Hearthstone

[J1M]

Well that's dandy. I thought I'd have to buy something (would never happen).

Well, if you want a key prior to open beta, you do actually need to buy something.

It doesn't need to be something new, but you do need a Battle.net account with a game attached to it. This is to prevent people from making dozens of accounts.

 

[Great Deceiver]

Well, turns out I've had an invite since early October sitting in my email inbox unattended. Installing now, I've been hooked on Duel of Champions lately, but hit an annoying wall at higher levels. This will be a nice change of pace.

 

[Kem0sabe]

Received my beta code but it says it's already in use, cant seem to register it.

 

[Great Deceiver]

I played this all day today, got the Mage to level 20 and tried building some decks with my peasant cards, but it's not really working out. It seems I always lose to rush decks and can never get enough traction to land my big spell combos with cards that boost their damage (maybe part of the problem is the 2 duplicate limit). I have no chance against most priests even at my shit Gold level, the only reliable wins I can get are vs Druids.

It seems to me that the Mage passive is really bad compared to most others. What's the consensus on this?

 

[Zed]

mage is all about surviving with +spelldamage/card draw minions and playing board clears/cc (flamestrike, polymorph, blizzard, cone of cold).

 

[J1M]

I played this all day today, got the Mage to level 20 and tried building some decks with my peasant cards, but it's not really working out. It seems I always lose to rush decks and can never get enough traction to land my big spell combos with cards that boost their damage (maybe part of the problem is the 2 duplicate limit). I have no chance against most priests even at my shit Gold level, the only reliable wins I can get are vs Druids.

It seems to me that the Mage passive is really bad compared to most others. What's the consensus on this?

You could try adding some minions with enrage to your deck and using your hero power on them. There should be some free neutral ones. I have a feeling pyroblast would also really help, so start saving your dust.

 

[Zeriel]

Also, the mage hero power is one of the best, maybe even the best. It's just one of those things where it is going to seem weak if you are getting thrashed in general.

 

[Great Deceiver]

I think the free coins are pretty hard to come by, at least at first. Compared to Duel of Champions, it's much more grindy - you earn coins there if you lose as well, albeit less so than if you win, but in Hearthstone you only get coins if you win, at least in constructed play (haven't played arena yet). It takes you 30 wins to buy a pack, and for a new player like me, I'm winning around 50% of my matches, so that makes roughly 60 games, at around 15-20 minutes each; that's a 15-20 hour cost for 6 cards, not generous at all.

Not feeling enthusiastic about this.

edit: I feel dumb because I just remembered the daily quests. They must give a good chunk of change.

Also not to sound entirely negative, I like the interface quite a bit more here compared to DoC - there's a suitable game log and the deck building interface is a lot better. It could use a graveyard though, if only to see what has been dropped before.

 

[1451]

Without a graveyard I always have to be on edge, "did he frogged me twice" , "did she sheeped me?" etc etc.

 

[Zeriel]

You could also just remember those things. It's not that hard. The bigger problem with no graveyard is the lack of mechanics that make graveyards interesting--recursion, banishing, et cetera. Hearthstone really is babby's first TCG.

 

[J1M]

I think the free coins are pretty hard to come by, at least at first. Compared to Duel of Champions, it's much more grindy - you earn coins there if you lose as well, albeit less so than if you win, but in Hearthstone you only get coins if you win, at least in constructed play (haven't played arena yet). It takes you 30 wins to buy a pack, and for a new player like me, I'm winning around 50% of my matches, so that makes roughly 60 games, at around 15-20 minutes each; that's a 15-20 hour cost for 6 cards, not generous at all.

Not feeling enthusiastic about this.

edit: I feel dumb because I just remembered the daily quests. They must give a good chunk of change.

Also not to sound entirely negative, I like the interface quite a bit more here compared to DoC - there's a suitable game log and the deck building interface is a lot better. It could use a graveyard though, if only to see what has been dropped before.

You should be using your gold on the arena. This mode gives you temporary access to a lot of cards you don't have yet. It also gives you the chance to win lots of gold when you get good at it.

 

[Damned Registrations]

And if you only play arena while you have a quest (or 2 or 3, depending on how shit you are) you don't even need to be that good to just endlessly play arena.

 

[Brotherman Bill]

You should spend gold on arena if you enjoy arena. Otherwise its a losing proposition unless you get an average of 5 wins or more (the average wins is obviously 3).

As for your deck, just remember your curve. It's always tempting to fill your deck with only big dudes but 2 and 3 drops wins the game for you.

