switch to control to counter aggo -> only face better control/greedy AF value
okay hearthstone. i guess i suck it up, play aggro face decks, and walk into traffic.
edit: faced ~ 10 greedy control decks in a row. okay. switch to kazakstan druid, immediately face OTK mage. makes sense.
next game with kaza druid, face libram paladin, a deck i'd not faced in the previous 10 games.
okay switch back to control warrior. face kaza druid. what is going on.
i wish i was exaggerating. i am ONLY queuing into decks that hard counter me. lost to kaza druid as warrior then immediately faced OTK mage again. switch to kaza druid, face demon seed, twice.
downvoted for posting appropriate content in the correct place. "message boards for everyone else, but fuck this guy in particular" right?
fuck the dislikers, ive literally had the exact same shit happen to me constantly for ages. it makes it feel completely impossible to play the game
THIS. THIS is why the warrior questline is the worst designed card ever printed. they took a perfectly good and powerful deck in pirate warrior and gave it an untouchable minion that cranks out 3 layers of rng every turn for the rest of the game.
shoutouts to blizzard for epicly nerfing the warrior and hunter questlines instead of just banning them from the format. one mini-set later and wild is still completely dominated by RNG warrior and cookie-clicker hunter is on the rise again, but apprentice decks were definitely the ones that needed to be hit the hardest. i legitimately have never seen a more incompetent balance team in any competitive game. wizards of the coast has made some notoriously bad balance decisions with MTG and even THEY would've had this solved by now.
regarding the apprentice nerf, this is the precise reason why i think another eternal format would benefit the game to such a massive degree. this would give players the ability to run iconic but unfair decks like apprentice/turtle mage in wild and have a more balanced experience in the new format.
theres a huge divide between the people that love to play these decks and the people that hate to play against them and the only method i can see of pleasing both parties is a new format.
Kotick getting the boot doesn't automatically mean any actual change will happen though. At the end of the day, there's still gonna be a group of stockholders pushing for more greedy business practices without a care for the actual state of the games being made or the employees working on them and I'd wager the stockholders at Microsoft will be willing to push even harder for those things. I hope I'm wrong though, I just don't see Microsoft getting another 5 companies under their monopoly ever being a good thing for consumers.
apprentice: extremely depressing, but whatever. ive devoted hundreds of hours to this card and the multitude of strategies it can put forth, and i will never support this nerf. i understand the frustration of getting blown up by apm and ignite mage (regardless of the fair to large degree of skill those decks can require), but this is a card from the history books of hearthstone being ruined. ive said this for a long time, but we would all be better off if blizzard made a second eternal format that could be more heavily balanced so that wild can remain wild. until then, the thousands of combo and tempo mage players that have been working on improving decks featuring the card will just have to find something new, or leave for magic: the gathering where combo decks arent always scalped by the developers.
warrior/hunter nerfs: ....what? just.... what? who on the balance team could have possibly thought that cutting rapid fire out of the equation and adding another pirate onto one step of a questline would just magically fix the wild format that has been completely and utterly DOMINATED by questlines since the day they came out?? and at the same time, nerf the card that so far has been most consistently able to counter those decks (apprentice)??? i was fuming angry when i heard this, but now im just sad. i hope im wrong. i hope this is enough to save the format from the two easiest, overpowered and rng-reliant decks that have ever dominated it. but i dont think so.
standard: i dont play standard as often as wild, but i would like to say that not nerfing the interaction between maestra and gnoll is completely psychotic. the nerfs arent bad, but that seemed like the most obvious unfair mechanic they could've done away with and retain both gnoll and maestra as powerful cards, albeit not as essential. also, because blizzard is too lazy to just make nerfs between the two formats separate, the cloak and scabbs nerfs will be felt in wild rogue decks as well that have been using the cards to deal with decks like pirate warrior. so yeah, kind of shit.
all in all, i desperately pray that im wrong and wild will be fine again after this, but i dont believe it for a moment. overall, this patch just makes me sad. deeply, overwhelmingly sad, moreso than maybe any other balance update thus far (except for turtle mage's unfair execution).
