Hearthstone Players!

I've come to the unfortunate conclusion that the new ranking system means I now have to specialise in Wild and stop playing Standard.

On the first month, I got the same bonus stars in each. But I've struggled to get comfortable with a deck in Standard, tried to learn a bunch of different ones, and my win rate dropped. So my bonus stars dropped. Which in turn makes it harder to get a good number of bonus stars even when you do perform well unless you play, like, a *lot* of games.

As a result, this season I've now got 8 bonus stars for Wild and 4 for Standard. The "minimum bonus" for each tier is at least one star lower than required to reach that tier before your bonus drops to one star. So I can't make up those bonus stars in Standard unless I make up ten ranks, so presuming a 50% win rate that's 60 games. Which probably more than I play across all formats in a month.

Logically, it makes sense at this point for me to abandon Standard and focus on Wild, especially given that you now get rewards per tier you climb. The trouble is that, generally, I don't much care for Wild. But I don't have much choice now to play in a format I dislike.

This might be the beginning of the end of my long love affair with Hearthstone.

Was just DMing Jeb about this last night. I think I've had enough. The random bullshit associated with so many cards (most notoriously Zephrys and Alex DQ, but many, many others) and the continued meta-warping effect of just one class have kind of pushed me over the edge. I realized that, despite what I like about the game and the various cards and concepts, I really don't enjoy playing it that much. Games are frequently either so one-sided that it seems futile to start or too frequently turn on a single random event or topdeck. Unlike almost every other game I play, the bad beats stick with me far longer than any win. When I can name every Demon Hunter card before it gets played and get increasingly frustrated as it happens, I know it's time to move on.

Guess I'll be playing more Heroes or simply finding something better to do with my time.

YEAAAAAAP. I'm also a little tired of Standard Ladder. And as noted, the two major issues are "casinostone" where random effects making huge swingy plays take a lot of skill out of the game, and the best way to beat casino effects is to play a Face deck that just blows you out by turn 5.

I was doing the latter yesterday, with Spell Damage Shaman. Make dudes, kill the opponent. Takes about six or seven turns max. If they even hint at a recovery, Concede, and try again. I climbed from Bronze 9 to Silver 9 in about eight games, but it's boring. I want to play Reckless Priest. I want to play Quest Shaman. but if I want to win, I need to play Hunter, or Murlocs. It's a drag.

That said, my kids help me see how much is still great in the client. They love Battlegrounds, and we play it collaboratively. I'm getting an AppleTV mostly for the purposes of smooth screen sharing to the big screen for this. My 8yo beat a Dungeon Run for the first time and was super excited. He's plugging away at Puzzles, Monster Hunts, Challenges, and all the other modes we all forget about. They're great. Funny, cool music, cool choices.

I can recommend LEGENDS OF RUNETERRA as well. Solid title, plays very differently for those who like F2P CCGs on mobile.

And now this, just as I thought the meta had settled into a comfortable groove:

www.hearthstonetopdecks.com/17-6-balance-update/

Not saying none of these cards needed adjustment, but the game seems to have gone from an attitude of "never nerf anything no matter how broken" to "nerf everything, as soon as it's successful". Seriously: every tier 1 deck has taken a hit.

Since there are always going to be tier 1 decks, I can only presume the intent here is to constantly shake up the meta so players have to keep building and trying out new decks.

That's not the game I want to play. I want to learn a deck, get good with it, and climb the ladder. Combined with the ladder changes I was complaining about above, the game feels like it's becoming actively hostile to more casual players.

I don't think that's the approach at all. You have to have been playing regularly to appreciate just what a problem Demon Hunter has been. One out of ten classes has consistently been almost 25% of the top decks since it was introduced. The class has had cards nerfed five times(!) in one expansion. It had cards nerfed in less than 24 hours from release when it immediately shot to the top of every format: Standard, Wild, Arena. It's currently in the mode that Odd Paladin was during the Genn/Baku year: a nerf is applied; an alternative is found; the deck continues its domination. I was telling Jeb yesterday that the biggest concern I have is whether there was any sense of trepidation about DH before the release, since it was glaringly obvious that the class was overpowered to a ridiculous degree (nerfs within 24 hours, etc.) I know the pool was intentionally overtuned to make it competitive with the larger ones that the other nine classes have. But no one should've been able to play more than a couple games with that card pool and thought: "Yeah. This is competitive, but not crazy."

And that's one of the two key factors that keep leading to this series of nerfs: every card in the set is at least playable, if not great. No other class has that luxury and it's especially notable that the two classes with the worst Basic/Classic set (Paladin, burdened by Secrets and ineffective healing; Shaman, burdened by Overload and random Totem crap) are utterly absent from the meta.

