I don't think LoR is a dead game at all, and some things it does, it does *better* than Hearthstone. It is a far more interactive play experience, and you tend to come across "less" wombo combos than in hearthstone. And it's far more interactive in the board presence and tempo. That being said.... I haven't played LoR in months...
And the only time I did was when the released the new lab adventure mode, which at first seemed neat with "choices make your ending different" until I realized it was literally only the first map where you had "story choices".
I think RIOT as a company is on the rise, capitilizing on the scandal/culture issues at Blizzard at the moment, pushing their IP's through multiple media platforms (Ruined King - RPG game, Arcane - TV Series, LoL - Original IP, LoR - Card game IP, TFT & Wild Rift - Mobile).
They are clearly building the same universe but attempting to hook different styles/types of players. It's definitely a smart diversification method.
That being said, the one thing Blizz still has going for them is *multiple* universes. Diablo, SC, WC/WoW, Overwatch... And admittedly while some of these franchises are suffering, in the coffin, or just plain old: it does give them diversification if a certain thematic doesn't appeal to an audience. If you don't like fantasy warcraft/wow then you still have a hack and slash demon killing game, a futuristic team fighting game, a sci-fi RTS game.
Anyhow I've digressed a bit....
I don't think the game is dead, but I do know that my interest has waned quite a bit. I do agree somewhat with Nifty (trust me, hard words to say because as others point out his behavior has been extremely caustic and berative in the past)...and the reason is what he mentioned: A lot of champions are no longer viable. And I agree with the sentiment that a lot of decks/champions are released with very narrowly focused synergies that pretty much build the deck for you.
The just need to change the unstoppable force for Rokara into 5/2 (you are immune while attacking). This would do a few things. Make the hero immune to the damage they take while attacking, but still rely on weapon charges. This in turn would encourage ways to gain weapon charges for a brief time (Krastinov perhaps?) and could possibly change the way the hero card is played. Instead of buffing the weapon to 6 (which IMO all that does is promote the warrior to go face instead of trade)
As for the nerfs coming. I won't go into too much depth now as I'm wrapping up things at work, but suffice to say: Mozaki Mage and Thief Rogue both need nerfs, however if they do get nerfed, we'll just have all the flavor of the month players switch back over to questlock/handlock.
I'll just come right out and say it: the hero cards from Alterac feel very fun and mostly balanced (except scabbs, and perhaps guff....I think the current decks we are seeing are borderline oppressive from a control standpoint) ....but the quest cards from Stormwind feel very poorly balanced and should never have been designed the way they were.
I like Diablo being a "dual class" hero (and an outside IP character at that) in Duels. What I don't like is the insane fucking synergy that demon seed has with the claws hero power.
Demon seed needs to be nerfed heavily (or banned from Duels) because it's just too much of a warping factor, especially with Diablo around. It creates a situation where you can't even play big minions, because you actually help accelerate their quest completion.
I'm not trying to bitch for the sake of bitching, but the quest specifically with Diablo creates a polarizing situation where playing no-minions or going wide will cause you to lose. Playing big minions will....also cause you to lose, just faster.
I just really hate the Demon Seed as a mechanic as a whole, it circumvents a core mechanic, and should never have existed in the first place.
Also, since I'm ranting in this thread: Fuck Pirate Quest: I know it's low skill in both duels and standard, but I'm so sick and tired of seeing it. I'm sick of seeing cannoneer on turn 4, and I'm sick of highrolls with Smite/Gorehowl.
On the next rotation Blizzard needs to tone down the mana cheating, tone down the card draw, and bring back resource management and actual decisions. When 90% of your playerbase currently is just speedrunning through their deck for their quest completion/OTK/aggro curve without any consideration to resources (because they never have to worry about running out of cards) then there is a fundamental problem with the game.
he wants to farm honor, not xp so mercs doesnt work. for me, duels is the fast way to farm because games are faster
duels is the fast way to farm because games are faster for the first 3-4 games. After that duels games tend to go on for way longer than the average ranked/standard match.
The L3 Xerath buff seems like a sidegrade at best. Buffing his health is necessary, and coupled with the passive improvement to sun disk *may* just may allow Xerath to carve out a small niche, but I doubt it.
