The last couple of seasons since the rank revamp, I’ve been fairly consistently hitting Gold 5. I want to push further and start regularly hitting Platinum 10 or 5, but when I’m only getting 2 stars per win, I don’t tend to get very close to Platinum, usually only getting around Gold 4 or so. For folks that do regularly hit platinum/diamond, a few questions:
How many games do you play per day/month, on average? I’m wondering if I’m just not playing enough matches and need to invest more time into it to improve more. Not really sure how many I play currently, as I usually play on my tablet and Arcane Tracker doesn’t have the same kind of stats tracking that HDT has (and HSReplay doesn’t do much on the website itself based on my replay data, either, alas).
How many times do you lose before you take a break for the day or switch to another deck? I usually tend to stop after 3 or so losses in a row, figuring that I’m just not in the right headspace and continuing to play is just going to result in more losses due to being tilted.
How many decks do you typically play in a season? I usually focus just on one or two decks and try to get to know them very intimately, like lately I’ve been playing Highlander Hunter and have some 46 games with the current deck on my tablet (27-19). Total across different versions of it, I’m 39-28 on my tablet. (More games across Mac and PC.)
The downside of immersing myself in a specific deck is that when balance changes or expansions happen, it takes me a long time to adjust as a result. Like once I really start hitting my groove, the meta gets upended and I feel like I’m starting back over from square one. I’m expecting that once DQA gets nerfed on Tuesday, I’ll be back to scrambling for a bit again.
I usually get both pre-order bundles for each expac, so I usually have most of the cards for the expansion between what I unpack and what I craft with dust… usually only missing a couple of legendaries towards the end of an expansion that I don’t really care about. (I’m still missing several from Classic, but I don’t think many of the ones I’m missing at this point are very relevant, to be honest, or at least not for the classes I tend to play the most.)
Any other suggestions? I try to follow a few streamers on Twitch/YouTube (mostly Dekkster, RegisKillbin, and BMKibler) both to see how they pilot decks and to get a better understanding of what popular decks are out there, what to expect from them, and how to plan around that, if possible.
I do have all my deck trackers uploading my games to HSReplay; any suggestions on how to use that to review games I lost in order to see what mistakes I made and how to improve?
With the new rank changes getting into Diamond 5 when you get there and then if you have a good deck for the meta Legend might take another day or two for me.
I typically don’t go too crazy on crafting and just either make decks that last a while (Wild is great actually if you build stuff to last, since decks like Secret mage last forever and make it to D5 quick and fine. They end up getting a bit harder countered at D5 to legend, but they’re plenty enough to climb. )
However a common misconception is you just need to have a expensive deck or know all the cards to win. Honestly for D5 you just need to maintain a 50%+ winrate and the win streaks will take care of you.
But if pushing ranked for the monthly rewards, things like Hearthstone Deck tracker can make turns quicker with quick board damage counter and deck tracker which is a incredible lifesaver for reno/Highlander decks where you only get 1 of each card. Then you can just go to Hsreplay net and go around opening up random packs and browse by two things. Best winrates decks in ranks (Diamond is restricted but generally gold is free and good enough to give you a good enough idea. Or just playing into legend and seeing the decks yourself), for what decks are good.
27-19 with highlander hunter looks pretty good, honestly i would just keep playing for a while. In wild, typically there’s a smaller pool base so if you run into counter decks, it is legitimate to take a few minutes break so they can que into someone else before you resume. Standard is pretty high pop since Blizzard pushes it as the main mode so it won’t really matter, but just play it and eventually you should break through. Remember the first time will be the hardest when everything’s new, afterwards when you break through the first time, every time after tends to get easier. Good luck and have fun!
Or play on a new region, play all apprentice ranks and grab a new deck. Your Bonus stars will be newly calculated once you manage to get out of the apprentice ranks. If you have money, make a Warrior deck and farm DHs, then you should get at least a 9 star bonus.
I will be starting a thread about a DH aggro deck variant. It will include some stats for standard (P10-D5) and wild (B10-G10). You do not read like a DH player, but if you are a Priest player, then you might still get some insight into cards you are likely to face more after the nerfs on the 14th.
