If your MMR is dumpstered in BG, half of the players will be afk from jump in a given game. The only reason nearly all of the players aren't afk is because Blizzard made an undocumented stealth change (that didn't see any discussion in social media) after the very first major overhaul of Battlegrounds where the MMR was reset that forced the track-pushers into games with anyone with a wide range of low MMR. This turboscrews the low MMR players trying to rank up, but Blizz is fine with that because what they don't want are the track-pushers to get infinite passive games in a row.
What this means is that at the very lowest ranks, your lobby will be garbage and getting first place just requires you to get an early build online fast and you'll almost never be punished by another early build because half your opponents will be ghosts. It can still be frustrating and take time, but if you were going to run a BG game or two anyway, the 1st place win is inevitable.
The intentional lose report function is there to keep the rest of the data clean. Consider:
Player X has a bad time in a match and feels, strongly, that their previous opponent did not conduct themselves in a sportsmanlike fashion and needs to be punished by the admins. They look at the report functions to express their displeasure. They feel the match was thrown in a way that caused them harm. If "intentionally lost" is not there, they pick some other function that matches how they feel. This distorts the data on that function. If the button is there, they push it and feel some relief, regardless of the button's efficacy.
The button exists as an emotion sink, allowing people to feel some resolution about a situation that the admins cannot possibly resolve.
The option serves a similar function to the "close door" button of most elevators (protip: those buttons are generally attached to empty shunts with no circuitry and do nothing -- elevator door closing is automatic).
With the added bonus main function of reducing false positives.
It's smart coding.
(And you do not want intentional losing to be penalized. That can of worms has no bottom.)
The devs have been making the tasks easier, which is a good thing. I was distracted and didn't get the fast completion I was intended but still got it done several days ago with far less pain than any of the other tasklines.
The decks are standard but the format is Wild -- you can discover anything. That's actually an interesting idea, giving one some varied gameplay without the obscenity that is constructed Wild combos.
As an introduction to the newest expansion, however, it's obviously misleading and therefore somewhat counterproductive, though the fact that it's weeks too late is even more counterproductive. Was it essential to have the Zephrys wishes brawl for the umpteenth time right that very minute so there was no time for the expansion-themed brawl?
You could actually do this brawl twice in a row, one with a Standard pool and one with Wild, all without hurting theme.
Speaking of theme: I'm surprised they didn't make a brawl built around Murloc Holmes and perhaps discovering cards to put in your deck, making it so players play lots of Holmes and spend the brawl guessing what their foe designed.
They won't look at Renathal for the same reason they won't look at Guff: they like what they've done and are indifferent to the implications until the latter becomes intolerable for their own future design. Recall how long it took for Celestial Alignment to be fixed.
Theotar, the Mad Duke will, I agree, get nerfed, but it will likely only be a mana hit. Reducing its stats is meaningless and changing its effect would be considered a nuclear option. Do recall how many steps it took to bring Mindrender Illucia to heel. If they go straight for the jungular and hit the effect, not only would I be wrong, but it would be a good sign that the devs are finally not overvaling their designs.
Quest Mage, much like Neptulon, is an evergreen problem in Wild and should be dealt with directly instead of resetting the time bomb by crushing some other card that happens to trigger its ascendancy once more.
The other person to reply to you is correct, but the Toxfin/Sefin disparity can't be overstated. I've had Sefins sniped 12 times in a row. You can literally get nothing out of them, wasting the whole investment. In addition, they force you to create really terrible boards where units are deliberately killed, risking your Health and giving dangerous enemies less Health damage, all to get poison up.
And finally, they played really badly with timing with divine shield, taunt, and King Bagurgle-or-whatever. If you wanted any of the latter to get poison, you usually had to make sure that they didn't have those attributes before poison-obtaination, because other things beside them need to die first to get them poison -- but taunt makes the would-be survivor die first, divine shield can make something fail to die fast enough, and so on. Sometimes this was so complicated it just didn't work.
Alternative: Toxfin just gives some mofo poison. Done and dusted.
This also makes your board way, way stronger. Ever had a good murloc that you couldn't keep because you needed to keep a Sefin around? Toxfin is disposable. Toss 'em. In fact, you must toss him to optimize because he has to re-enter the pool so that Primalfin or Bob can find him again. So Toxfin is way, way cheaper.