everyone talking about how things might get better from the microsoft purchase obviously does not remember the activision blizzard merger literally spelling the beginning of the end for the entire company as a respectable entity
late on this, but as someone who's played for a similar amount of time and is currently experiencing the same dissatisfaction with Blizzard's handling of the Wild format (not to mention their interesting workplace practices recently that have led to me going full free to play) I truly hope Blizzard will do something to help fix Wild soon. until that (hopefully) happens, enjoy your break! its been a joy reading your articles, and they've been my main reason for checking out the site every day, but regardless of whether or not you return to the game, thank you for the contributions you've made to the community nonetheless.
have you been facing a lot of garrote rogue??? im a wild player myself so ive spent the majority of this month working on my legend rank in that format but i grinded to diamond (so far) this season in standard since ive been having fun with aggro shaman and i dont think ive seen a single one, only questline rogues.
ive played on and off since beta, continuously since whispers, and i can say without a shadow of a doubt that odd questline hunter is the most brainless and cheap deck i have ever played against. sure, ive hated plenty of decks over the years, but even something as horribly oppressive as questlinelock or eater of souls at least took some amount of skill to execute.
ive never seen a competitive viable deck that is so mind-numbingly easy to rob games with, to the point where i legitimately think that if you got to legend with odd hunter that you dont deserve to be there. everyone else thats worked their asses off to climb their way up to legend now has to worry about losing games by complete chance because we matched into some drooling brainlet playing solitaire while the rest of us play hearthstone. you did not earn your legend rank because you werent even playing hearthstone, you were playing cookie clicker and making the game less enjoyable for everyone else. people that play this bullshit dont care about having a healthy meta, or earning the rank they get, or getting better at the game, or using any brain power whatsoever when they play; they just care about seeing their number go up regardless of whether or not they worked at all to get it there. hearthstone might as well be an idle game to these fucks.
wild is a place where "unfair" decks are allowed to flourish, and i think thats fine as long as those decks require skill to be able to pilot (e.g. exodia mage, turtle mage, darkglarelock etc.). however, when the most unfair deck in the meta is also the single easiest deck to pilot in the history of the game, theres a problem.
on top of this, hunter as a class has been forced into face/aggro hunter lists (that are also god awful to play against but are nowhere near as unfair) in standard for ages since blizzard wont print anything good enough for other potential archetypes to be viable. so what do they do? they print Defend the Dwarven District, the single most powerful face hunter card in the history of the game so now both standard AND wild are completely polluted with this shit. i remember when hunter had interesting things they could do, whether it be the highlander hunter decks from not too long ago with Dinotamer Brann or the spell-based hunter decks with Zul'jin. i remember when id see new cards revealed for hunter and be excited, not angry that i have new god awful card design to play against. whoever is in charge of designing cards for this class absolutely NEEDS to be fired.
alright, i really didnt think the tone of my post was anywhere near as aggressive as it seems to be being interpreted, but obviously i was wrong. im going to rewrite this more eloquently and post again, and i apologize for allowing my frustration to override the point that i was trying to make. that being said, if you're looking at what decks are being reported hitting legend as well as available deck statistics i dont see how you can come to the conclusion that every class has a deck in the meta. i have more to say on this as well as on your take on blizzards treatment of wild, but ill wait to expand on it in the aforementioned other post, as ill probably delete this one. thanks for being frank with me
how this balance update was ever put through is beyond me. by nerfing so many decks substantially while leaving questline warlock nearly untouched (in terms of how the actual changes affect the deck; e.g. the two nerfs on questline warlock did much less to nerf the deck than the single nerf to incanter's flow did to nerf every tempo/combo mage list in both formats) they've paved the way for the deck to completely stomp the meta twice as hard as it was before. this is even more of a problem in wild where:
evenlock was hit much harder from losing flesh giant than questlock was by the cost increase
apm/tempo mage decks have a much harder time playing incanters flow while dealing with aggressive warlock/priest/hunter boards
odd questline hunter somehow went completely untouched, resulting in even more games against drooling brainlets playing the skill equivalent of cookie clicker (sorry not sorry)
i could go on, but you get the picture. for the first time in a very long time, blizzard has butchered a balance update so badly that the meta has devolved into mostly the two same decks not only in one format, but in both of them. furthermore, the decks before this patch such as miracle mage and secret paladin that could stand up to the more overpowered decks without being too powerful (by blizzard's own statistics!) have been nerfed so much harder than their already more powerful counterparts that they've been stomped into a minuscule portion of the meta. so thanks blizzard, and thanks to all the players complaining about uninteractive mage decks, tax paladins and other decks with no actual statistical reason to be nerfed. i hope you enjoy the god awful meta you helped create. i, for one, will not be making legend for the first time in a while, because its not even close to worth the frustration of playing against the same 2-3 decks every single game regardless of what format im playing.
