It's always funny how many people bitch about how much card generation has ruiend the game, but then none of them bother to play Classic because know damn well that a strict 30 card deck every game is boring as fuck.
Yes, fast decks are historically easier to pilot than slower ones and thus often have a higher winrate. Why do we have to go through this every time.
You can easily play a heal heavy Priest deck that just grinds them all to dust, but you're gonna get shafted by Warlock 100% of the time (unless they fuck up) and Warlock is still a huge presence. If it wasn't, everyone would just bitch and moan about how games last an hour and all you can do is watch your board getting blown up over and over.
People really need to stop chasing the pipe dream of a meta where every single archetype is viable without somehow having a polarizeed matchup spread and games last long enough to play all your cards but not long enough for it to be annoying, and doing all of it without having excessive card generations or unavoidable win conditions.
Basically people want every deck to be Thief Rogue. Maybe they should make a mode for that and then everyone finally shuts up.
So apparently the Discord solved it by now. The puzzle essentially has two stages. A warm-up stage to introduce the concept and a second stage with multiple phases that is truly diabolical.
I'd recommend checking out the solutions in the discord itself, it's a bit hard to sum up, but basically the first step involves adding attack, health and tribe number values to get to your own personal solution.
In the next step you'll be presented with a Chronobreaker on your left and a Buccaneer on your right, whose stats are identical for all players. The discord kind of failed at this one until Celestalon explained the way it was supposed to work which is truly out there. Apparently the randomized opposing board isn't all that randomized and there would be players out there who would have a Chronobreaker or Buccaneer with those exact stats on their board. The challenge was to collect enough data to know what the total "chain" looked like and figure out which exact minions were between the Chronobreaker and the BUccaneer to then add those stats up like in step 1. Pretty damn crazy design and one of the lads even suggested it as a possibility but they just didn't have the data to test the theory.
You get a board full of minions of different tribes on one side, and on your side a single mystery minion flanked by two copies of the opposing minions that seem to be selected randomly and change everytime the puzzle resets.
You have a hand full of cards that you can use on the mystery minion. Each one represents a different tribe. The first time you use a card on the mystery minion it transforms into a 0/1 minion of that tribe (not related to the opposing minions though). After that you can play 6 more cards before the puzzle resets again. These add a digit to the minion's stat values, corresponding to their position in hand (left to right, 1-9, then 0).
Literally 0 idea what is going on there. Tried to transform it into a matching tribe to copy the statlines of the flanking minions, but that does nothing. Tried some adding and subtracting numbers, but that also lead nowhere.
My only hope is that if there are some well designed original characters in Mercs they also make it over to regular Hearthstone because they'd be wasted there.
because it's aa pointless effort. You nerf one broken thing in wild and another one takes its place.
People were crying about Secret Mage for years and now, all of a sudden it completely fell off the map The mode is unpredictable and would need a ton of effort to ever bring into any state of balance. It's just not worth it.
Good nerfs for Standard. Handlock will still be very strong but at this point it can't really cheese the bad matchups with Giants nearly as efficiently so it should eventually drop to an appropriate winrate. Stealer OTK is dead hopefully.
Problem is, this does nothing for Wild and if I have to deal with a whole expansion of Wild players lamenting how Wild is dead (isn't it always?) I'm gonna lose it. Just ban the Quest from Wild entirely until it rotates and then dumpster it afterwards. Clearly it's not possible to balance a card that suddenly enables years-worth of woefully undercosted self-damage support.
Unfortunately the puzzle seems to be even more confusing than the last ones. No directions or hints whatsoever on what you're actually supposed to do.
My only guess is that you have to make it so all the weird portal thingies have matching health on both sides. Killing a portal resets the puzzle, using the hero power swaps the opposing board with your own previous board state. Once you attack you essentially transfer the opposing board on to your side. Everything else doesn't make sense.
Also, fair warning. If you click on the end turn button the game will crash. If you try to start it back up again it will attempt to reconnect and then crash again. It repeats this until it decides it couldn't find your previous match. Don't click the end turn button.
as funny as that would be it's also impossible since solving the riddle gives you the ?-card to initiate the puzzle. Can't get that if your hand is full.
I'll try to find some clues, but if it's some big brain 4D chess riddle that requires a degree in economics to complete I'll just wait for the walkthrough
But that's the thing though...you'd have to nerf a whole bunch of other cards that are individually unproblematic but when you combine them with the win condition of the quest you suddenly end up with an S-Tier meta rapist.
In Standard however, it's absolutely everything except the Quest itself that's the problem, most of which has been sufficiently addressed at this point. Quest Handlock is strong, but has a couple of very efficient counters which are only getting stronger now that Flesh Giant has become less spamable.
Well, at least the OTK build should be sufficiently dead.
Giant nerf is literally just an apology since they should have done it like that the first place. Should definitely make it easier to outpace the Handlock version now.
I guess they'll just have to ban the Warlock Quest from Wild entirely, I doubt it can ever be balanced for that mode (at least not while also being at least somewhat playable in Standard).
I'm gonna be charitable here...if this is just a ploy to milk the barely-sentient whales who are so deep in the instant-gratification loop that you can sell them just about anything, then I'm fine with it, because at the very least it's going to rake in cash meaning we won't have to worry about them trying to monetize the main game (and Battlegrounds) even harder.
It's always funny how many people bitch about how much card generation has ruiend the game, but then none of them bother to play Classic because know damn well that a strict 30 card deck every game is boring as fuck.
well then how about you come up with a plan on how to do it, because clearly you are convinced that it's possible in the first place.
Yes, fast decks are historically easier to pilot than slower ones and thus often have a higher winrate. Why do we have to go through this every time.