Funny to see Trundle get buffed back to what were his original values if I recall correctly. Guess powercreep is real eh?
Everyone is playing Odd Questline Hunter in Wild, a stupidly oppressive deck, and they haven't done anything to curb its power? It's so boring and frustrating to play against and control decks autolose against it. Please do something, Blizzard!
I don't mean to be dismissive but Wild is *MUCH* less likely to have anything curbed. Yes they occassionaly nerf severely degenerate decks (like D6 warlock) but there's a reason it's called "Wild". If you aren't into over the top/high power level decks Wild may not be the best mode for you.
Cause the hero power for hero dawngrasp is now a straight upgrade. +1 damage, +scaling built into it.
Even if you don't build a hero power deck the card also helps with big spell replaying.
And even if you dont build big spells, the card can help with hand refill (run card draw spells, stall spells, hand refill spells like studies or font of power).
The card can be used for ANY mage build now. I don't think it's the worst thing in the world, just saying I thought the point of most of the heroes was not for them to be auto-includes in every deck.
Ooh boy that is some insane buffs to mage. I do worry that this means Dawngrasp just gets slotted into every mage deck though. I'm also don't think the Octobot nerf is going to change anything. Often they play octobo+pen flinger to discount their hand prior to a combo turn. We'll see but I just don't think it's going to change anything.
Also, still worried that the Mithril Rod nerfing is not going to fundamentally change anything. Best case scenario, it slows down Owllocks. Worst case scenario, people go back to fatigue priest with Demon Seed and just not bother running the weapon at all.
I don't think I ever realized it discovered from your own deck. The way it was worded made it sound like you just discovered from the entire pool of possible cards (for your class+neutrals) which to me made it sound way worse.
The fact it discovers from your own deck definitely makes it better.
But do you think it's still better strictly speaking to run Infinite Arcane over Embercaster for example? (Embercaster specifically to duplicate wildfire(s) )
Also, this sounds odd but is there a competitive deck with Yogg Tasties as the signature treasure? I remember when duels first came out and everyone was using it and it made duels so much fun.
Avalon (or anyone really) if you see this maybe you can explain something...
Why is Infinite Arcane popping up in more and more mage decks in duels as the chosen signature treasure? With hero power mage it used to be Embercaster....I understand that Infinite Arcane makes you "immune" to fatigue in the traditional sense, but is there something more that I'm missing?
I don't think that they are replacing it with anything. It will have an abbreviated final year and be gone. I am not sure what you think is the "Awesome Bowl" here but World Championship and Masters Tour are not new. And Lobby Legends is battlegrounds and sounds like it will be a weekend tournament not a weekly season.
I was asking for clarification. No need to be rude or crass with statements like "not sure what you think". Don't be an ass.
I'm confused. I don't really follow the competitive esports side of hearthstone, but I'm confused as the actual reason they are sunsetting "grandmasters" but seem to be replacing it with something similar.
It's like saying "Hey we are sunsetting the super bowl, and instead calling it the Awesome Bowl.....that's pretty much the only difference." Unless I'm misunderstanding something nothing will functionally change how people are put into the tournament?
And if we undershoot, well at least it's better than before. If we overshoot, that deck just stops seeing play entirely.
No, no, no.
If you nerf something and you overshoot, the deck stops seeing "play" because people want "#90% winrate deck PogChamp Kappa TwitchEmoteVomit"
People seem to think that if a deck is somewhere between 49-51% winrate it's "bad". It has to be some egregious winrate for people to want to play it in the first place. And this line of thinking is further exacerbated by a majority of streamers who make clickbait videos/streams.
1) Those streamers can pilot decks at a way higher efficacy level than the average gamer. So when those streamers get 60+ winrates, it's because they understand niche decisions that can snowball the deck to higher winrates
2) The streamers over-inflate how good or bad a deck is because being realistic doesn't get views. Bloviating and making hyperbolic and extravagant comments gets them more viewers.
Lastly, no-one cares when a tempo midrange decks gets a small nerf. Because the tempo mid-range can either continue on, or it swaps out the nerfed card for maybe something better. The only decks that "die out" due to overnerfing are OTK decks. (See Ilgynoth prevalance prior to his buff/nerf, see the vast majority of Demon Hunter decks during entire last year of hearthstone)
I'm sorry, but Team5 is acting dumb. They print all these mana cheating wombo combo cards. Then for some inexplicable reason they get surprised when the community finds stupid OTK/non-interactive decks.