And that, in turn, synergizes with the Darkmoon Faire treasure that pulls a minion back into your hand. Extra poison right when you need it.
Since you no longer need a permanent Sefin slot, that gives you an effective +1 Murloc for your whole board. That's huge.
We're all still trying to come to grips with the new Quest system, but I can guarantee you that they'll synergize better with new-old Murloc than recent-Murloc.
• Tiny Henchmen help low-tier Murlocs scale and you have more of those because you have no Seifins.
• Snicker-Snacks trigger Battlecries, so you can keep a Toxfin for an extra turn or two to spread the poison to everyone.
• Victim's Spectre similarly can get you extra Toxfins if you keep one in the back and it doesn't get sniped (and you're no longer penalized for Taunting your Kings, so that's easier).
The only things the new quests help Seifin with is make them golden if they're the rightmost or leftmost (it'll be the former), but keep in mind that even then, your Sefin could get sniped and you get no procs from it. That's way, way less synergy.
Also: remember how everyone's talking about Amalgams. Here's the thing: you don't even need to go full Murloc to make Amalgams work. You can legit go one or two other tribes, murloc-boost an Amalgam, and have the best of both worlds. You can go Amalgam, try to force Murlocs, and if you don't get them, poisonous the former and just go some other tribe, relying on Amalgams as you transition. You can't reliably do any of that with Seifins.
• Make the best (early) Demon harder to get but don't give it stats to compensate.
• Add lackluster Demons.
• Make Murlocs WAY FREAKN' BETTER.
Sounds about right.
By the way, because the changes are going to mean way more afk players, having a poison generation mechanic that doesn't require interaction with others is even stronger than it appears on first blush.
Also:
Quote From OoC said:
One of the things that Wonderous Wisdomball can do is replace your board with plain copies of your current board.
So it contradicts its explicit text in order to make you lose the game such that new players and players who don't check social media and fan pages are completely screwed over. Wellokaythen. They took a single-player bad troll concept and made it worse, because that's what the players somebody? wanted.
I expect, and hope, I'm misinformed of some or of all of that.
I appreciate the help and my god: the lengths the devs have gone to to not use typical game language and templating (including that already found in HS) is astounding.
Normally, the excuse for poor formatting is space, but that doesn't seem to be the case here.
Consider "your." In alternate-turn games you have to distinguish on whose turn a thing happens (which is why very odd cards like Cornelius Roame have to be explicitly and carefully worded). In BGs, everyone shares turns, so the term "your" is redundant at best or mildly confusing at worse. Saying "each" would actually have saved space. So --
Quote From BG Quest Reward
At the start of your turn, give a minion in your hand +12/+12.
would be better rendered --
Quote From BG Quest Reward
At each turn's start, give a minion in your hand +12/+12.
Or the ever-so-slightly longer but more naturally-worded:
Quote From BG Quest Reward
At the start of each turn, give a minion in your hand +12/+12.
Linking timing (start/end of turn) with reoccurability (every turn) isn't remotely obvious -- and they know that because they had to explain things on social media.
In any event, appreciate the clarification. I think that, as usual, players will just learn it the hard way and memorize the play outcomes.
It isn't always clear which of these go off exactly once and which happen every turn, so one assumes that they are every turn. If they vary, then the writing is awful.
Congratulations, F2P players: you're looking at what might be the worst patch in Hearthstone history.
The Runestones are an obvious cash grab, but here's what the Battlegrounds changes are really all about:
Quote From The Devs
By giving Battlegrounds players their own rewards track, we can give them more rewards they care about, and we no longer need to try to mesh Battlegrounds rewards with a Gold and XP system that was designed to serve traditional Hearthstone . . .
No. You will still gain some Hearthstone Rewards Track XP as you play Battlegrounds . . .
Runestones will be replacing real money purchases for nearly every product in the Hearthstone shop. Some products, like Pre-Purchase Bundles, the Hearthstone Tavern Pass, and Packs (purchasing more than one at a time) will be able to be purchased with money or Runestones. A few other select products, like individual packs and cosmetics crafted in the Collection, will remain purchasable with only Gold.
. . . No, there are no plans to earn Runestones in-game.
