    Posted 3 years, 8 months ago
    Quote From Marega

    well i didnt mean completely empty, but the Deep mechanic is from LoR which is with few cards in your deck u can do certain stuff like those other cards that require for u to have 10 or fewer cards, cause in the end game you want this card to win it

    HS fan boys just downvoting for no reason. i was just making a joke, i dont even play LoR, but u insecure fanbois need to cry out that ur game is better

    The deep mechanic was released after chef nomi.  So if anything, LoR copied hearthstone.  Secondly,  card games USUALLY draw inspiration from each other anyways.  It's not like a "if your deck is <X> thin, do this" is a LoR trademark...  Thirdly,  you're not being downvoted because "hs fan boys are downvoting for no reason" you're being downvoted primarily because your drawing conclusions that aren't related to each other, and secondarily because your attitude is poor and when you get downvoted you resort to ad hominem instead of realizing that your conclusions in life won't always be right.

    Let me put it another way,  what will happen when one day in the future you go to work and you draw an improper conclusion and a boss or colleague informs you of your wrong conclusion.  You going to say "bossman, why are you yelling at me?  You're just jealous of my awesome intelligence because I came up with an idea before you!"

  • Sykomyke's Avatar
    Grand Crusader 780 985 Posts Joined 05/30/2019
    Posted 3 years, 9 months ago

    Oh my god.  I remember MM:DoC.  The game was very interesting.  Imbalanced in some ways but still interesting.  Also, let's not forget Elder Scrolls Legends. 

    Also Faeria was an odd game.  It's like half card game/half board game?  IMO it tried to do too many things at once.

  • Sykomyke's Avatar
    Grand Crusader 780 985 Posts Joined 05/30/2019
    Posted 3 years, 9 months ago

    One can hope.  Unfortunately that does mean we have to deal with 2-3 more weeks of Nitroboost Rogue plaguing the ladder.

  • Sykomyke's Avatar
    Grand Crusader 780 985 Posts Joined 05/30/2019
    Posted 3 years, 9 months ago
    Quote From Zyella

    its ice barrier and spell damage does not at all work on armor gian of it

    My apologies oh infallible one.  I was still waking up this morning and got ice/frost mixed.  And how do you know spell damage in the new system won't affect it?  Do you have beta access to forged in the barrens?  It has a spell school tied to it, you have NO idea how it may work in the new system.  In theory what I suggested could very well be possible with the new spell schools.  I'm perfectly aware that spell damage doesn't currently scale the secret's armor gain, but that could change with spell schools and how they interact and work.

  • Sykomyke's Avatar
    Grand Crusader 780 985 Posts Joined 05/30/2019
    Posted 3 years, 9 months ago

    This is me thinking of mage in relation to it's WoW counterpart (or rather classic, as I have no idea what current wow mage excels at)...

    The idea of spell schools gives credence to the idea that spells will now have "specs".  In relation to mage, this means that I think if supporting cards came out for it, things like Frost Barrier.  Maybe if you have frost barrier up, and you play some card that says "For the rest of the game your frost spells have +2 frost spell damage".  This means that frost barrier, which holistically couldn't gain any more value at it's default 8 armor, could potentially gain +2 armor.  Likewise your frost spells will gain power.  Maybe they'll have things like "shifting power" where one school will increase, but others decrease.  The spell schools open up a ton of meaningful deck building choices. 

  • Sykomyke's Avatar
    Grand Crusader 780 985 Posts Joined 05/30/2019
    Posted 3 years, 9 months ago

    So....this is like Inner Demon, except better.  It's 1 more mana, but you get an 8/8 for it, it's not blocked by taunt, and is flexible if you need the self healing.  Remind me again what the core set was supposed to achieve?

  • Sykomyke's Avatar
    Grand Crusader 780 985 Posts Joined 05/30/2019
    Posted 3 years, 9 months ago

    Incentive:  Play a slightly higher than curve minion for (1) mana less.  

    Disincentive:  If you and your opponent are both greedy, get ready for LIGHTNING ROUND Hearthstone! :D  I can't wait for the Trolden videos on this.

  • Sykomyke's Avatar
    Grand Crusader 780 985 Posts Joined 05/30/2019
    Posted 3 years, 9 months ago

    Can we just enjoy the fact that the card name is Reckoning, and it looks like he's attacking Lord Kazzak (The infamous demon that caused the recokoning talent to get nerfed due to the "reck bomb" because some paladin figured out how to stack it a ton and one shot a raid boss by himself.)

  • Sykomyke's Avatar
    Grand Crusader 780 985 Posts Joined 05/30/2019
    Posted 3 years, 9 months ago
    Quote From YourPrivateNightmare

    It's basically King Krush twice

    There's a scary thought.  Really wish Blizz would stop pushing face damage so much.

  • Sykomyke's Avatar
    Grand Crusader 780 985 Posts Joined 05/30/2019
    Posted 3 years, 9 months ago

    Pretty much, yup.  While I on *some* level understand that people who like her characterization in LoL are a little upset with the shift in LoR voicewise (luxifying her voice), it's nothing to get bent out of shape over.

    On top of that, the two images above look the same to me.  If I was an artist hired on and was told "here's the left picture, we want you to make card art", I would have probably assumed that the characters face was in shadows in the left, and made her face look exactly the same as it is on the right.  The face on the right looks like typical euro heritage character but in the sunlight, while the one on the left looks like she has shadows cast on most of her face.

    This has NOTHING to do with LGBTQ-whatever or sexism at all.  But the sad thing is, the mercurial, vindictive, and frankly caustic gaming culture gets up in arms at literally everything.  It's frankly speaking, a little sad.  

    To respond to the article's question.  Was Riot's response warranted?  Sure, Riot wants to be known as the "inclusive gaming company" so they tend to rectify community outcry in all matters psuedo political.  Was it necessary? Depends.  The artist misconstruing the origin? Maybe, then again these are fictional characters with *technically* fictional lands of origin,  no=one should be getting offended at any of it.  Voice? Not at all.  I mean, yea the "lux-style" voice tends to get a little annoying after awhile, and new characters voices should be more reminiscent than "that sounds like it could be Lux's cousin", but at the same time, it's nothing to write home about.