Hearthpwn

Btw if you want the optimal even shaman list im happy to provide it 

Its 1/16 to hit any of the 4 minions 3 times, 1/64 to hit a specific minion 3 times. 

You're both right, although the 1/16 stat is more applicable to this situation. 

There are two conditions. If you are at 15 or less life, or if the game has gone a certain number of turns (10 if I remember correctly) 

Quote from XanXon >>

Without Brawl, the only major AoE removal Warriors would have would be Warpath - a card that deals 5 damage to ALL minions for 10 Mana, or Plague of Wrath which requires an additional activator. Without it, they'd have to use a removal spell for each minion while basically every other card has an AoE removal for board wipes. No clue what's your point here. 

 Brawl is actually an excellent card for the game. It allows warrior to play control without needing additional board clears from each set. One of the biggest problems with priest is that it had terrible AOE in the classic set, so pretty much every expansion it needed to get powerful AOE to stay viable. The goal of the priest rework was to change that by improving Holy Nova and adding SW:Ruin. 

Removing brawl would put warrior in a similar position that priest was in, which has been found to be unsustainable and unhealthy for the game. 

Will you get destroyed in Wild with that deck? Yes. You would also get destroyed in standard with that deck if you could play it in standard. 

Besides from that, I don't really know how to help you here, considering you said you're only interested in one specific deck. 

If you want some specific advice (like on what decks are strong, if I enjoy the current meta, etc.) I can probably answer any question you come up with, but you need to give me a little more here. 

Quote from Mandelbr0t >>

Quote from parzival2345 >>

Well to catch this thread up to speed, a few (4?) days ago people started realizing darkglare warlock is extremely extremely powerful. Since then, high legend has been pretty much exclusively darkglare, DMH, and reno priest. 

Why? Because darkglare has established itself as the deck to beat, and reno priest and DMH are the decks to beat it with. 

And yes, before someone starts telling me "but darkglare beats priest, I have X winrate against it," priest certainly isn't a hard counter. 

The prevalence of darkglare has people trying secret mage again, although I have my doubts as to if secret mage will stick around. 

Anyway, darkglare is really good, and the deck just keeps getting better. And if you're looking to netdeck, make sure you're getting a list posted TODAY. There has been so much refinement over the past few days that a list from say 3 days ago is pretty trash. 

 

 Yes...encourage people to play the latest and greatest CANCER deck.  Nice job.

 git gud. 

In all seriousness, no decks are 'cancer.' People can play what they want to play, there's nothing wrong for liking certain archetypes, decks, or classes. 

Not to be rude, but if you're gold 7 you really shouldn't be thinking about legend. It's not a bad idea to play a tier 1 deck, but your goal should be to practice and get better at the game. Changing your deck won't make you a better player, and you should never expect that the next netdeck (or the first netdeck) will significantly increase your rank or how much you win. 

On a somewhat related note, I personally hate losing to what I consider to be bad decks. So at the start of AoO when people were still experimenting with spell only mage, it was really frustrating to lose to it. Is there really such a difference between losing to a deck with around 48 percent winrate (like spell mage) than a deck with a 52 percent winrate? No, but I always feel kinda cheated when I lose to a tier 4 deck. 

But thats just a psychological issue, so I digress. 

As far as no minion mage goes, it isn't particularly focused on randomness. Sure one of the power cards generates a random 5 mana minion, but thats just a random hunk of stats. Sure you can highroll or lowroll, but most of the time you just get a or the like 5/5. Much more impactful is if they have Incanter's Flow on curve. 

Yogg box on the other hand is a terrible kind of RNG, but I'm not sure if its even a good card in no minion mage. 

Anyway, blizzard does NOT rig the results in any way, people play these decks because they want to. 

Quote from DiamondDM13 >>

If you read the post, it tells you what balance in Hearthstone means and why it means that. If you did read it and found the answer but didn't like it, I can't really do much to help, it is the objective principle to achieve perfect balance. It is the way to ensure no strategy is being favored compared to others by having unfair conditions on weak matchups.

In a very simple manner, if you apply the condition I wrote before, and you find that the Rock-Paper-Scissors is not working strictly, if you find one playstyle, for some reason, is capable of overcoming it's weakness under these conditions, that means there is an imbalance of power in it's favor.

You removed randomness, so that isn't the cause. You perfected technical play, so that isn't the cause either. You are left with an imbalance in the power level of whatever strategy you are testing. It is overcoming a matchup that it shouldn't overcome.

A matchup that is favored towards one strategy can only be overcome by a few factor. Random elements outside of player control that determine the outcome. Improper technical play which allows the weak strategy to take advantage and punish the mistakes. Power imbalance and allows it to overcome a natural weakness. If you remove the two first factors, you isolate the third factor, meaning if it happens, this is the cause of the problem.

It's not a rabbit hole. Blizzard themselves are capable of setting up these conditions for testing and balancing. We aren't, but they are.

