I’m one of those players who plays as much PvE content as he plays in PvP modes. I have finished all PvE modes and lately I have noticed a trend with PvE adventures that I pray won’t showcase how the team behind these modes plan to balance the next (paid) upcoming adventure mode.
So here’s what angers me: The general powerlevel of bosses in Witch Hunt and Rastakhans Rumble after boss no. 6-7+.
The A.I. in these modes is as dumb as bread and I think that’s fine. What I can’t get over is the bucket choices the player gets compared to how handcrafted and synergy-heavy every enemy deck is after boss 5 upwards. In Dungeon Run I finished all 9 classes and still went back to play again because every deck had at least a small chance to succeed.
In Rastakhan’s and Witch Hunt you just don’t. The game either hands you perfect buckets that fit your strategy or you have instantly lost the entire run for the most part. The worst offender was (and still is) how you basically need the Bloodhound Upgrades to finish the Houndmaster endboss and you will almost certainly lose with every strategy that the devs didn’t factor in. Another good example in Witch Hunt are those fictional relic cards the player can never get their hands on (stuff like “destroy all minions and get a minion with their stats combined” for what? 6 mana?). That’s not game design, that’s artificial difficulty at its best.
In Rastakhan’s Rumble things are even more laughable sometimes. Some totems are literally unplayable because the slower ones almost always lose as soon as you meet an aggressive opponent that has a deck with (of course) 100% synergy. Yeah sure, you can win (because the a.i. sucks at the end of the day) BUT that also highlights my gripe: These modes don’t seem to be designed with fun in mind
As it stands now, I’ll never play these 2 adventures again eventhough the genral idea behind them is very engaging and fun.
What do you think? What were your experiences with these modes?
I agree, though I thought Monster Hunt was pretty OK, and the Boomsday Puzzles were pretty interesting- at least they were a bit more honest about there being only one win condition, and you could figure it out . I hate hate hate the Rumble, and I’m glad it hasn’t shown up in my daily quests. The Rumble TB sucked, though it gave 2 packs, so I gritted my teeth and did them…
Oh I forgot to mention the Boomsday Lab
I think that “adventure” was pretty awesome although I’d consider it more of a puzzlebox than an actual mode.
This post is specifically about the 2 latest draft-your-deck adventures. I think just toning down the synergy in enemie’s deck would go a long way. Especially in Rastakhans Rumble you most likely have to take buckets that won’t help you at all while your a.i. opponents have handcrafted and handpicked decks to play with.
What I don’t like is how easy it is to find yourself in a game that is unwinnable, not due to any mistake of your own. The final rounds of Rumble Run are good examples - they get a 2 mana head start, and if you don’t have a strong opening hand that can kill their Shrine almost immediately, the game can basically be decided by turn 3 or 4.
It would be nice if there was more control over the deck-building. A way to reroll the card buckets presented to you, a way to delete terrible cards from your deck… Sometimes you just get three options that don’t contribute to winning in any way whatsoever.
But what I dislike most of all is that I don’t see these problems ever being fixed. The devs’ mentality towards design issues in past singleplayer content seems to just be “learn from it and move on to the next one”. There was enough pressure to do a balance update in Rumble Run, but only because it’s still fresh in everyone’s minds. Monster Hunt and Dungeon Run have never seen any updates whatsoever, aside from replacing cards that get nerfed in the starter decks. Some treasures, card buckets, shrines, and passives in these modes just suck, and there’s nothing stopping anyone from buffing them to make the options more flexible. But I just don’t think it’s worth holding out hope that that’ll ever happen. Maybe the next mode will be better, but these ones are still there. They still have content you can’t experience elsewhere in the game, cards and heroes you can’t play in any other mode. It’s ridiculous to treat permanent content in the game as some sort of transient event.
It kinda baffles me how they invest so much time and effort into a mode (and they clearly did - just look at all those extra card-designs alone) and then never really evolve at all. How is that possible? If I would be responsible for such a feature that can potentially draw in new players, I’d rather see it a little on the “easier” side than where it stands now (artificial difficulty turned up to 100). They should at least cut that “endbosses start with more mana” crap. I never met anyone who thought the idea felt balanced.
The only BALANCED shrine in rumble is the Rouge shrine that steal opponents cards and give you the 2 mana discount. You can build that deck to be every top heavy or more aggressive depending on how you want to play.
But I’ve always found that from boss 5 and on, their decks are pretty much nothing but synergized auto-wins, but I’m cool with that because I dont expect to to win every game because I already know how BS the buckets i’ve been offered are.
Only problem I ever had in witchwood is that dam “gain 6 armor and draw 2 cards” that almost every boss had. The last boss, i swear had 3-4 of them and by the time I was able to gain board control, they would have 60 health and about 25 armor.
I too have wondered why they never update these modes. I tend to stay away from PvP only games but do play them. The PvE events on here are the only thing that I ever played in the last 2-3 years because they’ve been more fun than climbing ladder, but like every blizzard game they push out a new mode or event and immediately move on the next one. If they updated the PvE modes and even arena more people would willing to spend an hour playing them. I don’t care for rewards just solid gameplay
Yeah, that one I finished my second run with. It’s also one of my favorites. The 2 mana discount is pretty insane. If I remember correctly, I won the last battle by fatiguing the a.i…
Yeah but that’s no fun at all. I don’t expect to win every game either but the amounts of synergies some of these decks have is just beyond stupid. It’s a PvE mode for crying out loud - it’d hurt no one if they would make the mode more fun instead of artificially “challenging”.
