What Flux said, although I will add that there is definitely an emotional aspect to it. If you know you are going to want to try something regardless of the meta, then doing it sooner rather than later can be beneficial so you can mess around with it while the meta isn't so refined (which is often the most fun time). Underneath all this is the question of what type of player you are, and how closely you adhere to the meta when it forms. I would say if you are a casual player then you should feel happy to spend the dust a bit sooner than if the meta is important to you.
I myself always craft the rogue cards immediately because I know I'll use them lots no matter what, but hold off a while on everything else, at least until I have tried out nearly all the cards I opened.
Look at it this way: now he has established the terms of your relationship he can begin to help out. Or, you know, do whatever it is he wants to do, which may or may not align with your goals. The important thing is that it can help you out...
Just a quick thread of community kindness regarding the achievement called 'Forbidden Jutsu', which requires you to summon a 10+ cost minion with Shadow Clone.
While the card itself is only a rare, so most players can in principle finish this achievement, the hard part is that it relies pretty much entirely on what your opponent does because you cannot really force them to a) have a 10+ cost minion, and b) force them to trigger the secret with it. Even with Old Gods around, this one can take forever because you are not really in control...
The helpful solution is to go to Wild, where you can go out of your way to do all of the following relatively easily:
Stall for ages, reducing the cost of Arcane Giant to 0.
Then in a single turn play Vanish to clean up the board,
next play the giant and give it to the opponent with Silas Darkmoon,
You will need some cost reduction too, e.g. with Preparations and/or Emperor Thaurissan, but in 1 turn you can make it so the opponent has nothing but a 10+ cost minion to attack you and nothing else with. Since the worst thing that can happen is that you get an 8/8 with stealth, and you have done nothing threatening all game, they should be willing to do the deed and give you your achievement, even if they have no idea what is going on.
Finally, use the 'Thanks' emote, concede, and cash in your XP.
I suspect not, since (most?) achievements won't even complete in Casual. At least, they didn't for me.
I wish we could for a few of them. I've been trying for ages to get someone to hit me with a 10+ cost minion for the Shadow Clone achievement, but either they just don't have any in their deck or its an Old God, out of which C'Thun kills you before he attacks, while Y'Shaarj and N'Zoth always come alongside a lot of cheaper minions which they attack with first.
I'm kind of regretting not letting that 43/37 Yogg hit me now... How silly I was for trying to win the game.
I agree with @dapperdog that an advanced improvement to the dust system would be best.
I'll also add some rough numbers to what dapperdog said about the monthly membership idea. From my own experience the sum of:
big pre-order;
a couple of mid-expansion bundles;
freebie packs and legendaries;
and a fairly typical amount of gold saved up over an expansion (~8-9k, I'm not getting into a deep discussion of how much we'll get with the new system here)
is enough to get essentially all the cards in a set minus a handful of legendaries. That can come directly from the packs or dust (including a significant amount from nerfs and Hall of Fame. The latter might be an extreme source of dust income next year).
The problem is that all comes to about £100 per expansion cycle (I'm pretty sure its less, but 100 is a nice round number), so the bare minimum they would have you charge to rent cards would be about £25 a month for renting to not just be strictly better than buying cards. I'm not sure how many people would be willing to pay that every month, but you'll certainly get a lot who come back every 4 months, pay £25 to play it like a conventional game for a while, then disappear again. That'll have a potentially catastrophic effect on the playerbase.
£100 for not quite the entire set, that's crazy?!
Show Spoiler
Since we're on the subject of the cost of HS, I think it's worth setting out my own views. After all, it is good for everyone to see things from multiple different perspectives.
Honestly, as hobbies go, it is not that expensive provided you have the expendable income and spend a good amount of time playing the game. A reasonable 1 hour a day puts it at about £100/122 hours = £0.82 per hour to have a mostly complete set. (Whether you have a complete collection will depend on how long you have been playing for, which certainly makes it a lot more expensive for new players, so don't take this as a complete story.)
That cost per hour can definitely be beaten by other things, but there are much much worse that are treated as fine just because society has been doing them for much longer. According to a BBC news article from July last year the average people spent on Friday nights out in the UK was more than £70! And the people involved often do this once a week! (Obviously they haven't been doing it so much in 2020.) That is utterly ludicrous to me, and if society thinks spending £70 to enjoy a few hours each week is fine, then spending £100 to enjoy well over a hundred hours over a few months would be considered an absolute bargain.
