Be Excellent To Each Other

The only way to obtain all soulbound golden cards is to hit 60 with all characters. So, erm, after Priest gets there (give it another week I reckon), I might switch out to Rogue, but I'm also very fond of the Paladin (my preference for Arena).

Of course, getting them all to 60 is a bonkers task. I think I'm at 150 ranked wins with Priest, and I wager it'll take at least another 50 to get there, but I started at quite a high level when the win totals were introduced.

So, I'd be interested to see what you hit first as a low-rank character - 500 wins or level 60? Probably level 60 I should think.

Golden cards are quite pointless, but provide for a long term goal for mental completionists. I have swapped out as much of my Priest deck with gold cards as possible. I'm probably 70% gold at this point.

My Mage as been at level 60 for ages now - maybe I'll try and level up the others once my patience and sanity returns.

Rank 14 now..... However, I do at least appear to have mastered the art of not giving a fuck, so I'm not getting stressy about it now.

There are so many shitass gimmick and aggro decks out there it's just not worth getting aerated about, if you hit a bad run with them you're gonna lose stars and ranks, and that's basically all there is to it. (Not that they're the only decks I lose to of course, it's not like I'd have hit legend status with those players removed from the game, but I'd certainly have hit Rank 10 or better.)

If Rank 11 is my peak this season then so be it, at least I'm not a cunty Hunter playing Leeroy > Hounds all the fucking time, and I'm satisfied that I've managed to play some solid games with a reasonably balanced 'fair' deck containing precisely zero legendaries.

Time to chill a bit and enjoy the game for what it is, plus I have enough gold for an arena entry so I'll do that later on too.

Ha.

Case in point I just had what was, in all fairness, a bloody good game against a druid but he played THREE high value legendaries and fuck knows how many epics - and I still very, very nearly beat him with the basic Trump Mage deck (it doesn't even have the Pyro in it any more). It was actually fatigue that killed me ONE TURN AWAY from finally finishing him off, which is a measure of how well I'd controlled him down.

Yesterday it would have pissed me off, today I'm just like, 'Yeah, whatever'. The game was fun, and I've stopped paying too much attention to my rank. (I'm playing ranked instead of casual because you tend to get a better game in ranked, otherwise I'd probably just switch to casual.)

If I drop down to Rank 15, so be it.

Game appears to be on its arse today, I suspect Easter Monday is proving rather busy for the servers.

I'm not going to risk starting an Arena run at the moment.

Just Blizzard's shitty servers not being able to cope with the demand. As usual. No idea how they put up with this - after all, it must be losing them money as it's been affecting all of their online games for months now. Or perhaps it's not losing them ENOUGH money to make them sit up and take notice? It's certainly losing them any good will that their customers may have had.


As an aside, and as proof (if it were needed) of the OP'ness of aggro Hunter - see how Trump is struggling at the higher ranks:

http://www.twitch.tv/trumpsc/b/521589593

First game starts at about 23:30 mins. Then watch ........

Laggy as fuck with disconnects galore tonight, I'm just doing the daily quest in casual mode as I daren't invest in an arena run (even though I'm sat on 260 gold) as disconnects/broken games are really infuriating in arena, and buying packs of cards to potentially improve my deck for Ranked seems a bit pointless when (1) The game isn't working properly and (2) Ranked is shagged to fuck with the gimmick and aggro decks anyway.

I'm a bit gobsmacked Blizzard rolled this out worldwide when they didn't have it stable on PC/Mac, but they still proceeded to a limited iPad release and then a worldwide iPad release. TBH they brought it out of beta before it was ready in the first place - and they're already bigging up the upcoming new content before they've got the game working as it is both technically and balance wise.

Thing is, surely they're shooting themselves in the foot anyway? Because I'm just thinking to myself, 'Oh well, at least it's free', and less inclined to spend any real money with each passing day.

Just keeps timing out for me - i cant even join a match

I think the Mac / PC side seemed stable but the word of mouth for the ipad version has been incredible and I really think its just the volume of new players thats doing this

Because no one could have predicted that an F2P game based on the most successful MMORPG ever would be hugely popular once rolled out onto the most ubiquitous mobile gaming device ever created by mankind

I also wonder if Blizzard have been a victim of their own, for want of a better word, 'morality' when it comes to F2P game design, whereby you really do get a full, proper game for exactly zero investment?

There are so many gouging horror shows of F2P games out there that are clearly just built around blatant paywalls that maybe Blizzard's approach of, 'No really guys, it's a full game for nothing!' has caught on very quickly with huge numbers of people, beyond even what they were expecting?

Sorry I just completely disagreed with my original point in this post there.

I think your original point is right - the game has been out and available for PC and Mac for ages and i never touched it - it came out on the iPad and i lost a lot of my weekend to it

I think it's maybe a combination of the two things.

Personally I don't have much to do with mobile gaming because I think the F2P model has basically fucked everything up, and instead of buying and playing a complete game experience, we get given a free 'pseudo-game' that is nothing more than a crude procession of paywalls designed to gouge money out of people.

(Mrs AE and AE Jnr both have iPads, and they've installed loads of free 'games' on both of them, and the breathtakingly cynical money-grabbing construction of them really is fucking evil.)