This is a massive, massive convenience punish for f2p players. You can no longer buy packs in bulk using in-game currency. Now the top of every expansion is sinking five to ten minutes just clicking on a button to earn your privilege of playing Hearthstone. It's a deliberate reduction of game quality to increase the financial cost of the game to you.
Further, this is a way to kill the gold gained by playing Battlegrounds. BGs was the best way for f2p players to hit that rewards track because the game spends less time on interstitial screens and wastes less gameplay on non-rewards-track time. Blizzard knew this: this is why BGs was updated some time ago to force lowest-level players to play with some low-mid players no matter what because the lowest-level players are always a bunch of afk'ers. (This has the hilarious effect of punishing low-level players, encouraging them to go afk.) Given the massive connection problems HS has, BGs was the best way to play through the rewards track since the constant bugs and disconnects don't feel nearly as bad for a throwaway game of auto-chess.
These changes are a direct attack on those tactics, so now you can expect even more dead games of casual and Tavern Brawl as people find other ways to crawl the rewards track.
Edit: And I forgot to mention the xp gains are only on wins on BGs. If this change hits the regular Hearthstone rewards track, this will all be even worse.
This is on top of the p2w changes on heroes making BGs even less enjoyable. Players lose at every opportunity.
If that wasn't enough, the fallout from this will dominate every discussion online.
Welcome to Hearthstone: Reddit Controversy Edition.
The Demon Hunter buffs accomplished little but an uptick in interest -- Relics are still trash and Renathal plus Implock makes aggro DH a joke. Irebound Brute is worthless because the tools needed to make it, and Quest, work were deliberately rotated out. Some were mentioned above, but one notable misinclusion was Double Jump, which often acted as a guaranteed 3-card draw for 3 mana. DH hyperdraw is dead, so the cards dependent upon it are dead, too. Much like the improvement of Warrior core-set cards, the improvement was good in principle (I approve) but functionally worthless.
Relics actively make your deck worse and the first 10 mana or so worth of them do little but negate the penalty you incurred by putting Relics in your deck in the first place.
Going to give a little update here, having played with these changes. Despite the herculean effort to maintain positivity, what was almost completely obvious turned out to be true: Relics are still absolute shite and are conceptual failures. Combined with Renathal making 40 the new 30, DH has no real ability to hit hard enough early to matter, no ability to stick a board (Deathrattle is trash both mechanically and thematically) and the Relics cause -- and this is literal -- more problems than they solve.
This puts the devs in an interesting position. DH will continue to be trash as will Relics but they've shown a willingness to buff the latter. Will they continue to buff them or simply abandon them? I expect the latter; the kind of cost reduction Relics would need to be viable is staggering.
Mixed feelings. The nerfs seem solid. The buffs are actually choosing better targets than normal, but I have a minor nitpick with Demon Hunter.
DH has a lot of completely dead spells that never had the mana cost they needed but would otherwise be playable. The buffs here are to cards that don't have the support needed because Team 5 exiled said support out of rotation (Irebound Brute) or hit a card that would have to be ludicrously cheap to justify its very weak effect (Abyssal Depths). Still, the fact that it occured to the devs to buff a card that saw no play is a very good thing. There's a possibility that a big DH could happen with Vanndar Stormpike coming out consistently because of Abyssal Depths.
They're using a very light touch on Relics, which stink on ice; not too sanguine about that. They did pick a set of buffs that help you defend from Imp Warlock (location plus buffed relic does 6 to the enemy board on turn 3) so that could be effective despite my reservations.
Warrior buffs have something more ambitious: buffs to ancient cards that are being updated for modern Hearthstone. That's an attitude we wish could be extended to all the dead neutrals that were never good but are inevitably put into the core sets, so that's very promising.
The only Pally archetypes that looked decent to me were handbuff and holy and the buffs don't directly help those archetypes. The buffs might justify combining them with pure or dude. I doubt it, but again, I appreciate them hitting some old cards with buffs.
Rogue bucks the trend and gets a buff to an already-strong card: Edwin, Defias Kingpin. Not a fan of that, but the other buffs are fine and, tbh, Edwin isn't a particularly toxic card.
The philosophy behind these changes is actually good and that's something I almost never say about Hearthstone changes.
