I disagree, I think having some limited amount of burst damage in neutral/evergreen is healthy for the game. Aggro decks are a necessary component to the balancing act of aggro-control-combo, and without evergreen cards to provide a baseline, it'd just mean more expansion cards have to be printed to fill that void.
We would still have Wolfrider for an evergreen burst neutral. Wolfrider did see lots of play back in the days of Deathrattle Face Hunter, so it's not unplayable. It's just massively outclassed... by Leeroy.
While evergreen burst is important, it shouldn't be Leeroy. He's too abusable to be in Standard forever.
(I also wouldn't mind some buffs for awful cards like Nightblade, but I don't think that's a unique opinion).
Wolf Rider sees play in face decks but not really as a finisher. It's just damage from hand. But suppose Wolf rider were to take Leeroys place due to lack of alternatives, I'm sure the same people who get triggered by losing to leeroy would have a similarly negative reaction to ole' wolfy.
The way I see it, "feels bad to lose against" is incredibly subjective and personal, hence not a strong reason to change things .
I'd be fine seeing him HOF'd. He's not broken, but he just isn't fun to play against in my opinion.
That's because he's a finisher.
It's never fun to lose.
Isn't that a valid argument to HoF Leeroy? Losing to the same card for over 5 years is just not a fun experience, even if the card isn't broken.
Assuming some other card has to be printed to fill the void, then no, that's not a particularly strong reason to HoF Leeroy. You'll still have that not-fun experience losing to a topdecked Killroy Watkins even if it's a brand-spanking new card, and as I mentioned earlier, a lot of people don't have strong negative feelings toward leeroy to begin with. Sure, it's not *fun* to lose to topdeck leeroy, but the same is true for any number of other ways to lose.
I agree that in the present meta, rush (and other removal tools) are a bit too dominant. Now it's generally true that the tail-end of the year favours control and combo(because the more cards there are in standard, the easier it is to craft a fine-tuned control deck that can deal with various threats) and it's also true that despite this, we're in a pretty aggro/face-heavy meta, but the successful aggro decks, mainly facehunter and rogue, more or less ignore the board by mid-game and have a ton of burst from hand. It feels like decks that try to win early via the board are just dead in the water ATM, which is definitely a problem, because it's that much less fun to lose against a face deck that can't be controlled via the board.
One can only hope that the standard rotation will deal with some of the problem cards and that subsequent expansions will be a bit less Rush-heavy. I also wouldn't mind a further nerf to Faceless Corruptor, because that card is still busted AF and completely negates any sort of early tempo advantage an aggro deck might want to build. I wouldn't mind seeing the health of that minion go down to 3 or 2 so that it doesn't value-trade as conveniently. 5 mana: deal 4 damage to 2 minions is still decent tempo even if the card doesn't leave behind two bodies. Right now even if you keep the board clear 6 mana: play a lackey and a faceless is still far too backbreaking for (board-centric) aggro to deal with.
I disagree, I think having some limited amount of burst damage in neutral/evergreen is healthy for the game. Aggro decks are a necessary component to the balancing act of aggro-control-combo, and without evergreen cards to provide a baseline, it'd just mean more expansion cards have to be printed to fill that void.
I can see the argument for minor nerfing/tweaking, maybe moving him down to 5 damage would be a bit more fair, especially since he does limit the design space for finishers, but I think a card like Leeroy is going to be needed to have aggro be viable for a consistently healthy meta.
Now that hat the cat is out of the bag, I sure am glad for my pessimistic initial take because things are so much worse than I'd imagined.
Apparently the PR department completely overhyped what reforged was going to be, setting unrealistic goals for the devs and making promises to fans that couldn't be met with how many resources Blizzard actually invested into this remake. But even if we set that aside, like I said in my first post, I think the rot goes all the way back to the core concept here: remaking a beloved game 18 years down the line. There's no way that game could ever have lived up to the fond memories and nostalgia of the original WC3. Hell, I would argue that even the idea of "improving" the graphics was a giant misstep: WC3 characters were designed for low-poly models and the two go together perfectly. Keeping the character designs but improving the visual fidelity turns these characters into misshapen nightmare fuel, much like turning Sonic from a cartoon into a 3D CGI creature made him a monstrosity. Adapting any design to a new medium is tricky, and this is one of the worst examples in recent years. For a game that does very little besides "update" the graphics, it's a crying shame that even those came out looking WORSE than the game that's old enough to drive and enlist at this point.