 

[Damned Registrations]

Well, it all depends. You do want some kind of plan, but depending on the cards and hero ability, you might want a curve skewed in some fucked way.

Also, my last arena run with a warlock deck has shown me the light of summoning portal. That card is actually quite good under the right circumstances. Dropping 12 mana worth of creatures for 4 mana is fucking brutal. I thought I might even get another 9 run until I got fucked twice in a row (first by back to back flamestrikes followed by Ysera, and then by a turn 3 6/8 questing adventurer courtesy of a priest with way too many bullshit cards. And the final loss was another mage of course. Would love to see the win/loss ratios on those in arena, I bet they're retarded.

 

[Berekän]

Man, Rogue early game is so OP, feels great finishing off a Priest in arena before he can do jack shit

 

[Brother None]

Finally got into the beta. This game's simple but complex enough to be a lot of fun.

But man, priests are so cheesy. I lucked into two shadowforms in my packs, built a shadowpriest deck and just went up from 0 to platinum just by playing for a couple of hours. It almost feels like cheating. I was spamming the sorry button constantly as I pulled off random power word or mindcontrol cheap moves.

Still, good fun. I should master some other heroes and probably play some arena though. Ranked doesn't seem like the best playmode.

 

[Zed]

druid without any swipes or starfalls is fucking garbage. my worst arena run yet, 1-3. fucking horrible draft. now I cant play arena for another 3 days or whatever. too bad you can't sell an already activated key.

 

[Mrowak]

From my experience both Druid and Rogue are a fucking joke. They have maybe 1-3 turns in mid or early game to take foothold or else they are dead. Don't know what Bliz smoked when they came up with how those classes work.

Contrast that with Cleric and Mage who can take the upper hand at any point of the match.

 

[Zed]

rogue is my favorite deck. you kinda need a coin and a good draft of 2-cards to get those combos going though. perdition's blade don't hurt either.
I personally think rogue is better than hunter and druid at least.

druid can be good with aggressive spells, but yeah it's definitely one of the weakest if not the weakest deck.

 

[Damned Registrations]

Rogues can put together absolutely disgusting combos. Get an auctioneer on the field, and start throwing out things like preparation, backstab, shadowstep, fan of knives, eviscerate and shiv, you'll do more in one turn than your opponent can do in 3. Especially if you also have a spell damage source out.

Druid gets shut down too easily because of card advantage and how cheap removal is in this game. Whats the point of buffing up a minion when it's gonna get silenced basically for free, or mind controlled, or outright killed, or hexed... If I ever make a druid deck I'd build it around cards that summon extra creatures, and the spells that buff everything you control. If you can get 4 creatures with death rattles to summon treants out at once, you've pretty much won, and it's not that hard to do. Definitely a ton of awful druid cards though, and the hero ability is terrible as well.

 

[Zed]

preparation and shiv are a waste of cards IMO.

 

[Brother None]

Preparation is made for combo cards obviously, and as plays go you could do worse, but at the cost of a card it's a little much. Maybe if you're doing gimmicky questing adventurer things, but who the heck falls for those anymore.

 

[Damned Registrations]

Well it beats the shit out of ennervate, and rogues have plenty of good cards to use it with, like fan of knives or sprint or all the combo cards. And, again, auctioneer makes it free. Dropping something like an auctioneer followed by preperation/coin and fan of knives is huge. Auctioneer makes any cheap spell insanely good. And you can't get cheaper than free.

 

[Brother None]

It's free in the sense wisp is free. Sure it's got benefits but you're wasting space in your deck. This perhaps matters less for rogues, but even then, that's a gambit way to play. Which is fine, I suppose, many gambit-based options in Hearthstone.

 

[Damned Registrations]

Wisp doesn't give you a free card when you play it with auctioneer (or anything else for that matter, barring some weird warrior deck so it has charge and you run it into an enemy minion that turn with that one creature on the field) so it's not really comparable. It's a card meant to be used in synergy with other cards in a certain kind of deck, you can't judge it as a stand alone thing the way you would, say, a 3/5 taunt. And even putting that aside, having a spell cost 3 less isn't totally irrelevant. You could drop an assassin's dagger on turn 2 or something, and that kind of tempo is valuable. It establishes board control and can give you card advantage by using an expensive card against cheaper cards. So it has uses both early and late game, which is more than you can say for most cards, which tend to just sit dead in your hand if you happen to draw them at the wrong time.