In brief, a scrub is someone who handicaps himself in a game because he believes that some strategies are “cheap” and thus it’s beneath his dignity to employ them. The scrub denies himself the use of the strategy, and becomes frustrated when he sees others succeed by it.
The OP is taking precisely this attitude toward aggro decks and speaks pejoratively of those who play them. In an aggro meta, this is self-defeating.
You may not enjoy playing aggro, you might not like the game when it’s dominated by aggro decks, and in that situation maybe you should simply play something else. I’m not going to tell you that you have to play aggro and like it. But don’t put down other players simply because they’re exploiting a successful strategy.
Only a literal ****** could formulate such a stupid stance. Literally all you said was "fall in line or gtfo" which is anti-consumer corporate propaganda bullshit.
You should actually read Sirlin. That's not even a remotely close restatement of his point. Furthermore, the Art of Winning is a text recommended by an incredibly diverse group of people who enjoy top-level success in everything from professional sports to chess to business and the list goes on. I mean, by all means, ignore it if you aren't interested in learning something, but it's been a valuable resource for countless successful folks.
For the record, Popeye, it's just a specific use of the word "scrub" for the essay. Most people use the word more in your line of use. But the way Sirlin uses "scrub", it describes that guy who whined as a little kid when someone picked up Street fighter (or any fighting game) and just used Ryu's fireball ability over and over until the scrub died. Instead of learning to jump over the projectile and easily win the match, the scrub is the guy who throws the controller down and yells about the other guy being "cheap" or "cheating" or whatever else and quitting the game.
Personally, my enemy has never been the Sirlin "scrub". My nemesis is the "faux pro", which is the second creature he writes about. The faux pro is the guy who knows just enough about the game to write a rant about balance, talking about how he would be a pro player except for this issue with the game that holds him back from success. Of course, it's somehow not holding back all the people who are actually enjoying success at the game, but the faux pro's main lot in life is to suffer all the bad luck and disadvantages of imbalance in the world.
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Helpful Clarification on Forbidden Topics for Hearthstone Forums:
Enjoying Americans winning in the Olympics is forbidden because it is political. A 14 plus page discussion of state-sponsored lawsuits against a multi-national corporation based on harassment, discrimination, and wrongful death allegations is apparently not political enough to raise an issue.
I don't reply often on topics. However, this one cries for it.
Wasn't the player base shouting for a 10th class for ages? Okay, most wanted DK or Pandas, but that aside.
Isn't DH still losing at least 40% of it's matches? Plenty of decks and classes that work against it, while still viable against other classes. OP should do his homework and find out what works for him instead of begging for attention here. Sure, I hate it too when I have a losing streak. I just set the game aside for 5 minutes to reset the inner frustration and continue. No need to disqualify an entire class, just because YOU can't seem to win from it.
Fact: the meta shifts regularly. Tough that you feel that the current meta isn't your cup of tea. Cry for three more months until the next xpac hits. DH wasnt dominant before Darkmoon hit. Deal with it.
I did read the article mate, although it wasn’t necessarily his main argument I was commenting on (more about his use of the term scrub which I found to be a weird usage of the term), but now I guess I will. His argument was that people who complain about cheap tactics and refuse to implement them because (for lack of a better phrase) they are “morally above” using said “cheap” tactic are “scrubs” and should hop on the bandwagon of repetitive, boring tactics. Which is.... not a valid argument. It is in fact a terrible one. For example, people like me who hit legend once and now only play home brews for fun, play games such as hs to have FUN. The only goal I have while playing any game is to have fun, and obviously that involves winning and completing stuff, but it also doesn’t have to. I’ve lost plenty games of hs where I still had fun. I’ve also run around COD quick scoping averaging a .65 k/d ratio (mw3 days) which is terrible, but boy did I have fun. The argument the article gave made it seem like the sole point of playing games is to win, no matter what boring, overplayed, bs tactics you have to employ to do so. As long as you win. And that the loser is in the wrong because you used lame, repetitive tactics while they tried to interact and have fun in the game. That is a very poor perspective to have towards games in my opinion. I can agree with your implementation of this type of argument to real life in school, careers, etc. but games are for fun. People who sacrifice having fun and interacting with opponents for playing brain dead aggro DH just for their W/L ratios are the real scrubs. Fooling themselves thinking dragging face to opposite face over and over again is as fun as the game can get, because they get to hear a triumphant jingle at the end of the game. If the deck ain’t fun, idc if it has a 100% win rate, you wouldn’t catch me playing it. And of course, fun is subjective, but I cant imagine it being as subjective as dragging a cursor and clicking on a picture for 5 turns, yet I am proved wrong everyday I run into DHs and wild Odd Pallys. The people that seriously implement this “art of winning” into something as arbitrary as video games like hs really need to get a grip and let loose a little. Have a beer or something. No one here is going to world championships.
