Has anyone left HS (minimum 3 months) and returned at a later date?
What is your background? e.g. F2P, average D5 rank, mainly STD ladder player, 30-60hrs spent/mth, etc, etc.
What are your thoughts,
Iâve taken an extended break from Hs, got a bit bored of it and wanted to try some MtG Arena and Artifact ( lol!).
I quite liked both games , MtG is an interesting game let down by a pretty lackluster client and Artifact was really cool but insanely complex and monetized in the worst way it is possible to imagine so died.
On returning to Hs I really appreciate the quality of the animations/ voicelines and the fact that Team 5 actively buff and nerf the balance of cards to keep things fresh.
Iâm a dumpster legend level player, play a couple of hours a week, and used to usually get the expansion pre-order, but I havenât been happy with the latest meta and am seriously considering switching back to MtG.
This forum and other Hs players are some of the things keeping me here for now, I find the Hs community much more fun than the MtG one.
Iâve taken breaks from hearthstone as you know I come and go on the forums through the yearsâŚ
When Iâve quit normally cause I just had other stuff to do that was more fun and didnât came back til it seem like some âfun stuffâ to do.
Mainly Play Wild, use to be legend player, now I canât even be bother to grind for legend as the game feel way more taxinâ with lack of âfun decksâ being viable for rank climbing, as nearly all decks need the same core to be âgoodâ for Standard, and Wild just fun to do random whatever.
once I return I use to be âontop of everythingâ but iâm starting to dip slowly cause last few years been pretty bad meta like it was in RR and druid feel worst in the fun department outside of wild stuff, can always praise Yogg for stuff. And I loved PvE Content tbh as they always kept me as a âfun thing to doâ when I didnât wanna play rank as it kept your last play kinda like playing a game on the computer âwhere you left offâ
Iâve always been f2p, Druid main and etc, as for hours⌠Canât say I always had different âtimesâ but I normally play now every 2-3 day of not playing (build up quest) then do all the quest in a few hours then leave again⌠Normally play games while I was in audition rooms and on short breaks during recording, or when I was running my non profit food bank, when I had 30 mins breaks something to relax after dealing with over 100k+ lbs of food I was handing out Thursdays.
yup
played for i think 6 years straight
left bc the deckbuilding situation became âcheat mana faster than your opponent, using the same old packages, and maybe a new card in thereâ. instead of disruption or outlasting being an option. âdid you find encanters flow?â vs âdid you find palm reading?â and its âcan you disrupt either of these two plays of your opponentâ and obviously the answer is no, all you can do is apples to apples it or outspeed it with aggro. very few classes can disrupt a mana cheat package from hand.
this is wildâs lack of interactivity, defined (above).
compare that to idk 2015, thijs, oil rogue âdo i prep fan and hope to draw this? do i drake and just pass? what about shiv hero power to set up oil for next turn what if my opponent does thisâ and so forth. compare that line of thinking with the whole âyoo twitchchat pog i got early flowâ and âsup chat hey i got early palm hollerâ. like, its beyond simplified, both deckbuilding and in match play. thats a big problem.
i typed a whole heap sorry in advance for wall of text. i dont know how else to cut out points that i feel need elaboration.
the ladder restructure was the big dagger for me, taking away the challenge in getting legend, and the feeling of caring about each ladder match since its mmr based not rank anymore. star bonuses that are massive, floors everywhere, its all lowering the bar.
giving away gold cards in the core set. now, everyone has so many gold cards. so, the new gold card you unpack isnât cool anymore because everyone is playing so many gold cards bc they got them for free and nobody memorizes which cards are core set and which are non core, so nobody appreciates or notices authentic gold cards bc the major gold card handout they did like diluted the value of gold cards, majorly.
i regret ever keeping a gold card or crafting the 50 some legendaries i did gold, bc every other card is gold now, bc they gave so many to everyone for free.
streamer prerelease parties exposing all the fun in new cards to vip streamers and youtube for all to see even if you ignore it, the playing field will watch, so the info is still spread to almost everyone. all the excitement of day 1 week 1 is gone when they do that prerelease, and no, like kibler said âthe meta isnât perfectly figured out in this 2 week streamer eventâ and thatâs true, but a lot of into still gets exposed by it a lot more than it seems.
gold card handout also makes all the UI look horrible as we all have seen. go to your CM and see doubles of almost every card bc they gave out all these gold cards and you may not have those or might have 1 and the whole thing is a visual mess. worst decision they made to hearthstone was that gold card handout on a mass scale.
the UI is a mess with the latest redo. to make a deck you have to click on âmodesâ then click on âwild/standardâ then go back, then click on CM, then scroll down however many decklists, then click âcreate new deckâ. to check your wins per class you have to have a current deck for that class and then click âplayâ to see that counter.
