Hearthpwn

Strong showing from all finalists. I like the long term strategy of the Plaguebringer but I can't help but think it would be a frustrating class. If weak it would make for drawn out, frustrating games for both. And if strong it would be super annoying to play against. This is why I ended up passing it over for Winglord since I really like the Formation keyword and the unique design of the Hero Power.

It will leave Beta when they figure out how to make more money off of the mode.

I just hit the pity timer.

40 packs before a legendary or within 1-2 packs of that. Fucking hell. I was just waiting to see if it will actually exceed it so I can see if it is a bug and maybe get some compensation. Nope, just incredibly unlucky, I think given how the odds work out this was unbelievably unlucky. But sadly it is bound to happen with enough time.

feels (very) bad man

And by that I don't mean they are boring, in fact in a vacuum they are rather fun. No, I feel the issue they create in the game and why they are so frustrating is that they ruin the play-around element of HS. I think playing-around is perhaps the most fundamental skill in Heartstone that sets apart middling from good players. 

So how do these two cards do that? Well in case of Hysteria it breaks the most fundamental play-around which is to balance between having few big minions and lots of small ones, having just a few powerful minions leaves you very vulnerable to hard removal, having lots of small ones helps against that but leaves you weak to AoE. Obviously the key is a judicious mix of both. Hysteria ruins that by having your big minion gobble up your small ones. And if you play around THAT you get wrecked by regular AoE. It is a double whammy, catch-22, screwed either way and it is why this card is so damn frustrating. And also why it is so good and why it is still run in all warlock and priest decks despite a 1mana nerf. This card on its own would be frustrating but possible to counter, in addition to AoE it becomes too much, and both priest and warlock have good AoE. Against All Odds does not help things at all, but from my current experience it is not nearly as bad and doesn't seem to be run as much, but another potentially problematic card.

Combustion is more mage specific but not entirely so. Basically there have always been cards that hit more than one minion but not all, lets call them partial-AoE. The way you play around them is you put your minions in a certain way, usually weak minions on the sides, strong minions in the middle, so the strong ones soak up the AoE. There are exceptions, like Combustion's partner in crime, Cone of Cold. With that you want it the other way, strong on the outside weak on the inside, so that your strong minions don't end up being the frozen ones and unable to attack. You can see where this is going, playing around CoC is exactly what you don't want to do against Combustion and again the player is caught in an impossible position. Not surprisingly both cards are run by all mage decks or close to it. Discovery only makes things worse in all these cases.

What is to be done? More generally Blizzard needs to pay more attention to cards they print, how they interact with each other and they need to consider the aspect of counterplay a lot more. Nothing is worse than when a card feels impossible to defeat, hitting your head against a brick wall, no possible solutions, etc. So Blizz need to make sure such cards are never printed or if they are... Well, the simplest way is more nerfs ofc. I would not mind if I never saw Hysteria again, it is such a pain. Combustion is not that toxic, it can stay if CoC is nerfed, those two are only super-frustrating together.

Thoughts?

Not only did they do it after this patch which is annoying and stupid, they by all rights should do it on Aug. 3 when the rotation happens. No they even contradict themselves since they urge players to get their achievement hunting done by Aug. 3 but they did it now.

Please note that incomplete Forged in the Barrens Gameplay achievements will no longer grant Reward Track XP once United in Stormwind releases on August 3, at which point the United in Stormwind Gameplay achievements will take over, so don’t forget to finish and claim those before you’ve left the Barrens.

Very fucking annoying. Can someone @ them on twitter or however the devs are easiest reached, I don't use twitter nor care to follow the Devs elsewhere.

Not very friendly are we?

Anyway for the people who might be in the same situation as me, seems Duels give no refund during a rotation. Or at least reset, since it just happened after this patch but my run was not interrupted nor did I get any sort of refund. Maybe I am wrong since it makes it seems like I will be queueing my pre-rotation deck into post-rotation decks which seems wildly unbalanced and very confusing. I will keep my run open until UiS launches, and maybe for a month after that, see if I get rewarded for it.

