Hearthpwn

Her purpose is to grant value in a control and midrange match. She's almost useless against aggro. So you need to replace her with something that gives you lots of cards in the late game so you don't run out of steam. The closest replacement would be Ivory Knight, since it's only 1 mana more, but gives you a card immediately and heals you OR Prince Malchezar since he gives you value, but he also makes your draws worse by thickening the deck by 5 cards, most of which will probably be useless against aggro... Lay on Hands is my second pick, but it's not as good against aggro at 8 mana, while Elise is 5 and 5/5, she kills one or two creatures in the mid game.

What's hilarious is that this may potentially have something to it. With tuning I'd say it may be viable, Who knows.

Gadgetzan Jouster is just way worse than Zombie Chow. Control doesn't care about the enemy healing for 5, so it's not worth the risk of not getting the 1/1.

Quote from Zeetchmen »

The most overpowered 2 drop in the game

And paladin is still mid tier at best, typically low tier, despite having the 'best' 2-drop, especially considering the first three turns of a match determine the entire game.

In legend ranks there's less Aggro, but getting there seems hard when there's really no taunt in the deck. You have to be VERY ahead of your zoo opponent or your hunter opponent in order to just not get rushed down by them. How do you not just die to hunter and zoo charges?

This is not a control deck. Paladin cannot make control work since it does not have enough removal tools. This is midrange with Tirion as the biggest card. A control deck would have at least two 8 mana finishers, maybe 9 mana Ysera or Nefarian, like Dragon Warrior.

Secondly this is not his idea at all. This is literally the midrange paladin that was refined when GvG was released. It's paladin's only good deck. The purpose is to stuff a ton of cheap minions to fight aggro decks in the first three turns, and when they run out of steam, start hitting them in the face and win. It usually loses to control because that's what midrange does: it loses to control because it doesn't have high damage, and it lacks the big finishers to handle the opposing control deck's finishers.

The only reason this deck does well against Control Warriors is because of Harrison Jones, and the nature of the Paladin Hero power (creating minions infinitely  which warrior has to spend cards to deal with).

Basically, which late game legendaries cause trouble for decks like Control Warrior, Handlock, Priest, etc? Off the top of my head I'm thinking Sneed's. A card that must be silenced or ignored, but is too big to be ignored.

Quote from thepoxbox »

I think the devs are very out of touch with this game. They talk about the game more as if all they played was test versions of future content with each other rather than playing actual ladder. 

Ben Brode's constant "we give you the tools to counter cards" idea is just flawed.  This isn't a game with sideboarding. It's further flawed as evidenced by cards like Lil Exorcist and Scarlet Purifier, which you know they tested in-house to great success but just suck in the actual reality of things.
So just don't make cards that need one specific counter card to not be dumb broken. Dr. Boom for instance. 

The devs simply don't "get" this game. They don't play it like their players do, they don't have the same goals or the same experiences and as such they make obvious design mistakes that push the game in a frustrating way. 

This exactly. The 'tech' cards designed to counter the meta are all completely trash. They should help you win the game, not hinder you completely. Like how Kezan Mystic is a 4/3. Why can't she be a more playable 3/5 with that special effect? She gets killed by 2-drops and she's a very conditional tech card. Or why can't Something like Scarlet purifier silence the deathrattle minions? Or maybe do more than 2 fucking damage, maybe 3. Blizzard designs tech cards and always makes them fall just short of the mark of being viable when needed.

The ONLY tech card I can think of that is legitimately good without issue is Ooze. Good stats. You don't feel like an idiot when you have one against a Priest. It's a playable card on its own.

Quote from danman42 »

I've said it before and I'll say it again, they don't need more cards, they need to go back and rework the whole godd***n game. You can say 'aggro is so OP' or 'Dr. Boom needz nerf' all you want, but it's a symptom of a fundamental problem.

I've played through every expansion (started before Naxx), spent a few bucks here and there on packs, trying to support the game and build the collection. I can build everything from Face Hunter to Wallet Warrior, I've tried every one of them, done well on ladder (close but no cigar to legend a few times, just don't have that kind of time to invest), and strictly from a design perspective, the game is horribly flawed.

Completely ignoring variance and RNG (what most complaint threads come down to), just the base systems in place for classes are such that there's only every 1-2 permutations per class to build decks around. I mean, the Grim Patron deck was built 5 minutes after the card was spoiled. Everyone knew it was going to be an abusable psuedo-combo deck, and it was going to win.

Combo decks run rampant in this game with no 'direct' check to keep them in place. Much like Kezan Mystic, any targetted discard would be an auto-include as at least a 1-of in every deck just to keep combo on its heels. There are just going to be some games where you just won't draw a taunt or a Healbot, even when you know the combo is coming.

Damage is too splashy, the game punishes tight play by allowing pumps so high that they can deal lethal through a taunt on an empty board. That's ridiculous. If your opponent is on 0 creatures and you're at 30 with a taunt up, the mechanics of the game should allow the opponent to battle back into the game, not win outright.

On that same note, if you're not on combo, the game punishes being put on the defensive. Usually you're seeing the game end within 2-4 turns ahead of where you are, topdecks be damned. I've played Mage, Warrior, and Paladin enough times to know, you can get to a point where you don't have to let your opponent do anything meaningful for the rest of the game just based on what's in your hand.

