before i get to the subject matter/complaint, i’ve gotta preface it with a few things to put it in context … first of all, i’ve been thinking a lot about hearthstone’s achievement system as i’ve been grinding to try to complete this new seasons set of achievements and hunt down some of the past achievements that have evaded me for one reason or another (mostly finding work arounds for cards that i didn’t open and don’t care to spend dust or other resources on besides time) … there are a lot of things about the achievements that i think i like and serve the game well … for example, in a lot of cases they are kind of like an indirect “tutorial” for the new deck archetypes in the sense that they give you an objective to try to build around which often leads to discovering how the new card interactions work together … they also give people an incentive to diversify the decks they are playing to help even out the meta and help the get a sample for deck matchups built … they also in some cases add deck building challenge and add a sense of accomplishment particularly for some of the more challenging ones (paaarley comes to mind) … obviously, they also attempt to help add a layer of replay-ability to the game to keep it from getting stale … and in many cases they try to get you to spend on the game like to collect all the legendaries in a set to get a diamond portrait
where i get annoyed with the achievements, particularly the gameplay based ones are when an achievement is waaaay more grindy than it needs to be … and this is where the subject comes in … warrior … is so oo ooo oooo ooooo oooooo ooooooo g r . i . . n . . . d . . . . y … in so many of the seasons achievements … for example this season’s achievement of destroying 150 total cards is already annoying as heck … now, you might wonder how i can say this given that it’s essentially the same thing as the patchwork achievement to destroy 100 cards, and you only have to play boomboss once to destroy up to 9 cards … that’s way more efficient than a patchwork proc … yes, but you also have consider that you need to wait for the bombs to be drawn, that you don’t over draw them, that the board state and hand state allow you to get value out of the bombs exploding … patchwork can come down on turn 6 with a coin, and can be played proactively, whereas to set up a boomboss bomb to be played proactively (in standard) you need to play it on turn 8 (7 with coin) where the board state often is in a “do something or lose” state and then you need to play for 3 mana the card that draws a card from the deck … for all the bounce/copy-to-hand cards that could be used for patchwork, you need double that if you want to bounce both boomboss and the draw-from-deck card … it’s just so much of a slower setup, and the attempt to make it efficient per bomb or even just from a game state/tempo standpoint is rediculous … now there is the fact that patchwork only worked on minions and that the bombs work on everything, but even if you were to just shuffle 3 bombs and bounce the draw card, if you get to a board state where you can do that, quite often you aren’t going to be getting full efficiency on the bombs and you will often just destroy 1 or 2 cards with each … and then on top of that there’s 50% more procs you need for the achievement … someone really wanted us to be playing a lot of boomboss this season … just like last season they wanted a lot of the warrior titan played … destroy 100 minions with attacks from the titan’s ability … yuck, that also took for ever, and also very little in terms of clever deck building to help speed it up from being one or 2 procs per game …
whoever is designing the warrior achievements in particular, could you please make the grindy ones either a little more fun or easier to make a factory out of with some clever/targeted deck building? there are plenty of other grindy achievements that you can make technically suboptimal plays to try to extend the game and get more procs in to get the achievement done in less time and maybe taking some losses along the way, which i appreciate, because then it’s like “am i playing to win or playing to maximize the achievement procs” and i think that’s a fun angle to achievement hunting … but warrior has been just blech for this in general … please consider some qol for warrior achievements next set – thanks!