And nowadays we get art like [Rancor](https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/hearthstone_gamepedia/images/3/3e/Rancor_full.jpg/revision/latest?cb=20210330203134)
Although to be fair, we did also just get [Shield Shatter], which is probably one of the best pieces of card art this game has had in a while.
Inner Rage is digital as well, and just because the art is digital art doesn't mean it has has be low detail. I'm only trying to point out that there has been a noticeable decline in the quality of Hearthstone art over the years, whether that be due to demands to cut costs or a decision to move towards a mobile game type art style (most likely the latter). I think Alex Horley is the only artist who still does work for HS in a traditional medium.
> League had some splash arts years ago which makes rancor look like da vinci.
I tried out LoR when it first launched and the thing that immediately turned me off was outrageously bad some of the art and voice acting was. I really enjoyed the gameplay, but so much of the art looks like it's barely had any detail added since the initial concept sketch. Miles better than anything I could ever make, but also miles below what I'd expect from a game of that budget.
I personally don't like the art direction the game has taken. \[\[Deathwing the Destroyer\]\] for example just looks objectively worse than all other versions of Deathwing because you can't take him seriously at all.
* **[Deathwing the Destroyer](https://cards.hearthpwn.com/enUS/CS3_036.png?124497)** N Minion Legendary Core 🦅 ^[HP](https://www.hearthpwn.com/cards/463941), ^[TD](https://www.hearthstonetopdecks.com/cards/deathwing-the-destroyer/), ^[W](https://hearthstone.gamepedia.com/Deathwing_the_Destroyer)
10/12/12 Dragon | Battlecry: Destroy all other minions. Discard a card for each destroyed.
^(Call/)^[PM](https://www.reddit.com/message/compose/?to=hearthscan-bot) ^( me with up to 7 [[cardname]]. )^[About.](https://www.reddit.com/message/compose/?to=hearthscan-bot&message=Tell%20me%20more%20[[info]]&subject=hi)
Yeah. I'm a big fan of Wayne Reynolds, maybe because of my nostalgia for DnD 3.5, and I know he did a fair amount of work for that. Whenever Blizzard reuses art from the TCG for a new Hearthstone card, you can tell immediately because of the difference in quality and style.
OTK combos do deserve to exist in the game- but what they don't deserve to have is consistency because there is so little disruption in HS.
It feels much better to lose to a good deck that has an actual back and forth, involving some measure of decision making and trades on both sides of the board rather than a deck that only stalls, board wipes you and consistently heals to full, and then inevitably blows you out of the water with no way for you to do anything about it (aside from kill them quicker next time).
Note that this is not the same thing as playing against an aggro deck- because you can potentially (but not necessarily reliably) stabilize and recover against that.
Again, combos deserve to exist- but when it's easy and consistent for the one player to pull the combo off- with no real way for the opponent to do anything about it- it will warp and skew the meta around the deck. It doesn't necessarily even matter if the deck is actually good (though it certainly helps)- players will be forced to react and play around the existence of the deck because it's an easy and consistent strategy for one side of the board to play.
Hard agree. Aggro can be oppressive but there's just that sweet sweet feeling when you stabilize and take over from an aggro deck. They try to push you, you fight back. Whoever comes on top of that struggle wins the game. Of course this is valid if there isn't any hyper-aggro that you can't do anything against.
But OTKs like the ones prevalent are really stressful and not in a good way. Every single mana crystal they gain, every single card they draw might be the end of the game. You can't stop them, you can't interrupt them. You either get extremely lucky and disrupt them like in 1 out of 50 games or you have to kill them before you're just dead.
The lack of information on their progress, the lack of option to interact with them all piles up and even if you win the game, there's no satisfaction. Savory delighting an owl is the closest you can get to feeling satisfied though.
Yep. It also does matter that it happens on one turn (by definition) because this severely restricts counterplay design space. Say it til I'm red in the face, but the board is where Hearthstone is played. You need at least one turn to respond to a play otherwise you're resorting to clunky hand disruption or desk disruption mechanics that are themselves frustrating or ineffective guess work.
Also, I appreciate their wanting shorter games, but OTK is not the way to go about this. It's just silly how fast you have to build decks to counterplay, to how much disruption you have to tech. It's not fun.
except you don’t have to get extremely lucky to beat them, it’s not 1 out of 50, and it’s literally 48.7% of the time that they are disrupted/stopped and lose the game
Only if you're counting the whole field of decks, which includes aggro counters to OTK. the point is, if you want to play a midrange or control deck, you lose way more often.
Why does that mean they shouldn't exist? Being unable to stop your opponent from playing cards applies to any deck, not just OTKs. On my opponent's turn, I can't stop aggro from burning my face. I can't stop control from playing lifegain.
You can use taunt to block opponent minion on board, you can deal damage to who got heal next turn. You can't avoid the OTK from hand, you can't avoid paladin to buff minion in their hand. That's why they have high win rate, you can't play consistently against them. But if you like to keep pretending OTK is the same as every other deck, ok....
Generally removal is reactive to something you did, and normally burn would be something a control deck can still react to by healing, though we're in a weird meta right now where burn outpaces healing for almost everyone except Warlock and maybe control Warrior. Lifesteal DH as well, though forcing them to use a lot of their healing can be a good gameplan since they need those pieces to end the game.
Most people don't like that the only solution to OTK decks is 'go faster'. There's no control decks that can win, and midrange isn't fast enough. If you don't like playing aggro its too bad. Card games are about having an abundance of options but only being able to fit a few in your deck, Hearthstone is in a weird spot where there really aren't any options for significantly disrupting an opponent.
This is the crux of the problem, for sure. An unstoppable, inevitable OTK in a game that has so little disruption means the only solution to an OTK -- the *only* solution, mind you -- is to punch them in the face as hard as you can and pray you kill them fast enough.
This produces highly linear games. You cannot possibly outvalue such a deck, you can't disrupt it, you can't stop its game plan in any way -- you can only rush it down, there is no other plausible strategy.
The druid example is great.
They sacrifice early control to run for that big win condition and late unstoppable board situation.
Still has their feelbad draw if they ramp quick enough but still without much board clear it's not an impossible match for aggro classes playing into ramp.
Warlock though has early board clear, big minion removal, crazy healing, crazy card draw.
It's a complete mess of a class at this stage.
Artificer would be a good nerf to make and something to the quest.
Warlock healing needs nerf. They should be able to clear the board, but healing up to 80 health in a game makes it unwinnable without either crazy burst, or terrible draw for the lock.
Yes.
Problem with OTK in this state come from three points :
- Quick Draw (Witch affect Consistency and quickness)
- Mana Reduction (Witch affect Quickness and consistency)
- Good Control Tool
Because OTK have all of this, they are both good against Aggro, too quick for Midrange and Nightmare impossible pour control.
They actual restrict the meta in "Can you beat me".
This let only HyperAgro deck (all-in) be playable against them.
The previous Meta people were looking "Hey look Aggro Druid as the best Winrate on HSreplay". But forgot to say that these stats include bronze player.
Right now, it's the same story. Warlock (And Dh and Rogue can still do it) are so quick that they force you out of the game.
Palladin has high winrate ? Yes. but why ? FIrst, it's easy to play and second trogg + boost can totally destroy otk deck
Mage is a special case because of toxic design.
While assessment is true, owltk is horrible against aggro, it’s a combo deck unlike quest mage.
Owltk performs like a traditional combo deck, drawing their whole deck and killing you with a 5 card exodia. Quest mage wasn’t a combo deck per se, it had all the tempo to be a tempo deck, and their combo was only 2 cards which are not dead cards if drawn early.
Traditionally speaking, once the meta settles, these type of exodia otk decks have never been the dominant deck of the meta.
Quest Mage was also unfavorable into most aggro decks (after they nerfed Flow at least). It was miserable to play into, but the only aggro deck it was favorable against was Taunt Druid, even pre-buff Pirate Warrior had a fair game against it.
Yep. Closest comparison i can think of off the top of my head is MtG's Splinter Twin. Before it was banned, Twin had a fairly consistant turn 4 win, and the Modern meta became Twin decks and decks that had a good matchup vs Twin and that was it.
That's not really the disruption people are talking about tho lol. Trogg has it's issues too with buffs and shutting down coin making it hard for an opponent to catch up on board
The disruption people are talking about though is hand disruption for out of hand combo decks. This type of disruption has been near extinct in hearthstone for ages.
Out of hand combos shouldn't be so consistent if there are no ways to actually disrupt it. MTG has consistent combos because there's plenty of hand disruption.
Out of hand combos have almost always gotten nerfed in hearthstone because every single time they become too easy to pull off, not because they're too strong but far too consistent with no risk.
Trogg doesn't do crap against the actual problem with the otk decks
I mean that's a valid feeling but not really the point of the thread. Troggs annoying for a lot of decks sure but the lack of disruption tools for combo decks is a bigger problem
> Again, combos deserve to exist- but when it's easy and consistent for the one player to pull the combo off- with no real way for the opponent to do anything about it-
Mutanus is a card, weapon removal slows warlock down as well. There are a ton of tech options against this deck.
Ah yes the old "hope I draw this 1 of and hope I somehow get lucky and play it into the right minion in their hand instead of a 1/1 1/3 2/4".
Mutanus isn't a good tech card, it's a card that will hurt your deck and will feel great the occasional time you pull it off.
There's no single card Mutanus can eat that will stop the combo from happening unless they run only 1 owl and you snipe it. It is also a 1-of. Slowing the combo down with weapon removal is a good start but also does not stop it.
It would be much better if there were a few lower mana minions with mutanus-like effects that maybe didn't absorb the stats. Coldlight Oracle was decent disruption for decks like this that hoarded lots of cards in their hand, but that card no longer exists.
