Hearthstone Players!

I never stopped playing HS, but it was a rough go for some time, especially if Standard Ladder was your thing. After these recent releases you were really hemmed into certain Heroes playing certain decks to succeed, and when you lost it was an ugly tragic experience that could really drive folks away from the game. It didn't feel fair. You lost, and lost badly, and you couldn't tag it with a bad draw or not having that Legendary, it was like playing tic-tac-toe when your opponent is playing chess.

As an anecdote, I played Priest (high tier capable) and Rush Warrior (mid-tier), full juiced, I have the cards I want, and would get to Gold 2 or 3 and then just bounce at 50:50 wins/losses and barely make it to Platinum season after season. I could predict how I would lose, and watch it happen with regularity.

Come a recent season, with a few days to go, I crafted Oh My Yoggs and played Menagerie Paladin (high tier) and just rolled. I was the unfair guy now. Ridiculous streaks. I probably went 30-5 and rolled into Diamond 8 before the season ended. Just nuts. I felt like I'd been wasting my time playing Priest or Warrior when I could have been doing this. The deck has a lower mental burden and incredibly robust (I make tons of mistakes). Everything was easier. Playing Priest is work. You have to get the most out of every mana, every time, with every card/decision. Playing Paladin was a romp, by contrast.

A few nerfs later, Paladin is still really quite good, but not 30-5 material anymore. The meta has shifted to Priest for Control (there are numerous builds, each somehow more annoying than the last), Hunter and Shaman(!) for Aggro, and Warrior (handbuff) and Rogue (Miracle) still hanging around as Midrange options. Demon Hunters are reduced to OTK and Warlocks are in really rough shape, Jackwraith's efforts notwithstanding. Mages are mages and might burn your face off, but there is a thematic push to Frost for them that isn't doing the class any favors. Druid... Druid is just there. They have a Token build that can just explode and kill you turn 3. They have a big build that manage to never lose once it gets rolling unless they misplay into Fatigue (see Priest, above). But neither deck really wows and is worth being overly concerned about.

On other fronts, Battlegrounds is great. They tweaked the Quilboars into being less nuts, so you don't see everyone in the group trying to get to Chargla first, hero power be damned. You can actually go with other themes and have a chance at winning, which is a welcome change.

The single-player content is kind of bad right now if you're like me and don't give a shit about WoW lore. All kinds of (I guess?) thematic stuff from WoW getting put out and it does nothing for me. Bring back the Puzzle Labs and Dungeon Runs!

Duels is a mess, but that's by design. Build a deck that might be broken and try to roll stuff that breaks it. You either go 2-3 or 9-3+.

Classic Ladder is a cool throwback. Everyone has the same collection and it's fun. I killed someone with Force of Nature/Savage Roar like the olden tymes. In turn, I have lost to Leeroy Jenkins into Shadowstep into Leeroy Jenkins into Shadowstep into Leeroy Jenkins into Eviscerate for 22. Such is life circa 2014.

Wild Ladder was a clusterfuck until a week ago when Stealer of Souls got banned. Now it's back to just its normal insanity.

Arena? Beats me, haven't played in years.

jeb wrote: Arena? Beats me, haven't played in years.

Just won an Arena ticket on the XP trail. I shrugged. I value my time more than the "fun' that engaging that part of the game will produce. And my efforts have done Warlock no favors. Mostly been playing the Dude deck, when I've been playing. Still with a 73% win rate with the most losses to the new Force of Nature (Illidari Inquisitor.)

I did end up using my Arena tickets that have come up on the quest chain, mostly just in the hopes of getting more gold or a lucky pack. I bomb out quickly because I'm not really good at Arena and I'm still not sure the time investment is actually worth it. One such lucky pack landed me a Firemancer Flurgl; the new, mostly useless Shaman legendary. I put a Murloc deck together and started toying around with it in Casual. It's not awful, but there's nothing particularly notable about it. It's also funny that, once again, the legendary Murloc is probably the worst/most superfluous card in the deck for the same reason they always have been before: lack of draw.