The other factor is the 1-cost hero power. Again, no other class has that luxury. It provides superior versatility to every other class, not only because of the cost (usable on turn 1, rounds out any curve with either face damage or removing a key minion) but because it's an active hero power. It directly affects the board on turn 1 and every turn thereafter, unlike random, static powers like Shaman's or Warrior's. Clearly, the dev team didn't learn their lesson from the Genn/Baku year. Everyone remembers how oppressive the Odd decks were because of how powerful the upgraded hero power were. But people forget that the first terror deck was Even Paladin because of the versatility provided by doing for 1 mana what normally costs 2.

The other problem is what has been Jeb's main complaint: mana cheating. The ability to completely turn around games, not because of one card, but because of one card that enables 2 or 3 or 4 others by eliminating their restraint: mana cost. DQA, Galakrond the Nightmare, Skull of Gul'dan; they all do this and it makes the random nature of HS worse because a game that you've played properly and in which you've put yourself in winning position is suddenly taken from you because the opponent played 1 card that allowed him to draw and play 3 more. This is the same problem that made Mysterious Stranger so bad. Almost no one argues that that card was bad for the game. DQA and company are essentially the same thing.

So, no. The nerfs have nothing to do with regularly shaking up the meta. They've introduced a ton of problems to the game by adding a 10th class. But there were other problems with it that were actively hostile to casual players: You'd basically always lose if your opponent played X card. Or Demon Hunter.

I firmly have a foot in both camps here. They want to shake up the meta, and they utterly fucked up the development of Demon Hunter. The meta got stale very fast—this has happened a few times before. As examples, Even/Odd in the wake of Witchwood and Tuskarr Totemic making a huge mess post-"The Grand Tournament" come to mind.

There's always been "tiers" of decks (for what it's worth), but this recent expansion really saw a bifurcation of haves/have-nots. Demon Hunter, Warrior, Rogue were Haves and Shaman, Paladin, and probably Warlock were Have-Nots. Other Heroes had ways to win, but were pretty tied down by the dominant decks. Everyone needed to play things that could kill DH's early board, because you certainly weren't going to compete on the board with them. Rogue and Warrior got to play swingy effects for free (Rogue via Galakrond, Warrior via Risky Skipper.) Demon Hunter, as noted above, just had all the tools. Access to 2/2's on turn 1, free cards, and finishing with 6/7's that dealt 6 and the ridiculous Warglaives. You didn't use lose, you lost the whole game. It was barely contested.

I was actually wondering what happened at Blizzard to cause this. Was it by design? Get new players into the game with a juiced new Hero? Or was it just a bumbling mistake by overworked development team not seeing the forest of the game for the trees they were planting for DH?

Mana cheating has always been a thing. It's always going to be a thing. Getting effects for less than they cost is just a smart thing to do in a resource-limited format. But they are so pervasive they are impossible to ignore and maybe even tolerate. Puzzle Box gets you about 30 mana worth of effects for 10, or even more (luck) for even less (hence the Dragoncaster nerf). Dragonqueen Alexstrasza usually got you around 12 for free (assuming you are ok with an 8/8 for 9, so make it 10 free mana). Priest has Murazond and Soul Mirror to exploit, Rogue has Galakrond, Warlock's Quest, and on and on. I don't even think this is the problem!

The problem is "Casinostone." What you are getting reduced, what falls out of the Puzzle Box or gets lowered by Skull of Gul'dan is hugely swingy on the game.* Skull can save a DH 9 mana, or it can save them 3—or even less when Twin Slice cost 0. Galakrond stumbling into Kronx for 0 is usually gamebreaking; stumbling into Backstab? not so much. One of my followed Streamers has been streaming nothing but TwoBoxes.dec for the last couple months, and it's entertaining to watch, though I really hate being on the other end of these games. You feel like you are losing to a die roll. Why bother spending time thinking about what your deck can do when you can let hearthstone.exe do all that thinking for you?

_{*(An aside: Zephrys isn't random, you know exactly what should come out on any mana in any board state. I exploit this regularly to get Wild Growth for turn 3 in mirrors, to get Natalie Seline on 10 to kill the big thing, or Twisting Nether to clear, &c.)}

I think that's the greatest "sin" of this recent meta. They took the agency out of the player's hands and put it almost exclusively into the deck builder's hands. Playing the actual game well has never mattered less. Too many players have the option of relying on their decks to "save" them with undercosted, cheated-out, gamebreaking turns.

Agree with all of that. I took Matt's post to mean that he feels that Team 5 are nerfing cards mostly for the purpose of shaking up the meta. Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong, Matt, but that's what I was objecting to. I don't think that's the primary purpose at all. Nerfing cards DOES shake up the meta, by default, because some decks/classes will recede while others advance. (Assuming that a "nerf" doesn't just mean shifting the power of the card to later in the game, like Twin Slice, and then, uh, doubling it.) But the point should be to cut down on the complete coin flip games that Jeb cites and to make it so that the game returns to some semblance of having 10 classes, rather than 1 with occasionally 6 others.

