Been away for more than a few months. But is HS still just a burned out wreck of ridiculousness power creep or has it been toned down or even scaled back?
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The main power creep I see, is that some decks can kill again by round 5 which I find abusive and uninteresting design. It feels abusive to the defeated because they don’t have time to play anything complex and it’s uninteresting to the pilot since they win against a board that is usually completely undeveloped.
I realize that fun is a relative feeling. But your response answers question. Thanks for responding.
Yes it’s very subjective. Someone very new to the game might want those 5-minute-kill decks because they are the most simple to end the game, but I’ve figured this isn’t the kind of game that is the most interesting to those knowing the game inside out.
True, true. Even the luster of diamonds fades over time. Fun factor has stayed constant. I have changed.
When The Great Dark Beyond was released in Nov, the power level of that set was lower and most of the cards were unable to compete with the 5 older sets in Standard.
Then the StarCraft mini-set was released, probably the best mini-set ever. These cards pushed the power level and redefined the meta. Though now it has been about 6 weeks and some people are tired of the cards already.
The upcoming expansion Into The Emerald Dream overall seems to be of a lower power level. Though cards like Tortolla seem insane…
We will have to see the mass nerfs and rebuffs of cards coming in Patch 32.0 to see what the new Year of the Raptor landscape will be like. They already said they were nerfing Terran and Zerg cards…
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Short answer: yes, all time highs concerning power creep. I’ll come back for an updated answer at the end of the month, since rotation and a new expansion is around the corner.
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It was just overpowered and people are greedy and like that. It was not even overpowered in a natural way because I believe they chopped off part of the expansion to pretend they created a miniset in isolation but it’s obvious the space theme isn’t a coincidence.
StarCraft packages are clunky and the only reason we play them is they’re overpowered for now.
As someone who quit 18 months ago and have just returned to see the exact same thing, I think the game has gotten 100x worse than it was years ago lol
I dont even know whats happening in the game anymore. Things just happen out of seemingly nowhere. You cant play around anything because so much of the game is won from hand. Board is so utterly meaningless it seems.
So many of the new mechanics and keywords seem super anti fun, uninteractive and unreadable.
What do i mean? Take starships.
They are basically dormant minions that also have magnetic where every starship piece played stacks its stats and keywords on top of each other. You as an opponent cannot interact with at all. They sit on the board just building and building and there is nothing you can do to stop it. Unlike dormant minions you cannot play around their wake timers, the opponent gets full agency over when and how they awaken. This is ANTI FUN and UNINTERACTIVE. It isnt fair or enjoyable to have things I cannot in any way prevent or play around. Then randomly 1 turn theyll press the starship button and summon an entire board, wipe yours and there’s nothing you can do to prevent that before hand
When I say unreadable, its utterly stupid how hard it is to understand what these starships even do. The UI is so terrible when you click on them. Plus some of the stupid rng effects these things can do is dumb. I played against an opponent who was literally just summoning infinite 10 mana minions with reborn from this thing. I just had to sit there and watch as he kept spawning infinite reborn giant minions for free every turn.
Second example. I dont know if its just because its new mini set but MY GOD the starcraft cards literally dominate 99% of games. You will struggle to play a match where the opponent isnt playing these obscene cards.
All 3 starcraft factions are completely broken imo. 1 faction has cards that literally reduce all their other faction cards by (2) mana for the rest of the game. EACH. So you can play 4-5 of these cards and essentially have everything for 0 mana.
And OF COURSE these cards have 0 downside to playing them. For instance one of the cards are just a standard 2 mana 2/2 with lifesteal and deathrattle reduce all your cards by 2 mana for the rest of the game!!! A 2 mana 2/2 with lifesteal is already a perfectly fine card. The fact it also mana cheats your entire deck and hand by 2 mana is literally overkill.
Another faction has infinite scaling stats. Similar to above, basic 3 mana 3/3’s that have deathrattle give all your minions for the rest of the game +1/1. God forbid any of these cards get reborn. Suddenly by turn 5 they are playing 3 mana 6/7’s with insane effects.
You either ignore these cards and they trade and get the effects anyway or you kill them first. EITHER WAY YOU LOSE.
Game is a literal joke and after 5 hrs of trying to play a few different decks, it feels like you need to play 1 of these broken decks or you cannot win because they get so much free value for no skill
The game has completely lost the plot with power creep and makes stormwind look like a healthy expansion
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Starships look overpowered now but I believe it’s mainly because they’re overtuned and if they weren’t they would be clunky. Take for example the combo of 3-effects + 1-damage-AOE on a starship which can easily produce a full board clear because it can be poisonous which would be very weak if it wouldn’t get poisonous and that’s only one example because the Zerg and Protoss have also broken tuning.