Flurgl does 1 point of damage to all enemies when you play a Murloc. Well, that means holding Murlocs in your hand until you can get Flurgl on the board, which is something no Murloc deck should be doing beyond holding off in the face of obvious board clears or having something to reload with. You have to keep tempo with Murlocs and if you hold cards, you're surrendering the board and much of your burst potential. Since Shaman still has the worst card draw in the game, you often can't build up a surplus of cards in hand to take advantage of him. So, he's basically a River Croc with a Landslide effect. But, wait!, you say. What about the Caravan? Well, I've been using the Caravan and it's as bad as everyone expected. I've played 10 games with the deck and I think I've had the Caravan survive to the next turn... twice? As the devs probably expected, if it does survive, it's amazing, since you're drawing two cards/turn as long as it lives. But it almost never survives and there are no taunts or freeze effects in the current batch of Murlocs to try to keep it alive.

You can do some cool tricks with Fishy Flyer and the Flying Carpet replacement (Murloc gets +1 attack and Rush) and I included Instructor Fireheart for a back door assist (landing a Hex to convert a 9/15 taunt into a 0/1 Frog, for example) but it's still a pretty sad sack tribe deck, as it almost always has been and Flurgl is better off as 400 dust unless something amazing shows up in Stormwind. It might be different if he triggered when you summoned a Murloc, but that would probably be catastrophic in Wild. (Once again, we see how cards usable in one format are ruined if not banned in another.)

The Dude deck is still as capable as ever. I lost my first game of the month to a Druid who got ahead of me with the Guardian Animals routine, but then won six straight, including 4 Mages whom you normally wouldn't think would be impacted so heavily by a weenie deck. But all of the Divine Shields (Seedcloud Buckler is my pick for the most underrated card when the mini-set was announced) makes your chip damage a constant presence and the power of Conviction (just like the priests say!) has enabled me to dish out 18+ damage in single turns to win games.

I know no one reads this thread anymore except me, Jeb, and Matt, so I'm just putting these words here for something akin to posterity, I guess.

I've been playing this game since the second week of the closed beta, with some breaks along the way. One of those breaks was extensive over the past year, in that I'd decided that the game was just too expensive to be involved with. But I got back into it in June, as noted in a couple previous posts, and had decided that I wasn't really trying to be competitive. I'd get up to Gold rank or something like that and that was enough for me. I just wanted to play decks that I'd enjoy and tool around with the game a bit.

It's in that frame of mind that I have to say that I've never been so discouraged in the opening days of an expansion as I am now. The proliferation of OTK or near-OTK decks created by the Questlines is insane. The quests are so easy to complete (routinely by turn 5 or 6 against every one I've played) and bring such an enormous power infusion that you regularly lose on turn 7 of every game, if not sooner. But even worse is that, as with most OTK decks, the term "non-interactive" doesn't begin to describe them. Remember how Team 5 always stressed the idea that minions were key to Hearthstone and minion interaction was what they wanted most decks to rely upon? That's all now in the past. Playing minions is actually detrimental to the person opposing the Questline player because many of them help your opponent to finish their quest (Mage, Hunter, Warlock.) There was a post on Reddit about two Quest Mages facing each other where both of them played and killed their own minions every turn so that they didn't help the opponent with their quest. But Rogue is also a culprit because it literally doesn't matter what you do when they can, once again, draw their entire deck that's filled with Garrote cards and snuff you out as early as turn 4. But there are also horror stories floating around about Demon Hunter's OTK with Ilgynoth and I've had Shamans OTK me with their quest no less than 5 times in the past two days.

I'm not sure how they solve this, since this is a much broader problem than just one class being out of control. It's an entire type of card across all 10 classes. It's also a core issue with the game's systems (e.g. minions aren't important and are often actually detrimental.) But that excitement I usually have for trying out new decks or cards is utterly absent after the few games I've played over the past two days. In true can't-beat-'em-join-'em fashion, after losing 5 games with the Shadow Priest I was so eager to try that I actually forged some previous cards to be able to play Priest again, I switched to Quest Paladin and immediately won a couple games; the first being against a Shadow Priest. Team 5 seems to be eager to try out more and more unusual stuff in recent months (Watch posts, etc.) but all of that stuff seems to be failing; either like the posts did because they were so onerous that they had to be nerfed into uselessness; were already useless when delivered (Caravans); or are now so overwhelming that the game simply isn't fun unless you happen to be (and enjoy) playing an OTK deck that basically ignores your opponent. I guess in one way they succeeded: They turned Hearthstone into a solo game. Congrats?

I still read this thread, but every time I do it reinforces my decision to give up playing a couple of years back.