That is not to judge anyone whether they or F2P on HS or are the sort who do spend a lot on socialising - everyone's circumstances and philosophies are different - just to point out that when discussing the cost of any game, it is really the cost of enjoyment in a much broader sense and HS doesn't look so expensive when viewed that way. Really we should be praising the video games industry for being as cheap as it is in that context.
That said, the games industry can absolutely be greedy, so please don't take this as any defense of Blizzard's actions with the new progression track or anything else.
And another thing...
Show Spoiler
Don't hate on Ol' Bwonsamdi! He was actually in a few good decks for a little while. Plus with the newer version of the no duplicate rule there shouldn't be any risk of that sort of thing happening again.
I also managed to complete the first stage of the E.T.C. achievement because I was offered him in a bucket in a Duels run. That probably means all the achievements can be earned early if you manage to pull the pieces together in Duels, but perhaps more importantly makes it possible to get the achievements without needing to own all the cards. I'm sure there are some that are too impractical to do this way, but it is nonetheless a few extra.
Well I did say it would be cheeky, but there is a nugget of truth in there. Blizz's accountants will be demanding some profit margin, and the fewer players contribute to that, the higher the price has to be. Of course it is not nearly so simple as to then say if more people started spending money on it that Blizz would reduce the prices; that could instead be taken as a sign that they could increase prices due to higher demand. Ultimately I don't know where HS sits with respect to keeping the accountants happy, so I'm not trying to claim what I just said is necessarily applying in practice.
I am also fully aware Blizz wants F2P players around to maintain a large playerbase and avoid the issues Artefact had, but it is nevertheless the paying players that fund the continued development of HS. Because of this there is a limit to how generous they can be. That is not to say they are at or even near that limit, only that casually handing out 1000 gold would have to be a rare occurrence. I don't know, maybe at about the frequency they have a good seasonal event (none of that Forbidden Library crap)...
-------------------------
Regarding enjoyment, it might help to step back and view HS as a hobby. Not specifically a video game, nor a card game, just a hobby. A good hobby could be defined as something with a high ratio of time spent enjoying them to money put in. There are important complications due to opportunity cost, which will prevent this ratio actually being infinite, but you get the point. That metric applies just as well to buying a movie, a video game, Warhammer, D&D, sport, sketching, etc. It's all just killing time in a way you are emotionally and financially happy with.
Where that ratio needs to be will depend entirely on who you ask. It absolutely is possible to be completely F2P and enjoy the game, at which point HS is a successful hobby. Likewise you can spend $80 every 4 months, spend 200 hours on it in that time plus however much time you spend on forums, and come out with a much better ratio than going to the cinema.
I think it is much healthier to view HS this way than to try to compare it to a conventional video game where you spend, say, $60 and play it for however long you play it for. Whether that video game was a good investment is still ultimately decided by how many hours you were happy playing it for. If that's 1000 hours then great, but if its 4 then it was crap. That matters a lot more than the fact you owned the whole thing. Note the important distinction between hours played and hours enjoyed.
Which brings us onto the opportunity cost. Do not ignore this! You should never be doing any hobby if you'd prefer to be doing something else. You are only wasting your own time. So I guess I'd say to put aside qualms with the devs for a moment (you can pick them back up later) and do a bit of soul-searching. [Insert something profound here.]
The importance of the time spent playing looks to be central the whole issue, and it is honestly something that I struggle to find a good argument against. Having had 6 years of aggro being rewarded simply because the games are faster, and people making complaints about that, it only feels right that time spent is the primary method of obtaining XP outside of quests. But at the same time that is the very thing that will be hurting you if you choose to spend time on other accounts.
It is a similar story with the mini-sets: people want more content to reduce the time spent with a stale meta, but they don't want there to be a corresponding cost increase to the game. I am also torn on whether HS is an expensive game or not: certainly it sounds expensive to spend $80 every 4 months and still not have access to every card, but that is balanced by the fact you can enjoy the game for years without spending any money at all. If I wanted to be cheeky, I could argue the F2P players are actually raising the cost for everyone else.