I fully expect to see ~0 play from StarCraft decks if they nerf them enough to be sort of “equal” to newer decks because then people will hate the clunkiness of their synergies and just abandon them completely.
its arguably in the worst state it’s ever been in 
i havent touched standard or the game in general for weeks, its borderline unplayable
no skill involved in a lot of the meta decks, and even the ones that do take some brain power are just not fun to play
basically if you arent playing the starcraft cards you don’t get to play the game period
games feel like a coin toss, you never feel like you have control over any given situation, and even if you pilot a deck perfectly, if it isnt meta chances are youre just gonna lose
tons of badly designed, really toxic cards, the devs seem reluctant to do anything about it which is disheartening
idk man, i would say rn is the worst time to get back into hs, but the light at the end of the tunnel is defo rotation, if they do nuke the starcraft stuff anyway
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yeah its the push toward no skill decks or just generating wins out of nowhere thats been really frustrating
i know RNG is inherent to hearthstone and I enjoy it, i appreciate it, but when i finally back my opponent into a corner, finally get through all their resources, only for them to play a card that discovers them a card that instantly completely turns the tables on me, when I havent made any kind of mistake as a player, is just horrible
and again I acknowledge that this happened in the past, but it was nowhere near as frequent as it is in modern hs
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no it is not fun anymore its way dumb and expensive for everything RIDICULOUS STUPID AND WORTHLESS NOW bring back duels put ARENA i n the scrap bin
the whole game sucks in its entirety now
I just think the devs are taking the game in the complete opposite direction most players want
We want more board based gameplay. And they seem to interpret that as adding more and more things onto the board you cannot interact with as an opponent!!!
First it was dormant minions. Probably the least offensive example. They have fixed turn timers before they wake up so despite you as an opponent not being able to remove them, you at least know they are literally useless until 2/3/4/5 turns time and you can plan ahead
Then quests which literally broke the entire game by their third iteration with stormwind. We all know that expansion so enough said
Then they added locations which started to push the uninteractivity but they purposely (at least initially) built some safeguards with the 1 turn cooldown between uses. Another thing stuck on board you as the opponent just have to stare at. You cannot remove it unless running the 1 niche underpowered tech location removal card. One of the reason the reno hero card was so prominent was it was one of few cards that could actually remove locations. That says a lot. Early locations were pretty innocent effects, but ive already seen multiple new locations since i left which are just stupid on a card you cannot remove as the opponent.
Now we are at Starships. I feel like this is the stormwind of dormant cards that questlines were. They have pushed the power level too far past the line of being just ok.
Starships are too strong to have 0 way to remove them. The mana cost to launch is non existent because there are multiple cheap tempo cards that reduce your starship launch cost. Ive never seen anyone pay full mana to use their starship because all the starship support cards dont have to sacrifice early game tempo to use. You just slot them in all the time and play them just like any other card. Its dumb to sit there and watch as your opponent builds this thing you have no say over
I want a game where my opponent plays a thing, I have react to the thing they played with my own thing and whichever player outplays the opponent through skill wins
NOT they play a thing I cannot interact with, I play my own thing and they dont caree, they keep building this thing i cant do anything about, press a button and win.
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nope still RIDICULOUS if not more so…
Its unfortunate that you came back during the literal worst miniset released in the history of the game. Its has produced 0 new interesting decks, 0 new interesting mechanics, 0 new interesting cards. Is has however managed to drive all the fun out of the game due to tutor cards allowing people to consistently play the same curve over and over again and introducing a ton of unavoidable damage in protoss charge minions, terran starships, and not so much unavoidable damage but an unavoidable aura in zerg DK.
As such the only decks are boring starcraft decks… or weapon/hero power decks like weapon rogue/hero power druid and mabye the off color dungar druid which itself is a one dimensional gimmick deck.
Luckily all the starcraft cards are designed specifically around starcraft cards so once they get powercrept out in an expansion or two you will never see or hear from them again as they have 0 utility in decks that dont contain the full package of starcraft cards.
I will happily say good riddance to this awful miniset and may they never try this experiment again.
If you enjoy losing 30 health in less than 4-5 turns… yes?
Interesting being subjective, I think the StarCraft mini-set was one of the best mini-set releases. Though with so many shared cards between classes things might feel a bit too samey after a while, which is what we’re seeing after nearly 7 weeks with the set. Players are getting tired of the cards already (new content seems to be consumed at a fast rate these days) and there’s still another week before a reported mass balance patch.
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