Reveal-season poopbombs like Tony, King of Piracy is why new sets haven't excited me for a long time; they just feel like a checklist that makes adapting to the new meta somewhat faster. The dev's commitment to effects people don't like while enthusiastically ignoring effects that people do like stops being outrageous and just gets tiring.
In any event, you now have a one-slot fuel source for aggro. So long as aggro doesn't completely lose board, they have a reason to stay in the game. If they can burn their deck out of any answer to Tony, losing the game wins it.
Remember how Warlock Quest turned an interesting limitation into a free win condition and how much fun it was to lose to that? So much fun that Wild became unplayable? Remember how you asked for more of that? You didn't? Well you fucking got it.
Our best hope for this card is irrelevance. Our best hope for that is that the meta is literally so fast and horrible that slow decks destroy you before this can be reliably drawn. Again -- our best hope is that everything is such shit that this shit never sees play.
Edit: I thought I'd mentioned it but apparently forgot: any aggro deck -- any deck, really, but this works best with aggro since aggro takes and holds boards -- that has two slots available, not one, can run this and The Jailer and get that inevitability on 10 going. If you're Druid, you can make going to 10 far more reliable.
Also: why even bother fixing Wild if a month later you're going to toss it into a cesspool?
So they took the Witchwood's lycanthropy mechanic, which wasn't well-appreciated there, and added it to spells.
Well, the mechanic is the very opposite of broken, so maybe they get it right this time. Doubt it, though -- it's really difficult to use well. (And Thaddeus has a variant of this as well.)
I think they should include some ways of influencing where the cycle lands, though, tbh, I'd be shocked if the effect is strong enough to invest in. Still, if they believe in the effect, they should go whole-hog and not be afraid to provide support.
It looks like only Blood Death Knight is getting goodies this expansion. I'm not sure I'm too keen on how they're splitting up Runes, but here we are.
Starlight Groove. Roame's effective replacement for Hero longevity requires more card investment but less mana and doesn't have the offensive chops that made Cariel useful in every deck. If control Paladin isn't a thing, this exceptionally-strong card will have no home.
Wild will be unpleasant due to this. Not Druid-armor level, but still.
Fan Club. And here we are, the best healing card in Priest and one of the best in the game. I was wondering what would make Heartbreaker Hedanis worth anyone's time because the mana cost to power it was stupid-high compared to the Xyrella it replaced, but this alone almost makes it playable on a wombo turn. Almost. 5 damage popping randomly is way too inconsistent, so the mana cost of that healing still needs to drop from one effect or another.
Record Scratcher. Oh look, it's the Rogue Card That Will Matter this rotation.
The One-Amalgam Band. If Charge is on the list of effects it can get, its future in jank and streamer decks is bright. Eh, no Charge. Too bad.
Wild was always meant to be a "wild" format where anything was possible with all the old cards.
Virtually nothing is possible with the old cards because a tiny number of them dominate the format in a consistently non-interactive way. This has caused enough problems to cause streamers to a) express disgust and fatigue with the non-games, b) stop marketing Hearthstone substantially, or c) stop playing Hearthstone. This is combined with the player disatisfaction with the mode.
Wild is less of a format than it is a dumping ground of shit ideas drowning better ones. Once its problems strain the unpaid advertisers of the game, that kicks off a spiral that can hit Blizzard's bottom line. Combine that with player outrage and it's simply cheaper to nuke the problem cards than it is to set free support on fire. Knocking down ten cards is a small price to pay to negate consumer unrest; the issue now is whether or not they have the competence to clean house effectively.
This Brawl needs to be changed to the first spell you play each turn and/or mana's worth of spells up to your current mana crystals or somesuch -- or it should simply be removed. It's almost impossible to be more newbie-hostile than this terrible brawl.
Anyway, this should win on Turn 2 or, if you are fast enough with an excellent connection and CPU, Turn 1.
