Am I the only one around here who has insanely bad luck after deciding which deck to use?
I hardly found any Warrior in the past few days, so I decided to try Oil Rogue. Guess who my first opponent was? Not only a Warrior, but a Warrior with Harrison Jones and Troggzor the Earthinator. Needless to say, I didn't win.
Second match, a Paladin. I thought "Hell yeah! This one will be easy!". Or not. A few turns in, I noticed he wasn't the usual Mustard Paladin. He was a Healadin (with Guardian of Kings and plenty of other heals), a deck that I haven't seen in ages. And guess what, he had Harrison Jones too.
Third match, a Warrior again. Lost.
I then took a break and when I came back I switched to Hunter. Of course there was a Control Mage with Illuminator, Antique Healbot and double Ice Block waiting for me. What the hell?
This happen all the time. If I play Warrior the ladder suddenly becomes full of Shamans. Trying out Handlock? Pretty much only Face Hunters. And so on. I'm starting to think that the matchmaking system isn't 100% random but the game actually tries to match you with players who use a counter class. What do you think? I'm at Rank 5 BTW.
So the system would match you against counter classes...
That would imply that the system is unfair to part of the players and keen to the rest ? That doesn't make sense.
Matchmaking is random... you just had a streak of unfortunate matchups... you probably don't remember when you had that amazing winstreak being matched against many positive matchups for yourself. the brain prefer to remember what is painful more then what's going well. Simple.
So no, the matchmaking system is not employing some sort of algorithm to make your matchups worse. It's the same for everyone.
I climbed to Legend by winning against unfavorable matchups to my handlock ... and losing favorable matchups too. I just kept on having a good winrate overall.
Many ''good'' players are stuck at rank 5 because that's where they belong. They are not able to predict successfully how the meta will develop (seeing your complain about the ladder being full of X class is an indicator of this), so they are stuck with a good deck that can be countered without having tech cards to reverse their unfavorable matchups.
I was running Flame Imp in my handlock, alongside Zombie Chow, just to help me against aggro decks. It has proven me that I was right to do so, since my winrate against aggro decks (Face Hunter, Oil Rogue, Mechdecks (Mage/Shaman being the most encountered).
Instead of blaming something that is not worthy of any kind of blame, try to focus on what you can do on your own to improve your winrate. The matchmaking system doesn't care of what deck you are playing or your opponent has chose. It only cares about your MMR. Which is not showed by any means but based on your results of the last months (and here, I don't have the algorithm used by Blizzard, no people on the Internet have such a ressource).
1
Your point is well taken here and I don't disagree with you, I just thought I'd point out that a lot of people seem to mind Druid Combo and Mage spells to the face for a million.
1
I thought Antique Healbot would be bad because it's stats are terrible and healing doesn't seem that important. Turns out I was wrong, though I am still sad every time I have to spend five mana on a 3/3.
1
Preparation is one of those cards, like Innervate (though I would disagree with the above post and say that Prep is probably better than Innervate in the decks that it's in), that lets you break the rules of the game just by playing it. I've tried Rogue decks without it, and you certainly can play them, but it's usually worse. Getting ahead on mana for a turn is a huge deal, and nothing does that better than Preparation. I'd say play two as long as your deck supports the card.
4
You mentioned chess as an example of a "perfect" game, by which I assume you meant there are no random effects involved. This comes with it's own set of problems. Games with no random elements like chess tend to become very sequenced. This isn't to say they are bad of course, but knowing the forms becomes very important. There are appropriate lines of play to follow in given situations, and although games tend to vary you will see the same sequence of 4-5 moves pop up over and over because it's simply the correct way to do it. This has bothered a lot of high level players because it takes away from the skill required to read the game state and make the appropriate decision, since you've already seen and memorized it (which is another kind of skill, really).