and it’s not like aggro style is the epitome of boredom because it’s not. I have a zoolock deck I made with renounce darkness and lore walker cho that is a blast and still upholds a 59% win rate currently and has gotten me to legend once before the new expansion and gets me comfortably to d5 each season I’ve played it, but at least it has some sort of interactivity and “fun” ability. I build boards, strengthen boards, steal opponents spells (people quake in the presence of cho, have even gotten insta concedes on priests and mages), and even have the option to go full random for max fun (winning off renounce darkness is the best feeling). But People who netdeck DH have no creativity or ability to understand anything other than winning. It’s sad really, I pity those people.
At this point, I think the best you can hope for is that the rewards track forces the most aggressive decks into ranked mode and that casual mode does in fact finally become casual. I agree with a lot of your sentiments, and if that makes me a scrub I guess I’m okay with that. I’ve long wondered why anyone would want to play DH (in casual mode especially) it’s not like it’s a “strategy” in the sense the sirlin article discusses it, compared to the other classes it’s really a kind of a handicap in deck creation terms. The equivalent of bowling with bumper rails on. But whether we like it or not, the developers have decided this is what they think is healthy for this game. I don’t expect they’ll ever remove it, and the day will come when I don’t play this anymore and I am happy not to see Ilidan. But until then they are correct, it’s a part of the game: you can play it, play to counter it, or do your own thing to your best and move on when you get beat by DH.
I did read the article mate, although it wasn’t necessarily his main argument I was commenting on (more about his use of the term scrub which I found to be a weird usage of the term), but now I guess I will. His argument was that people who complain about cheap tactics and refuse to implement them because (for lack of a better phrase) they are “morally above” using said “cheap” tactic are “scrubs” and should hop on the bandwagon of repetitive, boring tactics. Which is.... not a valid argument. It is in fact a terrible one. For example, people like me who hit legend once and now only play home brews for fun, play games such as hs to have FUN. The only goal I have while playing any game is to have fun, and obviously that involves winning and completing stuff, but it also doesn’t have to. I’ve lost plenty games of hs where I still had fun. I’ve also run around COD quick scoping averaging a .65 k/d ratio (mw3 days) which is terrible, but boy did I have fun. The argument the article gave made it seem like the sole point of playing games is to win, no matter what boring, overplayed, bs tactics you have to employ to do so. As long as you win. And that the loser is in the wrong because you used lame, repetitive tactics while they tried to interact and have fun in the game. That is a very poor perspective to have towards games in my opinion. I can agree with your implementation of this type of argument to real life in school, careers, etc. but games are for fun. People who sacrifice having fun and interacting with opponents for playing brain dead aggro DH just for their W/L ratios are the real scrubs. Fooling themselves thinking dragging face to opposite face over and over again is as fun as the game can get, because they get to hear a triumphant jingle at the end of the game. If the deck ain’t fun, idc if it has a 100% win rate, you wouldn’t catch me playing it. And of course, fun is subjective, but I cant imagine it being as subjective as dragging a cursor and clicking on a picture for 5 turns, yet I am proved wrong everyday I run into DHs and wild Odd Pallys. The people that seriously implement this “art of winning” into something as arbitrary as video games like hs really need to get a grip and let loose a little. Have a beer or something. No one here is going to world championships.
and it’s not like aggro style is the epitome of boredom because it’s not. I have a zoolock deck I made with renounce darkness and lore walker cho that is a blast and still upholds a 59% win rate currently and has gotten me to legend once before the new expansion and gets me comfortably to d5 each season I’ve played it, but at least it has some sort of interactivity and “fun” ability. I build boards, strengthen boards, steal opponents spells (people quake in the presence of cho, have even gotten insta concedes on priests and mages), and even have the option to go full random for max fun (winning off renounce darkness is the best feeling). But People who netdeck DH have no creativity or ability to understand anything other than winning. It’s sad really, I pity those people.
. . . . .
You know, I still don't know how people can miss the point so badly and still be right.
