I think T5 needs to implement a new policy whereby they have someone slap them with a smelly cod every time they attempt to print a card that gives two overstatted bodies at an unreasonably low manacost. Oasis Surger, Faceless Corrupter, Dragons Pack, can we just skip the cycle of inevitable nerfs and not have cards like these printed? Thanks.
This should have been included in the first round of nerfs instead of my boy Sludge Slurper. Of the two cards, Invocation of Frost is the one plainly cheating the mana curve, not the 1 mana 2/1 with overload.
Good idea. On that note they should probably also update the top right corner cheat sheet and remove amalgam from the list while it's not in the card pool.
Well every match is different I suppose (except he ALWAYS has Rakanishu on turn 2, wtf). Ultimately he just has way too much board presence through 4/4 lackeys, too much damage with C'Thun, and too much sustainability with Khartut Defenders and Obsidian Statues (and resurrecting those bastards over and over).
I had the good fortune of stealing Tekahn's Rakanishu with Reno's whip, so that's one approach you could try if you're being crushed by the first form. Without 4/4 lackeys Tekahn can't really do all that much besides spam golems, so you can comfortably set up for some big plays by keeping him stuck in that form. If you do lose the board, the enflamed golems themselves are a really good way to reset the board: kill two and they'll take any other golems to the grave with them. Just make sure you have a way to kill the last golem that pops out of the deathrattle and you're golden.
Finley with the lifesteal weapon and discover a minion hero power. IIRC i got him down on the first try.
And yea, the 300hp bosses thing really killed my enthusiasm for it. The replay value is so low. I played Dalaran Heist for a few months, but this one felt like an unfun chore.
Don't really know why so many people hated the 300hp bosses. At least your progress is saved, and having those one-run kills has been genuinely fun for me.
In K&C the 7-final bosses were so disgustingly unfair till this day I still get PTSD from it having grinded all the classes to get that fantastic card back. There's nothing like wasting 45 min to get to the final only to get your toosh handed to you by some of the most unfair bosses designed specifically to induce rage quitting
I preferred the K&C bosses because they felt like a real challenge that required an exceptionally strong deck to beat. Getting a 300 hp boss down in one go feels great, sure, but the fact that you can just whittle away at them with mediocre decks and still beat them in the end makes winning more of a foregone conclusion and a slog, if you ask me. Unless you have an amazing deck chances are you're going to have to do the whole run at least twice. For me, the original dungeon run was just about the right level of difficulty, whereas the newer versions of the concept have all been a bit too easy.
It's not fun to lose to the last boss in a run, but it's not very satisfying if you breeze through your runs without difficulty either. Where exactly the line is is obviously subjective, but I wouldn't mind heroic being a bit more of a challenge. It's heroic, after all, it's not supposed to be easy. So long as all the playable content can be unlocked in normal mode I don't see a reason why they shouldn't have heroic cater a bit more toward the niche of masochists that enjoy beating (and getting beat up by) overpowered bosses. It makes that card back a bit more meaningful as a badge of honour rather than a participation trophy. Is there such a thing as bosses that are too strong? Again, that's subjective, but for me some of the BRM bosses like Drakkisath and Maloriak were a painful chore to beat. That said, even the stronger bosses in dungeon run style adventures tend to give you some breathing room early on, which makes the experience feel a lot less oppressive even if you do end up losing, IMO.
Honestly, I found Tekahn to be by far the easiest plague-boss to beat, so much so that I had to go back and fight him again just to remember what he was like. Beat him on the first go, again.
It might help if you could describe what's going wrong for you when you fight him.
It does not matter how much patience or skill is required to play a mill deck. Patience and skill are not the criteria for whether something should be allowed in the game. The fact that it exists in other games is also not a criterion.
Decks with milling as a win condition should be actively discouraged in Standard because Hearthstone lacks the mechanical infrastructure to allow a player to tech against it. Saying you should "learn to play around it" is a ridiculous oversimplification. For some archetypes, that is literally impossible.
