Stealer Of Souls In Wild Mode Will Be No More!
Blizzard just announced that they'll be banning Stealer of Souls in Wild mode until he rotates out from Standard. See down below for more details.
Quote from BlizzardWe’ll be banning Stealer of Souls in Wild in a small update next week. Stealer of Souls will still be playable in other formats, and will be eligible for a full dust refund for two weeks after this change goes live.
The patch note for this change will be shared on Tuesday, and the patch itself is expected to go live on Wednesday.
Quote from Alec DawsonThe current plan is to adjust the card at that point in time and remove the ban. If any adjustments happen to Stealer of Souls before that (ex/ a standard nerf) we'll also re-evaluate its inclusion in Wild.
I doubt a preemptive nerf will ever happen just for Wild, so you'll have to wait until it actually gets bad.
But I always wonder why nobody of the dev team figured this out in the first place. It was so obvious...
Because normally they don't think about wild. They just leave it wild most of the time. There's a lot of broken stuff already in there. For this to happen it just means it was beyond broken and no choice other than intervening.
Good! Well played
xD you just ended a 10-page essay of complaints with this sentence 😂😂😂
the better thing to talk about would be the survey I was sent that basically laid out the framework for the mercenaries mode. I took screenshots of the questions and it was pretty lame. Mercenaries mode is going to be a roguelike random dungeon crawler using a team instead of a deck. They will be releasing 50-60 mercenaries to COLLECT(no doubt buy most of them) to go through solo content or head-to-head for items inside the dungeon that increase your mercenary's power/abilities. They asked questions about the art style, who would be the best promoter for the mode ie. celebrity, twitch personality. How likely you were to play the mode based on twitch views, collectability of mercenaries etc.
They are basically asking if anyone is even going to play this mode and how to best achieve possible revenue from it. I basically told blizzard if they don't focus on the reason anyone plays hearthstone and that's to play a CCG not random solo bs content that means nothing then they will finally lose me as a customer for good. Once I leave this game I will never play another blizzard-made game ever again.
They are trying to do too many things at once and they are doing none of them well at all.
Wild is and will always be a sh}tshow. I could care less if some kid wastes his time flipping a coin on a combo deck to try and get a legendary cardback. Nothing any other player does or has in the game affects me in any way at all. The only thing combo decks are to me is BORING.
Look ma.....I drew my combo and won....WOW AMAZING!
Look ma I rolled craps last night at the casino and won $1000....YEAH THATS MY BOY! Too bad you win or lose nothing in hearthstone so why would anyone even care?
Let's have a GOLD GAMBLING MODE where you put up 100g and go head to head best of 5.
Let's have a mode with permanent 15-second play timers
Let's have a solo mode where 10 wins against the AI nets you cosmetic goodies or better yet NEW VOICE LINES FOR TOONS. That you can only get with a gold entry fee.
let's have a tournament mode that awards special card art and costs gold/money to enter
Players need to push for things like this or you will just have more of the same boring garbage that you complain about.
They have dumbed down the game so much it's not even a challenge anymore and has become nothing more than a collecting game for me
nobody cared about stealer of souls before it was introduced so why would you complain that now its going to be gone from wild? Seriously who cares?
How many stupid if this than that, if and only if, if xy happens then ab happens if and only if xz happened bs mechanics do you think they can put in a game that eventually won't break another mechanic? That problem will never go away because you cant keep the game new and interesting forever with new conditions that do not ultimately bust one or more other previous conditions.
Blizzard knew this would happen when they released the game and if you think they needed playtesting to figure it you aren't too bright. They don't need playtesting when they have millions of playtesters already.
They wanted to see how many people would craft the card or buy the mini-set to abuse the mechanic. Desperate souls thinking they can get a legend cardback with a coinflip only have til next week to do it so you better hurry up.
I liked the fact the new achievement was easy to get and that's all I used it for because it was a bore-fest.
I made a deck where I get a 12/12 on turn 3 and beat the stealer deck 100% and it's another achievement deck.
I'm on pace to beat my free packs last expansion (175) with 180 this time around. LVL 200 on RT now and I just shake my head with all the things people complain about.
GET OUT OF MY HEAD GET OUT OF MY HEAD GET OUT OF MY HEAD GET OUT OF MY HEAD GET OUT OF MY HEAD
Yep, that's another interesting topic...
Will there be any reward for this new game mode or it's perhaps another battleground-thing? Are they going to somehow incentivise us to play this game mode? Or on the contrary, are they going to push us to play it?
I mean, for me, Hearthstone should be exclusively a collectible card game: all these new game modes not related with collecting and playing cards have no sense for me...
These new modes should be independent games, alien to Hearthstone completely, because you know: who grabs too much loses all. Blizzard should not bite off more than they can chew.
