Hearthstone

Hatorade

Hatorade

A nice asshole.
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Famm_sl said:
Doesn't matter, the whole thing is changing soon anyway.

Hearthstone at BlizzCon ??" Fireside Chat Panel Highlights - News - Hearthstone

Hearthstone: A Look at Today

Going first is still only slightly better than going second.
Top-level class balance looks pretty good, looking at 3 different days in October shows a different #1 class each day.
44% of our current 3-Star Master players have spent no money on Hearthstone.
Over one million players have been invited to the closed beta for Hearthstone.

Next Patch or Two

Card Changes

Mind Control's cost is changing to 10, up from 8. Mind Control can be frustrating to play against, and is dominating play at the lower ranks. This should allow opponents playing versus a Priest to have a couple more rounds to make use of their high cost minions before they have a sudden change of mind.
Starving Buzzard's Health is changing to 1, down from 2. Hunters were very strong against Druid, Mage, and Rogue in Copper through Platinum leagues, and this change should help those match-ups.
Unleash the Hounds can blow you out in a single turn, without any minions on the table. We're going to take a look at this card to see if there are some changes we'd like to make for the next patch. We haven't decided on a direction yet.

Ranked Play Changes

Exciting changes are coming to Ranked Play in Hearthstone! Our new system makes your path to move up in the rankings more transparent, and gives top-level players more ways to differentiate themselves from each other.

Each month, all players restart at Rank 25: "Angry Chicken"
Players will be matched against players of similar rank.
Win a game, acquire a star!
Acquire enough stars and you'll rank up!
Each rank has its own icon and medal.
Win streaks may give additional stars.
At higher ranks, you'll lose a star if you lose a game.

Beyond Rank 1 is a special rank: Legend.

Once you hit the Legend rank, it cannot be lost until the season ends.
Legend rank will have a big number in the middle of the icon - this tells you your exact rank in your region!

This won't be ready at the launch of our new ranked system, but eventually, if you participate in ranked play during a season, there's a reward awaiting you: Special card backs!

Card backs are acquired through participating in a ranked play season.
Each month holds a new card back for your collection!

One of the most exciting reasons to try Ranked Play is the epic Golden Heroes. After you've played 500 Ranked games with a specific class, you unlock the animated golden hero for that class. Whenever you play that class, it'll automatically be the golden version of the class rather than the regular one. Each Golden hero has its own special animations, just like the other Golden cards!

Additional Features on the Horizon

Reconnecting to a game in progress
Even more spell effects and animations!

A Bit Further Out

Hearthstone on the Go!

Hearthstone for Android, iPhone and Windows 8 Touch

Expansions!

Hearthstone will have expansion sets, each featuring packs full of exciting new cards!

Single-player Adventures!

To supplement expansions, we plan to release Adventures! These will come with a smaller set of cards that can be unlocked and will provide new strategies to explore.
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Holy fuck I am done. Can't do shit like this come launch and best believe they will. Duel of Champions for me it seems.
 
Mures

Mures

Blackwing Lair Raider
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Ooc, what do you mean by "can't do shit like this come launch"? You don't like the changes? or the changes aren't coming soon enough?
 
Attog

Attog

Blackwing Lair Raider
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mures_sl said:
Ooc, what do you mean by "can't do shit like this come launch"? You don't like the changes? or the changes aren't coming soon enough?
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Yeah, which parts of that announcement are bad? These all look good to me:

Hearthstone for Android, iPhone and Windows 8 Touch

Expansions!

Hearthstone will have expansion sets, each featuring packs full of exciting new cards!

Single-player Adventures!

To supplement expansions, we plan to release Adventures! These will come with a smaller set of cards that can be unlocked and will provide new strategies to explore.
 
Dandain

Dandain

Trakanon Raider
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What are opinions on having your mana base be guaranteed and capped at 10. Obviously its at the core of Hearthstone at this point - but down the road does a guaranteed colorless manabase limit the game in a meaningful way compared to possible alternatives? Given the fact that it caps out at 10 mana - high cost cards become turn prohibative as you can only cast one card 6 mana or higher card per turn. Perhaps more importantly - given the way the manabase functions can they ever get away from the ideal decks being full of lower cost cards?

Part of the elegance of deck building or drafting for magic is that splashing in cards is tied to the variety of manabase options. Would Hearthstone benefit from at least 1 more type of resource? You could call it energy - or class specific energy for flavor - obviously this is off the top of my head and just throwing this idea into hearthstone would be stupid - but long term does this matter as it is such a core foundation of their design.
 
khalid

khalid

Unelected Mod
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They definitely should have added an additional resource, with the player picking each turn what resource they gained one in, ala Duel of Champions. It is too late at this point though. Maybe in 2 years when they add an expansion.
 
Zaphid

Zaphid

Trakanon Raider
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I think they can put in an advanced resource that is class based pretty easily, it doesn't change anything and they get to play with the mana curve a bit, because unless you have a 10 mana card that just plain wins you the game, it's not worth slotting.
 
N

Neph_sl

shitlord
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I don't really think that having colorless mana is working against Hearthstone. They've shown that they can make interesting mechanics through things like Shaman's overload or Rogue's combos. Besides, having colored mana that doesn't automatically increase every turn would slow the game down -- which is contrary to the fundamental design.

There's also potential for adding cards that destroy opponents mana to slow them down. I mean, there's already cards like Arcane Golem (that no one uses) and Wild Growth that add mana. So there's nothing that would stop them from making it go the other way.

Here's a crazy idea that would probably be OP: 4 mana Shaman card: All overloaded mana generated this turn locks out your opponents mana rather than your own. For Warlocks, you could give them a Drain Mana spell that steals a mana crystal and gives you one.