arena is pooled, and limited in card count from years ago, its heavily altered and not random. nobody plays around opponentâs having this or that card unless they can afford to, which is barely ever since theres so few cards.
they nerfed a lot of artwork in the last 2-3 years and none of them look good.
they added so many skins to the game that no future cool skin matters bc nobody knows what anyone is bc thereâs so many skins. also, the new skins most of them look very undermade, like low effort, very unlike blizzard, i mean very.
seeing devs pour resources into a new game mode every year instead of pouring resouces into asking us about fixing wild standard ladder arena and the core things of the game is the biggest indicator they think the game is fine and that devving new modes is prio over fixing a mismanaged game.
the quest system is awful, we used to go âif i win 3 games i get a packâ now its âif i win 3 games i have no idea how many xp i ll get and even if i know how much, it will net me not enough gold to even buy a packâ
the numbers are inflated too, 1750 isnât as cool as 60 when it comes to valuing things and like keeping a number in your head on how much gold you have. we get exp for gold not gold for gold.
i tried battlegrounds, was super fun at first, and actually can see how that mode has a long game bc if you are super wealthy and have a very fast pc or laptop that directly helps bgâs more than arena or any mode since half of the skill in it is speed based. but if you are very good at it, there is replayablity, its just so narrow theres like what 5 tribes and only a handful of cards wanted per tribe and menagerie is like not a possibility even tho they really want to pitch menag builds as competitive. the litmus for BGâs is âhow playable is menagerieâ and if its not, there goes creativity bc mono-tribe builds are the exact same as as the last match just minor differences.
so now that i left for the 2nd time i feel well, wishing we had the old days back. when hs was about calculating plays and risk and making a decklist. not about not caring about any risk and most people just copy a metadeck bc in wild f/e the meta is so dominant you cannot win with off meta not even one game. off meta defined as not using a meta mana cheat package.
if you play hearthstone ask yourself âdo i like collecting cards more or actually playing them the way the game is now?â and if the answer is you are playing for collecting, you are wasting your time and money bc you could then play like for example not-remastered diablo 2. a game made by very good devs that has seriously years of collecting items if done solo, which is no different than just playing hearthstone to collect cards.
for example if i came back right now, in 1 month were going to get âok new expansion and hereâs the streamer pre release time windowâ and its likeâŚam i excited to play and think of decks 2 weeks after streamers got to play with and show these cards to everyone? Thereâs nothing surprising about day 1 when they do that.
and the whole quest idea i think is trash. quests are guided deckbuilding, a restriction, which is great, but when thereâs no or little competition for what cards to use to best complete that quest, the challenge is over right there.
wild needs a whole bunch of interaction to be fun again, the format is awful its all about from hand or aggro things. there is less and less interactivity in wild by the expansion.
when you look at ladder its like âtheres floors everywhere, nobodys paired off rank its mmr now, a lot of people have different star bonuses, this win does not mean the same for me as it would for my opponentâ.
when you see a gold card unpacked its like âcool!, well wait if its a legendary it has to go bc that giant border ruins the look. and if its not a legendary minion, it also has to go bc everyone has so many gold cards nobody even notices gold cards or that i unpacked thisâ
when you complete a quest its like âi have no idea if this will net me a pack or notâ or 'how many wins do i need for that next pack".
when you que into arena its like âeveryones playing the same standout cards, pooled against each other bc there are so few cards theres nothing random about this draft its very same each opponentâ
then you try out standard and its like âcore sets rotated, which sounded just perfect on paper but in practice now thereâs no class identity since we had 7 major years of class ID and now it gets reshuffled which means it will take years to forget what each class used to have not just a few weeks or months meaning that change wasnât worth it it was too little too lateâ.
and, the emote situation is minor but still thereâs no âim sorryâ and its still âwowâ and theres no auto squelch per login.
if any deck ever (this isnât devs fault for once) is anything near good, its on youtube and seen by just about everyone playing the game, within a day. the counter to that deck is going to be an already advertised and existing metadeck. there just is no room for building in this game with streamers this well known and good at the game and findable and, shoved in our face by youtube having a suggestions bar and twitch has one too.
keep in mind, most decklists are shared by, or sometimes created by, a streamer and his/her chat online. very rarely is one deck made by one person like the old days. usually streamers wont give credit to their chat or friends list, or their friends chat that helped make the deck for their friend who texted/messaged the list to them on their own stream.
in the old days barely anyone streamed hs, it wasnât good then, so youd have someone coming up with a list solo, or maybe with 1 person, and you werenât competing with twitch chats if you try to build around a card yourself at home.
geesh this sounds so negative.
but its all true.
i guess one thing devs did correctly the last 2-3 years is no dupes on legendaries, rares and epics. that was a baller move. log into hearthstone now youâre greeted with like 4 butttons here, 4 icons here, more icons here, nothing is words, the icons are not intuitive or clear or cool looking, art work is pretty bad for skins, promotion bundles and âNEW!â buttons all over the UI.