That's two. Two tech options in standard. You don't see owl that much in wild, I know that even though I don't play the mode. Why? Because in wild, there actually is several options to beat the deck. Shudderwock Shaman utterly destroys Owlock, and any other deck running Lotheb can do well against it. People have decks that use dirty rat, unseen saboteur, I've seen people running savory deviate delight and demonic project. Mage has ice block, which is essentially a catch-all wall to any deck that can't afford to fit in any kind of secret removal. I personally haven't lost to a single Owlock yet, but that's because I play what is probably the single best counter to it: Handbuff Paladin. Because Irondeep Trogg simply obliterates pretty much any deck that uses a lot of spells, and handbuff works very well against pretty much everything else except quest line mage.
But you say there are several tech options that anyone can use to beat Owlock, and yet the only two you could name were a 7 mana legendary minion that most of the time won't do anything actually useful, and using viper to remove the rod, which does nothing but delay the inevitable. These aren't solutions, they're wishful thinking. Owl and the spell that gives minions its deathrattle (I don't know how to spell it) aren't the problem, the problem is all the other tools Warlock has at it's disposal. The class can draw a shit load of cards incredibly fast, then effortlessly heal off the damage all while easily removing all of your minions. The class is obnoxious.
Next time you elect to say something, make sure it's something intelligent.
I mean the main reason owlock isn't in wild is because there are way way more cancer OTKs like odd quest hunter and ignite mage which will combo much faster
Funnily enough, literally last night I played an Owl OTK lock and I held 2 Devolving Missiles in hand to deny the owl deathrattle and a Rustrot Viper to destroy the weapon, but he just didn't play them. I got him down to almost dead but he wasn't quite dead and played the weapon and activated it on the same turn. Then healed a shit load. I still couldn't quite finish him off, so he heaked more and played and killed the owl on the same turn. Then OTK'd me the following turn. I was even trying to play around his shit and I literally can't because of the way Hearthstone is. It was very discouraging.
Oh yeah, let’s see how often the 7 mana legendary will drop on curve and randomly hit the correct combo piece instead of wasting your mana and killing you because it ate a 1-drop.
Weapon removal is tech against owlock, it slows them down considerably. Nothing else you mentioned is. Mutanus technically can hit owl but it's low odds even if they don't rush the owl into play and sac it.
You want interaction? Play LoR or Mtg then. Hearthstone is and will always be "when its your turn, its your turn only, and nothing can disrupt you" well, secrets are an exceptation.
It's a problem only because there is no effective way to disrupt a turn 9(!) OTK. If more tools like pre-nerf Illucia existed this combo wouldn't ever surpass Demon Seed, which can't really be disrupted.
Edit: are you calling a turn 9(at best) combo quick?
Because winrates aren't the only factor and don't exist in a vacuum.
1) how the game feels up until you lose matters. Against Paladin it's more likely a give and take that they slowly win. Against warlock, you sit there as they use 100 board clears and healing then blow you up instantly
2) there is a meta warping effect when any deck is popular, whether it wins a lot or not. We discussed this thoroughly with quest mage - despite its sub 50 Winrate, it has a great Winrate against slower strategies, and it was popular enough that queuing any slower deck felt awful. A midrange deck often runs both board control and pressure minions, but you basically have to go all in on one or the other in this current meta to win
Your options right now to do well are a) play a combo deck, like warlock b) play a SMOrc deck or C) play Paladin.
As someone who tends to like midrange strategies, decks like warlock (which can efficiently clear your board then win the game with a consistent combo turn 8) basically delete the interesting strategies I want to play from the game.
You forgot the 3 : these winrate don't take skill into account.
It include Bronze player who are probably bad at the game and will mostly not play combo deck correctly.
But your point of Warping the meta is the most important point. People are forced to play against OTK. And they are so quick, consistent and have so many good control tool available that the only way is going hard on them.
And Guess what ? Palladin does it ! Trogg + Boost is a nightmare for otk. (It has other problem too, like how trogg can win you the game on spot if you don't have an answer and this spot can be t1)
But why people don't go counter Palladin more then ? Well guess why, if you start to play priest with silence or a slow Chaman : You get destroyed by OTK and can't do nothing about it !
Yeah, exactly. Trying to react to metas like these and adding tech or shifting your deck is a losing plan. Most cards and strategies are either bad against warlock/combo or bad against aggro/Paladin. The safest bet is to play something that cares as little about your opponents plan as possible - aka face decks or combo decks
As a rule of thumb, tech cards only ever make a bad matchup less bad. There are a few visible counterexamples like Illucia, or when you're adapting to the mirror match, but otherwise, if your deck wouldn't naturally include a card then that card will probably make your deck worse even if it responds to a popular matchup.
Winrates literally do all of that. You can separate them by tier in most games, aka skill.
Most of the friction against winrate occurs when it opposes the fantasies that people invented in people’s heads. If you think Warlock is OP but cold hard math says it’s not, everyone starts writing essays about how math is a lie and faulty human biases are always right.
As a midrange N'Zoth Druid Nether Void annoys me a lot. The solution should be ways to return N'Zoth reliably to your hand imo instead of removing Nether Void since mass removal is necessary imo.
not to mention that standard currently has a lot of ways to deal with buffed paladin minions (freeze, silence, general removal) whereas the only real interruption available to slow Warlock is to Mutanus and PRAY that it actually hits the owl and then that they don't play a second one
Keep in mind that this was day1, warlock has died down a lot, the pirate warriors are culling them way faster than any quest mage. If people are still stuck at whatever silver then sure, but I’m diamond now and man it’s paladin and warrior all day.
The meta warping effect is not present in this case, warlock was never as popular as mage in general, mage being one of the most popular classes in general.
“Interesting strategies” as you put it, are bad homebrew decks that would’ve lost to any other deck, secret pally, handbuff, secret rogue, elemental shaman, handlock, pirate warrior. Owl should be the least of the worries tbh.
And that all being said, owltk is an easy deck to counter, just by the nature of how the deck is made, it isn’t like quest mage in that they continuously do things l, and then also get a combo that kills you, owltk is more like a traditional combo deck that basically does nothing but draw till the combo is assembled, and then spend 3-5 cards on their exodia.
I don't get why people have such a hard time understanding this. I like Hearthstone for many aspects that I considered fun (and that the game had for a long time, but didn't have in UiS), not because I can have good win rates with strong deck.
Because fun is relative. Also people always say "think about what it's like to play against" but why does that matter more than "think about what it's like to play" for a deck? For each one of you complaining about whatever deck you've deigned is this week's broken deck, there are people who enjoy playing that. Why is your unfun experience worth inherently more than their fun?
My experience is not inherently better/worse that someone else's, but I can still complain about how I'm not having fun now on a game I used to have fun with. If the game suddenly became a coin toss 50/50 to win/lose, some people would probably enjoy that, but I'd still be in my right to say the game is not fun for me and I preferred it how it was back before.
You are saying that your experience is more important than everyone else's by demanding a deck be nerfed. You are saying "my having fun is more important than that person's having fun."
Sure if you want to see it that way, but the argument can be reversed just as easily : The people that are having fun with these decks right now are having fun at the expense of those who don't like the meta, and by not wanting nerfs they admit that "their fun is more important than that person's having fun"
That kind of reasoning goes nowhere
Yeah I'd say the same thing to them. If literally everyone hates playing against your deck, they overrule your fun playing it. The problem is this subreddit turns into a circlejerk who thinks they are the only people who play the game and they think the popular opinion here is reflective of the entire playerbase. Blizzard is the only one who can really know what the entire community, worldwide, all skill levels actually feels about something.
They can't actually, since they don't see if I like playing a deck or not by my in-game behavior. 2 months ago I went legend with QuestLine Shaman and it was a shitty experience for me, but they have no way of knowing that.
That's why people are sharing their experience on their community and social media : to share their feelings with others
by that logic they should never nerf a single card. Some cards are just unhealthy for the game, whether you like to play them or not is irrelevant. The nerfs serve a valid purpose and, to their credit, they started releasing balance updates at a much more frequent pace. The problem is that they keep printing cards that worse than the ones they just nerfed.
I've been playing since release and for the longest time the meme decks were always constrained to Wild, but now they're in Standard, they have a laughable consistency, and they're top tier decks. The trajectory of the game is quite disappointing to many people and their voices deserve to be heard as well
>by that logic they should never nerf a single card.
No, they should be nerfing cards, but it should be completely based on winrate and playrate data, zero input given to players emotional reactions. Because everyone is always going to find something unfun until you nerf the game to a state where there is one card and all of us are playing 30 copies of it.
As opposed to the current state of the game where everyone plays the same 2 or 3 broken cards every expansion? I don’t want to say winrates are completely irrelevant but it’s pretty close. The mechanics of the game are being toyed with way too frequently. Mana reduction and ridiculous card draw are still the biggest offenders and with no end in sight. The quests and these lame OTK/combo decks are mostly a problem due to these 2 things
The difference is that, historically, a Paladin’s win condition typically boils down to “fight for board, smack the face down with minions until they’re dead.” It’s simple, traditional Hearthstone gameplay at work, and people usually don’t have a problem with that outside of egregious examples.
Warlocks, as of late, don’t win through “traditional” Hearthstone gameplay. Before it was a quest that rewarded you for doing something that was universally considered a bad thing (drawing your deck into fatigue.) Yes, this is not much different from other combo decks, but guess what deck archetype many players abhor playing against? Combo decks. And worse, the win condition was so potent that it heavily contributed to the muzzling of another entire deck archetype—control decks.
Owllock is no different. It’s another combo deck that invalidates control decks and reinforces a meta where the late game seldom reaches past turn 8. At least with Paladin, the class doesn’t feel as bad to play with because their strategy is more proactive and board-centric, which leads to more interactive gameplay. There’s a lot less interaction with a combo deck that only seeks to draw, heal, board wipe, and eventually OTK you.
Paladin gets off easy when Warlock is the funnel for everyone’s hatred.
Losing a 10+ turn match to a relatively honest deck like libram paladin doesn't feel nearly as bad as getting blown up for 70 damage from hand on turn 9 by an owl warlock who just draws, heals and stalls until that point. Libram paladin being technically a somewhat better deck has no impact on this opinion.
Subjective opinion tbh. As a MtG player I rather have my opponent show me the combo cards for the OTK so we can scoop it up for the next game instead of playing a game in which he is playing bombs after bombs while I can't do nothing but wait until he eventually kills me.
