Hearthpwn

Some people say that grim patron warrior takes a fair amount of skill, others say that its the easiest deck since facehunter. So i decided to see for myself how the community feels, through a poll.

If i misrepresent how much skill it takes to pilot a deck (for instance, if priest is the easiest shit ever and tempo mage is pretty hard to pilot), please let me know.

Note: I am not asking how good or cancerous the deck is. I am asking how much time you have to invest and how much and how much you have to understand the game and the deck to properly pilot it (which i dubbed "skill"). Please don't discuss unrelated issues here.

Edit: Almost a hundred votes now, didn't think it would accumulate so much votes so quickly :D. It seems as though most people think it takes a high amount of skill, and very few think it takes low or very little amount of skill. Guess i'll be refering to this whenever someone says grim patron warrior takes no skill.

Edit 2: 300+ votes, yay!

Why is "Tempo" Mage tier 4 instead of tier 5?

Quote from Zenmasta jump

Why is "Tempo" Mage tier 4 instead of tier 5?

I believe tempo mage requires a bit more thinking than just FACE FACE FACE all day, though i never played it.

I think spamming spells is no different than spamming minions/hero power, which is basically what Tempo Mage does. You can compare spell spam to minion spam and HP spam, which is what Face Hunter and Mechmage does. I played Tempo Mage for a while and I felt like a complete douchebag. But maybe I'm overreacting since I main Druid and playing vs Tempo Mage is hella frustrating.

Quote from Arkarion jump

If you want to start playing this deck I recommend you to watch a stream :) 

Thanks but i already play the deck, not going to say i am good at it though.

Patron Warrior is seen by  many players to be one of the hardest decks to play well in the game.  It's up there with decks such as Oil Rogue, Handlock, Freeze Mage, etc.

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I don't know what "ResidentSleeper deck" is, but when you say that it was used by Kripp - doesn't that mean it's a casual deck? I wouldn't compare a deck like that to the other popular decks that have proven that they work.

Patron Warrior definately is more difficult to play than most other decks, so I said it requires a high amount of skill. Basically, you need to be familiar with various mechanics, ordering, you need to count more and you need to do it quickly, too. It's not rocket science to play and you can probably get a high rank even without mastering the deck - but it requires a good amount of skill, so only someone who is familiar to Hearthstone already will be able to pilot it decently.

Kripp used to play a netdeck he named residentSleeper deck, which i believe he said required a very high amount of skill and understanding of the meta. That was in 2014 though, it's probably shit now. I couldn't really find any decks that were more skillfull than oil rogue off the top of my memory, so i just put that one instead.

Patron is probably the most complicated deck in the game.  The win condition is simple; surviving until you can successfully unleash it is complex.  Even then, you have to do a lot of math very quickly if you're going to beat the animations.

There are two Warsong Commanders in the deck that enable two Grim Patrons and two Frothing Berserkers.  The other 24 cards are trying to get those 6 in your hand, or keep you alive long enough to be able to use them.

If 50% or more of your key cards are at the bottom of your deck, you probably just lose.

Your opponent isn't just going to sit there and wait around while you draw into a 6+ card combo, so you have to balance resources you need for your combo vs. resources you must use to survive.  You'll often be at very low life totals by the time you scrape together enough pieces to make your push.

24 tools is a hell of a lot, and it takes much practice and familiarity to know how to use each most effectively.

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The only people that considers Patrons easy are either the ones who never play it or those who played it very little.

I still don't get the kripp reference tho...

It seems as though the ones who never played it are more vocal than the ones who did.

Kripp made a video about it in 2014, just search "residentSleeper deck kripp" and you will either find the deck or the video eventually.

Quote from Gahzrilla jump

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The only people that considers Patrons easy are either the ones who never play it or those who played it very little.

I still don't get the kripp reference tho...

It seems as though the ones who never played it are more vocal than the ones who did.

 

That's normal for..well,.. life.  It's the whole 'vocal minority'.  The vocal portion of any group tends to represent the extreme minority.  Bah, just us BEING here puts us all within a small minority.  Most players of a game never go to any forum, and thos ethat do tend to go to the company's official forum (bliz forums).  So we're sort of a minority of the minority.  

THEN you take that group, and you take the vocal of THAT group who fusses about how 'easy' patron warrior is.  Which gets to the backseat driver situation: the folks who never played a football game but SWEAR they know the game better than the players or coaches, or anyone else.

So we're talking the minority of the minority of the minority.  And note that most of them always talk about fighting them, not about using them.  Those that do talk about using them don't tend to, say, hit top legendary with it, instead just stomping a few random players of some unmentioned rank then talking about how easy it is.  

To compare, the players who regularly reach the top ranks and those who make a living playing this game competitively pretty much universally declare the deck both the strongest deck in the game and the hardest that HS has.  

And yeah, I can fully believe it wouldn't hold a candle to the hardest MTG deck.  Of course a good number of folks who claim it's easy because they have CCP experience aren't among the top in HS, which gets back to the earlier sentences.