Dr. Boom, Mad Genius for me. The card is fine, but I never had all the required cards for the pimped out warrior deck so I'd invariably lose to the other warriors, at which point there no point in playing the deck, really. And I don't even enjoy paying control warrior, so there's that.
Tyrone wouldn't be nearly as powerful relative to other heroes if there were minions that could buff neutrals (besides Defender of Argus). Right now neutrals are essentially balanced around the fact that they fall off hard toward late game and Tyrion is the one exception to that rule. (And Edwin, and Daryl and...) Most heroes cannot scale a tribeless minion, so outside of key enablers like Brann, Lightfang, Baron, Soul Juggler, etc. they don't see much play.
If everyone can buff their neutrals then it's no longer as powerful of an ability: other players have access to it and now they're also competing for your picks. That said it probably should cost 2 gold because it's a board-wide buff that's incredibly easy to set up. Like I said, the tribeless minions are overpowered relative to their level to compensate for the downside of lacking a tribe, but with Tyrion that's a feature, not a bug.
FWIW I'm EU and I got a special event quest today. Not sure exactly when it got added but It wasn't there when I completed my daily quest after midnight and it was there when I logged in around 2 PM.
Pretty much what Bystekhilcar said, the problem wasn't Wild Growth per se, it was the fact that Wild Growth existing as an evergreen card at that power level meant that any other ramp card they printed in future expansions would have to be piss-poor or it'd immediately push druid to top-tier. They could have HOF'ed the card IMO, but instead they chose to nerf it. Either way, the point was not to get rid of ramp but to free up design space for cheap ramp cards, as they're such a core aspect of the druid identity.
The same argument can be made for other class cards; notably a lot of the mage evergreen set is extremely powerful, think Frostbolt, Frost Nova and to a lesser extent Blizzard and Fireball. Now you can argue that these cards are doing their job at providing a playable skeleton for mages to build around, but at the same time it seems pretty obvious that mage rarely gets good burn or freeze effects because of how dominant its evergreen cards are.
Learn something new every day. Are you guaranteed a special quest or is it just a chance to reroll into one? Pretty sure this hasn't happened to me and it's not like I never reroll quests...
I would be very surprised if you could reroll normal daily quests into these special holiday gold&dust quests. Does this work? Can anyone else confirm?
Even Rez Priest is like less than 10% of the ladder.
Everyone's playing Rogue now because it beats all of those decks (and most others)
There's a new druid deck revolving around witching hour and the new druid taunt.
I maybe ran into that one twice within the last two days, so it can't be popular enough to complain about.
I played around casual for the last 2 days I saw this deck in around half my games (played 15 I think) it's gaining popularity.. it reminds me of res priest.. and the worst of all is that you can't really sheep or hex the annoying minion cause it's untargetable.. (well sheep or hex still makes witching hour less consistent... like with hadronox)
I played the deck a bit it can be rushed down.. or get out controlled with perfect control draws of control warrior.. but galakround warrior seem to have no chance against it.. similar to res priest actually it's also really good vs face hunter it got taunts, heals.. and armor gain.
it's interesting how one card created a full deck I kind of regret not rating the card a 5 star card (put it at 4/5)
Odd, I haven't encountered the deck a single time yet. I just keep running into Galakrond Rogues and facehunters over and over again.
Now granted, i haven't played a whole lo, partly because of the aforementioned, but still.
As for battlegrounds, a way to scale neutral minions was and still is sorely needed; almost all of the buffs and scaling mechanisms in the game, especially if you disregard heropowers, are limited to tribes, which excludes the vast majority of neutral minions from lategame feasibility. Outside of Baron, Brann and Lightfang, there aren't really any neutral minions you'd want in an end-game lineup. Well, maybe soul juggler in a demon build or Kangor's apprentice in a mech build, but you get the picture.
Giving neutral minions scaling options automatically makes the game a bit more diverse as you're not limited to [tribe] or menagerie. I'd love to see several minions that buff neutral minions the same way you have several ways to buff tribal minions. otherwise you're still only going to see lategame boogie monsters and such in Tyrone builds. A neutral 'lord' a la Murloc Warleader would be nice too.
You can always choose to not cheese them. You can build sub-optimal or straight-up meme decks and challenge yourself that way.
I mean, how do you design a boss that's fun but can't be cheesed out by the 3000+ cards in the game? It's the reason they switched to the Dungeon Run style in the first place.
That's a fair point. I suppose these heroic challenges would be a bit more tricky for players with very limited card pools.