### Brawl Deck # Class: Demon Hunter # Format: Wild # # 2x (0) Blur # 2x (1) Double Jump # 1x (1) Final Showdown # 2x (1) Twin Slice # 2x (2) Chaos Strike # 1x (2) Fel Barrage # 2x (2) Mark of Scorn # 2x (2) Spectral Sight # 2x (3) Acrobatics # 2x (3) Relentless Pursuit # 2x (4) Fel'dorei Warband # 2x (4) Glide # 2x (5) Need for Greed # 2x (6) Relic of Dimensions # 2x (6) Skull of Gul'dan # 2x (8) Inner Demon # AAEBAZWrBAL39gOJ9wMO17sD4LwD2cYD1cgD78kD1tED29MD+dUDxd0D2d4DyIAEquIEhpIFiZIFAA== # # To use this deck, copy it to your clipboard and create a new deck in Hearthstone
That mercenaries offer should have massive disclaimers about the mode directly in it; not putting that information in there is just absolutely shitty behavior. Not everyone playing HS is totally online and checking patch notes.
As dour as I usually am about Hearthstone design and Mercenaries in particular, those new Mercenaries look fun. In fact, they are the most thematically-linked, mechanically-interwoven, and synergetic suite of cards they've ever produced and look exciting to play.
Which is why it's a tragedy that most people shouldn't even try.
All the same old problems still exist. You're not getting these consistently from packs and farming them into existence and then farming them into playability is such a pain in the ass as to render the upshot moot.
They might as well have thrown in a shortcut to allow players -- at least experienced ones -- to fast-track acquisitions and buildup. As it is, even if you haven't done a good chunk of the single-player content, it's all too boring and onerous to contemplate.
Changing gears, in Battleground news, Teron looks stronk af and looks to be a better Tamsin with a more fun ability.
That is extremely confusing, doubly-so because it contradicts how webpages usually work, including this one (as previous reveals had links to secondary pages even though edited culmulative pages like this one existed). You'd be better off changing the artwork and font to suggest that the second entry isn't an article at all, but a reminder of the previous article.
Edit: Also, the primary -- okay, the actual article -- doesn't have a direct link to the comments section on it.
I understand that this is a busy time btw and that y'all are working hard, but this implementation has some issues.
This card was when I started yelling that giving Paladin these half-assed synergies was terrible and they needed dual-tribes to make the (terribly unthematic) archetypes work. Now you can run them but Paladin has better things to do. And y'know what? I'm kinda fine with that.
I was thinking about cool stuff the tribal overlaps could do with Divine Shield which pop up on the best Pally tribals, but then I thought about how awfully fast Wild is and concluded that the deck would be jank. :-/
Just like with Knights of the Frozen Throne and explicitly unlike Doom in the Tomb, introducing the Curse of Naxxramas will not likely devastate the meta because of how power-crept the game is compared to the the re-introduced cards. It will likely have a more intriguing affect, for the first few hours, because far more players weren't playing HS when Naxx first came out . . . but then that power disparity will kick that effect in the nads and no one will see those cards because the meta will crush them.
So with the exception of a tiny number of cards, this is an Arena/Duels thing.
There's only one card that people will want to play with though it will be hated by a slightly-smaller group. That one card will be 80% of the effect of reintroducing Naxx. Zombie Chow is the next runner-up in general utility; the problem is that control and slow decks don't need to bother with a speedbump so Chow might not even have a place. Everything else will be either utra specialized or tech --
Sylvanas is Undead (Forsaken) and they're Horde. Dawngrasp is a Blood Elf and they're Horde, too, for reasons stemming from WCIII and WoW, long before the Barrens story in HS. On top of this, everything in WoW is either slightly- or way more stupid compared to WCIII (my bias is evident) so researching WoW is a pain in the butt.
This is time-period-dependant. Slylvanas would have been part of the Lich King's Undead faction before the middle of WCIII's expansion the Frozen Throne (and was an Alliance member before she was Undead). Gul'Dan is a Horde member that betrays the Horde for Real Ultimate Power way back in WCII -- and dies. He's such an important plot-mover that he has models and dialogue and time-travelly dimension-shifty reappearances in WoW and a place in Hearthstone and Heroes of the Storm even though he's dead as fuck before WCIII begins and isn't arguably even Horde anymore because, y'know, betrayal. Gul'Dan, no longer a Horde member, is so important that his bleached skull gets more screen time in WCIII than some characters.
But he's Horde in Mercenaries because of course he is. Which is fine, but you have to signpost this stuff.
You can't possibly follow this. None of this is intuitive. This was a problem noted in the lauch teasers. I was asking how you identify factions before the game had released.
Traditionally Blizzard games stood out in terms of polish, but that was missing from Mercenaries.