Now I have written all of this down, it is clear to me why I end up neutral on most matters. Almost every aspect of the game has a balance where making an improvement forces something negative elsewhere, and not making an improvement leads to player dissatisfaction anyway. If you were playing at the time, recall the Brode-era HS when major changes were rare but monetisation of the game was quite tame. Contrast that to post-Brode HS which has seen many improvements both small and large, but has also led to more and more places to spend money on the game.
I guess that brings us to whether we trust the devs when they say they really want us to get the same amount of gold PLUS extras. Honestly, I'm not sure we have been given much reason to not trust them yet. There have been many decisions they have made that people have disagreed with, but none that come to mind that don't fall under the description above, where players with different philosophies will always come to different opinions. The only times they've really dropped the ball have been the ludicrous power level of Galakrond Shaman and Demon Hunter upon release, but they were very quick to act on them.
So for now I'll impassively take the devs' word for it, but don't worry, I'll join the chorus of complaints if it ends up actually costing us :)
-----------------------------------
Regarding 800XP quests being weighted more highly, I suspect that is indeed the case, but I'm also pretty sure they weighted the 50g quests more highly than the 60g ones before (specifically the 'Play 3 games with class X, Y and Z' ones because there's so many of them you'd rarely see anything else otherwise). So that's nothing new.
You will definitely find players who stop at 6900g < 8400g and argue all the extra stuff can be ignored because Blizz specifically said we'd get just as much gold AND get extras on top. Even if Blizz hadn't said that, the argument that 1500g is worth more than 15 packs still holds up.
I myself am pretty neutral. I'm not an Arena player and don't plan on being a Herioc Duels player, so 100g = 1 pack to me, and if I'm honest the differences in which packs I use them on are negligible. By which I mean, I currently stop buying packs more or less on day 1 so any gold I earn is used for the next expansion, but in the long run that expansion's rewards would still give me those packs anyway, albeit with a bit of delay. That delay might not even be a bad thing with how min-expansions are going to work.
So to me, if all the numbers add up such that I'm not worse off, and there is a hero skin to get at the end, then I'm content with it. I wouldn't be at all surprised if the more interesting milestones encourage me to play a little more, so I might end up getting more gold just because I'm more engaged with it.
First a correction: that is the experience to the NEXT level, so the halving happens just after you reach level 50.
It's very likely intentional yes. Everything up to level 50 is the main part, where you have the big carrot of the choice of hero skin dangling in front of you, meaning you won't mind the large gaps between levels. I'd even guess there's a psychological effect where it feels like you earned it more.
Everything after that, though, is just gold. It would feel much more frustrating to have such a large gap because the rewards aren't exciting. Plus, you'll note it gives 150 gold in about half the XP it gives 300 gold in levels 45-50, so the rate of gold acquisition is kept the same.
20 epics? Do they need to be unique or do duplicates count, because 20 unique ones would be nearly all of them.
I assumed the requirements were going to be specific cards that had some synergy with the treasure, not that you needed an arbitrarily large collection.
Sure, but not all the achievements require legendaries (it looked like that was 1 per class), and you can hardly blame them for making achievements related to utilising the fanciest effects.
Regarding Whizbang, I recall them asking if there were any other cards we'd like to see added to Classic in the rework, i.e. they were already considering doing that with Whizbang. That's not guaranteed of course, but it may yet happen.
- So if the above calculations for the Tavern Pass are correct (for an hour a day of play, completing all quests and completing most achievements) then it gives you +11 levels of experience, which is +1650 gold (16 packs), as well as all the cosmetics.
- 16 packs plus the cosmetics seems like an alright deal for $20. Having said that....I would like the Tavern Pass twice as much if that damn coin was golden and animated! I was so hyped for the Darkmoon Coin! But it not being animated is a big downer!!
Very interesting. I was leaning towards not getting the Tavern Pass, partly to set a precedent for myself that I just don't need all the cosmetics. But if I'm expecting to get about 16 packs worth of extra gold for £17 anyway (which is about the normal price in the shop, even if that is overpriced) then that really changes the maths.
Talking about book of heroes, jaina's deck vs kaelthas and rexxar hero power + deck on the 2 last fights are such terrible decks...
idk those are obviously bugs
I played book of rexxar before didn't have problem vs last boss.. now I am 5 tries I can't beat it... why they thought to give the player big warrior with a buffed Troublemaker vs an aggressive secrt hunter list was a good idea? it's such an unfavorable matchup and the card choices are terrible.
