Hearthpwn

I disagree with some of your predictions. For example, I think the Outrider's Axe will be changed to a 4/2, because those are different numbers.

But the real big oversight you made was Demon Hunter. Yes, Silence Demon Hunter will undoubtedly make its triumphant resurgence, but what is the key card in that deck? That's right, Illidari Inquisitor. And let's be honest, the card is underperforming right now. So how can we improve this card without making it too oppressive? That's right, give it "Outcast: Windfury." Why Windfury? Because sometimes the opponent has TWO taunts. Why Outcast? Because sometimes the opponent has TWO taunts.

Quote from PetiteMouche >>

Speaking as a veteran player who funded the game, I will be in no way fucked if Wild dust costs get adjusted. I already have those cards; their costs are immaterial to me. I use them for Brawls and Duels, but I have very little interest in Wild as a format, because there are a lot of cards that make me think "I'm glad that rotated so I don't have to deal with it anymore."

You have no interest in the Wild format, your opinion is pretty clearly biased. You would be in every way fucked if you cared about Wild.

"I already have those cards their costs are immaterial to me" makes no sense to me. Cost is cost. Money is money. If you pay 10 bucks for something and it later costs 5 bucks, you got fucked. It was your decision, yes, it's good that it costs 5 instead of 10, yes, but you got fucked.

To your second point, I think you're overestimating the number of people who make their Gameplay Mode decisions based on relative costs of cards.

I think you're underestimating it.

People literally wait for the meta to settle before they craft anything. They care about dust more than anything. Of course not everyone would care, as you stated, not everybody cares about Wild and there will always be people who want to experiment new sets in standard, but I believe the impact would be significant enough to deter Blizzard from doing it.

Your timelines here are completely out of whack with how people actually play games, and with how value works. I bought a TV several years ago. I paid what it was worth at the time, and it has performed its function quite well, and continues to do so now. These days, if I wanted to buy that same TV, it would be cheaper to do so, but I would have gone without the TV for the intervening years. I didn't get fucked by not waiting to buy the TV until it halved in cost; if anything, I would have fucked myself by going TV-less (or using the very bad CRT that I replaced) in the meantime. The amount of time that passes between discounts matters. If we're talking about a scale of days, then yes, it would be a shame to miss a 50% discount by a couple of days. But if the discount doesn't apply until literal years later? That's not the same conversation. At all. It's a completely new set of evaluations and factors, chief among them being the opportunity cost of "having the thing now versus not having it until later." Your calculations of Wild card value are ignoring that very important factor as if the raw monetary cost (whether that's dollars or gold or dust) is the only thing that matters.

I would be in very few ways fucked if I played Wild. I'd be out of practice in the meta, that's true. I'd be fucked in that I would have to play against Rez Priest again, which is something I loathe doing, even if I win against them. But my cards would still function the same, because I already have them. If there was a meta-relevant card that I didn't have (which is possible; my collection is large but not 100% complete), then I could potentially craft it for cheaper than usual, which is the opposite of me being fucked. If I'm going against opponents with good cards, I'm not particularly fucked by that; for all I know, they bought/opened them the first time around like I did. If the cards are in the meta, they're already in the meta even without any influx from other players picking up the decks as well.

"People literally wait for the meta to settle before they craft anything. They care about dust more than anything." Okay, that's nice. But if they're waiting literal years to craft cards at a discount, then the meta will necessarily have moved on to something completely different in the intervening time, such that the card they were waiting to buy at half-off might no longer be relevant to the meta at all once it settles out.

I'm one of those folks that doesn't care about dust more than anything. I care about fun. And if more people can have more fun, and it costs less dust in 2021 than I would have paid back in 2017? Fine. That does not affect me. There's a lot of stuff that doesn't operate now the same way it did in 2017.

Quote from PetiteMouche >>

Quote from Tykaine_J >>

Just half the dust for crafting cards in Wild sets.

Would anybody really object to this?

