3003

In Heroes of the Storm they actually make lots of small changes, very often. They are constantly slightly nerfing the most popular heroes, and buffing the ones that aren’t used. I love it. Keeps things interesting too. I would have preferred they take that approach in Hearthstone.

3004

I don’t like that approach as much in Hearthstone. Even if you’re spending real money, it can take months to build a particular deck you want to play. I would hate to have everything nerfed by the time I finally collect the cards I’m looking for. I think that would give an advantage to the players who have probably paid many hundreds of dollars to get a complete card collection. I think it’s also much more difficult to balance Hearthstone with small iterative changes. A minor change to a single card can have a huge (and not easily predictable) effect on a wide range of things in this game.

3005

Ok, maybe I was a little too glib. I agree that when Blizzard nerfs, it often takes a sledgehammer, and I’m not sure why. Starving Buzzard is Exhibit A: it is now one of the worst cards in the game, completely unplayable. Blizzard isn’t stupid, it has to know that’s going to happen. Weird.

Also, this kind of sucks for people who like to play warrior: now it’s control or nothing. Which for most people is nothing, since control is super-expensive (it’s called wallet warrior for a reason). I guess there are other decks out there (face warrior, dragon, fatigue), but not at any competitive level.

3006

I like the nerf but it is fair criticism on the nerf levels. They often go from “exploited over powered” to “useless” without hitting the bits in between.

3007

I just hope we see other high skill ceiling decks emerge. I do enjoy mindlessly climbing Aggro Druid to rank 3 while watching Netflix, but I also enjoyed the fact that I had been practicing Patron for almost two months now still hadn’t come close to really playing it expertly. Game needs decks like that.

3008

Miracle rogue was like that…and we all saw what happened. Keep your head on a swivel, freeze mage!

3009

Well, if high skilled decks are like miracle or patron in just “get a huge OTK combo”, then no thanks. 50+ damage in one turn where you had no board is total bullshit, and I’ll never understand anyone who thought that was good for the game.

Also, I think the nerfs of this and Buzzard were that hard because they oppressed the potential design spaces for beasts and smaller minions, respectively. I rather have them do one large nerf now, than several smaller nerfs in the future.

3010

I must say the timing on this was perfect.

I only started playing Hearthstone last month. I feel pretty sheepish ignoring a two+ year old 100+ page thread on QT3. For some reason I thought it was just a silly iPhone game. I didn’t realize you could play it on a PC, in addition to a tablet. I feel like amiddle age guy who realized about 1968, that the Beatles actually made really fantastic music and weren’t just another cute boy band. So I’ve been making up for my ignorance by playing a lot and reading a lot of stuff on the net.

Still why couldn’t that have changed it so that Warsong commander only gave charges for cards played from your hand.

However, the one thing that has been consistently frustrating for me is dealing with Warrior and Priest who use Grim Patrons, especially with the WarSong Commanders. Anyway, I was going to write a post asking advice on how to deal with them. It sounds like there isn’t a magic bullet to stop them. Hence the nerf.

3011

So, just in case you felt Hearthstone didn’t have enough of a random element, this week’s Tavern Brawl is here to roll the dice. You pick a class, they give you a deck full of random cards, and then they randomize the cost of those cards every turn. The randomization is weighted toward the low end…in my first game, I never had anything cost more than 4. And that includes Dr Boom.

It was kinda fun to play a couple of times, but I don’t see any future in playing this one much more.

3012

I’m pretty sure the cards won’t get cheaper than their original cost also. I just played one game so far and it was pretty nutso. My deck had 2 Tirions, Emperor Thaurissan, Skeleton King, Kel Thuzad. My opponent had two Confessor Paletress. So the legendaries were flying around. My favorite part was when his Paletress summoned a Nozdormu and the next 4 or 5 turns we both flailed around ineffectively during our 15 second turns. I’ve decided that I do prefer these wacky pre-built randomness brawls more than the constructed brawls.

3013

My first game I had Atonidas and Gahz’rilla on the board by turn four. Understandable insta-concede from my opponent.

I usually have fun with the random decks, but I feel I can probably ignore this tavern brawl now. The pack I won had Ragnaros in it though, so the 400+ dust was nice.

3014

I envy you and hate the pack-generation RNG!