If your MMR is dumpstered in BG, half of the players will be afk from jump in a given game. The only reason nearly all of the players aren't afk is because Blizzard made an undocumented stealth change (that didn't see any discussion in social media) after the very first major overhaul of Battlegrounds where the MMR was reset that forced the track-pushers into games with anyone with a wide range of low MMR. This turboscrews the low MMR players trying to rank up, but Blizz is fine with that because what they don't want are the track-pushers to get infinite passive games in a row.
What this means is that at the very lowest ranks, your lobby will be garbage and getting first place just requires you to get an early build online fast and you'll almost never be punished by another early build because half your opponents will be ghosts. It can still be frustrating and take time, but if you were going to run a BG game or two anyway, the 1st place win is inevitable.
The intentional lose report function is there to keep the rest of the data clean. Consider:
Player X has a bad time in a match and feels, strongly, that their previous opponent did not conduct themselves in a sportsmanlike fashion and needs to be punished by the admins. They look at the report functions to express their displeasure. They feel the match was thrown in a way that caused them harm. If "intentionally lost" is not there, they pick some other function that matches how they feel. This distorts the data on that function. If the button is there, they push it and feel some relief, regardless of the button's efficacy.
The button exists as an emotion sink, allowing people to feel some resolution about a situation that the admins cannot possibly resolve.
The option serves a similar function to the "close door" button of most elevators (protip: those buttons are generally attached to empty shunts with no circuitry and do nothing -- elevator door closing is automatic).
With the added bonus main function of reducing false positives.
It's smart coding.
(And you do not want intentional losing to be penalized. That can of worms has no bottom.)
The devs have been making the tasks easier, which is a good thing. I was distracted and didn't get the fast completion I was intended but still got it done several days ago with far less pain than any of the other tasklines.
The decks are standard but the format is Wild -- you can discover anything. That's actually an interesting idea, giving one some varied gameplay without the obscenity that is constructed Wild combos.
As an introduction to the newest expansion, however, it's obviously misleading and therefore somewhat counterproductive, though the fact that it's weeks too late is even more counterproductive. Was it essential to have the Zephrys wishes brawl for the umpteenth time right that very minute so there was no time for the expansion-themed brawl?
You could actually do this brawl twice in a row, one with a Standard pool and one with Wild, all without hurting theme.
Speaking of theme: I'm surprised they didn't make a brawl built around Murloc Holmes and perhaps discovering cards to put in your deck, making it so players play lots of Holmes and spend the brawl guessing what their foe designed.
They won't look at Renathal for the same reason they won't look at Guff: they like what they've done and are indifferent to the implications until the latter becomes intolerable for their own future design. Recall how long it took for Celestial Alignment to be fixed.
Theotar, the Mad Duke will, I agree, get nerfed, but it will likely only be a mana hit. Reducing its stats is meaningless and changing its effect would be considered a nuclear option. Do recall how many steps it took to bring Mindrender Illucia to heel. If they go straight for the jungular and hit the effect, not only would I be wrong, but it would be a good sign that the devs are finally not overvaling their designs.
Quest Mage, much like Neptulon, is an evergreen problem in Wild and should be dealt with directly instead of resetting the time bomb by crushing some other card that happens to trigger its ascendancy once more.
The other person to reply to you is correct, but the Toxfin/Sefin disparity can't be overstated. I've had Sefins sniped 12 times in a row. You can literally get nothing out of them, wasting the whole investment. In addition, they force you to create really terrible boards where units are deliberately killed, risking your Health and giving dangerous enemies less Health damage, all to get poison up.
And finally, they played really badly with timing with divine shield, taunt, and King Bagurgle-or-whatever. If you wanted any of the latter to get poison, you usually had to make sure that they didn't have those attributes before poison-obtaination, because other things beside them need to die first to get them poison -- but taunt makes the would-be survivor die first, divine shield can make something fail to die fast enough, and so on. Sometimes this was so complicated it just didn't work.
Alternative: Toxfin just gives some mofo poison. Done and dusted.
This also makes your board way, way stronger. Ever had a good murloc that you couldn't keep because you needed to keep a Sefin around? Toxfin is disposable. Toss 'em. In fact, you must toss him to optimize because he has to re-enter the pool so that Primalfin or Bob can find him again. So Toxfin is way, way cheaper.