There's been no other period in the game when a third of the available classes basically don't exist on a competitive level. There's also been only one other period of the game when the entire meta revolved around one class: Undertaker Hunter. Everything was tied to beating that class in the same way that everything is currently tied to beating DH. Warrior is the second-most powerful class and deck because of one reason: It usually beats Demon Hunter. That's it. It also would utterly destroy Shaman and Paladin (Risky Skipper!), if those two classes were actually played competitively. But they don't matter. Only Demon Hunter matters.

What's going to be interesting from a design standpoint is seeing what kind of cards get added to DH in August. They already have everything: great early and late minions; great removal, both targeted and AoE; great weapons; great spells; and, most tellingly in a card game, spectacular draw mechanics. What else do they need? Where's the weakness that might be shored up by a new set as Shaman and Paladin are desperately hoping for? What new thing could you add to DH that wouldn't simply reinforce their presence at the top of the table? Firebat was saying the other day that HS has basically become an exercise in playing Demon Hunter. It's the only truly viable class, with everyone else just trying (in vain) to catch up. You'd normally look at the class mechanics and think: "Hunter should wreck these guys because of all the damage they take." But, no, they have excellent life gain, too; better than anything Hunter has ever had, I might add, which is a specific design weakness that keeps the class from being like, well, Demon Hunter (Mage and Rogue also have this intentional restraint.)

Firebat has long had strong opinions about Hunter. He's referred to it as "oppressive," in that the entire game needs to built around whether or not Hunter's Hero Power and basic card level is enough to make the game a race of clicking HP and playing a dude/spell turn over turn. It's a dumb simple clock. You can see it in the Hunter builds prevalent now. Every time a Hunter opts to just ignore the board and bonk your face at 20 life is a turn that's for the ill of Hearthstone.

So you can argue Demon Hunter is "better" in that they do actually interact with the board quite a bit. The problem being they clean your side every turn and still manage to play a dude or two.

The DH nerfs may lead to another DH archetype to rise that you will find equally dismaying. It’s the new Barnes. You play Magtheradon on 4 and if opponent doesn’t have access to single target removal for that it’s game over. Because Mag will also clear the board when he pops. The slang for losing thusly is “getting slapped by the Magtheradong”.

I have no interest in Libram buff or evolve mechanic so I have been off those classes for a while. Been enjoying Priest and Galakrond warlock because there is decision making and counter play to be had. Sure I get scammed by mages and rogues from time to time, but still having fun with it.

When BG dropped I was all about that for solid month or two. They release new stuff all the time for that and I admit I don’t know best strategies for new heroes or how to beat build a winning Pirate Comp. What I find constraining about that game is Murlocs. Nothing beats board of 30/30 poison divine shield frogs. And it really sucks when you build some really well conceived Mech or whatever comp and final boss is Murloc guy. I have been top 2 with over 30 health and conceded once I saw the other guy had murloc nuts.

Guys, I'm not talking about Demon Hunter. It's all the other nerfs. Like, I know Corsair Cache is a great card but I don't see how it's game breaking. Nor is it random or unfun or even an auto-include. And engrage Warrior doesn't have delusional win rates against anything but Demon Hunter. I'm just not seeing the justification.

It's even more so for for Fungal Fortunes. I mean it's not like Spell Druid is terrorising the meta. Not everyone is even in agreement that it's a tier 1 deck and I've seen it backfire and pull minions. It's fine as it is.

I haven't seen enough of Dragoncaster to know, and for the other two I take your point about 0 cost cards. But the way Warrior and Druid have been targeted make it feel like they just want to take any performance deck down a notch for the sheer hell of it.

Bubbles beat Poison, Poison beats HugeDudes, HugeDudes beat bubbles. Murlocs can break this with the dreaded HugePoisonDudes comp. And they can make things interesting with the HugeDudesInBubbles. HugePoisonBubbleDudes is a problem, yes.

MacDirk Diggler wrote: The DH nerfs may lead to another DH archetype to rise that you will find equally dismaying. It’s the new Barnes. You play Magtheradon on 4 and if opponent doesn’t have access to single target removal for that it’s game over. Because Mag will also clear the board when he pops. The slang for losing thusly is “getting slapped by the Magtheradong”.

Yep. Seen it. There are enough control tools in DH that I've seen a few versions of this running around. FFS, it's a brand new class and they can make a better control deck than Paladin and they don't even need Wild Pyromancer.

