Sobject 9 and this are not comparable. Subject 9 is not used because Mage has plenty of ways to pull secrets from their deck (Mad Scientist, Arcanologist, Ancient Mysteries), what you want is access to the burn in your deck. Normally you use Aluneth and it draws you like 6-9 cards that you want, then starts killing you. If this draws you around 6 cards it's arguably better than Aluneth because of the body and much better tempo.
Yuuuck. Aluneth. With a body. That doesn't kill you later in the game. I'm not looking forward to the Mage meta we're about the experience in Wild...again. Well, I say again, but it won't be quite that Mage heavy. Aside from Reno Mage, Secret Mage and now Quest Mage (which didn't exist in the last Mage meta) we'll also have Reno Priest to "spice" things up. Pretty much everything else will likely be rendered irrelevant by those decks unless some big support or new archetypes are coming.
Heh, no. Interesting deckbuilding challenge but nowhere near viable. Doesn't even come close to Pocket Galaxy. Firstly, Mage has much easier access to getting the spell cast out of their deck, whereas Warlock has to dig for it with card draw. And pre-cast card draw only makes this card weaker. Secondly, Pocket Galaxy benefits everything. Literally any minion you put in your deck will benefit from it. You don't have to try to make it work, it works on its own. This, on the other hand, demands you specifically use expensive minions with low attack. Expensive minions + low attack is not exactly an enticing combination. And it will likely brick any of your early plays. Take a historically good early minion like, I dunno, Kobold Librarian or Mistress of Mixtures. All made worse by running this card. And since you're forced to build around this (unlike Galaxy which just works on everything), when you don't get it your deck essentially turns off.
New game mode....considering how downhill things have been going in Battlegrounds in terms of balance, the idea of them adding another mode to work on doesn't fill me with optimism. They can barely handle the one they have.
The sarcasm only applied to the last sentence of the second paragraph ;) I guess it was pretty redundant but you never know how dense people on the Internet can be.
And why make good points indeed when this is the extent of effort the devs intend to put into the mode. It's not like they're not getting feedback on this shit on forums. Pirates have been nigh-on useless for several patches now and Dragons have been so slow in scaling since their introduction that they're barely worth trying. Instead of addressing those long-standing issues we got another tribe shoved in last patch to overshadow them even more.
That's not to mention the discrepancy in hero power levels, which they're barely addressing. More than half the hero pool is still worthless, Maiev gets an irrelevant nerf (it's her insane economy that makes her busted, not the stats), Lich King still farms everyone and Rafaam swims in gold and triples just like Maiev. Getting +1 extra attack on frozen minions per turn isn't going to redeem Sindragosa in that environment. She's so deep down in the trash tier and all the top heroes get so many major stat or economy bonuses that this little change won't shift the scales in any significant way. She can technically get more stats on her minions than Kaelthas etc., but she could do that already. She pays for her extra stats with the inability to efficiently search for key minions to enhance her strategy, cause she's incentivised to skip the free rerolls she gets at the start of each turn. Thus she has the raw stats on her minions but is slow to reach those internal synergies that make builds tick.
I think what they should do with Poisonous is to limit it exclusively to minions that come pre-packaged with it, those currently being Deadly Spore and Maexxna. They should strip it off of Amalgadon adapts and remove Toxfin. That way you can't really just slap it onto a massive minion and have it farm two or three of your opponent's guys that've been built over the course of the whole game. It will be relegated to fragile, techy minions that serve a similar purpose to Unstable Ghoul.
As potentially busted and uncounterable as poisonous can be very deep into the lategame, I think it is necessary. Let's say you've made it to the final 2, both of you have been crushing, are very healthy. You square off, and you find that your opponent highrolled like a motherfucker. All other things being equal let's say they're like two or three turns ahead of you in scaling their build. Without poisonous being in the game, you're toast. You're likely to fight them at least two or three times before you die and there's just nothing you can do to alter your strategy. Without poisonous it's just big stuff against big stuff and their stuff is bigger. You can't ever catch up. There's no build switch you can make if it's all about stats.
Poisonous gives people the ability to adapt their build to their opponent, to catch up. To potentially counter strategies that revolve entirely around one ginormous dude (Pirates with a Taunted Looter, beefy Brann + Battlemaster, Garr) that would just farm all the minions you have and protect the squishies behind it. Poisonous lets you punch right through it, and if it's only available on small minions like the Spore or Maexxna, it gets one hit off to get you through that problematic minion and then the rest of your board has to take over. Poisonous + Divine Shield will not be as much of a problem because you then have to use Selfless + your poisonous minion to kill two enemy minions. So you trade evenly, 2 minions for 2 minions. Issues arise when the poisonous minion is big enough to survive hits even without divine shields. Spore is unlikely to get that big. Maexxna might but it takes a good deal of effort, or you have to already be running a Mama Bear/Goldrinn build to begin with. When it's not on Amalgadon or 50 health Murlocs, poisonous is fine and folds to anything with tokens, cleaves, secondary damage sources (whelps), divine shields, etc.