One way to address this issue would be to make these kinds of adventures standard-only (I.e for the standard card pool available at that time, not one that refreshes). That would make it a lot easier for the devs to create challenging bosses that can still be beaten by the much more limited card pool in any given standard set.
Another alternative would be to introduce a third difficulty tier for masochists with access to all of the cheese available in wild.
So far all of the bosses can be cheesed out with the usual suspects, heck I beat more than half of them with Shirvallah paladin. The reborn guy was a bit tricky though, he's pretty good against most board clears, but he gets absolutely demolished by Psychic Scream, so reanimator priest with Velen, Maly and good stuff did the trick for me.
But a decent draw with Exodia mage should work as well; even with one mana advantage that guy is still pretty slow for a final boss. I suppose budget players could probably beat him with Divine Spirit/[Hearthstone Card (Inner Fir) Not Found]e priest and a lucky draw with Wild Pyromancer. Silence is also obviously very strong in this fight.
Definitely in Wild Quest Mage! Already jammed it in a deck!
Funny how excited such an innocent little card can get you.
Good spot! This card has terrific synergy with Open the Waygates as it's a free quest trigger, not to mention the fact that it's a coin, which is insanely useful at getting clunkier random mage spells out of your hand. And a solid statline to boot on a turn where you're limited on options anyway.
Probably an auto 2-of in non-highlander OTK quest mage, both the giants and the Tony version.
I'M not sure I understand how it works. Does it buff a random minion with its attack or does it change a friendly minions attack to whatever it had at the time of death?
Used it in the solo adventure, it adds the attack.. If it would set the attack it would use the word "set" like subdue.
I think the word "add" or "gains" would have been less ambiguous than "gives", which to me intuitively replaces the existing attack value with the new one. I guess what's missing for me in the wording of this card is the '+' symbol. Any other buff in the game (that I can think of right now) is worded as "gives +x/+y", which makes it clear the stats are added to the existing ones rather than replacing them.
I just finished the first chapter of heroic for both sides, and I have to say I'm a little bit underwhelmed by the bosses so far. In terms of difficulty, they're a step up from most of the kharazan and Frozen Throne bosses, but still a bit too easy for my tastes. The other thing that bugged me a little is that in the EVIL wing, the last fight felt significantly easier than the other two.
I expect they'll do a bit of balance tweaking in the upcoming days; personally I hope the next chapters are a bit spicier. Also, does anyone know whether we're going to need 700 or 1400 gold each week, IE whether you have to unlock both halves of a chapter individually?
I really like the design of this card, including the demon tag. Probably not as exploitable as happy ghoul, but definitely similar.
Probably more exploitable? Damage dealt from board also counts, whereas you had to play healing cards to activate happy ghoul.
You need to deal 4 damage to an opponent's face to discount this to zero, which probably won't happen until turn 3 or later. If you can stick a 1 drop uncontested, then sure you can play this as a 2 mana 3/3, but that's a lot more fair than the old Healzoo nuts. I don't think you'd want to Soulfire this out on turn one.
The other thing is that there's no real counterplay to WL hitting himself and then healing back up, whereas if you know you're facing frenzied Felwing you can value not taking damage that much higher and use your resources accordingly.
Since you can't continuously cycle through your deck with this lie you would with Auctioneer, I guess this is more of a one-shot refill than a true "miracle" card. However, until Myra's rotates out I think this card is outclassed as a refill tool. Rogue isn't exactly hurting for ways to draw single cards either.
Wolf Rider sees play in face decks but not really as a finisher. It's just damage from hand. But suppose Wolf rider were to take Leeroys place due to lack of alternatives, I'm sure the same people who get triggered by losing to leeroy would have a similarly negative reaction to ole' wolfy.
The way I see it, "feels bad to lose against" is incredibly subjective and personal, hence not a strong reason to change things .
Assuming some other card has to be printed to fill the void, then no, that's not a particularly strong reason to HoF Leeroy. You'll still have that not-fun experience losing to a topdecked Killroy Watkins even if it's a brand-spanking new card, and as I mentioned earlier, a lot of people don't have strong negative feelings toward leeroy to begin with. Sure, it's not *fun* to lose to topdeck leeroy, but the same is true for any number of other ways to lose.
