I was discussing it from a gameplay point of view more than how effective it will be, since we don't have nearly enough information to comment on that at the moment. I'd be surprised if playing against it didn't feel like playing against bomb warrior. Both encourage passive, defensive gameplay along with healing (the legendary pay-off effect is literally that), that ends up very boring to outright frustrating to play against. How good warlock is at doing that (both initially and within it's 2 year lifespan in Standard) doesn't change much in that regard.
I'm not completely hating on the design though. I do like that there is the option to spend 2 mana to halve the damage taken from each curse. And even without that it is a genuine improvement over bomb warrior because you won't get blind-sided out of nowhere by randomly drawing several bombs and losing a game you were just about to win.
So at least it is a positive refinement on an old, contentious deck. That's a serious step up from them printing the hunter questline when people were fed up of Raza priest in Wild!
I'm a bit surprised this wasn't fish N'Zoth, but nvm. The bigger point is that this is an inevitable legendary to fly the flag for warlock's new curses. I never like playing warlock, so I won't bother estimating how fun or powerful it will be, especially before we know how many other curse cards there are.
What I can do is draw parallels with bomb warrior, a deck that gave a bunch of damage-dealing things to their opponent while stalling and gaining health/armour. The plan of this curse-lock looks to be more or less the same. Was bomb warrior fun to play against? Absolutely not, though I suppose we at least know when we're taking curse damage so that's an improvement. So my expectation is it's a slight refinement of a deck that was a real stinker to play against. Yay...
Practically speaking there are currently only 2 sunken cards though: Ambassador Faelin and 1 for whichever class you are playing. So no single deck has much to use dredge on yet.
Of course drawing your whole deck is another option, but even in modern HS that still way slower than dredging if the goal is to get the thing you sunk. Indeed, several of the sunken cards would make no sense if you drew them last since a significant part of what they do requires you to still have a deck.
They've not shown us anything yet that suggests a "dredge package" really exists beyond running a couple of cards. My guess is either the other half of the rogue cards are about dredge shenanigans, which is plausible, or the keyword is never meant to play more than a secondary/supporting role in decks.
I think she's a mechagnome. There are a few different things that term applies to, but it always amounts to them being somewhere on the spectrum between fully mechanical titan creation to the fully biological 'normal' gnomes.
A bit of Warcraft history: gnomes, humans and dwarfs began as titan constructs and were afflicted by the curse of flesh, leading to the biological forms we're used to. But unaffected characters continue to exist, and some mechagnomes are part way between flesh and machine. My guess is Ini is one of those, so whether she is a mech or not is ambiguous.
On the contrary I feel like this is why class identity is overrated. If Druid wasn't able to deal with wide boards in shape or form while also not being allowed to have viable single-target removal then the entire ramp playstyle would just be doomed. Scale of Onyxia is quite literally a worse flamestrike and is only even enabled because Druid has ramp. The problem is that the amount of effective ramp has reached absurd levels right now and therefore cards that would be balanced in another scenario are now suddenly really nuts.
Overgrowth and Lightning Bloom are the problem here, not the fact that Druid is allowed to fight back from behind.
Ramping takes advantage of the fact bigger/more expensive cards do more in fewer turns than smaller/cheaper ones. So ramp functions fine without strong removal when against anything that doesn't kill you fast enough to undercut that advantage. That's been the central aspect of druid's design ever since Overgrowth came out, and typically present beforehand too. Overgrowth has been very highroll-y the entire time, but it dodged nerfs because it didn't lead into a comeback card like Scale of Onyxia, and thus it actually retained the weakness it was designed with. Guardian Animals got nerfed largely because it provided the good removal that Scale of Onyxia is now doing.
We can point fingers at the ramp cards, but they are what makes druid different from other classes, and we aren't seriously going to argue druid shouldn't have strong cards for its own mechanic. So unless we want to argue classes should be made homogeneous, we have to recognise class identity is important, and strengths and weaknesses need to fit with mechanics in a way that directly supports them so there is a reason to use them, while also indirectly hindering them so they don't become uncounterable.
