Be Excellent To Each Other

About 45 pages of this thread are me witting on and/or arguing with Hearthly about being free to play. It's certainly possible, although to compete at the higher ranks then there are several key legendaries that it's really good to have and aren't easy to get for free.

I've been playing for free consistently for 9 months and I still need a total of 70 unique cards to complete the collection, 22 of which are legendaries.

I'll echo what I said above - unlock every class quickly by beating it in Normal Practice mode, and then unlock the first free wing of Naxxramas, quickly, as it stops being free in 2 days!

Oh, cheers! I know what I'll be doing for the rest of day, then...

I don't mind making one time payments, btw, if I enjoy the game. It's the never ending buying-cards-for-money I won't be getting into.

Oh, I think I have already unlocked it actually, but thanks for the heads up anyways. I didn't know it would cost money later. And now, back to the game...

That's cool, Naxx is locked until you have every hero, and then you only need to open it up to get the first week free before the deadline

I don't understand. The first week? Or did you mean the first wing?

Oh yes sorry, wing. I think of them as weeks as each one was released one per week

Righto. This means I have all my freebies, which is the important thing.

Yay! And just in the nick of time for the end of the season

It's not taken a huge number of games in Ranked either, most of my play recently has been Casual or Daily Quests (hence I'm sat on 900 gold).

Best rank yet and I'll settle for that this month.

(Still fucking lost to EBG the other day though. Grrrr.)

I just had a very annoying Arena, from 4/1 to 4/3 in a blink. As usual came up against a couple of pure bullshit hands that I had no chance against.

I'm not saying 'it's on', or anything like that, but there is still all of the 31st left

You're such a wanker!

I mean that affectionately, of course.

I'll get chance for a few games during the day but as of 6pm I'll be in the pub so that's my deadline for this season!

What deck are you using? I'm sticking to a hunter deck but I've made quite a few modifications to the version I posted earlier in the month.

This is the same Warrior which I used the other day

Can you post the deck please, it was pretty cool, wouldn't mind taking it for a spin myself!

Haha, ok, I'll get to it a bit later today

Won my next game out in Ranked to continue the winning streak and take me to Rank 9 ***, so if I can win the next two I'll be Rank 8 but somehow I can't see it happening I'll have a crack though, but TBH once I lose one I'll go back to Casual (which is where my play has been today just to do the daily quest and have a dick about with my warrior deck).

Exactly 1000 gold now too!

And there's the loss! Very good game against a warrior, unusual deck as well, not exactly aggro or rush but lots of pressure and weapons. Managed to get the game into a situation where a win was possibly in sight but like a total fucking idiot I put an Explosive Trap down when he had an Armorsmith on the board (d'oh!), then he played another on this turn, and worked with the board to get shitloads of armour off them, putting the win out of reach, and he had a Molten Giant down by then as well.

Real fucking schoolboy error TBH, no idea what I was thinking of.

Either way that's the loss, I'll take the peak of Rank 9 *** this month and consider myself satisfied with that, off to the pub soon anyway

Phew. I think I should stop here too.



So much grind required!

Congrats EBG Having been playing at around that rank myself I can testify that there are no easy games once you get that far up the ladder, so that's quite an achievement! (Fuck knows what kind of commitment it takes to get to legendary.)

I just hit a point where the laser-guided focus of Ranked stops being fun and I'd rather enjoy experimenting with stuff in casual, (in all honesty most of my play this month has been quests and casual), technically speaking there's still an hour until the pub and I'm Rank 9 **, but I'd rather fuck about with my warrior, which is what I think I'll use to have a crack at Ranked next season. Also, I have enough dust to make myself a Grom

It just did this to a zoo lock, now yes this is in Casual but I'd say it was a very 'standard' game, the likes of which you'll find out in Ranked.

I favour my Warrior strongly against Priest (4 attack minions a-go-go), Rogue, and Zoo. Zoo is a little iffier in that I really need my early weapons, cleaves, and another removal to keep ahead of them.

