gilraen wrote: Fri Jul 19, 2024 2:22 pm
I don't track my win rate but I just hit legend for the first time ever.
Congratulations!
I'd really like to get there just once, but I don't think I have the patience to grind.
I only played to Diamond 10 this season. Secret Hunter for most of it, which is only considered a tier 3 deck. But it was a lot of fun! It must be super annoying to play against when multiple 0-cost duplicates of Product 9 drop copies of every secret that went off so far in the game. I had around a 58.5% win rate over 65 games.
In the last week since the expansion dropped, I began playing the tier 1 aggro deck Pain Warlock and had good success, around a 61.5% win rate across 44 games. Mind you, half of them were with a weakened variation as I hadn't committed to crafting all the epics yet.
Well, it finally happened. After 10+ years I finally beat the game. I quit. (Maybe. Probably not. But time to find a new one-handed game to play while I'm eating dinner.) Unreal that I can go back 34 pages in this thread to see myself posting about waiting for a beta key in 2014.
It was in Wild. I'm not sure if that "counts". But I'm pleased!
I used the Pirate Demon Hunter deck to get there. Though I refused to spend the 1600 dust to craft OG Patches the Pirate until the final 21 games. But at that point I decided to go for Legend and figured I'd need to get Patches to get there. Overall, I played 141 games in ranked wild this month. (The joke is that half of them were in service of the first event, but I accidentally stopped just shy of achieving the final packs reward... I'm still sore about that and almost took an indefinite break.) The first 40 games were with an unoptimized pirate rogue deck for the event, but I still managed a 70% win rate. Then I played demon hunter for the next 101, winning 78.22% of games. I'm not too sure how I pulled that off... perhaps the deck is just that good. I didn't bother studying the meta or learning ideal mulligans. Playing quick aggro games sure helped with the grind. Blanked mages 16-0.
And that caps off a career of 2346 ranked wins, 2744 arena wins, and 718 top-4 battlegrounds finishes. I've got 500+ wins in every class except for warrior, death knight, and demon hunter. I doubt I'll ever get there with the latter two.
The Great Dark Beyond expansion is out tomorrow, Tuesday November 5th.
I really love the pre-release tavern brawl they've had running (it ends tonight); it costs two arena tickets or 300 gold. Your run ends whenever you reach three losses or six wins. You get packs from the new, unreleased expansion as a reward. And you can use any cards you open or already have from the new set in your decks. So it's essentially a preview. It felt pretty sucky at first because I didn't pre-order the new set so I didn't have any new cards to play with. But I ran a couple brawls with older decks and eventually opened enough GDB cards to build a deck.
Eventually I started running the shaman asteroid deck which is just an obscene funnel control deck. There are multiple combos to put you over the top and it's extremely satisfying. One of the paths to victory has you pretty much drawing your entire deck's worth of spells and it isn't uncommon to hit the opponent for 20, 30, or even 40 damage via asteroid and eruption (from Incindius) cards, because it all gets compounded by Shudderblock, Zola, Sasquawk, etc. (I think the most I hit someone for left my opponent at -49 health?) And I don't even have any copies the epic shaman card that increases the damage of future asteroids. But I imagine the deck is pretty frustrating to play against, so I foresee it getting nerfed in some fashion, or perhaps other new decks will just wind up out-classing it. At the very least they need to speed up the animations when you're drawing your deck... if your opponent doesn't concede you'll be there forever. Really great to see Incindius work in a deck... I think there was a priest (?) deck with him last expansion but it just wasn't strong enough to be competitive.
Sudy wrote: Tue Oct 01, 2024 12:48 am
Well, it finally happened. After 10+ years I finally beat the game. I quit. (Maybe. Probably not. But time to find a new one-handed game to play while I'm eating dinner.) Unreal that I can go back 34 pages in this thread to see myself posting about waiting for a beta key in 2014.
It was in Wild. I'm not sure if that "counts". But I'm pleased!
Congrats! I wasn't sure what Legend meant, but from looking it up, it sounds like you're the 3,756th best player in the Western Hemisphere.