Ultimately that's the biggest point: all decks/classes need to have some weak point(s) that opponent's can try to exploit, or it just becomes a matter of hoping they draw badly, which is not a fun experience for anyone.
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Also, Scale of Onyxia is not a worse Flamestrike. It can be against some boards, but it can also be way better, either because there's a 6+ health minion to deal with or because some whelps survive anyway.
Nope. Overgrowth and Lightning Bloom does way too much. Druid getting a way to fight the board is good because they aren't allowed to have good Aoe or Single target removal. It's only a problem when you can reliably play it at any point from turn 4 upwards.
Just hold on for another two weeks, it'll all be over soon
I'd refine that statement to: it's only a problem because druid has been designed to function well in the absence of any good AoE or single target removal.
It's a specific case of why class identity matters, regardless of how cool it might be for control hunter/rogue to work, for example. When a class is designed to have certain strengths and weaknesses, the effective removal of those weaknesses invariably leads to decks with no reliable counter, and the feeling from opponents that there is nothing they could ever have done (even at a deck building stage). Often it's associated with one class being completely dominant, and we've been there a few times before. I'm not sure that's where we are with druid right now, though the (thankfully brief) overlap of Scale of Onyxia with crazy ramp from the Year of the Phoenix puts it pretty close.
It is OK for class identities can shift over time, but it has to be a slow process with at least 2 HS years between a power card balanced by a class weakness, and a card that shores up that weakness.
So you can pull two 6-drops out with Drek'thar? I guess that's something, but I doubt it would make up for doing basically nothing the two turns before it. You are also capped at 6 mana minions for Drek'thar to work, so you are limited in what 'big' minions you want to play. Needless to say I'm not convinced.
It's also frustrating how unbalanced the tasks are. For example, I think everyone's final task is "deal 450 damage to heroic bosses." As the final task, it should be harder, but that's a piece of cake. On the other hand, the Kurtrus one was PAINFUL. You have to use an ability with cooldown and you can't choose the target. It took SO MUCH grinding. Same is true for any task you need to use summoned minions like Krush's devilsaur or Mukla's brother.
Yeah, there are some serious grinds in a few of them. I've now completed all the tasks for every merc that wasn't released a couple of weeks ago, and recall a few that just baffled me as to why they set the number so high. Warmaster Voone had one that required you to kill 2 enemies with Axe Throw... 150 times! For an ability capped at 8 damage due to having no spell school, and requiring setup just to get that far, it was ridiculous.
I think mercs they've added later have been less bad though. Long'xin had a similar task for her Celestial Breath ability (both were task 17 I think) that only required dealing 40 damage to neighbors, which was soooooo much easier. That said, I was a bit confused why her task 16 (likewise for Chi-Ji) was to deal 500 damage to heroic bosses, when they kept the same task 18 as everyone else. As you said, it's not that bad and probably quicker than the usual task 16 of dealing 900 damage to role X, but it was weird.
I've posted here before about using Cookie to grind out onerous tasks like "destroy X minions with Devilsaur (or other summoned minion)". Just want to add to that: if it's not too late, DO NOT upgrade Cookie's Fishing ability to level 4. If you do, the swordfish does 15 damage instead of 12, which will kill any other summoned fish. This means you cannot grind out kills endlessly.
I held off upgrading Cookie's Fishing to level 5 for a while because of this, and when I finally maxed it out I expected to have shot myself in the foot. But tbh I wasn't very bothered by it in the end. A lot of the tasks cookie helps with are still about as easy, since you can just not attack the Swordfish. It only really messes with tasks involving uncontrolled attacks that don't end up killing everything anyway, but even then I found it no more tedious grinding them across multiple fights than picking on fish within one.
So I guess my point is it may be optimal to stay at level 4, but it's not as big a deal as it first looks. Certainly the added effectiveness when not grinding can be argued to win out on balance, even if it's primarily just for the extra +1/+5 stats for maxing Cookie out.
That's a good point, and definitely a relevant consideration for burgle rogue who will generate it (or have the option to discover it) reasonably frequently. In Standard, I guess rogues will have to read the card text of both Azsharan and Sunken parts as "Add a random poison to your hand." In Wild it becomes: "Discover a nature spell, Brain Freeze or Candle Breath."