That's it? That's their big fix for Pirates being unplayable? Their way to make Demons relevant in any way? Their update to bring dragons back from being useless unless you luck into a Kalecgos? Their nerf to Elementals? Djinni is now better at what it's used for (it ain't the stats)! Two of the four elemental buffers got improved. Nomi is still busted in half.
But hey, Maiev's 1 cost minion purchases now get -1 health, Patchwerk has 5 extra HP, Sindragosa is just as useless as she was cause her hero power doesn't come close to even someone like Kaelthas. The hero meta is officially fixed guys! /s
Ugh. You just jam all the 0 mana minions into paladin, add crystology, first day of school, a couple of secrets, divine favour, corridor creeper, and you're set. Won 7 games in a row until I ran into some actual opposition.
I mean, since when are they worried about balance? The new motto is: keep churning out new stuff, don't worry about fixing old stuff. Pirates and Demons are still useless since a single divine shield Amalgadon two-for-ones you every time and there's nothing to fall back on like deathrattles or divine shields of your own. About half of the heroes are completely unplayable (I'm counting about 22 heroes out of 47), so not buying a Tavern Pass cuts your winrate to shreds. Damage spikes are still insane making Demons even more unplayable (since they hit like a wet noodle and can't afford a single loss past about turn 8).
You can do a Hadronox Druid or Odd Hadronox Druid without focusing on a beast base. Carnivorous Cube and Witching Hour are both odd so you can just chain-res Hadronoxes.
This could have been avoided...if they stopped printing blatantly broken shit. I mean Christ this thing was Growth Spiral with lifegain on the front end and a 4 mana 6/6 (the actual fuck) with a free Growth Spiral with lifegain on it on ETB and on attack on the back end. Did I mention it was unkillable? I think I didn't, sorry my bad. So here goes: it was unkillable. Exile it or steal it, otherwise it keeps coming back. With a Growth Spiral on play every time. And lifegain. Who could have seen that coming?
Hearthstone has definitely had a power creep problem as of late (in multiple game modes, in fact), but with the way MtG has been going recently, it seems Hearthstone still has a lot to learn from it about just how much power creep you can fit into a set.
And let's not forget, the majority of the blatantly overpowered, oft banned cards have been Mythic. The rarity that, in its original design, was not intended to just consist of absolute bombs that you'd want 4 of in every deck. But when they can get all that money, why wouldn't they.
Before you start swinging your wallet around (oops, too late!), you should probably know that I haven't been free to play since Whispers of the Old Gods. So so much for you being the "actual customer" in this conversation. Unlike you I just happen to be looking out for other people, not just the ones who play the way I do.
Secondly, um...yes, the game does actually, quite literally, owe people free shit. It's called a free to play game for a reason. Free to play games exist on the foundation that with enough time investment, people can play them for free. That's like the basis of their marketing strategy, that's how they get people involved. It's free so why not try it. In order for this system to function the game has to hand out free shit to its players or it ceases to be f2p, and that goes especially for games that have a collectible aspect to them. If you're playing something like World of Tanks you don't have to constantly keep expanding your collection to stay in the game, you can play the tanks you have and nobody is going to take them away, they won't rotate or become completely irrelevant in power....well, ok you could argue the last part. In collectible card games, you HAVE to have the ability to collect more and more packs for "free" (it ain't even remotely free, it costs you a ton of time).
When a company establishes a certain expectation of exactly how frequently and in what amounts these "free" unlocks get delivered, it is then only logical that customers, yes, even the "free" customers, voice their disappointment when those free handouts get scaled back. Because this is an expectation that the company itself established for its players, this is the in-game pattern which the f2p aspect is built on, and when that goes, so goes every right the game has to call itself f2p and implement f2p business models.
I don't know where you're from but let me conclude my point this way. Many countries offer free education, from primary all the way to university. "Free shit" if you will. Would you honestly, for real, expect people to just shrug their shoulders and move on if that were to be taken away? Sure, there are countries that monetise their education system. But those that don't have established an expectation for "free shit". And that expectation cannot be violated without backlash.
Sincerely,
Someone who actually thought about the issue for more than 2 seconds
So let me get this straight. People who pay for the game on the regular buying packs each expansion (be it with gold or money) had the opportunity to play a decently fun new game mode called Battlegrounds for free. Now, aside from having to buy your packs to play your format of choice, you also have to spit out more for a Tavern Pass to play the same mode you could play before for free, or else you're saddled with a 50 % cut in your options (and as it happens, hero choice is more than half the game at this point).