If you have a 2x star bonus, it shouldn’t be that hard to eventually reach the next step.
If you are playing a strong deck and you know how to play, you may get to diamond sooner than you think, thanks to the win streak bonus. If i remember correctly, when i tried to rank from gold 5 to diamond 10 without the bonus, i managed to get 5 ranks every one/two days. It was a little harder from D10 to D5, but i managed to do it last month.
Now I’m stuck between D5-legend, where you can’t have a streak bonus and 90% of the players just plays very strong/fast deck that beats me very often. Till then, you will have an easier life with the streak bonus, trust me
Its all come down to the deck you play. If you want to hit legend , you need a tier 1 deck. The more broken the deck, the better. if it can hightroll, even better. All the deck that took me to legend were crazy stuff like Amet IF/DS in early ulduum or deathrattle apothicary before nerf. I mean, Galakrond Sham was stronger than apothicary rogue, but Apo rogue had such crazy hight roll potential that it could basically roll over anything, given it had its scalething 2 mana minion and early apothicary.
So yeeah, its really what you run. assuming you have a lot of deck, play the best one and the one that counter the meta. Playing priest when the meta was full of face hunter got me one star away from legend. Play the top meta dominant deck or the deck that counter it, and that’s that.
Let’s say it is easier but many people manage to go to legend with Tier 4 decks or even worse /shrug. If you hate for example playing the current Tier one decks, it would make no sense to play them, since you wouldn’t really want to improve your gameplay, cuz you lack the passion for it.
I regularly get to Legend if I bother playing ranked, but you can’t really take me as a benchmark because I’ve played YuGiOh and MtG for years. I’ll give my two cents nonetheless:
If I’m in the mood to play ranked, I’ll play about 5 games per day. Getting to plat/diamond isn’t even hard because of the bonus stars you get when you hit a high rank and the win streak bonus. Ultimately, it’s not the number of games you play, it’s about the feedback you get. If you want to improve faster you should at the very least check your own replays if you have access to them. Even more useful is to have a (high level) coach give you feedback, because it can be hard to evaluate your own mistakes. Try making a thread asking for diamond 5 and higher players to help you (also try reddit). You might find someone who’s willing to help you for free, but you have to be willing to take some criticism about your plays and deck build.
Depends entirely which decks I lost to and how I lost the games. If I get hard-countered or high-rolled by some non-meta deck, then I can ignore the loss entirely. If I consistently lose to a meta deck, like 5 games in a row, then at the very least I’ll try to tweak my deck if not switch decks entirely. Three losses in a row to three different decks is too random, that can happen due to rng or a mistake on my part. So I try to not blame the deck too much unless I can see a pattern of failure.
I like to screw around, so I can easily play five decks in a season. But if you’re playing “seriously” I would suggest to play two decks, maybe three decks, with very different characteristics to improve your understanding of the game and to be able to adapt to the meta more easily.
Speaking as someone who’s ended each season of the new ranks in Plat 5/Diamond 10:
I usually play 2-3 Ranked games a day, 90-100 games per month. I definitely think that focusing on one or two decks would work best, because it makes it easier to learn the ins and outs of each matchup and how best to respond. The first three seasons I climbed primarily with Galakrond Priest, and this season I’ve been climbing with aggro DH. The few times I’ve tried other random decks in ladder (Quest Warrior, Spell Druid), I noticed my performance taking a big dip, primarily because I kept making mistakes which were pretty obvious in hindsight.
Depends on how tilting the loss was. Sometimes I can take two or three losses in a row, sometimes a single loss can be enough. I never swap decks, however, because I find that when I’m tilted, changing decks just means I’m playing tilted and with a deck I’m less familiar with, which just compounds the likelihood that I’ll lose.
Just one. At least to make it to Plat/Diamond, I find that learning a single deck thoroughly works a lot better than trying to target your pocket meta with multiple decks. If I ever bother going for Legend, that might be a different issue altogether.
This is the thread that I told you would be coming. It is for a DH deck. Skip to the stats section. It will show how many games it takes to get to different ranks with a respectable winrate.
