Hearthpwn

I think my biggest issue with this is that the reasons they gave for the nerfs (aside from Corridor Creeper) are not new. The Raza/Shadowreaper combo has been known since the launch of KotFT. Everyone and their grandmother has been trying to shove Patches into any aggressive deck since KotFT. Bonemare has been a scourge of Arena, so much so it's occurrence rate was nerfed, since KotFT. Notice a pattern here? All three of these cards haven't suddenly become a problem in the last month, but have been plaguing Standard and Arena for two entire expansion cycles now. Why did we have to wait for the rotation for Blizzard to FINALLY make changes? Maybe Blizzard should have thought about all of these very obvious issues in the post-KotFT balance patch? Sure, it's nice that Blizzard is recognizing they've made a mistake and are swooping in to keep Wild safe, but it feels like for Standard it's a bit of too little too late. For Patches to reign supreme for two whole years and only just now get nerfed feels shameful.

They talked a whole bunch on how they like change and how they dislike doing the same thing over and over, and yet I'm pretty sure that until Mean Streets rotates out next year we won't actually see any changes at all. Jade Druid will continue forcing the meta to choose between the fastest aggro deck, a recursive control deck, or an oppressive combo. People really don't seem to understand just how toxic this class is to game design. Control already, paradoxically, loses to aggro. Forcing Control to tech against recursive threats that will force them out of the game means they have to sacrifice the aggro matchup. This really heavily limits control decks down to ones that can either instantly win the game through highrolling, or ones that have an oppressive combo. Neither of these make fun games. Midrange is just straight up dead, neither aggressive enough or controlly enough to beat either of the above. We NEED fixes to Jade, or expect the meta to continue being the exact same with a few new broken cards.

We'll see how quickly Brode and the team change their tune on the Dungeon Run reward structure when they notice that ~10% of players are playing it after launch. If players have literally no incentive at all to play a mode they won't. How often have the players replayed Adventure content after obtaining all it's rewards? The thing is, Team 5 was making it sound like they really want dungeon runs to be a seperate mode that they'll continually update, hell it even sounded like they wanted it to replace Adventure content for expansions. If there is no reward structure at all they're gonna learn pretty quickly that's just not gonna fly, because Hearthstone players are always gonna be forced to work on grinding out cards for their collection.

 So Blizz is finally getting around to fixing their spaghetti code that has been the source of so many headaches and "Wait why does that happen?"s? Great, I'm really happy this small indie company has decided to make the game work in an intelligent way.

Great, this'll be the only Warlock skin we'll get for ages, and it's a completely made up Hearthstone character. Seriously, gimme an actual Warlock from the lore like Cho'gall or Ner'Zhul, hell I'd even take something like Willfred Fizzlebang. Just someone recognizable. Priests have Anduin Wrynn and Tyrande Whisperwind, Hunters have Rexxar and Alleria Windrunner, Mages get Jaina Proudmoore, Medivh and Khadgar, but you're gonna give Warlocks Gul'dan and who-even-cares? Like, at least Rogue's first hero was someone who was big in the lore. This just feels dumb and kinda lazy. 

Kinda impressive to see Blizz giving 8 free packs for a national holiday. Maybe if they could just give that many packs for holidays in other countries this game would start being cheaper.

"Well maybe new players should just expect to suck if they don't want to spend money."

This is the most toxic way of thinking, and is the quickest way to kill the game. If new players are constantly getting destroyed by extremely powerful decks that will take them months to obtain, they're not gonna keep playing. Hell, I have a fairly hefty collection and I usually end up just not playing for days on end. You can't just say "Well they don't want to pay money so they'll have a substandard experience" because then we'll never get any new players, which will lead to this game dying a slow and painful death. 

There definitely needs to be some fixes. Other games are just way more generous than Hearthstone is. I've been playing Eternal for a week and I have more legendaries and cards in that game than I recieved in my first year playing Hearthstone. Shadowverse gives you like a 100 packs when you start just as a backlog of all the free packs they've given out. These games' packs are also filled with more cards than Hearthstone's measly 5.

However, more important than generosity these games are fairly balanced. Cheap aggro decks can perform well, expensive control decks can do well, cheap and expensive combo can work, cheap and expensive midrange is fun. Games that have healthy metas where there are a large number of good decks but no absurd decks are great for new players. If Hearthstone's meta was good enough that you could throw the three legendaries a new player might have into a deck and perform reasonably well the current reward system would be fine.

