That’s got nothing to do with that.
It doesn’t matter to me.
I am not jumping on the Holy Brode Bandwagon.
I am jumping on the bandwagon that it’s just reskinned archetypes previously seen in other classes.
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Blizzard fvcked up releasing demon hunter.
Also Blizzard: lets go again, it prints money.
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Well, I assume Boreas is following up with Morhaime on Twitter, so what can be known, will be.
But this reskinned archetypes you have in almost every class, so where is the problem with DK?
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I was gonna make a similar thread with this sort of point as well.
They made a class that is able to do everything - aggro, control, burst/otk. Some classes are lucky to just get 1 of those.
Then, all the minions they have are powercrept because of the rune system which is pretty unfair. If you want to build an all aggro Unholy DK deck, for example, you stay Unholy Runes and you get those aggro minions with better stats for doing so.
But if you want to build an all aggro Druid deck…there is no benefit. The minions aren’t as powercrept and you don’t get a bonus because you stayed with an aggro build.
They sort of shot themselves in the foot with the design by allowing rune restrictions equating to more powerful minions.
Because of this design, DK has the best aggro, the best burst and the best control. You don’t get the best aggro AND the best burst in one deck because of the runes, and you don’t get the best burst and best control in one deck because of the runes, but you get the best if you stick to just that one style.
It’s pretty unfair.
And we’re all about to see that because of your 2nd point - rotation. Losing absolutely NOTHING while everyone else loses something significant is going to be devastating tomorrow.
Now what are they going to do? Make other classes better or tone done DK? I am guessing DK nerfs coming within a month. Meanwhile, SEVERAL other classes are desperate to just get 1 archetype.
With DK, you will ALWAYS have 3 archetypes MINIMUM.
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A long-winded intro, but I don’t see it getting to the point.
What OG is talking about is, essentially, the outcomes in single games being decided by random effects, rather than the player’s choices and thus their skill. How it pertains to Hearthstone, I think, is obvious enough.
I’ve written a bit, somewhat sarcastically, about the impact of skill myself, and I can offer another example: in chess, you’re likely not gonna beat a grandmaster unless you are on a high enough level; on a boxing ring, you as an amateur are gonna get smacked by a pro athlete; in HS, however… well, you know, don’t you?
There’s also another point about estimating overall risks and odds over a large amount of games, random outcomes taken into account, hence the analogy with poker, but that’s another thing, which, by the way, OG also discusses, and I don’t see a contradiction here either.
PS What you speak of about opportunities essentially translates into the difference between, say, 49% and 51% win rates long-term, but that also fits the overall picture.
One more thing I could add to this is the following: if you’re after a strategic, so to speak, chess-like play style, meaning that you calculate your opponent’s possible moves and plan your responses, then wild ‘RNG’ effects completely destroy it, making the game unpredictable. Whether you can speak of ‘skill’ in such scenarios is a matter of word choice, I guess, but I’d say it’s a different kind of skill than described earlier.
In the end, there’s nothing wrong if someone wants to play a game that is more like poker or even roulette, as opposed to chess, but I do agree that Ben Brode’s ideas about ‘variance’ are a bit… strange, as were, in my opinion, some of his ‘BWAHAHA’ design solutions in HS, known as ‘RNG monsters’ (well, by modern standards it might be laughable, so it’s relative, but that’s another story).
Yet in standard, but this should be changed over time. I obviousy don’t know what their reasoning is, but I could imagine they did this, because introducing a new class is harder, because this class will be behind in sets like it was for DH, so they tried sth. new.
But wouldn’t that require to get more DK cards than other class cards, because there are not enough slots for dk to always support all three archetypes. That means this problem should be also solved over time?
Feels like a win for blizzard IMO. Clearly the class was designed to pull in players who are new or been out of the game for a while. Easy entry barrier and all the current power level with little investment needed. Their whole speech about the class being new and complex for deck building is just BS.
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Aren’t there quite few DK cards, in comparison to others classes, to begin with? I think that settles this question, doesn’t it?
By the way, not sure about it either. From what they have announced and implemented so far, could it be that individual expansions or sets would be focused on support for certain runes?
For example, it has been noticed that Core has corresponded mostly to Unholy, PoA — to Frost, and MotLK — to Blood. How it evolves with subsequent expansions, remains to be seen…
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This is the crux of the argument though. Because of how they designed it, we have to wait what, 2 years for it to be “balanced?” That’s the problem.
No, because the 3 rune system will always have cards for each rune and each rune will be supported at least once throughout a year.
Compare this same thought process with Warrior, for example.
If I said “Warrior will always have Menagerie, Enrage and Control support” you could say it would require Warrior to get more cards than other classes to do this because there isn’t enough slots to support all 3, right?
However, DK is built specifically to automatically include those archetypes no matter what. It’s as if they said “Warrior will always have Menagerie, Enrage and Control” because the class is specifically built that way from the ground up.
Instead, what you get from DK is always support for all 3 archetypes because of the design process. You are guaranteed, with DK, to always have 3 different styles of play no matter what. Can Warrior claim this same thing? All it got was taunt and enrage this year. At least if you main a DK, you can always expect at minimum a 3 support system. And when they support any of those 3, the cards that support it will be better than your average card because of “downside of rune requirements”.