You can easily play a heal heavy Priest deck that just grinds them all to dust, but you're gonna get shafted by Warlock 100% of the time (unless they fuck up) and Warlock is still a huge presence. If it wasn't, everyone would just bitch and moan about how games last an hour and all you can do is watch your board getting blown up over and over.
People really need to stop chasing the pipe dream of a meta where every single archetype is viable without somehow having a polarizeed matchup spread and games last long enough to play all your cards but not long enough for it to be annoying, and doing all of it without having excessive card generations or unavoidable win conditions.
Basically people want every deck to be Thief Rogue. Maybe they should make a mode for that and then everyone finally shuts up.
Well...that got really dark.
So apparently the Discord solved it by now. The puzzle essentially has two stages. A warm-up stage to introduce the concept and a second stage with multiple phases that is truly diabolical.
I'd recommend checking out the solutions in the discord itself, it's a bit hard to sum up, but basically the first step involves adding attack, health and tribe number values to get to your own personal solution.
In the next step you'll be presented with a Chronobreaker on your left and a Buccaneer on your right, whose stats are identical for all players. The discord kind of failed at this one until Celestalon explained the way it was supposed to work which is truly out there. Apparently the randomized opposing board isn't all that randomized and there would be players out there who would have a Chronobreaker or Buccaneer with those exact stats on their board. The challenge was to collect enough data to know what the total "chain" looked like and figure out which exact minions were between the Chronobreaker and the BUccaneer to then add those stats up like in step 1. Pretty damn crazy design and one of the lads even suggested it as a possibility but they just didn't have the data to test the theory.
Anybody make progress on the 2nd puzzle yet?
You get a board full of minions of different tribes on one side, and on your side a single mystery minion flanked by two copies of the opposing minions that seem to be selected randomly and change everytime the puzzle resets.
You have a hand full of cards that you can use on the mystery minion. Each one represents a different tribe. The first time you use a card on the mystery minion it transforms into a 0/1 minion of that tribe (not related to the opposing minions though). After that you can play 6 more cards before the puzzle resets again. These add a digit to the minion's stat values, corresponding to their position in hand (left to right, 1-9, then 0).
Literally 0 idea what is going on there. Tried to transform it into a matching tribe to copy the statlines of the flanking minions, but that does nothing. Tried some adding and subtracting numbers, but that also lead nowhere.
oh so that's why it did that after you completed the first step.
I was wondering what the lore was supposed to be there, but it's literally just a direction to the next part.
My only hope is that if there are some well designed original characters in Mercs they also make it over to regular Hearthstone because they'd be wasted there.
because it's aa pointless effort. You nerf one broken thing in wild and another one takes its place.
People were crying about Secret Mage for years and now, all of a sudden it completely fell off the map The mode is unpredictable and would need a ton of effort to ever bring into any state of balance. It's just not worth it.
Good nerfs for Standard. Handlock will still be very strong but at this point it can't really cheese the bad matchups with Giants nearly as efficiently so it should eventually drop to an appropriate winrate. Stealer OTK is dead hopefully.
Problem is, this does nothing for Wild and if I have to deal with a whole expansion of Wild players lamenting how Wild is dead (isn't it always?) I'm gonna lose it. Just ban the Quest from Wild entirely until it rotates and then dumpster it afterwards. Clearly it's not possible to balance a card that suddenly enables years-worth of woefully undercosted self-damage support.
You have to Moonfire the Priestess I think
Unfortunately the puzzle seems to be even more confusing than the last ones. No directions or hints whatsoever on what you're actually supposed to do.
My only guess is that you have to make it so all the weird portal thingies have matching health on both sides. Killing a portal resets the puzzle, using the hero power swaps the opposing board with your own previous board state. Once you attack you essentially transfer the opposing board on to your side. Everything else doesn't make sense.
Also, fair warning. If you click on the end turn button the game will crash. If you try to start it back up again it will attempt to reconnect and then crash again. It repeats this until it decides it couldn't find your previous match. Don't click the end turn button.
as funny as that would be it's also impossible since solving the riddle gives you the ?-card to initiate the puzzle. Can't get that if your hand is full.
Kind of awkward to have Heathstone and gamemodes that are also Hearthstone but different.
Feels like the Menu design is just outdated at this point and needs a general overhaul. Only so much you can do with 4 buttons
I'll try to find some clues, but if it's some big brain 4D chess riddle that requires a degree in economics to complete I'll just wait for the walkthrough
But that's the thing though...you'd have to nerf a whole bunch of other cards that are individually unproblematic but when you combine them with the win condition of the quest you suddenly end up with an S-Tier meta rapist.
In Standard however, it's absolutely everything except the Quest itself that's the problem, most of which has been sufficiently addressed at this point. Quest Handlock is strong, but has a couple of very efficient counters which are only getting stronger now that Flesh Giant has become less spamable.
Well, at least the OTK build should be sufficiently dead.
Giant nerf is literally just an apology since they should have done it like that the first place. Should definitely make it easier to outpace the Handlock version now.
I guess they'll just have to ban the Warlock Quest from Wild entirely, I doubt it can ever be balanced for that mode (at least not while also being at least somewhat playable in Standard).
Poor woman looked so done with everything the entire time. It's like she knew this would backfire spectacularly.
I'm gonna be charitable here...if this is just a ploy to milk the barely-sentient whales who are so deep in the instant-gratification loop that you can sell them just about anything, then I'm fine with it, because at the very least it's going to rake in cash meaning we won't have to worry about them trying to monetize the main game (and Battlegrounds) even harder.
Shame to see all that artwork go to waste though.
Shoutout to the one guy in chat calling it Hearthstone: Shadow Legends