This leads to two possible fixes:

- Give far more rewards for playing than 1/10 of a pack every 3 wins + meh quests.

- On the next rotation have a metagame that isn't just a crazy aggro deck vs a crazy control deck. 

We do definitely need fixes though. As it stands I literally can't recommend my friend's play Hearthstone, but I'm more than happy to tell them to play other card games.

Kinda glad to see them remove synergy picks, but I do hope they revisit the idea. I think if they put the synergy picks at the end of the draft it would be much better. Having combos and synergy in arena can help make it a little bit less curvestone-y, or at the very least can raise the floor of the deck rating so that there is less of a gap between the best and worst deck.

Sure, control warrior vs other control matchups doesn't get changed by war axe. But who cares? The point of control isn't to beat other control decks, it's to beat Aggro and Tempo decks by removing their board and gaining life faster than the opponent can kill you. In that sense, making Fiery War Axe 3 mana does definitely kill the card. The point of War Axe is to play it on turn 2 and slow down the aggressive opponent building up a board. You get to take the damage of a card once instead of taking it multiple times, and you get to kill the card before it gets buffed up to deal even more damage. At 3 mana the aggressive deck has played a both a one drop and a two drop, perhaps even a three drop or more likely a two drop and a one drop. Most of the aggressive decks are either highly synergistic like pirate warrior or murloc paladin, or very buff reliant like Token Shaman and Aggro Druid. Having to wait until turn 3 for your first weapon hit pretty much guarantees that your opponent will be able to take advantage of the synergy of their deck. Additionally, your second swing of War Axe will now be on turn 4, which is primarily when you would want to play Blood Razer to get the whirlwind effect. In Wild you would prefer to use Death's Bite, but in Wild you will never play War Axe over King's Defender so the card is completely dead there as well. Additionally, Warrior really has some good defensive tools on 3 mana that are a good way to recover after taking the damage on turn 2. Being able to play cards like Ravaging Ghoul and Tar Creeper on 3 have been pretty important to deal with aggro. 

On top of all of this, War Axe really isn't that crazy of a weapon. The community as a whole may have dubbed it Fiery Win Axe, but against aggressive, tempo and midrange variants you really need that second hit of war axe to get value. Decks running weapon removal like the Ooze's can really wreck a warrior's early tempo. Additionally, decks that play early minions with 4 health and larger, or minions with deathrattle can also reduce the effectiveness of War Axe. All in all, it was a really fair card at 2 mana, and now at 3 mana it's going to be hard finding warriors who will willingly include it. I think after Whispers of the Old Gods rotates out we might see a resurgence if Warriors don't get any good cards in the 3 cost slot, but War Axe is definitely dead forever in Wild. 

• Changing the cost makes it immediately obvious a card can't be cast at that same cost anymore - no green outline.

Right, so players aren't stupid, but we aren't smart enough to read a number on a card? We need to rely on whether or not there is a green outline on whether or not we can play?

I feel like this didn't help Blizzard at all. Ben doesn't think this makes War Axe EXCESSIVELY weaker, to the point of being unplayable. At the very least in Wild, War Axe is actually now completely unplayable, as everyone will run King's Defender over it. Additionally trying to backpedal on things like the Warsong Nerf, saying that Classic and Basic cards that are too frequent need to be nerfed to "shake up" Standard...these aren't good justifications. They're still not addressing the core of the problem, which is that this nerf is fundamentally bad and should have been "Can't Attack Heroes" on War Axe. I'm glad that we get to see more into Team 5's thought process, but it's only gone to make me more uncertain about the game's future than I was before.