3015

Well, if high skilled decks are like miracle or patron in just “get a huge OTK combo”, then no thanks. 50+ damage in one turn where you had no board is total bullshit, and I’ll never understand anyone who thought that was good for the game.

I know the feeling… it’s the Druid Combo that I hate most of all, for some reason. But, playing Patron was much more interesting to me than either standard midrange control or face hunter, for instance. You’ve really got to make tough decisions about when/where to put out threats to buy time for your kill shot.

Take your example of “50+ damage in one turn where you had no board.” This is extremely hard to accomplish in patron warrior. You need to have, in hand, two Frothings, a Warsong Commander, probably a Patron (unless your opponent has flooded the board on his end with minions that have enough toughness to survive more than one whirlwind effect), and two or three whirlwind effects. You need to have played Emperor in order to be able to lay all that out in a single turn. The enemy needs to have no taunts on the board, or weak enough taunts that they can be removed by something other than the Frothings, who absolutely must be able to hit face.

In other words, that ‘one turn kill’ is something the patron warrior has been setting up the whole game. And meanwhile, if you’re the opponent, you know it’s coming. You’ve probably identified that your opponent is a Patron warrior rather than Control, even if he hasn’t played a Patron yet, because he is playing heavy card-draw minions (Acolyte, Gnomish, etc.) rather than laying on massive amounts of armor. (The difference isn’t quite as easy to spot as Handlock vs. Zoo, but it’s not too hard.) You know it’s imperative that you shut down his card draw. Do not let him get more than one card off his Acolytes. Do not leave him with a bunch of damaged minions off of which he can score a big Battle Rage. You need to put on pressure so that he can’t leisurely keep his Frothings and Patrons in hand, and instead force him to make some kind of earlier play. Guess what? When he does that, he’s absolutely sweating bullets that you don’t have AoE to wipe him off the board and put him back to zero, minus whatever minions and whirlwind effects he blew to stave off death.

Of course it sucks when the big combo happens, but speaking as the guy who tries to make that combo happen, it’s not like I’m sitting there for 8 turns cackling gleefully. I’m desperately trying to get the cards I need and to stay alive long enough to pull it off. If there’s an objection to this kind of deck, or Miracle Rogue, I think it’s less a question of ‘balance’ or ‘fairness’ than of aesthetics: how does it feel to lose to a big combo-heavy blow versus incremental minion actions that are visible on the board?

3016

This is a good post. Ideally, the game would allow and balance both kinds of decks: board control decks that slowly build up pressure vs. burst decks that buy time until they can pull off their combo. However, even in a perfect world where those decks are balanced, people are going to remember the games they got OTK-slammed more vividly than the other games, which leads to a perception that the game is unfair.

Blizzard is thus stuck deciding whether it wants a fair game, or a game that “feels fair.” I think it leans toward the latter, which sounds bad but makes sense, because demoralized players stop playing.

3017

I still get a kick out of this game sometimes.

3018

It just sucks that the single deck that played completely differently than every other deck was also the combo deck they had to nerf, and I don’t know exactly how closely tied those two concepts are – will that always be the case? Will every deck end up as a Tempo deck? When you play Secret or Druid or Mech Mage or whatever you pretty much have the same gameplan and the match dynamics don’t feel that different.

I do think other high skill decks already exist that also play very differently and have very high skill caps. One that comes to mind are some of the quirky mage decks that use lots of duplicate and echoes to produce certain combos that won’t be relevant for 5 or 10 turns later, if not more. Though I’ve never seen any of these decks in a tournament or even in a list of the top 20 meta decks.

3019

New patch notes confirm… it is done. I’ve played my last patron warrior game :-/

3020

It’s not like Patron was the only special and unique snowflake that ever existed. It’s an OTK-ish deck, and there have been plenty of those, each with their own flavor. And I think there have been, and in some cases still are, decks out there that are at least as distinctive. Handlock and Miracle Rogue are obvious examples.

3021

Miracle Rogue is still out there? I thought it went the way of the dodo with the Gadgetzan auctioneer nerf. All I see now are oil rogues.

3022

Patron Warrior and OTK Warrior were effective decks when they worked, but the number of times they didn’t provided the balance. It was hardly a guaranteed win, so I don’t see the need for a nerf. They might as well nerf Combo Druid or Tempo Mage, which also require having the right cards on the right turn