As another guy said: "Blizzard is spending a lot of their focus making a lot of content for casual PVE players which would be better invested in making the main game more interesting and accessible to the audience that they are trying to capture with this game mode. It also feels strange saying my favourite card game is an auto battler and a adventure game."
Exactly. The more they tie to the Hearthstone UI and more importantly, hijack the Hearthstone engine, the worse things are. Battlegrounds being slapped together on top the spaghetti code for Hearthstone has bitten them several times already. Battlegrounds should have been on a new engine and its own game.
Well we see where there limit is for how broken a card needs to be to get banned from Wild.
playtesting 101
which basically doesn't exist
Not for Wild. Wild is wild, it has always been meant as that. They don't playtest wild and they don't design the crads with wild in mind.
I've posted this again, but mark my words. This is the prelude to a new format in Hearthstone. One between Standard and Wild, where you will be able to play the sets from the last 4-5 years. Just wait and see.
Yep, and that format will replace the useless classic: each month only will be playable specific sets from previous years, changing each month
Just make it work only once or twice per turn. There's a few ways.
I'm not proposing an exact wording, but if it only works once, maybe twice per turn, that stops the massive cascade and doesn't trivialize OTKs. It'd still be a good card for combo decks, since having a few 0-mana cards is really potent.
Folks are acting like a nerf of this card is impossible, but it isn't. Don't get me wrong, maybe these suggestions would be non-trivial to code, but the concepts behind them are easy to grasp, and probably short enough to write into card text.
there were a lot of nerf possibilities that could kill the toxic deck without killing the card that has an interesting mechanic, and they decided to ban...Blizzard became too lazy to solve problems? at least we’ll have dust refund, but now that they opened a precedent that broken cards in wild mode can be banned, standard can possibly have this same countermeasure in case of broken cards or mechanics
While I think there are potential nerf options, getting an immediate ban so that it doesn't wreck the format before the nerfs can be implemented just makes sense.
That's actually a great precedent. If they know they have a problem with a card, a temporary ban followed by an eventual rework is the best of both worlds. It puts a rapid end to games being ruined, while potentially coming up with more elegant solutions to problem cards.
They don't want to nerf a card that works in standard and is broken in wild. That's why they banned it, then either they also have to nerf it in standard, which for the moment isn't apparently the case, or they'll nerf it on rotation.
But considering what Wild is, they definitely don't want to prioritize it over stadard, or change standard because of wild
How exactly should they nerf it? There is no easy way to nerf this card. Cannot just up the cost, can't make it battlecry instead of static effect.
If I were a game developer, I wouldn't change the concept of immunity (which is quite obvious and self-explanatory) not even this specific card, because that would be a mere band-aid that would only serve to hide the real problem.
Make no mistake, the problem with this card is the same as always: the cost cheating problem. We must avoid trivializing the cost of cards, either in mana or health, as in this case.
The concept of PAYING in health instead of mana is interesting, especially in the thematic philosophy of warlocks. But paying means paying, if you don't give what is asked of you, you get nothing.
If you are immune and CANNOT lose health, then it should be impossible to make any health payments, therefore it is as when you have no mana to pay and therefore cannot play any more cards. Remember that the game already prevents you from playing cards for life if you don't have enough life to pay the cost! There is already a precedent.
Taking damage would be a different thing, since an immunity would prevent it, but if in the upper left corner of a card where its mana cost is usually shown inside a blue gem, there is now a drop of blood, that means that you have to give health as payment for playing it...
Practical example: imagine that a card is published whose text reads: "Battlecry: During the next turn, your opponent cannot spend mana". Then, even if your opponent has 10 mana crystals, or even if he has ways to recharge them, he could only play cards whose mana cost is zero on that turn, because he could not consume mana no matter how much he had.
I hope that it has been clear. Honestly, it would be the most elegant solution, and also, it would not only solve the problem of this card but it would have corrected the underlying problem at its roots, that is, it would have fixed the problem forever, even for future cards, as it would not be a simple patch or temporary solution.
This is a great reply. I’ve always thought Hearthstone should treat damage and life stealing as two separate forms of reduction like how they did it in MtG. If I remember correctly life stealing there could get around armor?
They could easily do the same here as you already described. Make the blood cost mandatory whether you’re immune or not. And Immune effects would only affect physical damage and damage from other spell schools. This way the card can be played as designed, and not exploited.
I'm not great at this game, but how about this? Battlecry: change the cost of the cards in your hand from mana to health (optionally, it could be for one turn only).
It would still allow for combo turns, but it would no longer be possible to draw and play much of your deck in a single turn, as only your initial hand would benefit from the mana-to-health exchange.