I went through both again yesterday to get the achievements, and I got 90% of the way through Rexxar's last boss without any trouble and thought to myself: "why did I find this so difficult last time?". Then he played Dimensional Ripper and summoned 2 of those Toublemaker-like minions and I remembered. I was super lucky he didn't draw any earlier on.
The issue with Rexxar's last bosses is that you aren't even an aggro deck. You are a slow secret deck without any real power plays, pitted against value decks and stuck with a hero power that would be quite good if the opponent's decks weren't built specifically to make it ineffective. I appreciate there being some difficulty, but they could have at least given us a win condition.
Anyway, to OP: I suspect it was a bug caused by the 2/3 elemental that recasts spells. If that minion wasn't on the board then I have no idea what triggered it.
Isn't the entire point of achievements to do something difficult? If they were all things everyone could get in 10 minutes then it would be a hollow victory. Besides, you are getting XP just for spending the time trying so at least you are paid for the procedure as well as the kidney.
As for them being walled behind requiring specific cards, that's pretty much unavoidable with set-specific achievments. I would say the reality of this is a better reason for people to not expect to get them all than how difficult some of them are.
As I see it there are 2 different types of information surrounding this. I entirely agree with you with being told the numbers for XP per hour in each of the game modes, and how much wins modify that. A simple table would do the job there. Note though, that the only reason I would like to be told this by the devs is because I don't expect this information to be displayed anywhere in-game.
However, details like how much a daily quest is worth and how much we need to move up the progression system will be made obvious to us at the very moment at starts mattering, i.e. when the patch hits. There really isn't much benefit to flooding us with those numbers beforehand, because it's not like we will make any different decisions based on knowing that information early.
In the end it is a progression system that is designed to span 4 months, so getting the precise numbers a few hours, days, or even weeks early really makes next to no difference.
You are overthinking it. They are just saying that you will get XP based on how long you play for, regardless of whether you win or lose, and in pretty much all game modes. Just spend time in the game and you will be rewarded for that.
Don't worry too much about the minutiae like earning XP at different rates in different game modes and there being bonus XP for winning. Those are just XP versions of what we already have with getting 10g for 3 wins in some game modes but not all.
From what I can gather, there is no grinding incentive in the new system. You earn XP from playing in any mode, but you ONLY earn XP. You do not earn gold every 3 wins, or an XP boost every 3 wins. You do not have to worry about pushing your participation to the absolute max in order to benefit. You could skirt by, doing the absolute minimum of completing daily quests every three days and your weekly quests every seven days, and get the same benefits as the most hardcore players.
I don't think this is quite true. I think we could still grind XP, we just won't need to be so try-hard about doing it since we will be given it for playing in all game modes and (I assume) when we lose too. In which case hardcore players should still be getting more XP than people just doing their daily quests.
I haven't tested it, but I doubt it since you don't seem to be able to get achievements in Casual.
What Flux said, although I will add that there is definitely an emotional aspect to it. If you know you are going to want to try something regardless of the meta, then doing it sooner rather than later can be beneficial so you can mess around with it while the meta isn't so refined (which is often the most fun time). Underneath all this is the question of what type of player you are, and how closely you adhere to the meta when it forms. I would say if you are a casual player then you should feel happy to spend the dust a bit sooner than if the meta is important to you.
I myself always craft the rogue cards immediately because I know I'll use them lots no matter what, but hold off a while on everything else, at least until I have tried out nearly all the cards I opened.
Look at it this way: now he has established the terms of your relationship he can begin to help out. Or, you know, do whatever it is he wants to do, which may or may not align with your goals. The important thing is that it can help you out...
Sometimes.
Hi all,
Just a quick thread of community kindness regarding the achievement called 'Forbidden Jutsu', which requires you to summon a 10+ cost minion with Shadow Clone.
While the card itself is only a rare, so most players can in principle finish this achievement, the hard part is that it relies pretty much entirely on what your opponent does because you cannot really force them to a) have a 10+ cost minion, and b) force them to trigger the secret with it. Even with Old Gods around, this one can take forever because you are not really in control...