If they print an evergreen neutral card that lets me move my "graveyard" into my deck, I might reconsider my position.
Loads of decks can't beat OTK combos except by going face. Cards in hand are almost entirely untouchable in standard HS at the moment.
Why the hell should combo and control players feel safe in the know that THEIR win condition can't be disrupted by other players when every other wincon can be? I'm not averse to the idea of more interaction, but dear god let's not pretend that all the strategies already in the game have adequate tech counters. It's been years since my old pal Dirty Rat was in standard...
I was pretty disappointed when Coldlight Oracle got HOFed even though I don't think I've played a mill deck in HS ever. I think having alternate win conditions and counters to combo strategies (like overdrawing key combo pieces) is important to the game's overall health. For example, I don't think control warrior would've been as dominant over the past year if milling had been a viable strategy in standard.
The more viable strategies there are, the less likely it is a single strategy will become meta-game warping.
I’d say one of the bigger problems Priest has is the fact that so many of their healing cards can’t match up to what other classes have in terms of healing/armor. If you want to play a control deck you’d often have better survivability just by choosing another class.
I’d argue that it’s Auchenai that’s causing a lot of Priest’s problems these days, since it means Priest’s healing cards are always being made with that in mind. If Auchenai didn’t exist, then Priest probably would’ve gotten Forbidden Healing and a bunch of other nice healing cards. Priest’s thing is supposed to be healing, but you almost never really see that
Galakrond not helping the class just shows another case of Priest having problems rooted deeply into the class itself.
I see where you're coming from WRT Auchenai being a constant design constraint, but regarding self-heals we've already seen numerous cards that can only heal friendly characters in priest specifically so they could print bigger heals that can't be used to kill an enemy with Auchenai. CF: Greater Healing Potion, Radiance & Divine Hymn. Priest can heal itself for a ton if it wants, but a lot of the newer healing cards don't play nice with the Soulpriest, which leads to the question why she's even in classic.
To be clear, I can definitely see the argument for HOFing Auchenai, but it's a bit more complicated than that they can't print powerful healing effects.
Unfortunately, as long as Auchenai exists in its current state, there's no way to prevent it from restricting the design of new targeted healing cards. Even a HoF doesn't do much because they can't ignore balance in wild. Priest is a real mess of a class. They need to rework its basic and classic set to prevent stuff like this from happening (and to stop the need for printing insane cards for the class every expansion).
Auchenai Phantasm and Embrace the Shadow exist in wild for a more combo-able version of the auchenai-effect. I don't think the kind of play those cards reinforce (degenerate OTKs with Velen, mainly) is necessarily a concern for wild, but it's definitely something that affects the power of newly printed healing cards in priest, especially spells. Not having an evergreen Auchenai card would allow the devs to print stronger heals that could go face in wild, whereas the current schema basically forces the devs to print cards that are hard-written to not work with auchenai and/or be weak, forever.
As for the commenter that said that HOTing Auchenai would leave the class even more dead in the water, yes, but I think most people arguing for HOF want to see that happen in the context of a full overhaul of the evergreen priest cards, so the expectation is that priests would get something back in return for losing the shadow priest stuff.
I’d say one of the bigger problems Priest has is the fact that so many of their healing cards can’t match up to what other classes have in terms of healing/armor. If you want to play a control deck you’d often have better survivability just by choosing another class.
I’d argue that it’s Auchenai that’s causing a lot of Priest’s problems these days, since it means Priest’s healing cards are always being made with that in mind. If Auchenai didn’t exist, then Priest probably would’ve gotten Forbidden Healing and a bunch of other nice healing cards. Priest’s thing is supposed to be healing, but you almost never really see that
Galakrond not helping the class just shows another case of Priest having problems rooted deeply into the class itself.
I see where you're coming from WRT Auchenai being a constant design constraint, but regarding self-heals we've already seen numerous cards that can only heal friendly characters in priest specifically so they could print bigger heals that can't be used to kill an enemy with Auchenai. CF: Greater Healing Potion, Radiance & Divine Hymn. Priest can heal itself for a ton if it wants, but a lot of the newer healing cards don't play nice with the Soulpriest, which leads to the question why she's even in classic.