So along come Blizzard with an actual, complete, genuinely good GAME that is F2P, whereby you're given a pretty damn generous supply of everything required to play the game. Cards, gold, dust - just playing the game in free mode delivers enough of these for most people, yes you can buy your way to a full set of cards but even then it's down to the skill of playing them correctly.

Maybe there's been a pent-up demand all along for a really good game like this on the iPad, and a whole horde of people who were offended by the likes of the Dungeon Keeper mobile abomination have latched onto Hearthstone like a lifebelt in an ocean.

Either way Blizzard must have known it was going to be popular, but maybe even they've been caught off-guard by just how popular it's proving to be.

Still think they could have staggered the iPad release a lot better though.

The problems aren't specific to certain platforms - they are caused by server issues, and these issues affect all of Blizzard's online games. The strange thing is that this has been ongoing for a number of months (and is getting even worse) yet the server issues remain unresolved. Says a LOT about Blizzard's lack of competence (or perhaps they feel like they have so much of a captive audience that they really don't need to give a shit?).

8/3 in arena, not too bad at all

Why is it, that the only time my bluetooth mouse runs out of battery, is when i'm playing a round of Hearthstone?

Because you didn't buy one with a dock, you cheap git

I did, I even bought better than that, I have an induction charging pad and rechargeable battery in it, all I need to do is to put it on the pad every so often.

Do I ever remember? Or course not.

Why is the pad not a mouse mat?

It's only the size of the mouse...

Yay got enough gold for two arena entries and the game appears to be working properly tonight so I'll have a punt with my new DON'T GET ANNOYED ABOUT HEARTHSTONE demeanour about me.

Coming up, two 1/3 clusterfucks, probably......

Clearly this is an issue - although it's fine for Craster.

Gah.

2/3 on Arena run number one, I'm so crap at this game sometimes. Although I was playing a shammy who I'm barely even a novice with play wise.

Still, pretty good mileage time wise and some enjoyable games (one of my wins was pretty epic, screenshot below), decent chunk of gameplay and I still got the (crap) pack of cards and another (crap) random card at the end of it.

Not gonna start another Arena run tonight so that'll be something for tomorrow, and another daily quest to do as well - I'll have a punt at Ranked with the Trump Mage deck to round off this evening.

Hearthstone really is the only game I need at the moment, apart from BF4 on Saturday evening with the chaps, and fruit machine emulation.

http://www.arenavalue.com/u/trooperlooper

My arena history over the past 10 attempts.

10 Arenas
68 Games
3.8 Wins per arena
55.88% Win Rate
65 gold Average per arena
645 gold Total

So, for me at least, it is definitely better value doing arena runs than just buying decks, even without how much fun I find them compared to constructed

If my wireless trackball was sat permanently on a wired mat, may as well just have a wired trackball...

Wow, I definitely can't be bothered to annotate every Arena run I do, with cards/rewards etc. The data is interesting but I'd really want to see that automatically logged by something.

Also some feature to tell me how many cards I need (without having to trawl through the crafting mode) to complete my collection would be good. At the moment I have a vague notion of progress in that it's rare for me to unlock a pack without at least a couple of cards that need disenchanting. I did really set myself back a while ago by disenchanting everything to get the 1600 dust for the Priest legendary. The only Priest card I'm still yet to get is Mindgames.

Shadow Madness is an awesome card. At the moment I'm comboing it with a Youthful Brewmaster. So I can steal the minion, attack with it, and then brew it back into my hand, essentially stealing it for good. Very good for stealing things like Defender of Argus, and depending on mana I can replay it on the same turn. Very many opponents tip me a 'Well played' when I do that

Yeah, automatic tracking would be nice, but it only takes a minute or so to put your cards in for each run. I choose my cards, then open up the website and type in the first few characters of each card in my list into the search box, which brings up a filtered list. A click for each card and it's done. Takes about 5 seconds per card I would imagine. Then at the end you can edit the webpage to fill in how much gold and dust you got in the preset fields. The annotation is basically just filling in a box with a number.
It's a minor faff, but if you are a stats junky, then there isn't another option at the moment. I expect blizzard will build all this shit into the actual game in future, if WoW is anything to go by.



Something like this?
http://www.hearthhead.com/cards?filter= ... rs=3;crv=0
You can fill in your collection in hearthhead and there is a link to show a list of the cards you still need to get, ordered by name, class, cost, popularity etc...

Bloody priests!

You wouldn't get a well played from me

It's a good thing I have my new sanguine head on with this game....

Just had a really challenging game against a hunter in ranked, controlled him down very well (if I do say so myself), never overplaying, never going nuts, waiting for the turn I knew I had lethal.

He was top-drawing by this point and had 5 health left, I had 8 health left and three cards. Figuring that even a Unleash The Hounds couldn't kill me at this point I added an extra couple of minions to the board to make four, as even an Unleash would be 4 + 2 (hero power) = 6, next turn, I've won, and I'm racking my brains to think of what he might draw to kill me on his turn.......

And what does he top draw on his turn?

King Krush, 8 attack + charge.