I agree that in the present meta, rush (and other removal tools) are a bit too dominant. Now it's generally true that the tail-end of the year favours control and combo(because the more cards there are in standard, the easier it is to craft a fine-tuned control deck that can deal with various threats) and it's also true that despite this, we're in a pretty aggro/face-heavy meta, but the successful aggro decks, mainly facehunter and rogue, more or less ignore the board by mid-game and have a ton of burst from hand. It feels like decks that try to win early via the board are just dead in the water ATM, which is definitely a problem, because it's that much less fun to lose against a face deck that can't be controlled via the board.
One can only hope that the standard rotation will deal with some of the problem cards and that subsequent expansions will be a bit less Rush-heavy. I also wouldn't mind a further nerf to Faceless Corruptor, because that card is still busted AF and completely negates any sort of early tempo advantage an aggro deck might want to build. I wouldn't mind seeing the health of that minion go down to 3 or 2 so that it doesn't value-trade as conveniently. 5 mana: deal 4 damage to 2 minions is still decent tempo even if the card doesn't leave behind two bodies. Right now even if you keep the board clear 6 mana: play a lackey and a faceless is still far too backbreaking for (board-centric) aggro to deal with.
I disagree, I think having some limited amount of burst damage in neutral/evergreen is healthy for the game. Aggro decks are a necessary component to the balancing act of aggro-control-combo, and without evergreen cards to provide a baseline, it'd just mean more expansion cards have to be printed to fill that void.
I can see the argument for minor nerfing/tweaking, maybe moving him down to 5 damage would be a bit more fair, especially since he does limit the design space for finishers, but I think a card like Leeroy is going to be needed to have aggro be viable for a consistently healthy meta.
Now that hat the cat is out of the bag, I sure am glad for my pessimistic initial take because things are so much worse than I'd imagined.
Apparently the PR department completely overhyped what reforged was going to be, setting unrealistic goals for the devs and making promises to fans that couldn't be met with how many resources Blizzard actually invested into this remake. But even if we set that aside, like I said in my first post, I think the rot goes all the way back to the core concept here: remaking a beloved game 18 years down the line. There's no way that game could ever have lived up to the fond memories and nostalgia of the original WC3. Hell, I would argue that even the idea of "improving" the graphics was a giant misstep: WC3 characters were designed for low-poly models and the two go together perfectly. Keeping the character designs but improving the visual fidelity turns these characters into misshapen nightmare fuel, much like turning Sonic from a cartoon into a 3D CGI creature made him a monstrosity. Adapting any design to a new medium is tricky, and this is one of the worst examples in recent years. For a game that does very little besides "update" the graphics, it's a crying shame that even those came out looking WORSE than the game that's old enough to drive and enlist at this point.
Dr. Boom, Mad Genius for me. The card is fine, but I never had all the required cards for the pimped out warrior deck so I'd invariably lose to the other warriors, at which point there no point in playing the deck, really. And I don't even enjoy paying control warrior, so there's that.
Tyrone wouldn't be nearly as powerful relative to other heroes if there were minions that could buff neutrals (besides Defender of Argus). Right now neutrals are essentially balanced around the fact that they fall off hard toward late game and Tyrion is the one exception to that rule. (And Edwin, and Daryl and...) Most heroes cannot scale a tribeless minion, so outside of key enablers like Brann, Lightfang, Baron, Soul Juggler, etc. they don't see much play.
If everyone can buff their neutrals then it's no longer as powerful of an ability: other players have access to it and now they're also competing for your picks. That said it probably should cost 2 gold because it's a board-wide buff that's incredibly easy to set up. Like I said, the tribeless minions are overpowered relative to their level to compensate for the downside of lacking a tribe, but with Tyrion that's a feature, not a bug.
FWIW I'm EU and I got a special event quest today. Not sure exactly when it got added but It wasn't there when I completed my daily quest after midnight and it was there when I logged in around 2 PM.
Pretty much what Bystekhilcar said, the problem wasn't Wild Growth per se, it was the fact that Wild Growth existing as an evergreen card at that power level meant that any other ramp card they printed in future expansions would have to be piss-poor or it'd immediately push druid to top-tier. They could have HOF'ed the card IMO, but instead they chose to nerf it. Either way, the point was not to get rid of ramp but to free up design space for cheap ramp cards, as they're such a core aspect of the druid identity.
The same argument can be made for other class cards; notably a lot of the mage evergreen set is extremely powerful, think Frostbolt, Frost Nova and to a lesser extent Blizzard and Fireball. Now you can argue that these cards are doing their job at providing a playable skeleton for mages to build around, but at the same time it seems pretty obvious that mage rarely gets good burn or freeze effects because of how dominant its evergreen cards are.