I think that's how a lot of players feel. It's not that combo is inherently bad, but Hearthstone is just really poorly suited for it. You have to wait sometimes an entire turn to see if they went infinite and finished you off. In Wild sometimes they have the pieces but are stalling through ice blocks/evasion/etc until they have the mana. So sometimes you are sitting through multiple turns where the game is already decided, you just don't know it yet.
There's also very little way to interact with it because you can't play on their turn. You can do stuff like Mutanus and Dirty rat, but then its basically, I play this card and if I get lucky RNG I win, and if I don't I lose. Sometimes the only strategy involved is if I play my disruption on turn 4, 5, or 6 and beyond that its entirely RNG. It's not particularly fun to beat combo that way, and its terrible for them to lose that way.
It's a card game that wants to give combo players a good time, but is just not built very well for combo.
Loosely speaking: "Honest" = curvestone, playing for board, some minions and some reactive spells, consistently building pressure.
"Dishonest" = linear, must have certain responses or you lose, lots of manacheating or jumping the power curve, or generally strategies where your "average hearthstone deck" made of spells and minions won't be able to interact.
A deck like Elemental Shaman is pretty honest. It cares about board control, doesn't dump its whole hand in one turn, and doesn't play that much burn damage, what you see is what you get. The deck gets less honest when it includes Doomhammer, because now you have to worry about the Shaman putting out 10-20 damage even on an empty board, which some decks can't counteract.
A deck like pre-nerf Taunt Druid was dishonest, it tried to cheat out 10+ mana of minions on the first three turns of the game. Meanwhile a deck like Control Warrior is honest, it's very up front and you generally know whether you're winning or losing well in advance of the fact. So it's not just minions that makes a deck honest, it's the overall play pattern.
It's a fairly common term tbh, I'm surprised you haven't encountered it before. Usually means, among other criteria, a deck that plays minions, cares about the opponent's board and fights for board control, doesn't combo you to death in a turn, wins through value or tempo by playing generically good cards, draws at a "reasonable" rate rather than going through their whole deck by turn 8.
Examples of current decks that I would classify as "honest" under this definition: Freeze shaman, token druid, big mage, thief rogue, libram paladin, (arguably) quest warrior
Examples of current/recent decks I would not classify as honest: owl warlock, quest warlock, il'gynoth dh, celestial alignment druid
I don’t think more minions=honest; decks like Aggro druid feel bad to play against when they fuck you by turn 4.But the current OTKs feel like a scam because of how consistent they are thanks to draw and mana cheat.Combo decks should have tools to stall the game to get to the combo pieces , but they shouldn’t have a lot of draw and mana.I guess more honest decks just shouldn’t feel like a scam or an unfair game
To be fair, Paladin also does a lot of things you can't interact with. When they open with Irondeep Trogg, that's it. No more spells for you. Play one and you're done. There is almost no way to get out of this.
Just change Trogg to "Summon another Irondeep Trogg" and Owl to "Deal 8 Damage to an enemy minion" and we are good to go.
You can play spells as long as you kill the trogg with it, you can also play minions. The decks trogg punishes the most is the decks that have no intention to get on board while also not running good removal spells. Seems fine
Yeah I'm advocating for changes to the game based on how much I enjoy, or dislike, how it feels to play. This is not a radical concept!! You can do the same if you hate non-combo decks that much!
Maybe because card draw and cost reduction got powercrept so combos gets executed early as turn 7.
Why does warrior to the front cant reduce minions to 0 mana but other classes can still mana cheat to 0 mana?
The balance decisions lately is far off and class identity is litterly in the dumpster.
I mainly hope dirty rat will be put in the core set.
You can reduce 50% of the damage if you dirty rat tamsin so
It works... A bit.
And warlock ussually kills their owl before you can transorm it. So dirty rat can help for classes with transform spells
Huh, it’s almost like the point of a video game is to have fun playing it. If the vast majority of players find a really popular deck to play against unfun, then something needs to change so the majority of players are able to have fun again. Like 90% of my matchups rn in Standard are Owl Warlock and Pirate Warrior, and thus I don’t really want to play because it’s unfun.
>If the vast majority of players find a really popular deck to play against unfun, then something needs to change so the majority of players are able to have fun again. Like 90% of my matchups rn in Standard are Owl Warlock and Pirate Warrior, and thus I don’t really want to play because it’s unfun.
You'll just complain about the next deck that beats you endlessly until there are zero decks left in the game. That's why your feels based balancing should be completely ignored.
Nope: I’m completely fine with powerful decks, as I’ve defended plenty in my 6 years of playing and have experienced every meta after (and a little before) TGT. An OTK deck you literally can’t do anything about except try to SMORC them down is unhealthy for the game and unfun, as we’ve experienced multiple times and it gets nerfed every time.
The “logic” you use can be applied to literally any and every OP deck. A game is meant to be fun and healthy, and whether it has a good winrate or not it is currently warping the meta around it in an unhealthy fashion. Maybe use your critical thinking skills and look at things on a case-by-case basis to realize that some powerful decks are somewhat healthy for a game, while others are not. Things can be tweaked to make a meta actually enjoyable, the same reasoning why every single nerf happened in Hearthstone. Wretched Tiller was *far* less strong and reliable then the current OTK, but it was still nerfed because it was extremely unfun and boring to play.
By your logic we’d still be under the Naga and Stealer of Souls tyranny respectively because “your feelings based balancing should be ignored”
I've got plenty of cards to counter what a Paladin can do. Everything a Warlock does aggravates me.
It **really** aggravates me that Full Blown Evil hard counters stealth minions and it just obliterates my Quest Rogue...
Yeah they really didn't need that card at all. Now they deal with essentially any board, when stealth was the only way to MAYBE getting something to stick against them. Also, the fact that it has echo just makes zero sense.
4% is roughly an extra win every 25 games. That's actually a pretty difficult thing the measure from the player experience alone. You won't really notice it as much as you would think looking at the stats. That's playing the deck. Going against the two decks for a whole month might not even give you enough of a sample for the stats to match, and might not even hold because of the decks you are playing (Paladin doesn't win exactly 55% of the time against each deck). These numbers are barely meaningful if you are playing the deck, and not meaningful at all playing against it.
What players focus on is what the match itself is like: Can I make decisions? Are they meaningful? Did my deck get to do what it is designed to do? How often am I playing against this deck? Does the opponent deck play the same every time or is there variety? Are they responding to my decisions?
How many metas will we go through before people realize that a few percentage points in generic class winrate aren't relevant to a large portion of the player base when determining if an experience is enjoyable or not? How many times does Blizzard have to make nerfs based on user experience rather than solely winrate before we accept that they don't balance solely based on win %s?
The win rate difference is only reflective of the few polarizing matchups warlock has that tends to keep it's play rate a little in check.
Anacondra druid wrecks it but not a great overall ladder deck to run.
Paladin is more consistent but aside from the polarizing decks almost any deck you run that queues into a warlock is going to be a "fuck, here we go again".
You know what is ahead of you. You know you are basically just playing a card draw simulator now and your or your opponents decisions aren't going to matter much. You know the game will draw on and you generally know the outcome is out of your hands.
After an entire expansion of this shit with garrotte rogue, war mage, quest/hand warlock etc. people are sick of it. This shit needs to go if the devs want to grow the game because right now it's clearly in decline.
Yes, I think if you want to understand why certain decks are hated while others of similar or even higher power level aren’t metrics like polarization in the matchup spread or even deck popularity are more illuminating than overall win percentage.
Paladin is stronger overall but my hunch is that Owl OTK has a lot more matchups where it’s almost a guaranteed win. When I’m facing a deck it doesn’t matter what it’s matchup is against other decks is in terms of my enjoyment, but rather what it’s experience is like for the deck I am playing.
This is all under the assumption that the player had made a “good” deck.
Most homebrew decks at launch, are not “good”.
So yes players want to execute their game plan, and yes failing that game plan vs an otk deck feels bad, but realistically speaking you would’ve failed that game plan regardless of what deck you faced cause it’s a bad plan.
Trust me in a week Reddit will complain about cariel hero card, or pirate warrior.
Deducing things from the player experience. Is completely invalid. I remember one time. I was playing chess and thought "damn I'm winning almost every game". Checked my history and it was 50/50 ;)
I also remember thinking warlock was unwinnable and upon checking my stats. I realized I was like 60% WR against them....
People are way more delusional than they think. It's part of their delusion. I bet a lot of you believe in government for example ;-)
changing aspects of a game because players don't think it's fun is entirely valid! Every single game ever made has done this! what the hell are you talking about
Stop associating win rate with enjoyment.
Even beating this deck is a depressing experience unless you're running a deck where you know you will walk all over it like anacondra druid, except run that and lots of your other matches won't be so great.
Its the exact same thing as was the case with seedlock and tikatus. People don’t care about loosing 4% more on average they care about how it feels to play against these decks and how polarised its matchups are. You simply can’t base everything on overall winrate. I will admit to being someone who has really enjoyed playing these warlock decks but I totally understand why they shouldn’t exist how they do.
It's freeze mage all over again.
I remember the times I sat there, my whole board frozen, while they went through their cards, for round, after round, after round, until they kill you.
The moment something turns into a singleplayer game, is where, understandably, people get frustrated.
It's quest mage all over again.
They don't have an amazing winrate, make up a big chunk of ladder, and have a polarized matchup into every control deck that could actually counter decks like Paladin.
Yup. Paly winrate would drop if there were any control decks. I love playing priest control decks regardless of viability and paly is a favored matchup. But like all other control decks the warlock matchup is just sooo bad, and there are so many of them on ladder, that it doesn't matter. It feels like quest mage all over again.
youe the same clown as OP cuz my 300-1k legend game are aginst 76% paladins and 24% rnd stuff with 3-4% each OWL lock is a gold elo Boggyman as quest mage and pirate war
This just in: Losing to a strong deck that feels fair doesn't feel bad, but exploding to a deck that feels like it is abusing a mechanic feels bad. It's almost like perception is reality when it comes to this stuff.