Then, they bring back the Brawliseum to replace the standard Tavern Brawl and they don't even have the decency to give you the usual free entry anymore. You have to pay for the privilege of playing standard and unless you do astonishingly well (66% winrate) you are guaranteed to lose money. Which is attractive...how, exactly? Meanwhile free-to-play players are twiddling their thumbs waiting for the Tavern Brawl button to be usable again cause they just got robbed of their regular free pack. Everybody is worse off. Literally everybody, including the people not interested in the Brawliseum.
I'm sorry is this supposed to be the way companies provide their services to customers? Gradually, over time, make everything both cost more and be worse? Keep pushing Bliz, please, by all means. Keep grubbing up all the short-term cash at the cost of long-term customer loyalty. Keep looking for people experienced with "executing on monetisation" for your games before they're even a game. Keep cutting down on people's options for game modes you're selling while they're still officially in Beta. I'm absolutely positive it won't bite you in the anal cavity down the road.
Point is it shouldn't have been about the story in the first place. Who comes to HS for lore? It has none. It tried to have some last year with the whole league of evil thing. Didn't impact the experience at all, there was just a lot more unskippable dialogue in between the games. What was the takeaway from all that over the grand total of over 3 expansions? Lazul is dead, oh no, my feelings, I cared so much about her. Rafaam destroyed the Alliance and the Horde and then retired, what massive ramifications for the HS universe, can't wait to see how this changes the landscape...oh wait we're going to some random school now, k.
If they can't tell their own original well, then telling the story of another game in the same environment isn't gonna go over any better. Besides, HS is a really poor delivery mechanism for story. Everything is done through "out-of-game" dialogue, as in, dialogue that actively disrupts the gameplay. And then the story you get is: Arthas vs Jaina with the plot motivation of "we'll settle this by sparring". Oh boy...and here I was thinking that Demon Hunter story was contrived.
Blizz has been pretty adamantly focused on "gameplay first", often to an infuriating extent where they'd rather butcher the story, atmosphere and logic to force a gameplay mechanic into the thing, but in this case, I think I'd prefer good gameplay with no or minimal narrative over uninteresting gameplay with the added benefit of forced uninteresting narrative. Does anybody feel more emotionally connected to Jaina after this? Does anyone feel ANYTHING after this? Except maybe disappointed, bored, or happy they finally got through that to open the damn pack? And really, if your story can't incite emotion from your audience, why even bother?
Generally I've been seriously underwhelmed/bored by the majority of adventures post Rastakhan (which, due to my completionist nature, I massively burned out on cause of how many shrines there were and how heavily some encounters were stacked against you). And while I generally agree that getting a new dungeon run every expansion would get extremely tiresome too, this half-assed "content" (one person could cobble this idea together in an afternoon, then it's just implementation time) ain't exactly scratching the adventure itch either and in some respects I'd rather they not even spend time and resources on this crap if that's the extent they intend to develop it to. I'd much prefer if the middle expansion of each year included a serious, good quality dungeon run adventure with the rest of the expansions getting nothing. Quality over quantity. But when has that ever been the AAA way of doing things? They'd rather half-ass it three times a year than do it properly once. As somone who doesn't give a crap about the packs, the content itself has nothing to offer if the gameplay experience is poor.
Generally while taking an absolute chonking off of two minions staying alive is pretty BS and could use toning down, I'd say the game has bigger problems. Namely the massive discrepancies between hero power levels and the constant power creep in that regard. I'd say it doesn't matter that much how much damage you're taking off a guaranteed loss because your opponent is Lich King, but rather that there is such a thing as guaranteed loss because your opponent is Lich King. Many heroes with lategame hero powers or slowly scaling hero powers arrive at the stage of the game where they actually get to make decisions and find that they've lost 7 games in a row so far and not one of them was winnable because the opposing hero was inherently better. The benefits that hero powers provide should be nowhere near as impactful on the outcome of the game as it is right now. Ysera getting guaranteed Dragons in her tavern to incentivise a Dragon build is fine because you still have to put in the effort to make that build work. Maiev getting guaranteed ridiculous gold and board advantage for 1 gold investment per turn takes no effort and yet is somehow way more impactful. Heroes that are harder to play should be better as a reward, easier heroes should be weaker, not the other way around.