Perhaps the shareholders. But somehow I feel Wild is barely a dent in their wallets.

Unleash the potential. Wild could match Standard if Blizzard wanted it to.

I can say some from personal experience: I have tried to introduce friends to Hearthstone, who quit after a short amount of time because they felt Standard was too basic; a "demo version" of the game, but Wild was too expensive to get into.

 Problem if you do that is :

1) people who paid full money/dust will be angry. I'm still angry at the duplicate protection, they could have made a nice gesture to all of us fools who paid trash packs when the game was still growing, but they didn't. And if they introduce half dust cards, same story, us veteran players who funded the game get fucked.

2) many people will wait for the wild rotation before they craft anything, this will heavily promote Wild which is good for the community, but also heavily discourage people from playing Standard which is very bad for Blizzard.

 

Speaking as a veteran player who funded the game, I will be in no way fucked if Wild dust costs get adjusted. I already have those cards; their costs are immaterial to me. I use them for Brawls and Duels, but I have very little interest in Wild as a format, because there are a lot of cards that make me think "I'm glad that rotated so I don't have to deal with it anymore."

To your second point, I think you're overestimating the number of people who make their Gameplay Mode decisions based on relative costs of cards. Wild gameplay is not the same vibe as Standard, and even though I have a very large Wild collection, I play Standard pretty much exclusively. Will there be some people who go "Oh cool, cheap cards"? Sure, of course there will be some. Does that add up to "heavily discourage people from playing Standard"? I think that's a real stretch. There will always be excitement around the newest set, for the simple reason that it's new and interesting. And you can use those new cards in Wild too, so it's not like that would affect Blizzard's bottom line.

It'd be interesting if there were some sort of "Loaner" system available. Years ago, when I played Magic: the Gathering, I had a decently large collection, as did my friends, but we of course didn't all have the same cards. So the decks we could build were different. I'd sometimes lend a deck to a friend for a few games/weeks so that he could get a feel for it, after which he'd return it and maybe try to trade for/buy some of the cards in that deck he was missing. When my brother wanted to learn how to play, I loaned him a deck to get him started while he built up his own collection.

I'm not sure exactly how that translates to a digital game like Hearthstone, but maybe you could "license" some of your own cards to someone on your Friends List for a limited time, and they could put them in decks (whereas you could not use them in your decks while they're "loaned out"). There would have to be limitations, like "max 30 cards loaned out at any given time," or something -- the potential for abuse of the system/lost sales is high, without proper safeguards.

I'm not playing Wild because I prefer Standard, but I also have a very robust Wild collection, because I've been playing since launch. If I could toss my Reno Jackson and Loatheb at a newbie trying to learn the ropes, I gladly would, as long as I still had the option to use them myself later in case I wanted to try Wild, or in case a Tavern Brawl comes up where I'd want my Wild stuff. In the meantime, though, I'd be happy to temporarily "sacrifice" some of the unused portion of my collection if it would help somebody else out.

I'm just not certain what the necessary limitations would be.

Quote from grisu >>

Only thing I don't get about zeph is why he offers windspeaker that often... In my book it's one of the weaker 4 drops in classic/basic (if the windfury gives you lethal it's a different story, but somehow blizzard made zeph think windspeaker is great when you have at least one minion without looking at the opponents health)

In a vacuum, "get a 3/3 and double the damage output of something else on the board" is a pretty good value proposition. So if other board-states are sufficiently addressed by Zeph's other two options, I can understand why he'd be like "I dunno, hit more harderer? Seems good, people like that."

I already explained why Natalie Seline is considered by Zephrys to be better than a transform effect: It gets rid of the minion and gives you a big minion. If you transformed it, you would have a minion on the board that you'd still have to deal with, and Zephrys considers that to be sub-optimal. So he gives you an excellent removal option.

Now that the removal is taken care of, he moves on to other options. Temple Enforcer is a weird one, I agree, but offering a second removal option is bad praxis. Either you remove it or you don't. Offering nuanced shades of removal is counter to the card's design, and would be impossible to implement consistently.