Let me put on my tinfoil hat and say that Blizzard was like Japanese industry of the 70's and 80's, taking existing material and improving it -- not creative or imaginative in a broad sense, but giving cliches and tropes that high-sheen polish that outshined the competition . . .
. . . and that changed after the buyout.
Blizzard was some combination of a) the management and b) the employees and both of those groups have changed lineups. It would have been surprising if things hadn't changed, tbh. But the old-school Blizzard that had so much good time management that their high-polished games had the time for the most random-ass easter eggs imaginable is way out of our rearview mirror.
Regarding a lack of enthusiasm from streamers though, the mode just isn't great streaming material, so I think that was always going to happen. You can't really grasp what is going on in PvP unless you know the abilities of every merc by heart; this was a problem even for players and it would be worse for a viewing audience. Streaming PvE would be easier to follow, but not varied enough to keep viewer attention for long.
Emphasis added. This is the ultra-mega version of that lack of polish: feedback.
Just like Hearthstone's "history bar," Mercenaries didn't tell you shit. It explained nothing, forcing you to scurry about online to grasp basic game mechanics, with your only recourse to sometimes be experimentation in a game that already taxed your time to nauseating heights. It was too slow to tolerate and too fast with issues that mattered with no respect for the information the players needed or wanted. Ignoring how many extra steps and issues the interface had in and of itself, the buffs/debuffs output format dragged over from HS was worse than inadequate and even when it "worked," useful information could flow right off the screen.
This wasn't a game that respected the game assets it presented to you, so why should you respect it?
Much like how Hasbro hates the idea of any sort of "community" being a part of its sales of Magic or D&D, video games producers, to a lesser extent hate any dependence on influencers or goodwill to sell their product. This is less fatal for a video game than for physical or social hobby games, but the rub is that Mercenaries was so egregiously bad for players that its awfulness poured over to the streaming experience and actually turned a positive resource into a negative. In fact, streamers that were interested in or liked the mode were more damning of it than those who hated it imo because their enthusiasm to understand it drove home the paucity of the content. Over and over again, people were claiming that they learned Mercenaries from Trump, which is a building-sized red flag for people who don't know anything about Trump.
And the only reason such a colossal fail makes sense was if Mercenaries was meant to be an addictive, abusive, unscrupulous appeal to the most vulnerable players possible such that the money gained from abusing the former would easily make up for the poor buzz of the half-assed "effort."
Mercenaries needed to fail. It could have failed in ways better for HS players, but it did need to fail asap.
The mythic bonuses appear to be bespoke, which means that some human being had to give each and every ability in Mercenaries a pass. Ignoring the bug fiesta that will probably create (they did say they would do some bugfixes going forward, so that's fine), there's just no way that the abilities can be anywhere close to balanced with that kind of work. Which is not a big deal since this is PvE and it should create some funny moments and reliable comps.
Indeed, imbalance towards the players is even more justified as this renown system puts pressure on those trying to level-up mercs by removing a good source of upgrade points from their toolbox.
The faction insignias and multi-tribe features are examples of things that should have existed for Mercenaries and mainstream Hearthstone both and from the very beginning. Mercenaries seemed to be a more intimate exploration of the themes of the card game which made it all the more disappointing when the game dismissed details from the world background's lore in design.
Incidentally, this also means that taking the treasure that makes your mercs all pirates will no longer screw over as many comps. (Just the ones relying on faction identification, which are fewer than tribal reliance.) And fewer dumb Lich King debates.
There was never a real good-faith effort here, but I don't think that this is necessarily the fault of the devs (though I'm not in the room with them so I can't tell). It's not merely that the launch was a blatant insult -- not half-assed but an actual grim joke with incompleteness, bugs, and some terrible pro-monetization design choices dominating the experience. It was the fact that the devs had a muted response to the lack of enthusiasm from a lot of the fans -- and streamers. Tolerating that kind of negative feedback suggests that the monetezation model, the thing that had to be killed for the mode to work, was the very thing that management wanted the most.
At this point, the most reasonable thing for the team to do is to make everything in the game as accessible as possible and use the mode as a sweetner for HS content. (Actually, the most reasonable thing for them to do is to refund people's purchases, but since this was a low-key scam from the beginning, that's not happening.) The mode still has potential as a sandbox that can help showcase new characters and themes the main game wants to explore.
But its most likely future is to be quietly discontinued and pulled from the client over time.
