What were the developers thinking when they created this “I WIN” thing?
I just played a worlock who by turn 4 was able to roll through their entire deck because all their cards cost Zero.
Why do their cards cost Zero?
Can someone explain?
It’s because a prior nerf to Thaddius, Monstrosity (a 10-mana card) has now become an idiotically overpowered buff. Thaddius used to make odd or even cards cost 1 (the odd/even “polarity” swaps each turn). That created issues many months ago, so they “nerfed” it to making cards cost 4 less. But that means it now makes any 1 or 3-mana cards cost zero… and they then issue an expansion with the sludge mechanic and make the sludge activators/generators cost 1 and 3 mana. Was this intentional or incompetent? I don’t know. What I do think is either way it reflects poorly on the current design team.
Or rather, it reflects how they now completely ignore the lessons learned by the original, brilliant design team (headed by Ben Brode) that created Hearthstone and made it a genre-creating mega-hit with millions of players.
In classic Hearthstone, the most damage that could be done from hand in one turn was 14 damage, with the druid’s Force of Nature/Savage Roar combo. (At that time Force of Nature created minions with Charge.) In 2016 the design team nerfed Force of Nature. I remember Ben Brode did an interview or made a post where he explained that the team had come to realize that it does not make for a fun game when an opponent with no board can just instantly take half your health. He explained that class “balance” is not the true measure of good design, if what you end up with is the “balance” of a coin flip over who gets their combo first. In various interviews in those years he also explained that it is very important for good design to not create archetypes that have no counter, or that can only be countered by everyone playing aggro.
I also remember him saying that the team had learned to be very, very careful about allowing anything to cost zero mana.
Of course, over the past few years the new team has ignored many of the old team’s hard-won learnings and design insights. I have no idea why they have persisted in this, as Hearthstone regrettably continues its decline in players. What frustrates me is they have never deigned to answer a very simple question:
If in 2016 it was clearly not fun, and bad design, for one class to have the ability to take half your max health on turn 7 (with Innervate), why do you now think the opposite is true? When did it become fun to allow multiple decks to reliably and instantly inflict 100%-200% of their opponent’s max health, with no need to develop a board of minions that interact with your opponent’s?
Why did you turn an extremely successful, interactive two-player game that was centered on minions doing battle (with spells acting as support), into a declining game where two players each manipulate their hands and card draw in the hope of being the first to get their OTK combo? (And where most minions are now designed to effectively function as spells with some stats attached, not as primary damage dealers).
Yup, OP, you are right to wonder WTF is going on.
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Because they wanted to optimize the game for 10 year old kids who have no brain to make more money and get more players… like they did to WoW… thats why I stopped playing it after 8 years.
There are cards i’m gonna miss when the yearly rotation happens in a couple of month, Thaddius ain’t one of them.
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the new Brann arrives to give us all extra grief
This forum is going to be filled with Brann complaints soon enough
I predict Brann/Astalor stuff will be at the top or at least near the top