Ah the dreaded power legend plus faceless manipulator combo.. Did you play against a priest or a Druid? I'm on the NA server so the invite didn't come through sadly...
I am also saving gold for the expansion. Right now I have 750 saved up from daily quests and achievement rewards. My suggestion to you is to play Arena regularly. Even if you manage a single win, you get 30 gold back plus an expert pack. I am assuming you won't spend real money, so Arena is the only way for you to collect expert cards. Despite doing poorly in Arena, my net gold balance is going up. As for how much gold the expansion will cost - my guess is approx 1000 gold.
There is a known bug that can be exploited by night owls on the North American server. For some period of hours around 3-4 am EST, you can infinitely re-roll quests. The time window seems larger than that, but I'm not sure of the exact parameters. Sometimes it seems the 100 quest won't show up no matter how much time you spend, but you can get the 60 of your choice fairly easily. Very strange bug, but if you happen to be up at those hours, its definitely worth exploiting unless you have some moral opposition to an extra 20 (or if your lucky 60) gold.
Arena cost 150, and if i win a single game i get expert pack (100) + 30 gold so in the end i still lost 20 gold. I'm terrible at the arena and frequently get 0-3
I see what you mean. I initiate a new Arena only every 3rd day or so. Keep busy with quests mostly. I have opened few expert packs. But the cards have definitely improved my win rate in Play mode. So I guess the best way forward would be to keep going at Arena, but without losing a lot of gold over time. The Naxx thing could end up costing way less than 1000 gold, since Blizzard currently equates 150 gold to $2.
I saw a Millhouse Manastorm for the first time last night. My opponent played him late in the game. What a mistake. It let me cast four spells for free, one of which killed the MM.
Holy crap you guys seen this? http://i.imgur.com/RF2oUmu.jpg EDIT: didnt use the IMG tag coz the image is way too big.
WTAF!?? Haha I opened by first legend last night but it was the 8/8 Dragon that forces 15 second turns. Not sure if I should keep him or disenchant for something better.
Yeah that's the reason the rest of us get Jack all, he's got all the luck! Saying that I did pull that Cenarius card, it's 9 mana but pretty beastly when you pull it (either increase all allie card stats or summon 2 x 2/2 taunt treants!). Arena is a continuous puzzle to me, went 8 wins yesterday (best by 3) with a Mage deck. Today rolled a priest deck and I'm 1 win for 2 losses, though admittedly it does suck as a deck.
Lol!!!!! Keep trying bro!!! I lost 15-0 before my first win. Only bad thing is you have to pay to play. But this is a truly fun game so it is worth it.
Yeah, I stopped playing the arena for a while, it could just be me, but it was feeling like the level of competition has been ramping up in there. I figure to ensure a "profit" on your 150 entry cost, you have to win at least 3 games which was starting to get harder to do, plus it just feels so dejecting to build up the 150, jump into the arena and draft a crappy deck. For me, I've just been paying the 100 for Expert packs.
I have completely opposite feelings about the arena. I love it! I love that when you're picking out your deck you often have a chance to try out great cards that you don't have yet. Last week I got to try out the legendary card Tirion Fordring, which was a blast. I won 5 games with my deck that had him in it. My last arena run I only won two games, but I got a card pack and 35 gold. So that only cost me 15 more gold that it would have just to buy the pack alone. To me that's well worth it for a chance to get a lot more if you do well.
I'm loving arena, seems like I get to play every 2-3 days w/o paying any real money. The best I've gone is 5-3 from yesterday. I was playing Paladin, thought I got a decent draw and ended up winning 5 in a row (was 5-0). I was so excited that I may get to 7 wins and get enough rewards to play for "free" next time. So match 6 I was up against a hunter who I seem to have a hard time with so I lost. Match 7 was ANOTHER hunter, I had the same problem as match 6 (that release the hounds card w buffs is teh suck). Then I lost one against a warrior who threw out some legendary I couldn't deal with. I'm still encouraged w my 5 wins in a row though and look to get to at least 7 wins soon!
Yeah, I got that one a couple of days ago. My first and only legendary card! Feel like I should at least try it out before dusting it. I quite often have games that run to 10 mana.