First off, I'm not a big fan of people bringing up the Sirlin article. While it's a good read. It's often used as a thinly veiled ad hominen attack.
The whole point of the Scrub article is to outline a type of mentality that exists where players are too caught up in themselves and what they're doing to pay attention to their opponent and adapt to what their opponent is doing. The actual balance that the 'scrub' is complaining about is a non-issue. It doesn't matter if it's balanced, overpowered, or underpowered. The scrub will complain about it regardless because it requires them to change what they are doing. The mentality of playing to win has nothing to do with balance.
Sirlin is actually a huge advocate of opponent interaction, specifically reading opponents lines of play, and would probably consider the non-interactive face aggro poor design. Sirlin actually went on a tangent in one of his articles about optimal play not being about the best play available, but the less likely to be exploited. Things like repetitive tactics would create openings through predictable play patterns. The fact that it doesn't usually result in that in Hearthstone could be argued as a problem. You either have the answer or you die. Anyway, Sirlin wrote another article titled Love of the Game: Not Playing to Win which is part of the same set of essays that the scrub article came from. It outlines that playing to win all the time is not how you get better at a game. Experimenting, exploring, and avoiding developing habits from doing the same thing all the time are all important to improvement and sometimes you will have to lose to get there. The difference is that a scrub sees a loss as a loss and a good player sees a loss as a learning experience.
So yeah, completely wrong take away from the article, but pretty much on the right page despite all that.
Edit: and i apologize if my rambling is somewhat incoherent. This originally started as a response to KingOfKings post, but then I found yours so much more interesting.
Aggro Demon Hunter isn't that hard to beat. And what beats it is also good against the popular shaman decks and paladin decks. Penance, School Spirits, Brain Freeze, run any of the good 1/3 one drops that trade well into demon hunter's one drops (i.e. battlefiends and such) and you can match them pretty well. I honestly think Outcast Aggro Demon Hunter is better than standard aggro Demon Hunter overall.
Also as far as the deck being "dumb" or whatever, I actually think Demon Hunter aggro decks require some thought. You're usually trying to find ways to protect your low health minions and power them up. Which is very different from Hunter which just... blasts you in the face with their hero power, Kill Command, Huffer and so forth. Or aggro mage decks that just use burn spells and make big tempo plays. As a predominately midrange/control player I think aggro match ups are fun. I like to see if I can outlast a good aggro deck or keep control of the board.
The most powerful Demon Hunter deck right now is Soul Demon Hunter; which is a lot more powerful. But it's not an aggro deck. It's a combo deck, and it requires any slower deck to put a lot of taunts and healing in to prevent their bursts.
I think in general; Demon Hunter is MOSTLY propped up by how strong Twin Slice is and how efficient it is in combination with Blade Dance. Without it, Demon Hunter doesn't have a lot of reach. It mostly has spells which do less damage than they cost, and without blade dance it gets walled *hard* by taunts or big tempo plays that it can't keep up with.
With Twin Slice, you take a class that has pretty good sustained damage each turn and give it pretty great reach with no conditions (4 for 2 is a lot of damage). With Blade Dance, you take a class which has trouble dealing with wide boards or tall boards, and give them a pretty good tool against both.
Yeah, I won't repeat ReisRune's post because that has most of it, but I was just going to say, I don't know the intent of the person who quoted Sirlin, but Sirlin himself spends like half of his prologue talking about how there are plenty of other things to be concerned about in life, and there's only going to be a small portion of the populace who even cares about his subject matter.
Assuming, therefore, that one might be a part of that group . . . then the book is really interesting. But he's the first to admit there are lots of folks who won't want to hear it.
SO, if you're playing for fun, and you don't care about winning, then definitionally, that whole book doesn't apply to you.
Also, the use of the word "scrub" might be twisted into an ad hominem by people bastardizing the text, but it's just a designation as far as the book is concerned. Obviously, it's not a positive reference, but then again, it's not a positive thing to be the guy who whines about "cheap" tactics regardless of your reasons for playing.
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Enjoying Americans winning in the Olympics is forbidden because it is political. A 14 plus page discussion of state-sponsored lawsuits against a multi-national corporation based on harassment, discrimination, and wrongful death allegations is apparently not political enough to raise an issue.
