Hearthstone

I decided I will only craft non-WoG legendaries because I fear this will happen

Still caved in and crafted NZoth and Veklor, but Rag and Xaril will have to wait.

 

Crafted golden N'Zoth, because why the fuck not.

Was a good decision.

 

Pay to win.

 

Another legendary!!!! Mukla 2.0. I think it's time to cave and craft N'Zoth.

 

35th-ish WotG pack opened today, still no orange in sight.

I guess it's a normal state of affairs? That's probably the reason for the mercy timer - without it most players would need way more than 40 packs to open their first legendary. Therefore most players will get their first orange only at pack no. 40? Just random thoughts.

 

ur cursed

 

get on my level

 

I've opened roughly 80ish OG packs and pulled 5 legendaries. Good average, I suppose... too bad they're all shit. Would really like to get Yogg for the fun but don't want to burn 1600 dust for RNG fiesta. Will probably stop buying packs at the end of the month.

 

I'm at 6 in like 110 packs. Huhuran, 2x Ragnaros, Mukla, Bogeymonster and Moklorok.

 

You stole muh Ragnaros.

 

The tavern brawl is a complete repeat of the first Mechazod. The exact same decks. Fucking nerfed Arcane Golem and everything.

 

Holy fucking shit, kill the retard that came up with this brawl.

Someone give me some cheap paladin deck (inb4 N'zoth control, huehue, so funny) so I can finish muh quests.

 

Brawl isn't so bad unless you're paired with someone who doesn't understand combos. Only two paladin decks being run are N'Zoth (huehue) or aggro/flood with the 3/3 that gives divine shields to 1 health minions.

 

3 aggro shamans 3 mid shamans 2 miracle rogues in 8 games.

Well that was fun but I am done with this expansion and Hearth in general. This sorta proves that their design team is either incompetent or uncaring, to try and slow down the meta for longer games only to have a deck that is even faster than Secret Pally dominate the meta is quite an achievement. Netdecking ruins all card games, even physical ones (MTG used to be a lot more fun before the advent of every set being picked apart on day 1). Obviously I could also play super aggro but aggro in hearthstone is worse and more mind numblingly stupid than playing mono red goblin decks in MTG (and that is saying something). You are essentially playing slots, 0% thought involved.

Arena has 100% lost its charm due to the programs hand picking cards for you which defeats the entire point of the exercise.

Still its a fun little game if only a bit more thought went into it, maybe in the next two years I'll try it again.

 

RIP

 

I played wild for the few couple of days. It's actually more fun than standard. Fuck netdecking.

 

I don't see netdecking ruining the game, nobody's gonna willingly play decks that are suboptimal. The real problem is that Blizzard just can't get the class balance right to save their life. After each expansion some are always completely broken. This time around it's aggro shaman, probably the most broken deck in HS history.

Not only are Totem Golem, Tunnel Trogg, Flamewreathed Faceless and Thing from Below utterly absurd but shamans have also all the mana unlocking cards so they can generate value up the wazoo.

Class balance constantly being all over the place means the meta is always infested by cancer decks. And that's what's really ruining the game - when you face 5 aggro shamans (or Secret Pallys/Face Hunters before) in 10 matches you lose the will to live. You can always jump on the bandwagon and play them as well ofc but I personally loathe playing aggro decks. Grinding with Face Hunter last year and zoo this one was a fucking ordeal.

Blizzard's unwillingness to adjust cards much more frequently was always infuriating for me, tho they did nerf a lot of shit last time. But even then they seem incapable just to bring cards back to balance, they almost always completely obliterate them (with the exception of Knife Juggler and BGH, they did a good job on those).

And Arena is weird, can't really put my finger on what's wrong with it. I just don't enjoy it. Maybe because it seems as an environment where only really good players who put a lot of hours into the game can expect to do well and everybody else is just fodder. Nothing objectivelly wrong with that ofc.

Overall tho the biggest problem for me is the price of packs. Because they're so retarded expensive I'll never be able to play the game the way I'd like - having a wide card pool to experiment with. I'll always come back after each expansion to check new stuff but I don't see myself sticking for long.

 

Wut? If there's nowhere to copy decks from how can you tell it's suboptimal? You'd play what you see fit and adapt and change and learn what works and not by yourself.
Or you'd play whatever you find fun.

Playing suboptimal decks in Hearthstone is only unfun exactly because of netdecking because you can't do shit if you get facetarded in 4 turns.

 

But...you CAN copy decks from the various sites. What's the point of hypothesizing about a world without the Internet? None.

 

Assuming the internet didn't exist (and you could still somehow magically play Hearthstone online) the strongest cards would still rise to the top in terms of frequency played. And for those who couldn't figure it out on their own rather than looking at a website they could simply observe the decks they play against that beat them.

The internet is not to blame. The lack of viable/quality cards is to blame. The developers constantly feed into this by following the same archetypes that were established in Vanilla designing cards around that. Their laziness in the face of pro-active balancing started 'Standard' mode which further undercuts the ability to slowly develop new archetypes over time because cards from earlier expansions/adventures are rotated out.

 

remove classes

 

If they would stop going a step too far in buffing bottom-tier classes then things would be fine. Shaman got far too many buffs from both the last adventure and Whispers. Druids were nerfed into borderline worthlessness. I expect Priests to get absurdly OP cards in the next round.

 

Aggro will always have a top tier variant or at least close to the top unless the design team aggressively releases sets to hyper buff early game control (like a 2 mana 2/6 taunt neutral minion)

The first issue here is the resource generation. In Magic and most Magiclike games, really aggressive aggro can get mana screwed/flooded due to the fact that they don't have any mana control engines early game like control and combo decks have. In Hearthstone, aggro will ALWAYS play something which means they will always start with board control. This brings us to the second problem which is that creatures double as removal unlike in Magic where defenders choose what to trade. This makes tempo absolutely imperative (there is also an upside to this since you don't get those confusing MTG games where there are 10 creatures on each side of the board). The third and last issue is that aggro roll their dice before the opponent. RNG is an integral part of the game but cards like the jugglers or animal companion can give the win to aggro instantly but even if they don't its possible for aggro to be fast enough that the control RNG cards don't matter.

The whole design of the game pushes towards aggro unfortunately. You want early board control and enough burn to finish the job, that's the winning strategy of like 80% of "competitive" decks.

 

Durrr, magically we're not assuming anything. And I'm not defending Blizzard or saying their design is good, it's not, the fact that netdecking is so effective shows that the design is actually very bad.
But I'm saying netdecking is shit and makes the game worse.
And yes, you could observe and learn, that's how games are supposed to be played, not by copying winning decks and reading mulligan guides.

 

My point is ultimately there would be no difference in your ladder experience. It would simply take a bit longer, maybe an additional few weeks, for the 'netdecks' to appear with frequency. Something tells me you wouldn't take solace in the fact that people did it the 'proper' way when you're still getting reamed by aggro shaman.