Frost DK, for example, gets a powercrept card:
compared to:
Because of the “downside of rune restrictions”.
Thus, you play DK, you will always get powercrept cards because runes are considered a downside, but in reality it’s not really a downside - it’s simply a restriction of “go full aggro, full control, full burst”…which decks are already designed around anyway. An aggro face hunter isn’t also building partial control in there, it’s all in aggro. But for DK, that is an upside.
Now, granted, they now have to buff Consecration (likely because of this exact comparison), but is that the solution now? We have to go back and rebuff everything DK is power creeping?
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Why?
See also my post above about this particular point.
You’re comparing a card from a recent expansion to one that has been there since the beginning. It’s nothing new, see, for instance:
https://hearthstone.fandom.com/wiki/List_of_powercreeped_cards .
Why? Because they said so. They said that each Rune will get supported more than the other 2 at least once a year so that in 1 year all Runes will have had an expansion support it heavily.
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If this cards are relevant for the core set, yes probably. But would this way be bad? I mean even before DK we know how powercreep’ed newer sets are, the powercreep didn’t start with DK. So what’s the problem with adjusting older cards if they are relevant?
Yes devs could push this like they do with DK, but they don’t have to. They just push archetypes they come up with. DK’s runesystem just makes it more easier, because they decided what cards they give to certain runes, they kinda forced archetypes, but it doesn’t mean they can’t do more archetypes for other classes. It just doesn’t look so obvious.
From what I remember them saying, one expansion each year will focus on 1 specific Rune type (but not ignoring the others). So, for example, Frost might get 6 cards, Unholy 3, and Blood 1. Next expansion, Blood might get 6, Unholy 3 and Frost 1. It could also be Frost gets 4, Unholy 2, Blood 1 and they all get 3 cards to share. They didn’t say what the extra expansion would do, or the minisets. They were vague, but just said 1 expansion is dedicated to each rune for more focus.
We don’t know how much “focus” but only had guesses based on previous expansions.
So, in the end, each rune gets supported well throughout the year.
Look at the flip side of that. Imagine if they just straight out said “Paladin will get Silverhand Recruit Support, Big Paladin Support and Pure Paladin support” throughout a year. You’d have 3, hopefully, playable archetypes minimum. But they don’t do this. Sometimes, a class gets some weird support that can’t even see play because the cards they need to help are in wild. For example, they rotated into Core discard cards for Warlock and didn’t support it at all for the entire time those cards were in core. Rotated in Jeklik and she was completely unplayable. Absolutely no reason to do that.
DK suffers very little, if any at all, from this sort of problem.
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Yeah, that makes sense, and I wasn’t paying attention earlier, sorry.
Actually, if you look at the mathematical problem of ‘picking n objects in k colours’, three runes of three types give ten possible combinations, which they might have touted… However, in seems to have come to ‘three classes in one’ instead of ten, so it depends on the viewpoint, I guess…
I think the biggest takeaway from all of this is that, by design, DK has 3 solid, very specific archetypes. That’s a major plus for the class. You don’t have to question the design of a card and it’s not like “huh?”. You’d be hard pressed to find a card in DK where you go “What’s that for?” yet you’ll find these cards littered throughout all of the other classes.
Because Blood DK in an expansion will be limited by the cards it has, the cards it does get will completely support its archetype. Like, you’re guaranteed to get some card that supports you.
So, if you’re an aggro Unholy DK…you’re going to get aggro support all the time.
Now look at the perspective of another Class. As a warlock, you’re twiddling your thumbs wondering when you’re going to get Discard support…and you’re waiting a year or so maybe longer. And maybe for that entire year you got a single discard support card.
DK doesn’t have to worry about this on 3 different fronts.
Go through the DK library and every card fits an archetype for its rune. Nothing is just “what’s that for?” feel. Go through another class’s library. You’ll see stuff like this:
What archetype does that fit into? Pretty much nothing.
That’s the difference in class design when you base a class off 3 specific archetypes. It forces you to make cards that fit into one of those 3, or into all of them or some of them. You don’t have the luxury of just giving the class “filler” cards that are worthless because you have to support 3 different runes.
Does that make more sense on what I’m trying to say?
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I wouldn’t be so sure about this tbh., because this direction might change in the future with new core set and cards. The one thing we know for sure that DK has three different runes, but how they evolve in the future we don’t know. If it stays too linear then the class will might be boring over time compared to other classes.
This can be a downside tho, because it feels to straight forward and less creative.
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I probably should have started with a post replying to the OP.
The way I see it, Arthas is just too powerful lore wise. He was the Sarah kerrigan of Warcraft 3. I don’t play wow, but from what I’ve heard, the lich king expansion was the one where the original story ends and then after that they have like those extra seasons of TV where the writers aren’t allowed to end the story. The First Lich King expansion for Hearthstone was the most popular one ever, and the second one was the best performing in terms of player base increase over the past 4 years.
So there was never a question about whether there would be a death knight class as some kind of cash grab. It was only a question of when, and how well it would be done. Brode couldn’t stop it any more than he could body block a tsunami.
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Do you remember that Iksar actually took a community poll exactly around the time they would have to start creating the new class?
Asking Monk VS DK.
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Yeah…I thought Monk won lol
I was actually shocked Monk didn’t come out and it was Voyage to the Sunken City revealed.
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