Edit: Sorry if this comes off as ranty or crass. I think this meta is "ok" but barely tolerable than stormwind. We just swapped out one evil for another. It's just very monotonous.
Why would you think a streamer's habits or opinions are representative of the greater player base?
They may have a broader perspective on gameplay issues (because they play a lot more than the average player), but this is a quality-of-life issue. Enough people have asked for this with such consistent frequency that there's really no excuse for ignoring the request.
I used streamers because generally (not always) they are well adjusted individuals (at least the highly successful ones I mentioned) who are self disciplined enough to not need to auto squelch people, and only take that action if absolutely necessary.
Don't take this the wrong way, but most players if this thread is an indication are highly sensitive imbalanced people. I mean do you really need an "auto squelch" feature?
Not to be crass but is it too hard for you to hover over the enemy hero, right click and choose squelch? Do you get the point I'm attempting to drive home? It's a "highly requested feature". That doesn't make it a *good* feature to implement. I've worked in the software industry for going on almost 15 years now. People want every breadth of feature imaginable, half of them are super niche and the other half already exist in some form or another, they just want something "easier" to use.
But in this particular case, this is stupidly simple. Hover over hero, right click. Squelch. Problem solved. Especially if there's a plugin that already does it for you.
I'd rather the devs spend their time and energy on putting in a built in deck tracker for Hearthstone as a quality of life feature, then implementing an "auto squelch" feature to pander to the pansy nimbly-wimbly people who's sensibilities are offended by pre-loaded character characters talking to you.
Edit: And honestly I don't care if the entire OOC community downvotes and disagrees with me on this. You're allowed your opinion and I'm allowed mine. And in my opinion this "highly requested feature" is stupidly infantile. And if you can't handle someone emoting you, or if you can't take the effort to make 2 clicks to squelch them: then honestly there are far more problems going on in your life that won't be solved by this QoL feature making it in the game. It's not like the person is typing that he defiled your grandfather's grave. You're at best getting the "wow" emote spammed at you. Squelch them and move on, jesus christ.
Competitive games tend to bring the worse out of some. Its just a human emotion. But I dont like the idea of repercussions for meaningless words or actions of which any serious person would just easily ignore. Especially because we know very well that the report button would easily be abused, and it puts our accounts at the mercy of some community manager etc who would likely be monitoring these things. Sometimes when I get rng-ed to death I would use the 'wow' emote, of which some person might take offense at and report my arse. I wouldn't like the idea of getting a ban from that, and then losing days of productivity appealing it off.
If there was a 30 min cooldown to invite someone you've just faced, its enough to cool heads or sometimes prompt some self-reflection. That's more positive to me than implementing punishments.
Agreed. If someone is still angry after 30 minutes or even remember the details of the game that's going to be surprising. I think that if someone rage-adds someone and throws out explicitives or racial slurs, sure that should be a "warning: this community does not tolerate verbal harrasment" kind of thing. Once someone gets a 12 hour ban from their behavior, they will do 1 of 2 things: A) Change their behavior, because they realize their current behavior has consequences or B) leave the game because they don't want to change.)
Auto-squelch could happen. Just do it already, please! I know they've said the game feels more immersive without it, but to me it's only more immersive in a negative way.
Not decrying your opinion, but I've never seen a single streamer (granted I don't watch a ton except for Regis/Kibler/Kripp/and a few others) request auto squelch. Generally they don't care if the opponent emotes occassionally, and if they opponent becomes overly "vocal", they just squelch them.
Not to mention but the game has a built in timer feature for emotes anyways. After using like 3 or 4 emotes in a row, the game times out your use of emotes for something like 30-60 seconds.
This just seems like low-hanging fruit. I know there is no harm in adding this feature, but you gotta remember that time spent on a largely unnecessary feature (that technically already exists, you just have to manually click) is time not spent on other QoL features.
Please don't bring back reborn, it was a pain to play against.