The helpful solution is to go to Wild, where you can go out of your way to do all of the following relatively easily:
You will need some cost reduction too, e.g. with Preparations and/or Emperor Thaurissan, but in 1 turn you can make it so the opponent has nothing but a 10+ cost minion to attack you and nothing else with. Since the worst thing that can happen is that you get an 8/8 with stealth, and you have done nothing threatening all game, they should be willing to do the deed and give you your achievement, even if they have no idea what is going on.
Finally, use the 'Thanks' emote, concede, and cash in your XP.
I suspect not, since (most?) achievements won't even complete in Casual. At least, they didn't for me.
I wish we could for a few of them. I've been trying for ages to get someone to hit me with a 10+ cost minion for the Shadow Clone achievement, but either they just don't have any in their deck or its an Old God, out of which C'Thun kills you before he attacks, while Y'Shaarj and N'Zoth always come alongside a lot of cheaper minions which they attack with first.
I'm kind of regretting not letting that 43/37 Yogg hit me now... How silly I was for trying to win the game.
I agree with @dapperdog that an advanced improvement to the dust system would be best.
I'll also add some rough numbers to what dapperdog said about the monthly membership idea. From my own experience the sum of:
is enough to get essentially all the cards in a set minus a handful of legendaries. That can come directly from the packs or dust (including a significant amount from nerfs and Hall of Fame. The latter might be an extreme source of dust income next year).
The problem is that all comes to about £100 per expansion cycle (I'm pretty sure its less, but 100 is a nice round number), so the bare minimum they would have you charge to rent cards would be about £25 a month for renting to not just be strictly better than buying cards. I'm not sure how many people would be willing to pay that every month, but you'll certainly get a lot who come back every 4 months, pay £25 to play it like a conventional game for a while, then disappear again. That'll have a potentially catastrophic effect on the playerbase.
£100 for not quite the entire set, that's crazy?!
Since we're on the subject of the cost of HS, I think it's worth setting out my own views. After all, it is good for everyone to see things from multiple different perspectives.
Honestly, as hobbies go, it is not that expensive provided you have the expendable income and spend a good amount of time playing the game. A reasonable 1 hour a day puts it at about £100/122 hours = £0.82 per hour to have a mostly complete set. (Whether you have a complete collection will depend on how long you have been playing for, which certainly makes it a lot more expensive for new players, so don't take this as a complete story.)
That cost per hour can definitely be beaten by other things, but there are much much worse that are treated as fine just because society has been doing them for much longer. According to a BBC news article from July last year the average people spent on Friday nights out in the UK was more than £70! And the people involved often do this once a week! (Obviously they haven't been doing it so much in 2020.) That is utterly ludicrous to me, and if society thinks spending £70 to enjoy a few hours each week is fine, then spending £100 to enjoy well over a hundred hours over a few months would be considered an absolute bargain.
That is not to judge anyone whether they or F2P on HS or are the sort who do spend a lot on socialising - everyone's circumstances and philosophies are different - just to point out that when discussing the cost of any game, it is really the cost of enjoyment in a much broader sense and HS doesn't look so expensive when viewed that way. Really we should be praising the video games industry for being as cheap as it is in that context.
That said, the games industry can absolutely be greedy, so please don't take this as any defense of Blizzard's actions with the new progression track or anything else.
And another thing...
I also managed to complete the first stage of the E.T.C. achievement because I was offered him in a bucket in a Duels run. That probably means all the achievements can be earned early if you manage to pull the pieces together in Duels, but perhaps more importantly makes it possible to get the achievements without needing to own all the cards. I'm sure there are some that are too impractical to do this way, but it is nonetheless a few extra.
I think achievements will remain completed, and they just add new ones. (Some of) those new ones will award XP for the progression system.
Note that most achievements don't actually award XP, just 'Achievement Points' to indicate how many you have completed.
Well I did say it would be cheeky, but there is a nugget of truth in there. Blizz's accountants will be demanding some profit margin, and the fewer players contribute to that, the higher the price has to be. Of course it is not nearly so simple as to then say if more people started spending money on it that Blizz would reduce the prices; that could instead be taken as a sign that they could increase prices due to higher demand. Ultimately I don't know where HS sits with respect to keeping the accountants happy, so I'm not trying to claim what I just said is necessarily applying in practice.