Some deathrattles benefit the opponent. If you were facing a Darkspear Berserker and Zephrys gave you transform instead of Shadow Word: Death, it would be a "bad offer."

Zephrys is a powerful tool. He's also, essentially, a genie. If you make bad wishes, you're gonna get bad results. That's pretty thematically great, in my opinion. It's not Zephrys's fault you don't know how to word your wishes.

You're getting the "saaaame answer" because you keep posting the "saaaame gripe." Spend a little mana before your next complaint; you might get a better outcome.

Seriously. There are a lot of articles available on how Zephrys is coded, and you don't seem to have done your research. If you want a certain result, you sometimes have to "coach" Zephrys into it, either by manipulating your mana or making/holding some attacks for before/after you play him.

In your Scrapyard Colossus example, he offered Faceless Manipulator, Natalie Seline & Temple Enforcer. The first thing you need to know is that Zephrys tries to offer a variety of types of solutions, because he doesn't "know" what outcome you want. The Manipulator is a good pick if the opponent's 7/7 deathrattle is one you might like too -- it gives you a copy of that card, and you can afford it. Natalie is a good pick if you want to get rid of the opponent's minion -- Zephrys doesn't know what the Deathrattle is, but he knows you'll end up with an 8/8 for 8, and the opponent will end up with a dead minion. That's a great outcome, by Zephrys's standards. The Temple Enforcer is there because it's just a pile of stats, and sometimes that's what you want. Three very different outcomes, based on the board state: "Copy a minion," "Removal + big minion," "Big stats and buff your existing minions."

Zephrys doesn't tend to prioritize transforms, because they're not efficient. Whenever possible, Zephrys tries to get rid of stuff using his "removal slot," to the extent that he has one. Leaving a minion on the board (as Polymorph and Hex do) isn't as good as taking a minion off the board, so if you have the mana to kill it, Zephrys will help you kill it. He doesn't know if the Deathrattle will spawn another minion; he just knows that there's a big minion, and it's generally good to get rid of those.

If you wanted Hex, as others pointed out, you should have spent some mana so that Zephrys would only have 4 to work with. In that case, he definitely wouldn't offer Natalie, because that's a next-turn play, and Zephrys prefers this-turn plays when he can give them. He still would probably only offer one "removal" type card, and that may very well have been Hex. But if you'd had Spell Damage, for example, it would probably be Fireball, because again, death > transform, from Zephrys's perspective.

Learn how your tools work before you complain about them. You've got the Classic set and Basic set to work from, not the Core set. I don't know why you thought it would change to include the Core set, but it didn't and won't.

This is completely intended -- as you can see from the tri-color banner under his mana cost, Kazakus has always been available only to Kabal classes: Priest, Mage & Warlock. There are other tri-class cards available to other sets (Hunter/Paladin/Warrior & Druid/Rogue/Shaman), but Kazakus has always been limited to Priest/Mage/Warlock.

I find it fascinating how many people assume that Blizzard's decision to offer a dust refund in this case is "caving to complainers."

Without knowing their internal review process, it's impossible to determine that that was the case. All we know is that complaining existed, and that at a later date, a dust refund was offered. These things may have a causal relationship, but they are not guaranteed to have a causal relationship. To assume otherwise is a fallacy: "post hoc, ergo propter hoc."

It's more likely that they had an internal discussion going about whether or not to offer a refund in this case, and the final decision got amended after the cutoff date for the patch notes/announcement. "Small indie company" jokes aside, there's still a process that patch notes and announcements have to follow, and it takes time to draft, edit and approve the text of those.