To be clear, I can definitely see the argument for HOFing Auchenai, but it's a bit more complicated than that they can't print powerful healing effects.
Priest's invoke was probably balanced with Dr. Boom in mind, not to mention the fact that the class has Princess Talanji. That said, it's the least scary Galakrond invoke by a wide margin because it rarely has any impact on early/midgame tempo, which is really when most Galakrond decks want a leg up from their invokes.
I like the idea of stealing cards from the opponent's (starting) deck, but I feel it'd probably still be way too gimmicky to be playable. Generating dragons instead of priest minions would also be a slight improvement, but again too slow. The only way I see the HP be playable at the moment is if it discounts the minions it generates by 1-2 mana so the invokes actually generate some tempo, not just value. In all probability that'd still mean the discounted card comes down a turn later, but at least it'd be overperforming compared to what you paid for it.
I haven't played that much since the nerfs, just daily quests basically, but I pretty handily beat quest/galakrond shaman with Lackey Zoolock, so yeah, even with a small sample size, I have to say the nerfs were effective. I expect the meta to evolve quite a bit now that there's room to experiment without one S-tier deck warping the entire field.
I'm actually wondering how long it'll take someone to make this work in an infinite Shudderwock deck again. Surprised Blizzard went and made this mistake again after having to nerf Saronite Chain Gang. Admittedly, it's a bit too slow for the current meta, but things can change with nerfs incoming.
The combo is much less reliable than the old Saronite+Grumble one, and the payoff is much worse as well as this doesn't give you 1 cost Shudderwocks either, so at best "infinite" means playing 1 Shudderwock per turn for the rest of the game. But the bigger issue is the unreliability of the combo due to the extra hurdle of requiring bodies on board to transform into shudderwock copies: if you get your corruptor procs before you spawn your tokens, or if your barista procs before your tokens are transformed you're screwed.
I think the reason they don't change the evolve mana cost is to do with UI simplicity. Mousing over a minion that was summoned for a different mana cost, you would need to see both - the original cost and what it was summoned for. I think that goes against their paradigm of an uncluttered UI that has to present a minimum of important information.
Is there a way to do it that I'm missing?
Why would you need to see both? You don't see the vanilla stats on a (hand-)buffed minion either. You could have the altered manacost, in green, show up when you mouse over the minion and it'd be more consistent with any other type of buff or stat-change in the game.
I don't like it. I'd much rather have seen a fundamental rule-change whereby cards retain their played mana cost while they remain in play, effectively nerfing a bunch of swingy interactions involving discounted minions and cards that care about mana costs.
Instead we got the conjurer's calling nerf last season and Mogu getting whacked now, when both of those cards would be fine in a world where giants and fleshshapers retain their mana cost.
This one feels really undeserved. An indirect nerf to quest & Galakrond shaman I guess, but it does affect other archetypes like miracle, token and murloc shaman, none of which are oppressive. I don't really see how Sludge Slurper itself is OP so I don't like this nerf at all.
I suppose it depends on your definition of "aggro", but I would argue that true aggro has been very weak for most of the past year. Other than divine spirit inner fire priest, most of the top aggressive decks have slow starts and crazy power spikes in mid and late game(Conjurer mage, Galakrond/quest shaman, Beast hunter, etc.). For a large part of last year, the only deck running one-drops was Control Warrior. DoD has enabled/revived some of the more aggressive archetypes but I'd still say midrange decks that can generate oodles of value are dominating the meta, not aggro.
So that's exactly the average of 1:20 (7 legendaries in 140 packs). But have to tell you those two times I got over 30 packs between legendaries had me bummed, especially since they were back-to-back. I guess that's kind of the crux - lowering the timer would make people "feel better" since it really sucks when you hit the pity timer (or come very close) more than once in a short period.