So the new Starcraft mini-set is insane fun and the community seems to be excited about the state of the game for the first time in a long time. It can be unlocked with in-game gold, or is around $20. Annoyingly I accidentally depleted my saved gold by entering the heroic tavern brawl a while back, so I just crafted most of the good cards using saved up dust. You can get them in the current expansion's packs as well though.
I thought I was done with Hearthstone for the foreseeable future with the occasional exception of Battlegrounds, but this has drawn me back in, at least to pursue the latest event rewards (going for another couple weeks). Small tip though--for the event you need to choose one of the three SC races (Terran, Zerg, or Protoss) and you work toward unlocking the corresponding portrait. Do not pick Protoss unless you really dig the portrait reward, because their quests take far longer to complete due to the high cost of their units.
The event can feel kind of frustrating before you have most of the SC mini-set unlocked, but it's totally possible to slowly grind your way through with crummy deck if you need to.
Sudy wrote: Tue Jan 28, 2025 7:07 pm
So the new Starcraft mini-set is insane fun and the community seems to be excited about the state of the game for the first time in a long time. It can be unlocked with in-game gold, or is around $20. Annoyingly I accidentally depleted my saved gold by entering the heroic tavern brawl a while back, so I just crafted most of the good cards using saved up dust. You can get them in the current expansion's packs as well though.
I thought I was done with Hearthstone for the foreseeable future with the occasional exception of Battlegrounds, but this has drawn me back in, at least to pursue the latest event rewards (going for another couple weeks). Small tip though--for the event you need to choose one of the three SC races (Terran, Zerg, or Protoss) and you work toward unlocking the corresponding portrait. Do not pick Protoss unless you really dig the portrait reward, because their quests take far longer to complete due to the high cost of their units.
The event can feel kind of frustrating before you have most of the SC mini-set unlocked, but it's totally possible to slowly grind your way through with crummy deck if you need to.
Yeah, I'm sort of annoyed because I picked Protoss because they were my favorite SC faction. But I don't have enough gold for the mini-set and don't want to shell out $20. So I have to watch the other boys and girls play with the toys.
The game 100% unplayable right now unless you have the new cards (and unless you are okay losing every single match without exception). They broke the cardinal rule: you shouldn't make it so decks without the new cards are an automatic loss, and right now that's the case 99% of the time, unless your opponent gets incredibly unlucky with their card draw. I should just uninstall it and be done with it, it's just convenient to have someone I can play with one hand while I'm doing something else.
gilraen wrote: Wed Jan 29, 2025 11:54 pm
I should just uninstall it and be done with it, it's just convenient to have someone I can play with one hand while I'm doing something else.
gilraen wrote: Wed Jan 29, 2025 11:54 pm
The game 100% unplayable right now unless you have the new cards (and unless you are okay losing every single match without exception). They broke the cardinal rule: you shouldn't make it so decks without the new cards are an automatic loss, and right now that's the case 99% of the time, unless your opponent gets incredibly unlucky with their card draw. I should just uninstall it and be done with it, it's just convenient to have someone I can play with one hand while I'm doing something else.
Yeah I'm mostly feeling this way as well. The Zerg in particular seem to be out of control, though the Protoss "damage all enemies twice" guy can be a little absurd as well.
I didn't realize it would be quite so frustrating for those in a similar situation to me, unwilling/unable to pay gold or cash for the mini-set. I'm just lucky I had sufficient dust to do what I wanted to do. Probably not the wisest use as most of the mini-set-dominant decks have now fallen from the top of the meta, but I will say this mini-set has been the best value in terms of enjoyment that I've had with the core game in years. Both the theme and mechanics are just so much fun.
But overall, the game is still stale for me and I don't think it will ever bounce back. And this event has just been a pain to accomplish as Protoss. It's going to require daily play for me, right up until the end in a couple days. Some serious sunk cost fallacy going on here re: unlocking the portrait, I rarely ever even play rogue!
The majority of my Hearthstone time now goes to The Bazaar (currently in paid beta; will be F2P eventually). It's still too early to recommend to anyone who isn't willing to put up with beta issues, but it's consumed dozens of hours for me and it's been interesting to see and experience the design changes. What I like most is that the PvP battles are asynchronous, against others' ghosts meaning that there's absolutely no time commitment so it's ideal for multitasking.