Sidenote: I play Tempo mage.  I like Tempo mage.  It's honestly Hybrid hunter easy at best, and I can see an argument for face hunter easy.  Tempo decks tend to have very few choices by design since they carry very little card pull and a VERY specific mana curve they can't really deviate from.  In HS it's the Combo decks that carry the most difficult situation since the right plays tend to  be the less obvious ones and you have to plan ahead and constantly calculate to keep within that line between keeping your opponent at bay and keeping your win condition in tact.. all while card gathering at the right times.  It only looks easy when fighting against it, facing a bad opponent/deck, or getting a perfect hand.  

Oil rogue is straight forward, easy deck, just the spell cards are cheap and that creates an illusion of difficulty. Patron warrior has many various outcomes for the same cards depending on how a player manages his actions. It's more about midrange warrior than grim patron that makes the deck difficult. Turns independently are easy, it is the ordering that matters.

I don't know about Oil Rogue being a high skill deck. It's not auto-pilot, but it's not exactly difficult either. I think some Priest builds are more complex than Oil Rogue tbh.

I didn't vote at all, as i think it does not really require skill at all to pilot ANY deck correctly.

All it takes is a few games to get used to it, you just need a little experience. And that's it. Anyone can pilot any deck correctly after a couple of games with it.

The only real skill involved in this game is arena.

There's a lot of nuance in patron warrior.  The basic concepts are easy to learn (4 patrons on board is almost always a good idea, learning which MUs that patrons are your win condition vs berserkers, etc).  You can get a decent handle on the deck withing probably 20 games or so.  Mastering it is very difficult.  

I recently started playing it and enjoy it very much, but there are a lot of difficult decisions, most of them revolve around when to use key cards to keep the board under control.  Other decisions around keeping board state ok or drawing are sometimes difficult.  Most of my misplays are probably ones where i misuse key cards to draw more, or I clear and run out of cards.  Finding that balance comes from experience that I just don't have yet.

That math is sometimes difficult too.  Calculating the correct order to do things,make sure things don't die to your aoes before you need them to, etc.  I've missed lethal a lot just because I run out of time to figure out how much damage I can do.

Anyway, I would say that the difficulty is probably around handlock difficulty to play it very well, but you can be successful at lower skill levels and while making mistakes.  I know I've won a lot of games with misplays.  So probably between moderate and high.

Quote from narnou jump

Quote from Onenutmcgee jump

That math is sometimes difficult too.  Calculating the correct order to do things,make sure things don't die to your aoes before you need them to, etc.  I've missed lethal a lot just because I run out of time to figure out how much damage I can do.

That's probably why opinions differs... 

I mean, if you find those maths complicated you'll surely find Patron hard to play...

But so you're just an idiot as there are f*cking simple basic maths (and yes i play the deck)

I'm definitely not born on the right planet.

You need to be joining tournaments then because you'd be creaming the top end players there as they are having problems with the 'f*cking simple basic maths'.  

Quote from narnou jump

Quote from Onenutmcgee jump

That math is sometimes difficult too.  Calculating the correct order to do things,make sure things don't die to your aoes before you need them to, etc.  I've missed lethal a lot just because I run out of time to figure out how much damage I can do.

That's probably why opinions differs... 

I mean, if you find those maths complicated you'll surely find Patron hard to play...

But so you're just an idiot as there are f*cking simple basic maths (and yes i play the deck)

I'm definitely not born on the right planet.

The insult was completely unnecessary.  I'm not saying the math itself is difficult (adding up the number of minions * the number of AOEs + 2), but when you throw in stuff dying and single target damage that creates aoe that creates more dudes and kills stuff and then you have more aoe and such, it can get complected.  I'm not talking about playing whirlwind against 4 minions while you have a berserker up, but when you have other things going on and you need every point of damage, it gets complicated.  Add in that this is all timed (and some actions you can't queue up), getting what your maximum damage (and if you have lethal or not), and it's quite difficult.  But hey, if you play PW perfectly and know if you have lethal or not super easily, great.  more power to ya.  

The damage calculation can be complicated when Frothing Berserkers are involved, simply because the order of plays determines how much +attack the Frothing Berserkers would receive, and you need to run over every possible scenario in your head while summing up the total damage your board + weapon could dish out in every situation WITHOUT ERROR, then you need to execute what you think are the most optimal plays before the rope is totally burned out.

Beside all that, there are considerations of mana cost, of every state of the board after an AoE, of other minion interactions (say an enemy Deathlord summoning a minion of yours)...etc.

To pilot the deck properly a high amount of skill just as it would a Handlock or Oil Rogue player, but enough to win? I would put it somewhere around low-mid skill same as Handlock and to a lesser degree Oil-Rogue in terms of imperfect but still enough to win consistently. Only egregious plays from players who purely netdeck without understanding the deck at all will have a subpar winrate with the deck. This is typically players you meet who play their Warsong or Frothing on an empty board turn 3 or 4. Everyone else will get ~50% winrate, and highly skilled players easily 60-70% if not more.

grim patrons are boring and i cant wait to see them nerfed or a meta change.

for months this is tier 1 deck and i'm over watching those boring animations over and over..