To the anecdote from phiL up there - if I ever bought an expansion bundle and only opened for this example say 3 legendaries that would absolutely be enough to make me never spend another dollar on this game, if not quit it outright. That's the fine line any product - let alone a "loot boxy" game - has to walk: balancing getting the most money from your customers without alienating them when the odds bank against them and losing them as customer entirely. I obviously don't have any of Blizzard's data, but I can't imagine they'd lose that much money by lowering the pity time to 30 or 35 packs, which would lower the average to around 15-18 packs. Not a big swing, and would quell at least some of the bad feelings about the general lopsided value of the dusting system/duplicate epics/etc.
Now if we want to get really crazy, my thought was: Conditionally lowering the pity timer. For example, if you open 30/35/40 packs without a legendary, your next pity time is lowered to just 20/25/30 packs (pick whichever numbers you like). That way you wouldn't run into my situation where I had multiple 30+ pack opens in a row and would again lower the overall average by a little without "giving away something for free" since the majority of players rarely experience that kind of thing.
" lowering the timer would make people "feel better" since it really sucks when you hit the pity timer (or come very close) more than once in a short period."
I'm not sure it would, though. Suppose the pity timer were at 35 in the example above: Would it have been a better experience to actually hit the pity timer for legendary #5? Or would that have made opening that legend even more bittersweet? That's the problem with a pity timer: if you know about it and especially if you keep track of it, it lessens the joy of getting a legend to know it was guaranteed by the pity system. To give a more extreme example to illustrate the point: suppose instead of randomness you were guaranteed a legend every 20ieth pack, but only every 20ieth pack. It'd completely ruin the experience of opening packs because you know with certainty that the 19 packs in between are guaranteed filler, and you also know no luck was involved in opening any legendaries.
I absolutely understand that a long streak of not opening legends is a real bummer, but I don't think drastically reducing the pity timer would be a satisfying fix. I think increasing the drop rate for legendaries would similarly reduce the occurrence of long dry spells while at the same time increasing the number of very positive player experiences, like getting back-to-back legendaries.
I have been counting my pack openings for almost 2 years now, and I can say that in my case, opening over 25 packs without legendary is more common than obtaining one within the first 20 packs (guaranteed legendary within 10 packs at the start of any expansion excluded).
That seems unlucky but certainly not impossible if the 1-in-20 stat is true, unless you've bought inordinate numbers of packs. I don't know in what form you've collected the data but I'd be very interested to see a distribution of the intervals between legendaries and how closely it reflects the bell curve you'd expect.
I looked into it and according to the wiki Blizzard has confirmed a 1-in-5 average drop rate for epics and 1-in-20 for legendaries in order to comply with a chinese law regarding lootboxes, although that announcement may only apply to the Chinese region. https://hearthstone.gamepedia.com/Card_pack#Statistics
I think T5 needs to implement a new policy whereby they have someone slap them with a smelly cod every time they attempt to print a card that gives two overstatted bodies at an unreasonably low manacost. Oasis Surger, Faceless Corrupter, Dragons Pack, can we just skip the cycle of inevitable nerfs and not have cards like these printed? Thanks.
This should have been included in the first round of nerfs instead of my boy Sludge Slurper. Of the two cards, Invocation of Frost is the one plainly cheating the mana curve, not the 1 mana 2/1 with overload.
Good idea. On that note they should probably also update the top right corner cheat sheet and remove amalgam from the list while it's not in the card pool.
I had the good fortune of stealing Tekahn's Rakanishu with Reno's whip, so that's one approach you could try if you're being crushed by the first form. Without 4/4 lackeys Tekahn can't really do all that much besides spam golems, so you can comfortably set up for some big plays by keeping him stuck in that form. If you do lose the board, the enflamed golems themselves are a really good way to reset the board: kill two and they'll take any other golems to the grave with them. Just make sure you have a way to kill the last golem that pops out of the deathrattle and you're golden.