And that, in turn, synergizes with the Darkmoon Faire treasure that pulls a minion back into your hand. Extra poison right when you need it.
Since you no longer need a permanent Sefin slot, that gives you an effective +1 Murloc for your whole board. That's huge.
We're all still trying to come to grips with the new Quest system, but I can guarantee you that they'll synergize better with new-old Murloc than recent-Murloc.
• Tiny Henchmen help low-tier Murlocs scale and you have more of those because you have no Seifins.
• Snicker-Snacks trigger Battlecries, so you can keep a Toxfin for an extra turn or two to spread the poison to everyone.
• Victim's Spectre similarly can get you extra Toxfins if you keep one in the back and it doesn't get sniped (and you're no longer penalized for Taunting your Kings, so that's easier).
The only things the new quests help Seifin with is make them golden if they're the rightmost or leftmost (it'll be the former), but keep in mind that even then, your Sefin could get sniped and you get no procs from it. That's way, way less synergy.
Also: remember how everyone's talking about Amalgams. Here's the thing: you don't even need to go full Murloc to make Amalgams work. You can legit go one or two other tribes, murloc-boost an Amalgam, and have the best of both worlds. You can go Amalgam, try to force Murlocs, and if you don't get them, poisonous the former and just go some other tribe, relying on Amalgams as you transition. You can't reliably do any of that with Seifins.
Hearthstone Devs:
• Make a pro-Demon pach.
• Make the best (early) Demon harder to get but don't give it stats to compensate.
• Add lackluster Demons.
• Make Murlocs WAY FREAKN' BETTER.
Sounds about right.
By the way, because the changes are going to mean way more afk players, having a poison generation mechanic that doesn't require interaction with others is even stronger than it appears on first blush.
Also:
So it contradicts its explicit text in order to make you lose the game such that new players and players who don't check social media and fan pages are completely screwed over. Wellokaythen. They took a single-player bad troll concept and made it worse, because that's what the players somebody? wanted.
I expect, and hope, I'm misinformed of some or of all of that.
I appreciate the help and my god: the lengths the devs have gone to to not use typical game language and templating (including that already found in HS) is astounding.
Normally, the excuse for poor formatting is space, but that doesn't seem to be the case here.
Consider "your." In alternate-turn games you have to distinguish on whose turn a thing happens (which is why very odd cards like Cornelius Roame have to be explicitly and carefully worded). In BGs, everyone shares turns, so the term "your" is redundant at best or mildly confusing at worse. Saying "each" would actually have saved space. So --
would be better rendered --
Or the ever-so-slightly longer but more naturally-worded:
Linking timing (start/end of turn) with reoccurability (every turn) isn't remotely obvious -- and they know that because they had to explain things on social media.
In any event, appreciate the clarification. I think that, as usual, players will just learn it the hard way and memorize the play outcomes.
It isn't always clear which of these go off exactly once and which happen every turn, so one assumes that they are every turn. If they vary, then the writing is awful.
I didn't misread it -- but they did, in fact, miswrite it.
After checking on the devs on social media, they clarified that they hadn't written up the announcement all that well and, thankfully, contradicted it.
Congratulations, F2P players: you're looking at what might be the worst patch in Hearthstone history.
The Runestones are an obvious cash grab, but here's what the Battlegrounds changes are really all about:
This is a massive, massive convenience punish for f2p players. You can no longer buy packs in bulk using in-game currency. Now the top of every expansion is sinking five to ten minutes just clicking on a button to earn your privilege of playing Hearthstone. It's a deliberate reduction of game quality to increase the financial cost of the game to you.
Further, this is a way to kill the gold gained by playing Battlegrounds. BGs was the best way for f2p players to hit that rewards track because the game spends less time on interstitial screens and wastes less gameplay on non-rewards-track time. Blizzard knew this: this is why BGs was updated some time ago to force lowest-level players to play with some low-mid players no matter what because the lowest-level players are always a bunch of afk'ers. (This has the hilarious effect of punishing low-level players, encouraging them to go afk.) Given the massive connection problems HS has, BGs was the best way to play through the rewards track since the constant bugs and disconnects don't feel nearly as bad for a throwaway game of auto-chess.
These changes are a direct attack on those tactics, so now you can expect even more dead games of casual and Tavern Brawl as people find other ways to crawl the rewards track.
