Hearthpwn

Nothing surprising. There are literally hundreds of tiny bugs like these. Nothing game-breaking that would need immediate fixing, but just some minor weird stuff and inconsistencies. Blizzard is currently very busy being silent about the battlepass, theyre waiting for the storm to blow over, so dont expect them to do any balancing or bug fixing anytime soon.

I never rerolled a 1000xp (not worth the risk). So far I tried rerolling 800xp five times over the weeks, 4 times I landed on 800xp again and only one time I managed to upgrade from 800 to 1000.

I think the issue with DH is the fact that its the only class that can start their turn with empty board, and somehow manage to push 20 face damage out of thin air... and usually much earlier than turn 10 (yea technically ETC OTK can also do damage out of nowhere, but they need to draw their entire deck first).

There is nothing wrong with aggression, those decks and strategies have the right to exist. But it feels very reminiscent of the old Force of Nature + Savage Roar druid decks. Just a ton of damage out of nowhere, and nothing you could have done to prevent it. It feels somehow even worse than FoN + Savage Roar, since setting up taunt minions doesn't help you at all thanks to Blade Dance.

When the Druid cards were nerfed back in the day, it was because the whole face damage push was impossible to interact with which resulted in frustration. DH right now is doing exactly the same thing and its even stronger. So yea, nerf is warranted.

Lets set the whole reward track fiasco and the abysmal monetization system aside for one post. There are dozens of other threads talking about this.

What I want to point out is that Blizzard is messing up on other things as well. If HS was fine tuned and polished game, maybe some of the sins of the marketing team could have been excused. But that is far from the reality...

Here is a short list of stuff I am personally angry about:

1. Bugs, bugs everywhere - the list of bugs is huge, most of it is due to the "spaghetti code" nature of HS. Weird card interactions, inconsistent behavior, take your pick. If you want more details, just search for HysteriA channel on Youtube and watch some of the mythbuster videos.

2. Inconsistent card text - why dont Witch's Brew and Unstable Evolution have Echo? Why dont Commencement and Dimensional Ripper use the Recruit keyword? Why does Time Out! and Blur have completely different wording? You can watch Solem's video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xNmeSSyyOtg for more examples.

3. Pushing the card design towards more randomness and mana cheating. It's only a matter of time before someone figures out a wild deck using Insight or Free Admission that completely breaks the format. Not to mention that Palm Reading can basically be a three mana Emperor Thaurissan that you can have two copies of. Some cards that generate random stuff are ok. For instance cards like Steward of Scrolls, Mystery Winner or even something older like Stonehill Defender are decently balanced. The problem is when you start designing cards like Evocation, Mana Cyclone or Yogg-Saron, Master of Fate where the amount of randomness is off the charts.

4. Balancing and tuning of other game formats. Why is Junkbot still a 5* in battlegrounds? Why do we have Floating Watcher taking space in the demon tribe when the only way to utilize it in any way is when you pickup bunch of Wrath Weavers early. The discrepancy between the power level of treasures offered in Duels is horrendous. You can have one card with Small Pouches or infinite weapon value from Pillage the Fallen, take your pick. You can basically retire 50% of your Duel runs after the first game, when you dont get offered anything decent. And the adventure content has been kinda crap lately as well. Like for instance the Rexxar book of heroes, the Daelin Proudmoore fight is overtuned as hell. And why do Kul Tiran Footman have spell damage and deathrattle face damage? Why does Daelin use Shaman spells and minions? That doesnt fit the Warcraft lore at all. It screams laziness. It has just been cobbled together with zero thought put into it.

And finally the biggest sin of them all:

5. Not enough card changes / buffing. The whole point of digital medium is the amazing advantage of being able to change stuff "retroactively". If your card game is paper print like Magic the Gathering, once you print it, thats it. HS has had an amazing opportunity to change under-utilized cards, buff bad cards, adjust their functionality and so on. Yet they NEVER do this. We have arrived in a place where the cards that are supposed to be viable deck-filler evergreens from the Basic and Classic sets have long been outshined and out-powercreeped. My estimate is that roughly 80% of the Classic and Basic set hasnt seen any serious play in the past two or three years. Lets take druid for an example - when did you last see someone play Keeper of the Grove, or Force of Nature, or Ancient of Lore? Ancient of War? I guess it leads to the monetization issue Ive set aside at the beginning of the post. If Classic and Basic cards were decent, people wouldnt need to buy the new powercreeped expansion packs.