It beyond frustrates me that Hearthstone hasn't been able to create anything competitive for the average player in the 10 years the game has been around. All of it has just been pumping Twitch stars, a lot of which moved on from the game soon after having success.
And why were those Twitch streamers leaving? The sameness of gameplay created by high-powered openers and consistency generated from high-powered cards. You know, the cards that the playerbase has been complaining about but also put players on a "buy-or-die" escalator.
You know what would help shake things up (besides better design) and increase streamer retention? A tournament mode oh wait. Holistic problem is holistic.
Wildpaw Gnoll might represent the biggest I Told You So in Hearthstone history. The devs made us suffer through that shit for more than a year and, in the end, just did what the community had asked for -- what was consistent with their own card text -- in the first place. The anticlimax would be infuriating if the nerf wasn't such a freakn' relief.
Note that they spent 0 seconds on making cool stuff for Maestra to interact with: there was only the egregious Gnoll, no follow-ups.
I was hoping for more functional changes like Last Stand received -- maybe the recursion/copy effects of Warrior and Priest in the buff list become Discovers or offer some choice instead of just getting stat buffs because in this meta, the stats mean little. I was also hoping for more corpses for Unholy and not just stat buffs. Still better than nothing, though.
Astalor Bloodsworn's nerf was way less mean than what seemed expected. It's still totally playable. Brann can still kill you with it.
Hunter is slower but still murderous. Final Showdown got it in the neck with the most inelegant gut-punch possible. Stormwind Quests remind me of the science fiction/fantasy trope where a group creates monsters, the group then hunts said monsters, and the writer wants you to treat the group like the good guys. Those Quests were a pile of problems.
I'm not sure how to use the DH quest now as the card draw you need would clog your hand by the time you have the mana to solve the first step, and most of the cards you draw will be, themselves, card draw.
High Cultist Basaleph may not save aggro, but it's good enough for control to try out even if it doesn't.
Reveal-season poopbombs like Tony, King of Piracy is why new sets haven't excited me for a long time; they just feel like a checklist that makes adapting to the new meta somewhat faster. The dev's commitment to effects people don't like while enthusiastically ignoring effects that people do like stops being outrageous and just gets tiring.
In any event, you now have a one-slot fuel source for aggro. So long as aggro doesn't completely lose board, they have a reason to stay in the game. If they can burn their deck out of any answer to Tony, losing the game wins it.
Remember how Warlock Quest turned an interesting limitation into a free win condition and how much fun it was to lose to that? So much fun that Wild became unplayable? Remember how you asked for more of that? You didn't? Well you fucking got it.
Our best hope for this card is irrelevance. Our best hope for that is that the meta is literally so fast and horrible that slow decks destroy you before this can be reliably drawn. Again -- our best hope is that everything is such shit that this shit never sees play.
Edit: I thought I'd mentioned it but apparently forgot: any aggro deck -- any deck, really, but this works best with aggro since aggro takes and holds boards -- that has two slots available, not one, can run this and The Jailer and get that inevitability on 10 going. If you're Druid, you can make going to 10 far more reliable.
Also: why even bother fixing Wild if a month later you're going to toss it into a cesspool?
Yup, I noticed a minute after I posted this and had trouble getting back to my post to fix it. :-/ Thank you.
So they took the Witchwood's lycanthropy mechanic, which wasn't well-appreciated there, and added it to spells.
Well, the mechanic is the very opposite of broken, so maybe they get it right this time. Doubt it, though -- it's really difficult to use well. (And Thaddeus has a variant of this as well.)
I think they should include some ways of influencing where the cycle lands, though, tbh, I'd be shocked if the effect is strong enough to invest in. Still, if they believe in the effect, they should go whole-hog and not be afraid to provide support.
It looks like only Blood Death Knight is getting goodies this expansion. I'm not sure I'm too keen on how they're splitting up Runes, but here we are.
Starlight Groove. Roame's effective replacement for Hero longevity requires more card investment but less mana and doesn't have the offensive chops that made Cariel useful in every deck. If control Paladin isn't a thing, this exceptionally-strong card will have no home.
Wild will be unpleasant due to this. Not Druid-armor level, but still.
Fan Club. And here we are, the best healing card in Priest and one of the best in the game. I was wondering what would make Heartbreaker Hedanis worth anyone's time because the mana cost to power it was stupid-high compared to the Xyrella it replaced, but this alone almost makes it playable on a wombo turn. Almost. 5 damage popping randomly is way too inconsistent, so the mana cost of that healing still needs to drop from one effect or another.
