Hearthstone Players!

Well, that Mage deck is now my officially most hated opponent. The RNG is so goddamned deep and bullshit that I want to fucking punch my hand through the screen. His Deathrattle weenie gets an Arcane Explosion to kill my board. His Firelands Portal (not from his deck) gets an Abomination to kill a later board. He cast FOUR Ice Barriers (and was at 6 and in fatigue when he won). Fucking hate it to fucking death fucking FUCK.

I opened about 40 packs.

I got the quests for Priest, Mage, and Paladin, and the Nesingwary that toasts everything that costs 3 or less in your deck. I am not sufficiently advanced in Theorystone to see how that's going to help me. I guess I could thin my deck to some predictable draws, but when the game seems to be "get wrecked by tiny dudes rushing you" that seems like a suboptimal strategy.

I was able to pull a Mage win out of a fairly shit quest deck, but it took a few frustrating tries to do it. Paladin did better. Murloc Shaman is just stupidly strong, so I won a batch of things with that last night to clear my quest log.

"Adapt your Murlocs" is frightening, as a Windfury can just end the game. I hammered someone down from 20+ on T6 when I windfuryed up a decent board.

Opened 67 packs and got two legendaries - the mage quest, and the warlock 2/2.

I know it's super-early, but I am pretty sure the Rogue quest is way OP, to the point of being broken. I've played against it five times and got crushed every time. The issue is that, if the Rogue player know what they're doing, there's nothing you can do to mitigate it or stop them from completing the quest. Once they decide which card they want to play four times, it's just play/shadowstep or play/brewmaster, and it's back in their hands before you have a chance to do anything about it. And once you're facing down a swarm of 1-2 mana 5/5's it's Game Over.

engelstein wrote: I know it's super-early, but I am pretty sure the Rogue quest is way OP, to the point of being broken. I've played against it five times and got crushed every time.

Indeed. It's so obviously OP that I can't help but feeling we must be missing something. There's no way Blizzard couldn't have seen that coming.

engelstein wrote: The issue is that, if the Rogue player know what they're doing, there's nothing you can do to mitigate it or stop them from completing the quest. Once they decide which card they want to play four times, it's just play/shadowstep or play/brewmaster, and it's back in their hands before you have a chance to do anything about it. And once you're facing down a swarm of 1-2 mana 5/5's it's Game Over.

See, this is the problem with the overall design. Since the game lacks interaction on your opponent's turn (counterspells, instants to shoot what he's activating, picking your own blockers instead of Taunt), all the initiative is on his side. Whatever actions he takes are virtually unstoppable. The devs' "counterbalance" to that is that if there's no deck manipulation, people are totally dependent on the draw to get those kinds of decks to function. So you're dependent on luck to make sure his deck doesn't go off. Or you just have to play mad aggro to make sure you kill him before it does. That's part of the circle of life of CCGs: Control>Aggro>Combo>Control but HS uses RNG to make that work, such that it becomes less about skilled play than coin flipping. This why pros like Lifecoach are dropping out.

Hmmm, I have a shitload of dust saved up (like 13k), maybe I should get in on this Rogue bullshit.

At the least I'll get it back in the eventual nerf, right?

I've beat a few rogues with my dinomancer hunter. Last game I crackling razormawed my taunting nesting roc into windfury and pounded away. At the end he was down to 6 life and no board facing my bow and two big bad wolves when he conceded.

I hate the priest 40 life BS, although I have beat it as well with the dinomancer.

Not real fond of playing against the shaman elemental crap either.

I'm trying out Dinomancer Hunter as well. Care to share your current deck?

I can't see there's any reliable counter to that Rogue quest. Therefore I was unsurprising to learn that the word is it's stomping all over everything with ridiculous win ratios: people are reporting 3:1 and 4:1.

Obviously I had to craft it to see for myself. And it's nuts. First game I got a fairly lucky hand. This is how it played out

Turn 1 - nothing
Turn 2 - Novice Engineer, Shadowstep x 2: so I've played the Engineer 3 times, drawn 3 cards
Turn 3 - Coin, Brewmaster, Engineer: so I've fulfilled the quest
Turn 4 - Preparation, Quest card, Swashburglar (which summons Patches), Stonetusk Boar

So it's turn 4 and I've got five - five - 5/5 cards on the board, two of them with Charge. Opponent resigns.

Someone in Blizzard's testing department is going to get the sack over this.

