3
and this is why i play that card in every type of control warlock list both standard and wild. its not about winning, its about people like you my friend. making people ragequit. i dont play duels but after this post i might try it in there too.
best thing to do in wild is t9 brann + tick = 50% of people just quit. its beautiful, i love that guy so much, its only golden card i play.
20
So what, he got a nut draw T1, something that almost never happens and it's not even that strong to begin with. Cast lightning storm on his board and he basically lost because he has no cards left to your full hand... It's not even a T1 deck lol, people really do complain about everything.
20
1. They make those decks well before thousands of people test the meta and find optimal compositions
2. They probably low ball some decks so they're not crazy expensive
3. Adding as many new cards as is reasonable to promote the expansion
4. Merely outlining new decks & paradigms to inspire deck creators
Putting the best decks as possible for their recipes isn't the only, nor even their first, consideration. Complaining about everything is sweet n all but use your brains a bit
1
All i know is that every last day of the month i can hit legend even from D 5 with a homebrew -full of removals- control deck in wild, easy.
Make aggro epidemics work for you.
Netdecking control decks doesn't help, you need to be unpredictable.
Very nice post and comments by the way!!!
108
The biggest question about the new reward system: is it better or worse than old one? There are many misconceptions about it, some people love it because its front-loaded (meaning: its very easy to get a lot of rewards in the beginning but later it will be harder) and some people just hate it because they cant get that sweet 10g per 3 wins anymore.
Now we have the numbers and I dont wanna wait for the Hearthstone Mathematics channel, because I love to do the number-crunching myself. So the answer to the question mainly depends on what kind of player you are. Lets see the first one:
UPDATE: Before that, lets talk about the "apology blue post". We will have 6 less packs and 1350 more gold on the reward track from level 1 to 50. I didnt update the original number crunching, only the conclusions at each category, because it was easier to do. I have also renamed the 4th category to "competitive player". BTW I should mention here that I have used these numbers for the required xp for levels: https://outof.cards/hearthstone/2200-the-rewards-track-how-long-to-get-to-level-50-644000-experience-required-to-get-to-level-150 and by their calculations you can achieve level 50 in 12 and a half weeks with 1 hour play per day. You can still achieve it within the expansion cycle with less gameplay, since most of the xp comes from quests.
The Questing adventurer:
In this category I will assume that you are just logging in to do your daily quests (and weekly quests) and play less than an hour per day. In the old system you could get an average 55 gold per quest and I will assume 3 wins for the 10 gold. So 65 gold * 120 day = 7800 gold per expansion cycle. Now lets see the new reward track. Up to level 50 you will get 4200 gold, 16 packs, 2 arena/duel tickets, 2 legendaries and 1 epic card. 1 pack is worth 100 gold, the ticket is the same because the questing adventurer doesnt have time for this, but instant conceding is still worth a pack. Cards are a bit more tricky, but we can measure them in dust, and a packs average worth is around 100 dust. Lets say we are pessimistic and you just want to disenchant your rewards. (BTW I dont know if the reward cards could be golden but lets assume they are always non-golden) So a random legendary is equal to 400 gold and a random epic is 100 gold for this calculation. If we add this up we get a value thats worth 6900 gold. From there, you gain 150 gold for every level up.
So lets see the new quest system. Every week we get 3 weekly quests, 1 has 2500 exp reward and the other 2 has 1750, so its 6k exp per week. We also have 66 new daily quests, 50 of those worth 1000 exp the rest are 800 or 1500, so I think its reasonable to count 1k as an average. Easy math, 7k + 6k means 13k exp per week just from quests. You can also gain xp just from playing the game. Winning means more xp but the main factor is the time and its capped at 400 xp / hour in ranked. Lets assume that the questing adventurer doesnt have time to play a whole hour per day, so I will count with 200 xp per day which should be attainable in less than 30 minutes. Thats another 1400 xp per week.
So we are at 14400 xp per week, and an expansion cycle is 120 days or 17 weeks, so the Q.A. will get 244800 xp which is equal to level 61 on the reward track. So its 1650 gold bonus above level 50, which means 8550 gold in total. So for the Q.A. its 7800 gold vs. 8550 gold or 5850 gold + packs and cards.
There is also another source of xp, namely achievments. There are some that gives you xp, overall they can give 3-4 more levels so 450-600 bonus gold but we know that the questing adventurer dont have time for this. I would say for this category the new system is better, but some people dont think that a pack is actually worth 100 gold, so its maybe less good for them.
