Currently hearthstone modes are sitting in some of the WORST ruts the game has been in A LONG LONG TIME.
Duels - Unplayable ((you either roll the right heroes of Reno/Drek’thar/Lilian and then get lucky enough to roll staking a claim because they made everything once per turn EXCEPT staking a claim. which snowballs most games to turn 4.75 win. (((games average over on turn 4 more often than not lethal is dealt on 5 concessions on 4))
Battlegrounds balance isn’t being looked at. its literally all over every meta. its Banana Slamma or bust. if beasts are in you hope you high roll banana slamma and don’t get F’d by RNG.
the game is currently run by SPECIFIED Meta’s. in EVERY format. Standard, Duels, and Battlegrounds. I won’t say anything about Arena because that’s always been a discover fest RNG roll since discovers inception. and that’s why the mode hasn’t been respected since 2017.
Wild is well… wild. the format has been heavily run by the same few meta contenders with minor fluctuations and then return to the old tried and trues after the “flavor” of the month has been emptied, hollowed out or just banned/nerfed to oblivion. I believe the format is “better” just because higher versatility. but that’s why it’s also a smaller population, larger card pools required. and its very swingy.
Activision/Blizzard seem to NOT care about the health of their game as they release things without proper testing ((why they have a MYRIAD of content creators who’d be willing to test out patches before their release. if it wasn’t for the NDA and MASSIVE draw backs for doing such. such as barring content from being made of unreleased stuff because it might change.)) Wouldn’t it be better to let people see it for proper balance decisions and feedback PRIOR to releasing a product that strangleholds game play and generally causes MORE people to leave? maybe it’s just my understanding but, you’d make more from letting people see it as its being tested by the typically higher ranked players.
I myself am currently legend in 2 formats, working on wild 7700 ELO on BGs and 7300 Heroic Brawls 8100 on normal brawls ((gold gets spent too fast)). but there’s not much reward for playing since right now everything is HYPERLY unbalanced for specific roles in every single instance of the game. and achievement hunting/ adventures are bugged to high hell so chasing stuff to give yourself a distraction from the monotonous madness is more likely to be rage inducing since EVEN THE SINGLE PLAYER MODES aren’t touched up or fixed for months if not years because it carry’s 0 monetary value to blizzard so they don’t care about it.
Blizzard or whoever you are, please care more about the player base and fixing the issues then what is the bottom dollar. even if it ISNT directly making you money. there is monetary game in keeping ALL aspects of your game balanced and bug free. as it will keep players around longer for when one area is bad, they have an escape to another.
3 Likes
From my point of view, HS is not longer fun.
It reached the very negative extreme in each category of play and type.
I don’t play BG nor Mercs as I always found those modes not to my liking and Wild is a format which has obvious problems due to its nature so I won’t talk about it. But.
ARENA
I stopped playing arena several years ago as it felt so random there was not much for me to have fun with.
DUELS
I’m an avid player here, I roam around 7500/8500 elo. Again, stopped playing the format due to the base luck required to even thinking of playing. The gap between finding the right hero and the right treasure and the right bucket is so immense that 8 times out of 10 I had to “retire” after game1 even winning as the deck would have been completely useless since game2.
STANDARD
It’s absurd. We went from a normal game with strategy and a bit of randomness to THIS.
Aggro: you hardmulligan for godlike starting hand. If you get it, you win by turn4 no matter what. If you don’t get it, you lose.
Control: you don’t even control; you simply put your armor/hp value to a number so high the opponent can’t have enough damage to beat you after an average of 25mins game.
Combo: I have a combo. If I use it, I win and there’s nothing you can do. If I don’t find it, I lose no matter what.
The interactivity is basically down to zero. Once, player 1 did a thing, player 2 did another thing trying to get a bit of advantage. Then player1 did another thing trying to regain the tempo/advantage and so on. Now: I am playing, then all of a sudden player2 does one thing and the game is over instantly.
This is not longer a problem of balance or of powercreeping, this is “a game which has completely lost its plot”. A game NEEDS interaction between the players, needs to give you a feeling that you snatched a suffered victory or you lost but were close enough to run another match as you definitely had a chance. The current game has no interaction until the first player does something that has no possible answer and seals the game.
I mean “I keep gaining so much life and armor that I am immortal / I remove your deck / I open so fast I deal 30dmg by turn4, I do nothing for 10 minutes then I have one turn that breaks the game” are now the normality while they should not even be a thing in a game that allows a player to do stuff only on their turn.
3 Likes
Yup I liked last year over this year but the discovery bit is literally ruining this game as it gives the Devs a free get out of jail card with actual balance.
It used to be you had to know your opponents deck so you could play around specific cards, now it is all about who appeases the RNG Gods.
They wanted to eliminate “control decks that do nothing”, as they called it. They wanted every deck to require a “win condition” (playing minions, weapons and spells is not a “win condition” according to them. Only an OTK qualifies as a “win condition”).
What’s funny is that the entire game is now dominated by control decks that do nothing lol. They pretty much designed playing minions to create a threat out of the game.
Go into deck designer and start building a wild deck that has all the tools you need for Tony druid, kingsbane rogue, secret mage, and belly shaman. What you will find is that once you put all those tools in, you don’t have much room to do anything else. You now have a control deck that does nothing so that you can compete with other control decks that do nothing.
1 Like