Hearthpwn

Quote from The_Illusive_Man jump

I don't know what to do this season and am getting extremely frustrated. I try to play a heavy control decks to deal with the insane amounts of aggro around rank 15 and constantly run into other control decks that smash me. I then switch to  midrange and aggro and can't gain any traction.  I'm about ready to give up on ladder again and just go back to arena.

It's still early enough that there is plenty of competition once you get to rank 15. Legend players who aren't trying too hard and some who are. You also need to just stick with a deck or two because, although it seems like the matchmaking is going against you, it is all normal variance. You could have 10 games against face hunter and that would still be totally normal and not have anything to do with "the meta". Anyway good luck!

I haven't made a push for legendary since 2014. Going to do so with my good ol' Silence Druid deck <see signature if interested>. 

Currently level 5 after a solid weekend =)

As it is, aggro decks based on low health minions ARE favoured vs handlock, and that's because:

1) Sometimes he won't have hellfire to wipe your board, so he loses.

2) Sometimes he has nothing to follow up hellfire (no taunts OR no moltens) so you just SMOrc him until he dies.

3) Sometimes he has everything, but the other player has every burst spell in the deck in his hand, so he gets bursted anyway. 

Also some other situations that make aggro player win. They all together make more than 50% winrate against handlock. Basically all you do is count on handlock having bad draws and just play like he had empty hand. 

Playing control mage and Jap. priest, but no luck only 15 rank for now. Mb time to take Face Hunter to rank 10 and then continue with my control decks.

Quote from raydowner_uk jump

Aggro just simply isn't favoured against handlock.. it's incredibly obvious, I just don't know why anyone pretends that it is. Maybe because places like tempostorm stick this info out there and people just repeat it without analysis or seeing if it actually passes some sort of sanity-test.

Aggro with burst is normally favoured against handlock, aggro without it is not. The way the matchup goes is that you need to put insane pressure on the handlock from turn one, force him on defense and deal as much damage as possible in the first few turns. The way you win is that the handlock will have no mana to clear board and heal up at the same turn and you finish the handlock with burst damage. If you play with hunter, you need to mulligan away all the slow cards like haunted creepers and such and you should keep your burst (kill command/quickshot) to finish off the handlock after they put up the taunt wall. If you can do that, it is an easy win, if not the handlock will crush you.

it is really cancer this season. im playing also now patron, but not becouse  i want to climb fast, control warrior seems to suck on this type of rank , and i want mine gold, so i did choose patron, but all im facing is patron or sometimes hunter. rank 5 is full of patrons, its like rank 10-18 face decks...

Quote from Vugore jump

This season is odd (EU). Started laddering with Control Warrior, Control Priest and Control Mage but stuck at Rank 18 (which is embarassing because I usually hit Rank 10 through casual playing alone). So I started to play Zoo for the first time since Beta and dang: Rank 15 in two hours. Guess I will switch back to control at higher ranks.

On a side note: the time length difference between an aggro match and a control match is soul crushing. Blizz should implement more sophisticated variables in laddering than only win/lose. Maybe the number of turns survived/before winning wtc. As long as the time investment for a single control deck win equals 3 aggro wins the majority will play aggro.

They should just skip the ranked ladder... they should introduce ELO ranking, with a calculation on the background calculating howmany points you get for a win or howmuch points you loose on a loss... if for example my elo is 1600 and my opponents is 1800 u should gain more points per win, and loose less for a loss. when my elo is 1800 and my opponents is 1600 i should gain less per win, and loose more per loss...

Quote from JesterEU jump

what are others using to rank up with out of interest?

I'm playing around and doing quests mainly. Midrange Druid, Tempo Mage and Aggro Paladin what I tried so far. I can see all of them working more or less, but will probably switch to Control Warrior at one point. I'm rank 10 at the moment.