@Matt: Usually when they pluck cards out of what is seemingly "the blue" like that, it's because of win rates based on that card's play AND what they anticipate is going to be a change based on other nerfs. They just nerfed DH, which means it's going to be weaker and, thus, Pirate Warrior could go on a Rampage (little joke there.) Similarly, one of the things containing Spell Druid is DH because they can't get going fast enough. With a lesser DH, they need to slow Druid's ramp capability or we're back where we were with Jadeworld.

Of course, as I explained earlier, I think the root cause of the DH domination runs deeper than a couple key cards. Just like the failure to contain Odd Paladin caused them to retire Genn and Baku a year early, I think they're going to have to make a more basic alteration to Demon Hunter before things will really change.

I agree with Jackwraith here—Spell Druid is not killing everyone because it's too slow and liable to be burst down once they finally have enough to get going. Once DH actually plays slower, there's all the more reason to think they will explode. Also, purely from a cost perspective, three cards for 2 is pretty nuts. Folks get mad when Warrior gets crazy Battle Rage value and that actually needs setup. Spell Druid can just get that for free before the nerf.

DH is still chugging along just fine, they just have access to so many cool effects. Wrathscale Naga is cool with the little Illidari they make, Altruis is still cool with Twin Slice, the best Silence, the best Battlecries, Demon synergies, &c &c. It's been what, like six nerfs, and they are still probably the best class in Standard. That's crazy.

And Naga is considered one of the niche, "non-competitive" cards...

So, thought I'd check in here. I mentioned to Jeb last month that I'd pretty much had enough of HS. The swingy nature of the game bugs me and I find that I really don't enjoy playing, except very rarely. But I had a ton of gold left over, so I bought packs of Scholomance (the dungeon in WoW is one of my all-time faves) and I've put together a couple decks with what I got.

One of the things I haven't been playing is Pure Paladin. Despite an influx of ridiculously powerful cards, there's something that irritates me about the class right now. I've thought briefly about just scrapping it and sticking to Warlock and Shaman, but it might just be my current disaffection with the game as a whole.

I've tried a couple different versions of Warlock: Pain and Handlock. Both of them use the new Soul Fragment mechanic and both of them, in turn, try to exploit Flesh Giant. I've won decently with both. Pain is much more inclined to self-harm (how weird is that phrase...?) with Darkglare and Vulture (You know... the two excellent cards that were rendered null and void by Demon Hunter?) and is more of a midrange/almost-Zoo approach. Handlock, instead, uses the normal board clears, along with Soulciologist Malicia and Void Drinkers. Earth Elemental without Overload is some good.

Speaking of which.... sigh. Totem Shaman was supposed to be a thing in Ashes because of how good Reflection is. But the problem with totems has nothing to do with what cards can be played on them. The problem is that they're too slow, largely because the overwhelming majority of them have no attack capability. When your opponent clears, he normally pays two costs: not damaging you and taking damage to his minions. With totems, he only pays one cost. 3/4 of hero power results, EVIL Totem, Trick Totem, Mana Tide, etc. can all be removed at almost no cost to the opponent. His first turn Battlemage can sit there clearing your hero power for the entire game, barring Searing appearances. That means it's tougher to gain board advantage for Shaman, which is a condition that a deck like Totem is trying to achieve to be successful. You can't compete with other minion decks determined to clear your board and you can't create enough threat against control decks because you can't do early chip damage that stacks up by the mid- to later game. The only thing that generally changes that is Reflection, which means you need to draw into it as one of the classes with the worst access to draw.

On top of that, the "big" card for Totem in this set, Totem Goliath, doesn't address that problem and adds another one. It's basically a vanilla 4/5 that costs 5. In other words, tempo-wise, it's worse than Chillwind Yeti. To not engage its deathrattle, your opponent can just ignore it. On top of that, you're paying TWO more mana for it next turn, which is yet another tempo loss for no appreciable gain when it's first played. If I have one fervent wish to convey to the dev team, it's that Overload cards need to be borderline broken to be genuinely viable. You know why Totem Golem was an insane card? Because it was so fast. 3/4 on turn 2 or coined out on turn 1. Yes, you were still paying for it next turn, but you got the jump on your opponent. That's an Overload card. Goliath is not that.

I've tried a couple variations on burn/spell damage Shaman, as well. It's OK. But it doesn't really compare to the current ability of Druid or Paladin to just romp across the board. It'd be great if Totem could be a genuine aggro deck since you now have to win by turn 7 (i.e. the Guardian Animals turn) but, again, without attack power, it's still too slow. One upside is that I think Devolving Missiles has become a prerequisite for all Shaman decks because of those two dominant classes and Aggro/Secret Passage Rogue with the everpresent Edwin. I was unimpressed when I first saw the card, but it's been quite handy the couple times I've used it.