Anomalies was the worst meta to get mmr. I Agree if you take this game to mmr was unfair as duck. But I was having a lot of fun.
The broken part was crazy as duck. But i know the objetive was not to have balance.
Trinkets is pure crap. you get ducked in the trinket selection is very like game over.
The pool is meh for some tribes.
Tribal trinkets is the worst idea of this meta. Some heroes have a lot of vantage, bla, bla bla.
Can talk hours about how terrible the design is.
But is for me so
I don’t find that play style enough. If you take it slowly you will usually be good up to the point everyone is level ~4 but after that the 15 points of damage may start raining again( (unless at least one player is level 6 I find that excessive).
I have identified a couple of subtleties that cause it and aren’t immediately apparent; e.g. a dude when most of us were level ~3 had a deathrattle that spawned on the last winning minion 4 other minions; they were in total >15 dmg.
Kinda made my point for me, at least in part.
Not really. the reason they made tempo so important in this meta was to fix the problem of Tier rushing that has plagued the mode for a while now. Simply making the tiers more expensive at each level doesn’t do it. Removing early economy helped a bit but didn’t fully solve it.
Punishing a player for gambling and tiering up too fast is a much better fix. It makes players decide if they are going to play at a more reasonable pace or gamble and risk taking game ending damage or at least but them in the danger zone of 15 or less health.
You aren’t meant to play Tempo for 9+ turns. Tempo is for the early game to find your direction/build to pivot into. If you try and just play tempo all game you will lose. The point of playing tempo early in BG’s now is to discourage tier rushing. There’s less economy and more chances to be eliminated early by trying to rush tiers.
There’s also games where you get bad tempo and you find no real direction and you just lose. Even the best players have off games where nothing really comes together for them. Most of the time there is something there to work with. The skill of the game is identifying that and what to pivot into.
Unless your ultimate point was “I am doing it wrong and blaming the game” then no, we did not.
You not understanding how to be successful in a given meta does not indicate an issue with the game.
I understand the meta. My complaint is that there is the meta. Not a meta. What made the game fun was all the different strategies you could employ to come out on top through mix-n-matching different techniques/approaches.
You can’t do this anymore to the degree you were able to previously.
Imagine Texas Hold’em where every hand ends in a straight or a flush because the cards are set up that way. The skill might still exist, but the excitement and unpredictability are diminished. I want a game where the rare “royal flush” moment still exists, not just winning by using the same optimal strategy everyone knows.
Everyone has straight flushes… it just depends on how high your high card is now.
Boring AF
Is it though? Let’s look at your example.
Depending on how many players are at a table, there are hands that tend to be good enough to be first in a Texas Holden showdown. Get enough players at a table and, unironically, things are set up such that straights and flushes ARE the Holdem meta — i.e. the larger the number of players limping in, the more equity suited connectors have. A lot of early play is designed to counter this and limit the number of players in a hand, but my point is that we can run the solvers, simulate some arbitrarily large number of hands and work out percentage wise which showdown hand types have which percentages of a first place in any given hand.
I don’t think that your problem with BGs in its current state is what builds ACTUALLY have which percentages of a first place finish. I think your problem is that your perception of which builds have which percentages, has a high degree of dissonance with what builds actually have whatever percentages. You are acting as if the meta is particularly non-diverse, like it’s “just straights and flushes,” when it’s a lot more complicated than that. You just don’t understand the how, and that frustrates you. So you’ve become like the bad poker player who can do little else but pray for pocket rockets and gets salty when they aren’t dealt a steady stream of ultra-premium hole cards.
Git gud.
Wow, bet you’ve been waiting to say that your whole life now that the meta’s gotten more to your favor.
“yOu JuSt DoN’T uNdErStAnD!1” Right, the game whose RNG is The poker analogy you’re clinging to actually works in my favor. In poker, sure, you can calculate odds, and certain hands like straights and flushes have a better chance of winning with more players. But that doesn’t take away from the fact that poker thrives on unpredictability. Just because some hands are statistically stronger doesn’t mean the entire game revolves around those few outcomes. You can win with a lot of different plays if you know what you’re doing.
That same unpredictability where the trinkets conveniently line up with your hero or deck, making it about as random as picking your favorite shirt from a closet full of the same options. That’s not RNG, that’s the illusion of choice. When the game practically hand-holds you into builds that fit neatly into whatever overplayed meta strategy you’re already running, you can drop the pretense of randomness. It’s like spinning a wheel with one outcome—you’re not gambling, you’re just following the script.
That unpredictability is exactly what’s missing in HS BGs now. The meta has funneled players into the same few strategies — those “straights and flushes” you mentioned — to the point where if you’re not building the perfect Beast or Murloc comp, you’re just wasting time. It’s not about me misunderstanding the meta, it’s about the game becoming so predictable that the element of surprise, that spark of randomness that made it fun, is gone.
You act like I’m the bad poker player praying for pocket rockets, but what I’m really saying is that the game has been reduced to just that: praying for the perfect setup, because the diversity in winning strategies has collapsed. Before, you could piece together something unexpected and still win, and that’s where the fun came from. Now? Nah, it’s the same handful of builds steamrolling the rest of the lobby.