The randomized deck building choices is the most frustrating part to me. The only battle I’ve actually had fun with is the one against Hagatha (final challenge of the Monster Hunt series). I’ve also found that one enjoyable because you can reset that challenge without having to go through all previous battles and losing every good thing you were able to randomly get.
This kinda sounds like you need a different game altogether, mate?! I mean not having fun in a game is the worst that can happen? What is left for you?
The problem is always there from the first iteration of dungeon run, but blizzard has 0 intention fixing it. At best, every single dungeon mode is praying to RNG gods so that you don’t encounter boss with their super synergy decks that counters you, then praying so they draw bad, and then praying that you draw better and get synergy cards.
Blizzard also give those bosses some OP cards (and some even have more than 3 copies, such as those Sack of Gnomes owned by Gnomenapper playable on turn 4), mana advantage (a real game breaker unless you are lucky), higher health, and all these are on top of those high synergy decks.
You can see that these modes are designed not to give players challenge or fun, but rather, testing how many people can be lucky enough to complete it. It’s really shallow design and most likely they hope that these modes can’t be completed quickly even by dedicated players, so they don’t exhaust contents too fast.
There is a difference between difficult boss fight vs win by luck boss fights. When you see pro players losing because of luck during their stream, i honestly didn’t find watching them lose like this quite entertaining. If they made a lot of mistakes during their gameplay, then they deserve to lose. But when they play to the best that they can and still lose due to RNG without a chance to recover (and we are talking about multiple RNG and OP cards owned by these bosses), well that’s silly.
Personally I have completed them all, so I am very glad that when I lose in those adventure modes now, I don’t need to stress much. But during the journey to get the rewards…
Hopefully they do something for this year’s adventure. They said there would be casual vs heroic. But this worries me because heroic mode in the past was basically build custom deck that counter the boss (this is intended, and encourage deck building), hope the boss draw bad and you draw good, otherwise concede as the bosses’ hero power would just cause you to lose. Surely blizzard didn’t find it fun to just concede until you draw good in the first few turns… But who knows
I think solo adventures are the perfect example to give to anyone who has never played Hearthstone how the game works and how the designers think.
Solo modes should be fun, enjoyable and challenging but possible to complete with thought, skill and a learning curve.
But they aren’t, in any way.
Each time they do them they just put in insanely overpowered bosses after a certain point that just make you think What The? and want to alt f4.
I certainly have no interest in playing any of them outside of the first runs or daily quest.
Solo content should make you want you to play it, if not just once repeatedly, but Hearthstone solo content lets you get to maybe boss 3 or 4 and then starts to throw things at you that are just plain ridiculous and nothing more than a punishment.
Although to be fair I would point a new player at them and advise them that ranked isn’t actually much different.
Anyway - TLDR - Hearthstone game designers need to stay away from single player games other than for sado-masochists.
I also think the problem comes from those in the community who think they’re sooo hardcore and always demand “harder modes” (“Hey, do you remember Heroic Naxx when it came out? That one was so challenging, not that baby crap we got now with League of explorers!” <- a post I remember)
Newsflash for those players: Deckbuilding depends on your cards available and challenge often depends on your draw-rng. As it stands now, luck is waaaay more important than skill to clear those modes and “skill” in cardgames always comes down to card-knowlege.
So far the only PvE I’ve beaten was the Lich King but only on 3 heroes. And that was using whatever cards I could scrape together into a usable deck (casual F2P). I have yet to beat dungeon run, monster hunt, or rastakahn’s rumble. I’ll have a good deck that stomps pretty hard then I run into my perfect hard counter and there’s nothing I can do. I’ve tried hundreds of times across the different PvE modes. I’ve only reached the end of dungeon run once and monster hunt I’ve reached the 8th boss like 6-7 times across the different heroes. On rastakahn’s rumble I think the farthest I’ve gotten was boss 6 or 7.
It’s ridiculous how hard these game modes are considering the reward is a card back. If the reward was like 20 free card packs or 2k gold for each successful run I could understand why they made it so aneurysm inducing. Myself I don’t even want the card backs they’re a pretty pointless cosmetic feature. I wish the PvE modes were a way to grind gold or card packs(outside of quests). At least then their level of difficulty would be somewhat warranted.
100% agree. I don’t know what they are thinking either, as they cearly spend a lot of time on it as another poster mentioned.
Dungeon Run was good as you could get away with anything, but still had like a chance to win. (Although I don’t like the updated buckets as much). Also there were clearly fun treasures and easter eggs like Tad Pole and trying to build Quel Dalar (which I haven’t managed yet) and supposedly the treasure room.
Monster Hunt and Rumble are just dumb synergy forcing with Rumble being slightly more enjoyable for me. Also what the heck is this idea of not allowing players to choose any shrine they want? (Or at least maybe let them be unlockable if you win with it?)
I also don’t see why they insist on restarting the entire run. It made sense in Dungeon Run, since it fit with the story better and you could really explore different things every time. Monster Hunt and Rumbler are more linear though.
Puzzles were great since you could do them any time you want. Imagine puzzle being like the other PvE that you have to restart from the very first one every time you lose… .
So true. It’s completely dumb that one has to play and win 8 games in a row in every mode. There should be something like checkpoints and retries because there’s nothing more unfun than having a good rng and then losing to a hardcounter-deck.
