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Hearthstone Thread FTMFW - 4/7 Ashes of Outland release - New Demon Hunter class!

I finally hit legend for the first time in my HS history. Took a long ass time because I'm not what those would call an optimal player, but finally did it!

Used a combination of Secret Mage (thanks HTTD) and Odd Paladin to get across the finish line. 56% win rate this month to get there.

#feelsgoodman
 
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Warrior is pretty good in Duels, post-balance changes.

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Turns out, multiple 5-cost, easily-enraged 9/9s are good. This game ended turn 6.
 
Anyone played the new updated progression system? I won’t be home until after dinner but look forward to trying it out.
 
Anyone played the new updated progression system? I won’t be home until after dinner but look forward to trying it out.

Yeah, I've been playing a bit. It seems pretty straight forward. I'm up to level 15 so far.
 
Finally hit 12 wins in Duels. I give a modicum of credit to the insane synergy with the passives & treasures.

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New system is kinda cool. The rewards actually look sweet imo. Not sure how I feel about adding more paid stuff but it is what it is. Is the gold amount you can earn the same as before?

My only gripe is that if I am really in to a game mode (like BGs right now), I have to play others to max out.
 
If you want some calm and collected reactions, check the Hearthstone reddit :eek:

I like the achievements, even though the points don't matter. I just completed Lost "Dog", Call Curator by controlling the Amalgam while not playing as Curator. I got it while I was Millificent!
 
If you want some calm and collected reactions, check the Hearthstone reddit :eek:

I like the achievements, even though the points don't matter. I just completed Lost "Dog", Call Curator by controlling the Amalgam while not playing as Curator. I got it while I was Millificent!
Yeah, I wandered over to reddit after I wrote my last post.

I accepted that hearthstone was not a smart investment a long time ago. Never will be. The complaints are understandable though
 
Yeah, Blizzard's crisis communications team has some work to do tomorrow. I especially like the bingo board on reddit with guesses at their response. :)
 
I finally got to 12 wins in duels as well. I had a hunter deck with the proc deathrattle hero power and I got both the deathrattle treasures (proc and double deathrattles).

I had both Kindly Grandmother and Bloated Python in my starter deck and they were insane. If my opponent left them up for one turn, it was essentially good game and concede.

Unfortunately, the game stopped giving me good deathrattle buckets after about round 6, so I actually lost 2 games when I didn't draw my good deathrattle minions early.
 
I can't remember if it was a preorder bundle or a drop or a quest reward but I had 5 golden packs of the new expansion. I managed to play the probabilities correctly and open those packs near the end of legendary pity timers and got 2 golden legendaries out of it.
 
Well I was having fun until I ran into that Demon Hunter combo deck
 
This is a good synopsis of what's occurring; The New System's Predatory Nature

The structures of systems have always fascinated me, so I'd like to break down how the new system is designed to influence players and get them to spend more money.

1. New XP System Obfuscates How Much You're Actually Getting

Before, you got 10 gold per 3 wins. You got 50-60 gold per quest. It was easy to understand and if anything changed, you would know immediately.

Now, unless you're really into excel spreadsheets or read reddit regularly, you can't exactly tell how much you're getting. In fact, how much 1000 XP is worth varies depending on how far into the pass you are (it mostly drops later). This opens the door for Blizzard to do several things:

A. Frontload the Rewards - Pretty much everyone noticed how incredibly you level at the beginning. I am already level 20, and it feels great! It's no coincidence that this part of the pass lines up with the release of the new expansion. The euphoria of getting so much free stuff so quickly will convince many unaware players to spend more during the most critical part of the expansion cycle: the release. Once rewards taper off and people start getting upset, they've already spent the money.

B. Reduce how much they're giving out - In future special events, they'll probably just give xp boosts/flat xp. Players once again don't know if they're getting less because it's not as simple as 60 gold -> only 50 gold now. In fact, people who don't play often will actually think they're getting more (frontloaded system). Also, the later 200+ gold bags seem amazing at first, but that is only until you realize it'll take many more times the effort to reach.

C. Sneakily replace actual rewards with less valuable rewards (like older expansion packs).

D. Sneakily insert rewards as part of the pass that people used to get for free. On expansion day, you used to get a bunch of free packs and a free legendary. Now, it's all part of the battle pass.

