Be Excellent To Each Other

Chopley#1273 is mine. I've already got Trooper on my friends list from the WoW days

I'm generally amenable to challenges but I do go AFK a lot to deal with family matters so if I appear to ignore a challenge please don't be offended!

Also, I'm pretty shit at the game, I don't have many cards, and some of my decks are appalling works in progress that fail spectacularly in combat so don't be too surprised if you utterly annihilate me

Yup, unlucky indeed. I'm currently at rank 13 and the buggers keep cropping up.

Video looks awesome, thanks for the link

My mage deck is intended to be adaptable, so it can go offensive and DPS where the opportunity arises, but also go into control mode if necessary.

I honestly haven't come across that many rush decks so I wouldn't like to go into ranked with a constructed anti-rush deck as it'll be shit against everything else. Also I felt a bit aggrieved as the mofo was pulling out legendary and epic Murloc cards, and there's me with what is essentially a basic deck!

TBH I felt quite satisfied with taking him as close as I did (one turn off winning), but I was annoyed as well. He certainly didn't get a 'Well Played' emote, which I usually give to the victorious player.

I'm such an emo rage quitting conceder, just conceded on Turn 5 in FUCKING ARENA because I made a mistake. It wasn't even a game-loser by any means, but nope, concede....

I can't help myself.

And I just blew one of my own minions up with a card I'd never played before as I don't know pallies very well AND FUCKING CONCEDED AGAIN.

Maybe Arena isn't a good match for me.

EDIT - It was a game I'd locked down and won as well, and then one fatal blunder turned the whole thing on its head and I was just like FUCK IT.

OH YES THAT'S HANDY.

Had this one in the bag, binned me off with a couldn't reconnect error in the end, didn't count as a loss but the guaranteed win is gone.

There is a warning up on the launch page that the game is experiencing various issues but come on Blizzard, can't keep a fucking card game working properly?

Blizzard's servers have been extremely erratic over the years, far more so over the past few months - it's affecting all of their online games. They just don't seem to want to invest in the appropriate infrastructure even though it's making a lot of players extremely angry (but seemingly not angry enough to stop playing, which is why Blizzard don't give a flying fuck).

Ever get the feeling it's just not your night?

After losing the last arena set (although it wasn't a total wipeout at 1/3) I decided to have another punt.

Lost my first game badly to a good player (no problem with that), lost my second game STUPIDLY which is entirely my own fault 'cause I had an online slot running over on the other side of my screen and let it distract me from a winning play (I take 100% of the blame for that), and then during the third game where things were looking pretty good for me and a win was on the cards, would you fucking believe it we had a power trip on the main fuse box! (It tends to happen when the weather is bad and the wind has been howling a bit this evening, it's not the house electrics since the whole place was rewired about ten years ago.)

My PC and monitor are on a UPS so they carried on running as the whole house was plunged into darkness as the game disconnected and attempted to retry (the router isn't on the UPS), by the time I'd got downstairs and out to the utility room, flicked the master fuse back on, and thereafter the router had reconnected and established comms once more, and I was able to log back into Hearthstone - I'd auto-lost the game!

I officially fucking give up for tonight.

I didn't play much yesterday - but I did drop a rung on the ladder. Won a few games but lost a few (all to fecking rush decks) and dropped from 13 to 14.

On the bright side I did decimate a Priest with his sodding Lightspawns that he buffed to 15 and 20 HP. Thank goodness for Polymorphs (which aren't always around when you need them!).

And on my match to FINALLY GET TO RANK 19 I get a rogue whose deck contains infinitely more legendaries than mine (hint, I have zero in my mage deck, he played three and may have had more in reserve).

He even played that ridiculous goblin thing that summons a repair bot which repairs ANY damaged character, four times on the fucking trot it chose his hero or a minion.

You'd think when it's matching you up it'd do some sort of quick pass on how the decks are weighted with legendaries.

Yeah, whole game appears to be offline. Silly game.