Ha. Unfuckingreal. Now comes the question: Clearly, everyone underestimated this, even the pros (Lifecoach dismissed it as the worst quest in the set) but there had to be enough testing in-house that approximated this. I mean, these are basic cards (Engineer, Boar) and standards of the Rogue deck (Shadowstep, Prep), especially for combos that quests are clearly intended to drive. Do you think they made it so easy that people would actually try it and spend money/dust for the card? That's the only vaguely reasonable approach I can think of, barring a complete and utter failure on the part of their internal testers. I mean, obviously, said testers did a faceplant on both Spirit Claws ("We thought it would go in control decks!") and Buccaneer ("No one thought 7 attack power on turn 1 (with Coin) was that bad!") I mean, once you've tried it once with minions on the board, that's all it should take to know that it's crazy. That's what it took for me. I was still dismissing it yesterday afternoon until I started seeing minions in play become 5/5s. But it only took seeing that once to know something was wrong.

Jackwraith wrote: It's not "minions that you play are now 5/5s." It's ALL minions are 5/5s, including the ones sitting on the board or that get transformed, otherwise. I Hexed a 5/4 Novice Engineer (she'd taken a hit from one of my Recruits) and it became a 5/5 Frog.

Wait, does that mean that Equality + Consecrate or Pyromancer + Equality won't clear a board of Rogue quest 5/5's? Because if they stay at 5 health and ignore Equality - or any other health-modifying spell - the same way a board full of Warleader-buffed Murlocs does (i.e., a Murloc's health is set to 1 and then immediately raised to 2 due to the Warleader), then that would be the cherry on top of this bullshit sundae Blizzard has served up. Cripes, did they learn nothing from Yogg?

Anyway, to keep some semblance of balance, minions in play should not be affected, and maybe not even minions in hand. Second, their health and attack need to be set to 5 and 5 so they're vulnerable to silence and spell effects like Humility, Polymorph, etc.. FFS, the fact that 5/5's are immune to Hex - one of the most powerful hard removal spells in the game - is beyond ludicrous.

Not sure about Equality effects. That's a good point about the Warleader phenomenon. But it wasn't that the minion was immune to Hex. It did change to a Frog with Taunt. It just changed to a 5/5 Frog with Taunt because that's a minion and the Cave makes all their minions 5/5s. Maybe I should put a Paladin control deck together just to test this out. If it does ignore Equality, then someone made a(nother) serious mistake.

Ok. I made the quest Rogue deck and binged on it late last night. Took it from rank 15 to 11 and then back to 14. I am not saying its not the new cancer, and likely to dominate the meta for a long time unless nerfed. It is ubiquitous, if I had to guess I would say 40% of my matches were mirror. It crushes the dreams of anyone hoping to win with a control deck for sure. But.... it can be beat. Here are some examples:
Pirate Warrior
Weenie/Egg Druid
Murloc Buff Druid (its shockingly good, maybe better than the weenie Elemental/egg version)
Murloc Shaman
The Questing warrior CAN beat it. With Brawl and saving removal.
Tempo Mage
Zoolock (the quest warlock is slower)
Hunter. Period.

I was playing HS on computer and watching HSDog stream his tempo mage (face mage) last night on iPad. It had a sick win rate and crushes the rogue. It runs two ice blocks and one pyroblast. The game plan is you draw and barely control the board hoping to last to turn 10 using fireballs and frostbolts on their face. Some incidental minion damage or some Medivh Valet or pings, plus a pyroblast turn 10, makes up the difference. Without Reno or many decks running heal it works way better than you might think. Control warrior eats it alive though and probably priest.

But to sum up. The Rogue is breaking the game and dominating the meta. But If you play decks that get stuff out early you can rush down the Rogue, who you know is likely best case completing on turn 5. If his board is empty and he preps out caverns below he can only play a couple of minions.

Personally I don't use Moroes or Violet Teacher in my Rogue. I run the 2/3 elemental that gives 2 more 1/2 and Firefly so I have a backup way to get the extra minions needed to complete AND fill my hand with bodies for post-quest. Obviously the best targets for shadow step shenanigans are 1. Novice Engineer 2. Swashburgler.

Edit: right after I posted this I made egg Druid. It's gooooood. Th 3/1 that drops two weenies. The 2/2 guy who adapts. Firefly. And adapting a full board is game over. Better than savage roar. Wind fury or +3 attack is brutal. Will experiment with the Murloc version when I get tired of winning with this one.

This is everything about Hearthstone design for the past few expansions (bonus points for dinosaurs):

There are times when I wonder about the makeup of the HEARTHSTONE development/playtesting team internally. Do they make everyone play every kind of hero? Or is one person "the Hunter player?" I assume it's the former, but it would make sense is the Priest player was really good and Spikish, so Priest cards end up nerfed before release, and the Rogue player is a goob that's really into bad weapons and doesn't notice things like Oil and this debacle.