 First a question: how do you cleanly get rid of previously quoted statements?      EDIT: I appear to have figured that out :)

As for the topic at hand, I did in fact read the original post (that I quoted), and I appreciate that you have chosen to clarify what you meant. To reiterate your definition of balance in my own words, you believe that the game is imbalanced when a weak strategy is capable of beating what should be the 'favored' strategy (e.g. paper beating scissors). 

This has logic, and is a reasonable enough definition. You then proceed to defend your claim. 

Your premise is that there are 3 factors that affect any given game of hearthstone: randomness, player skill, and matchup favorability. This is also reasonable. 

However, after this point the logic falls apart. Even in our theoretical world, there is no way to isolate 'matchup favorability' as you have attempted to do. Although it is acceptable that you can remove the factor of player skill, you cannot remove randomness. Even if there were no 'random' cards in the game, it is impossible to discount draw RNG.

Rigging the draw order for 'optimal draw' is absolutely not the solution, because some decks care more about draw order than others. In your first post you said that "you actively rig it for optimal draw order, what you get is a game in which, if both players play perfectly, the strategy that has an advantage in the matchup will win every single time." This is false. As the most stark example, in wild it is possible for a druid player to OTK their opponent on turn 1 going first. By your metric, that deck is the very definition of imbalanced because it will beat ALL other strategies. However, that deck is utter garbage, and I struggle to accept any metric that declares a deck with a poor winrate imbalanced. As such, we cannot use 'optimal draw' to remove the factor of randomness. 

I will now move on to 'average draw' as a metric. If you believe 'optimal draw' is still workable we can come back to that, but to me that feels like a waste of time. Anyway, 'average draw' is indeed a theoretical way to offset the affects of randomness. However, 'average draw' will yield statistics like average win rates and win percentages. Are those good things to work with? Well, they could be, but unfortunately that means abandoning (or at least heavily adapting) the theory that the RPS model is what we should be working with to determine balance. Why? Because Rock Paper Scissors has only clean, 100% winrates. 

Lets now begin to adapt the RPS model. Still with 'average draw', scissors will beat rock lets say 40% of the time. Is that a problem? Maybe, but not if rock also beats paper 40% of the time (and paper scissors 40% of the time). Paper beating scissors sometimes is not ALONE cause for concern, nor is it a sign of imbalance. Now that we have done our best to eliminate the affects or randomness by looking at averages, has scissors become "capable of overcoming it's weakness under these conditions" and as such become imbalanced? No, it hasn't. 

What is really the fatal flaw of using Rock Paper Scissors is that in hearthstone, strategy and decks are adaptable. Lets say you're a rock player, and you get really really tired of losing to paper. So you adapt, become a little thinner and a little sharper, and start to give paper a run for its money. Now you might think you just became imbalanced, but that isn't the case. Because as you adapted to be better against paper, you start to lose a little more to fellow rocks than you remembered, and even scissors who you used to bully starts to feel like they have a fighting chance against you. So even though rock is managing to beat paper, it sacrificed itself in other matchups. 

And even with everything I've said previously notwithstanding its incorrect to say 'look this aggro deck beats this control deck, the game is imbalanced.' Favorable matchups are favorable matchups, and if the aggro deck is winning that means that it has the optimal strategy. Maybe its because aggro is overtuned. But its also possible that the control deck got greedy, started to try and bully fellow rocks, and slipped up against scissors. At that point, rock has moved a little too close to paper (midrange/combo) to be good against the aggro decks. This isn't always the case, but it certainly is sometimes, and so it is in fact wrong to define imbalance in hearthstone as being when paper manages to beat scissors. Sometimes it is a cause of imbalance, sometimes a symptom, and sometimes unrelated. 

To be clear, I think that the RPS model has a lot of value. And although I've just spent a bunch of paragraphs bringing up its weaknesses, I could write at least as much if not more defending the value and importance of the Rock Paper Scissors model. But to declare it to be "the objective principle" is at best incorrect and at worst intellectually dishonest and incorrect. And for the record, I still feel like this was a deep dive into an ever widening rabbit hole. 

If I have in some way misinterpreted either of your posts I do apologize, feel free to clarify anything that you feel I misunderstood or misrepresented. If you feel like I missed a crucial point, feel free to bring that to my attention. 

Quote from DiamondDM13 >>

Quote from Daulphas >>

How do you define balance in a game like hearthstone?

 A game state where if you provide average draw order (or even optimal) and you perfect technical play, you have a strictly enforced Rock-Paper-Scissors model.

If the game is correctly balanced, and you remove any element that the player cannot control, or in the case of draw order, you actively rig it for optimal draw order, what you get is a game in which, if both players play perfectly, the strategy that has an advantage in the matchup will win every single time.

This happens because using these conditions, you remove any variable that would deliver outcomes based on anything except the strategies being played, so what you get is a state where the strategy that has an advantage in the matchup always win.

Obviously, even if you remove all randomness from Hearthstone, you will still have variance because of draw order and improper technical play, this is where the matchups lose the strict RPS model.

Anyway, it is not subjective.

 Bleh. 