It'll probably take them a little while to stabilise the whole thing, and IMO they were a bit hasty to move it from beta to launch.

WoW was flaky as fuck in its early days but they soon got it all settled down to the point where it was stunningly solid for such a massive and complex MMO.

An exciting day, in that I disenchanted nearly every single card I could just to craft the Priest's stupid legendary at 1600 dust.

This has completely maimed every other deck I have that isn't Priest. Ho hum.

Also played AE at a game there which I just about won, but it didn't feel too easy. Afterwards I spent my 1100 gold I've saved over a week or so on 11 card packs.

'Twas a good tussle and it looked like it could go either way in the mid-game but you really took control for the last couple of turns, plus I did get rather lucky with the way our Demolishers behaved.

There was one point where I would have sexually pleasured a rabid mongoose for a Flamestrike....

Stating to feel like I know what i'm doing, and that i'm making informed choices, rather than randomly playing cards because they are pretty.
Still not winning any more often, but at least I know why i'm losing.

Started watching the Trump video posted. An hour or so in, and all his games so far have been piss easy as far as I can tell. I know he makes it look easy, but his card draws and the decks he has played against have both gone in his favour every game so far.

What's all this disenchanting stuff? When does it tell me about that?

It doesn't explain it very well.
Basically, any cards you get in the packs can be disenchanted, which gives you Arcane Dust. You can then use that Arcane Dust to create any cards that you want. Common cards cost 40 to create, and you get 5 for disenchanting them, the rare cards cost a lot more, but you get more if you disenchant one.

So you don't buff cards that already exist? Okey dokey.

There are a few common cards that you'll probably want to craft and put in most of your decks, the Ironbeak Owl for example is a cheap card to craft and makes a handy silence for only 2 mana.

http://hearthstone.gamepedia.com/Ironbeak_Owl

The Demolisher is another good card that I have in most of my decks (both me and EBJ played one in our game yesterday ).

http://hearthstone.gamepedia.com/Demolisher

Generally speaking just keep an eye on what your opponents are playing, any card that strikes you as annoyingly effective is quite possibly one that you want to research for inclusion into one or more of your decks

Rank 18, wooo!

Good going man, losses are going to start to sting a bit now though....

I'm still just on the cusp of Rank 19, I always seem to lose the game that'll take me up to from Rank 20 Three Star!

EDIT - Shit, just logged in and I'm Rank 20 Two Star, I need to stop playing this game in Ranked after a few glasses of wine because I always fucking lose.

It's annoying that you can't issue a challenge unless both people are in the main menu. A queued message of some kind would be nice.

BOOM!

Good god Trooper just stamped all over me, he finished with 30 health.

My card draw wasn't the nicest and I'm not too hot with my Rogue, but even so, I feel violated, and not in a good way.

REMATCH!

DOUBLE BOOM!

Well played again there Trooper, although I'm a bit aggrieved at my card draw in that game, didn't get an Arcane Intellect (I have two in there) or indeed any card at all that would allow me to draw.

Then I chucked my ooze out (which I'd been holding onto for the weapon destruction battlecry) just to get some damage potential on the board and next turn you drew the Arcanite Reaper!

Can't complain overall though as you played very well, and looking again at my mage deck now it could use some tweaking, it's a bit too weighted towards 2s and 3s I think.

Sorry about the cheap-ass Flamestrike but I was very, very low on options by then!

Yeah, the flamestrike just delayed the inevitable, but it was a bit of a "you cunt" moment

I've based my mage deck around the one that Trump built in his video, it's a good deck.
There are a couple of things i've learnt that I think have let me make a bit of a step change in performance.

1) Build your decks based on the big combos that you want to work towards.
2) The first draw can be key, throw away everything that is above a 4, and in most cases I throw everything above a 3.
3) Wait, and keep waiting. If you have tactical cards in your deck, then they are there for a reason, don't spend your mana lightly.

Yeah I've no doubt the best player won in both of our games there, you had a lot of good synergies going on with your cards and I always felt like I was on the back foot, reacting to what you were doing and trying to control the situations you were creating rather than making my own plays.