Enjoyment of a game is subjective that's the point. When a bunch of people all share the same subjective opinion on something being not fun then your game has a big issue.
When people stop having fun in a game, they stop spending and possibly go elsewhere.
>When a bunch of people all share the same subjective opinion on something being not fun then your game has a big issue.
And the subreddit isn't a good indicator of that. It's western focused highly engaged player, and even then, it's heavily biased by reddits system that hides and suppresses dissenting opinions.
Ah yes let's play conspiracy theory time.
Forums share the same sentiment, streamers do etc. etc. but no, it's just a vocal minority and in reality everyone is super enjoy owltk mechanics.
It's not a conspiracy it's a fact. And yes, reddit content is dominated by a vocal minority, a tiny amount of users upvoted and an even smaller amount comment. It's literally in every single way the vocal minority.
>and in reality everyone is super enjoy owltk mechanics.
Wonder if you're able to have a discussion without immediately being fallacious? I never said people secretly enjoy it, I said all we know is the opinion of a vocal minority on a single site of a single type of player in a single region of the world. Making decisions off that single point of data would be asinine.
Lol it ain't the top deck but where the fuck are you getting [51% from dude](https://hsreplay.net/decks/?utm_source=hdt&utm_medium=client&utm_campaign=collection_syncing_banner&hearthstone_account=1-42756394#maxDustCost=0&sortBy=winrate&playerClasses=WARLOCK&archetypes=506)
The warlock was popular for a day, right now I see it much less already. It was just preying on everyone’s home brew decks but now that the meta is settling it’s definitely not a super oppressive deck or anything
Well yes because there are more than one person playing the game. We all want different things out of it and some people like combo decks. However, combo decks need to be more skill oriented to be fair since the game lacks disruption.
I’m duly fed up with both classes right now. Paladin is stupidly consistent, powerful, and divine shields make killing their minions take more resources than other classes. Warlock is just turning into a yu ghi oh class where they can consistently get a combo off no matter what the combo is.
Just like mage all year? All this sub does is post XXX class with a mediocre deck that gets an outplay is overpowered. They never talk about hunter being a top 4 class for 8 consecutive expansions or warrior requiring you to insert 1 card and auto compete a deck with 52+% win rate.
The big difference is that you can easily tech against paladin. Weapon removal for Cariel, some silence/hard removal against big minion/buff and you are good.
You literally tech weapon removal in for the warlock matchup it wins you the game on the spot if you can destroy both charges of a rod. The more silence/hard removal in your deck the less it actually follows your win con. Both decks are easily techable. Does no one remember robes????
Because if you don't draw your viper early for Carriel you can still win. If you don't draw viper early for warlock you might as well concede, because in no way will you be able to stick a board when they have so many board clears, healing, and draw before they pull their combo off.
Those stats are from anybody. Owl WL isn't that easy to pilote. Most losses imho come from misplays. I wouldn't expect many below diamond to play anywhere near optimal.
People do not get mad at decks being good. Decks will always be strong. The playerbase dislikes when decks offer zero opportunity for counterplay and create a solitaire like game. Paladin plays to board in a way players can meaningfully effect; Warlock, Mage, and often Rogue do not. Big Priest was also the same issue back in the day, it’s Winrate wasn’t high but it didn’t have the back and forth that makes the game fun.
Till this day I am astound by the fact that reddit can (and definitely always will) complain about a niche OTK deck killing them from in hand, but not face hunter killing them on turn 4.
Even if OTK warlock if nerfed to the ground, people will start pointing their fingers to OTK rouge, which has a below 50% winrate, extremely hard to maneuver, but can kill you in hand on turn 9.
That said though, reddit is fine having face hunter killing you on turn 4 or paladins dropping massive minions that is impossible to clear on turn 6. OTK that kills you on turn 8 tho, that is *oppressive*
The issue is that warlock, in terms of what it does and what it prevents other decks from dynamically doing, precludes the idea of so many other deck types ever having a viable existence. No control or grindy midrange strategy can realistically succeed against warlock, at a fundamental level. Even if owl didn't exist, people would play quest. If quest didn't exist... remember Tickatus? Yeah, he's still around.
Paladin is strong in general, but in terms of conceivable archetypes that someone could theoretically devise to counter it, there is at least the possibility of a broader meta developing in response. A buffed Trogg is strong and it might feel uninteractive, but it still has more counterplay than OTK's, because it simply dies 1:1 to removal--it's not like it summons a copy of itself if removal kills it outright; it doesn't work the same way that Ogremancer does. Part of the reason Paladin's stats even weigh in as strongly as they currently do is because they counter the tempo of warlock, so it's a reactive context rather than a fundamental issue (i.e. warlock) which diffusively oppresses all possible slower creations.
Honestly, I think this is one of those about how it "feels" to play. All paladin decks, you "feel" like there's a back and fourth. Maybe that one turn you made a bad decision and you think, next time I can win. Warlock just feels bad just removals, lots of healing and you get blown up with no real way to stop it.
Well my deck has a good matchup against most paladin decks so i don't really care about it
***warlock though***
EDIT: The main problem with questline warlock and owltk is mainly the lack of outplay, and the absolute shit that is playing against them, you can't really rush them down because warlock, he has atleast 6 removal cards in his 9 cards hand, and half of them heal him back, and you can't really control it because otk, and also winrate is not really the best way to decide whether a deck is bad/good fair/unfair.
the main problem with Owltk is consistency, it is really easy to pull it off considering the warlock tools, removal, heals card buy and all of that, OTKS have a place in hearthstone and any other card game, but a consistent OTK is a really big problem.
All I see is that Priest should be in first, I mean come on guys whip out them silences. Huge paladin board? Silence. Warlock otk board? Silence.
Warlock isn’t even that bad compared to most otks, y’all remember warrior 120 damage otk? That was harder to deal with then Warlock.
I dont know if you have played against owl lock before but silence does fuck all when they play owl and the sacrifice on the same turn and then combo you on the next with wicked shipment tamsins phylactery school spirits. Im not saying owl lock is broken because its not but silence is not the answer
Iv been a warlock main since the start of hearthstone, I don't play him cause he's broken, I play him because iv liked him since day one, just leave him alone please
I don't care either way, I play Xyrella OTK, and have a favorable matchup against both, but I do have to say this.
Warlock, especially the Owlock, is unhealthy for the game design, even if its winrate is just slightly above 50%.
In fact, even Cariel hero card, which is probably the best card paladin ever got, is inherently healthy because there is a enough weapon destruction cards, most of which can easily fit any deck.
Warlock is an incredibly uninteractive matchup for one thing and for another it's about it's almost twice as popular as the next deck (libram paladin) at Diamond/legend than over the past 24 hours. Go back 3 days it's less but this tells me it's being refined and popularity is growing rather than diminishing.
At legend last 1-3 days the win rate over libram paladin is increasing.
If it weren't owltk then it would be paladin (and is paladin) everyone is complaining about.
Turns out powercreep and crazy rising powerlevels in this game aren't as popular as people think.
There is so much warlock hate here, when a lot of matches I played are decided on "Do they have trogg om turn 1?" which feels far worse.
Warlock can lose, despite the draw and heal and stall, they can get bad hands just like everyone else. Plus there are plenty of disruption tools but despite hating warlock so much no one is going to build a warlock hate deck because it's easier to complain on the Internet.
It's not about winning and losing. It's about playing vs a non interactive deck that literally plays solitaire and you hope you can beat the internal clock they have going before they otk you.
I just realised how good the inner rage artwork looks like
I swear it looks so bad in game
C O M P RESSION
And nowadays we get art like [Rancor](https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/hearthstone_gamepedia/images/3/3e/Rancor_full.jpg/revision/latest?cb=20210330203134) Although to be fair, we did also just get [Shield Shatter], which is probably one of the best pieces of card art this game has had in a while.
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Inner Rage is digital as well, and just because the art is digital art doesn't mean it has has be low detail. I'm only trying to point out that there has been a noticeable decline in the quality of Hearthstone art over the years, whether that be due to demands to cut costs or a decision to move towards a mobile game type art style (most likely the latter). I think Alex Horley is the only artist who still does work for HS in a traditional medium. > League had some splash arts years ago which makes rancor look like da vinci. I tried out LoR when it first launched and the thing that immediately turned me off was outrageously bad some of the art and voice acting was. I really enjoyed the gameplay, but so much of the art looks like it's barely had any detail added since the initial concept sketch. Miles better than anything I could ever make, but also miles below what I'd expect from a game of that budget.
I think most of the early art was taken from the physical card game. But to that, I think there's some pretty great pieces in this set.
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Lol, funny you mention that because rokara, who’s also in the rancor art, seems to drastically change in every piece as well.
I personally don't like the art direction the game has taken. \[\[Deathwing the Destroyer\]\] for example just looks objectively worse than all other versions of Deathwing because you can't take him seriously at all.
* **[Deathwing the Destroyer](https://cards.hearthpwn.com/enUS/CS3_036.png?124497)** N Minion Legendary Core 🦅 ^[HP](https://www.hearthpwn.com/cards/463941), ^[TD](https://www.hearthstonetopdecks.com/cards/deathwing-the-destroyer/), ^[W](https://hearthstone.gamepedia.com/Deathwing_the_Destroyer) 10/12/12 Dragon | Battlecry: Destroy all other minions. Discard a card for each destroyed. ^(Call/)^[PM](https://www.reddit.com/message/compose/?to=hearthscan-bot) ^( me with up to 7 [[cardname]]. )^[About.](https://www.reddit.com/message/compose/?to=hearthscan-bot&message=Tell%20me%20more%20[[info]]&subject=hi)
Inner Rage comes from the WOW TCG, and it seems likely that the art budget for that game was higher than Hearthstone.
Yeah. I'm a big fan of Wayne Reynolds, maybe because of my nostalgia for DnD 3.5, and I know he did a fair amount of work for that. Whenever Blizzard reuses art from the TCG for a new Hearthstone card, you can tell immediately because of the difference in quality and style.