I am also fully aware Blizz wants F2P players around to maintain a large playerbase and avoid the issues Artefact had, but it is nevertheless the paying players that fund the continued development of HS. Because of this there is a limit to how generous they can be. That is not to say they are at or even near that limit, only that casually handing out 1000 gold would have to be a rare occurrence. I don't know, maybe at about the frequency they have a good seasonal event (none of that Forbidden Library crap)...
-------------------------
Regarding enjoyment, it might help to step back and view HS as a hobby. Not specifically a video game, nor a card game, just a hobby. A good hobby could be defined as something with a high ratio of time spent enjoying them to money put in. There are important complications due to opportunity cost, which will prevent this ratio actually being infinite, but you get the point. That metric applies just as well to buying a movie, a video game, Warhammer, D&D, sport, sketching, etc. It's all just killing time in a way you are emotionally and financially happy with.
Where that ratio needs to be will depend entirely on who you ask. It absolutely is possible to be completely F2P and enjoy the game, at which point HS is a successful hobby. Likewise you can spend $80 every 4 months, spend 200 hours on it in that time plus however much time you spend on forums, and come out with a much better ratio than going to the cinema.
I think it is much healthier to view HS this way than to try to compare it to a conventional video game where you spend, say, $60 and play it for however long you play it for. Whether that video game was a good investment is still ultimately decided by how many hours you were happy playing it for. If that's 1000 hours then great, but if its 4 then it was crap. That matters a lot more than the fact you owned the whole thing. Note the important distinction between hours played and hours enjoyed.
Which brings us onto the opportunity cost. Do not ignore this! You should never be doing any hobby if you'd prefer to be doing something else. You are only wasting your own time. So I guess I'd say to put aside qualms with the devs for a moment (you can pick them back up later) and do a bit of soul-searching. [Insert something profound here.]
The importance of the time spent playing looks to be central the whole issue, and it is honestly something that I struggle to find a good argument against. Having had 6 years of aggro being rewarded simply because the games are faster, and people making complaints about that, it only feels right that time spent is the primary method of obtaining XP outside of quests. But at the same time that is the very thing that will be hurting you if you choose to spend time on other accounts.
It is a similar story with the mini-sets: people want more content to reduce the time spent with a stale meta, but they don't want there to be a corresponding cost increase to the game. I am also torn on whether HS is an expensive game or not: certainly it sounds expensive to spend $80 every 4 months and still not have access to every card, but that is balanced by the fact you can enjoy the game for years without spending any money at all. If I wanted to be cheeky, I could argue the F2P players are actually raising the cost for everyone else.
Now I have written all of this down, it is clear to me why I end up neutral on most matters. Almost every aspect of the game has a balance where making an improvement forces something negative elsewhere, and not making an improvement leads to player dissatisfaction anyway. If you were playing at the time, recall the Brode-era HS when major changes were rare but monetisation of the game was quite tame. Contrast that to post-Brode HS which has seen many improvements both small and large, but has also led to more and more places to spend money on the game.
I guess that brings us to whether we trust the devs when they say they really want us to get the same amount of gold PLUS extras. Honestly, I'm not sure we have been given much reason to not trust them yet. There have been many decisions they have made that people have disagreed with, but none that come to mind that don't fall under the description above, where players with different philosophies will always come to different opinions. The only times they've really dropped the ball have been the ludicrous power level of Galakrond Shaman and Demon Hunter upon release, but they were very quick to act on them.
So for now I'll impassively take the devs' word for it, but don't worry, I'll join the chorus of complaints if it ends up actually costing us :)
-----------------------------------
Regarding 800XP quests being weighted more highly, I suspect that is indeed the case, but I'm also pretty sure they weighted the 50g quests more highly than the 60g ones before (specifically the 'Play 3 games with class X, Y and Z' ones because there's so many of them you'd rarely see anything else otherwise). So that's nothing new.
You will definitely find players who stop at 6900g < 8400g and argue all the extra stuff can be ignored because Blizz specifically said we'd get just as much gold AND get extras on top. Even if Blizz hadn't said that, the argument that 1500g is worth more than 15 packs still holds up.