Thanks for that.

Followed up with an inordinately annoying game against a priest, just stealing your fucking stuff all the time.

*builds a Priest deck*

Don't do it!

Priest does have some interesting cards - i dont really have any special cards for him but some of the cards and the ways you can play them do give you options.

I have a level 22 mage which i was playing but the challenges over the last few days have been to win 2 games with other characters so i have a level 8 or so druid (the create mana crystals and replenish them seems like his main trick) and then a level 8 priest (i like having minions down which give you cards when you do actions and then get extra cards for other tasks which means i'm never at the end game with no cards just relying on the draw to get me though

Although i'm at rank 20 and i've had 2 stars but I've never hit 19 as i cant get a string of 3 together - i'm happy enough just playing around and finding out how things work

Stop playing mage and grind up all of your other characters to L10 - you get 100 gold for collecting all the basic cards.

If you're still getting into it, check here for some easy quests, most are hidden: http://hearthstone.gamepedia.com/Quest

Also 300 gold for getting to 100 wins total.

I'm on 438 wins... still a long way to go before I get the 300g quest for 1000.

Rogue Arena run just now. 4-0 and feeling good, to 4-3 wondering how that just happened. Bah.


Also Trooper, wow, so can't be arsed to fill in all my cards on that link (thanks all the same). I will stay my curiosity and wait for game updates.

You only need to fill in the expert cards, it'll take you ten minutes max

Thanks - i've played at least one game with the others but most are level 2 or 3 max so i'll do that next

Front page feature at Eurogamer today, about playing Trump, no less.

(I must confess I try to watch an hour of Trump videos every day....)

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2014- ... earthstone

Dammit just went 3:0 up in Arena and then lost the next three on the trot!

It was a pretty crap deck anyway, and my draw on the last three games was awful, one in particular was laughably bad.

Oh well at least I hit 3:3 which is evens.

Now using the Trump Arena rankings which are here: http://www.liquidhearth.com/forum/arena ... al-commons (There are links below for the rares, epics and legendaries too, as well as class specific.)

http://www.liquidhearth.com/guides/arena-tier-list

The number of times the best column I had something to pick out of was 'average' got rather depressing.

I've whacked them into a spreadsheet and printed them off for easy reference.

Weakness has overcome me....

Although I have to say that opening 40 packs of cards was very exciting.

Three legendaries of which were two were the class legendaries (rogue and hunter), and one neutral, Cairne Bloodhoof who is an excellent card.

Loads of epics and rares, and created enough duplicates for nearly 700 dust.

And at the end of that £34.99 investment? I swapped out a Boulderfist for Cairne, other than that my mage deck remains exactly the same

EDIT - Actually, there's plenty of goldens in there that I can DE as well, although they're not technically duplicates why use a golden Azure Drake when I have two normal ones?

You don't have a middle setting between Free and Fucking Everything do you?

Oh AE, if I cared about how you spent your money I'd be disappointed

Beating Trump is not that rare. He loses all the time. He just consistently wins more than he loses. I'm subbed to him at well. He's a charming geek who just seems like a simple, nice guy that likes games. Can't fault him and watching the stream is always interesting.

Jesus AE, money to burn or what, you'd never catch me doing that...

<cough>

It feels so wrong, but so right

I only saw two legendaries pop up on my news feed, was that the lot for all 40 packs?

Still going

Golden Loremaster Cho
Bloodmage Thalnos
Cairne Bloodhoof

so far...

Yup, that was it.

Thalnos and Cairne I can use, not too sure about Cho

More info about the upcoming Naxx expansion, although nothing about what it will cost other than 'you'll be able to spend real money or gold, but we don't know how much gold.'

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2014- ... a-power-up

Just tipped over 150 gold so I'll have an Arena run at some point today, still feel like shit from last night's BF4 over-indulgence though, I really am a lightweight these days.

It'll be good to know how much and when, i've got 540 gold at the moment, not sure how much to save and how much to spend on arena.

Well since 150 gold currently equates to £1.49, I can't see them charging much more than a fiver for each wing, probably less than that.

I'm going to put my Super Prediction Hat on and say it'll be 400 gold per wing.

PLACE YOUR BETS.

I reckon they'll round up to 500. At least a week of grinding out quests for that - it'll make it seem worth it.

Dammit just went 6:0 in Arena and then lost three on the trot! Still 6:3 isn't a bad result, and I got 80 gold + pack of cards + 50 dust so I'll be able to afford another Arena run tomorrow probably.

I have broken opening packs of cards for myself a bit though after buying 40 of the buggers yesterday All five cards were duplicates with just the one guaranteed rare, so all got DE-ed for a bit of dust.

Definitely right back into Arena though after getting a bit jaded with Constructed, it really is cool how there's two completely different games in one, and with the new Naxx content on the way I reckon this game could run and run.

In a way I'm glad I spent the £35 on the 40 packs of cards just because it feels right to tip some cash over for the huge amount of quality playtime I've had out of the game.

I've stopped being so precious about my ranked level and have started to mix it up and play whatever character takes my fancy, and try out various builds that I make up myself.
I'm losing a lot, but it's more interesting to play constructed again.