My Warrior deck is probably my most synergistic at the moment, but perhaps a bit too reliant on me getting the cards that I want to work with each other, as if I don't get dealt them I tend to lose horribly, which suggests to me that it's not a great deck.

I'm definitely a bit of a n00b at the game as my inability to get beyond Rank 20 bears testament to, but it's great fun and I'm enjoying learning as I go, even just that kicking that you gave me there has shown up a couple of things I want to change in my mage deck already.

Clearly, I must play Trooper.

Trump is currently rank 1 on the videos I'm watching. The sheer number of games he's played to grind up this high, and so repetitive. I don't think I'd ever have the time or patience to keep at it so long.

I'm currently having fun just unlocking all the basic decks in Casual mode, nice and stress free and gives you sight of all the other classes as well, which helps understand the mechanics of all the different opponents.

Plus it doesn't involve quite so much in the way of being battered senseless by Trooper, which is also nice.

Facebook says he's going to London on a date, so you'll have to wait until later for your summary execution

I'd be interested to see how you two got on in a match, 'cause he absolutely took me to pieces - twice.

Perhaps I'll fire up Bandicam for the fun of recording it

That's a feature that they really need to add in, the ability to spectate other matches (with the participants' agreement) and also to record and replay, and ideally share, your own matches as well.

The entire game file would only run to a few kilobytes I'd have thought, and the client could replay the whole thing with no load whatsoever on the servers.

I should be online around early evening for a game or two

I've concentrated on three decks to learn properly for constructed, mage, warrior and rogue. But in the arena I typically choose a class I don't know at all well, as that makes for fun games!

You only really learn by losing I find. I've certainly done enough of that!

I'm just disappointed that I didn't choose the rogue for the second match, to really hammer home the humiliation

There's already a program to record and replay your games:

http://www.hearthlog.com/

I've tried it - works just fine although due to the way it works the framerate (on my average PC) is affected a little so animations and movement are very slightly choppy.

/defriends Trooper

Hearthlog looks interesting, I'll give that a go tonight and post up links to the games, good and bad

Well, I that was annoying. About to win a match and move up to rank 17... Client crashes and won't restart.

Bandicam recording of mine and Trooper's best of 3 will come in a bit.

I'm not sure if my gibbering commentary will have picked up as well, otherwise you're in for a fascinating 45 minutes of mute play

I think it is fair to say that EBG and I are pretty evenly matched

No OSX client, shame.

Sadly no gibbering from me, mic wasn't enabled. Rest of the sound is good though but damn, that last game was LONG

I'm still only doing practice matches, but am having the most luck with a Hunter and lots of beasts.

The saddest part of my mic not working is that you can't hear me call Trooper a 'piece of shit' on a few occasions. In the friendliest way

Rank 17!

I just jumped straight into ranked matches, you get more XP that way and still unlock all the same cards. Even if you lose you still get XP, and you can't lose ranks stars below rank 20.

Oooh, I just got 300 gold for winning 100 matches. Looking online I see there is also a gold reward for beating each expert AI mode.

http://www.hearthpwn.com/forums/hearths ... -quests-in

I expect Blizzard will put a lot more of these sort of achievement progress lists in the game client at some point.

I think Casual and Ranked award the same XP, as long as you're playing real people instead of the AI. (i.e. Don't bother with Practice mode at all except to unlock all the classes.)

Either way you should always at least play Casual instead of against the AI (Practice) as you'll be up against real people with real decks, and you may as well play Ranked until you hit Rank 20 as you can only climb and not fall on the rankings until 20.

Once you get to Rank 20 you might want to be a bit more careful as you can lose stars and rankings as well as gain them, so don't dive straight into Ranked with an untried deck for example, give it a few games in Casual first.

Also don't play Trooper, unless you enjoy the experience of being hung, drawn, quartered, and then having your bloody remains pissed on.

And then set on fire.