I was informed however that my Arena run will expire in 7 days so that is on the table, be sure to have a 2 loses run open by that time. I am still curious however if a reset also happened 15 days ago, read somewhere that there was an arena rotation roughly at that time.

Looking for those sweet sweet free tavern tickets. Will Duels and Arena be reset when the Stormwind expansion hits? Read that apparently there has already been an Arena rotation some days ago that I missed, which is a pity, but more important will there be another one soon?

Just looking to maximize packs and so free tavern tickets, any tips and answers welcome.

Sorry for the late reply/slight necro, I was indisposed. I am thankful for all the replies and hope there will be more.

Seems most people support trying out LoR and I will, maybe I check out MgT and Gwent too after.

There are quite a few issues with HS I have, and then I recently saw CGPGrey play MtG and it seemed interesting enough, so it made me curious about if maybe another card game might be worth checking out. Plus it might be interesting to all here to see the pros and cons of different cardgames laid out, maybe we even walk away with newfound appreciation for HS who knows :P

The criteria:

1. How diverse is the game? Seems to me Blizzard wants all games to be some midrange minion trading snoozefest. I meanwhile like exciting new decks, with novel mechanics and ways to win. So it is a bonus if the game has many kinds of decks and win conditions. The primary criteria is diversity in the way games go and the decks that can be played. But secondarily I guess this is also about how fun and exciting the game is, as hard as that is to quantify.

2. How F2P friendly is it? I don't really have a lot of money to spend on a CCG atm, and tbh I don't like the idea of spending much money on something so immaterial period. So it is an important criteria that the game be readily accessible for free. I do not care if it charges outrageous sums for cosmetic things as long as the actual gameplay is easily available. Bonus points to the game if the prices for cards (and to a lesser extent cosmetics) are affordable in the case I do choose to spend money on the game.

3. How popular is it? Tbh I don't need a huge crowd, but having enough people for easy matchmaking sure is nice. And ofc if there is a ton of people then there is more content about it online, ways to learn to play, people to talk to or even just to meme. It is also about the longevity of the game, if it has few players and is barely breathing that is maybe not a game to get into. OTOH maybe it has few people but the cost to run it is low and the business model works. Primarily though this is about the ease of finding matches in the game.

I'd love to hear from as many people as care to answer and about any online card game you can think of. Tell me your thoughts people!

PS. Not sure if this kind of thread is kosher, I know some places have weird hangups about discussing other games and if that is the case mods can close this thread I suppose. Still I am curious about your opinions so feel free to PM me with your thoughts if you want.

Quote from Pythonproduct >>

Quote from Neko_Tamo >>

I've said this before but in short disruption and mill are not problems in of themselves. The problem is that there is no counterplay to them. Obviously since combo is the most dependent on having all their cards to work it feels like it targets them in particular, but in truth it sprays wide. Combo has to have a way to regain lost pieces fairly reliably. But regaining what you had does not boost your ultimate goal, on the contrary it is an expensive fix. This way disruption weakens combo without killing it outright. As is if Antonidas or Ill'gynoth get milled it is a virtual insta-loss.

 Tell me, how is there supposed to be counterplay to them? Even if there was, then you'd go back to rock paper scissors meta with combo beating control since they can beat disruption, control beating aggro, and aggro beating combo. If combo decks are uninteractable and don't care whatsoever what's on the board, the only way to stop them is with disruption. As you alluded to, disruption is also uninteractable,  which makes it unfun to play against, but if combo could circumvent it, there would be no point to it

 Because getting back what you already had does not further your win condition, it just fixes damage. If you were sure you won't face disruption you'd never run those graveyard recovery cards would you? You would streamline your deck further to have more removal, survival, draw or redundancy to boost the odds of the combo happening. So including disruption becomes a tech choice to combat combo, and they respond with anti-disruption measures. The disruption cards help raise the winrate against combo but weaken it against other matchups, meanwhile the recovery cards combo starts to run dilute their deck and lower their overall winrate but prevent auto-loss situations. Through trial and error the two sides will find an acceptable middleground between adding more tech to boost that matchup and cutting tech to boost overall matchups. It is a push and pull. Kind of like how slower decks run taunt, which they don't want, to counter face decks. Who in turn run cards like Hunter's Mark, which they don't want, since they know they will run into taunt and other big things that must die before smorc. Make sense?