As for the damage issue, the game could definitely do with some slowing down, but if you take that too far (and by too far I mean extending the game by upwards of 3 turns), you'll find that certain tribes just have no place in the game. What are you going to do with Mechs, Demons or Pirates in a 17 turn game? What reason is there to even go for those strategies if the end-game is going to revolve around Divine Shielded Dragons, Amalgadon Menageries. Amalgadon Poisonous Murlocs with Selfless Heroes, and Goldrinn Beasts? Demons, Pirates and Mechs thrive on being powerful early to kill people off and secure you a good position to place before you inevitably lose to one of the more powerful lategame builds. If you cut that route to success off then the game becomes a lot more samey because the powerful lategame builds will have the time they need to scale. It's like if you increased the starting health in normal Hearthstone to 50. It's just an accross-the-board nerf to all aggressive strategies, and now combo and control are the only ways to play.
TLDR: Tune down the damage, sure, but either be careful not to go too far, or bring more strategies up to an equal late-game power level.
EDIT: Since I've spilled so much digital ink already, might as well come with my own suggestion: cutting damage from minions to 1 per is ridiculous and I can't believe they're even considering it. It's obviously way too much. I'd say keep the current damage formula, but either remove tavern tier from the equation, or keep tavern tier and minion tier in, but then cut the resulting number in half, rounding up.
Oof. And the power creep just keeps piling on. Lord Barov isn't even remotely balanced. You can buy nothing turn one and bet on your opponent to win. Next turn, buy a minion, don't play it, bet on your opponent to win. Turn after, you got 11 gold to play with, so you level for 3, buy 2 minions, bet on your opponent to win (leaving you with one coin). Turn after that, 6 gold turn, you have 10 gold so you can buy 3 like you were Milhouse and bet on yourself to win cause now you have 6 (!!) minions on the board. You're essentially always drowning in money from turn 2 and all it cost you is like 5 health. Meanwhile, in Bazhial land....
Omu is just strictly better Bartendotron, to the point of making me question why Bartendotron still exists in his current form.
Jandice is Hooktusk 2.0. Broken with tokens, middling with everything else. Except if you roll with your last coin and hit gold, you can toss your worst minion for, say, a tier 3 minion on 7 gold.
And they didn't nerf Lich King, so apparently they are comfortable with making more and more heroes crushingly OP while leaving others just as unplayable as before.
I find that generally the best strategy is not teching, but switching if you find you're not doing well with what you're playing. My very first legend happened, might be like year and a half ago almost by accident. I had a Thaddius Deathrattle Hunter I really enjoyed and it somehow got me to Rank 1 by just casually playing it. So I thought, I'm this far, might as well go all the way. 5 times I made it to 1 win from legend and 5 times I was denied. So I gave up on it, switched to Jaina Mage and got legend in like 4 games, because the deck was just better suited to the meta. I've reached Legend every month since then, usually by just picking a deck that seems not just powerful on its own, but powerful agaisnt what I'm most commonly facing on my climb.
This season I was trying to reach legend with my tried and tested Deathrattle Raza Priest, which on its own got me to Legend 4 times in the last 6 months or so. This month, couldn't move an inch. Got to D3, and then went back and forth between D5 and low D2 for 3 days. Either I lost to ridiculously fast aggro that was always too fast and too strong despite my numerous board clears and hefty healing, or I lost to OTKs despite running an Illucia and Dirty Rat (neither of which I drew in the dozen or so games against combo). The deck felt too "in the middle", hedging against too many threats while excelling against neither of them. So I switched to Odd Warrior, accepted the losses against OTK (even though I did outarmor some of them) and just ate aggro for dinner game after game. Nobody else was playing anti aggro, it was all aggro, OTK or Raza Priest, and I was favoured against most of them. Bam, reached Legend in a day.
There is only so much teching can do for you if you're just playing the wrong deck for the meta. Two or three cards are not going to change the outcome as much as just adopting a different strategy will. But what that strategy is for Standard I could not tell you.
That is really disappointing. Coming from the Wild perspective, the Illucia nerf now reduces the range of combos that can be disrupted and significantly reduces your ability to play out the opponent's important stuff if they're not combo. In essence, if the opponent is not combo, Illucia is even less useful than she was (she was mostly unplayable already in those situations) and if the opponent is combo, you better hope they got the cheaper pieces of their combo in hand, or you're stuffed. She's now just worse at the only thing she was useful for (assuming you drew her in the little time you had).
With Kael, the problem is the exact opposite. I don't think this nerf is enough. It slows down Mechathunlock by one turn (so you die turn 9 instead of 8, but the combo is still possible) and Druid can easily float extra mana with all the cheap accelerators they use to trigger him anyway. There are some chances you may fail to chain the accelerators with your draw, but it will often still be just enough that you can essentially just nuke your opponent on turn 5-6 (depending on how quickly you ramped) with just plain damage spells with no further assistance (like Malygos or such).
Worse yet, with these nerfs coming out, it is likely they'll consider these cards addressed and won't touch them again unless something egregious happens. So these may be the final versions of these cards. Can't say I'm happy with either of them.
