The Road to Level 50 - What's Your Choice?
Everyone playing Hearthstone, casual and hardcore alike, has been on the road to reach level 50 in the new Reward Track, where we will get the new Hero Portrait of our choice, out of the 10 main Heroes. Most people will get there in the life of this expansion, so we pose this simple question: If you have already reached level 50, which portrait did you go for, if you are still working on it, which one do you have your eye on?
Guldan or Illidian.
I already either have nicer skins or prefer the default for all classes except priest and demon hunter so I chose priest
I chose Priest to remember what i hate the most
Valeera, no hesitation. Her 1k portrait is awful (only playable in pirates deck imo). OG Valeera is BAE, but a change is always nice. And Maiev is not a rogue! She is a warden!
But Rogue's Fan of Knives and Shadow Strike are actually Warden abilities in WC3
if you have very few alt skins (e.g. because f2p) and trouble choosing your reward, then maybe this is for you.
i'll try to elaborate my complete train of thought.
also, despite being a veteran player, i have no hero @1000, and only very few at 500 wins.
the main questions for me were:
- how many skins do i have for class x? and which ones are these?
- which ones might i have in the nigh future? (by winning 1000 times: https://hearthstone.gamepedia.com/Hero#Honored_heroes)
- compared to the best-looking skin for class x, how much of an upgrade would i get in comparison? and how much if i include golden heroes or honored heroes?
below is my thought process, in case you want some similar guidance. for those who want to stop reading: the final two contestants were valeera and garrosh, and valeera won.
let's go through them by class:
- DH: art looks good and i have no alternative (only base), plus farthest away from 500 or even 1000 wins, so ... quite a front runner. however, base illidan looks already good, the upgrade would not be huge.
- druid: i have lunara, but that one looks so silly i prefer classic malfurion. unfortunately, this skin does also look bad, barely better than vanilla malfurion, if at all. somehow druid has really rather bad skins. elise is the only one that looks really nice, imo. (rogue skins are actually also bad)
- hunter: i got aleria windrunner as a gift long time ago. she looks better than this rexxar upgrade imo. even without her skin i'd say the difference between normal rexxar and this one is not huge either.
- mage: i have no alt skin for mage at all (despite a plethora existing) and jaina does look good here! jaina joins DH in the frontrunner competition. one slight downside: normal jaina does already look pretty cool to me. also 1000 jaina looks very good.
- paladin: i have an alt (arthas), but i dislike that skin and rarely use it. unfortunately the skin here is not a big improvement over plain old uther, imo. slight improvement only. 1000 uther looks pretty good, though, so maybe i get there one day. until then i can alternate between classic uther and arthas.
- priest: i have tyrande. nough said. also anduin looks really shitty here. choosing this skin would be a downgrade even compared to classic anuin, if you ask me!
- rogue: i have maeve. normal valeera looks terrible. maeve looks okayish, but not great. 1000 valeera looks like a carnival clown - apart from the fact that i might never reach 1000 wins as rarely as i play rogue. skin here is looking really awesome, imo. this skin would be a big jump in quality for rogue skins. so choosing her over maeve would be quite a big upgrade. this is moving to the front of the pack, though illidan and jaina are still in pursuit, since i rarely play rogue, but valeera is my current front-runner.
- shaman: i have the murloc guy and i love him. top notch voice acting there :P so ... not really much of a question for me. otherwise this would be also getting in there with the front runners, since the skin looks pretty cool.
- warlock: i have nemsy and i am in love with nemsy. skin here looks good, but 1000-guldan is not too far down the road and he looks pretty good, too. almost all warlock skins look good, if i ever get one for free (in whichever way), this skin would be obsolete soon. this guldan skin would at latest be superseeded when reaching 1000 wins, but for me already nemsy beats this guldan.
- warrior: i have only the normal garrosh skin and it does not look great. 1000-garrosh looks like garbage to me. the skin here.... looks not super flashy, but actually pretty good. i think i would gain here more than when choosing illidan or jaina, for which i also have no alternate skins.
so front-runners:
valeera (for which i *do* have a decent looking alt-skin) and garrosh
followed by illidan and jaina, for which i have no alts.
but bot illidan and jaina look pretty good in their classic skins. so it's garrosh vs. valeera.
i chose valeera, because while garrosh here looks notably better than classic garrosh or 1000-garrosh, it's not the flashiest of skins.
but for rogue the skin here is by far the best rogue skin available and the distance to the next best skin existing is so big that i accept choosing a skin for a class for which i already have an alt skin and even choosing a skin for a class i rarely play these days (but when KB could still leech life i played a ton of rogue in standard and wild). so i hope i'll warm up to rogue again one day and then i'll have a really cool looking skin ready!
that's how i made my choice. hope it helps.
I see your point. Got 500 garrosh and will be choosing soon between garrosh and valeera. Probably gonna choose warrior, cause that OG vanilla armor set is in pair with arcanite reaper so cool but after reading your post I’ve started to consoder rogue again
my post is only meant to provide some guidance for decision making, not to promote rogue. not saying that's what you took from it, but just in case you did ;)
since people will generally have some different sets of available skins and everyone has some different tastes in looks, everyone needs to do the process by themselves. i just tried to maximize my personal perceived gain in aesthetics :D
I didn’t mean any harm, just the way you describe it made me consider rogue skin. Thats all, its written quite well
demonbane is the dopest
I don`t like the artwork of all of them. I took Jaina but I will never use it.
Same here
While it's nice to have some flashy stuff on your portrait, the drawing quality i arguably a lot worse than on the originals and it's not like Blizzard don't have a good collection of prime drawings lying around already.
I still like Illidan and Gul'dan thou, so I went for DH knowing that I will probably never get him in golden or get any alternative skin for him. I'm glad to see that so many people seem to like the new portraits at least :)
Rexxar since I don't have any other Hunter portrait :) Also I assume the next season we will get another pick :)
Always Rexxar
off topic a bit but that's cool you and your sister play and it seems like you 2 are quite fond of the game to get to 50. envious.
valeera just because she have only 2 portrait
How much time left, boys?
Next expansion? Maybe 2 months or so.
Oh, thank God! I'm lvl 40 and was a little nit nervous :/