I'm not surprised that this refund is being offered. Kargal is explicitly built to rely upon the Watch Posts in a way that the other previous examples in this thread do not. I see Jan'alai being brought up a bunch as a casualty of Baku's early rotation. But that's collateral damage; it makes no sense to refund Jan'alai when Baku gets changed. The more accurate comparison would be if Spirit of the Dragonhawk got changed, Jan'alai might need to be examined for a refund. But even then, Jan'alai doesn't depend completely upon the Spirit -- it's obviously a related card, and it's clearly intended to function alongside the Spirit, but you can still get to 8 HP damage in a game (thereby activating Jan'alai) even without the Spirit. It just takes longer. Kargal, on the other hand, fundamentally cannot pay off unless you have Watch Posts in your deck, and that means that if Watch Posts change, Kargal changes.

I, for one, think the nerfs to the Posts are a good balance change, and I wouldn't craft OR dust Kargal based on these changes. But other folks might feel differently, and I think it's commendable that they be able to re-evaluate this dependent legendary based on several components of his narrow build-up package changing.

Unlike some others, I don't think this sets a very broad precedent. It shows that in the limited cases where there's an in-expansion payoff-card tied explicitly to and dependent upon a suite of cards in that same expansion, there's a potential for synergistic refunds. That's it. It has no bearing on the Leper Gnome/Mekgineer Thermaplugg situation of yore, nor the Baku/Jan'alai situation (especially since they were from very different sets, and even though Jan'alai was obviously designed within the context of Baku's existence, it still had several other viable support cards beyond just Baku).

In other words, there's a big difference between "Hey, these cards go well together" and "This card literally does not function without these other cards." Kargal is the latter.

This thread aged well.

The thing is absurd, and the counterplay barely works. I was playing a Taunt Druid for a while, which often has several beefy taunts on the board at once. Didn't matter -- it just cleared them and stayed alive for the next turn. No hard removal and no Rush in hand meant that I was screwed.

Also played a bit of Wildfire/Freeze Mage. I know it's not a good deck, but I was having fun. Inquisitor came out and blasted my face on the opponent's turn. Okay, fine, I've got a Brain Freeze, I'll just shut him down until I can deal with him.

Oh, what's that? It's a Frozen minion who attacks anyway, even though that's never been how Freeze works in any case ever in the history of Hearthstone? Interesting. Very balanced. Balanced and interesting and not at all problematic for a discountable non-Legendary effect that will be around for an entire year.

Quote from etaoinshrldu >>

A nice nerf would be to speed up the animations

Seriously. While they're at it, I wouldn't mind some new voice lines. Like, I get it, he's supposed to be annoying. But he takes forever, you already know what's going to happen the first time one comes out, but you have to sit there and sit through it five or more times each turn, and it just feels interminable. For a company to get rid of the "Sorry" emote and then move forward with the Pen Flinger voiceover direction that they did is ... inconsistent at best.

The problem I keep running into is my Wildfires being buried at the bottom of the deck. I have a ton of Discover-a-spell generation and card draw, and my last four games I haven't seen a single Wildfire until turn 8. Very frustrating.

Just went against this card as Mage. It was frozen, and still triggered anyway. Seems weird to have absolutely no valid counterplay against this thing other than removal/silence.

I don't understand why this thing has Rush on top of everything else, especially as a Rare.

Quote from Fyrfytr998 >>

I've noticed that Blizzard has gone back to the old system for determining what makes up a game.

Prior to the new patch, I could just insta concede and have it count towards my quest quota. Now a player has to play a game they don't want to play and get enough mana crystals or 15 health, or concede and get nothing.

Thanks Blizzard. I just when I'm satisfied with how I can choose to spend my time in game, you guys come along and screw it up again. Why do they consistently try to force game interaction? I don't want to waste extra time searching for opponents I want to play just so I can get my quests done.

If you get a quest you don't want to do, re-roll the quest. Otherwise, yes, you have to actually play the game in order to get the rewards. If you concede instantly, you're obviously not "playing a game," you're "shopping for opponents." And you're within your rights to do that, but it makes sense that there's no reward attached to it.

So it's up to you: Would you rather wait around for the perfect opponent, or just play the three games, even if you end up losing them? There's always Tavern Brawls if you don't have decks for the classes on your quest.