Quote from raydowner_uk jump

... as for "meta"..... yeah, you come see my meta and try to deal with it. I have face hunter, hand-whateverthefuck-lock, patron, control Warrior, freezemage, echo mage, aggrodin, tempo mage, zoo, midrange hunter. That's my reality. It's a testament to my consistency that I can win any games with all the shit I am dealing with

As much as people complain about "only facehunter", the diversity of the meta is the same for me. It may be tilted to the aggro side, especially at the start of the season, but there are people playing more classes and there are so many different decks. For some that is a bad thing and for some that is good.

As for handlock, yes, it is a strong class and has been consistent over every expansion, even when others weren't playing it.  Healbot had made them even stronger. When a handlock drops discounted minions, taunts and heals up, it can be just as frustrating as gettting OTK'd by patron warrior, because it doesn't feel fair and if you don't have silences, burn damage, burst damage or ability to clear the board, then it is game over.

Regardless, there is no reason you can't keep plugging away with mid-range hunter and climb up the ladder. Others are doing it and are very successful. Maybe a hybrid Hunter could be successful too. Hell, I was able to get 5 straight wins with a Dragon Hunter yesterday, while trying to knock out some dailies. If I didn't have golden hunter already I might have kept pushing with it on the ladder lol.

As I've been working on the climb to legend this month I came across this reddit guide that discusses how to hit legend.

https://www.reddit.com/r/CompetitiveHS/comments/37gxs2/guide_how_to_hit_legend_rank_on_hearthstone/

I think everyone trying to hit legend should take a look at this and some of the comments in the reddit thread. It is a good starting point to get in the right mindset to make the "grind" to legend.

 If you want to stick to Hunter you should better go for the Face Hunter and not for the midrange because face hunter is better in mirror matches.

But there is of course another option:  Zoo is quite a solid deck which brought me to legend, so you will have no troubles to get at least rank 5 with it :)

my Zoo:

Played malygos rogue up to rank 6, but then it started to feel very unreliable.

Decided to swap to ramp druid (basically lots of taunts and 1xcombo). Not as fun, but got me to legend last month, and seems to work just as well now.

Quote from raydowner_uk jump

I really don't like trackers

Now thats a bug randomly swapping decks so I cannot use tracker at all

Quote from raydowner_uk jump

I really don't like trackers. As soon as I put one on I lose almost every game. If I play enough today I think I'm going to end up with about a 33% win rate, at 25% currently. Definitely not going to be anywhere near 50% today. Just losing to completely broken decks and outrageous luck. There's no doubt I am working 50 times harder for my wins that most the people I am playing.

I'm losing so much to nonsense that I'm close to switching to either handlock or patron for a bit. They aren't decks I've had as much practice with, but if I'm losing playing a deck I am familiar with I might as well be losing with a deck I'm not familiar with. At least I will pick up some free wins for playing completely broken decks, which is something I'm not getting at the moment.

WHat is the deck you play ? Have you tried hard hard teching against weapon ? that worked well for me.

Quote from raydowner_uk jump

I should record these handlock matches.. I was recording stuff a while back but too much of it is mundane... but this mid-range hunter favoured crap vs handlock is hilarious. It really is 1 in 20 for the hunter; it's probably not even that good.

It's such a bad match-up for the hunter, it must be one of the most consistent auto-losses in any match up going. literally no way to win. Absolutely doesn't matter how well you draw, what you play, what he does, you lose every single time. Endless free board clears, endless free taunts, massive free minions. You have no answers at all.

I don't mean to be rude to people here more than is warranted, but if anyone here agrees with tempostorm's table saying mid-range hunter wins 75% of games vs hand-anything-lock, then I think you are an idiot. Reasons can be found in my last umpteen posts.

If this was a high rank problem then I'd deal with it accordingly, but I'm sick of having win streaks ruined by people playing this shit throughout the ladder to induce auto-losses.

... as for "meta"..... yeah, you come see my meta and try to deal with it. I have face hunter, hand-whateverthefuck-lock, patron, control Warrior, freezemage, echo mage, aggrodin, tempo mage, zoo, midrange hunter. That's my reality. It's a testament to my consistency that I can win any games with all the shit I am dealing with.

It might be the way you are playing against Handlock. 

Currently rank 13 on NA (after a month of not playing on my main account) and still rank 4 on EU. 