Sobject 9 and this are not comparable. Subject 9 is not used because Mage has plenty of ways to pull secrets from their deck (Mad Scientist, Arcanologist, Ancient Mysteries), what you want is access to the burn in your deck. Normally you use Aluneth and it draws you like 6-9 cards that you want, then starts killing you. If this draws you around 6 cards it's arguably better than Aluneth because of the body and much better tempo.
Yuuuck. Aluneth. With a body. That doesn't kill you later in the game. I'm not looking forward to the Mage meta we're about the experience in Wild...again. Well, I say again, but it won't be quite that Mage heavy. Aside from Reno Mage, Secret Mage and now Quest Mage (which didn't exist in the last Mage meta) we'll also have Reno Priest to "spice" things up. Pretty much everything else will likely be rendered irrelevant by those decks unless some big support or new archetypes are coming.
Heh, no. Interesting deckbuilding challenge but nowhere near viable. Doesn't even come close to Pocket Galaxy. Firstly, Mage has much easier access to getting the spell cast out of their deck, whereas Warlock has to dig for it with card draw. And pre-cast card draw only makes this card weaker. Secondly, Pocket Galaxy benefits everything. Literally any minion you put in your deck will benefit from it. You don't have to try to make it work, it works on its own. This, on the other hand, demands you specifically use expensive minions with low attack. Expensive minions + low attack is not exactly an enticing combination. And it will likely brick any of your early plays. Take a historically good early minion like, I dunno, Kobold Librarian or Mistress of Mixtures. All made worse by running this card. And since you're forced to build around this (unlike Galaxy which just works on everything), when you don't get it your deck essentially turns off.
New game mode....considering how downhill things have been going in Battlegrounds in terms of balance, the idea of them adding another mode to work on doesn't fill me with optimism. They can barely handle the one they have.
The sarcasm only applied to the last sentence of the second paragraph ;) I guess it was pretty redundant but you never know how dense people on the Internet can be.
And why make good points indeed when this is the extent of effort the devs intend to put into the mode. It's not like they're not getting feedback on this shit on forums. Pirates have been nigh-on useless for several patches now and Dragons have been so slow in scaling since their introduction that they're barely worth trying. Instead of addressing those long-standing issues we got another tribe shoved in last patch to overshadow them even more.
That's not to mention the discrepancy in hero power levels, which they're barely addressing. More than half the hero pool is still worthless, Maiev gets an irrelevant nerf (it's her insane economy that makes her busted, not the stats), Lich King still farms everyone and Rafaam swims in gold and triples just like Maiev. Getting +1 extra attack on frozen minions per turn isn't going to redeem Sindragosa in that environment. She's so deep down in the trash tier and all the top heroes get so many major stat or economy bonuses that this little change won't shift the scales in any significant way. She can technically get more stats on her minions than Kaelthas etc., but she could do that already. She pays for her extra stats with the inability to efficiently search for key minions to enhance her strategy, cause she's incentivised to skip the free rerolls she gets at the start of each turn. Thus she has the raw stats on her minions but is slow to reach those internal synergies that make builds tick.
I think what they should do with Poisonous is to limit it exclusively to minions that come pre-packaged with it, those currently being Deadly Spore and Maexxna. They should strip it off of Amalgadon adapts and remove Toxfin. That way you can't really just slap it onto a massive minion and have it farm two or three of your opponent's guys that've been built over the course of the whole game. It will be relegated to fragile, techy minions that serve a similar purpose to Unstable Ghoul.
As potentially busted and uncounterable as poisonous can be very deep into the lategame, I think it is necessary. Let's say you've made it to the final 2, both of you have been crushing, are very healthy. You square off, and you find that your opponent highrolled like a motherfucker. All other things being equal let's say they're like two or three turns ahead of you in scaling their build. Without poisonous being in the game, you're toast. You're likely to fight them at least two or three times before you die and there's just nothing you can do to alter your strategy. Without poisonous it's just big stuff against big stuff and their stuff is bigger. You can't ever catch up. There's no build switch you can make if it's all about stats.
Poisonous gives people the ability to adapt their build to their opponent, to catch up. To potentially counter strategies that revolve entirely around one ginormous dude (Pirates with a Taunted Looter, beefy Brann + Battlemaster, Garr) that would just farm all the minions you have and protect the squishies behind it. Poisonous lets you punch right through it, and if it's only available on small minions like the Spore or Maexxna, it gets one hit off to get you through that problematic minion and then the rest of your board has to take over. Poisonous + Divine Shield will not be as much of a problem because you then have to use Selfless + your poisonous minion to kill two enemy minions. So you trade evenly, 2 minions for 2 minions. Issues arise when the poisonous minion is big enough to survive hits even without divine shields. Spore is unlikely to get that big. Maexxna might but it takes a good deal of effort, or you have to already be running a Mama Bear/Goldrinn build to begin with. When it's not on Amalgadon or 50 health Murlocs, poisonous is fine and folds to anything with tokens, cleaves, secondary damage sources (whelps), divine shields, etc.