I consider this an altogether poor answer to a pretty open ended question. Without getting too into this, the structure of your post should be something like "balance in hearthstone means ___, because ___". 

Instead we get into a rabbit hole of assuming perfect play and rigged draw order in an attempt to reduce variance or something. 

To try and be constructive, I like to define balance in hearthstone as occurring when a) all or at least most classes have at least one deck at tier 2 or higher, b) there is a level of parity in the frequency that you play against each class, and c) there is a level of parity in the frequency of aggro, midrange, control, and combo. 

and yet, i didn't recive my weekly quest either after the patch
thanks blizzard :(

This essentially changes nothing. They didn't address any of the major issues that people had with the system, just that they now have a "wealth of feedback". Will this feedback be utilized in any meaningful way or will the community just get a golden star while Blizzard sweeps this under the rug hoping that this band-aid fix is enough. 

I miss you Ben Brode :(

This still does not change the fact that they LIED to us. The ez fix would be to have the daily quests still give some gold to compensate for the long stretches of far apart levels, and maybe even bring back the 10 gold per 3 wins? I should not have to rely on an in game event to properly level my rewards track and feel like I’m being actively rewarded 

Just like Solem said: They intentionally make a problem, knowing it will cause an outrage. Then they "fix" it, and expect us to kiss their boots.

But this is still isn't good enough. Let's say they change the year of the dragon pack with a reward of 300 gold. To reach level 48, you need 90k experience. Are you aware just how much playtime that is? You'd literally earn 300 gold for nolifing HS for 10 days. How is that better for any player?

They did literally nothing with that...

Maybe I can help them

We want:

1. More exp for every activity or less exp overall needed
2. More gold than before the patch
3. Higher legendary and epic droprate to justify the high expenses
4. more dust coming from disenchantments
5. a company that doesnt lie to its players and isnt as greedy as EA

Still not good enough. If Blizzard wants forgiveness I need $10,000 in unmarked bills and a free tavern pass. 

On this episode of "Intentionally trying to get away with BS, then apologizing when somebody simply does the math and calls us out on it"

- Season 19 episode 46

Quote from Anomaly98 >>

The system is really bad. The first 10-15 levels fly by quickly but getting just one daily quest a day (You wont get 3 new dailies everyday) for 800-1200 xp when the level is 1500+ is a really bad look. The xp ramps up to 4500 at level 50 and stays constant past that point for 150 gold. Meaning you have to complete 5+ dailies to get 150 gold while 5 quests with the older system would get you ~300 gold.

This system is nice till lvl 15. Then it becomes really bad because now you will be earning less gold on a daily basis from the quests. 

Now that I know the numbers, I also did the math and came to the conclusion that you are wrong. You used the math that was convenient for you and ignored it when it wasnt.

Quote from Anomaly98 >>

 Just by dailies (not counting how much you play per week) you get around 6k (weekly quest) 5.6k (dailies) per week. That means you need 16 weeks to complete the first 50 ranks. That gets you 50 ranks worth of rewards meaning 4200 gold, 16 packs, 2 legendaries and one epic card.

The weekly quests are indeed 6k xp/week, but for the dailies you used the absolute minimum value 800 while most quests worth 1000 and there are some 1500 ones, So the more realistic number is 7k xp/week instead of 5.6k. And you didnt add the 400 xp/hour gameplay xp because reasons. 4200 gold + 1600 gold (packs) + 800 gold (2 legendaries, in case you want to disenchant them and 800 dust is about 800 gold) + 100 gold (1 epic) + 200 gold (the 2 ticket which you forgot to mention) = value that is worth about 6900 gold. And thats just the first 50 levels.

Quote from Anomaly98 >>

 To put this in perspective, I have a wild account where I just do the daily quest and log out and I have 8300 gold over the 3 months between Scholomance and Today.

 So you made more than 90 gold per day just by doing daily quests? Wow you were really lucky with your dailies.

Quote from Anomaly98 >>

 I played ranked ladder for 1 hour (No bonus/less xp from wins or losses) and earned 400xp. So I assume 1 hour of ranked play is 400xp. This means that past rank 50, you have to play ranked for OVER 10 HOURS to earn 150 gold ignoring any quests.....That is awful.

As for the "free legendary" when we login for the first time after the changes is shown as a "reward" when it is something we used to get for FREE....(They re-worded something that was free to reward).

 As someone said, the new system is front-loaded, so its gonna be harder to get gold after lvl 50, but not that hard. Again with the convenient math... If you count your daily xp plus your weekly xp divided by 7 plus 1 hour gameplay per day, you get the correct picture which is 1 level up or 150 gold per 2 days. Which is still better than just doing dailies in the old system if we use average values. As for free legendary, you didnt get Silas?

Quote from Anomaly98 >>

 

TLDR: It is really bad past level 15, old system was way better.

 TLDR: The new system is better if you use the correct math.

Does not work this way. Secret Passage does not make you draw it, so you get the ticket in hand. Happened to me with the book of wonders in duels.