Given the complete lack of good (especially synchronous) online games, I actually played a lot of Hearthstone over the last months. To be honest, I think it's probably Blizzard's best game yet. General stance I played any of their releases from Diablo 1 to Starcraft 2. I've had a lot of discussions about these games before and here's my view on them these days: One half of their games (namely the Diablos and WoW) are horrible grinding machines with mostly Farmville-like anti-gameplay of "clicking things away" (excluding the teamwork in WoW-raids, but that's really not what it's about for the most part). The other half (the Warcrafts and Starcrafts) are actually competitive games (and with Battle.net they have one of the best online matchmaking systems), but they're just so "messy" and unfocussed and after all execution-heavy, it's a shame. So I really don't like them all (even though, sadly enough, I've probably put more hours into these Blizzard games than into anything else). Now Hearthstone comes along and seems to be like the worst thing ever. A "free to play" collectible card game. Elegance is out of the window immediately, unfairness and randomness on the other hand ensured. And of course grinding for random "booster packs". And well, that's of course actually how it really is. And still it's so much more interesting and clear than all of their other games, basically just because it's a (virtual) card game and therefore free from all the usual messy videogame spectacle crap. It's all about nicely small numbers (unit health and attack values, spell damage), and for everything that happens it is 100% clear why and how it does (plus the visual feedback and interface is just phenomenal), there are many interesting interactions between the cards (well, there are many cards, so you almost can't avoid that), and the matches are rather short. And most important of all, even though it's obviously all dragged down by the randomness and asymmetry and amount of mere stuff, there actually are some interesting decisions. It's mostly about when to play and when to hold back a card to either wait for a better combination play you might get later or a chance to get better value out of a single card because of another board situation later. Sometimes I really find myself struggling between different options (i.e. there's ambiguity, cool!), whether to play a unit immediately to potentially attack with it next turn or better to protect it with a taunt creature, because it might have some benefitial ongoing effects (like card draw), so I might want to keep it alive a few turns to get more value out of it etc. It's really nothing too fancy that you've never seen (if you know CCGs; why doesn't someone actually make a similar non-collectible game?), but it works pretty well as it is. And then there's obviously the kind of "fair" mode called "Arena", where you draft a deck out of all available cards (your collection has no influence here, cool!) and see how far you can get with it. A bit like the drafting tournaments in Magic. I casually played around in constructed a bit and earned enough to do a few Arena runs and had some fun with it I'd say. Honestly, if you want to differentiate between "more devious" and "less devious" F2P at all, this game is definitely on the "good" side. I mean, this game could probably get some people into card (and board) games, who'd have never thought about it. Players horribly addicted to Diablo 3 or WoW could finally get a glimpse at what a really deep and focussed contest decision-making could be. Obviously Hearthstone is not close to that, but it's (or at least can be) a starting point, I guess. Why I can't take constructed seriously as a strategy game What bothers me far more than the ability to buy power potential, is the mere existence of this whole "meta game". It's like that is the only thing all the fansites talk about. They all have their lists of top decks (stolen from Kripp, Trump, Artosis and the likes). When the Mage's ice abilities were nerfed, they went "Oh, so this deck is now officially useless!" When the last balancing patch hit: "Oh, Blood Imp is now officially useless!" It's ridiculous. Sure, that's for the "seriously competitive top players" or whatever, but here's the thing: You might figure out how to make your deck better over time, and that process might be fun in itself, but you could also just go online and copy a deck known to be great (in the current state of the "meta game"). Now, you might not want to do that, because it's pretty lame (and completely uninteresting), but others will do it and then probably destroy you when you face them in ranked play. Before you have figured out how to make your deck better, you'll already have dropped the ranks again (because you didn't take the "meta game" shortcut) and have to fight against weaker decks again, which then don't give you more information on how to make your deck better, because you're already better than them. It's like when people figured out the optimal builds for Diablo 2. You could still dabble around on your own, but if you wanted to be really competitive on the ladder, you basically had to go a fixed route through the skill trees and character stat progression. And that makes the game far less interesting: What's left if you have a fixed character build? Grinding, grinding, grinding... Conclusion: I pretty much exclusively play non-Arena to do my dailies to get gold to jump into Arena. Arena is pretty cool, because the (non-meta) game is cool! And recently I was quite reliably able to get 4-8 wins per run, so it pays off quite nicely. Why I won't play too many more matches Honestly, right now playing HS just feels completely awful. Which is a shame since it's now on iPad (and I might still play a couple matches on the couch for that reason). The "funny" thing is: the better I get, the more the randomness of the system gets to my nerves. Okay, maybe when I started it was even worse. When I played for the first time, I saw little but randomness. Then I was in that neat learning phase (there clearly is a lot of skill involved), where it was bearable, because it was mostly not clear if I made mistakes or drew badly. Now that I'm reasonably good, I think (I rarely leave the Arena below six wins), it's turning to awful again. I mostly know whether I did everything right theoretically. And when the game then gets decided by card draws or incredibly lucky RNG card effects, it's nothing but infuriating. And I mean that even if they turn out in my favor. Winning by RNG feels just as bad as losing by RNG to me. To be fair, it's not at all uncommon with digital strategy games, I guess: You play a few hundred matches, and get to a point where you've not exactly "solved" them (I'm not just talking about componential complexity through the hundreds of cards by the way, but primarily about systemic intricacies), but play well enough so that further improvement (i.e. getting to see the yet unsolved situations) would require too much effort (going through hundreds of solved plays in the process) for too little learning reward in the end. But the amount of randomness is obviously a fixed part of the system, and stays the same. So it just takes the upper hand at some point. Well, that's still far more than you get out of most games, especially video strategy games. It's still not exactly what I'd call "deep", but certainly deeper than most. And all that for free, so I'm not complaining. I just think I'll shift my personal gaming focus from here on out.
I felt the exact same at first. I came out of the arena every time with 3-4 wins and was really loving the exposure to different cards (exactly as you describe). Then I I had a string of 3 trips where I went 0-3 with just terrible decks (and certainly I probably drafted lousy). Anyway, I'm off the Arena for a bit, I'm sure I will return at some point. Also, to your point above, the arena tries to match you with opponents with like records, so after you went 5-0, you were being matched with some pretty great players.