Record Scratcher. Oh look, it's the Rogue Card That Will Matter this rotation.
The One-Amalgam Band. If Charge is on the list of effects it can get, its future in jank and streamer decks is bright. Eh, no Charge. Too bad.
Quest mage time warp and both 10 drops and gnoll worthlessly evolve into gnolls, irrespectively.
Virtually nothing is possible with the old cards because a tiny number of them dominate the format in a consistently non-interactive way. This has caused enough problems to cause streamers to a) express disgust and fatigue with the non-games, b) stop marketing Hearthstone substantially, or c) stop playing Hearthstone. This is combined with the player disatisfaction with the mode.
Wild is less of a format than it is a dumping ground of shit ideas drowning better ones. Once its problems strain the unpaid advertisers of the game, that kicks off a spiral that can hit Blizzard's bottom line. Combine that with player outrage and it's simply cheaper to nuke the problem cards than it is to set free support on fire. Knocking down ten cards is a small price to pay to negate consumer unrest; the issue now is whether or not they have the competence to clean house effectively.
It's a ton of positives with very few negatives.
This Brawl needs to be changed to the first spell you play each turn and/or mana's worth of spells up to your current mana crystals or somesuch -- or it should simply be removed. It's almost impossible to be more newbie-hostile than this terrible brawl.
Anyway, this should win on Turn 2 or, if you are fast enough with an excellent connection and CPU, Turn 1.
### Brawl Deck
# Class: Demon Hunter
# Format: Wild
#
# 2x (0) Blur
# 2x (1) Double Jump
# 1x (1) Final Showdown
# 2x (1) Twin Slice
# 2x (2) Chaos Strike
# 1x (2) Fel Barrage
# 2x (2) Mark of Scorn
# 2x (2) Spectral Sight
# 2x (3) Acrobatics
# 2x (3) Relentless Pursuit
# 2x (4) Fel'dorei Warband
# 2x (4) Glide
# 2x (5) Need for Greed
# 2x (6) Relic of Dimensions
# 2x (6) Skull of Gul'dan
# 2x (8) Inner Demon
#
AAEBAZWrBAL39gOJ9wMO17sD4LwD2cYD1cgD78kD1tED29MD+dUDxd0D2d4DyIAEquIEhpIFiZIFAA==
#
# To use this deck, copy it to your clipboard and create a new deck in Hearthstone
That mercenaries offer should have massive disclaimers about the mode directly in it; not putting that information in there is just absolutely shitty behavior. Not everyone playing HS is totally online and checking patch notes.
As dour as I usually am about Hearthstone design and Mercenaries in particular, those new Mercenaries look fun. In fact, they are the most thematically-linked, mechanically-interwoven, and synergetic suite of cards they've ever produced and look exciting to play.
Which is why it's a tragedy that most people shouldn't even try.
All the same old problems still exist. You're not getting these consistently from packs and farming them into existence and then farming them into playability is such a pain in the ass as to render the upshot moot.
They might as well have thrown in a shortcut to allow players -- at least experienced ones -- to fast-track acquisitions and buildup. As it is, even if you haven't done a good chunk of the single-player content, it's all too boring and onerous to contemplate.
Changing gears, in Battleground news, Teron looks stronk af and looks to be a better Tamsin with a more fun ability.
With proper signposting, I can believe it.
That is extremely confusing, doubly-so because it contradicts how webpages usually work, including this one (as previous reveals had links to secondary pages even though edited culmulative pages like this one existed). You'd be better off changing the artwork and font to suggest that the second entry isn't an article at all, but a reminder of the previous article.
Edit: Also, the primary -- okay, the actual article -- doesn't have a direct link to the comments section on it.
I understand that this is a busy time btw and that y'all are working hard, but this implementation has some issues.
No. They're referring to the mislink on your frontpage: the article "New Legendary Rivendare, Warrider Joins Return to Naxxramas' Mini-Set and Brings the Horse Riders With Him" links to the page we're on right now and shouldn't.
This card was when I started yelling that giving Paladin these half-assed synergies was terrible and they needed dual-tribes to make the (terribly unthematic) archetypes work. Now you can run them but Paladin has better things to do. And y'know what? I'm kinda fine with that.
