Having everything unlocked now for every class and every hero is HUGE for barrier of entry for new players.
It never made sense to gate off the experience of a game mode that was already niche.
With this everyone is on a level playing field and new players can get to enjoy this game mode too, without having to grind out a massive amount of duels on all classes just to get to basic compentency level.
GREAT change.
1
I really want them to rotate/retire some of the heroes. Vandar/DrekThar in particular. I think they’re boring to play against and at this point Fractured was almost a year and a half ago, why are they still in Duels?
1
I got olgra, the Leviathan and sinful brand
Thank you Bezos-san!
2
They need to take druid down a few pegs. Marvelous Mycelium needs to go to discover one w both effects or lose the shuffling ability. Guff or twig need a ban.
Maybe this is an unpopular opinion, but I wish they would phase out some of the heroes. I’m pretty tired of DrekThar and Vandarr. It was cool they added LoE but then it seems like the majority of decks I see are these two clowns.
3
I’m curious to try it with Ring of Tides from Queen Azshara. Even if you only killed a few things on the first cast, the pings off the second could clear another few things, and with the Kelth play later you could easily get into the double digits for dead skeletons
3
This one is sort of absurd—I’ve seen Guff somehow summon a his squirrel and rather than it go straight to my face he was able to put the mount spell on it and then deal 6 somehow.
also, the shadow priest has skipped my turn two times now. I know people complained in the past about these being too easy but I don’t exactly want to get played like this. For 40 dust!
3
I have said this before: I think the outrage about over powered design is BY DESIGN
they used to never nerf anything, and now every expansion gets nerfed two to three times? This is t some accident, they play tested this stuff and knew it would be OP. Then streamers, youtubers, Reddit and all begin to talk about it again and again. This is intentional, it’s happened too many times for it not to be. Outrage drives interest in your 7 year old card game and then you can “fix it” which generates more interest. You repeat this a few times per expansion and the next thing you know, nobody got bored of your game and they are ready to buy the next expansion 4 months later.
2
How cool is it going to be getting this off of Teacher’s Pet?
0
To protest their own workplace issues, Blizzard too shall postpone its card reveal stream until the State of California fixes this.
1
This is how they got me too!
1
I have been feeling lately like Blizzard employs this development pattern of releasing broken content to outrage half of the players for hearthstone while absolutely delighting the other half. And then people talk and talk and talk about it, and then they fix it so the process can be repeated.
I sincerely doubt they are failing to play test as much as often some of these breaking moments would imply. I believe this pattern kind of began back around Galakrond, It has been nearly every release since then has created some new frustrating experience that half the players cannot shut up about and the other half must wholly commit to.
Think about it—they used to never touch any of the cards. Nerfs were rare! And the meta shake up that came with them was super special. Now it’s like they release broken content so they can shake up the meta and keep people coming back to see if it’s “good” yet. I don’t know what their sales look like, I couldn’t say if it’s making them money. But we are probably never going to have the sort of balance that any of these nerf cycles seem to suggest is possible. Power creep has made any middling deck a thing of the past. There will always be a crazy tier one deck and the best nerfs are going to get us is maybe a second or third tier one deck.