That's it? That's their big fix for Pirates being unplayable? Their way to make Demons relevant in any way? Their update to bring dragons back from being useless unless you luck into a Kalecgos? Their nerf to Elementals? Djinni is now better at what it's used for (it ain't the stats)! Two of the four elemental buffers got improved. Nomi is still busted in half.
But hey, Maiev's 1 cost minion purchases now get -1 health, Patchwerk has 5 extra HP, Sindragosa is just as useless as she was cause her hero power doesn't come close to even someone like Kaelthas. The hero meta is officially fixed guys! /s
Ugh. You just jam all the 0 mana minions into paladin, add crystology, first day of school, a couple of secrets, divine favour, corridor creeper, and you're set. Won 7 games in a row until I ran into some actual opposition.
I mean, since when are they worried about balance? The new motto is: keep churning out new stuff, don't worry about fixing old stuff. Pirates and Demons are still useless since a single divine shield Amalgadon two-for-ones you every time and there's nothing to fall back on like deathrattles or divine shields of your own. About half of the heroes are completely unplayable (I'm counting about 22 heroes out of 47), so not buying a Tavern Pass cuts your winrate to shreds. Damage spikes are still insane making Demons even more unplayable (since they hit like a wet noodle and can't afford a single loss past about turn 8).
You can do a Hadronox Druid or Odd Hadronox Druid without focusing on a beast base. Carnivorous Cube and Witching Hour are both odd so you can just chain-res Hadronoxes.
This could have been avoided...if they stopped printing blatantly broken shit. I mean Christ this thing was Growth Spiral with lifegain on the front end and a 4 mana 6/6 (the actual fuck) with a free Growth Spiral with lifegain on it on ETB and on attack on the back end. Did I mention it was unkillable? I think I didn't, sorry my bad. So here goes: it was unkillable. Exile it or steal it, otherwise it keeps coming back. With a Growth Spiral on play every time. And lifegain. Who could have seen that coming?
Hearthstone has definitely had a power creep problem as of late (in multiple game modes, in fact), but with the way MtG has been going recently, it seems Hearthstone still has a lot to learn from it about just how much power creep you can fit into a set.
And let's not forget, the majority of the blatantly overpowered, oft banned cards have been Mythic. The rarity that, in its original design, was not intended to just consist of absolute bombs that you'd want 4 of in every deck. But when they can get all that money, why wouldn't they.
Before you start swinging your wallet around (oops, too late!), you should probably know that I haven't been free to play since Whispers of the Old Gods. So so much for you being the "actual customer" in this conversation. Unlike you I just happen to be looking out for other people, not just the ones who play the way I do.
Secondly, um...yes, the game does actually, quite literally, owe people free shit. It's called a free to play game for a reason. Free to play games exist on the foundation that with enough time investment, people can play them for free. That's like the basis of their marketing strategy, that's how they get people involved. It's free so why not try it. In order for this system to function the game has to hand out free shit to its players or it ceases to be f2p, and that goes especially for games that have a collectible aspect to them. If you're playing something like World of Tanks you don't have to constantly keep expanding your collection to stay in the game, you can play the tanks you have and nobody is going to take them away, they won't rotate or become completely irrelevant in power....well, ok you could argue the last part. In collectible card games, you HAVE to have the ability to collect more and more packs for "free" (it ain't even remotely free, it costs you a ton of time).
When a company establishes a certain expectation of exactly how frequently and in what amounts these "free" unlocks get delivered, it is then only logical that customers, yes, even the "free" customers, voice their disappointment when those free handouts get scaled back. Because this is an expectation that the company itself established for its players, this is the in-game pattern which the f2p aspect is built on, and when that goes, so goes every right the game has to call itself f2p and implement f2p business models.
I don't know where you're from but let me conclude my point this way. Many countries offer free education, from primary all the way to university. "Free shit" if you will. Would you honestly, for real, expect people to just shrug their shoulders and move on if that were to be taken away? Sure, there are countries that monetise their education system. But those that don't have established an expectation for "free shit". And that expectation cannot be violated without backlash.
Sincerely,
Someone who actually thought about the issue for more than 2 seconds
So let me get this straight. People who pay for the game on the regular buying packs each expansion (be it with gold or money) had the opportunity to play a decently fun new game mode called Battlegrounds for free. Now, aside from having to buy your packs to play your format of choice, you also have to spit out more for a Tavern Pass to play the same mode you could play before for free, or else you're saddled with a 50 % cut in your options (and as it happens, hero choice is more than half the game at this point).
