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AngryShuckie

Joined 06/03/2019 Achieve Points 1705 Posts 1735

AngryShuckie's Comments

  • AngryShuckie's Avatar
    1705 1735 Posts Joined 06/03/2019
    Posted 1 year, 9 months ago

    They are definitely fine together. I wonder if the biggest reason they don't generally do it is because they want to strongly incentivise combo activation as the core part of rogue gameplay, and having a half-strength version as a battlecry means players would often not need to.

    When looking through the combo spells, even they don't typically scale with combo, with the closest since Classic being tutoring an extra card type. (With Swindle you often didn't pay too much attention to the fact you got a spell and a minion, hence why I counted it above. But it feels more significant with, say, Raiding Party.) So there must be some design preference to make combo activate truly new effects.

  • AngryShuckie's Avatar
    1705 1735 Posts Joined 06/03/2019
    Posted 1 year, 9 months ago

    Lol. That butterknife isn't helping him get out of that bind.

    I assume you can Shadowstep the sack and make the opponent cry. Would that be like HS's version of Stockholm syndrome when you then play the minion on your side?

  • AngryShuckie's Avatar
    1705 1735 Posts Joined 06/03/2019
    Posted 1 year, 9 months ago

    Since combo seems overwrites the battlecry, they only really work together for scaling effects, meaning we kinda have seen it lots of times with all the Edwin-eqsue cards, including the 2 we got this expansion.

    The alternative is to use combo to completely switch up the effect and effectively turn it into a choose one card, which I suspect they have avoided so druid continues to feel special.

    You could also argue any spell which scales with combo (e.g. Eviscerate, Cold Blood and maybe something like Swindle) is exactly the same thing. After all, what is a battlecry if not a spell on a stick? Plus any minion or weapon whose combo gains stats is really just scaling the base 'battlecry' version (I'm being very liberal with the use of battlecry there, I know).

    So while yes, they technically haven't touched the obvious battlecry + combo... erm, combo, they also arguably have.

  • AngryShuckie's Avatar
    1705 1735 Posts Joined 06/03/2019
    Posted 1 year, 9 months ago
    Quote From dapperdog

    There's about 5 more rogue cards left, so there's bound to be at least 2 secrets, because the current crop of secrets in rogue are fairly abysmal.

    What "current crop"? There are no rogue secrets in Standard currently. So it's highly likely there will be 3 added this set like both previous times secrets were added (back) into Standard.

  • AngryShuckie's Avatar
    1705 1735 Posts Joined 06/03/2019
    Posted 1 year, 9 months ago

    Well would you look at that, a rogue deathrattle. And one that costs 4 too so it can actually work well with Sketchy Information, and indeed it's kinda like Korrak the Bloodrager's weird cousin.

    I guess the question will be whether rogue's secrets work well with this. I assume at least one of them will trigger upon minion death, else it will be difficult to rely on them still being around when Halkias dies, but quick to trigger and re-summon him afterwards. Edit: it looks like the secret in the video is something like "When a friendly minion dies, draw 2 cards", but it's not super easy to tell when one can't read Korean.

  • AngryShuckie's Avatar
    1705 1735 Posts Joined 06/03/2019
    Posted 1 year, 9 months ago

    Not quite. There are beings native to the Shadowlands that didn't get there after a mortal life. Denathrius was created along with the other Covenant leaders, and he himself created the venthyr like Renathal, so some, if not all the vampires are natives. There are natives from other zones too, such as Stewart the Steward.

    That said, lots of the characters will have died at some point, yes, and I presume that includes Murloc Holmes. If he was himself murdered, I hope he at least managed to work out the killer.

  • AngryShuckie's Avatar
    1705 1735 Posts Joined 06/03/2019
    Posted 1 year, 9 months ago
    Quote From NegativeNemsy

    Highly doubt the devs would let you do this in the deck construction phase.  This type of experimentation is what modes like duels are for.  We don't know what is coming in the next 4 expansions. Cheap paladin secrets would be very abuseable with combo cards.  I also can't imagine how unfun pirate rogue in wild would be against Freezing Trap and Explosive Runes.  I do not think Ice Block is that problematic nowadays.

    They would probably take the safe route and make a legendary that converts your current spells in hand into secrets from other classes or just shuffle 5 random secrets into your deck.