I preferred the K&C bosses because they felt like a real challenge that required an exceptionally strong deck to beat. Getting a 300 hp boss down in one go feels great, sure, but the fact that you can just whittle away at them with mediocre decks and still beat them in the end makes winning more of a foregone conclusion and a slog, if you ask me. Unless you have an amazing deck chances are you're going to have to do the whole run at least twice. For me, the original dungeon run was just about the right level of difficulty, whereas the newer versions of the concept have all been a bit too easy.
It's not fun to lose to the last boss in a run, but it's not very satisfying if you breeze through your runs without difficulty either. Where exactly the line is is obviously subjective, but I wouldn't mind heroic being a bit more of a challenge. It's heroic, after all, it's not supposed to be easy. So long as all the playable content can be unlocked in normal mode I don't see a reason why they shouldn't have heroic cater a bit more toward the niche of masochists that enjoy beating (and getting beat up by) overpowered bosses. It makes that card back a bit more meaningful as a badge of honour rather than a participation trophy. Is there such a thing as bosses that are too strong? Again, that's subjective, but for me some of the BRM bosses like Drakkisath and Maloriak were a painful chore to beat. That said, even the stronger bosses in dungeon run style adventures tend to give you some breathing room early on, which makes the experience feel a lot less oppressive even if you do end up losing, IMO.
Honestly, I found Tekahn to be by far the easiest plague-boss to beat, so much so that I had to go back and fight him again just to remember what he was like. Beat him on the first go, again.
It might help if you could describe what's going wrong for you when you fight him.
Loads of decks can't beat OTK combos except by going face. Cards in hand are almost entirely untouchable in standard HS at the moment.
Why the hell should combo and control players feel safe in the know that THEIR win condition can't be disrupted by other players when every other wincon can be? I'm not averse to the idea of more interaction, but dear god let's not pretend that all the strategies already in the game have adequate tech counters. It's been years since my old pal Dirty Rat was in standard...
I was pretty disappointed when Coldlight Oracle got HOFed even though I don't think I've played a mill deck in HS ever. I think having alternate win conditions and counters to combo strategies (like overdrawing key combo pieces) is important to the game's overall health. For example, I don't think control warrior would've been as dominant over the past year if milling had been a viable strategy in standard.
The more viable strategies there are, the less likely it is a single strategy will become meta-game warping.
Auchenai Phantasm and Embrace the Shadow exist in wild for a more combo-able version of the auchenai-effect. I don't think the kind of play those cards reinforce (degenerate OTKs with Velen, mainly) is necessarily a concern for wild, but it's definitely something that affects the power of newly printed healing cards in priest, especially spells. Not having an evergreen Auchenai card would allow the devs to print stronger heals that could go face in wild, whereas the current schema basically forces the devs to print cards that are hard-written to not work with auchenai and/or be weak, forever.
As for the commenter that said that HOTing Auchenai would leave the class even more dead in the water, yes, but I think most people arguing for HOF want to see that happen in the context of a full overhaul of the evergreen priest cards, so the expectation is that priests would get something back in return for losing the shadow priest stuff.
I see where you're coming from WRT Auchenai being a constant design constraint, but regarding self-heals we've already seen numerous cards that can only heal friendly characters in priest specifically so they could print bigger heals that can't be used to kill an enemy with Auchenai. CF: Greater Healing Potion, Radiance & Divine Hymn. Priest can heal itself for a ton if it wants, but a lot of the newer healing cards don't play nice with the Soulpriest, which leads to the question why she's even in classic.
To be clear, I can definitely see the argument for HOFing Auchenai, but it's a bit more complicated than that they can't print powerful healing effects.
Priest's invoke was probably balanced with Dr. Boom in mind, not to mention the fact that the class has Princess Talanji. That said, it's the least scary Galakrond invoke by a wide margin because it rarely has any impact on early/midgame tempo, which is really when most Galakrond decks want a leg up from their invokes.