You'd get one normal and one special quest, but apparently there's a chance to reroll that normal quest into a holiday quest as well
Learn something new every day. Are you guaranteed a special quest or is it just a chance to reroll into one? Pretty sure this hasn't happened to me and it's not like I never reroll quests...
I would be very surprised if you could reroll normal daily quests into these special holiday gold&dust quests. Does this work? Can anyone else confirm?
Odd, I haven't encountered the deck a single time yet. I just keep running into Galakrond Rogues and facehunters over and over again.
Now granted, i haven't played a whole lo, partly because of the aforementioned, but still.
As for battlegrounds, a way to scale neutral minions was and still is sorely needed; almost all of the buffs and scaling mechanisms in the game, especially if you disregard heropowers, are limited to tribes, which excludes the vast majority of neutral minions from lategame feasibility. Outside of Baron, Brann and Lightfang, there aren't really any neutral minions you'd want in an end-game lineup. Well, maybe soul juggler in a demon build or Kangor's apprentice in a mech build, but you get the picture.
Giving neutral minions scaling options automatically makes the game a bit more diverse as you're not limited to [tribe] or menagerie. I'd love to see several minions that buff neutral minions the same way you have several ways to buff tribal minions. otherwise you're still only going to see lategame boogie monsters and such in Tyrone builds. A neutral 'lord' a la Murloc Warleader would be nice too.
That's a fair point. I suppose these heroic challenges would be a bit more tricky for players with very limited card pools.
One way to address this issue would be to make these kinds of adventures standard-only (I.e for the standard card pool available at that time, not one that refreshes). That would make it a lot easier for the devs to create challenging bosses that can still be beaten by the much more limited card pool in any given standard set.
Another alternative would be to introduce a third difficulty tier for masochists with access to all of the cheese available in wild.
So far all of the bosses can be cheesed out with the usual suspects, heck I beat more than half of them with Shirvallah paladin. The reborn guy was a bit tricky though, he's pretty good against most board clears, but he gets absolutely demolished by Psychic Scream, so reanimator priest with Velen, Maly and good stuff did the trick for me.
But a decent draw with Exodia mage should work as well; even with one mana advantage that guy is still pretty slow for a final boss. I suppose budget players could probably beat him with Divine Spirit/[Hearthstone Card (Inner Fir) Not Found]e priest and a lucky draw with Wild Pyromancer. Silence is also obviously very strong in this fight.
Good spot! This card has terrific synergy with Open the Waygates as it's a free quest trigger, not to mention the fact that it's a coin, which is insanely useful at getting clunkier random mage spells out of your hand. And a solid statline to boot on a turn where you're limited on options anyway.
Probably an auto 2-of in non-highlander OTK quest mage, both the giants and the Tony version.
I think the word "add" or "gains" would have been less ambiguous than "gives", which to me intuitively replaces the existing attack value with the new one. I guess what's missing for me in the wording of this card is the '+' symbol. Any other buff in the game (that I can think of right now) is worded as "gives +x/+y", which makes it clear the stats are added to the existing ones rather than replacing them.
I just finished the first chapter of heroic for both sides, and I have to say I'm a little bit underwhelmed by the bosses so far. In terms of difficulty, they're a step up from most of the kharazan and Frozen Throne bosses, but still a bit too easy for my tastes. The other thing that bugged me a little is that in the EVIL wing, the last fight felt significantly easier than the other two.
I expect they'll do a bit of balance tweaking in the upcoming days; personally I hope the next chapters are a bit spicier. Also, does anyone know whether we're going to need 700 or 1400 gold each week, IE whether you have to unlock both halves of a chapter individually?
You need to deal 4 damage to an opponent's face to discount this to zero, which probably won't happen until turn 3 or later. If you can stick a 1 drop uncontested, then sure you can play this as a 2 mana 3/3, but that's a lot more fair than the old Healzoo nuts. I don't think you'd want to Soulfire this out on turn one.
The other thing is that there's no real counterplay to WL hitting himself and then healing back up, whereas if you know you're facing frenzied Felwing you can value not taking damage that much higher and use your resources accordingly.
Since you can't continuously cycle through your deck with this lie you would with Auctioneer, I guess this is more of a one-shot refill than a true "miracle" card. However, until Myra's rotates out I think this card is outclassed as a refill tool. Rogue isn't exactly hurting for ways to draw single cards either.
I haven't actually played the deck, but wouldn't this be quite nuts in OTK maly quest druid? You know, the one with Elyse + Floop shenanigans.