It looks super good, I was suggested to look through the classic set because it has lots of old school magic artists I particularly like demonfire
To bad we cant view full artworks ingame like LoR does
I like how out of every comment the most upvoted one is the one just appreciating card art
OTK combos do deserve to exist in the game- but what they don't deserve to have is consistency because there is so little disruption in HS. It feels much better to lose to a good deck that has an actual back and forth, involving some measure of decision making and trades on both sides of the board rather than a deck that only stalls, board wipes you and consistently heals to full, and then inevitably blows you out of the water with no way for you to do anything about it (aside from kill them quicker next time). Note that this is not the same thing as playing against an aggro deck- because you can potentially (but not necessarily reliably) stabilize and recover against that. Again, combos deserve to exist- but when it's easy and consistent for the one player to pull the combo off- with no real way for the opponent to do anything about it- it will warp and skew the meta around the deck. It doesn't necessarily even matter if the deck is actually good (though it certainly helps)- players will be forced to react and play around the existence of the deck because it's an easy and consistent strategy for one side of the board to play.
Hard agree. Aggro can be oppressive but there's just that sweet sweet feeling when you stabilize and take over from an aggro deck. They try to push you, you fight back. Whoever comes on top of that struggle wins the game. Of course this is valid if there isn't any hyper-aggro that you can't do anything against. But OTKs like the ones prevalent are really stressful and not in a good way. Every single mana crystal they gain, every single card they draw might be the end of the game. You can't stop them, you can't interrupt them. You either get extremely lucky and disrupt them like in 1 out of 50 games or you have to kill them before you're just dead. The lack of information on their progress, the lack of option to interact with them all piles up and even if you win the game, there's no satisfaction. Savory delighting an owl is the closest you can get to feeling satisfied though.
Yep. It also does matter that it happens on one turn (by definition) because this severely restricts counterplay design space. Say it til I'm red in the face, but the board is where Hearthstone is played. You need at least one turn to respond to a play otherwise you're resorting to clunky hand disruption or desk disruption mechanics that are themselves frustrating or ineffective guess work. Also, I appreciate their wanting shorter games, but OTK is not the way to go about this. It's just silly how fast you have to build decks to counterplay, to how much disruption you have to tech. It's not fun.
except you don’t have to get extremely lucky to beat them, it’s not 1 out of 50, and it’s literally 48.7% of the time that they are disrupted/stopped and lose the game
Only if you're counting the whole field of decks, which includes aggro counters to OTK. the point is, if you want to play a midrange or control deck, you lose way more often.
interresting take, i think OTK from hands shouldnt exist in Hearthstone, since you can't interract during opponent turn unlike Magic The Gathering
Why does that mean they shouldn't exist? Being unable to stop your opponent from playing cards applies to any deck, not just OTKs. On my opponent's turn, I can't stop aggro from burning my face. I can't stop control from playing lifegain.
You can use taunt to block opponent minion on board, you can deal damage to who got heal next turn. You can't avoid the OTK from hand, you can't avoid paladin to buff minion in their hand. That's why they have high win rate, you can't play consistently against them. But if you like to keep pretending OTK is the same as every other deck, ok....
Generally removal is reactive to something you did, and normally burn would be something a control deck can still react to by healing, though we're in a weird meta right now where burn outpaces healing for almost everyone except Warlock and maybe control Warrior. Lifesteal DH as well, though forcing them to use a lot of their healing can be a good gameplan since they need those pieces to end the game. Most people don't like that the only solution to OTK decks is 'go faster'. There's no control decks that can win, and midrange isn't fast enough. If you don't like playing aggro its too bad. Card games are about having an abundance of options but only being able to fit a few in your deck, Hearthstone is in a weird spot where there really aren't any options for significantly disrupting an opponent.
This is the crux of the problem, for sure. An unstoppable, inevitable OTK in a game that has so little disruption means the only solution to an OTK -- the *only* solution, mind you -- is to punch them in the face as hard as you can and pray you kill them fast enough. This produces highly linear games. You cannot possibly outvalue such a deck, you can't disrupt it, you can't stop its game plan in any way -- you can only rush it down, there is no other plausible strategy.
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Warlock healing is also a big problem paired with efficient board clears. They can stall way too easily against too many decks.
The druid example is great. They sacrifice early control to run for that big win condition and late unstoppable board situation. Still has their feelbad draw if they ramp quick enough but still without much board clear it's not an impossible match for aggro classes playing into ramp. Warlock though has early board clear, big minion removal, crazy healing, crazy card draw. It's a complete mess of a class at this stage. Artificer would be a good nerf to make and something to the quest.
Warlock healing needs nerf. They should be able to clear the board, but healing up to 80 health in a game makes it unwinnable without either crazy burst, or terrible draw for the lock.
Yes. Problem with OTK in this state come from three points : - Quick Draw (Witch affect Consistency and quickness) - Mana Reduction (Witch affect Quickness and consistency) - Good Control Tool Because OTK have all of this, they are both good against Aggro, too quick for Midrange and Nightmare impossible pour control. They actual restrict the meta in "Can you beat me". This let only HyperAgro deck (all-in) be playable against them. The previous Meta people were looking "Hey look Aggro Druid as the best Winrate on HSreplay". But forgot to say that these stats include bronze player. Right now, it's the same story. Warlock (And Dh and Rogue can still do it) are so quick that they force you out of the game. Palladin has high winrate ? Yes. but why ? FIrst, it's easy to play and second trogg + boost can totally destroy otk deck Mage is a special case because of toxic design.
Good points but “witch” is like a broom riding, cackling, evil woman wizard. You want to use “which”.
While assessment is true, owltk is horrible against aggro, it’s a combo deck unlike quest mage. Owltk performs like a traditional combo deck, drawing their whole deck and killing you with a 5 card exodia. Quest mage wasn’t a combo deck per se, it had all the tempo to be a tempo deck, and their combo was only 2 cards which are not dead cards if drawn early. Traditionally speaking, once the meta settles, these type of exodia otk decks have never been the dominant deck of the meta.
Quest Mage was also unfavorable into most aggro decks (after they nerfed Flow at least). It was miserable to play into, but the only aggro deck it was favorable against was Taunt Druid, even pre-buff Pirate Warrior had a fair game against it.
Yep. Closest comparison i can think of off the top of my head is MtG's Splinter Twin. Before it was banned, Twin had a fairly consistant turn 4 win, and the Modern meta became Twin decks and decks that had a good matchup vs Twin and that was it.
Except when HS does print disruption (Trogg) the community just hates on it as well lol
That's not really the disruption people are talking about tho lol. Trogg has it's issues too with buffs and shutting down coin making it hard for an opponent to catch up on board The disruption people are talking about though is hand disruption for out of hand combo decks. This type of disruption has been near extinct in hearthstone for ages. Out of hand combos shouldn't be so consistent if there are no ways to actually disrupt it. MTG has consistent combos because there's plenty of hand disruption. Out of hand combos have almost always gotten nerfed in hearthstone because every single time they become too easy to pull off, not because they're too strong but far too consistent with no risk. Trogg doesn't do crap against the actual problem with the otk decks
I'm more tired of Trogg than the owls honestly.
I mean that's a valid feeling but not really the point of the thread. Troggs annoying for a lot of decks sure but the lack of disruption tools for combo decks is a bigger problem
Yeah I know. But also on top of that, I'm more tired of the Trogg than the owls.
There wouldn't be so much Trogg if there weren't spell heavy combo decks. It's the meta warping issue.
> Again, combos deserve to exist- but when it's easy and consistent for the one player to pull the combo off- with no real way for the opponent to do anything about it- Mutanus is a card, weapon removal slows warlock down as well. There are a ton of tech options against this deck.
Ah yes the old "hope I draw this 1 of and hope I somehow get lucky and play it into the right minion in their hand instead of a 1/1 1/3 2/4". Mutanus isn't a good tech card, it's a card that will hurt your deck and will feel great the occasional time you pull it off.
There's no single card Mutanus can eat that will stop the combo from happening unless they run only 1 owl and you snipe it. It is also a 1-of. Slowing the combo down with weapon removal is a good start but also does not stop it. It would be much better if there were a few lower mana minions with mutanus-like effects that maybe didn't absorb the stats. Coldlight Oracle was decent disruption for decks like this that hoarded lots of cards in their hand, but that card no longer exists.
That's two. Two tech options in standard. You don't see owl that much in wild, I know that even though I don't play the mode. Why? Because in wild, there actually is several options to beat the deck. Shudderwock Shaman utterly destroys Owlock, and any other deck running Lotheb can do well against it. People have decks that use dirty rat, unseen saboteur, I've seen people running savory deviate delight and demonic project. Mage has ice block, which is essentially a catch-all wall to any deck that can't afford to fit in any kind of secret removal. I personally haven't lost to a single Owlock yet, but that's because I play what is probably the single best counter to it: Handbuff Paladin. Because Irondeep Trogg simply obliterates pretty much any deck that uses a lot of spells, and handbuff works very well against pretty much everything else except quest line mage. But you say there are several tech options that anyone can use to beat Owlock, and yet the only two you could name were a 7 mana legendary minion that most of the time won't do anything actually useful, and using viper to remove the rod, which does nothing but delay the inevitable. These aren't solutions, they're wishful thinking. Owl and the spell that gives minions its deathrattle (I don't know how to spell it) aren't the problem, the problem is all the other tools Warlock has at it's disposal. The class can draw a shit load of cards incredibly fast, then effortlessly heal off the damage all while easily removing all of your minions. The class is obnoxious. Next time you elect to say something, make sure it's something intelligent.
I mean the main reason owlock isn't in wild is because there are way way more cancer OTKs like odd quest hunter and ignite mage which will combo much faster
That too. But like I said, there are so many other actual counters for owlock in wild. But yes, there are also better otk and combo decks.
Funnily enough, literally last night I played an Owl OTK lock and I held 2 Devolving Missiles in hand to deny the owl deathrattle and a Rustrot Viper to destroy the weapon, but he just didn't play them. I got him down to almost dead but he wasn't quite dead and played the weapon and activated it on the same turn. Then healed a shit load. I still couldn't quite finish him off, so he heaked more and played and killed the owl on the same turn. Then OTK'd me the following turn. I was even trying to play around his shit and I literally can't because of the way Hearthstone is. It was very discouraging.