Obviously that's pretty bad in Standard, but I could see there being times you'd like that very controlled choice in Wild.
Maybe, though warrior already has a hydra minion and the key part of the art here is the ship dodging the big beastie, rather than the hydra itself. So I'm not sure how much we can read into the art here.
There are so few legendaries left to see that we can probably guess at them all now. Ini (the female mecha-gnome) is likely the last neutral. N'Zoth's fish is probably in warlock, perhaps with a bunch of associated cards to quickly make up for the serious lack of warlock reveals so far. There's a colossal minion we know the art for (see video that revealed Crabatoa) which glows so is probably shaman's. That just leave's hunter's colossal, which could be a hydra (3 heads are an obvious route to take for appendages), or maybe Ozumat if we want lots of tentacles.
I'm not sure the night elf origin really matters when you end as something completely different, nor do I think it is essential that N'Zoth was involved. Hypothetically, someone could transform a human into something identical to a naga using the same magic as N'Zoth used. Choosing not to call them a naga would be defining the race by its past, and not what it is in the present. That's an option, but I don't think it's a very useful one.
Ashvane is probably a bit too monstrous to even fit a loose definition accommodating the forms from BfA, but she's close enough on many levels that she might be helpful in establishing that definition.
Something, but not quite as much as it seems. Part of it is that it looks weak contextually since we're in a world where the Juggernaut makes it redundant in the historically obvious deck (pirates). We also know very little about what weapons warrior will have available at this point.
As far as actual weaknesses go, any mass weapon buff hits the issue of only having one weapon usable at a time, which is made worse by increasing their durability. So there are serious diminishing returns with effects like these, and in most games I'd be surprised if its buff applies to more than 2 weapons that are actually used. At which point it's not setting a particularly high bar for 'weakest legendary'.
I haven't had any luck finding out who her voice actor is though. It's a shame HS still doesn't credit anyone other than the card artists in-game. Even artists for hero portraits go un-credited, which is so weird when they tell us for cards.
What transformed her? And how is the process distinct from N'Zoth transforming the highborne into Naga? In other words, let's have a philosophical debate over whether Lady Ashvane is in fact a naga :P
I agree it's probably better, especially in the long run, but would involve a discussion about changing their design philosophy for single-set keywords. Tbh I don't even know why Evolve and Unstable Evolution count as nature spells when it is old gods magic (shadow) involved.
I was discussing it from a gameplay point of view more than how effective it will be, since we don't have nearly enough information to comment on that at the moment. I'd be surprised if playing against it didn't feel like playing against bomb warrior. Both encourage passive, defensive gameplay along with healing (the legendary pay-off effect is literally that), that ends up very boring to outright frustrating to play against. How good warlock is at doing that (both initially and within it's 2 year lifespan in Standard) doesn't change much in that regard.
I'm not completely hating on the design though. I do like that there is the option to spend 2 mana to halve the damage taken from each curse. And even without that it is a genuine improvement over bomb warrior because you won't get blind-sided out of nowhere by randomly drawing several bombs and losing a game you were just about to win.
So at least it is a positive refinement on an old, contentious deck. That's a serious step up from them printing the hunter questline when people were fed up of Raza priest in Wild!
I'm a bit surprised this wasn't fish N'Zoth, but nvm. The bigger point is that this is an inevitable legendary to fly the flag for warlock's new curses. I never like playing warlock, so I won't bother estimating how fun or powerful it will be, especially before we know how many other curse cards there are.
What I can do is draw parallels with bomb warrior, a deck that gave a bunch of damage-dealing things to their opponent while stalling and gaining health/armour. The plan of this curse-lock looks to be more or less the same. Was bomb warrior fun to play against? Absolutely not, though I suppose we at least know when we're taking curse damage so that's an improvement. So my expectation is it's a slight refinement of a deck that was a real stinker to play against. Yay...