IdkâŚhs changedâŚand its almost all due to the developers over the least 2-3 years.
thatâs why i left, and the whole other side of the coin with streamers twitch chat youtube suggestion tab and youtube comments section and the whole social media aspect compltely dominating games and especially pvp games which is unlike 2014, 2015 it was not like this then.
hope this isnât too much text reaver
thanks for reading if you did, or if anyone else did.
Yeah. For like, a year I think? Maybe more. Iâm quite sporadic with HS. I sat out Boomsday, witchwood and rastakhan rumble for sure. Maybe some of Kobolds too.
I was a rank 19 player, F2P, played this game fairly casually right before I left (say, 2 or 3 hours a week. Sometimes a bit more, sometimes a bit less).
I just got bored of the game and had other things to occupy me. Simple. I got sick of using the deck I had, couldnât think of any of decks I was interested in trying out & was just tired of HS in general. Didnât really think about HS after that.
Coming back renewed my interest mildly. Played more sporadically, but generally less. The thing that really got me back into HS was duels though. I loved dalaran heist and it seemed to emulate that.
Sure. Iâve done it twice. First time I was D5 in Ungoro and frozen throne. Raza, Barnes, keleseth, and Spreading Plague/Jade sucked all fun out of the game. The horrendous economy made it too expensive to build full meta decks which did not help my experience.
Later I played MTG Arena. Loved magic more but always missed Hearthstoneâs better presentation.
Came back a little before DH got released and picked Paladin for the free deck. Had the dust for one class and was unpleasantly surprised to learn Paladin was just butt at the time and Murlocs were basically all there was to do again. Hit legend with Pure aggro and then did it again with a custom aggro deck just as midrange Pure Paladin started becoming passable to farm DH.
Quit again around the time of rotation. The rise of Libram Paladin was fun, I enjoyed cyclone mage as well, and I was hitting 11 star legend but I just got bored of the game. I tend to get into games a few months at a time so this wasnât unusual. Last thing I was doing was a bunch of the old solo adventures Iâd missed. Also I didnât go entirely F2P and man does it turn me off to open a bunch of packs and realize how little you get for 10-20 bucks; card games are such a ripoff.
Played tons of Deep Rock Galactic and Slay the Spire (S tier game), among other things. Watched Hearthstone on forums/Grandmasters a bunch even though Iâd stopped playing.
Came back a little bit ago. The book of heroes stuff is vastly better since theyâve done this mercenaries set of stories, so other than lack of dungeon runs the solo content is nice. Hit legend again with Libram Paladin a tiny bit before it hit the meta (mostly since it was the deck I already had) and Iâm back around 500-1000 range. The prevalence of OTKs on turn 7-8 is more than a little ridiculous and I think they need to tone down damage from hand again, but otherwise game is fine. The economy is vastly improved. Battlegrounds is dumb; mercenaries seems cool but also like a mobile cash grab so Iâm not sure itâll hold my attention much past clearing the PvE.
I have been quiet in past and came back, but this time I donât think I see myself return again. The game is just straight trash with what Blizzard has done to play style it is no longer hearthstones because of no interaction between players. All need to do is just watch few games past and present and see mega differences in play style it was more interaction on the board in the past.
I started during the Witchwood expansion and played until Descent of Dragonsâplayed pretty heavily (for a guy with a full-time job and 2 kids) throughout that stretch. My highest rank was level 14.
I quit and didnât even log in for months at a time. I didnât really have anything against HS, just got busier and found myself gravitating towards stuff on my phone that could be played very casually (Empires and Puzzles, if you want to know).
Ironically, I came back to HS in May '21 because I needed to stop spending so much money on the ridiculous game I was playing. I was surprised by how much I enjoyed it and have been playing heavily since. Iâve reached D5 the last couple of months.
A break could work wonders for people who arenât happy with the game right now. Decide to take a month off. Explore other options. Maybe youâll find that you miss HS. Maybe you wonât miss it at all. Either way, youâll probably be happier.
I left my wife for Hearthstone. 
With the current state of the game iâm really starting to regret it 
I do often. Not play for several weeks or months and after that when i feel like it i play again. Sometimes just 1 week and sometimes longer like 1 month.
I am at the edge where am considering if I could take a prolong leave from HS. (F2P, STD player)
Is there any preparations advisable if I wish to get back to the game at a later date?
Do share personal experiences, hopefully not the usual common ones.