Damn dude, that’s really harsh. Not everyone is as result-oriented as you are, maybe he just plays for fun and finally decided to set a goal for himself.
Yeah, I’m partially disabled and I work in IT. I have plenty of disposable income, and I’d rather support Hearthstone than buy AAA titles that I’m frequently unable to play. This is why I focus on Hearthstone as much as I do, because I can play on my tablet if I can’t handle sitting at my desk (and the predominant amount of my games are on Android due to that). Or I can watch YouTube videos/Twitch streams if I’m not even up to that, which is common. Compare my expenses in HS to other forms of entertainment, and it’s still a lot of bang for my buck, even before you factor in my disabilities. My overall monthly winrate does not indicate I’m losing, just that I’m not competitive enough right now.
Anyways, troll aside, my takeaway from this is that it sounds like I’m doing most of the right things; I just need to do them faster and/or more consistently. Which is good feedback; I was suspecting that was probably the case, but external validation is quite helpful.
I think the two main questions that I still don’t have a good grasp on are how do I review my replays to learn what my common misplays are (or if there really wasn’t a good chance of me winning, period, and while I played to my outs, I still lost) beyond asking others to review them, and how do I acclimate faster to changes when they come out. Which the latter is really the more crucial in my book, especially given both the upcoming patch and expansion on the horizon for August.
I feel like many balance patches throw me off-kilter, and expansions really feel like I’m starting back at square one (logically, I know that’s false, given the rotation cycle, but it still feels like it usually). In the specific case of Ashes, I feel like a lot of my successes with Highlander Hunter came from playing the same archetype last expansion, but in all previous expansions, the archetypes I played the most got relegated to t3 or below after the shift in meta. This was the one time that I felt I could naturally just drop in and go. Maybe that will be true of the next expansion as well, it’s certainly possible, but I’m operating under the assumption that it will not be. I think in general this is somewhat of the opposite side of the coin for focusing on 1-2 decks; I learn how to play them effectively in a wide range of scenarios, but then updates happen and I don’t feel like I know what the right decisions are anymore.
Beyond the standard technicalities - like checking for bad move order, mulligan phase mistakes or general misplays - there’s almost always a turn where you had multiple options and didn’t know exactly what to play. When you’re watching the replay you have the luxury of calculating/reasoning which option you think would’ve been the best without a time constraint. This makes those types of situations more familiar, which in turn makes it easier to calculate them in the future. This works wonders for more complicated decks like Enrage Warrior. However, some mistakes are strategic in nature, generally meaning that a card had been played at the wrong time. You can catch these mistakes by wondering whether a card has a specific role in your deck and how it interacts with your opponents deck. One of the things I like to do is to check whether I played the “worst answer” on a given turn. The idea is that you answer a threat with the worst card in hand to preserve your better cards.
There is no straightforward answer for this, because it comes down to how you evaluate cards. Balance changes generally don’t change a card’s utility, but rather it’s strength. Re-evaluating cards can be hard and is a skill honed through experience. The easiest way to describe the process would be to ask yourself these questions:
-Does the card still do what I want it to do?
Is the card playable when necessary?
Is the card worth the investment?
It’s hard to explain what the cut-off point is, you learn to recognize it through experience.
Under the old system, from r5 to legend took 250 games played with a 55% WR, many less if you could maintain a 60%+ WR whilst climbing ladder.
With changes, still takes a lot of games to reach legend (to answer your question, lots of legend players/streamers play over 1k games per month to give you an idea) but reaching Platinum won’t take you long if you’re using HH especially. My advice is just to keep watching HH main streamers pilot the deck, study literature to find out which cards are best kept and which are to be mucked etc. Most importantly you’re going to need to familiarize yourself with all the other meta decks to know what they can do so you know what they’re going to do in certain situations. Really all it comes down to is experience just keep playing the deck and continue studying as I said and you’ll start ranking up quickly especially with that deck. You’ll reach Diamond easily once you get more comfortable with said deck, good luck.
just keep playing the deck and continue studying as I said and you’ll start ranking up quickly especially with that deck. You’ll reach Diamond easily once you get more comfortable with said deck, good luck.