I myself am pretty neutral. I'm not an Arena player and don't plan on being a Herioc Duels player, so 100g = 1 pack to me, and if I'm honest the differences in which packs I use them on are negligible. By which I mean, I currently stop buying packs more or less on day 1 so any gold I earn is used for the next expansion, but in the long run that expansion's rewards would still give me those packs anyway, albeit with a bit of delay. That delay might not even be a bad thing with how min-expansions are going to work.
So to me, if all the numbers add up such that I'm not worse off, and there is a hero skin to get at the end, then I'm content with it. I wouldn't be at all surprised if the more interesting milestones encourage me to play a little more, so I might end up getting more gold just because I'm more engaged with it.
First a correction: that is the experience to the NEXT level, so the halving happens just after you reach level 50.
It's very likely intentional yes. Everything up to level 50 is the main part, where you have the big carrot of the choice of hero skin dangling in front of you, meaning you won't mind the large gaps between levels. I'd even guess there's a psychological effect where it feels like you earned it more.
Everything after that, though, is just gold. It would feel much more frustrating to have such a large gap because the rewards aren't exciting. Plus, you'll note it gives 150 gold in about half the XP it gives 300 gold in levels 45-50, so the rate of gold acquisition is kept the same.
20 epics? Do they need to be unique or do duplicates count, because 20 unique ones would be nearly all of them.
I assumed the requirements were going to be specific cards that had some synergy with the treasure, not that you needed an arbitrarily large collection.
Sure, but not all the achievements require legendaries (it looked like that was 1 per class), and you can hardly blame them for making achievements related to utilising the fanciest effects.
Regarding Whizbang, I recall them asking if there were any other cards we'd like to see added to Classic in the rework, i.e. they were already considering doing that with Whizbang. That's not guaranteed of course, but it may yet happen.
Very interesting. I was leaning towards not getting the Tavern Pass, partly to set a precedent for myself that I just don't need all the cosmetics. But if I'm expecting to get about 16 packs worth of extra gold for £17 anyway (which is about the normal price in the shop, even if that is overpriced) then that really changes the maths.
I went through both again yesterday to get the achievements, and I got 90% of the way through Rexxar's last boss without any trouble and thought to myself: "why did I find this so difficult last time?". Then he played Dimensional Ripper and summoned 2 of those Toublemaker-like minions and I remembered. I was super lucky he didn't draw any earlier on.
The issue with Rexxar's last bosses is that you aren't even an aggro deck. You are a slow secret deck without any real power plays, pitted against value decks and stuck with a hero power that would be quite good if the opponent's decks weren't built specifically to make it ineffective. I appreciate there being some difficulty, but they could have at least given us a win condition.
Anyway, to OP: I suspect it was a bug caused by the 2/3 elemental that recasts spells. If that minion wasn't on the board then I have no idea what triggered it.
Isn't the entire point of achievements to do something difficult? If they were all things everyone could get in 10 minutes then it would be a hollow victory. Besides, you are getting XP just for spending the time trying so at least you are paid for the procedure as well as the kidney.
As for them being walled behind requiring specific cards, that's pretty much unavoidable with set-specific achievments. I would say the reality of this is a better reason for people to not expect to get them all than how difficult some of them are.
As I see it there are 2 different types of information surrounding this. I entirely agree with you with being told the numbers for XP per hour in each of the game modes, and how much wins modify that. A simple table would do the job there. Note though, that the only reason I would like to be told this by the devs is because I don't expect this information to be displayed anywhere in-game.
However, details like how much a daily quest is worth and how much we need to move up the progression system will be made obvious to us at the very moment at starts mattering, i.e. when the patch hits. There really isn't much benefit to flooding us with those numbers beforehand, because it's not like we will make any different decisions based on knowing that information early.
In the end it is a progression system that is designed to span 4 months, so getting the precise numbers a few hours, days, or even weeks early really makes next to no difference.
You are overthinking it. They are just saying that you will get XP based on how long you play for, regardless of whether you win or lose, and in pretty much all game modes. Just spend time in the game and you will be rewarded for that.
Don't worry too much about the minutiae like earning XP at different rates in different game modes and there being bonus XP for winning. Those are just XP versions of what we already have with getting 10g for 3 wins in some game modes but not all.
I don't think this is quite true. I think we could still grind XP, we just won't need to be so try-hard about doing it since we will be given it for playing in all game modes and (I assume) when we lose too. In which case hardcore players should still be getting more XP than people just doing their daily quests.