I like the idea of stealing cards from the opponent's (starting) deck, but I feel it'd probably still be way too gimmicky to be playable. Generating dragons instead of priest minions would also be a slight improvement, but again too slow. The only way I see the HP be playable at the moment is if it discounts the minions it generates by 1-2 mana so the invokes actually generate some tempo, not just value. In all probability that'd still mean the discounted card comes down a turn later, but at least it'd be overperforming compared to what you paid for it.
I haven't played that much since the nerfs, just daily quests basically, but I pretty handily beat quest/galakrond shaman with Lackey Zoolock, so yeah, even with a small sample size, I have to say the nerfs were effective. I expect the meta to evolve quite a bit now that there's room to experiment without one S-tier deck warping the entire field.
The combo is much less reliable than the old Saronite+Grumble one, and the payoff is much worse as well as this doesn't give you 1 cost Shudderwocks either, so at best "infinite" means playing 1 Shudderwock per turn for the rest of the game. But the bigger issue is the unreliability of the combo due to the extra hurdle of requiring bodies on board to transform into shudderwock copies: if you get your corruptor procs before you spawn your tokens, or if your barista procs before your tokens are transformed you're screwed.
Why would you need to see both? You don't see the vanilla stats on a (hand-)buffed minion either. You could have the altered manacost, in green, show up when you mouse over the minion and it'd be more consistent with any other type of buff or stat-change in the game.
I don't like it. I'd much rather have seen a fundamental rule-change whereby cards retain their played mana cost while they remain in play, effectively nerfing a bunch of swingy interactions involving discounted minions and cards that care about mana costs.
Instead we got the conjurer's calling nerf last season and Mogu getting whacked now, when both of those cards would be fine in a world where giants and fleshshapers retain their mana cost.
They should have increased its cost IMO. This is a tiny nerf to a massive card.
This one feels really undeserved. An indirect nerf to quest & Galakrond shaman I guess, but it does affect other archetypes like miracle, token and murloc shaman, none of which are oppressive. I don't really see how Sludge Slurper itself is OP so I don't like this nerf at all.
I suppose it depends on your definition of "aggro", but I would argue that true aggro has been very weak for most of the past year. Other than divine spirit inner fire priest, most of the top aggressive decks have slow starts and crazy power spikes in mid and late game(Conjurer mage, Galakrond/quest shaman, Beast hunter, etc.). For a large part of last year, the only deck running one-drops was Control Warrior. DoD has enabled/revived some of the more aggressive archetypes but I'd still say midrange decks that can generate oodles of value are dominating the meta, not aggro.
" lowering the timer would make people "feel better" since it really sucks when you hit the pity timer (or come very close) more than once in a short period."
I'm not sure it would, though. Suppose the pity timer were at 35 in the example above: Would it have been a better experience to actually hit the pity timer for legendary #5? Or would that have made opening that legend even more bittersweet? That's the problem with a pity timer: if you know about it and especially if you keep track of it, it lessens the joy of getting a legend to know it was guaranteed by the pity system. To give a more extreme example to illustrate the point: suppose instead of randomness you were guaranteed a legend every 20ieth pack, but only every 20ieth pack. It'd completely ruin the experience of opening packs because you know with certainty that the 19 packs in between are guaranteed filler, and you also know no luck was involved in opening any legendaries.
I absolutely understand that a long streak of not opening legends is a real bummer, but I don't think drastically reducing the pity timer would be a satisfying fix. I think increasing the drop rate for legendaries would similarly reduce the occurrence of long dry spells while at the same time increasing the number of very positive player experiences, like getting back-to-back legendaries.
That seems unlucky but certainly not impossible if the 1-in-20 stat is true, unless you've bought inordinate numbers of packs. I don't know in what form you've collected the data but I'd be very interested to see a distribution of the intervals between legendaries and how closely it reflects the bell curve you'd expect.
I looked into it and according to the wiki Blizzard has confirmed a 1-in-5 average drop rate for epics and 1-in-20 for legendaries in order to comply with a chinese law regarding lootboxes, although that announcement may only apply to the Chinese region. https://hearthstone.gamepedia.com/Card_pack#Statistics