Depending on the opponent, it's often a case of armouring and holding the board until I can drop Alex and then burst over two turns. Depending on board state and their ability to heal, this can work or fail. Your Paladin deck knows this, because in the instance where Guardians of Kings and Holy Lights come out, I might be a bit fucked.

Lots more tinkering to be done, but I'll hold off for now. Since I restarted Arena last week I've done 14 Arenas, so I'll either unlock or get dust for what I need before too long

Arena stats:

Net Spend: 820
Avg. Cost per Pack: 58.6

I'm running with two Armorsmiths, two Berserkers, two Unstable Ghouls, and four weapons, generally speaking I'll manage to get at least one or two of them in my opening hand. (The Armorsmiths and Berserkers effectively have a passive taunt, compelling the zoo lock to trade minions with them.)

Add in the spells available (Cleave, Whirlwind, Slam etc), I find zoo is actually a good match-up for the deck.

Only problem is it can run out of steam quite badly, especially since the only innately chunky cards in there are Rag and Cairne. (Couple of Yetis and Drakes too.)

I'll have a punt with it in Ranked next season and iterate as I go on, it may well be it doesn't work at all but we'll see

I'll probably try hard with Warrior too, yet my deck is considerably different to yours. For example, I have no ghouls or whirlwinds, and it wouldn't occur to me to put a Drake in. I'll be fascinated to see how it gets on.

Played a Mage in Arena. He had no interest in face damage at all, just tried to survive and whittle me down. Fair enough, but I was winning, or so I thought.

Off a double board clear he plays a Pyroblast. Next turn I get stuff out and start attacking. He hits another Pyroblast. I nearly finish him off, he hits a third successive pyroblast.

Harsh.

Well I'll make a start with it in Ranked tonight, no idea whatsoever how it'll fare (It does OK in Casual but unless I get some value off the Armorsmiths/Berserkers it all tends to go a bit wrong.)

There's one little job I need to do first though

(Also any chance you could post your deck EBG? This is what I'm going in with.....)

EDIT - One of the Shield Blocks gone already. Extra Fiery War Axe.

Well it did just make an amusingly horrible mess of a Freeze Mage, he was clearly setting me up for the Flamestrike on Turn 7 with Frost Novas so I just happily Whirlwinded and Slammed and used the Deathrattle of Death's Bite/Unstable Ghouls on my frozen minions (two Armorsmiths among them )to rack up huge amounts of armour, to the extent that I'd mostly killed my side of the board off when the Flamestrike turn arrived

When the inevitable Alex came I was like 'Yeah whatever' and he had to waste far too much stuff controlling the board, and you can see how the game finished here (I peaked at 26 health and 30 armour.) Also this is after he's had two Ice Barriers and two Ice Blocks played through.

(I lost the three games before this one though, if I don't get any synergy going on with the deck it all falls apart horribly, can't see it being consistent enough for Ranked but I'll hone and iterate and see what happens.....)

Alright, sheesh



Dicking about with Paladin in ranked at the moment for the quest and then I'll head to Arena with the loot.

Two Brawls! That's very unusual and suggests you're expecting the board to get somewhat out of control on a regular basis?

It's a compensation for cards I'd rather have. In the meantime it's useful to increase the odds to draw at least one and if I get both I can keep the board controlled nicely while I'm awaiting the finish.

I bet there'd be a Grommy in here for you.

TURN TO THE DARK SIDE.

Decided to try and do the daily quest in Ranked with my pissabout warlock deck..... BAD IDEA. Back down to Rank 20 after the initial jumpstart at 19 *** for my rank last season

Oh well at least there's very little to lose now, I may as well persevere

Seems to be an absolute fucking cacophony of aggro decks though.

Not even remotely tempting

A 6/3 Arena which gave me a stupid Conceal which I already have as a card reward. Then I open the pack to find yet another Conceal! All cards in the pack dusted.

Bah, enough gold for another run tomorrow though, so that's roughly one a day which is good enough progress for me.

Got a great Mage deck with loads of potential synergy, but only got a 3/3 in the end.