Reborn is just a weaker version of "Deathrattle: Resummon a copy of this minion"
That's like saying it's hard to play around Cairne Bloodhoof. Except reborn is strictly weaker than that particular effect since the minion only comes back with 1 health. Reborn was a fantastic mechanic because it allowed the development team to essentially create a deathrattle type minion, with multiple deathrattles without the player being confused.
Take Khartut Defender. It was an excellent designed card that allowed life gain through two different ways, The deathrattle, and the taunt. However a card like that is still strong at 5 mana. By putting it to 6 mana, and giving it reborn, they were able to balance it's cost effectiveness with it's tempo in the game at turn 6 or higher.
It would have been weird if it said "Deathrattle: Restore 3 health to your hero. Deathrattle: Resummon this with 1 health".
I don't think LoR is a dead game at all, and some things it does, it does *better* than Hearthstone. It is a far more interactive play experience, and you tend to come across "less" wombo combos than in hearthstone. And it's far more interactive in the board presence and tempo. That being said.... I haven't played LoR in months...
And the only time I did was when the released the new lab adventure mode, which at first seemed neat with "choices make your ending different" until I realized it was literally only the first map where you had "story choices".
I think RIOT as a company is on the rise, capitilizing on the scandal/culture issues at Blizzard at the moment, pushing their IP's through multiple media platforms (Ruined King - RPG game, Arcane - TV Series, LoL - Original IP, LoR - Card game IP, TFT & Wild Rift - Mobile).
They are clearly building the same universe but attempting to hook different styles/types of players. It's definitely a smart diversification method.
That being said, the one thing Blizz still has going for them is *multiple* universes. Diablo, SC, WC/WoW, Overwatch... And admittedly while some of these franchises are suffering, in the coffin, or just plain old: it does give them diversification if a certain thematic doesn't appeal to an audience. If you don't like fantasy warcraft/wow then you still have a hack and slash demon killing game, a futuristic team fighting game, a sci-fi RTS game.
Anyhow I've digressed a bit....
I don't think the game is dead, but I do know that my interest has waned quite a bit. I do agree somewhat with Nifty (trust me, hard words to say because as others point out his behavior has been extremely caustic and berative in the past)...and the reason is what he mentioned: A lot of champions are no longer viable. And I agree with the sentiment that a lot of decks/champions are released with very narrowly focused synergies that pretty much build the deck for you.
The just need to change the unstoppable force for Rokara into 5/2 (you are immune while attacking). This would do a few things. Make the hero immune to the damage they take while attacking, but still rely on weapon charges. This in turn would encourage ways to gain weapon charges for a brief time (Krastinov perhaps?) and could possibly change the way the hero card is played. Instead of buffing the weapon to 6 (which IMO all that does is promote the warrior to go face instead of trade)
As for the nerfs coming. I won't go into too much depth now as I'm wrapping up things at work, but suffice to say: Mozaki Mage and Thief Rogue both need nerfs, however if they do get nerfed, we'll just have all the flavor of the month players switch back over to questlock/handlock.
I'll just come right out and say it: the hero cards from Alterac feel very fun and mostly balanced (except scabbs, and perhaps guff....I think the current decks we are seeing are borderline oppressive from a control standpoint) ....but the quest cards from Stormwind feel very poorly balanced and should never have been designed the way they were.
I like Diablo being a "dual class" hero (and an outside IP character at that) in Duels. What I don't like is the insane fucking synergy that demon seed has with the claws hero power.
Demon seed needs to be nerfed heavily (or banned from Duels) because it's just too much of a warping factor, especially with Diablo around. It creates a situation where you can't even play big minions, because you actually help accelerate their quest completion.
I'm not trying to bitch for the sake of bitching, but the quest specifically with Diablo creates a polarizing situation where playing no-minions or going wide will cause you to lose. Playing big minions will....also cause you to lose, just faster.
I just really hate the Demon Seed as a mechanic as a whole, it circumvents a core mechanic, and should never have existed in the first place.
Also, since I'm ranting in this thread: Fuck Pirate Quest: I know it's low skill in both duels and standard, but I'm so sick and tired of seeing it. I'm sick of seeing cannoneer on turn 4, and I'm sick of highrolls with Smite/Gorehowl.