edit: i understand that the tone of this post is apparently too aggressive and i apologize. ill be rewriting my thoughts on this subject in a new, calmer post and will likely delete this one afterwards
ahhhhh gotcha gotch
other way around in the title <3
fuck the dislikers, ive literally had the exact same shit happen to me constantly for ages. it makes it feel completely impossible to play the game
THIS. THIS is why the warrior questline is the worst designed card ever printed. they took a perfectly good and powerful deck in pirate warrior and gave it an untouchable minion that cranks out 3 layers of rng every turn for the rest of the game.shoutouts to blizzard for epicly nerfing the warrior and hunter questlines instead of just banning them from the format. one mini-set later and wild is still completely dominated by RNG warrior and cookie-clicker hunter is on the rise again, but apprentice decks were definitely the ones that needed to be hit the hardest. i legitimately have never seen a more incompetent balance team in any competitive game. wizards of the coast has made some notoriously bad balance decisions with MTG and even THEY would've had this solved by now.
LOL no prob, cool deck
someone mixed up their deck titles
BASED and apprentice-pilled
as an ignite mage rights activist im deeply hurt by this take
regarding the apprentice nerf, this is the precise reason why i think another eternal format would benefit the game to such a massive degree. this would give players the ability to run iconic but unfair decks like apprentice/turtle mage in wild and have a more balanced experience in the new format.
theres a huge divide between the people that love to play these decks and the people that hate to play against them and the only method i can see of pleasing both parties is a new format.
jesus fucking christ, 14 downvotes?? just for sharing my opinion that doesnt happen to align with the majority's??? i dont get it man
Kotick getting the boot doesn't automatically mean any actual change will happen though. At the end of the day, there's still gonna be a group of stockholders pushing for more greedy business practices without a care for the actual state of the games being made or the employees working on them and I'd wager the stockholders at Microsoft will be willing to push even harder for those things. I hope I'm wrong though, I just don't see Microsoft getting another 5 companies under their monopoly ever being a good thing for consumers.
apprentice: extremely depressing, but whatever. ive devoted hundreds of hours to this card and the multitude of strategies it can put forth, and i will never support this nerf. i understand the frustration of getting blown up by apm and ignite mage (regardless of the fair to large degree of skill those decks can require), but this is a card from the history books of hearthstone being ruined. ive said this for a long time, but we would all be better off if blizzard made a second eternal format that could be more heavily balanced so that wild can remain wild. until then, the thousands of combo and tempo mage players that have been working on improving decks featuring the card will just have to find something new, or leave for magic: the gathering where combo decks arent always scalped by the developers.
warrior/hunter nerfs: ....what? just.... what? who on the balance team could have possibly thought that cutting rapid fire out of the equation and adding another pirate onto one step of a questline would just magically fix the wild format that has been completely and utterly DOMINATED by questlines since the day they came out?? and at the same time, nerf the card that so far has been most consistently able to counter those decks (apprentice)??? i was fuming angry when i heard this, but now im just sad. i hope im wrong. i hope this is enough to save the format from the two easiest, overpowered and rng-reliant decks that have ever dominated it. but i dont think so.
standard: i dont play standard as often as wild, but i would like to say that not nerfing the interaction between maestra and gnoll is completely psychotic. the nerfs arent bad, but that seemed like the most obvious unfair mechanic they could've done away with and retain both gnoll and maestra as powerful cards, albeit not as essential. also, because blizzard is too lazy to just make nerfs between the two formats separate, the cloak and scabbs nerfs will be felt in wild rogue decks as well that have been using the cards to deal with decks like pirate warrior. so yeah, kind of shit.
all in all, i desperately pray that im wrong and wild will be fine again after this, but i dont believe it for a moment. overall, this patch just makes me sad. deeply, overwhelmingly sad, moreso than maybe any other balance update thus far (except for turtle mage's unfair execution).