Skill in Hearthstone comes down to a variety of things, with certain random elements like matchups and card draw. Can you lose a game to blind luck? Certainly. Is skill 5% of what makes up a game? Don't be absurd. To me, it seems like the instances where I lose due to luck are maybe 20% of my losses. Usually I can look back and say "I probably should have thought about that card" or "I didn't really play to my potential outs there" among other things. A big thing to remember is that there are a lot of skill related things that you probably don't even know you're not doing in a given game. The people who play this game a lot use up their whole turn most of the time. Do you suppose it's because they all play slow or want to waste their opponent's time? Or do you think they might be thinking about a wide variety of things that could happen and different lines of play?
Really, this game has a high degree of skill involved. I won't say luck plays no factor, but it's certainly nowhere near 95%
2
To be fair, the bow and buzzard nerfs weren't really hits to face hunter. They were more meant to corral the insane amount of value the midrange hunter decks could get. Those nerfs more or less paved the way for the face hunter deck you see now, as before midrange was pretty much always going to be the superior choice and you could still kill people fast. The all rush deck's popularity is relatively recent. Even the old Undertaker variation played more like zoo than the current version, since with giant Undertakers and a ton of value deathrattles it could afford to not just go face and pray in the games where that was necessary.
2
I'm not sure anyone was trying to make an excuse about playing it on ladder. He was talking about not liking to see the deck in Casual. As for making legend with it, I don't see a problem with that. It's not like playing face hunter gives you that much higher of a win percentage than anything else really. You'll have to grind just the same. It's not as if someone getting to legend with face hunter should feel bad about it, or like they somehow cheated because they didn't play the way other people think they should. Getting there is getting there and as long as you aren't actually cheating then good on you.
1
Mech mage has been, and is still a thing that I see just as often as face hunter, and for the last week zoo has been back on the rise. I'll grant that my sample size is small but in the last few days I've played more than 60 ladder games and face hunter is the one of those three I've seen the least. I don't actually see it much at all at the moment, though I'm not entirely sure why. It still seems like a solid choice.
On topic, I think it is good for the game. It gives newer players a way to get into the game, it forces the greedier decks to include cards to tech against it which prevents a control meta where nothing ever happens in the early game, and it gives people options for quick games if that's what they want. Not everyone wants a Hearthstone game to be a 30 minute grindfest.
1
I would also say, in addition to most of the advice that you've already gotten, that you shouldn't expect to switch classes and achieve instant success with it. If you are just starting to play Paladin then I don't imagine you know exactly how to play it. Things like what key cards are, key turns, what a given game is going to be about, stuff like that. It changes more than you might think based on class, so don't take a bad winrate right when you switch to mean the deck isn't good. You will improve with the deck as you play more games and get familiar with how it functions. All too often I see people hopping on those rank 1 legend decks where the architect painstakingly explains the interactions and has played dozens or hundreds of games and then going 3-7 with it. They then comment with how terrible the deck is.
Point being, don't get discouraged if it isn't working right away for you. Get some practice in, and just don't expect to play it perfectly right away.
3
Let's see:
1. Onyxia
2. Nozdormu
3. Leeroy (post nerf for full value)
4. Bolvar (dup)
5. Bolvar (dup)
6. Bolvar (dup)
7. Bolvar (dup)
8. Bolvar (I'm serious)
9. Black Knight (dup)
10. Harrison (dup)
1
The previous point, made in a terrifically sarcastic manner that I'm sure we can all appreciate, is that one of the best decks right now includes no legendaries. Now let's look at the other best decks. Well, pretty much all of them do include legendaries, right? Okay, so we can make an educated guess as to what might happen in this no legendary meta: Most decks get worse, face hunter is as good as ever. So where then is the incentive to play anything else?
This is of course without getting into the point that in so doing Blizzard would be alienating the players that have given them the most money. Don't get me wrong I do understand what you're getting at, and something along those lines might work at some point, but it needs to be executed in a manner that's a little more complex than just "No legends in this mode."