    Not knowing what's coming in the next 4 expansions doesn't worry me. If nothing stuck out as abusable in all 8 years' of secrets in Wild, it's unlikely they struggle to keep things tame for a year or so.

    Rogue already has so many decent 1-mana cards I doubt the availability of paladin secrets would matter much for combo activation. Some pally secrets are quite good, but I'd be surprised if they out-competed the cards rogue can already use for anything other than secret synergies.

    I'd also be a little surprised if Wild pirate rogue squeezed in Explosive and Freezing Trap, especially as they'd have to find space for the legendary that allows them to do this too. That deck is better at keeping the opponent's board clean than the usual aggro hunter decks that fit those traps in, and they could already use rogue's stall cards like Sap if they wanted that sort of effect.

    I agree the devs are much more likely to take a safe route with another secret-based legendary (if that's even what it ends up being), though they were pretty brave with giving us Hanar to replicate the most notorious boss in Dungeon Run. Still, this is an expansion where they have given extra freedoms in the deck construction phase via Renathal, and Duels has already provided the technology for multi-class deck building, so it's not outside the realm of possibility.

  • AngryShuckie's Avatar
    1705 1735 Posts Joined 06/03/2019
    Posted 1 year, 9 months ago

    First off, I have no expectation that the idea I present below will actually happen. I just wanted to put it out there to bring in other thoughts and opinions since I find it a surprisingly interesting possibility that's worth entertaining before next week's card reveals show it (probably) won't happen.

    So what's the idea? Well, we know rogue is getting some secret stuff this expansion, but we don't yet know what the secrets themselves are. The idea is that there are no new rogue secrets, but instead the second rogue legendary lets you use secrets from other classes when building the deck.

    Now, normally I'd be the first person to shoot down ideas about multi-class deck construction, but in this limited case my hunch is it might actually be OK. The primary reason being that secrets are rarely that good on their own, and their real strength almost always comes from the secret synergy cards instead. There are a few exceptions to that, but even most of the good secrets wouldn't suddenly cause any big crisis because the very nature of secrets puts control over their power into the opponent's hands. So the rogue couldn't really exploit some hitherto unavailable combo that usually plagues multi-class deck-building.

    Plus of course, rogue's full list of secret synergies is currently very limited, being only Shadowjeweler Hanar, Blackjack Stunner, Sparkjoy Cheat and Ghastly Gravedigger. These aren't made significantly more dangerous by having access to the other classes secrets, and introducing all-class secret access while there's no dangerous synergies around would be the best time to do it.

    The burgle rogue side of things is probably where real problems arise, though I'm not sure they matter much. Secrets are often quite good to get for Tess and Contraband Stash because you can guarantee they will be useful when re-played, but they do lose their secrecy in the process so they don't cause massive trouble. It's also already super easy to get cards from other classes into your hand for burgle synergies, so you don't really need to add out-of-class cards into the deck to make that easier (especially with Maestra around).

    Currently the biggest issue I can think of is that Ice Block exists, and Wild won't be thankful for two of these being added alongside Evasion, Cloak of Shadows and Valeera the Hollow, especially as the Ice Blocks could be replayed a couple of times with things like Contraband Stash. That's really not fun to play against. At least anti-secret tech and Ashen Elemental exist for when that gets too obnoxious.

    So what do you think? Have I missed something or is it a surprisingly plausible idea?

  • AngryShuckie's Avatar
    1705 1735 Posts Joined 06/03/2019
    Posted 1 year, 9 months ago

    The pool of Druid spells is pretty narrow, so you can be fairly sure Convoke the Spirits will summon a bunch of minions, buff them, and draw a bunch of cards... and reasonably often cast Celestial Alignment and piss off the control/combo opponents who weren't too worried about the sudden massive board.

    It probably won't clear the opponent's board, though it might summon a bunch of rush minions to do that job. So compared to Puzzle Box, at least its somewhat predictable and won't feel quite so un-earned when it wins games, but thanks to Celestial Alignment it will still cause as much anger I expect.

  • AngryShuckie's Avatar
    1705 1735 Posts Joined 06/03/2019
    Posted 1 year, 9 months ago

    I'm not sold on it being a strong card, but that doesn't mean an 8/8 with taunt can "easily be ignored". Unless you have enough reach to kill the druid with spells that turn, ignoring it really isn't an option.