I started playing HS a week after it was released. Itâs a bit weird, I had been playing WoW for a very long time, ditched it in 2011 and then started to play some FPS game I really enjoyed. Then coming 2014 I had shot enough people, and what I really wanted to do next was a game like Magic The Gathering I remembered from a PC game. So started googling for PC card games and to my great and pleasant surprise of all companies in the world, Blizzard had released a computer card game. WoW themed. Wow. It was also FREE.
So I started playing it and it was everything I hoped for. It was fantastic, you got cards for free to get started and then could save up points for better cards or buy them directly.
I immediately decided I was gonna F2P, not because I am against it or donât have the money, but because I donât want to have some artificial advantage over people who just donât have the money.
I made best I could with the cards I got an slowly levelled up, as I did I found out about netdecking and found it was against my fun. Because thinking about building a deck was pretty much the thing I liked the MOST about the card games. The play itself was also kinda cool, but just dumping cards and not thinking about if you wanted it in your deck or would rather have drawn something else at that moment just made it lack depth to me.
Either way I always kept working on that one deck I had, we would nowadays call it tempo warrior. I used my points to sometimes buy the wrong cards and find out those points were wasted, that is part of the learning process. As the deck improved I slowly made it to rank 5, then repeated that a few months.
Played the game constantly for like 4 years, doing at least a few games every week. Got to legend about 4 times when I tried, and that was during the summer holidays because only then I could play enough games to acually reach it. Had more decks that were capable of doing it though.
Then I was running out of ideas, I did not see any room to make my own decks as the meta was so very polarized. The few ideas I had in practice just didnt work. And after a while I just lost enthusiasm.
Then I quit in march 2018, reason was that I didnât want to play any of the meta decks as per usual, but this time also saw no light in how to defeat multiple of them.
And this is by the way also something that would remain.
I came back in august 2018, after just checking whats going on. I saw the potential of odd rogue, and played it for a bit, then tweaked it into an elemental package also containing that 4/5 âdiscover and elementalâ minion, which netted me many wins vs control decks. It was cool and also fun to add some sauce to a netdeck Iearned.
Eitherway I lost interest again, and donât remember why. It just didnt appeal to me to go legend again with exactly the same deck and there was nothing else I wanted to play I guess.
Came back again a summer later, so now a year break more or less and I really wasnât too enthusiastic about the whole thing, but Bomb warrior was somewhat refreshing and looked like deck worth tweaking, and I made a tempo variation without shieldslams and instead frothing berserkers etc. It was looking somewhat promising but I just didnât have the patience of old days to go through the learning process of tweaking and keeping track of all the cards etc. The tempo variation would later become popular.
Then I was in the mood to forever let go of HS, but yet another summer later, so 2020 now, I checked some twitch HS (after not thinking/looking at HS for a year) and saw this Galakrond thing happening. And that looked really intersting. As opened HS, I also saw I had gotten all of the Galakronds for FREE.
So yeah, I wanted to try it. But this time I would netdeck and just play without thinking, because the deck on itâs own was interesting enough. As it went by though I made some very minor but more often seen tweaks. (I had the stealth varation with Akama).
So that was fun, as I had laddered I also got some ideas out of the meta that I wanted to try but those failed, and then I just quit HS again.
Untill this summer when I heard about HS classic happening, and now I am tweaking my classic deck and playing it on the classic ladder.
I am currently not tempted to return to âstandardâ HS, or try battlegrounds, or mercenaries.
Conclusion: great game, free game. Played a lot and probably will have more 1-year breaks but eventually play again.
I thought about quitting so I started to hoard gold (The first month was a bit tough because I was missing 4 important commons, just endure, donât craft these, these will come for free with time). If you get to diamond 5 each month then you get most of the rares drip fed to you by the end of the expansion even if you donât buy the packs. I started buying classic packs with the gold I was hoarding, the way I see it, I am missing 22 epics so that should be about 10,000 gold worth of packs and actually classic packs have the most value for me at the current moment because I donât have molten lava giants or second ice block, shield slam, brawl, preparation (I basically dodged every single good epic from the set).
Also plan to have GvG and Grand Tournament (all rares). Also mitigate your dust spending, I got the hunter quest from the free packs so I didnât craft a single card, but if you werenât lucky idk craft the cheapest deck to mitigate dust spending. (about 7000g needed here for me)
Then if you can be patient enough probably save 5000g per set you plan to miss, having all the rares is most important because after then you basically only get one new card per every 500g and that extra card might not even be good, so really probably youâll get one good card every 2000g past collecting every rare. So in other words if I want to come back to the game and have a fair chance, Iâll probably need to save (17,000 gold + 15,000g/year), so I could probably quit after 3 more expansions (1 year break) or 2 more expansions (4 month break). After then I would need to play 4 months of every year to stay on top of things (still requiring to let that current set drip feed).
I hope this helps.
First time leaving after years of diary gameplay, the questlines completely ruined the experience for me, maybe I will return when finally this crap rotates maybe not.