2 Ethereal Arcanists, 6 secrets, and only in one game did I draw both even vaguely together. last game I had the opp down to 6 health and was just waiting for any of my 3 remaining fireballs (I had 4). Got down to 4 cards by the time I died without drawing a single one. GAH! Luck is not on my side.

Arena is funny like that. Sometimes the deck looks perfectly solid but you'll splat and die. I've gotten to 4/0 several times and then end up going 4/3 because whatever seemed to make my deck good suddenly disappeared.

I have firmly established why Druid is my lowest level char - I can't play it at all. Was trying to grind casual for the quest earlier and lost perhaps 6 games on the trot with it. I'm not sure if the deck is total shit or I am. At some point I'll need to work on it.

Wow, a 1/3 Arena, but once again I came up against the most bullshit decks imaginable.

Ragnaros with Faceless? Yep. Couldn't recover from that.

Paladin, which I'd smashed to smithereens only for him to pull a Lay on Hands, Guardian of Kings, Holy Light, and then fucking Tyrion on top.

Against drafts like that my deck had no chance, and it was a perfectly good one that absolutely deserved to go further. Fuck you Arena.

Not feeling the motivation to do Arena at the moment, I dropped 1000 gold on 10 packs last week, and am back up to 580 gold again, sort of thinking I'll just get to 1000 again and buy another 10 packs. Tales like that from your last 1/3 run remind me how fucking annoying it can be

I'm having a fun fuckabout with the game this month, I did get up to Rank 16 with my wildly inconsistent Warrior deck, but it wasn't a great deck for Ranked, and after last month getting to Rank 9 I didn't fancy taking on the serious challenge again so soon.

As such I just insta-conceded one game after another right back to Rank 20 and am now having a jolly just trying any old random deck that takes my fancy, I love the way that you tend to meet all sorts of other equally random decks at Rank 20, because of course you can't lose stars before Rank 20 so people can get there with all sorts of weird and wonderful creations.

I might start to settle down on a deck to have a climb with as the month moves on, see how it goes I suppose.

So what's that now, about seven months of pretty intense play on this game? It's certainly got some legs in it.

I'm going to be going dark for a while as I'm moving into my new flat and internet of any kind will be a couple of weeks away. I will miss out on many quests

THINK OF ALL THE GOLD YOU WON'T HAVE!

Got five wins as Hunter as my daily quest today so thought I'd bring the deck back into action, four wins on the trot and then lost four on the trot! Grrrr.

Won the game after that and was back in the groove a bit so played a few more.

Hunter vs Hunter in the current meta, that's a seriously vicious match-up - very rarely goes past Turn 8 (And often ends at 6 or 7.)

What I like about this deck though is it's not aggro (it's actually quite mid-range), it can go absolutely fucking postal when it needs to, but can also settle down for a far longer and more considered game when the match-up demands it, unlike zoo for example which totally runs out of steam if the game runs on for a bit and they don't get their aggro win.

Every arena deck I face seems to be stacked with legendaries.

Last one had Myxxena, Leeroy and Gruul.
One before had Rag (and then a faceless and an ironbark) and a Ysera

Made my Magma Rager look a bit weak

I've had a run of them in the last few area's - always offered at least one and since the class stuff was limited i had a priest with mind control so could steal one if the other person played it :-)

Woah! Two serious nerfs incoming!

http://us.battle.net/hearthstone/en/for ... 79128810#1

Leeroy is getting hit with the big bat of nerf, going from 4 mana to 5, doesn't sound like much but will make a big difference IMO (look at what the UTH nerf did to hunters until the Naxx cards made the class viable again)......

Which leads onto Starving Buzzard going from 2 mana to..... 5 (!!!). The body changes from a 2/1 to a 3/2.

Think I might dust my Leeroy and get the 1600 dust back! I only ever use him in my Miracle Rogue deck anyway.