UPDATE: Old system: 7800 gold vs New system 9300 gold value OR 7200 gold + packs and cards.
The farmer:
The farmer plays a very fast aggro deck, he always does the quests and always farms the daily 100 gold for 30 wins then immediately shuts down HS. 155 * 120 = 18600 gold per expansion cycle (thats the cap). Assuming a 50% winrate and 5 minute matches, the farmer plays 5 hours every day. In the new system that means 5*400=2000 xp per day, so 14k xp per week + 13k from the quests so 27k per week, so 459000 xp in the expansion cycle. We will be generous this time and give him 500 achievment xp to earn level 109. This means 8550 gold above level 50, for a total of 15750 gold. The farmer doesnt like the new system.
UPDATE: Old system: 18600 gold VS New system 16500 gold value OR 14400 gold + packs and cards.
The hardcore player/streamer:
The farmer capped out the old system with 5 hours per day. But I was curious if someone can max out the current reward system. The math shows that you will need an average 9 hours per day to do that (which is really high, I know), but the new cap is actually higher than the old one. On max level you have 21900 gold, or 19200 + the goodies. So the hardcore player likes the new system.
UPDATE: Old system 18600 gold VS New system 22650 gold value OR 20550 gold + packs and cards.
The competitive player:
This is my category, a player who doesnt have much time on the weekdays but plays a bit more on the weekends. My assumption is that the average player plays 1 hour per day from monday to friday and somewhere between 2-5 hours per day on the weekend. For this calculation I will use 10 hours per week. In 10 hours a farmer would get 200 gold, but the competitive player also plays other decks than hyper-aggro, so lets calculate with 80% effectiveness, that would mean 160 gold per week from the 3 wins deal plus 7*55=385 from quests for a total of 545 gold per week on average. This is 9265 gold per expansion cycle. In the new system we have the 13k/week from quests and the 4k/week from gameplay, which means 289000 xp per expansion cycle. It means level 71 on the reward track, but the competitive player is interested in doing some achievments for xp, so we will give him +2 levels. The summary is 10350 gold or 7650 gold + goodies.
UPDATE: Old system 9265 gold VS New system 11100 gold value OR 9000 gold + packs and cards.
The conclusion:
If you agree with my conversion rate of the goodies, you can see that the new system is better for most players. The pure gold will be lower, but it is compensated by cards/packs. Since the new system is front-loaded, you will get more stuff in the beginning of a new cycle, which is good IMO. Later you get mostly gold, which you want anyways for the next expansion. Needless to say that the xp bonus from the premium track helps a lot, but as far as I know it doesnt change the hourly cap from gameplay. Personally I like the new system better, but I can see why someone would like the old one better. One thing is for sure: its NOT more grindy than the old one, you get rewards based on how much you play the game.
I did these calculations mainly for myself, but I hope it will help you too to understand what you should expect from the new system on the long run.
Conclusion UPDATE:
At first I didnt consider that the loss of pure gold would upset most of the playerbase, but that was my mistake, since Blizzard specifically stated that we will make more gold in the new system, and its obviously not the case, by my math not even after the update (-6 packs and + 1350 gold). I am a mostly wild player and I also like to collect cards, so for me any pack that can give me a card I dont have has a 100 gold value. If you are not like me, you can use the updated numbers with pure gold + packs and cards. So I still like the new system better BUT we will have a mini-expansion with 35 new cards and the slightly better rewards wont help us to get them. All we can do is hope that the promised events will get us enough xp to help with that.
Thanks for the feedback, if Blizzard will update the rewards track again, I plan to do the same with my post.
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4
I've been a player since day 1, spent hundreds on this game, a really dedicated fan. when they announced killing Duels I left the game, the only way I was ever going to come back is if they gave duels a death Roe reprieve, and it seems they are going through with it, I will always miss hearthstone, but the team is not standing up for the game, they are letting corporate dictate their work too much, making bad decision after bad decision. 10th anniversary was supposed to be a joyous time for me, but you ruined it, thanks Blizz.
3
II'm in the same boat, I've played since launch, and I had been hopeful for the 10th anniversary this year, though I hadn't played much this expansion for the first time since launch, I was waiting to see what they would do next.