Practically speaking there are currently only 2 sunken cards though: Ambassador Faelin and 1 for whichever class you are playing. So no single deck has much to use dredge on yet.
Of course drawing your whole deck is another option, but even in modern HS that still way slower than dredging if the goal is to get the thing you sunk. Indeed, several of the sunken cards would make no sense if you drew them last since a significant part of what they do requires you to still have a deck.
They've not shown us anything yet that suggests a "dredge package" really exists beyond running a couple of cards. My guess is either the other half of the rogue cards are about dredge shenanigans, which is plausible, or the keyword is never meant to play more than a secondary/supporting role in decks.
Maybe, or maybe it ends up like Scabbs Cutterbutter who is an appropriate comparison: crazy on paper, perfectly fine in practice.
No downvote, but we really don't need Ini to give it charge. Even just a measly 3 attack mech would be like summoning Al'Akir the Windlord!
I think she's a mechagnome. There are a few different things that term applies to, but it always amounts to them being somewhere on the spectrum between fully mechanical titan creation to the fully biological 'normal' gnomes.
A bit of Warcraft history: gnomes, humans and dwarfs began as titan constructs and were afflicted by the curse of flesh, leading to the biological forms we're used to. But unaffected characters continue to exist, and some mechagnomes are part way between flesh and machine. My guess is Ini is one of those, so whether she is a mech or not is ambiguous.
Ramping takes advantage of the fact bigger/more expensive cards do more in fewer turns than smaller/cheaper ones. So ramp functions fine without strong removal when against anything that doesn't kill you fast enough to undercut that advantage. That's been the central aspect of druid's design ever since Overgrowth came out, and typically present beforehand too. Overgrowth has been very highroll-y the entire time, but it dodged nerfs because it didn't lead into a comeback card like Scale of Onyxia, and thus it actually retained the weakness it was designed with. Guardian Animals got nerfed largely because it provided the good removal that Scale of Onyxia is now doing.
We can point fingers at the ramp cards, but they are what makes druid different from other classes, and we aren't seriously going to argue druid shouldn't have strong cards for its own mechanic. So unless we want to argue classes should be made homogeneous, we have to recognise class identity is important, and strengths and weaknesses need to fit with mechanics in a way that directly supports them so there is a reason to use them, while also indirectly hindering them so they don't become uncounterable.
Ultimately that's the biggest point: all decks/classes need to have some weak point(s) that opponent's can try to exploit, or it just becomes a matter of hoping they draw badly, which is not a fun experience for anyone.
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Also, Scale of Onyxia is not a worse Flamestrike. It can be against some boards, but it can also be way better, either because there's a 6+ health minion to deal with or because some whelps survive anyway.
I'd refine that statement to: it's only a problem because druid has been designed to function well in the absence of any good AoE or single target removal.
It's a specific case of why class identity matters, regardless of how cool it might be for control hunter/rogue to work, for example. When a class is designed to have certain strengths and weaknesses, the effective removal of those weaknesses invariably leads to decks with no reliable counter, and the feeling from opponents that there is nothing they could ever have done (even at a deck building stage). Often it's associated with one class being completely dominant, and we've been there a few times before. I'm not sure that's where we are with druid right now, though the (thankfully brief) overlap of Scale of Onyxia with crazy ramp from the Year of the Phoenix puts it pretty close.
It is OK for class identities can shift over time, but it has to be a slow process with at least 2 HS years between a power card balanced by a class weakness, and a card that shores up that weakness.
So you can pull two 6-drops out with Drek'thar? I guess that's something, but I doubt it would make up for doing basically nothing the two turns before it. You are also capped at 6 mana minions for Drek'thar to work, so you are limited in what 'big' minions you want to play. Needless to say I'm not convinced.
Yeah, there are some serious grinds in a few of them. I've now completed all the tasks for every merc that wasn't released a couple of weeks ago, and recall a few that just baffled me as to why they set the number so high. Warmaster Voone had one that required you to kill 2 enemies with Axe Throw... 150 times! For an ability capped at 8 damage due to having no spell school, and requiring setup just to get that far, it was ridiculous.