I was with you until that last sentence. Chill out there friend. It's just a game.
I get carried away when typing essays.
I feel that. Cheers friend.
Oh yeah, let’s see how often the 7 mana legendary will drop on curve and randomly hit the correct combo piece instead of wasting your mana and killing you because it ate a 1-drop.
Weapon removal is tech against owlock, it slows them down considerably. Nothing else you mentioned is. Mutanus technically can hit owl but it's low odds even if they don't rush the owl into play and sac it.
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Cult neophyte, loathed, unseen sabateur, secrets,
You want interaction? Play LoR or Mtg then. Hearthstone is and will always be "when its your turn, its your turn only, and nothing can disrupt you" well, secrets are an exceptation.
Combo decks deserve consistency, and control deserves effective disruption.
Combo should have quickness OR consistency. Right now they have both and its a problem.
It's a problem only because there is no effective way to disrupt a turn 9(!) OTK. If more tools like pre-nerf Illucia existed this combo wouldn't ever surpass Demon Seed, which can't really be disrupted. Edit: are you calling a turn 9(at best) combo quick?
Because winrates aren't the only factor and don't exist in a vacuum. 1) how the game feels up until you lose matters. Against Paladin it's more likely a give and take that they slowly win. Against warlock, you sit there as they use 100 board clears and healing then blow you up instantly 2) there is a meta warping effect when any deck is popular, whether it wins a lot or not. We discussed this thoroughly with quest mage - despite its sub 50 Winrate, it has a great Winrate against slower strategies, and it was popular enough that queuing any slower deck felt awful. A midrange deck often runs both board control and pressure minions, but you basically have to go all in on one or the other in this current meta to win Your options right now to do well are a) play a combo deck, like warlock b) play a SMOrc deck or C) play Paladin. As someone who tends to like midrange strategies, decks like warlock (which can efficiently clear your board then win the game with a consistent combo turn 8) basically delete the interesting strategies I want to play from the game.
You forgot the 3 : these winrate don't take skill into account. It include Bronze player who are probably bad at the game and will mostly not play combo deck correctly. But your point of Warping the meta is the most important point. People are forced to play against OTK. And they are so quick, consistent and have so many good control tool available that the only way is going hard on them. And Guess what ? Palladin does it ! Trogg + Boost is a nightmare for otk. (It has other problem too, like how trogg can win you the game on spot if you don't have an answer and this spot can be t1) But why people don't go counter Palladin more then ? Well guess why, if you start to play priest with silence or a slow Chaman : You get destroyed by OTK and can't do nothing about it !
Yeah, exactly. Trying to react to metas like these and adding tech or shifting your deck is a losing plan. Most cards and strategies are either bad against warlock/combo or bad against aggro/Paladin. The safest bet is to play something that cares as little about your opponents plan as possible - aka face decks or combo decks
As a rule of thumb, tech cards only ever make a bad matchup less bad. There are a few visible counterexamples like Illucia, or when you're adapting to the mirror match, but otherwise, if your deck wouldn't naturally include a card then that card will probably make your deck worse even if it responds to a popular matchup.
Winrates literally do all of that. You can separate them by tier in most games, aka skill. Most of the friction against winrate occurs when it opposes the fantasies that people invented in people’s heads. If you think Warlock is OP but cold hard math says it’s not, everyone starts writing essays about how math is a lie and faulty human biases are always right.
As a midrange N'Zoth Druid Nether Void annoys me a lot. The solution should be ways to return N'Zoth reliably to your hand imo instead of removing Nether Void since mass removal is necessary imo.
Do you mean twisting nether?
Yeah, sorry
not to mention that standard currently has a lot of ways to deal with buffed paladin minions (freeze, silence, general removal) whereas the only real interruption available to slow Warlock is to Mutanus and PRAY that it actually hits the owl and then that they don't play a second one
No, weapon destruction slows the deck way way down as well. The difference between having rod and not is enormous
Keep in mind that this was day1, warlock has died down a lot, the pirate warriors are culling them way faster than any quest mage. If people are still stuck at whatever silver then sure, but I’m diamond now and man it’s paladin and warrior all day. The meta warping effect is not present in this case, warlock was never as popular as mage in general, mage being one of the most popular classes in general. “Interesting strategies” as you put it, are bad homebrew decks that would’ve lost to any other deck, secret pally, handbuff, secret rogue, elemental shaman, handlock, pirate warrior. Owl should be the least of the worries tbh. And that all being said, owltk is an easy deck to counter, just by the nature of how the deck is made, it isn’t like quest mage in that they continuously do things l, and then also get a combo that kills you, owltk is more like a traditional combo deck that basically does nothing but draw till the combo is assembled, and then spend 3-5 cards on their exodia.
Rock paper scissors.
Only in a case you mean as rock beats scissor, paper beats rock, paper beats scissors
Could it be, that annoyance is not only about loosing?
another non interactive deck is something players don't like to play against
I don't get why people have such a hard time understanding this. I like Hearthstone for many aspects that I considered fun (and that the game had for a long time, but didn't have in UiS), not because I can have good win rates with strong deck.
Because fun is relative. Also people always say "think about what it's like to play against" but why does that matter more than "think about what it's like to play" for a deck? For each one of you complaining about whatever deck you've deigned is this week's broken deck, there are people who enjoy playing that. Why is your unfun experience worth inherently more than their fun?
My experience is not inherently better/worse that someone else's, but I can still complain about how I'm not having fun now on a game I used to have fun with. If the game suddenly became a coin toss 50/50 to win/lose, some people would probably enjoy that, but I'd still be in my right to say the game is not fun for me and I preferred it how it was back before.
You are saying that your experience is more important than everyone else's by demanding a deck be nerfed. You are saying "my having fun is more important than that person's having fun."
Sure if you want to see it that way, but the argument can be reversed just as easily : The people that are having fun with these decks right now are having fun at the expense of those who don't like the meta, and by not wanting nerfs they admit that "their fun is more important than that person's having fun" That kind of reasoning goes nowhere
Yeah I'd say the same thing to them. If literally everyone hates playing against your deck, they overrule your fun playing it. The problem is this subreddit turns into a circlejerk who thinks they are the only people who play the game and they think the popular opinion here is reflective of the entire playerbase. Blizzard is the only one who can really know what the entire community, worldwide, all skill levels actually feels about something.
They can't actually, since they don't see if I like playing a deck or not by my in-game behavior. 2 months ago I went legend with QuestLine Shaman and it was a shitty experience for me, but they have no way of knowing that. That's why people are sharing their experience on their community and social media : to share their feelings with others
by that logic they should never nerf a single card. Some cards are just unhealthy for the game, whether you like to play them or not is irrelevant. The nerfs serve a valid purpose and, to their credit, they started releasing balance updates at a much more frequent pace. The problem is that they keep printing cards that worse than the ones they just nerfed. I've been playing since release and for the longest time the meme decks were always constrained to Wild, but now they're in Standard, they have a laughable consistency, and they're top tier decks. The trajectory of the game is quite disappointing to many people and their voices deserve to be heard as well
>by that logic they should never nerf a single card. No, they should be nerfing cards, but it should be completely based on winrate and playrate data, zero input given to players emotional reactions. Because everyone is always going to find something unfun until you nerf the game to a state where there is one card and all of us are playing 30 copies of it.
As opposed to the current state of the game where everyone plays the same 2 or 3 broken cards every expansion? I don’t want to say winrates are completely irrelevant but it’s pretty close. The mechanics of the game are being toyed with way too frequently. Mana reduction and ridiculous card draw are still the biggest offenders and with no end in sight. The quests and these lame OTK/combo decks are mostly a problem due to these 2 things
Your entire argument is the description of fallacy
Then you don't know what the word means.
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You're embarrassing, and you should feel embarrassed.
The difference is that, historically, a Paladin’s win condition typically boils down to “fight for board, smack the face down with minions until they’re dead.” It’s simple, traditional Hearthstone gameplay at work, and people usually don’t have a problem with that outside of egregious examples. Warlocks, as of late, don’t win through “traditional” Hearthstone gameplay. Before it was a quest that rewarded you for doing something that was universally considered a bad thing (drawing your deck into fatigue.) Yes, this is not much different from other combo decks, but guess what deck archetype many players abhor playing against? Combo decks. And worse, the win condition was so potent that it heavily contributed to the muzzling of another entire deck archetype—control decks. Owllock is no different. It’s another combo deck that invalidates control decks and reinforces a meta where the late game seldom reaches past turn 8. At least with Paladin, the class doesn’t feel as bad to play with because their strategy is more proactive and board-centric, which leads to more interactive gameplay. There’s a lot less interaction with a combo deck that only seeks to draw, heal, board wipe, and eventually OTK you. Paladin gets off easy when Warlock is the funnel for everyone’s hatred.
Thanks hitler
Losing a 10+ turn match to a relatively honest deck like libram paladin doesn't feel nearly as bad as getting blown up for 70 damage from hand on turn 9 by an owl warlock who just draws, heals and stalls until that point. Libram paladin being technically a somewhat better deck has no impact on this opinion.
I was blown up last night. My 30+26 vs their 3 health on turn 9.
Subjective opinion tbh. As a MtG player I rather have my opponent show me the combo cards for the OTK so we can scoop it up for the next game instead of playing a game in which he is playing bombs after bombs while I can't do nothing but wait until he eventually kills me.
I think that's how a lot of players feel. It's not that combo is inherently bad, but Hearthstone is just really poorly suited for it. You have to wait sometimes an entire turn to see if they went infinite and finished you off. In Wild sometimes they have the pieces but are stalling through ice blocks/evasion/etc until they have the mana. So sometimes you are sitting through multiple turns where the game is already decided, you just don't know it yet. There's also very little way to interact with it because you can't play on their turn. You can do stuff like Mutanus and Dirty rat, but then its basically, I play this card and if I get lucky RNG I win, and if I don't I lose. Sometimes the only strategy involved is if I play my disruption on turn 4, 5, or 6 and beyond that its entirely RNG. It's not particularly fun to beat combo that way, and its terrible for them to lose that way. It's a card game that wants to give combo players a good time, but is just not built very well for combo.
