All right, the new single-player content is fun.
I usually only play tavern brawls to one win, but I’ve actually played like 50 games of this week’s brawl. It’s just a bunch of archetypes of the new decks, but it’s fun to be able to try out a unique fully formed deck compared to most tavern brawls. I wish they’d do these more often.
Having played significantly more of the new single-player content, I take this back. Fucking christ, who thought that was a good idea?
I gave this Hearthstone up when the Old Gods expansion came along, boy did it turn the game to a pile of shit. Perhaps time to go back?
Hunter seems to have become a decent arena class - I’ve gotten 5 to 7 wins in each of my last 6 runs with hunter.
Yeah the new Rumble Run is fun at first, but can get frustrating. The shrines are vastly different in power level; the cards you get may not at all synergize with your deck/shrine; and the AI’s decks get crazy good real fast.
Managed to beat it yesterday with the Paladin shrine that damages your opponent for 5 when your hero takes damage; got enough weapons and healing to get through the early levels fairly easily. And then I got the shrine boost that gives you a second shrine, which made the seventh level a breeze and the eighth fairly easy.
Not sure how much I’ll play it going forward.
Balance update coming out in a while
So it seems like “man, druid is too strong with ultimate infestation and spreading plague. Let’s nerf some classic set core identity cards!”
Level up is targeted specifically at odd paladin, which probably makes sense, but it sort of feels like overkill to basically remove it from that deck. Maybe +2/+2 would’ve been a better route to take.
Edit: Oh, I just figured out what the saronite nerf was about - shudderwock. That one makes sense.
Leeching poison kind of murders kingbanes rogue, doesn’t it?
Note that two of the nerfs are for classic oldies, and that the other three all directly reference a build-around-me legendary/deck (Baku, Shudder, and Kingsbane, respectively). Sensible nerfs? Sure. But if I shelled out for a Shudderwock Shaman and it turns out that this broke its back, I’d be pissed.
Yeah, I don’t like those druid nerfs at all. UI and spreading plague are what make druid oppressive. You’re murdering the basic class archetype (ramp druid) in an off-target attempt to nerf current druid power. Which leaves druid kind of screwed when rotation comes up. Plus ramp druid is the most fun way to play druid and kind of kills the identity of the class.
Saronite Chain Gang and Level Up are rotating out in April, and I never play Wild, so this seems too little too late to me. Still I get why they are doing it - Saronite Chain Gang with Shudderwork combo is OP, and the nerf only really affects that. And Level Up is one of the keys to Odd Paladin, probably the strongest archetype this year.
I see their point about why they are nerfing Leeching Poison, but Kingsbane is rotating out also…
The druid ones are probably the biggest impact nerfs, since they are classic. Having read the developer’s notes, I see what they are saying, but wow those are big changes. Nourish may still be playable, but Wild Growth seems like it would be almost useless.
Where I tend to play (15-13) you don’t see a lot of Druids, but I understand they are much more common higher up.
Actually, no, they could’ve been more precise in the change, because it also affects any sort of handbuff deck, because people are pretty sure it summons another 2/3 no matter what, not a copy of the original minion.
The changes went live today which is surprising, usually they’re very slow moving about these things.
From what I see on forums, apparently Kingsbane rogue is one of the best counters to big priest. I’ve been playing wild more lately and big priest is already an annoying and frequent matchup. It sounds like it might get unbearable if this is true. I’m pretty tired of having 6+ statues dropped on me in a match.
So I celebrated the nerfs by rolling out my odd paladin deck - it is still good. (Replaced the level ups and rejiggered a few other things to get a mech/magnetic theme going).
Yup, I missed the handbuff/Keleseth part of this nerf, which is pretty embarrassing considering I play a Heallock deck sometimes. Shudderwock is still the biggest effect, though.
After listening to some streamer’s reactions, I do appreciate more that Blizzard made this change so soon after the expansion dropped, which is not their past behavior. It is good that they are being more proactive.
I finally broke down and crafted Zilliax for just this reason.
I got Zilliax in one of those 4 freebie packs they gave for last expansion. I also happened to get the paladin mech resurrection legendary spell before. I guess I could try crafting some sort of odd mech paladin, especially since most decks I want to try in the current expansion costs like 8000+ dust.
Does it seem like they’re making decks that are more reliant on more legendaries? Particularly specialized legendaries that only work in one sort of deck. Most of the rastakhan demo decks they had from that tavern brawl had 3+ specialized legendaries. The disco warlock I want to make probably costs more than building a wallet warrior deck from scratch.
I just had a bizarrely stupid opponent. I’m playing wild around rank 12, he’s playing kingsbane rogue. He decides to cast leeching poison on turn 2 after he used kingsbane, and he was at full health. So I think “okay, so the guy somehow doesn’t notice the big change notice when he logs in, and also doesn’t notice that leeching poison is only 1 mana now, but whatever, he’ll figure it out”
Then on like turn 8, he attacks me with his 7/3 Kingsbane, and then… after he attacks with it, he applies his other leeching poison the kingsbane, so that it does nothing at all.
I’m a little baffled. Rank 12 isn’t super high, but shouldn’t that guy be stuck at rank 20 with those moves?
I agree - disco warlock, kragwa shaman and dragon warrior seem to require a lot of legendaries.
Sounds like you have all the legendaries you need for Odd Mech Paladin (assuming you have Baku). I’m not quite sure how good the deck is though…
Spell Hunter only requires DK Rexxar and the legendary weapon (and probably Zuljin).
Even shaman is working best for me. That requires only two specialty legendaries (Hagatha and Kalimos), plus Genn, Lich King and Al’Akir.
I noticed that a few of the meta analysis sites, like tempostorm, hsreplay.net, others seem to have significantly different ideas of what the top decks are right now. Does anyone know how they’re calculated and why they’re so different, and which is the most useful guide?
The main difference I’m aware of is that VS and HSReplay use actual game logs and stats to determine the meta. I think VS puts some weighting on how common a deck is to build their meta snapshot. HSReplay pretty much just seems to use raw numbers.
TempoStorm is completely different in that (I think) they have a team of experts and use more analysis to determine what the top-Legend meta is. It’s not very useful for folks grinding 20-5 or even 5-Legend - HSReplay or VS (using the All-Ranks or 5-1 Filter) is way better for that. With the caveat that I think VS is having a pretty bad data shortage problem - since they don’t have a deck tracker app built in they rely on folks signing up via HDT to get data.
The other thing that I try to think about if ladder grinding is the length of the games. A 55% win-rate deck that has 5 minute games is better than a 60% win-rate deck that has 12 minute games. Although I pretty much just hit 5 every season and then play whatever I want - the grind to Legend doesn’t interest me since it seems to be purely about how many games you can play.