I'll try to do both Legends this season... but I do believe I'll focus more on NA then EU finally... mainly because that's were I got all of my good decks while on EU I only got a good backdoor rogue and a decent Handlock.

Been laddering with a control priest that runs a lot of one offs. One echoing ooze, one argus, one bgh, one faceless, an acolyte of pain. It's been doing pretty well. The biggest surprise though is how well it's done against handlock. Haven't lost to one yet, and I don't run light bomb, and none of the games even felt close. Been a fun season. Rank 6 at the moment, gonna try and hit legend before my priest hits golden.

Quote from raydowner_uk jump

Quote from dwl_ jump

It's not that hard, if every deck you face is Aggro, used an Anti-Aggro deck like Lightbomb Priest.

If you face a lot of Contro, use Aggro etc.

You want to take a wild guess at what happens if I switch deck to counter endless aggro?

Usually picking priest as antiaggro is a good choice. However the overall meta is not in favour of priests. The meta is not only aggro but decks are doing so much damage even anti aggro decks can hardly keep up. One owl and You're dead. Let's hope Blizzard manages to fix the bronsen game. This was supposed to be puzzle solving LOL! Go face, if taunt use owl and then go face. 

Quote from raydowner_uk jump

urg... this is ridiculous, 11 games, less than 30% win rate. The level of aggro is ridiculous, as are some of the hands these arseholes have, this is just relentless turn 6 lethal mega-face rush bullshit. They couldn't be getting better cards if they were picking them out of the deck at will.

What have I got to play to deal with this shit..? control warrior?

I'm playing handlock, but even that can't deal with aggro this fast.. it's literally unbelieveable how quickly I am dying.

Edit: 25% winrate now. This is literally unplayable. I've played every game perfectly, I've played far better than my opponents. You cannot rank up when you face the sort of stuff I do, and this isn't a freak occurence, this sort of auto-loss, counter deck, anti-whatever-I-play matchmaking is the norm. I would love to see some of you people face this shit and then come in here telling me that getting to rank 5 or whatever is easy. There isn't a person here who'd be doing any better than me right now.

 

I ladder at the beginning of every season with all the legend players and hit rank 4 the 4th day of ladder reset this month, I've had games where people get lucky and seem to steam roll me when I have no answers but that is gonna happen at points in HS, I also have losing streaks after winning streaks as well, but you have to come to the conclusion that you can't always play every game perfectly every time you hop on HS.

There are certain risks you have to take like for (ex. turn 1 you're zoo vs mech mage, you go 1st but you have an abusive, imp gang boss, dire wolf and implosion) Do you skip your turn and wait to play dire wolf or do you play the abusive naked turn 1? My personal input would be to play the abusive as you can trade with either mech warper, snow chugga with dire wolf, or even take out an annoy o trons divine shield and play your wolf to kill it next turn. Weird plays like that can reward you sometimes. And if he/she coin, pings then you still have tempo since you have turn 2 play. If you're stuck at a certain rank, then i can spectate you if you'd like me to give you some pointers and see how you play. Because I'm not the best player ever, I make mistakes but I can see them clear as day after next game and play more efficiently.

pseudo edit... yeah 15 games.. 26% win-rate and absolutely flawless play; beyond flawless, utterly impeccable, superior planned turns, every turn played to maximise advantage/minimise counters.

Quality of my plays = sensationally good.

Maybe you need to stop making "brilliant" plays and start taking some risks. Playing safe is sometimes the best way to lose, especially against these face rushy decks. People are constantly telling me I made a "bad" play and then I go on to win the game. I don't make stupid plays either. Sometimes you win and sometimes you lose. 

Also, don't play handlock unless you really want to get good at it. It is a great deck and will take you to legend, but it takes a long time to get good at it. Even you have said how strong it is when you are playing against it and yet you are struggling. 

Mid-range hunter is also a strong deck, but it is not a free win. Back in the days of buzzard and unleash combo or pre-undertaker nerf it was a super strong deck. Now it is just strong.

If over 100 games you have a less that 30% win-rate, then there are other issues, than just being unlucky.