Let's talk about quest hunter

Multiplayer Discussion
81

I’m not to ashamed to say this is my go to deck for laddering the last 3 months to legend. Games are fast so if you lose it’s a quick game and you go on. However the deck itself is good but if you don’t understand your matches you can easily throw. I can normally squeeze out about 60-70 dmg from my quest hunter all together if need be. Some matches it varies though because i’ll switch to Tavish and go on the 0 cost companions route which is way more top end damage.

Currently Druid is the tougher match although i prefer beast druid matches since it’s fairly easy to control their board. Spell druid Kazak is normally the tougher of the bunch especially if they can ward out some big minions. I normally have to have Slate or Ringling’s in hand if i want to beat those decks.

Going into rotation it keeps a solid core of cards but not everything. It loses two big tech cards in Slate and especially Ringling’s Rifle. That weapon is the absolute nuts on 4 for just about any match to extend games. It could still be a good deck post rotation but i have a feeling it’s mid game falls apart.

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82

How to tell people you have zero training in data analysis without saying it.

You have no idea how much you don’t know.

Not even close. Not even related.

My statement is radically different than “the game is rigged and I see eleventy billion weapon decks until I play two ooze and never see another one in the next eleventy billion games.” It’s so different that the statement you quoted was non sequitur with his “rigged” conclusions.

Twist it however you want, all you’re doing is failing to see the point because you can’t admit to being the slightest bit wrong. If you gave it any depth of thought you would understand, but where’s the pedantry in that, right?

Whatever you say, Comic Book Guy.

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83

All United Quests are CRAP!!! Period!!

84

Seem pretty close to me.

Maybe I do, and maybe I don’t. But let’s not forget that the burden of proof is yours. You’re advocating for nerfs, the affirmative, when decks become popular; I’m advocating for doing nothing, the negative, when decks become popular. Debate 101. If you don’t explain what I don’t know, you lose.

85

I disagree. They both matter. One person’s experience is no more important than another’s.

I’m with you here, although I’m not sure I’d use the term “bad decks”. But people like different decks for different reasons. I also play what I find fun, even if it’s not a top tier deck.

I’m not saying that they don’t know what they are doing. I’m saying that, in my opinion, some of their balancing decisions have been misguided.

I never made this claim. I said that win rates is what they ought to use as the primary driver of card/deck balance decisions.

And I think it ought to be less relevant.

I’ll reiterate my case for the original Quest Rogue. The strength of the deck was that it could complete it’s quest and create a sustained dominant position in the mid game long before slow control decks could get going. The weakness, of course, was that hyper aggro decks would destroy it so quickly that it never got a chance to do it’s thing. Now that’s not to say that a control deck could never beat QR; it just was a very unfavored matchup. And aggro decks didn’t always beat QR; it was just a very favorable matchup. With an overall win rate of about 50%, the deck would seem to be ok… overall. So any nerf implemented was entirely based on “feels bad man” with zero consideration given to the many players who loved the deck.

The best overall solution would have been to make the deck weaker against control AND more resilient to aggro, ideally maintaining that 50% win rate. Nerfing the post-quest stats from 5/5 to 4/4 (or even 4/3) might have been a better approach. This would allow control decks to withstand the damage (reduced by 20%) AND have a better chance to remove the lower health minions. And on the other side, maybe give some armor/heal component to some of the core cards of the deck to improve it’s resilience to aggro.

Instead they simply bumped the bounce requirement from 4 to 5. This slowed quest completion by roughly 1-2 turns. This made the deck only a tiny bit weaker against control, since QR could still get there against the slowest decks. But the deck became much, much weaker against aggro, because now any aggro deck (even a slower one) could easily burn the Rogue down with those two extra turns. This is what effectively destroyed the deck.

So their decision to make a balancing adjustment entirely based on “feels” resulted in a completely misguided change that just destroyed a deck (that many, many players loved) rather than coming up with a solution to make it better overall. That’s why win rate ought to be the primary driver of these changes.

86

Thank you!! I really hate it when people pretend anything said on this forum is ever actually objective, the pros at Blizzard have all the data and analytic expertise they need, the real value of this forum is design (not development) feedback, because issues of design are fundamentally subjective and more feedback is always better. It is also the stated purpose of this forum.

And yes, I think the Hunter questline is very bad design. Sometimes it is development’s job to take out the trash…

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87

Quest Hunter doesn’t have ignite
It’s not Mage’s fault they printed stupid BS into the class to make it broken, but they did and it had to be nerfed. Ignite functions the same way as the Warlock quest reward without going through any of the self damage.

I’m not going to defend the current team 5, I think all of that expansion should be destroyed and the player base refunded or equally compensated, Quest mage and Quest hunter included. But I have outlived Quest hunter as Control Warrior, you never could and still can’t outlive BS Mage.