Point being, there's plenty of fun things you can do without adding MtG's mana system.
 
khalid

khalid

Unelected Mod
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Zaphid_sl said:
and they get to play with the mana curve a bit, because unless you have a 10 mana card that just plain wins you the game, it's not worth slotting.
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I don't think the problem is with the mana resource itself, it is with all decisions being made by the active player. If one player gets ahead, they start getting favorable trades from every creature exchange. In a game so heavily creature based, this is crippling if you ever get behind, so the meta keeps getting pushed towards more and more aggro.

Hopefully Blizzard can figure out a way to escape this. As a player that loves more control-based decks in MtG and DoC, Hearthstone just doesn't really offer any of that unfortunately.
 
khalid

khalid

Unelected Mod
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Neph_sl said:
Besides, having colored mana that doesn't automatically increase every turn would slow the game down -- which is contrary to the fundamental design.
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Suppose you had colorless mana and class-based mana crystals. Each turn your decision was simply to gain one in either of them. I think that would add hardly any slowdown whatsoever and add some interesting complexity to deckbuilding. Certainly the equivalent decision in DoC (which even involves more than just a binary decision) is made every turn in a split second.
 
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Neph_sl

shitlord
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I could maybe see them doing something like that for a new class. Monks, for example, could gain light/dark chi (like they used to have for MoP). And you could then decide whether you want more of one as opposed to the other or a balance of the two.

I just feel like at this point in the game, they're too entrenched in colorless mana to straight up change it.
 
Dandain

Dandain

Trakanon Raider
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Don't you think the manabase will have the largest influence on card design though? I'm not sure I trust their ability to make interesting cards that don't break their core rules. Without a secondary resource at least, can they actually make cards that have meaningful tradeoff to add a decision to deck building? Right now the manacurve is static and there is nothing for the player to discover or fiddle with, and with a cap at 10 there is a built in limiter of card combos that can be played just because their sum total cost cannot exceed 10.
 
N

Neph_sl

shitlord
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I just don't think that the static gain on mana, nor the single resource, is the limiting factor in this game's design. There just needs to be more interesting cards that can be played that will break up the current aggro-centric meta. Hearthstone is missing things like neutral secrets/weapons/spells that any class can use. Or creatures that have activated abilities that you can use to pump your minions (rather than the random ones that add zero strategy). We won't know how well Blizzard can handle these kinds of changes until the first expansion comes out, but right now the base game is pretty good. There's plenty of other mechanics from games like Magic that Blizzard can steal from, so it's just a matter of time until this game fleshes itself out.

However, given the massive interest this game has, the fire should really be under Blizzard's ass to get more content out sooner, rather than later, before people jump ship.
 
N

Neph_sl

shitlord
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0
Now that I'm thinking about it... why are there so many random effect minions? You could easily replace the text on the Demolisher with something like: at the beginning of your turn, gain a 1 mana deal 2 damage card. Change Young Priestess to: When played and at the beginning of every turn, gain a 0 mana, +1 hp card. etc etc.

Shit like that would add another layer of decision-making. King Mukkla already has a card buff mechanic with his bananas.
 
Morrow

Morrow

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I haven't been able to play in a couple days. I'm on a Macbook Pro and lately I get this graphics thing every time I try to play that fucks my computer up and then it won't even restart, it just stalls after the Apple logo on trying to boot up. It takes like 10-15 tries before it boots back up again. It's happening over and over and over again upon loading Hearthstone or right when I enter a game. The screen freezes into two color stripes and fucks up and freezes and forces a restart, which then doesn't often work. Anyone heard of this? I've had Hearthstone crashes like this before from time to time, but never so consistently like this.
 
Delly

Delly

Trakanon Raider
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Neph_sl said:
Now that I'm thinking about it... why are there so many random effect minions? You could easily replace the text on the Demolisher with something like: at the beginning of your turn, gain a 1 mana deal 2 damage card. Change Young Priestess to: When played and at the beginning of every turn, gain a 0 mana, +1 hp card. etc etc.

Shit like that would add another layer of decision-making. King Mukkla already has a card buff mechanic with his bananas.
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Then these cards are much stronger and need to be more mana. Making it random makes the effect a gamble and therefore less mana.
 
Morrow

Morrow

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Famm_sl said:
RNG really does seem to factor in very heavily. Sometimes it just seems like you should say fuck it and concede right on your original draw. Its a shame because when you and your opponent do end up with reasonably even draws over a game then it can be very equitable and skill dependent. I don't know what the fix is, I'm totally new to the TCG/CCG thing.



There are dedicated EU servers right? I was thinking about this the other day. Is there really a compelling reason to have this game segregated by region? Would latency even be much of an issue? Despite all the controversy over it at launch, I sort of understand in retrospect for WoW, but for Hearthstone it seems like the game would only benefit from lumping everyone together. I guess this is just how Blizzard is structured in general these days maybe.
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Don't play on Europe, prices are %20 higher. My GF's account is the one I play on and it's in England/Europe. 20% higher prices. Annoying.

And Yes, Unranked is more difficult and Ranked is quicker for sure.
 
Zaphid

Zaphid

Trakanon Raider
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Mr. MorrowGirl_sl said:
Don't play on Europe, prices are %20 higher. My GF's account is the one I play on and it's in England/Europe. 20% higher prices. Annoying.

And Yes, Unranked is more difficult and quicker than Ranked for sure.
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I think the reason for regions are mostly paperwork and finances being much easier to handle this way. Even Valve has EU office that is mostly doing paperwork.
 
Famm

Famm

Ahn'Qiraj Raider
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Has anyone run into this shit playing paladin when you have multiple hero power squires on the board all the minions are getting moved around randomly when you attack or they do battlecries or what have you?
 
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