Hearthpwn

Arena is obviously the way to go if you actually want more value out of your gold, assuming you can get a few wins each time. Some people (myself included) simply don't enjoy spending so much time on what often feels like a soul-crushing experience. Even when I end up doing pretty well in arena, I tend to think, "Man, I probably should have just bought a pack." Others seem to genuinely enjoy arena or just aren't bothered by it as much.

Arena is without a doubt a better use of your gold.  However I buy packs simply because I just rarely feel like playing the arena format.  I like deck building and making weird combos to surprise my opponent.

Unless you are consistent in doing well in arena it is not worth investing the time and money over what you achieve in constructed to allow you to buy packs directly. The typical knee-jerk response to this is equivalent to a "git gud" response, to which I would say that there always needs to be losers in arena. You could have everyone be on Kripp, Hafu, and Amaz level of play in arena and you still need to have somebody go 3:3, 2:3, 1:3, 0:3 etc. The game doesn't automatically grant you free games simply because you are a good player.

Believe it or not you can be less than average at arena and still come out ahead in prizes because of the way the rewards scale.

The explanation is that you will have some variance in your results and the prizes do not scale linearly with your final score, they increase more steeply as your wins go up. Once in a while you will score 5, 6 or even 7+ wins and the rewards will completely make up for the losses you suffered so far even though your total average is less than 3 wins per run.

As an extreme example this means you could go 0-3 11 times and 12-2 once making your average 1 win but your total rewards would be similar to going 4-3 every run. Point is the rare times you do good more than make up for the multiple times you do bad.

If you count in the 10 gold every 3 games won + the rewards for finishing ranked in top 5, 10, 15 rank if I remember correctly those are golden epics or golden rares depending on ranked it makes these two modes more or less balanced.

WHY I don't play arena often? Because of the one sided game most of the time: it's either I completely destroy the opponent that it makes me feel bad for him/her, or I get absolutely abolished and I am like wtf just happened?