I think we should remove Ranked rewards because players are forced to play it to gain Dust and Golden Rare and Epic. Also tavern brawls force us to play some weird rules to gain 1 Classic pack. Just like how daily quests make us play odd decks or classes we don't like. Let's just remove them all, so players can truly enjoy this f2p game.

fixed it: the base set cards are used consistently in too many decks [because Team 5 has failed to develop any stable archetypes to "build" onto the original synergies that came as the game, however Team 5 accepts no responsibility for nursing a ridged and ill conceived "turn" style play along, knowing full well that the game, unaltered, had reached its maximum potential upon conception, so we will say instead] because their power levels are too high and are at times confusing [because we only want stupid players to play our game] to understand...

we have decided to make the game as to be clear that the only pros we want to play the game are the ones we pay to play. 

 there is actually a way to make the card get on the power level without both confusion and not destroying the card completely by simply making the card 2 mana 1/2 and giving it the effect +2 atk when attacking minions.it would serve the similar purpose as before would be still available for all warriors even face ones and wouldn't be op on them.Lastly i would argue that other classes didn't use 3 mana 3/2 weapons simply not without effects unless their early game is ridiculusly bad aka paladin.the reason paladins used the 3/2 mana divine shield buff card without divine shield minions was their lack of early game removal but this is not fair to do to the warrior because paladin has a board effecting hero power at the least which allows them to at least do something in the game on turn 2.considering this a warrior using hero power on turn 2 is wayyyyyyy worse than a paladin using hero power on turn 2 because of the difference between them when looking at their cards paladins have more reliable and relatively faster board clears compared to the warrior with pyro equality equality consecration while the warrior has brawl and sleep with the fishes which is simply less reliable.what these changes going to do is killing off the taunt and any type of warrior besides pirate warrior whom will use the card and will still be at least tier 2 while all other warriors will extinct.I also disliked the innervate because of the similar reasons when you look at the rogue who has conterfit coin they have sap ,eviscrete deadly poison,betrayel,jade shuriken,si/7 in their arsenal as early game available removals druid only has naturalize,wrath,feral rage ,swipe.Can you see the difference ? and this is without mentioning preperation.rogue is struggling right now and you are reducing the tempo of the druid to this level turning innervate to basicly counter fit coin.This is just ridiculus how the fuck are druids supposed to play against any aggro deck or a good opener from any class considering this lack of early game presence and even in late their lack of board clears and the single target removal.rogue has vilespine slayer vanish and sap to gain tempo in later turns while druid can only big minions with the mana they ramp despite the fact that almost all classes have answers to them and they can continue going to face and kill them before they can recover.the right move to fix innervate was 2 mana gain 4 mana for the turn and even than most druids would only run one because it wouldn't be as good with auctioneer and the sick early game possibilities wouldn't be there.

>Jeff Kaplan

>Listening to what the community wants

Pick one.

You want a real game dev that actually listens to the fans, look at CD Projekt Red and the amazing stuff they did for the Witcher games and Gwent. Hell Gwent was made for the minigame in Witcher 3 was so popular fans wanted more of it.

I don't know what surprises me more, blizzard forgetting to implement Justicar to Maiev or someone actually finding this out.

I agree. I'm still salty that I missed out on a free Old Murk-Eye. I think rewarding certain classic Legendaries for completing certain in-game achievements is a fantastic idea.

New player this new player that,

instead of makign the game simple for new players give them any way to actually catch up with the average 5 months player in some way they on't be useless by the end of the year expansion like happened in MSG if you didn't had patches or reno you couldn't win 2 months ago..

The new player experiance is abyssmal ATM.

Keywords are the main "ingredient" in every card game.If you focus everytime in new players and don't want these players to get confused with something,then make guides,adventures even more small solo story lines and explain the cause you are into.Many adventures in the past have made this clear and have given more fun in the game but now we face an era that we have to buy many more packs to stay into the meta..As sme guys mentioned before me,Blizzard introduce new things,abandoning old things making he game more confusing for both new players and old ones.For example if you are a new player and you want to keep up with the current meta maybe building some decks need some cards from old expansions which were powerful with or without keywords.But when the go and craft these cards after 3-4 months the most of them will be useless cause the will introduce a new thing that will "replace" completely the old one..So to keep up with the flow you have to put more money into the game or grind the game itself so many hours.I believe that makes ha game too confusing for new and old players and not the keywords.The state in which the game goes..If there was a keyword that fits in the game and works well then I don' see a reason being an issue for the players(like deathrattle or divine shield or poisonous etc).In my opinion you have to help new players like introducing them in other ways into this game and not focus only in ways to earn more money..If you make this good then the money will come,the other way I'm afraid it won't..

Illidan's flavor text: "YOU ARE PREPARED!"