Shouldn’t targets that are frozen be prevented from attacking during Mass Hysteria?
I was playing Wall Priest against a Freeze Mage, and he froze my Mountain Giant and Mosh’ogg Enforcer and dropped his second Doomsayer for the game. I had already countered the first Doomsayer with a Mass Dispel, and this time around I didn’t really have an answer. Out of desperation, I cast inner fire and divine spirit on my Mosh’ogg Enforcer, and then cast Mass Hysteria, hoping and praying that the Doomsayer would be cleared and he wouldn’t have a polymorph the next turn. I cleared the Doomsayer and after playing around Vaporize was able to win. I really don’t think I should have won that game other than maybe the off-chance the Doomsayer specifically attacked my Mountain Giant or Mosh’ogg Enforcer with them being frozen and not attacking (the mage had other minions on the battlefield that could have been targets for Doomsayers attack).
If Mass Hysteria’s mechanic was more intuitive, the line of play I took would have been less effective, because frozen targets can’t attack. If Mass Hysteria implied that freeze effects were removed, and then the targets attacked, that would have made more sense, but these were frozen targets that were attacking.
0 attack minions attacking makes a little more sense, because a minion that could be seen as not having the capability to attack from a power standpoint or a minion that is seen as a pacifist could still attack albeit weakly under the psychological affects of Mass Hysteria.
Thoughts? Should Mass Hysteria be changed where Freeze effects are concerned?
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This is not only a good question, but an interesting observation as well!
I think for the sake of spellcasting, it is working as intended. The idea is to freeze your minions so they don’t attack. Mass Hysteria counters that effect with randomized attacks for one turn.
In my humble opinion, this is how spells should work.
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The hysteria is so strong, they fly into a Wolverine-like berserker rage and break out of the ice.
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Do they actually unfreeze when they attack? I haven’t personally seen this interaction.
I agree mass hysteria’s effects are a bit weird sometimes.
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Visually no, they don’t unfreeze. They still have the ring of frost around the card as they are attacking.
I like Wardrum’s interpretation though. Hehe.
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While unintuitive, Mass Hysteria causing minions to attack is consistent with both itself and how Freeze works. Freeze means the minion loses it’s next attack (which is why a Windfury minion frozen on it’s first attack is not frozen on its next turn). But Mass Hysteria forces attacks regardless of whether the minion has any attacks left, which is why you can make a minion attack, cast Mass Hysteria, and the minion will still attack (even though it technically used its attack for the turn already).
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Mass Hysteria…
Berserker Rage…
Picture it: Our heroes on the shoreline and from the depths of the ocean, an army of berserked undead…a spell is cast to confuse our heroes…but one amulet saves one hero from the curse…and he makes a beeline for his nemesis. He can feel the rage boil underneath his skin as the villains evil deeds flash in his mind. With every step, his anger grows and before you know it, our hero and villain are face to face.
See what I mean? They just come from the most mundane of events.
Don’t…don’t encourage him…
I don’t really have an issue with Mass Hysteria technically giving an extra attack for the turn, because its the spell forcing an attack versus the player intentionally attacking. I still don’t think Mass Hysteria should allow a player to get around freeze effects where the effect specifically states that they can’t attack and common sense dictates they physically wouldn’t be able to attack. Unless I’m supposed to imagine that Mass Hysteria allows them to partially break the freeze above the waist and swing hysterically at only other minion targets that are close to them. That’s the only way I could imagine it making sense while they are still frozen.
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This game is full of mechanics that are not specified and people just have to play them to see what happens.
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You like it and you know it.
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Any beings that survive the onslaught, still being really cold, return to their frozen state once they have exhausted their strength.
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Freeze is not “can’t attack.”
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Mass Hysteria card text:
Force each minion to attack another random minion
We went back and forth on this during design. Should minions with “Can’t Attack” be allowed to attack? 0 Attack minions? Frozen minions? You could make arguments for each of these. Ultimately, it came down to Supercollider - we use the same wording for both and we wanted these two weird cards to act similarly. For Supercollider, the story is that you’re smacking two minions together, so Frozen, Can’t attack, and 0 Attack minions should all get smacked into an adjacent minion. So we made Mass Hysteria the same. As a bonus, it seemed simpler and there were less edge-case if we said it worked on all minions.
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No offense to your process, but you could still do substantial damage slamming a corpse into another minion. Doing so is, in fact, extremely metal and thus on brand for warrior. And yet, if the thing dies from the super collider hit, it doesn’t do its damage.
I demand you change the game to allow me to weaponize corpses.
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Usefull Soldier: 6 mana 4/4. Deathrattle: equip Usefull Corpse.
Usefull Corpse: 3/2 weapon.
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Ohh so while desinging the game you guys actually think ? I am in tear right now. You people are actually think and desing the cards after it instead of throw ever idea you have and ruin fun ? Hmm good to see that
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THANKS FOR RESPONDING!!! I’m not used to Hearthstone devs responding on the forums. It’s appreciated!
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Really appreciate the dev response. Either decision was probably going to result in some amount of confusion, and Mass Hysteria is another prime candidate for some type of “hover text” that explains the finer details of the card wording (or anything else that isn’t intuitive from the card).
Other examples have been Wild Growth, Sense Demons (who’d think to expect imps?), Call of the Wild (it really should be stated that the minions are summoned in alphabetical order, or just give the order to account for other languages), Explosive Runes (just a bit of text explaining that “excess” means “in excess of the minion’s health”), and I’m sure there are several others I can’t recall right now.
It could go right along with the hover text already there to explain keywords on any of the cards.
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