Then this. I have uninstalled Hearthstone, and unless they backtrack I'm not sure I will be back. I've been a whale in the past, having spent probably a thousand dollars on this game total, and ten years of consistent playtime, but the current hearthstone management is terrible. I had kept some hope that maybe the change to Microsoft ownership would cause some improvement, but apparently not.
There were entire classes I never played in standard/wild that I played the heck out of in Duels, every time a new Demon hunter card was announced I was excited to play it in Duels, but I've probably played like 3 games of Demon hunter total in constructed.
I'm sure Duels earned Blizzard plenty of money they just couldn't see, because it wasn't monetized separately from constructed, but the best part of unlocking new cards each expansion was playing more new gimmick decks.
If I had to make one critique of Duels it was the sets. it started out with a small subset, and each expansion they would add 2 new sets (the newest and one older one). this meant that the potential for breaking combos got worse, and decks stagnated. if I were them I would have done an Arena-like rotation of sets for Duels, so each season you can log in and try something new. what i would NOT do is kill the only mode that felt fresh and new each time
Of course like everyone else I hated the change to the bucket system, tagging each of 140 cards in an expansion with a tag is probably something that should already have been being done for future cataloging, and probably took one intern like a day to do, so not doing it probably saved almost no money, and now shutting down the mode will save that same amount of money again, so good job Blizz, enjoy all the money you won't earn from this change.
3
like what? they changed the bucket system awhile back to be 100% more boring because they didn't want to keep having to manually add cards to buckets, so at this point isn't the maintenance just "change static variable PLAYABLE_SETS to include the new expansion each rotation"?
like some people talk about balancing, but I find that balance has never been duels strong point anyways, and they've never catered to it.
3
I mean, that shouldn't be true, in order to earn enough gold to go infinite you have to knock other players out. the net profit for blizzard should always be positive.
I guess I am done playing Hearthstone. The one, two, three of killing Solo Adventures, Mercenaries, and now Duels has killed all interest I have in the game. I don't think the big wigs at Blizzard understand that nice things like Mercenaries, Duels, and Solo Content, while they don't directly make much money, they bring people to the game, who then create opponents for the whales, and even buy things for the other modes since they are there.
I have played hearthstone almost constantly since launch, this expansion was already the first one where I'd just been zoning out, not really playing at all, instead playing some Warpforged. but I kinda assumed I'd be coming back, especially with the 10th anniversary upcoming, but with this distasteful attitude I guess this might just be the end for me, I'm sorry Brode, I tried to stay, but your family hurts me too much.
3
they already announced that October's ladder will be Wonders again, but the twist is that you can have 30-40 cards in your deck, with your starting health being equal to the number of cards you use
1
I assume you mean Hullbreaker, not hellbreaker. and the way all these interactions work is that the first card is the one the effect applies to. so Hullbreaker draws a soul shard, you take damage equal to its cost, then the soul shard draws you another card (not Hullbreaker). this interaction is obvious with the Warlock hero power that draws a card and sets its cost to 0.
3
Why has Finkle Einhorn been replaced? is there a lore reason for this?
1
Honestly, with only 32 slots for players, you could just make people submit their decks beforehand, a quick glance at the decks should tell you whether they are copying a meta deck or actually building one. I'm sure if that's too much to ask of you you could also get a few members of the community to help out.
My Highest win rate decks are not meta, at least I am fairly sure, can't say I've ever actually looked at a deck list, so I guess thoughtsteal priest might be meta in standard right now. :D
1
yes, I do go 9-10 wins occasionally, and it is longer queue times there, but that's to be expected, especially on Heroic since only a tiny fraction of people make it that far. Blizzard has always, and seems to be sticking to the idea that duels is a minor game mode, and it seems to have good health for a minor game mode. before we knew anything about it they said "should be about the same size and complexity as Arena" so by your own statistics the mode has succeeded Blizzard's expectations of it.
again, at Blizzconline they said Mercenaries mode is "our third flagship game mode, after constructed and Battlegrounds" meaning blizzard doesn't want duels to be the main game mode, it is a fun treat. I spend almost all my gold these days playing Heroic Duels, because it's better value than just buying packs, and Arena is full of people who just let computers do their drafts for them. I think it's probably the only mode that rewards good deckbulding skills, because even if you netdeck your first 15 cards, you quickly get 3x that many and it becomes an actual test of wits and luck.
12
So, many MANY people on this form talk about how Duels is dead. and while it might be the mode I play the least other than Arena, it's still a ton of fun and I get matches within seconds, so by what metric is it dead?