On the next rotation Blizzard needs to tone down the mana cheating, tone down the card draw, and bring back resource management and actual decisions. When 90% of your playerbase currently is just speedrunning through their deck for their quest completion/OTK/aggro curve without any consideration to resources (because they never have to worry about running out of cards) then there is a fundamental problem with the game.
/endrant
So we have to suffer through another week of Rogue dominating the meta? Wow....I can't even right now....
duels is the fast way to farm because games are faster for the first 3-4 games. After that duels games tend to go on for way longer than the average ranked/standard match.
The L3 Xerath buff seems like a sidegrade at best. Buffing his health is necessary, and coupled with the passive improvement to sun disk *may* just may allow Xerath to carve out a small niche, but I doubt it.
Funny to see Trundle get buffed back to what were his original values if I recall correctly. Guess powercreep is real eh?
I don't mean to be dismissive but Wild is *MUCH* less likely to have anything curbed. Yes they occassionaly nerf severely degenerate decks (like D6 warlock) but there's a reason it's called "Wild". If you aren't into over the top/high power level decks Wild may not be the best mode for you.
Just my 2 cents.
Any idea when the patch is going to drop?
Cause the hero power for hero dawngrasp is now a straight upgrade. +1 damage, +scaling built into it.
Even if you don't build a hero power deck the card also helps with big spell replaying.
And even if you dont build big spells, the card can help with hand refill (run card draw spells, stall spells, hand refill spells like studies or font of power).
The card can be used for ANY mage build now. I don't think it's the worst thing in the world, just saying I thought the point of most of the heroes was not for them to be auto-includes in every deck.
Ooh boy that is some insane buffs to mage. I do worry that this means Dawngrasp just gets slotted into every mage deck though. I'm also don't think the Octobot nerf is going to change anything. Often they play octobo+pen flinger to discount their hand prior to a combo turn. We'll see but I just don't think it's going to change anything.
Also, still worried that the Mithril Rod nerfing is not going to fundamentally change anything. Best case scenario, it slows down Owllocks. Worst case scenario, people go back to fatigue priest with Demon Seed and just not bother running the weapon at all.
I don't think I ever realized it discovered from your own deck. The way it was worded made it sound like you just discovered from the entire pool of possible cards (for your class+neutrals) which to me made it sound way worse.
The fact it discovers from your own deck definitely makes it better.
But do you think it's still better strictly speaking to run Infinite Arcane over Embercaster for example? (Embercaster specifically to duplicate wildfire(s) )
Also, this sounds odd but is there a competitive deck with Yogg Tasties as the signature treasure? I remember when duels first came out and everyone was using it and it made duels so much fun.
Avalon (or anyone really) if you see this maybe you can explain something...
Why is Infinite Arcane popping up in more and more mage decks in duels as the chosen signature treasure? With hero power mage it used to be Embercaster....I understand that Infinite Arcane makes you "immune" to fatigue in the traditional sense, but is there something more that I'm missing?
I was asking for clarification. No need to be rude or crass with statements like "not sure what you think". Don't be an ass.
I'm confused. I don't really follow the competitive esports side of hearthstone, but I'm confused as the actual reason they are sunsetting "grandmasters" but seem to be replacing it with something similar.
It's like saying "Hey we are sunsetting the super bowl, and instead calling it the Awesome Bowl.....that's pretty much the only difference." Unless I'm misunderstanding something nothing will functionally change how people are put into the tournament?
LOL. We don't always have to agree, but when we do agree... that's a scary moment. 'Cause it's gotta be something REALLY bad for us to agree on it...
Ugh.
No, no, no.
If you nerf something and you overshoot, the deck stops seeing "play" because people want "#90% winrate deck PogChamp Kappa TwitchEmoteVomit"
People seem to think that if a deck is somewhere between 49-51% winrate it's "bad". It has to be some egregious winrate for people to want to play it in the first place. And this line of thinking is further exacerbated by a majority of streamers who make clickbait videos/streams.
1) Those streamers can pilot decks at a way higher efficacy level than the average gamer. So when those streamers get 60+ winrates, it's because they understand niche decisions that can snowball the deck to higher winrates
2) The streamers over-inflate how good or bad a deck is because being realistic doesn't get views. Bloviating and making hyperbolic and extravagant comments gets them more viewers.