88

Sure, you win. You’re the smartest bestest ever.

Feel better? Carry on in blissful ignorance secure in your knowledge.

In some egalitarian utopia, you’re right. In the world of “this is a for profit enterprise” the one that brings the money wins every time.

Because that experience is what you value, not the multiple times you win. Different types of players, which I won’t rehash here.

I get that. I have yet to see a change that I didn’t understand, though. Even when it hit a deck I really like to play, I understood what they were doing.

If winning were the primary goal of the majority of players, I can see that. But there’s so much more to it than how often it wins, especially in a combo deck or something that is feast or famine.

I find this humorous from someone who doesn’t like emotes, but okay.

Caverns below? Oh, ya, F that thing. That nerf was totally warranted.

https://youtu.be/MWwr7midQFA

Here is Kibbler talking exactly about this conversation. Kibbler 100% agrees with me on the topic, and the actual nerf was among the options he gave for how to fix the problem.

89

Actually, just because I have argued the Rigged side of the argument in the past (for the sake of debate mostly (I really cant prove its rigged, duh (except anecdotally))), I wasn’t saying the game is rigged in what you are referencing.

I was saying, rigged or NOT, the customers experience is all that matters.

I am attacking the data hoe’s who’s seemingly only defense (besides Blizzard would NEVER do anything wrong!) is a pile of papers with numbers on it.

They slam the stack of papers down and say “the games not rigged! because numbers!”

I say, fine, I see your numbers and raise you customer dissatisfaction.

YOU CAN NOT DENY… for WHATEVER REASON…

That a lot of people come here and “see weird stuff”.

The famous adding oozes and never facing a weapon again.

The adding AOE because you faced wide small minion boards for an HOUR and as soon as you add flamestrike, you never see them again.

WHO CARES WHY THIS IS HAPPENING! Who cares if the game is truly rigged!

THE GAME SUCKS AT THAT MOMENT FOR THAT CUSTOMER

I can give you 100 analagous real life business models where that would be unacceptable regardless of “the numbers”.

“We have the best this and that, the top of the line stuff and things, and the store is empty!” So, no one cares that statistically you SHOULD be successful! SOMETHING is WRONG! And you better start listening to your customers or you can go hang out with Radio Shack, KMart, Sears and Toys R Us and talk about numbers.

90

You and I are not saying the same things, though.

91

I don’t care, no offense. I really didn’t read what you wrote to be fair.

I was commenting on the quote you made of my statement to clarify my position.

If you wanted to clarify your position with a TLDR, I would gladly take a look at it.

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92

I’m strictly talking about game balance and justifications for changes to cards.

93

But you’re missing the point. The nerf didn’t actually do anything to address the problems. It simply made the deck “unplayable”. If that was the intention, why didn’t they simply delete the card?

And his reasoning was completely misguided. QR was very, very favored against control and very, very unfavored against aggro. The logical solution would be one that makes the deck not as favored against control and not as unfavored against aggro, thus maintaining the same 50% win rate it was experiencing. Instead they made a change that made the deck slightly less overpowered against control but dramatically more unfavored against aggro. Can’t you see the flaw in that approach?

So forget about Quest Rogue, since obviously it triggers emotional reactions (on both sides – I’m still steamed at what they did to it). Let’s take this hypothetical example:

A combo deck has an overall win rate of 50%, which seems ideal but looking deeper into the numbers, we find a problem. It has an 85% win rate over control decks and a 20% win rate over aggro decks. Well, it should be favored against control, but 85% is too much. And it should be weak to aggro, but 20% is too weak. So the solution should be to knock the 85% down to, say, 70% and bump the 20% up to, say, 35%. The deck remains at 50% overall and the polarization is improved. Win win. But instead you implement a solution that knocks the 85% down to only 80% AND also knocks the 20% further down to 10%. And you end up with an overall win rate of only 35%. You’ve barely addressed the issue vs control and you’ve make the issue vs aggro EVEN WORSE! And the deck is now “dead”. If the intent was really a balance adjustment, their approach was flawed. And that happens because they looked only at feelings (subjective) instead of the numbers (objective). On the other hand, if the intent was to kill the deck, why mask it as a “balance change” rather than simply delete the card?

94

No.

The deck was abysmal to play against. It was lliterally just kill it first or die to it without any sort of interaction. It was solitaire to get off the combo needed and then gg.

The only reason it was 50% win rate was sometimes you didn’t have the cards you needed soon enough, but other than that it ruined the game for anyone not playing something faster. When your lethal is consistently turn 7, that rules out basically anything that isn’t face aggro.