I was thinking about cool stuff the tribal overlaps could do with Divine Shield which pop up on the best Pally tribals, but then I thought about how awfully fast Wild is and concluded that the deck would be jank. :-/
Assuming Naxx is brought back:
Just like with Knights of the Frozen Throne and explicitly unlike Doom in the Tomb, introducing the Curse of Naxxramas will not likely devastate the meta because of how power-crept the game is compared to the the re-introduced cards. It will likely have a more intriguing affect, for the first few hours, because far more players weren't playing HS when Naxx first came out . . . but then that power disparity will kick that effect in the nads and no one will see those cards because the meta will crush them.
So with the exception of a tiny number of cards, this is an Arena/Duels thing.
There's only one card that people will want to play with though it will be hated by a slightly-smaller group. That one card will be 80% of the effect of reintroducing Naxx. Zombie Chow is the next runner-up in general utility; the problem is that control and slow decks don't need to bother with a speedbump so Chow might not even have a place. Everything else will be either utra specialized or tech --
Mad Scientist
Deathlord
-- or possible jank that will be tried and have a slim chance of mattering:
Dancing Swords
Unstable Ghoul -- how come this isn't Undead?
Kel'Thuzad -- ditto.
* The database hasn't been updated; those cards are Undead in the Collection Manager.
A lot of cards in that second category were traditionally good but it's hard to say how they'll fare nowadays. I think Haunted Creeper holds up.
Poison Seeds will see play and it will be awful and terrible and bad. I'm going to try to make Reincarnate work. It won't.
Sylvanas is Undead (Forsaken) and they're Horde. Dawngrasp is a Blood Elf and they're Horde, too, for reasons stemming from WCIII and WoW, long before the Barrens story in HS. On top of this, everything in WoW is either slightly- or way more stupid compared to WCIII (my bias is evident) so researching WoW is a pain in the butt.
This is time-period-dependant. Slylvanas would have been part of the Lich King's Undead faction before the middle of WCIII's expansion the Frozen Throne (and was an Alliance member before she was Undead). Gul'Dan is a Horde member that betrays the Horde for Real Ultimate Power way back in WCII -- and dies. He's such an important plot-mover that he has models and dialogue and time-travelly dimension-shifty reappearances in WoW and a place in Hearthstone and Heroes of the Storm even though he's dead as fuck before WCIII begins and isn't arguably even Horde anymore because, y'know, betrayal. Gul'Dan, no longer a Horde member, is so important that his bleached skull gets more screen time in WCIII than some characters.
But he's Horde in Mercenaries because of course he is. Which is fine, but you have to signpost this stuff.
You can't possibly follow this. None of this is intuitive. This was a problem noted in the lauch teasers. I was asking how you identify factions before the game had released.
Let me put on my tinfoil hat and say that Blizzard was like Japanese industry of the 70's and 80's, taking existing material and improving it -- not creative or imaginative in a broad sense, but giving cliches and tropes that high-sheen polish that outshined the competition . . .
. . . and that changed after the buyout.
Blizzard was some combination of a) the management and b) the employees and both of those groups have changed lineups. It would have been surprising if things hadn't changed, tbh. But the old-school Blizzard that had so much good time management that their high-polished games had the time for the most random-ass easter eggs imaginable is way out of our rearview mirror.
Emphasis added. This is the ultra-mega version of that lack of polish: feedback.
Just like Hearthstone's "history bar," Mercenaries didn't tell you shit. It explained nothing, forcing you to scurry about online to grasp basic game mechanics, with your only recourse to sometimes be experimentation in a game that already taxed your time to nauseating heights. It was too slow to tolerate and too fast with issues that mattered with no respect for the information the players needed or wanted. Ignoring how many extra steps and issues the interface had in and of itself, the buffs/debuffs output format dragged over from HS was worse than inadequate and even when it "worked," useful information could flow right off the screen.
This wasn't a game that respected the game assets it presented to you, so why should you respect it?
Much like how Hasbro hates the idea of any sort of "community" being a part of its sales of Magic or D&D, video games producers, to a lesser extent hate any dependence on influencers or goodwill to sell their product. This is less fatal for a video game than for physical or social hobby games, but the rub is that Mercenaries was so egregiously bad for players that its awfulness poured over to the streaming experience and actually turned a positive resource into a negative. In fact, streamers that were interested in or liked the mode were more damning of it than those who hated it imo because their enthusiasm to understand it drove home the paucity of the content. Over and over again, people were claiming that they learned Mercenaries from Trump, which is a building-sized red flag for people who don't know anything about Trump.