I think this is just the new normal, didn't Blizzard say they don't like super long matches. That pretty much kills control, the slowest decks will be control-combo hybrids or so I interpret their "we want all decks to have a win condition" comment. And the majority of decks will be aggro/midrange. Indeed they always have since such decks are cheap to make and most players are F2P or close to it. I don't things will change soon or ever.

That is why pretty much any meta has something annoying, usually some fast deck which hits less skilled players especially bad. I know that was especially true for me since while fairly good even in the beginning I liked slow, meme decks and you can guess how well those did against zoo and face hunter. Especially undertaker hunter /shudders. Weirdly enough I was not as bothered by mech mage and tempo mage, maybe because by that point I was usually having fun on higher ranks with meme decks, only going to lower ranks at the end of the season for rewards? I guess early highlander decks were also annoying given how disgustingly op they were with Reno, Kazakus, Raza in a meta that was much lower power than modern one.

I've said this before but in short disruption and mill are not problems in of themselves. The problem is that there is no counterplay to them. Obviously since combo is the most dependent on having all their cards to work it feels like it targets them in particular, but in truth it sprays wide. Combo has to have a way to regain lost pieces fairly reliably. But regaining what you had does not boost your ultimate goal, on the contrary it is an expensive fix. This way disruption weakens combo without killing it outright. As is if Antonidas or Ill'gynoth get milled it is a virtual insta-loss.

It was fun for sure, I was new to cardgames (not counting that old single-player Yu-gi-oh game). The intro was entertaining enough and the matchmaking good enough that I was not bullied out of the game. I quickly discovered on my own a ramp/combo druid that worked really well, Cenarius was my first ever legendary so it kind of pushed me that way.

I climbed to Diamond League, this was way back in closed beta. I thought I was such hot shit but later I learned anyone who was good got that far, and best players were all in Platinum or Masters (I think there was Masters league, it copied SC basically). To my defense I was pretty fresh and I also did not have much time to climb since days after I popped in they introduced the original Ranked system.

Good times, being a noob is at the same time the best and worst thing.

@P4dge but that is a clear copout. It is possible to make interesting cards on budget, especially when you have Standard rotations to serve as artificial sources of scarcity to make those new cards playable compared to golden oldies. Indeed that was pretty much the excuse used to introduce Standard, which I also found a copout since it is an implicit admission by the devs that they are not clever enough to make cards that are both balanced and interesting. It shows incompetence and greed, because now newer packs are more worthwhile than old ones forcing you to constantly grow your collection aggressively, little to no advantage to old players. Powercreep does the same thing, so now we are doubly fucked for same reasons, incompetence and greed by Blizzard. Plus it is just aesthetically unpleasing, seeing how much worse old cards are than contemporary ones.

I don't know about other games as I don't play them, so someone else will have to either challenge you or back you that all card games powercreep over time. But I do know that I find this practice very disgusting and scummy and it is a big part of why Blizz won't see a dime from me.

Some of those are broken some not so much, if they ever get too out of hand they will be nerfed hopefully. Note Tickatus wasn't nerfed despite being OP and hated, so the blade cuts both ways. Neither were some other OP warlock tools. Anyway I don't see much point in further debate, I look at individual cards and I see Warlock ones are considerably bonkers, probably most OP class pound for pound. It is just that currently the other pieces of the meta work against Warlock, if you buffed it to overcome those then there would be nothing to stop it, it would be T0. That is my read of the situation and seemingly Blizzard agrees.

I hope things work out for you m8, consider trying out some other class for a bit.