Be Excellent To Each Other

I'm back into WoW in a pretty big way (the Warlords of Draenor expansion is awesome, like, fifty gazillion times better than the pandas), so Hearthstone will be on the back burner for a while.

I'll keep up with the Hearthstone daily quests for gold, (for card packs come the Goblins vs Gnomes expansion), but that'll be about it.

Can't see myself dropping any cash on Goblins vs Gnomes card packs now either.

Guide and info on cards that have been announced so far

http://www.polygon.com/2014/11/20/72473 ... -new-cards

I agree with what EBG said a couple of pages back, so many new cards when IMO the Naxx stuff hasn't 100% bedded in yet is really going to shake the game up again, but in potentially quite a random and messy direction (especially since so many of the cards themselves have random effects).

I'm also slightly concerned that the cards are getting a teensey bit over-powered on the base stats side of things, with a lot of the cards Trump was saying words to the effect of 'this card would be pretty good even without the text'.

The worry there is that Blizz could quite easily devalue older cards in favour of new cards, simply by making the newer cards give more bang for their mana buck, pushing folks toward purchasing card packs to get the new cards.

I'd also be quite sad if decks like Miracle Rogue became completely non-viable even in Casual, because they're such good fun to play.

We will have to wait and see though!

14 and 2 stars last night - today one of my quests was to win 2 games with hunter which i have just succeeded at and I'm at rank 17 so that must have been around 10 losses for those 2 wins :-(

And back to 14 2 stars

I'm ruining my stats by getting up to, say, 12, then changing decks for a quest and screwing things up.

Why not change to Casual for quests if it's a deck/class you're not so comfortable with?

Personally I haven't played a Ranked game for days now, possibly over a week, even.

Still doing my daily quests in Casual (sat on over 1200 gold at the moment), and I am enjoying those games, plus it'll give me a nice war chest of gold for when the new cards hit in December. Don't see much point in buying packs at the moment, when the new cards are going to be shaking everything up so much, and I want to have as many of them as possible from the off.

Game-time wise however, WoW is back on the rampage in a serious fashion.....

Coz I often win the first one with a deck I made in 20 seconds and then think it might work again and it doesn't. Also, ultimately, I'm not too bothered and find it more challenging.

Think my Paladin deck is gonna need to get the quest in Casual though.

More interesting is that playing about 10 games today I didn't encounter a single rush deck. The meta seems to be moving (from a small sample size) to more controlling decks (though no Warriors today, weirdly).

Golden legendary and level 13 3 stars

Someone is getting all the good cards! Last ten packs I have had all common apart from one rare each pack and one bonus epic that I'll never use.

Interesting stats from Blizzard



Hitting level 10 puts you in the top 7.5% of players.
Anything above 15 is top 25%.

I wonder of those 75% how many are sitting at 25 because they've not played a single ranked game or they're dormant accounts.

A useful thing to see on that would be where the break is at 20 (which is all you can drop back to after playing some games during the month)

These are the results of a recent reddit poll

#gid=0">https://docs.google.com/a/thoughtworks. ... edit#gid=0

Obviously they are going to be massively skewed to better players, as it's a pretty fair assumption that if you are active in the reddit community, you are likely to be more interested in the game and play it more often...

I played a Casual game. Hunter v. Hunter, and I won.

The person was mad.



I translated what he said:



I've seldom encountered such butthurt.

You going to report him? That will get him temporary ban.

I genuinely cannot be arsed. I found it vaguely amusing that someone could get so angry over a card game - the curiosity of what they might say is the only reason you accept the friend request.

In all fairness playing against EBG makes me feel the same way.

You think I'm a dirty wog? Racialist!

Here's the deck that a mate at work is currently at Rank 5 with, and rising!

No such fancery as screenshots but he did hand-write it from memory, albeit with some personal riffs on the names of the cards.

Haunted Creeper = 1/1 Spiders
Harvest Golem = Harvester Golem, summoning up images of country pubs
Flare = Flair, far more stylish than any of our Flares
Kill Command = 3/5 Damage, does what it says on the tin
Animal Companion = Random Beast

etc etc....