You literally restated my point of view with the slight alteration of your view on “balance isn’t the problem.” Which I can somewhat agree with but it also has its issues. You say the scrub will always complain no matter what but that’s like me saying I’ll complain when I lose to a meme deck just as much if I were to lose to an aggro DH. This view is incorrect because one obviously is more “overpowered” than the other which is a definite problem, but not according to you. You say scrubs will complain no matter what which is somewhat what the article was saying but I took it differently. I took It as saying they will complain at “cheap” tactics. I can understand how you say the scrub sees any tactic used against them as “cheap” and will always complain but that (I hope) is a very small portion of the population that can complain about losing to a shitty meme deck as much as when they lose to DH. If you think playing to win has nothing to do with balance you are sorely mistaken my friend. Playing to win literally means to implement tactics that give you the best shot at winning, which is to use the so called “best” tactics in the game which scrubs will see as “overpowered” but that’s because they usually are. There’s a reason nobody respects people that play DH or rez priest.
I might’ve had a slight different takeaway from the article but that doesn’t mean my argument is invalid. And anyhow, my response was also a partial response to the author’s point a view which I found flawed as well, so why would I aim to summarize an argument I didn’t agree with? No I gave my takeaway and stated my opinion. Believe it or not, alternative opinions are possible to have
Just for the record, who is the "you" you're referring to? I didn't see the balance argument; maybe I'm missing something in a previous post.
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Helpful Clarification on Forbidden Topics for Hearthstone Forums:
Enjoying Americans winning in the Olympics is forbidden because it is political. A 14 plus page discussion of state-sponsored lawsuits against a multi-national corporation based on harassment, discrimination, and wrongful death allegations is apparently not political enough to raise an issue.
I was replying to Runes. In his response he says that “balance isn’t the issue” or is a “non-issue” to the scrub bc they will complain anyway no matter what tactic is used. Which I fundamentally disagree with.
Helpful Clarification on Forbidden Topics for Hearthstone Forums:
Enjoying Americans winning in the Olympics is forbidden because it is political. A 14 plus page discussion of state-sponsored lawsuits against a multi-national corporation based on harassment, discrimination, and wrongful death allegations is apparently not political enough to raise an issue.
You literally restated my point of view with the slight alteration of your view on “balance isn’t the problem.” Which I can somewhat agree with but it also has its issues. You say the scrub will always complain no matter what but that’s like me saying I’ll complain when I lose to a meme deck just as much if I were to lose to an aggro DH. This view is incorrect because one obviously is more “overpowered” than the other which is a definite problem, but not according to you. You say scrubs will complain no matter what which is somewhat what the article was saying but I took it differently. I took It as saying they will complain at “cheap” tactics. I can understand how you say the scrub sees any tactic used against them as “cheap” and will always complain but that (I hope) is a very small portion of the population that can complain about losing to a shitty meme deck as much as when they lose to DH. If you think playing to win has nothing to do with balance you are sorely mistaken my friend. Playing to win literally means to implement tactics that give you the best shot at winning, which is to use the so called “best” tactics in the game which scrubs will see as “overpowered” but that’s because they usually are. There’s a reason nobody respects people that play DH or rez priest.
I might’ve had a slight different takeaway from the article but that doesn’t mean my argument is invalid. And anyhow, my response was also a partial response to the author’s point a view which I found flawed as well, so why would I aim to summarize an argument I didn’t agree with? No I gave my takeaway and stated my opinion. Believe it or not, alternative opinions are possible to have
Okay two different topics.
Yes, balance is completely subjective, and yes I was agreeing that you were right so some overlap is expected. Like I said, the article isn't about the inherent balance in a situation, so bringing it up in a balance conversation just derails the topic. The article is also painting the issue in very broad strokes in order to illustrate the problem. It's not meant to be seen in terms of absolutes, but people treat it like it is. Everyone is going to have their own personal biases and nothing can be done about that. How you let those biases dictate your behavior is another matter but is neither here nor there when talking about balance. So yes, your point is valid. My entire point is that your point, the OPs point, and a lot of other points are valid because the article isn't about balance and quoting it like it is some authority on the subject is not helpful when discussing balance because that is not what the article is about. Complain about whatever balance problem you want, that is not what makes a person a 'scrub.'
Playing to win is not about making the 'best' plays. It's about recognizing that there is a goal and that the trip there is from A to B and not A to 3 to B. If I were to play an OTK deck, playing to win means that I recognize there are instances where its better to ignore the combo and win in other ways then trying to assemble the OTK my deck is built around. Likewise if your priority is to have fun. You shouldn't make winning a pre-requisite to have fun.