Then, they bring back the Brawliseum to replace the standard Tavern Brawl and they don't even have the decency to give you the usual free entry anymore. You have to pay for the privilege of playing standard and unless you do astonishingly well (66% winrate) you are guaranteed to lose money. Which is attractive...how, exactly? Meanwhile free-to-play players are twiddling their thumbs waiting for the Tavern Brawl button to be usable again cause they just got robbed of their regular free pack. Everybody is worse off. Literally everybody, including the people not interested in the Brawliseum.
I'm sorry is this supposed to be the way companies provide their services to customers? Gradually, over time, make everything both cost more and be worse? Keep pushing Bliz, please, by all means. Keep grubbing up all the short-term cash at the cost of long-term customer loyalty. Keep looking for people experienced with "executing on monetisation" for your games before they're even a game. Keep cutting down on people's options for game modes you're selling while they're still officially in Beta. I'm absolutely positive it won't bite you in the anal cavity down the road.
Point is it shouldn't have been about the story in the first place. Who comes to HS for lore? It has none. It tried to have some last year with the whole league of evil thing. Didn't impact the experience at all, there was just a lot more unskippable dialogue in between the games. What was the takeaway from all that over the grand total of over 3 expansions? Lazul is dead, oh no, my feelings, I cared so much about her. Rafaam destroyed the Alliance and the Horde and then retired, what massive ramifications for the HS universe, can't wait to see how this changes the landscape...oh wait we're going to some random school now, k.
If they can't tell their own original well, then telling the story of another game in the same environment isn't gonna go over any better. Besides, HS is a really poor delivery mechanism for story. Everything is done through "out-of-game" dialogue, as in, dialogue that actively disrupts the gameplay. And then the story you get is: Arthas vs Jaina with the plot motivation of "we'll settle this by sparring". Oh boy...and here I was thinking that Demon Hunter story was contrived.
Blizz has been pretty adamantly focused on "gameplay first", often to an infuriating extent where they'd rather butcher the story, atmosphere and logic to force a gameplay mechanic into the thing, but in this case, I think I'd prefer good gameplay with no or minimal narrative over uninteresting gameplay with the added benefit of forced uninteresting narrative. Does anybody feel more emotionally connected to Jaina after this? Does anyone feel ANYTHING after this? Except maybe disappointed, bored, or happy they finally got through that to open the damn pack? And really, if your story can't incite emotion from your audience, why even bother?
Generally I've been seriously underwhelmed/bored by the majority of adventures post Rastakhan (which, due to my completionist nature, I massively burned out on cause of how many shrines there were and how heavily some encounters were stacked against you). And while I generally agree that getting a new dungeon run every expansion would get extremely tiresome too, this half-assed "content" (one person could cobble this idea together in an afternoon, then it's just implementation time) ain't exactly scratching the adventure itch either and in some respects I'd rather they not even spend time and resources on this crap if that's the extent they intend to develop it to. I'd much prefer if the middle expansion of each year included a serious, good quality dungeon run adventure with the rest of the expansions getting nothing. Quality over quantity. But when has that ever been the AAA way of doing things? They'd rather half-ass it three times a year than do it properly once. As somone who doesn't give a crap about the packs, the content itself has nothing to offer if the gameplay experience is poor.
Lowering hero health nerfs demons.
Generally while taking an absolute chonking off of two minions staying alive is pretty BS and could use toning down, I'd say the game has bigger problems. Namely the massive discrepancies between hero power levels and the constant power creep in that regard. I'd say it doesn't matter that much how much damage you're taking off a guaranteed loss because your opponent is Lich King, but rather that there is such a thing as guaranteed loss because your opponent is Lich King. Many heroes with lategame hero powers or slowly scaling hero powers arrive at the stage of the game where they actually get to make decisions and find that they've lost 7 games in a row so far and not one of them was winnable because the opposing hero was inherently better. The benefits that hero powers provide should be nowhere near as impactful on the outcome of the game as it is right now. Ysera getting guaranteed Dragons in her tavern to incentivise a Dragon build is fine because you still have to put in the effort to make that build work. Maiev getting guaranteed ridiculous gold and board advantage for 1 gold investment per turn takes no effort and yet is somehow way more impactful. Heroes that are harder to play should be better as a reward, easier heroes should be weaker, not the other way around.