I think mercs they've added later have been less bad though. Long'xin had a similar task for her Celestial Breath ability (both were task 17 I think) that only required dealing 40 damage to neighbors, which was soooooo much easier. That said, I was a bit confused why her task 16 (likewise for Chi-Ji) was to deal 500 damage to heroic bosses, when they kept the same task 18 as everyone else. As you said, it's not that bad and probably quicker than the usual task 16 of dealing 900 damage to role X, but it was weird.
I held off upgrading Cookie's Fishing to level 5 for a while because of this, and when I finally maxed it out I expected to have shot myself in the foot. But tbh I wasn't very bothered by it in the end. A lot of the tasks cookie helps with are still about as easy, since you can just not attack the Swordfish. It only really messes with tasks involving uncontrolled attacks that don't end up killing everything anyway, but even then I found it no more tedious grinding them across multiple fights than picking on fish within one.
So I guess my point is it may be optimal to stay at level 4, but it's not as big a deal as it first looks. Certainly the added effectiveness when not grinding can be argued to win out on balance, even if it's primarily just for the extra +1/+5 stats for maxing Cookie out.
That's a good point, and definitely a relevant consideration for burgle rogue who will generate it (or have the option to discover it) reasonably frequently. In Standard, I guess rogues will have to read the card text of both Azsharan and Sunken parts as "Add a random poison to your hand." In Wild it becomes: "Discover a nature spell, Brain Freeze or Candle Breath."
Obviously that's pretty bad in Standard, but I could see there being times you'd like that very controlled choice in Wild.
Maybe, though warrior already has a hydra minion and the key part of the art here is the ship dodging the big beastie, rather than the hydra itself. So I'm not sure how much we can read into the art here.
There are so few legendaries left to see that we can probably guess at them all now. Ini (the female mecha-gnome) is likely the last neutral. N'Zoth's fish is probably in warlock, perhaps with a bunch of associated cards to quickly make up for the serious lack of warlock reveals so far. There's a colossal minion we know the art for (see video that revealed Crabatoa) which glows so is probably shaman's. That just leave's hunter's colossal, which could be a hydra (3 heads are an obvious route to take for appendages), or maybe Ozumat if we want lots of tentacles.
I'm not sure the night elf origin really matters when you end as something completely different, nor do I think it is essential that N'Zoth was involved. Hypothetically, someone could transform a human into something identical to a naga using the same magic as N'Zoth used. Choosing not to call them a naga would be defining the race by its past, and not what it is in the present. That's an option, but I don't think it's a very useful one.
Ashvane is probably a bit too monstrous to even fit a loose definition accommodating the forms from BfA, but she's close enough on many levels that she might be helpful in establishing that definition.
Something, but not quite as much as it seems. Part of it is that it looks weak contextually since we're in a world where the Juggernaut makes it redundant in the historically obvious deck (pirates). We also know very little about what weapons warrior will have available at this point.
As far as actual weaknesses go, any mass weapon buff hits the issue of only having one weapon usable at a time, which is made worse by increasing their durability. So there are serious diminishing returns with effects like these, and in most games I'd be surprised if its buff applies to more than 2 weapons that are actually used. At which point it's not setting a particularly high bar for 'weakest legendary'.
Yeah, I've always had that gif in the back of my mind. I just had fun reading through the Reddit thread Matt discussed the design process on (https://www.reddit.com/r/hearthstone/comments/al4ljx/captain_hooktusk_process/).
I haven't had any luck finding out who her voice actor is though. It's a shame HS still doesn't credit anyone other than the card artists in-game. Even artists for hero portraits go un-credited, which is so weird when they tell us for cards.
What transformed her? And how is the process distinct from N'Zoth transforming the highborne into Naga? In other words, let's have a philosophical debate over whether Lady Ashvane is in fact a naga :P
I agree it's probably better, especially in the long run, but would involve a discussion about changing their design philosophy for single-set keywords. Tbh I don't even know why Evolve and Unstable Evolution count as nature spells when it is old gods magic (shadow) involved.
Oh god, they did not think that through. Well, let's see how long it takes them to remove the nature school from that!