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I couldn’t agree more
You should actually read Sirlin. That's not even a remotely close restatement of his point. Furthermore, the Art of Winning is a text recommended by an incredibly diverse group of people who enjoy top-level success in everything from professional sports to chess to business and the list goes on. I mean, by all means, ignore it if you aren't interested in learning something, but it's been a valuable resource for countless successful folks.
For the record, Popeye, it's just a specific use of the word "scrub" for the essay. Most people use the word more in your line of use. But the way Sirlin uses "scrub", it describes that guy who whined as a little kid when someone picked up Street fighter (or any fighting game) and just used Ryu's fireball ability over and over until the scrub died. Instead of learning to jump over the projectile and easily win the match, the scrub is the guy who throws the controller down and yells about the other guy being "cheap" or "cheating" or whatever else and quitting the game.
Personally, my enemy has never been the Sirlin "scrub". My nemesis is the "faux pro", which is the second creature he writes about. The faux pro is the guy who knows just enough about the game to write a rant about balance, talking about how he would be a pro player except for this issue with the game that holds him back from success. Of course, it's somehow not holding back all the people who are actually enjoying success at the game, but the faux pro's main lot in life is to suffer all the bad luck and disadvantages of imbalance in the world.
Helpful Clarification on Forbidden Topics for Hearthstone Forums:
Enjoying Americans winning in the Olympics is forbidden because it is political. A 14 plus page discussion of state-sponsored lawsuits against a multi-national corporation based on harassment, discrimination, and wrongful death allegations is apparently not political enough to raise an issue.
I don't reply often on topics. However, this one cries for it.
Wasn't the player base shouting for a 10th class for ages? Okay, most wanted DK or Pandas, but that aside.
Isn't DH still losing at least 40% of it's matches? Plenty of decks and classes that work against it, while still viable against other classes. OP should do his homework and find out what works for him instead of begging for attention here. Sure, I hate it too when I have a losing streak. I just set the game aside for 5 minutes to reset the inner frustration and continue. No need to disqualify an entire class, just because YOU can't seem to win from it.
Fact: the meta shifts regularly. Tough that you feel that the current meta isn't your cup of tea. Cry for three more months until the next xpac hits. DH wasnt dominant before Darkmoon hit. Deal with it.
I did read the article mate, although it wasn’t necessarily his main argument I was commenting on (more about his use of the term scrub which I found to be a weird usage of the term), but now I guess I will. His argument was that people who complain about cheap tactics and refuse to implement them because (for lack of a better phrase) they are “morally above” using said “cheap” tactic are “scrubs” and should hop on the bandwagon of repetitive, boring tactics. Which is.... not a valid argument. It is in fact a terrible one. For example, people like me who hit legend once and now only play home brews for fun, play games such as hs to have FUN. The only goal I have while playing any game is to have fun, and obviously that involves winning and completing stuff, but it also doesn’t have to. I’ve lost plenty games of hs where I still had fun. I’ve also run around COD quick scoping averaging a .65 k/d ratio (mw3 days) which is terrible, but boy did I have fun. The argument the article gave made it seem like the sole point of playing games is to win, no matter what boring, overplayed, bs tactics you have to employ to do so. As long as you win. And that the loser is in the wrong because you used lame, repetitive tactics while they tried to interact and have fun in the game. That is a very poor perspective to have towards games in my opinion. I can agree with your implementation of this type of argument to real life in school, careers, etc. but games are for fun. People who sacrifice having fun and interacting with opponents for playing brain dead aggro DH just for their W/L ratios are the real scrubs. Fooling themselves thinking dragging face to opposite face over and over again is as fun as the game can get, because they get to hear a triumphant jingle at the end of the game. If the deck ain’t fun, idc if it has a 100% win rate, you wouldn’t catch me playing it. And of course, fun is subjective, but I cant imagine it being as subjective as dragging a cursor and clicking on a picture for 5 turns, yet I am proved wrong everyday I run into DHs and wild Odd Pallys. The people that seriously implement this “art of winning” into something as arbitrary as video games like hs really need to get a grip and let loose a little. Have a beer or something. No one here is going to world championships.
and it’s not like aggro style is the epitome of boredom because it’s not. I have a zoolock deck I made with renounce darkness and lore walker cho that is a blast and still upholds a 59% win rate currently and has gotten me to legend once before the new expansion and gets me comfortably to d5 each season I’ve played it, but at least it has some sort of interactivity and “fun” ability. I build boards, strengthen boards, steal opponents spells (people quake in the presence of cho, have even gotten insta concedes on priests and mages), and even have the option to go full random for max fun (winning off renounce darkness is the best feeling). But People who netdeck DH have no creativity or ability to understand anything other than winning. It’s sad really, I pity those people.