E. Sneakily hide the XP progress bar after each game UNLESS you completed a quest - It's not obvious immediately how hard you're getting shafted by the pithy XP rewards per game.

2. New XP System Introduces Non-Continuous Rewards

Before, if you needed 10 or 20 gold for a pack or arena run, you could just grind it out. You got daily gold through quests. Basically, if you needed something, it was always within reach.

Now, though, you are frequently "stuck". You need gold, but the next level is so far away. Sometimes, there are useless packs and other rewards in the way. You may need to grind for weeks to get that next bag of gold. And once you get all that nice juicy gold, you're tempted to spend it all immediately. Then you're stuck again.

All of this incentivizes you to spend actual money since you can no longer get your daily fix.

3. New passes and bundles give you less and include things that you used to get for free

Remember when battleground perks were kind of free? At the beginning, all you had to do to unlock it was buy 20 packs. Now, you have to pay 2000 gold and get no packs.

New tavern pass is filled with cosmetics. The only value-giving part of it is the XP boost, which seems nice until you realize the sum total is still less than what you got in the old system. It's also terrible that the mega-bundle doesn't include these rewards.

4. New Expansion Format Makes The Game More Expensive

More cards + mini-expansion = more packs needed to get what you want.

Whenever new cards come out, people need to buy packs to stay competitive in ranked. Blizzard can quite conveniently cloak all of this as "we're just giving you more updates and more cards!"

In reality, it just costs more. The mini-expansion is a shameless cash grab for anyone with half a brain.

Conclusion

All of this is very concerning, not just because Blizzard is taking advantage of us. The most concerning part is the DEGREE to which they are doing this. Any one of these design decisions could be very profitable and bad for the player by itself.

But all of them at once? This is looking to me like some sort of final cash squeeze before devs just give up on the game completely and maintain it with just a skeleton crew in the future. It would make some sort of sense since rumors are that the game has been hemorrhaging players and revenue recently. It's just sad that the company is deciding to do stuff like this instead of trying to revitalize the game with more and better content.
 
What put it in perspective for me was just playing the game recently. A couple hours a day and after 2 days, I'm still at the same gold total. I can't buy a pack now, when it is still relevant, where I would have had enough for multiple packs in the past.

Combined with the fact the rewards pace dries up significantly around level 20 and, yeah, its feeling pretty terrible right now.
 
Yeah the new economy has me back playing arena to grind for packs.

My 7 year old has been getting into Battlegrounds. It’s really difficult to teach a 7 year old. I mainly just try to get him to read card text and understand the turns you generally upgrade tavern. I need to figure out how to explain tempo vs value to him.
 
I hit 7k for first time in Battlegrounds. think im around 7200 now.
 
I spent a lot of time reading reddit today and it made me want to dust my whole collection
 
Bear with me here in this post - I just compiled one of my best BG warbands, ever, and I need to share with folks who will appreciate it. It was absolutely disgusting, in particular because of the treasures I discovered. And somehow I matched up with someone who was just as strong. The story in pictures...

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Not bad: two Amalgadons (one Golden), both with DS and Poison. You can't see it, but I switched to Tess's hero power in round 12 which aided most of my shenanigans. Also, notice the time-stamp. This battle goes on for another 20 real life minutes.

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It's round 16 now, and you see I now have two Golden Amalgadons, and three new treasures. Ice Block being most clutch. Again, note the time - I'm going mono-a-mono for the next 15 minutes.

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Got a Golden Maexxena, because why not? You can kind of see the skeleton of my opponent's board (this is leftover from the Tess hero power) - he had five poison minions, plus golden Selfless hero and Baron Rivendare. That's why I grabbed Zapp Slywick to hopefully snipe the Rivendare before all his poisons had DS.

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Things are looking bleak. My opponent has the upper hand. Should I hard-roll for Ravaging Goul? I try.

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Now it's turn 20. Zapp Slywick didn't help. I'm down to 3 life, but my Ice Block is still up. I discovered the 'Give a Dog a Bone' treasure which gives Windfury, Divine Shield, and +10/+10 to a minion - I found a cleave and we're ready to rock.

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Victory! I slowly started winning, and then my opponent felt like he needed to adapt, which he did poorly (he tried a Ravaging Ghoul the turn before this, hamstringing himself). He ends up quitting. What a battle!
 
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