It's not Net-Decked from anywhere and as you can see it's a Deathrattle variant on one of the favoured Hunter decks out in the meta at the moment, with Baron Rivendare potentially causing all sorts of trouble (that's why he's got the Golems in there).

By his own admission when it fails it fails really hard, but he reckons he's managing at 55-60% win rate with it, and interestingly says the games aren't really much harder at Rank 5 then they are at Rank 10.

Can't argue with results, Rank 5 is quite an achievement, but he's nearly out of time this season to get much higher.....

I'm currently L11. Should be able to get to L10 I think, but that's going to be it I expect.

If I hadn't started with mage, I would probably be a tad higher.

I was L12 but got bored and made some new decks.

I'm now L15

Whoop!

I've entirely given up ranked for this month, I didn't have enough time in the end so instead focussed on farming gold for GvG. What I'll actually do is go Arena with it for better gold->card value while being able to experiment with some of the newer cards in the draft. I have about 800g at the moment and I'll keep at it until the expansion is out.

I got to 9***** in the end, but have now dropped down to 9* again.
Today is the last day of the season, so I doubt I'm going to get higher than that again, so 9***** is my result for the month

What did everyone else end up as?

I've got 1100g saved up now, I'm going to do the same and spend it in arena when GvG drops.

Rank 12 for me, and haven't even played a Ranked game for the best part of three weeks, just about keeping up with the daily quests in Casual, and I wouldn't be doing that but for the GvG expansion being close to release and I want to have a decent stash of gold to launch into a decent number of card packs. (Currently sat on about 1650G.)

This is also known as 'The WoW Effect' Only enough time for one game obsession at once!

Hmmm decided to play Ranked for my daily quest, needed five wins and got five on the bounce.... TBH the games were a hell of a lot easier than I've been getting in Casual!

Rank 10 then

12 was my highest.

I have definitely decided that casual is a lot more fun so I will be sticking to it in future, apart from going for the months card back.

9th December for the expansion.

Should have about 2000 gold by then, so can hit the ground running with 20 decks.

TBH with this many new cards coming in (and me not playing Hearthstone that much at the moment) I think I'll just what others make of the new cards and take it from there, TO THE TRUMP-O-TRON!

Gallery of all GvG cards: http://imgur.com/a/GCNo4

In a word, fuck me. It'll be a whole new game.

Also three nerfs coming with the patch. Get your dusting wands ready:

The following balance changes will be made in an upcoming patch:

Soulfire now costs 1 (up from 0)
Soulfire, along with fast and powerful minions, allowed Warlock rush decks to get ahead on the board and stay ahead. We’ve upped Soulfire’s mana cost by 1 to slow down the Warlock rush deck just a bit and allow more players time to react and interact against the Warlock.

Gadgetzan Auctioneer now costs 6 (up from 5)
Gadgetzan Auctioneer’s ability allows for a player to potentially draw many cards for little cost. Card draw and card advantage are important to the game—overall, games are less interesting when a player draws their entire deck. This change brings Gadgetzan Auctioneer’s cost more in line with its power level.

Flare now costs 2 (up from 1)
Flare allowed the Hunter an advantage versus decks that revolve around Secrets, while also allowing the Hunter to draw a card for little cost. We want to encourage a variety of decks in Hearthstone. With this change, Flare will continue to be useful against decks playing Secrets, but will be weaker against other decks

Cheerio Miracle Rogue, Hunter slightly less bullshit, and Warlock slowed down a bit.

Also a card that steals secrets! About fucking time. Fuck you fucking secret mage/hunter.

WTF

Cant link but about card 5 in the list is 'V-07-TR-0N'

7 point card , with charge and mega windfury - attacks 4 times - its a 4 / 8 so on turn 7 if you dont have a block out this card by itself can hit you for 16 points , if you can buff it in some way to add a few more points it could be an instant kill ?

It's only called by Mirimon's Head, which needs 3 mechs on the board and destroys them. Hard combo to pull off.

Now about card 20 and got to Mimi - iron , which seems to suggest that V-07-TR-0N is a card created if you have 3 mechs + this so I guess thats better to stop it than it being an actual card to play

Soulfire change seems reasonable, if you get the right hand early on the free Soulfire (i.e. you don't discard anything) can be seriously nasty. It won't destroy Zoo that's for sure.