Quote from Echtvad >>

They don't want you to know cause they try to hide the fact that it is a really small amount.

If you didnt know what the expression "hit a nail on the head" means, heres Echtvad for you with a perfect example.

Even if you were right about the f2p... even the whales are getting screwed. You think that paying $120+ three times a year and not even having the full collection of cards is reasonable? Even assholes like EA with their Battlefront lootboxes and FIFA copypasting have to stare in absolute awe at Blizzards greed and the monetization model they have been able to get away with for almost 5 years. This game is no longer carried by regular whales, but by mega-whales from the mobile client. Kids with rich parents, who can throw away $1000 yearly on a game without hesitation cos it will get hidden inside the mobile bill.

I have to agree that one of the BIGGEST advantages (and I cannot overstate this enough) of a card game in a digital medium is the ability to change cards. In MtG or other physical / paper medium, once you print it, that's it. In digital format you have the option to nerf busted cards AND also buff under-performing cards...

Sadly Blizzard just doesn't utilize this properly. If we put aside the monetary cost of the game, the battlepass issues and other non-sense Blizzard has pulled over the years (remember Blitzchung?). I think that the complete lack of buffing old and weak cards that were either never good or very quickly outperformed by power-creep is the biggest sin of Team 5.

Quote from JamesT >>

Face hunter is overplayed because the deck is cheap and the game is too expensive. Some of these Demon Hunter cards like Twin Slice are going to rotate out in 4 months.

Isn't Demon Hunter Initiate set like a replacement for the fact that DH has no cards in the Classic set? I thought the plan was for the Initiate to work the same way - meaning that DH Initiate cards are always gonna be in standard forever.

Maybe considering the Initiate set has more cards for DH class than Classic set has for other classes, what might happen is that they Hall of Fame some of the Initiate cards to match the overall card pool across all classes...

Do you guys think that Blizz will continue its sh*tty practice of letting streamers and youtubers play the expansion couple of days before it actually releases for the rest of us plebs?

I always find it so annoying that if I want to experience the expansion fresh and try brewing my own decks, I basically have to stop going to youtube for a couple of days, because my recommended section will be full of clickbaity videos from creators with titles like "This new druid is amazing" or "The new hunter cards are broken" or something like that, that will inevitably spoil the expansion.

Oh yea, youre right. My bad.... but still capped. So the all the 30 version are actually preexisting and not generated dynamically during the game.

Considering the corrupted version seems to be a different card (has different art and text) - similarly to how Spellstones worked - it makes me believe that the stat gains wont be silence-able. Even though its technically a handbuff and those can be silenced normally, because it transforms the card itself, silence probably wont work.

BUT

This minion can be corrupted infinitely. It highly unlikely that they can accomodate this. HS historically had a huge problem "generating" new cards on the fly. That why all the tokens actually pre-exist. Thats why Jades capped at 10/10. The only card I can think of that can essentially generate cards on the spot is Deathstalker Rexxar Zombeast. This makes me wonder if the Horrendous Growth will be also proceduraly generated "on-the-fly" OR if they just slap additional stats on top the 3/3 version. Cos if they do, it will make Horrendous Growth silenceable down to the 3/3 statline while other Corrupt minions will be immune to silence. 

Feast of Souls 2 mana draw up to 14 cards... kinda overkill.

Agreed. Its kinda weird that Robes somehow got through playtesting, but on the other hand - if Blizzard has like 10 people playtesting stuff versus hundreds of thousands games played every day, it understandable that the community figures out what OP much better. Glad for the fast fix. It was making Duels too coinflippy in later stages (after 5 wins it was about who has the Robes and who doesnt).

Too bad nobody playtested it... I guess they just cobbled it together and threw it out there for the players to figure out what stuff is broken and get salty in the process. This frikkin mindset of pay us to test our game for us is so annoying.

If I wanted to play coinflip games, I would go to battlegrounds. We didnt need another heavy RNG format. Like what are you supposed to do when your opponent has Robes of Gaudiness, and starts chucking 5-drops for 2 mana at you. 7-drop on turn 3. It just ridiculous.

Well, Mozaki is completely busted. No point playing until they nerf her.