everyone talking about how things might get better from the microsoft purchase obviously does not remember the activision blizzard merger literally spelling the beginning of the end for the entire company as a respectable entity
late on this, but as someone who's played for a similar amount of time and is currently experiencing the same dissatisfaction with Blizzard's handling of the Wild format (not to mention their interesting workplace practices recently that have led to me going full free to play) I truly hope Blizzard will do something to help fix Wild soon. until that (hopefully) happens, enjoy your break! its been a joy reading your articles, and they've been my main reason for checking out the site every day, but regardless of whether or not you return to the game, thank you for the contributions you've made to the community nonetheless.
have you been facing a lot of garrote rogue??? im a wild player myself so ive spent the majority of this month working on my legend rank in that format but i grinded to diamond (so far) this season in standard since ive been having fun with aggro shaman and i dont think ive seen a single one, only questline rogues.
ive played on and off since beta, continuously since whispers, and i can say without a shadow of a doubt that odd questline hunter is the most brainless and cheap deck i have ever played against. sure, ive hated plenty of decks over the years, but even something as horribly oppressive as questlinelock or eater of souls at least took some amount of skill to execute.
ive never seen a competitive viable deck that is so mind-numbingly easy to rob games with, to the point where i legitimately think that if you got to legend with odd hunter that you dont deserve to be there. everyone else thats worked their asses off to climb their way up to legend now has to worry about losing games by complete chance because we matched into some drooling brainlet playing solitaire while the rest of us play hearthstone. you did not earn your legend rank because you werent even playing hearthstone, you were playing cookie clicker and making the game less enjoyable for everyone else. people that play this bullshit dont care about having a healthy meta, or earning the rank they get, or getting better at the game, or using any brain power whatsoever when they play; they just care about seeing their number go up regardless of whether or not they worked at all to get it there. hearthstone might as well be an idle game to these fucks.
wild is a place where "unfair" decks are allowed to flourish, and i think thats fine as long as those decks require skill to be able to pilot (e.g. exodia mage, turtle mage, darkglarelock etc.). however, when the most unfair deck in the meta is also the single easiest deck to pilot in the history of the game, theres a problem.
on top of this, hunter as a class has been forced into face/aggro hunter lists (that are also god awful to play against but are nowhere near as unfair) in standard for ages since blizzard wont print anything good enough for other potential archetypes to be viable. so what do they do? they print Defend the Dwarven District, the single most powerful face hunter card in the history of the game so now both standard AND wild are completely polluted with this shit. i remember when hunter had interesting things they could do, whether it be the highlander hunter decks from not too long ago with Dinotamer Brann or the spell-based hunter decks with Zul'jin. i remember when id see new cards revealed for hunter and be excited, not angry that i have new god awful card design to play against. whoever is in charge of designing cards for this class absolutely NEEDS to be fired.
im just gonna say i would kill to live in a world where questline mage is unbeatable without burn
how this balance update was ever put through is beyond me. by nerfing so many decks substantially while leaving questline warlock nearly untouched (in terms of how the actual changes affect the deck; e.g. the two nerfs on questline warlock did much less to nerf the deck than the single nerf to incanter's flow did to nerf every tempo/combo mage list in both formats) they've paved the way for the deck to completely stomp the meta twice as hard as it was before. this is even more of a problem in wild where:
i could go on, but you get the picture. for the first time in a very long time, blizzard has butchered a balance update so badly that the meta has devolved into mostly the two same decks not only in one format, but in both of them. furthermore, the decks before this patch such as miracle mage and secret paladin that could stand up to the more overpowered decks without being too powerful (by blizzard's own statistics!) have been nerfed so much harder than their already more powerful counterparts that they've been stomped into a minuscule portion of the meta. so thanks blizzard, and thanks to all the players complaining about uninteractive mage decks, tax paladins and other decks with no actual statistical reason to be nerfed. i hope you enjoy the god awful meta you helped create. i, for one, will not be making legend for the first time in a while, because its not even close to worth the frustration of playing against the same 2-3 decks every single game regardless of what format im playing.
edit: i understand that the tone of this post is apparently too aggressive and i apologize. ill be rewriting my thoughts on this subject in a new, calmer post and will likely delete this one afterwards