Starving Buzzard sounds like a massive nerf but I'm trying to work my head around the change, I guess the point is that it's played in the same way that Leeroy is played. (Leeroy has the downside that he summons two whelps for the opponent, but in reality he's used as a finisher so the other guys never gets chance to use the whelps. Similarly for Starving Buzzard you're not expecting it to survive, you're just using it for card draw for a single turn. Making it a 3/2 perhaps gives it a chance to survive a bit longer and draw cards over a couple of turns rather than one insane turn. Then again I routinely use the Buzzard just to draw a card or two, so I'm not so sure.)

Either way there's no doubt Hunters are in a very strong place right now, maybe Buzzard is getting OP with the new low cost beasts Webspinner and Haunted Creeper which can negate the need to use UTH? Certainly at the moment it's possible to play two Buzzards in a turn and then lob down a Webspinner or Creeper to get solid card draw without using UTH at all.

Interesting stuff!

Might as well dust the starving buzzards too if you don't plan on playing a hunter deck for a little bit. You'll get full dust and might get a couple in packs before you need it again. If you don't you can always craft them back again for the same cost.

The Buzzards are standard soulbound hunter cards, so no dustage going on there. I'm still trying to think through how the nerf will work, Hunter is a strong class and TBH I think it'll still be a strong and viable class even after this nerf.

Buzzards are only really very good against certain classes anyway, against classes/decks that tend not to play a lot of minions they're far less effective as the UTH combo goes out of the window, whereas classes that tend to be minion heavy (shammies and some mage builds for example) it can be ruinous.

Then again that's always been the case, so maybe it's the new low-cost beasts that have forced Blizzard's hand.

2 to 5 mana is a HUGE jump though, and I'm concerned that the 3/2 body will still be a trivial task for just about any class to remove the turn after it's played, negating its ability to draw cards over more than one turn. (I'd rather see it as a 2/4 or even a 2/5, to give it a chance at survival.)

It's definitely going to be one to watch.

The Leerory nerf is more straightforward and even though it will directly affect my miracle rogue deck I can't argue against it. The card is mega-powerful, especially when comboed with Cold Blood and Shadowstep.

Trump disagrees with my analysis and he probably knows more than me

He basically calls the Buzzard change 'the death of hunter', the nerf literally makes the entire class non-viable. ('Now that hunter is dead, and I am saying hunter is dead.....')

Leeroy he says will no longer be used by Miracle Rogue and Handlock (Leeory > Power Overwhelming > Faceless can no longer be done in one turn). Miracle Rogue he sees as ditching Leeroy and moving to Malygos, Handlock he sees as having other options.

But as for the Buzzard change - 'Rest in peace hunter, prepare for the rise of the handlock, shaman, and a lot of other decks to be viable now.'

His thoughts about the latest changes are right at the end of this video, from about 5h38m.

http://www.twitch.tv/trumpsc/b/567541898

Wow. 5 mana for buzzard kills the card. I'm not sure you'd even play it for 4.

You have to assume this is off the back of shitloads of data that shows which cards make hunter OP, but still.

Leeroy was always absurd value for 4. Reckless rocketeer is 6, only attacks for 5. No whelps but the main cost was the key advantage. Interesting times.

Its also the way it works with other cards like and combo's

I've been playing with a hunter for the last few days and have had some good wins and some terrible situations and although i dont often get the buzzard to fire off correctly when it does its amazing

(on 10 mana having no cards - draw a Buzzard and then play each new card as they come out to clear the board and leave a winning position)

New Leeroy I can almost sort of get along with (although given the downside of the whelps you could argue a Rocketeer makes more sense now, or the Golem).

But seriously, look at what the fucking new Buzzard is going to be!

If Blizzard really didn't want the card to be played EVER AGAIN BY ANYONE, they should have just deleted the fucking thing.

You do have to wonder with Blizzard and balance sometimes, the rollercoaster ride my classes went through in WoW did make me pause for thought sometimes....

FFS Priest!

I had him down to 1 health. Equal cards and he has no minions. I have an 8/8 and a 4/10.

About seven turns later he wins whilst on 15 health.

Soulpriest, double circle of healing, mind shock. Then shadow words both of my subsequent ironbarks, healing all the time, then steals my Gruul and pounds me down.

Bastard. Very well played, if a tad fortuitous.