  • AngryShuckie's Avatar
    1705 1735 Posts Joined 06/03/2019
    Posted 1 year, 9 months ago

    Yeah, there's definitely some strange choices with how they converted the DH theme into mechanics, and the (big) demon stuff is chief among them. As far as I'm aware the way DH's use demons in lore is never something the demons engage with willingly and they are not working together. With DH rivaling rogue with its speed I understand the dormant mechanic could be awkward for the DH characters themselves, but it would be a really neat way to show their subjugation of demons if they started dormant.

    That would even make a lot of sense for the traditional demon gameplay in warlock where they are very powerful for their cost but you have to pay for it in other ways (sadly that cool aspect of demons has been largely forgotten over the years). In DH you could keep the theme of demons being under-costed, but you have to wait for them. Essentially a continuation of the dormant minions in Outland, which always felt like the DH expansion anyway.

  • AngryShuckie's Avatar
    1705 1735 Posts Joined 06/03/2019
    Posted 1 year, 9 months ago

    As I've replied elsewhere, the effect of Bibliomite is fine on its own. It's just weird to be different to what Kryxis does when they achieve very similar things mechanically, and we'd expect them to be the same due to them being the same race. They both seem to be for decks that win too fast to care much about whether the card is shuffled or discarded, so why make them use different mechanics?

  • AngryShuckie's Avatar
    1705 1735 Posts Joined 06/03/2019
    Posted 1 year, 9 months ago

    I don't mind Bibliomite by itself at all. What I don't understand is why two minions of the same race, in the same set, in the same class are using different mechanics (shuffling vs discarding) to achieve essentially the same thing. Doubly so for cards designed to win games quickly. Just pick a lane Blizz!

  • AngryShuckie's Avatar
    1705 1735 Posts Joined 06/03/2019
    Posted 1 year, 9 months ago

    I don't flip my shit when DH gets new stuff - I actually thought the sigils would be a good way for DH to distinguish itself, and hopefully they keep getting printed. I just get annoyed that nearly everything new to DH is a rehash of something either druid, hunter, rogue or warlock already does, and rarely combines tools in a way that sets them that far apart.

    When DH started it was a hodge-podge of core aspects of those 4 classes thrown together in a way that removed the weaknesses that makes those classes OK in the wider ecosystem (it also didn't help that DH was seriously overtuned). Now, DH is a hodge-podge of core aspects of those 4 classes plus a few of their more niche features.

    The constant need to regain hero attack looks unique, but you only have to look at questline druid to see that's not entirely true. It's just they committed to supporting it properly in DH whereas they always half-arsed it in druid. That alone would probably justify DH's place if the resultant gameplay didn't end up suspiciously close to rogue when that class has decent weapon support.

    Ultimately I want DH to deviate their theme and finally break free from the design space nestled between the aforementioned classes. I want it to feel like decks that only DH could have made, rather than the stream of decks that are technically different, but would have felt at home in one of those classes if the devs chose to print the cards there. I just don't think we've got there yet, and the new discard stuff doesn't change it.

    Edit: I should be fair. Combining disco-lock with hero attacks can definitely be considered a way to combine the tools of classes that can only be done in DH. So I'll happily wait before nay-saying the archetype. I do still wish DH could find something more unique though.

  • AngryShuckie's Avatar
    1705 1735 Posts Joined 06/03/2019
    Posted 1 year, 9 months ago

    While on paper I don't disagree, in practice these don't hold up all that well because:

    • I don't know if I have ever seen a DH reach fatigue and lose because of it. While edge cases do exist, it's really rare for DH to suffer for not having value generation, especially as card draw is almost always the stronger of the two.
    •  
    • DH's AoE plays out a lot like warlock's AoE and messes up their own board. So just like warlock never uses AoE in its aggressive decks (and hunter and rogue never have AoE to work with), DH never uses AoE in its aggressive decks. So yes, in principle DH is combing tools that these 3 classes don't. But at the level of individual decks it doesn't really work out that way.
    •  
    • Rogues also use hero/weapon attacks to pressure the opponent a lot of the time. I think it depends more on what they are playing against than which of the two classes we're considering. There are definitely some differences when comparing rogue's weapon buffs to DH's temporary attack buffs, but they are still very similar as far as the gameplay is concerned.
    •  
    • I'll grant you token DH has its own interesting twist, and it was always the one side of DH I actually liked. The problem is this twist is underutilised, even to the point that DH doesn't seem to be making much use out of the infuse mechanic this set. Meanwhile hunter - which always did this to some degree with Scavenging Hyena - is looking like it will lean heavily into infuse. That just ends up supporting my claim that we didn't really need DH to do the stuff DH does.