Edit: And I forgot to mention the xp gains are only on wins on BGs. If this change hits the regular Hearthstone rewards track, this will all be even worse.
This is on top of the p2w changes on heroes making BGs even less enjoyable. Players lose at every opportunity.
If that wasn't enough, the fallout from this will dominate every discussion online.
Welcome to Hearthstone: Reddit Controversy Edition.
Just adding my two cents. No packs here after what has to be five hours plus.
The Demon Hunter buffs accomplished little but an uptick in interest -- Relics are still trash and Renathal plus Implock makes aggro DH a joke. Irebound Brute is worthless because the tools needed to make it, and Quest, work were deliberately rotated out. Some were mentioned above, but one notable misinclusion was Double Jump, which often acted as a guaranteed 3-card draw for 3 mana. DH hyperdraw is dead, so the cards dependent upon it are dead, too. Much like the improvement of Warrior core-set cards, the improvement was good in principle (I approve) but functionally worthless.
Relics actively make your deck worse and the first 10 mana or so worth of them do little but negate the penalty you incurred by putting Relics in your deck in the first place.
Vanndar looks to be the best DH deck now, but hand theft (Theotar, the Mad Duke) utterly destroys the Sire Denathrius win condition and you can't easily run Theotar, the Mad Duke in response because it tends to break Vanndar and Abyssal Depths both.
Going to give a little update here, having played with these changes. Despite the herculean effort to maintain positivity, what was almost completely obvious turned out to be true: Relics are still absolute shite and are conceptual failures. Combined with Renathal making 40 the new 30, DH has no real ability to hit hard enough early to matter, no ability to stick a board (Deathrattle is trash both mechanically and thematically) and the Relics cause -- and this is literal -- more problems than they solve.
This puts the devs in an interesting position. DH will continue to be trash as will Relics but they've shown a willingness to buff the latter. Will they continue to buff them or simply abandon them? I expect the latter; the kind of cost reduction Relics would need to be viable is staggering.
Never had the chance to use Lich Baz’hial's coins with Nagas, by some weird coincidence, and now it looks like that may never happen.
Elise looks like a super-high-skill ceiling power . . . which will be mostly used to frustratedly attempt to force comps. Good luck, everyone.
Deathwing just seems boring.
Mixed feelings. The nerfs seem solid. The buffs are actually choosing better targets than normal, but I have a minor nitpick with Demon Hunter.
DH has a lot of completely dead spells that never had the mana cost they needed but would otherwise be playable. The buffs here are to cards that don't have the support needed because Team 5 exiled said support out of rotation (Irebound Brute) or hit a card that would have to be ludicrously cheap to justify its very weak effect (Abyssal Depths). Still, the fact that it occured to the devs to buff a card that saw no play is a very good thing. There's a possibility that a big DH could happen with Vanndar Stormpike coming out consistently because of Abyssal Depths.
They're using a very light touch on Relics, which stink on ice; not too sanguine about that. They did pick a set of buffs that help you defend from Imp Warlock (location plus buffed relic does 6 to the enemy board on turn 3) so that could be effective despite my reservations.
Warrior buffs have something more ambitious: buffs to ancient cards that are being updated for modern Hearthstone. That's an attitude we wish could be extended to all the dead neutrals that were never good but are inevitably put into the core sets, so that's very promising.
The only Pally archetypes that looked decent to me were handbuff and holy and the buffs don't directly help those archetypes. The buffs might justify combining them with pure or dude. I doubt it, but again, I appreciate them hitting some old cards with buffs.
Rogue bucks the trend and gets a buff to an already-strong card: Edwin, Defias Kingpin. Not a fan of that, but the other buffs are fine and, tbh, Edwin isn't a particularly toxic card.
The philosophy behind these changes is actually good and that's something I almost never say about Hearthstone changes.
After dropping a high-damage minion: "By my calculations, you need to chill out!"
With two more copies in hand, just granted on the draw, not even from the opening or mulligan.
The game mode is . . . limited.
Murlocula should be mentioned here.
Murlocula should be mentioned on every class page that has an aggro concept.
It needs to be tested first and foremost, because if it works, it will be rotation-defining.
They pop this skin sale for a skin I've been waiting for for ages right before the expansion drops. Figures.