Not too many people want that meta, and that’s the whole issue - how many people are having fun in the game. Not you, not me, the collective game.

Okay, so idk if you watched any of that video, but kibbler goes through a list of other options to nerf, but every single one of them would have directly damaged all other rogue decks because the cards driving the deck’s speed were integral to rogue as a class. This is what you run into when you try to do what you suggest - you cause more problems than you solve.

The intent was to slow down the deck, which they did. People can still play it if they enjoy the deck, but the tryhards got off the bus and the meta was more open, which was the point. From my seat, I saw the change as trying to balance everyone’s fun by not outright deleting the card.

95

You felt the deck was abysmal to play against.

I’ve never seen any dev comment citing “uninteractive” as a reason for a balance adjustment.

No. It was 50% because it was horribly unfavored vs aggro which offset its high win rate vs
control.

Again… feelings.

Really? How many is “not too many”? How many people did you survey to come to this conclusion? Let me guess… it’s obvious. Come on, Selwynn. That’s the kind of argument the “game is rigged” yahoos put out there. You’re better than that. But I will grant there was a lot of complaining on the forums (just like there is every expansion) and a lot of whining from Kibler on youtube.

I watched that rant video many times when it came out. I know it well. Kibler’s a bright guy, but the suggestion to require another bounce was colossally ignorant.

No. Either the intent was to balance the deck, in which case they did a terrible job because the result was not balanced, or the intent was to kill the deck, in which case, why lie and call it “balancing”? Just HoF the card right there.

But you (and Kibler) are still missing the point. Slowing the deck was the WRONG approach if your intent is balance. Weakening the deck post-completion would have been a better approach, i.e. minions are 4/4 or 4/3 instead of 5/5. That gives control a better chance and doesn’t really make it that much weaker to aggro decks, although you’d still need to give the deck some early game survival tools.

I play decks for fun. That deck became a sub-30% win rate deck. Any aggro or midrange clobbered it. It could really only beat the slowest of slow decks. Even I couldn’t play that deck.

Oh… just to be clear… I’ve (obviously) got a passion for the old Quest Rogue and what they did still sticks in my craw, so I apologize if my frustration seems directed at you; that’s not my intent. You’re a good guy and I enjoy our discussions.

96

autosquelch, I get you when you say that the problem with QR back in the day wasn’t that it was popular, but that it had a polarizing matchup spread. But for Selwynn, that’s not the problem. The problem is that the deck became popular, and every deck is unfun to play against when it becomes popular.

97

Thanks, mate.

Clearly you have passionate feelings about why it shouldn’t be nerfed ( :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:), but ultimately the people that know more than both of us made a decision (which. I know, you don’t like their choice).

Since the release of Journey to Un’Goro, Hearthstone has enjoyed a wider variety of competitively viable classes and decks than ever before. We’ve been monitoring overall gameplay, and we’ve decided that - even though everything is varied and many decks are viable - a change to The Caverns Below is still warranted.”

”The Caverns Below is uniquely powerful versus several slower, control-oriented decks and played often enough that it’s pushing those decks out of play. This change should help expand the deck options available to players both now and after the release of the next expansion.”

*My emphasis added.

There is a long history of tamping down decks that see high playrate but are not fun to play against. I get where you disagree with it, and you can give all the numbers you want, but the numbers that matter the most to blizzard are player engagement and revenue.

If you don’t think those are what truly drives the nerfs, you don’t understand business. And feels bad = play less, so that’s a reason to make a change. They’ve done it a ton and will continue to.

I have already told you that you won, you have continually misrepresented my position, and that it isn’t my job to teach you all the things you don’t understand.

I would please ask you not to reference me in this way in posts to other posters because you are moving towards trolling by doing this.

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98

That would mean that you haven’t demonstrated that nerfs based on populatity are justified.

99

Sure, you’re the smartest guy in the room and you won.

Feel better?

lol

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100

icwutudidthar

My problem was that instead of making the deck less powerful against those slower decks, they chose instead to make even more inept against the fast decks to which it was already weak. It was either a fundamental misunderstanding by the developers of what was actually happening with the deck and how to effectively balance it on all sides OR it was simply a desire to eliminate it from play in which case that developer comment is just a load of bullsh!t and I detest being fed bullsh!t from someone to whom I’m paying for a product. Just say something like, “We went through a number of options to balance the card and none of our testing gave us a satisfactory result, so we are sad to say that we’ve decided to HoF the card.” At least that would have been honest.

Oh, I’m not denying that this happens. My point is that I completely disagree with the philosophy of nerfing exclusively over “feels”. As much as I disliked the recent Quest Mage juggernaut, I thought the nerf was a poor design decision. I also don’t like being fed bullsh!t from people whose salaries I helped fund.

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