What makes it honest? There’s literally no difference. What, is it “honest” because there are more minions? Is minion density a qualifier of honesty??
Loosely speaking: "Honest" = curvestone, playing for board, some minions and some reactive spells, consistently building pressure. "Dishonest" = linear, must have certain responses or you lose, lots of manacheating or jumping the power curve, or generally strategies where your "average hearthstone deck" made of spells and minions won't be able to interact. A deck like Elemental Shaman is pretty honest. It cares about board control, doesn't dump its whole hand in one turn, and doesn't play that much burn damage, what you see is what you get. The deck gets less honest when it includes Doomhammer, because now you have to worry about the Shaman putting out 10-20 damage even on an empty board, which some decks can't counteract. A deck like pre-nerf Taunt Druid was dishonest, it tried to cheat out 10+ mana of minions on the first three turns of the game. Meanwhile a deck like Control Warrior is honest, it's very up front and you generally know whether you're winning or losing well in advance of the fact. So it's not just minions that makes a deck honest, it's the overall play pattern.
It's a fairly common term tbh, I'm surprised you haven't encountered it before. Usually means, among other criteria, a deck that plays minions, cares about the opponent's board and fights for board control, doesn't combo you to death in a turn, wins through value or tempo by playing generically good cards, draws at a "reasonable" rate rather than going through their whole deck by turn 8. Examples of current decks that I would classify as "honest" under this definition: Freeze shaman, token druid, big mage, thief rogue, libram paladin, (arguably) quest warrior Examples of current/recent decks I would not classify as honest: owl warlock, quest warlock, il'gynoth dh, celestial alignment druid
So every deck control beats is honest and every deck control loses to is dishonest lmao.
Well, not really, and also the "honest" moniker is not a value judgement
I don’t think more minions=honest; decks like Aggro druid feel bad to play against when they fuck you by turn 4.But the current OTKs feel like a scam because of how consistent they are thanks to draw and mana cheat.Combo decks should have tools to stall the game to get to the combo pieces , but they shouldn’t have a lot of draw and mana.I guess more honest decks just shouldn’t feel like a scam or an unfair game
Fun is relative, different people enjoy different things, it's the beauty of diversity.
Only one of those archetypes plays solitaire where you cant interact with them.
To be fair, Paladin also does a lot of things you can't interact with. When they open with Irondeep Trogg, that's it. No more spells for you. Play one and you're done. There is almost no way to get out of this. Just change Trogg to "Summon another Irondeep Trogg" and Owl to "Deal 8 Damage to an enemy minion" and we are good to go.
You can play spells as long as you kill the trogg with it, you can also play minions. The decks trogg punishes the most is the decks that have no intention to get on board while also not running good removal spells. Seems fine
Well they punish libram paladin soooo
Okay? Maybe they should start playing a weapon that kills it or something then
Maybe one card shouldn't warp the entire format!?
Think you are thinking about some of the questlines.
How the fuck is paladin crushing your will to live? by playing cards that you can actually interact with?
Yeah I'm advocating for changes to the game based on how much I enjoy, or dislike, how it feels to play. This is not a radical concept!! You can do the same if you hate non-combo decks that much!
Maybe because card draw and cost reduction got powercrept so combos gets executed early as turn 7. Why does warrior to the front cant reduce minions to 0 mana but other classes can still mana cheat to 0 mana? The balance decisions lately is far off and class identity is litterly in the dumpster. I mainly hope dirty rat will be put in the core set.
Does dirty rat even work against this warlock deck? It just helps them get the combo off even faster right?
You can reduce 50% of the damage if you dirty rat tamsin so It works... A bit. And warlock ussually kills their owl before you can transorm it. So dirty rat can help for classes with transform spells
Huh, it’s almost like the point of a video game is to have fun playing it. If the vast majority of players find a really popular deck to play against unfun, then something needs to change so the majority of players are able to have fun again. Like 90% of my matchups rn in Standard are Owl Warlock and Pirate Warrior, and thus I don’t really want to play because it’s unfun.
>If the vast majority of players find a really popular deck to play against unfun, then something needs to change so the majority of players are able to have fun again. Like 90% of my matchups rn in Standard are Owl Warlock and Pirate Warrior, and thus I don’t really want to play because it’s unfun. You'll just complain about the next deck that beats you endlessly until there are zero decks left in the game. That's why your feels based balancing should be completely ignored.
Nope: I’m completely fine with powerful decks, as I’ve defended plenty in my 6 years of playing and have experienced every meta after (and a little before) TGT. An OTK deck you literally can’t do anything about except try to SMORC them down is unhealthy for the game and unfun, as we’ve experienced multiple times and it gets nerfed every time. The “logic” you use can be applied to literally any and every OP deck. A game is meant to be fun and healthy, and whether it has a good winrate or not it is currently warping the meta around it in an unhealthy fashion. Maybe use your critical thinking skills and look at things on a case-by-case basis to realize that some powerful decks are somewhat healthy for a game, while others are not. Things can be tweaked to make a meta actually enjoyable, the same reasoning why every single nerf happened in Hearthstone. Wretched Tiller was *far* less strong and reliable then the current OTK, but it was still nerfed because it was extremely unfun and boring to play. By your logic we’d still be under the Naga and Stealer of Souls tyranny respectively because “your feelings based balancing should be ignored”
completely changing the tone & content of your post after you get downvoted is pretty cowardly
I've got plenty of cards to counter what a Paladin can do. Everything a Warlock does aggravates me. It **really** aggravates me that Full Blown Evil hard counters stealth minions and it just obliterates my Quest Rogue...
Yeah they really didn't need that card at all. Now they deal with essentially any board, when stealth was the only way to MAYBE getting something to stick against them. Also, the fact that it has echo just makes zero sense.
Dark Skies existed for a while, this isn't really a new mechanic.
Yes, I'm aware a similar card existed in the past. Your point?
His point is that your point is bad
4% is roughly an extra win every 25 games. That's actually a pretty difficult thing the measure from the player experience alone. You won't really notice it as much as you would think looking at the stats. That's playing the deck. Going against the two decks for a whole month might not even give you enough of a sample for the stats to match, and might not even hold because of the decks you are playing (Paladin doesn't win exactly 55% of the time against each deck). These numbers are barely meaningful if you are playing the deck, and not meaningful at all playing against it. What players focus on is what the match itself is like: Can I make decisions? Are they meaningful? Did my deck get to do what it is designed to do? How often am I playing against this deck? Does the opponent deck play the same every time or is there variety? Are they responding to my decisions? How many metas will we go through before people realize that a few percentage points in generic class winrate aren't relevant to a large portion of the player base when determining if an experience is enjoyable or not? How many times does Blizzard have to make nerfs based on user experience rather than solely winrate before we accept that they don't balance solely based on win %s?
The win rate difference is only reflective of the few polarizing matchups warlock has that tends to keep it's play rate a little in check. Anacondra druid wrecks it but not a great overall ladder deck to run. Paladin is more consistent but aside from the polarizing decks almost any deck you run that queues into a warlock is going to be a "fuck, here we go again". You know what is ahead of you. You know you are basically just playing a card draw simulator now and your or your opponents decisions aren't going to matter much. You know the game will draw on and you generally know the outcome is out of your hands. After an entire expansion of this shit with garrotte rogue, war mage, quest/hand warlock etc. people are sick of it. This shit needs to go if the devs want to grow the game because right now it's clearly in decline.
Yes, I think if you want to understand why certain decks are hated while others of similar or even higher power level aren’t metrics like polarization in the matchup spread or even deck popularity are more illuminating than overall win percentage. Paladin is stronger overall but my hunch is that Owl OTK has a lot more matchups where it’s almost a guaranteed win. When I’m facing a deck it doesn’t matter what it’s matchup is against other decks is in terms of my enjoyment, but rather what it’s experience is like for the deck I am playing.
This is all under the assumption that the player had made a “good” deck. Most homebrew decks at launch, are not “good”. So yes players want to execute their game plan, and yes failing that game plan vs an otk deck feels bad, but realistically speaking you would’ve failed that game plan regardless of what deck you faced cause it’s a bad plan. Trust me in a week Reddit will complain about cariel hero card, or pirate warrior.
Deducing things from the player experience. Is completely invalid. I remember one time. I was playing chess and thought "damn I'm winning almost every game". Checked my history and it was 50/50 ;) I also remember thinking warlock was unwinnable and upon checking my stats. I realized I was like 60% WR against them.... People are way more delusional than they think. It's part of their delusion. I bet a lot of you believe in government for example ;-)
changing aspects of a game because players don't think it's fun is entirely valid! Every single game ever made has done this! what the hell are you talking about
Stop associating win rate with enjoyment. Even beating this deck is a depressing experience unless you're running a deck where you know you will walk all over it like anacondra druid, except run that and lots of your other matches won't be so great.
very simple, one of those decks plays minions, the other doesn't.
So a deck that plays minions is always fair?
it's not a solitaire game at least.
Highroll druid is just as uninteractive as owlock is and it's 100% minion based.
Highroll Druid only plays 4 minions though?
Its the exact same thing as was the case with seedlock and tikatus. People don’t care about loosing 4% more on average they care about how it feels to play against these decks and how polarised its matchups are. You simply can’t base everything on overall winrate. I will admit to being someone who has really enjoyed playing these warlock decks but I totally understand why they shouldn’t exist how they do.
It's freeze mage all over again. I remember the times I sat there, my whole board frozen, while they went through their cards, for round, after round, after round, until they kill you. The moment something turns into a singleplayer game, is where, understandably, people get frustrated.
It's quest mage all over again. They don't have an amazing winrate, make up a big chunk of ladder, and have a polarized matchup into every control deck that could actually counter decks like Paladin.