Lastly, no-one cares when a tempo midrange decks gets a small nerf. Because the tempo mid-range can either continue on, or it swaps out the nerfed card for maybe something better. The only decks that "die out" due to overnerfing are OTK decks. (See Ilgynoth prevalance prior to his buff/nerf, see the vast majority of Demon Hunter decks during entire last year of hearthstone)
I'm sorry, but Team5 is acting dumb. They print all these mana cheating wombo combo cards. Then for some inexplicable reason they get surprised when the community finds stupid OTK/non-interactive decks.
Edit: Sorry if this comes off as ranty or crass. I think this meta is "ok" but barely tolerable than stormwind. We just swapped out one evil for another. It's just very monotonous.
I used streamers because generally (not always) they are well adjusted individuals (at least the highly successful ones I mentioned) who are self disciplined enough to not need to auto squelch people, and only take that action if absolutely necessary.
Don't take this the wrong way, but most players if this thread is an indication are highly sensitive imbalanced people. I mean do you really need an "auto squelch" feature?
Not to be crass but is it too hard for you to hover over the enemy hero, right click and choose squelch? Do you get the point I'm attempting to drive home? It's a "highly requested feature". That doesn't make it a *good* feature to implement. I've worked in the software industry for going on almost 15 years now. People want every breadth of feature imaginable, half of them are super niche and the other half already exist in some form or another, they just want something "easier" to use.
But in this particular case, this is stupidly simple. Hover over hero, right click. Squelch. Problem solved. Especially if there's a plugin that already does it for you.
I'd rather the devs spend their time and energy on putting in a built in deck tracker for Hearthstone as a quality of life feature, then implementing an "auto squelch" feature to pander to the pansy nimbly-wimbly people who's sensibilities are offended by pre-loaded character characters talking to you.
Edit: And honestly I don't care if the entire OOC community downvotes and disagrees with me on this. You're allowed your opinion and I'm allowed mine. And in my opinion this "highly requested feature" is stupidly infantile. And if you can't handle someone emoting you, or if you can't take the effort to make 2 clicks to squelch them: then honestly there are far more problems going on in your life that won't be solved by this QoL feature making it in the game. It's not like the person is typing that he defiled your grandfather's grave. You're at best getting the "wow" emote spammed at you. Squelch them and move on, jesus christ.
Agreed. If someone is still angry after 30 minutes or even remember the details of the game that's going to be surprising. I think that if someone rage-adds someone and throws out explicitives or racial slurs, sure that should be a "warning: this community does not tolerate verbal harrasment" kind of thing. Once someone gets a 12 hour ban from their behavior, they will do 1 of 2 things: A) Change their behavior, because they realize their current behavior has consequences or B) leave the game because they don't want to change.)
Either of those is a win-win for the community.
Not decrying your opinion, but I've never seen a single streamer (granted I don't watch a ton except for Regis/Kibler/Kripp/and a few others) request auto squelch. Generally they don't care if the opponent emotes occassionally, and if they opponent becomes overly "vocal", they just squelch them.
Not to mention but the game has a built in timer feature for emotes anyways. After using like 3 or 4 emotes in a row, the game times out your use of emotes for something like 30-60 seconds.
This just seems like low-hanging fruit. I know there is no harm in adding this feature, but you gotta remember that time spent on a largely unnecessary feature (that technically already exists, you just have to manually click) is time not spent on other QoL features.
Reborn is just a weaker version of "Deathrattle: Resummon a copy of this minion"
That's like saying it's hard to play around Cairne Bloodhoof. Except reborn is strictly weaker than that particular effect since the minion only comes back with 1 health. Reborn was a fantastic mechanic because it allowed the development team to essentially create a deathrattle type minion, with multiple deathrattles without the player being confused.
Take Khartut Defender. It was an excellent designed card that allowed life gain through two different ways, The deathrattle, and the taunt. However a card like that is still strong at 5 mana. By putting it to 6 mana, and giving it reborn, they were able to balance it's cost effectiveness with it's tempo in the game at turn 6 or higher.
It would have been weird if it said "Deathrattle: Restore 3 health to your hero. Deathrattle: Resummon this with 1 health".