Auctioneer nerf is a shitter, Miracle Rogue has already been nobbled in various ways without the need to do that IMO. It's not exactly rampant on the ladder after all......

Flare is a very powerful card in the right context but I'm not convinced it was that much of a problem.

But yeah, overall the game is going to get turned upside down, I will rely on folks like Trump to explain it all to me.

Flare change is fine - its one of those cards you *need* to have as a hunter if your facing enemies with secret cards but if you are facing anyone without its a 'waste' of a draw - the mech to steal secrets may work out as a better card overall (I do like firing off flare when a mage has stacked secrets or its great when they are almost dead and you use it to knock out that 'dont die' secret card and then finish them off - in that way having it as a 2 point card stops me playing it along with King Krush :-( )

Saw an interesting statistical breakdown of the GvG set on reddit about how on average, accounting for probability, you'll need to open 272 packs on average to complete the set. I think this also took into account disenchanting dust along the way and putting it back into getting the last few cards.

Apparently we'll get a free Arena run and 3 GvG packs to start us off, so that's at least 4 packs as a starter. Roll on 8th Dec!

I'm really fucked off about the Auctioneer nerf, for a laugh I decided to try and do my daily quest out in Ranked with Miracle Rogue, two wins with Rogue required.

Dropped from one win off Rank 17 to Rank 20 before I got the two wins, got absolutely fucking destroyed, and I know how to play this deck reasonably well. The meta has turned against this deck massively, the Naxx cards did the job.

What the fuck are they nerfing this card for? Even before the nerf it's mostly a dead (but fun to play!) deck, with Auctioneer at 6 they may as well just delete Miracle Rogue from the game.

It seems to me like a pre-emptive nerf because all the spare parts are spells in GvG, which is shoddy work on Blizz's part IMO.

Blizz aren't getting any more fucking money out of me for this game, they can just have my cash for WoW instead, which has come back for Warlords of Draenor in excellent shape, unlike Hearthstone which they seem to be trying to fuck up.

Yeah, that'll show 'em

Well actually it's two lots of WoW cash, because Mrs Hearthly and Hearthly Jnr are playing it on their own account, so instead of no cash spent on Hearthstone for seven months and now NO MORE, they're getting a steady £18 per month instead.

I did have my tongue in cheek when I wrote that sentence BTW

Very funny start to the month. I probably played 100 games before I hit rank 16 in November, and now I'm there after 9 games and only 1 loss.

The card is *not* a rouge special card , I've had it played against me for long chains of cards in many other decks (recently it seems to be a warrior favorite) so I dont see how bad adding another mana point to it is ?

Well that's kind of the point, for other classes that run Auctioneer (and not many will run with two), they can make use of him in a far wider range of circumstances and don't need to pile through their deck like Miracle Rogue does. (My shammy deck uses an Auctioneer but he's a 'nice bonus' rather than a pivotal element like he is in Miracle Rogue.)

The only deck the increase to 6 really hurts is Miracle Rogue, which is a deck that already got knackered by Naxx and the Leeroy nerf, Blizz are trying to fix a problem that doesn't exist any more, and if they really did want to fix it when it was a problem, they needed to act months ago.

Kripp reviews the last batch of cards :-

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aBCmW9Y ... e=youtu.be

** Please note - You need an hour to spare but it is worth it **

I like the way you mithered and mithered me to play this game and as soon as got in to it you sacked it off. Cheers for that.

You know fine well that next week when he opens his free cards and gets one really special one that he'll be back into it and playing 18 hours a day.

Just imagine its a Fruit machine that caned him for £200 before dropping a jackpot and he says "I'll never touch that f*cker again" , and you know that the next day when you pass by he'll be standing there shoveling coins in the slot.

I sent you a WoW invite!

Anyway as zaphod says, new cards here in a few days which will shake it all up again. (Plus I still do play Hearthstone every day, just not as much as I used to.)

Goblins Vs Gnomes cards are now live in the Arena - and you get a free Arena run

Heh, great way of getting people to spend all their saved gold before the gvg card packs are available

INTEREST PIQUED - I'm drawing for my free Arena run now

Crazy new cards!