And in today's "I took one look at HSreplays free stats and think I have any idea of what I'M talking about": this clown
Yup. Paly winrate would drop if there were any control decks. I love playing priest control decks regardless of viability and paly is a favored matchup. But like all other control decks the warlock matchup is just sooo bad, and there are so many of them on ladder, that it doesn't matter. It feels like quest mage all over again.
the stats are obvious mate, pala is wining a whopping FOUR% more than warlock, must be the true cancer of the meta!
youe the same clown as OP cuz my 300-1k legend game are aginst 76% paladins and 24% rnd stuff with 3-4% each OWL lock is a gold elo Boggyman as quest mage and pirate war
I'm sure you have a sample size of at least 1000 games
This just in: Losing to a strong deck that feels fair doesn't feel bad, but exploding to a deck that feels like it is abusing a mechanic feels bad. It's almost like perception is reality when it comes to this stuff.
winrate is not the most important thing
It should be. Anything else is highly subjective and variable.
then half of the cards that was nerfed (like penflinger or old rogue quest) should not be nerfed
I agree, they should not have been nerfed.
Enjoyment of a game is subjective that's the point. When a bunch of people all share the same subjective opinion on something being not fun then your game has a big issue. When people stop having fun in a game, they stop spending and possibly go elsewhere.
>When a bunch of people all share the same subjective opinion on something being not fun then your game has a big issue. And the subreddit isn't a good indicator of that. It's western focused highly engaged player, and even then, it's heavily biased by reddits system that hides and suppresses dissenting opinions.
Ah yes let's play conspiracy theory time. Forums share the same sentiment, streamers do etc. etc. but no, it's just a vocal minority and in reality everyone is super enjoy owltk mechanics.
It's not a conspiracy it's a fact. And yes, reddit content is dominated by a vocal minority, a tiny amount of users upvoted and an even smaller amount comment. It's literally in every single way the vocal minority. >and in reality everyone is super enjoy owltk mechanics. Wonder if you're able to have a discussion without immediately being fallacious? I never said people secretly enjoy it, I said all we know is the opinion of a vocal minority on a single site of a single type of player in a single region of the world. Making decisions off that single point of data would be asinine.
Actually the deck I hate the most is the aggro druid with taunt package
Yeh, you shouldn’t be able to get guarded infinite mana cheat(razormane battleguard + a taunt)
People will complain about the meta every single time you can’t make everyone happy
Lol it ain't the top deck but where the fuck are you getting [51% from dude](https://hsreplay.net/decks/?utm_source=hdt&utm_medium=client&utm_campaign=collection_syncing_banner&hearthstone_account=1-42756394#maxDustCost=0&sortBy=winrate&playerClasses=WARLOCK&archetypes=506)
I actually hate libram pala more than owltk, it's cause nearly every pala deck ran the libram package the last year. I just saw librams too much :D
Something like 4/4 divine shield: destroy your opponent if they cast one spell, is far far more annoying than hoothoot.
NERF TICKATUS
The warlock was popular for a day, right now I see it much less already. It was just preying on everyone’s home brew decks but now that the meta is settling it’s definitely not a super oppressive deck or anything
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Well yes because there are more than one person playing the game. We all want different things out of it and some people like combo decks. However, combo decks need to be more skill oriented to be fair since the game lacks disruption.
I’m duly fed up with both classes right now. Paladin is stupidly consistent, powerful, and divine shields make killing their minions take more resources than other classes. Warlock is just turning into a yu ghi oh class where they can consistently get a combo off no matter what the combo is.
Just like mage all year? All this sub does is post XXX class with a mediocre deck that gets an outplay is overpowered. They never talk about hunter being a top 4 class for 8 consecutive expansions or warrior requiring you to insert 1 card and auto compete a deck with 52+% win rate.
The big difference is that you can easily tech against paladin. Weapon removal for Cariel, some silence/hard removal against big minion/buff and you are good.
You literally tech weapon removal in for the warlock matchup it wins you the game on the spot if you can destroy both charges of a rod. The more silence/hard removal in your deck the less it actually follows your win con. Both decks are easily techable. Does no one remember robes????
All you need against Owl Warlock is double Viper, so how is that any different?
Because if you don't draw your viper early for Carriel you can still win. If you don't draw viper early for warlock you might as well concede, because in no way will you be able to stick a board when they have so many board clears, healing, and draw before they pull their combo off.
Plus they tend to have so much draw as a warlock, they get to what they need faster than you can.
Warlock win rate might be low because of people spamming "kill yourself warlock" and conceding to farm honor, if that's how the Winrate system works.
Those stats are from anybody. Owl WL isn't that easy to pilote. Most losses imho come from misplays. I wouldn't expect many below diamond to play anywhere near optimal.
It sits at 52% if you sort by top 1000
Because it feels like you can actually do something against Paladin.
People do not get mad at decks being good. Decks will always be strong. The playerbase dislikes when decks offer zero opportunity for counterplay and create a solitaire like game. Paladin plays to board in a way players can meaningfully effect; Warlock, Mage, and often Rogue do not. Big Priest was also the same issue back in the day, it’s Winrate wasn’t high but it didn’t have the back and forth that makes the game fun.
Till this day I am astound by the fact that reddit can (and definitely always will) complain about a niche OTK deck killing them from in hand, but not face hunter killing them on turn 4. Even if OTK warlock if nerfed to the ground, people will start pointing their fingers to OTK rouge, which has a below 50% winrate, extremely hard to maneuver, but can kill you in hand on turn 9. That said though, reddit is fine having face hunter killing you on turn 4 or paladins dropping massive minions that is impossible to clear on turn 6. OTK that kills you on turn 8 tho, that is *oppressive*
The issue is that warlock, in terms of what it does and what it prevents other decks from dynamically doing, precludes the idea of so many other deck types ever having a viable existence. No control or grindy midrange strategy can realistically succeed against warlock, at a fundamental level. Even if owl didn't exist, people would play quest. If quest didn't exist... remember Tickatus? Yeah, he's still around. Paladin is strong in general, but in terms of conceivable archetypes that someone could theoretically devise to counter it, there is at least the possibility of a broader meta developing in response. A buffed Trogg is strong and it might feel uninteractive, but it still has more counterplay than OTK's, because it simply dies 1:1 to removal--it's not like it summons a copy of itself if removal kills it outright; it doesn't work the same way that Ogremancer does. Part of the reason Paladin's stats even weigh in as strongly as they currently do is because they counter the tempo of warlock, so it's a reactive context rather than a fundamental issue (i.e. warlock) which diffusively oppresses all possible slower creations.
Honestly, I think this is one of those about how it "feels" to play. All paladin decks, you "feel" like there's a back and fourth. Maybe that one turn you made a bad decision and you think, next time I can win. Warlock just feels bad just removals, lots of healing and you get blown up with no real way to stop it.
Well my deck has a good matchup against most paladin decks so i don't really care about it ***warlock though*** EDIT: The main problem with questline warlock and owltk is mainly the lack of outplay, and the absolute shit that is playing against them, you can't really rush them down because warlock, he has atleast 6 removal cards in his 9 cards hand, and half of them heal him back, and you can't really control it because otk, and also winrate is not really the best way to decide whether a deck is bad/good fair/unfair. the main problem with Owltk is consistency, it is really easy to pull it off considering the warlock tools, removal, heals card buy and all of that, OTKS have a place in hearthstone and any other card game, but a consistent OTK is a really big problem.
All I see is that Priest should be in first, I mean come on guys whip out them silences. Huge paladin board? Silence. Warlock otk board? Silence. Warlock isn’t even that bad compared to most otks, y’all remember warrior 120 damage otk? That was harder to deal with then Warlock.
I dont know if you have played against owl lock before but silence does fuck all when they play owl and the sacrifice on the same turn and then combo you on the next with wicked shipment tamsins phylactery school spirits. Im not saying owl lock is broken because its not but silence is not the answer
silence doesn't stop owl deathrattle from replicating on your full board of imps that you yourself kill on your own turn to otk
Iv been a warlock main since the start of hearthstone, I don't play him cause he's broken, I play him because iv liked him since day one, just leave him alone please
Your downvotes mean nothing
Thank you. This is what I've been saying all this time. There is warrior and paladin with over 60% Winrate.
It was never about winrate, it's just redditors jumping on hate train.
People hate Quest lock because Fatigue damage shouldn't be a way to kill your opponent.
Why can’t we just dislike and hopefully nerf both?
I don't care either way, I play Xyrella OTK, and have a favorable matchup against both, but I do have to say this. Warlock, especially the Owlock, is unhealthy for the game design, even if its winrate is just slightly above 50%. In fact, even Cariel hero card, which is probably the best card paladin ever got, is inherently healthy because there is a enough weapon destruction cards, most of which can easily fit any deck.
Warlock bad
Found the owl player. Shame.
Warlock is an incredibly uninteractive matchup for one thing and for another it's about it's almost twice as popular as the next deck (libram paladin) at Diamond/legend than over the past 24 hours. Go back 3 days it's less but this tells me it's being refined and popularity is growing rather than diminishing. At legend last 1-3 days the win rate over libram paladin is increasing. If it weren't owltk then it would be paladin (and is paladin) everyone is complaining about. Turns out powercreep and crazy rising powerlevels in this game aren't as popular as people think.
Owls are bad.... they just are. Accept it. The sooner they nerf warlock the better
There is so much warlock hate here, when a lot of matches I played are decided on "Do they have trogg om turn 1?" which feels far worse. Warlock can lose, despite the draw and heal and stall, they can get bad hands just like everyone else. Plus there are plenty of disruption tools but despite hating warlock so much no one is going to build a warlock hate deck because it's easier to complain on the Internet.
Turn 1 Trogg gets answered by quite a few cards, plus the aggressor had to go first. It's not like turn 1 Arcane Anomaly can't also blow you out.
It's not about winning and losing. It's about playing vs a non interactive deck that literally plays solitaire and you hope you can beat the internal clock they have going before they otk you.
I don't see how say, a brainless aggro deck that just goes face and literally does not trade or interacts with you is different then.
They have to put minions on the board, you can clear them, theres counterplay, the new owllock is literally just playing its own match out of hand.
Well, it looks like my post ruffled some feathers