And the only reason such a colossal fail makes sense was if Mercenaries was meant to be an addictive, abusive, unscrupulous appeal to the most vulnerable players possible such that the money gained from abusing the former would easily make up for the poor buzz of the half-assed "effort."
Mercenaries needed to fail. It could have failed in ways better for HS players, but it did need to fail asap.
The mythic bonuses appear to be bespoke, which means that some human being had to give each and every ability in Mercenaries a pass. Ignoring the bug fiesta that will probably create (they did say they would do some bugfixes going forward, so that's fine), there's just no way that the abilities can be anywhere close to balanced with that kind of work. Which is not a big deal since this is PvE and it should create some funny moments and reliable comps.
Indeed, imbalance towards the players is even more justified as this renown system puts pressure on those trying to level-up mercs by removing a good source of upgrade points from their toolbox.
The faction insignias and multi-tribe features are examples of things that should have existed for Mercenaries and mainstream Hearthstone both and from the very beginning. Mercenaries seemed to be a more intimate exploration of the themes of the card game which made it all the more disappointing when the game dismissed details from the world background's lore in design.
Incidentally, this also means that taking the treasure that makes your mercs all pirates will no longer screw over as many comps. (Just the ones relying on faction identification, which are fewer than tribal reliance.) And fewer dumb Lich King debates.
There was never a real good-faith effort here, but I don't think that this is necessarily the fault of the devs (though I'm not in the room with them so I can't tell). It's not merely that the launch was a blatant insult -- not half-assed but an actual grim joke with incompleteness, bugs, and some terrible pro-monetization design choices dominating the experience. It was the fact that the devs had a muted response to the lack of enthusiasm from a lot of the fans -- and streamers. Tolerating that kind of negative feedback suggests that the monetezation model, the thing that had to be killed for the mode to work, was the very thing that management wanted the most.
At this point, the most reasonable thing for the team to do is to make everything in the game as accessible as possible and use the mode as a sweetner for HS content. (Actually, the most reasonable thing for them to do is to refund people's purchases, but since this was a low-key scam from the beginning, that's not happening.) The mode still has potential as a sandbox that can help showcase new characters and themes the main game wants to explore.
But its most likely future is to be quietly discontinued and pulled from the client over time.
And why were those Twitch streamers leaving? The sameness of gameplay created by high-powered openers and consistency generated from high-powered cards. You know, the cards that the playerbase has been complaining about but also put players on a "buy-or-die" escalator.
You know what would help shake things up (besides better design) and increase streamer retention? A tournament mode oh wait. Holistic problem is holistic.
I knew Brawlesium was coming and it still feels like crap. I was hoping to clear some quests with Brawl; well that's not happening.
This thing is anti-marketing.
Wildpaw Gnoll might represent the biggest I Told You So in Hearthstone history. The devs made us suffer through that shit for more than a year and, in the end, just did what the community had asked for -- what was consistent with their own card text -- in the first place. The anticlimax would be infuriating if the nerf wasn't such a freakn' relief.
Note that they spent 0 seconds on making cool stuff for Maestra to interact with: there was only the egregious Gnoll, no follow-ups.
I was hoping for more functional changes like Last Stand received -- maybe the recursion/copy effects of Warrior and Priest in the buff list become Discovers or offer some choice instead of just getting stat buffs because in this meta, the stats mean little. I was also hoping for more corpses for Unholy and not just stat buffs. Still better than nothing, though.
Astalor Bloodsworn's nerf was way less mean than what seemed expected. It's still totally playable. Brann can still kill you with it.
Hunter is slower but still murderous. Final Showdown got it in the neck with the most inelegant gut-punch possible. Stormwind Quests remind me of the science fiction/fantasy trope where a group creates monsters, the group then hunts said monsters, and the writer wants you to treat the group like the good guys. Those Quests were a pile of problems.
I'm not sure how to use the DH quest now as the card draw you need would clog your hand by the time you have the mana to solve the first step, and most of the cards you draw will be, themselves, card draw.
High Cultist Basaleph may not save aggro, but it's good enough for control to try out even if it doesn't.