At this point, I think the best you can hope for is that the rewards track forces the most aggressive decks into ranked mode and that casual mode does in fact finally become casual.
I agree with a lot of your sentiments, and if that makes me a scrub I guess I’m okay with that. I’ve long wondered why anyone would want to play DH (in casual mode especially) it’s not like it’s a “strategy” in the sense the sirlin article discusses it, compared to the other classes it’s really a kind of a handicap in deck creation terms. The equivalent of bowling with bumper rails on. But whether we like it or not, the developers have decided this is what they think is healthy for this game. I don’t expect they’ll ever remove it, and the day will come when I don’t play this anymore and I am happy not to see Ilidan. But until then they are correct, it’s a part of the game: you can play it, play to counter it, or do your own thing to your best and move on when you get beat by DH.
. . . . .
You know, I still don't know how people can miss the point so badly and still be right.
First off, I'm not a big fan of people bringing up the Sirlin article. While it's a good read. It's often used as a thinly veiled ad hominen attack.
The whole point of the Scrub article is to outline a type of mentality that exists where players are too caught up in themselves and what they're doing to pay attention to their opponent and adapt to what their opponent is doing. The actual balance that the 'scrub' is complaining about is a non-issue. It doesn't matter if it's balanced, overpowered, or underpowered. The scrub will complain about it regardless because it requires them to change what they are doing. The mentality of playing to win has nothing to do with balance.
Sirlin is actually a huge advocate of opponent interaction, specifically reading opponents lines of play, and would probably consider the non-interactive face aggro poor design. Sirlin actually went on a tangent in one of his articles about optimal play not being about the best play available, but the less likely to be exploited. Things like repetitive tactics would create openings through predictable play patterns. The fact that it doesn't usually result in that in Hearthstone could be argued as a problem. You either have the answer or you die. Anyway, Sirlin wrote another article titled Love of the Game: Not Playing to Win which is part of the same set of essays that the scrub article came from. It outlines that playing to win all the time is not how you get better at a game. Experimenting, exploring, and avoiding developing habits from doing the same thing all the time are all important to improvement and sometimes you will have to lose to get there. The difference is that a scrub sees a loss as a loss and a good player sees a loss as a learning experience.
So yeah, completely wrong take away from the article, but pretty much on the right page despite all that.
Edit: and i apologize if my rambling is somewhat incoherent. This originally started as a response to KingOfKings post, but then I found yours so much more interesting.
Aggro Demon Hunter isn't that hard to beat. And what beats it is also good against the popular shaman decks and paladin decks. Penance, School Spirits, Brain Freeze, run any of the good 1/3 one drops that trade well into demon hunter's one drops (i.e. battlefiends and such) and you can match them pretty well. I honestly think Outcast Aggro Demon Hunter is better than standard aggro Demon Hunter overall.
Also as far as the deck being "dumb" or whatever, I actually think Demon Hunter aggro decks require some thought. You're usually trying to find ways to protect your low health minions and power them up. Which is very different from Hunter which just... blasts you in the face with their hero power, Kill Command, Huffer and so forth. Or aggro mage decks that just use burn spells and make big tempo plays. As a predominately midrange/control player I think aggro match ups are fun. I like to see if I can outlast a good aggro deck or keep control of the board.
The most powerful Demon Hunter deck right now is Soul Demon Hunter; which is a lot more powerful. But it's not an aggro deck. It's a combo deck, and it requires any slower deck to put a lot of taunts and healing in to prevent their bursts.
I think in general; Demon Hunter is MOSTLY propped up by how strong Twin Slice is and how efficient it is in combination with Blade Dance. Without it, Demon Hunter doesn't have a lot of reach. It mostly has spells which do less damage than they cost, and without blade dance it gets walled *hard* by taunts or big tempo plays that it can't keep up with.
With Twin Slice, you take a class that has pretty good sustained damage each turn and give it pretty great reach with no conditions (4 for 2 is a lot of damage). With Blade Dance, you take a class which has trouble dealing with wide boards or tall boards, and give them a pretty good tool against both.