Which flows into yet another problem. If you showed me two decks opening hands and their first 3 draws, I can probably tell you who's going to win with a fair amount of certainty. The game doesn't differentiate between creatures, secrets, weapons and spells...it's all just damage. Where in another CCG you might have cards that very specifically interact or work against a certain strategy, everything here is just based on damage that you either point at a minion or the player. That's it. The 'skill' this game requires is figuring out where to put the damage.

...and that's why people hate decks like Face Hunter and Mech Mage. One completely ignores the opponent's position, forcing the opponent to make them interact with their deck. Mech Mage spams creatures to the board, then holds back spells designed to strip away interaction (fireball for a taunt, for example), but then has this unnecessary synergy with Archmage that allows for a late game that rush decks should never be allowed to have.

So, what do you fix there? What do you nerf? All or nothing. You can't fix that many fundamental issues with the design of this game without reworking it completely. Couple that with a business model that is quickly becoming an investment of $100 just to get started, and you're going to see the game get to a point where it can't grow. Then they'll switch to the mode where they just try to bleed the loyal customers they have to death and they'll hang on a few years before this game is forgotten as a money sink.

This guy pretty much rekt the entire thread. Hearthstone is treading water as a game I think. It's just infuriating that after a year and a half the same two classes still dominate, and it's not a matter of how cheap the decks those classes use. If the decks were bad but cheap nobody would play them. This is a sort of rule in competitive card games.

I think a tweak that could possibly help is to increase starting health. Or like in alpha, have different classes start with different amounts of HP. This way the classes that are DESIGNED around slow stabilization and board control (paladin and priest) would have a real chance against aggro without having to design their entire decks around stopping it.

Quote from Stubblestubble »

Quote from Dustincr »

Quote from Stubblestubble »

Quote from rdeegan »

Like you said, all three of those decks have more than 3 card draw in them. Hence, you shouldn't be going into fatigue first when playing LoH unless you have other substantial draw, which is just not needed with LoH.

playing midrange with no draw except LoH? Whats your secret? 

Are you being sarcastic? Most midrange paladin runs LoH as the only draw, aside from a lucky Harrison and mayyyybe Hammer of Wrath.

No unfortunately not. I dont really know anything about how control pali works. With other control classes you have to have answers to board threats and that seems like it would be hard to do without draw until turn 8.  Does it rely on equality to win or something? 

Control paladin is simply dead right now. Most paladins are running a cookie midrange deck that has about 14 cards for aggro, Sylvanas, Thaurrisan, Lay on Hands, and Tirion as the crown of the deck. The goal is to destroy aggro decks (almost impossible unless u draw ur only Chow and play Minibot the next turn) and then start pushing for face in the mid game. I find most games to be very close, which is what angers me about this class.

Quote from Dustincr »

A post I made on a deck earlier about this topic:

Lay on Hands is a very good card with many uses. If you're playing against a burn/aggro deck, it's good to use it to heal once you stabilize and gain board control. Many aggressive decks will have reach spells that can burst you down once they can no longer directly attack your face (Kill Command, Soulfire,Fireball).

In a control vs control matchup, often you'll be going card for card with the other player until you're both close to topdeck mode. A Lay on Hands to fill up your health and draw 3 cards will straight win you the game in that situation.

As an additional summary: No, LoH isn't going to singlehandedly stop aggro from killing you. But if you played right and stabilized - as you should have by turn 8 - it's a useful heal. In addition, 8 mana for 3 card draw is completely fine in lategame circumstances, if also not amazing. LoH is a jack of all trades, master of none card and 1 copy goes well into most Paladin decks.

In control I find myself in danger of being fatigued when playing LoH, especially against Warrior and Priest. I suppose this always happens because paladin has no burst and cannot close out games, even with Ashbringer sometimes. 

I am hesitant to call LoH the game winner against control because the only control classes you'll face are Priest, Warrior, and Handlock, all three classes have massive card draw throughout the entire game. Of the three, only priest has no game ending threats, but you both often go to fatigue, in which case LoH will kill you first usually, especially if its one of your last cards.

It is infamous in WoW, one of the largest heals in the game, if not the largest across all expansions. 

But in hearthstone it's just a massive tempo loss. Against aggro you MUST keep playing minions to contest the board. Healing in the end gets you killed. You can only heal when you already have a board otherwise you still just die. And you can never play anything else the same turn you use it, except on turn 10 summon a dude or play equality/Minibot. Why does a 5 mana robot heal as much as the largest (or one of) heal in WoW?

Would Lay on Hands be more welcome if it drew less cards and healed more? Maybe draw two cards and heal for 12?  

Great deck but there is not a single taunt, and if you get behind on board you automatically lose since there is no equality or consecrate to swing back.

 Dragon paladin gets steamrolled by both hunter decks and has serious trouble against Zoo and handlock. But this is not a dragon issue, this is a paladin issue. Paladin is in the bottom three right now since it outright loses to Grim Patron, OIl Rogue, and midrange hunter. I'm all for dragons working but they simply aren't right now. Blizzard still needs to tune aggro decks in order for other archetypes of emerge because for the past year it's been aggro and midrange. The only control deck that is viable is often warrior, simply because of how strong his cards are and his ability to outheal hunters.

I played against Brian Kibler yesterday at rank 1 and he was running dragon paladins. Since last night he has deranked to rank 5 because that's how hard hunters beat him. He's actually streaming right now and you can literally see why dragons are bad just from watching his stream.