So if your idea of “getting good” is just memorizing the meta and going through the motions, I’d say that’s missing the point entirely. The fun of the game was in its variety, its chaos, its unpredictability — not in becoming a human calculator for the few overpowered builds. Maybe you’re the one who should git gud at understanding why that makes a game less fun. It’s a safe bet you didn’t win much until the meta change, given how you’re defending it with such abandon.
All that said, thank you for your commentary, even if it came from someone whose tone carries a condescending and dismissive, with a “know-it-all” attitude. You could be nicer and I’ll match my tone to the tone I receive, or you could just stick to the former.
I didn’t say you should; so that’s a strawman; you constructed an imaginary thing I said to make it easier to respond to.
Are you seriously finding it easy to go top 4 even if you feel you didn’t do any mistake this meta in most cases?
I may be doing something seriously wrong but I feel like ~50% of the games just kill me by power creep.
I’ve appreciated the feedback throughout this thread, and I think it’s important to step back and clarify a few things so we can better understand the core of my concern.
First, I don’t deny that skill is involved in adapting to the current meta. I respect that many of you have taken the time to learn the nuances and tempo shifts that the game demands now. My point, however, is not about how to play the game today, but about what the game has become. It’s shifted away from the unpredictability that made it exciting and into a more streamlined experience, where certain builds dominate more often than not.
RNG, by definition, should introduce a level of unpredictability. But when the game funnels players into predetermined builds or strategies based on the trinkets that conveniently align with their hero or deck, it’s hard to call that randomness anymore. It’s a calculated flow, not true randomness. And that’s where the heart of my frustration lies — the game’s diversity has narrowed, and the illusion of choice is becoming more apparent. This makes victories feel more like a result of following a formula than a showcase of creativity or adaptability.
In the early days of BGs, we had more room to experiment, more opportunities to turn a less-than-ideal hand into a win through a mix of luck and strategic improvisation. Now, we’re often forced into high-rolling specific comps to stay competitive, which narrows the experience and removes a lot of what made the game enjoyable in the first place.
To those who’ve adapted to the current state of the game, I respect that — you’ve learned how to succeed within the system we have now. But my point is, I’m not asking for a world where we just rely on “pocket rockets” to win. I’m asking for a return to a game where there’s space to play beyond what’s most efficient and expected. A game where there’s true randomness — not just the illusion of it.
I think we can all agree that the fun of a game like this comes from finding unique ways to win, from having close matches that keep us on our toes. Right now, that thrill feels diminished by a meta that’s too rigid, leaving little room for the unexpected. I believe a more balanced approach could make this game enjoyable for a wider range of players, without reducing it to a solved equation.
Thanks for the discussion, everyone. I hope we can all continue enjoying the game in our own ways, and maybe find common ground in wanting a bit more variety and unpredictability.
Seethe harder please
Well said and I agree with you.
It’s actually exactly like this right now. It’s more piecemeal than it’s ever been.
Except you… but it’s the game’s fault, right?
I don’t seethe over contrarians.
I disagree, it’s pretty crippling to go out of your “Straight Flush” that you’ve been building. In the streams I’ve watched, I’ve not seen people do that.
Because, that’s exactly what I said. /s
I’m sitting currently at about a 68% rate of getting into top 4. Keep in mind a 4th is usually a 0 in points or negative at higher ranks. It’s respectable but nowhere near the top players who are well over 75%. Finding ways to stay in the lobby for a 4th or better should be your goal to begin with. Ultimately there are just going to be games where the shop isn’t giving you anything to work with and you will go out on an 8th or somewhere between 4th. It happens to even the best players. In the long run though more games will erase those disaster games.
Perhaps i misunderstood what you were trying to say but you said.
By Turn 9 you need to be well on your way to your build or get an amazing shop that allows you to pivot hard. You play tempo till your first trinket in order to not take 15’s or minimize it as best you can. You should never be playing tempo after your first trinket. Ideally you don’t want to play tempo from the start and you want to have some kind of a direction and build that you can build on in the later turns or be able to transition from. Of course we all know that is usually not possible without a high roll shop.
From what you were saying i assumed you meant playing tempo continually from turn 7-9+. You cannot sustain yourself in a lobby just playing unguided tempo. Scaling will overtake you and push you out quickly if it isn’t already. If that’s not what you meant i misunderstood.
I sometimes get minus points as 4th, if I die together with the rest 4th/5th/6th+. I never saw negative points if I was alive as 3rd/4th and then died with the other 3rd/4th and 2 remained.
none of this is fun.
taking multiple 15 hits and being out before even get the 2nd trinket is garbage.
this season is garbage.
This is about you not making a board more than what your opponents are doing. If you aren’t making it to second trinket you’re just not doing it right.
It starts happening when you’re 12k+ rating. I’ll get a lobby with a bunch of people who have less than 8k rating. Meaning, i’m playing against people who have an mmr much lower but the system needed to fill in the lobby.
Try playing any other mode, the game as a whole is toxic crap. It’s a real shame the game has gone into full blown mana cheating clown fiesta circus nonsense.