Yeah, I won't repeat ReisRune's post because that has most of it, but I was just going to say, I don't know the intent of the person who quoted Sirlin, but Sirlin himself spends like half of his prologue talking about how there are plenty of other things to be concerned about in life, and there's only going to be a small portion of the populace who even cares about his subject matter.
Assuming, therefore, that one might be a part of that group . . . then the book is really interesting. But he's the first to admit there are lots of folks who won't want to hear it.
SO, if you're playing for fun, and you don't care about winning, then definitionally, that whole book doesn't apply to you.
Also, the use of the word "scrub" might be twisted into an ad hominem by people bastardizing the text, but it's just a designation as far as the book is concerned. Obviously, it's not a positive reference, but then again, it's not a positive thing to be the guy who whines about "cheap" tactics regardless of your reasons for playing.
Helpful Clarification on Forbidden Topics for Hearthstone Forums:
Enjoying Americans winning in the Olympics is forbidden because it is political. A 14 plus page discussion of state-sponsored lawsuits against a multi-national corporation based on harassment, discrimination, and wrongful death allegations is apparently not political enough to raise an issue.
You literally restated my point of view with the slight alteration of your view on “balance isn’t the problem.” Which I can somewhat agree with but it also has its issues. You say the scrub will always complain no matter what but that’s like me saying I’ll complain when I lose to a meme deck just as much if I were to lose to an aggro DH. This view is incorrect because one obviously is more “overpowered” than the other which is a definite problem, but not according to you. You say scrubs will complain no matter what which is somewhat what the article was saying but I took it differently. I took It as saying they will complain at “cheap” tactics. I can understand how you say the scrub sees any tactic used against them as “cheap” and will always complain but that (I hope) is a very small portion of the population that can complain about losing to a shitty meme deck as much as when they lose to DH. If you think playing to win has nothing to do with balance you are sorely mistaken my friend. Playing to win literally means to implement tactics that give you the best shot at winning, which is to use the so called “best” tactics in the game which scrubs will see as “overpowered” but that’s because they usually are. There’s a reason nobody respects people that play DH or rez priest.
I might’ve had a slight different takeaway from the article but that doesn’t mean my argument is invalid. And anyhow, my response was also a partial response to the author’s point a view which I found flawed as well, so why would I aim to summarize an argument I didn’t agree with? No I gave my takeaway and stated my opinion. Believe it or not, alternative opinions are possible to have
Just for the record, who is the "you" you're referring to? I didn't see the balance argument; maybe I'm missing something in a previous post.
Helpful Clarification on Forbidden Topics for Hearthstone Forums:
Enjoying Americans winning in the Olympics is forbidden because it is political. A 14 plus page discussion of state-sponsored lawsuits against a multi-national corporation based on harassment, discrimination, and wrongful death allegations is apparently not political enough to raise an issue.
I was replying to Runes. In his response he says that “balance isn’t the issue” or is a “non-issue” to the scrub bc they will complain anyway no matter what tactic is used. Which I fundamentally disagree with.
Ah, right on. Sorry for interrupting.
Helpful Clarification on Forbidden Topics for Hearthstone Forums:
Enjoying Americans winning in the Olympics is forbidden because it is political. A 14 plus page discussion of state-sponsored lawsuits against a multi-national corporation based on harassment, discrimination, and wrongful death allegations is apparently not political enough to raise an issue.
Okay two different topics.
Yes, balance is completely subjective, and yes I was agreeing that you were right so some overlap is expected. Like I said, the article isn't about the inherent balance in a situation, so bringing it up in a balance conversation just derails the topic. The article is also painting the issue in very broad strokes in order to illustrate the problem. It's not meant to be seen in terms of absolutes, but people treat it like it is. Everyone is going to have their own personal biases and nothing can be done about that. How you let those biases dictate your behavior is another matter but is neither here nor there when talking about balance. So yes, your point is valid. My entire point is that your point, the OPs point, and a lot of other points are valid because the article isn't about balance and quoting it like it is some authority on the subject is not helpful when discussing balance because that is not what the article is about. Complain about whatever balance problem you want, that is not what makes a person a 'scrub.'
Playing to win is not about making the 'best' plays. It's about recognizing that there is a goal and that the trip there is from A to B and not A to 3 to B. If I were to play an OTK deck, playing to win means that I recognize there are instances where its better to ignore the combo and win in other ways then trying to assemble the OTK my deck is built around. Likewise if your priority is to have fun. You shouldn't make winning a pre-requisite to have fun.