pardon the cheesy topic heading … for the last couple weeks i decided to dive into clearing out a bunch of the hs gameplay achievements for normal hearthstone, partly just b/c, and partly because i’ve done all i really care to do towards achievements in the other game modes (bgs/mercs/duels)
now i don’t have a full collection, but quite often there are ways around the need to craft a certain card to get an achievement done, mainly through discover effects
for example i don’t own korrak, but i got the korrak achievement done through a priest deck using a combination of discover deathrattle, discover legendary, and discover 4-drop effects … that and plenty of copy/bounce effects
currently i’ve cleared out all of the neutral achievements except one (i don’t own horrendous growth, and am not sure if it is possible to discover it through anything, and i’m not about to craft one just for the achievment =P) from darkmoon faire through the current expansion … i’ve also cleared out most of the priest and demon hunter achievements along the way … i actually started with demon hunter because i figured i’d start to hunt the achievements while i tried to finally get 1000 wins with the class (so i can finally play dk fr)
but i wound up switching off to priest for a bunch of the neutral achievements since quite frankly it is op with aman’thul (fortunate enough to drop in a pack) for the sake of both just controlling game flow vs. bots (and in general) as well as randoming into legendaries that may have an achievement attached to it
in fact, because of aman’thul, i think priest is bust in terms of achievement hunting balance and i believe needs to be addressed … not because i think it ought to be nerfed, but in that i think every class needs a way to discover random legendaries like aman’thul
a card like paparazzi is great, but it suffers from being stuck in the card pool of the class that played it … as it stands priest seems to be the best class for completing all class’s achievements on a budget due to the fact that it can grab a legendary from any class and it can very easily copy aman’thul with creation protocol, seance, power chord sync … as well as other bounce/copy/ressurect effects … all found quite readily in priest (maybe not bounce, but pandas exist)
and if you don’t need to copy aman’thul, those effects can very easily copy other cards you need copied to get certain achievements done, korrak for example
going back to demon hunter and trying to 4-drop/legendary discover into an il’gynoth is so much more remarkably difficult, not only due to the fact that those seem to be the only two “efficient” effects that can get to an il’gynoth, but also the deck construction of demon hunter is just so much less conducive to controlling the battle and then getting to a point where of making use of the effect … priest has so many juicy board clear effect especially in wild, but demon hunter just doesn’t compare … plus there’s no aman’thul to copy to keep removing minions as you get more and more chances to discover the legendary you are looking for … in short, the achievement hunting has come to a crawl for some of those legendary based ones that i don’t wish to bother spending dust on …
i guess what i’m saying is that i hope they create a card (or several) that will help to level the playing field in terms of budget achievement hunting … it is quite fun to puzzle together a deck that can find a way around needing the card that is required to do the quest … i got the son of hodir and storm giant achievements done with containment unit and grace of the highfather for example
in any case, maybe this post will help inspire people who care about achievement hunting to find a budget option to completing some of the legendary based achievements … and hopefully it will also inspire the devs to equalizing the class balance a bit in this regard with future card sets (seriously, why is there not a “discover a lifesteal card” in demon hunter …)
edit1: also, i forgot to mention one weird thing i noticed regarding “class balance” and certain discover effects … for example, there are certain cards that seem to come up way more than others, and for something like sketchy stranger, i almost always got rogue, hunter, and mage when using it in priest, and only rarely got paladin (which was fine b/c i have been trying to trigger 300 rogue secrets for the achievement while not playing rogue), but in demon hunter i quite frequently get paladin, hunter, and mage, and much more rarely get rogue (though, unlike with priest where i almost always got rogue, in dh the split seems closer to something like 1:4 or 1:3 to find rogue in the mix … this seems to boarder on a bug report) … given that nearly all of my 230/300 triggered rogue secrets have been done outside of rogue, it seems like that is a decent sample size to wonder what’s up with that
edit2: another example of weird discover buckets … idk how many times paparazzi had given me xy’mox, zihi, and zhilag … and i don’t just mean individually, i mean all three at the same time … and yet, i’ll only gotten il’gynoth what twice out of many, many discovers … i think i saw it more with aman’thul so far … not much more, but more