    Often we find DH does these things better than the other classes, and hence their version is the one we see in the meta, but that's only a sign that DH had more/better support. Look at the recent deathrattle rogue for instance: it could easily have been designed like the DH version and nobody would have thought it was out of character for the class, but instead it became a complete meme because the class has no deathrattles to work with.

  • AngryShuckie's Avatar
    1705 1735 Posts Joined 06/03/2019
    Posted 1 year, 9 months ago

    Wait, why did Bibliomite go through all the faff of shuffling the card back into the deck if DH discards now anyway? Also, why is DH discarding now? 2+ years on and the class still hasn't convinced me it brings something to the table that warlock, hunter and rogue hadn't already got covered.

  • AngryShuckie's Avatar
    1705 1735 Posts Joined 06/03/2019
    Posted 1 year, 9 months ago

    As it stands, I don't see this being anything more than a meme card. Priest doesn't have many ways to generate copies of opponent's cards (I'm sure we'll see a few in this set...), but even assuming that isn't an issue, you'd need to find a turn where you can spend 3 mana on this and actually want to play the generated cards. It's probably quite easy to find time to do this with 1 card, but doing anything useful with more feels like a massive stretch.

    I'm not sure there has been a time since Witchwood when thief priest hasn't been completely overshadowed by burgle rogue, and I can't imagine it having enough support to step out of that shadow. So if this card is going to work out, it's probably thanks to a very specific card in this set. Maybe something like a spell that adds a 1 mana 1/1 copy of a minion to your hand, which the Harvester could then easily steal the original with.

    Also worth noting, there isn't widespread hate for Pirate Admiral Hooktusk, so being able to steal your opponent's cards doesn't necessarily translate to the culprit being hated.

  • AngryShuckie's Avatar
    1705 1735 Posts Joined 06/03/2019
    Posted 1 year, 9 months ago

    Extending what Demonxz95 said below, rogue is probably the most diverse class thematically (covering spies, assassins, thugs, thieves, con-men, alchemists, pirates, ninjas and anything vaguely sneaky or dishonest), while paladin sits alongside DH as the most narrow (they're all righteous humanoids fighting in heavy armour and using holy magic). Since that diversity of theme translates to diversity of class mechanics, it's not surprising some mechanics had to be passed around to balance out the diversity in-game.

    Besides, I think people latch onto the word 'secret' a bit too much. Like most evergreen keywords, there are times when they apply mechanically but they are thematically off. Not all lifesteal effects should really be viewed as draining the target's life, for example. In this case paladin 'secrets' are often like reactions in D&D, but since that does the same thing mechanically as a hunter's secretly placed trap, they use the same keyword.

  • AngryShuckie's Avatar
    1705 1735 Posts Joined 06/03/2019
    Posted 1 year, 9 months ago

    To be fair, the flavour is pretty good here: he's digging the grave for/burying someone who's been secretly murdered. He's not digging up a previous corpse like Shallow Gravedigger was.

    That said, as a rogue main I do acknowledge the the pain of the ever-absent rogue deathrattles, especially when presented with secret synergy shortly after all of rogue's secrets rotated out.

  • AngryShuckie's Avatar
    1705 1735 Posts Joined 06/03/2019
    Posted 1 year, 9 months ago

    It's pretty clear there will be ways to enable miracle-esque turns for this and Sinstone Graveyard that we have not yet seen, so I'll hold off on analysing Draka's power. For now all I can think of is using UiS's deathrattle stuff to gain a bunch of coins. I will point out though, Cora did say the rogue suspect [Draka] is very spicy, so don't sleep on this card.

    For her flavour, this is quite a neat way to show she's a warrior at heart, supplemented with her recent rogue training. Also, her art is unusually dynamic for a minion. It reminds me a bit of Edwin, Defias Kingpin, making me think they actively wanted super-dynamic art for these cards that scale with the number of cards played in the turn (which makes sense since rogue only has that mechanic to represent speed and agility).

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