As for the damage issue, the game could definitely do with some slowing down, but if you take that too far (and by too far I mean extending the game by upwards of 3 turns), you'll find that certain tribes just have no place in the game. What are you going to do with Mechs, Demons or Pirates in a 17 turn game? What reason is there to even go for those strategies if the end-game is going to revolve around Divine Shielded Dragons, Amalgadon Menageries. Amalgadon Poisonous Murlocs with Selfless Heroes, and Goldrinn Beasts? Demons, Pirates and Mechs thrive on being powerful early to kill people off and secure you a good position to place before you inevitably lose to one of the more powerful lategame builds. If you cut that route to success off then the game becomes a lot more samey because the powerful lategame builds will have the time they need to scale. It's like if you increased the starting health in normal Hearthstone to 50. It's just an accross-the-board nerf to all aggressive strategies, and now combo and control are the only ways to play.
TLDR: Tune down the damage, sure, but either be careful not to go too far, or bring more strategies up to an equal late-game power level.
EDIT: Since I've spilled so much digital ink already, might as well come with my own suggestion: cutting damage from minions to 1 per is ridiculous and I can't believe they're even considering it. It's obviously way too much. I'd say keep the current damage formula, but either remove tavern tier from the equation, or keep tavern tier and minion tier in, but then cut the resulting number in half, rounding up.
Oof. And the power creep just keeps piling on. Lord Barov isn't even remotely balanced. You can buy nothing turn one and bet on your opponent to win. Next turn, buy a minion, don't play it, bet on your opponent to win. Turn after, you got 11 gold to play with, so you level for 3, buy 2 minions, bet on your opponent to win (leaving you with one coin). Turn after that, 6 gold turn, you have 10 gold so you can buy 3 like you were Milhouse and bet on yourself to win cause now you have 6 (!!) minions on the board. You're essentially always drowning in money from turn 2 and all it cost you is like 5 health. Meanwhile, in Bazhial land....
Omu is just strictly better Bartendotron, to the point of making me question why Bartendotron still exists in his current form.
Jandice is Hooktusk 2.0. Broken with tokens, middling with everything else. Except if you roll with your last coin and hit gold, you can toss your worst minion for, say, a tier 3 minion on 7 gold.
And they didn't nerf Lich King, so apparently they are comfortable with making more and more heroes crushingly OP while leaving others just as unplayable as before.
I find that generally the best strategy is not teching, but switching if you find you're not doing well with what you're playing. My very first legend happened, might be like year and a half ago almost by accident. I had a Thaddius Deathrattle Hunter I really enjoyed and it somehow got me to Rank 1 by just casually playing it. So I thought, I'm this far, might as well go all the way. 5 times I made it to 1 win from legend and 5 times I was denied. So I gave up on it, switched to Jaina Mage and got legend in like 4 games, because the deck was just better suited to the meta. I've reached Legend every month since then, usually by just picking a deck that seems not just powerful on its own, but powerful agaisnt what I'm most commonly facing on my climb.
This season I was trying to reach legend with my tried and tested Deathrattle Raza Priest, which on its own got me to Legend 4 times in the last 6 months or so. This month, couldn't move an inch. Got to D3, and then went back and forth between D5 and low D2 for 3 days. Either I lost to ridiculously fast aggro that was always too fast and too strong despite my numerous board clears and hefty healing, or I lost to OTKs despite running an Illucia and Dirty Rat (neither of which I drew in the dozen or so games against combo). The deck felt too "in the middle", hedging against too many threats while excelling against neither of them. So I switched to Odd Warrior, accepted the losses against OTK (even though I did outarmor some of them) and just ate aggro for dinner game after game. Nobody else was playing anti aggro, it was all aggro, OTK or Raza Priest, and I was favoured against most of them. Bam, reached Legend in a day.
There is only so much teching can do for you if you're just playing the wrong deck for the meta. Two or three cards are not going to change the outcome as much as just adopting a different strategy will. But what that strategy is for Standard I could not tell you.
That is really disappointing. Coming from the Wild perspective, the Illucia nerf now reduces the range of combos that can be disrupted and significantly reduces your ability to play out the opponent's important stuff if they're not combo. In essence, if the opponent is not combo, Illucia is even less useful than she was (she was mostly unplayable already in those situations) and if the opponent is combo, you better hope they got the cheaper pieces of their combo in hand, or you're stuffed. She's now just worse at the only thing she was useful for (assuming you drew her in the little time you had).
With Kael, the problem is the exact opposite. I don't think this nerf is enough. It slows down Mechathunlock by one turn (so you die turn 9 instead of 8, but the combo is still possible) and Druid can easily float extra mana with all the cheap accelerators they use to trigger him anyway. There are some chances you may fail to chain the accelerators with your draw, but it will often still be just enough that you can essentially just nuke your opponent on turn 5-6 (depending on how quickly you ramped) with just plain damage spells with no further assistance (like Malygos or such).
Worse yet, with these nerfs coming out, it is likely they'll consider these cards addressed and won't touch them again unless something egregious happens. So these may be the final versions of these cards. Can't say I'm happy with either of them.