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Chasing the High
It’s super dumb, but I have pretty much exclusively been playing Hearthstone Battlegrounds for the last 1.5 weeks. I say “super dumb” because this sort of gaming doesn’t mean anything. And, yeah, “does anything really mean anything?” but Battlegrounds is on a whole other level of frivolousness.
If you’re unfamiliar, Battlegrounds is a game mode within the Hearthstone client that is essentially an Auto-Battler. There are two main phases: Tavern and Battle. During the Tavern phase, you spend gold purchasing minions, upgrading the Tavern tier (unlocking higher-tier minions in the pool), refresh available minions, sell minions, use your Hero Power, and/or rearrange your minions. After about 60-90 seconds, you transition into the Battle phase. During Battle, minions take turns attacking from left to right, but their targets are chosen randomly (barring Taunt or other special effects). Whoever has a minion(s) left standing wins and deals X damage to the opponent’s hero.
Battlegrounds has been around for a while, but I didn’t really bother playing it for years. As my interest in Hearthstone proper started to wane though – I don’t care much about ladder ranks – Battlegrounds started to become more appealing. Throughout the seasons, Blizzard started to really shake things up with new, rotating features that added some spicey randomness. Granted, there’s already plenty of randomness in the game mode, but these were on another level. Things like Buddy units (unique to each Hero), Quests (bonus effects if you can complete them), and the latest season introduced Spells as something you can purchase in the shop. All of these things were introduced in a particular season, and then rotated out, keeping things fresh.
And then someone this season went nuts and added all of the things.
Specifically, this current season has Spells and then several weeks later… Quests too. The Quests have been revamped though, and some of them feature crazy effects like “Discover a new Buddy each turn.” That’s not actually the most powerful Quest effect, but I had a few degenerate games where I leveraged it to a massive win. Indeed, the sheer nonsense you can evoke depending on randomness – and the speed in which you must do so – is what is driving me to almost compulsively play Battlegrounds. I’m chasing the high I get from some of these games, or chasing the dream where I was a turn or two away from going nuts before getting wrecked by someone else’s high-roll.
Really though, the randomness cannot be overstated:
- Starting Hero selection is between 2-4 from random pool (94)
- Opponent hero selections are random (for you)
- Overall minion type pool is random (5 out of 9)
- The minions you’re offered in each Tavern are random
- There are only X copies of specific minions in the pool, which opponents can buy
- Getting a “triple” confers a huge bonus, which is a pick 1-of-3 minions from a higher tier
- Minion attacks are random (aside from Taunts or other special conditions)
- HUGE variance can that lead to losing to 5% odds
- Certain spells are random
- Steal a random minion from the tavern, Discover a Battlecry Minion, etc
- Quests are random on top of random
- At a baseline, you are offered a choice of three quests (out of 60)
- Your hero selection impacts which quests are available
- Quest completion methods are randomly assigned (out of 15)
- Play X Battlecry Minions; Speed Y Gold; Kill Z Minions; etc
- Minion types, hero selection, and quest power impact X/Y/Z values
- Some Quest rewards are themselves random
- Cast 5 Random Spells each turn; Discover a Buddy; etc
Sounds like it would be frustrating, yeah? And yet… it usually feels fine.
In Hearthstone, a card that does 3-6 damage is frustrating. Not drawing your combo pieces is frustrating. In Battlegrounds, the randomness is usually just presented as you needing to make the best decision out of available options. Did your minions miss the enemy buff target three times in a row and yet they hit your buff minion right off the bat? OK, that sucks. What’s your next play?
It also helps that losing early just means you can queue into a potentially better game right away.
Near as I can tell, whatever reward center in my brain that lights up from deck-building roguelikes (e.g. Slay the Spire) or survival-crafting games has been short-circuited by this season of Battlegrounds. I’m somewhat mad at myself because I should be playing Red Dead Redemption 2 (played one session) or anything else in my extended library. We’re talking like probably 30-40 hours of potential progress spent on otherwise wirehead activity in the past few weeks.
And yet… I need another bump. The next Battlegrounds season gimmick has been teased as being co-op, which honestly sounds pretty awful. I doubt that they keep Quests around for another entire season in any case, but maybe Blizzard will see the spike in (my) gametime and consider keeping it around. The fact that it may go away for a while makes me want to get my fill even more.
Gimmie, gimmie, gimmie! I need it.
Oh, and Hearthstone proper released a new expansion cycle too, I guess. Yawn.
Duels Out
Blizzard put out a surprising notice that the Duels game mode in Hearthstone is getting axed.
As we think about the future of Hearthstone and where the team can best focus their efforts, we’ve made the difficult decision to discontinue support for the Duels Mode. We do not have plans for any further scheduled updates for Duels, and the Mode itself is scheduled to be removed from the Hearthstone client in April 2024.
This change will allow us to shift our resources to where we feel they will have the most impact, including Traditional Hearthstone, Battlegrounds, and more. To that end, Battlegrounds Duos is scheduled for an upcoming Battlegrounds patch, and we’re trying out some Duels Treasures in our next Arena season—more details soon.
My feelings on this are… complicated.
First, the introduction of Duels was the deathknell of the content I actually enjoyed the most in Hearthstone: the Dungeon Runs. Those were repeatable PvE solo content largely on par with Slay the Spire in fun. It would not surprise me, if it were possible to calculate specifically, that I spent 200+ hours playing Dalaran Heist alone. But when Blizzard rolled out the Duels game mode and marketed it as PvP Dungeon Runs, the writing was on the wall. We ended up getting shit like “Book of Heroes” PvE content, but you couldn’t craft your decks or have much agency in completing it.
Also, Duels as originally monetized, was incredibly malicious. You were offered a random selection of heroes when first entering, then offered three hero powers for that hero, but two of those hero powers were locked behind “achievements” within your collection, like having 20 epics unlocked from a recent expansion. Then there was a third choice of signature treasure card, which most were again locked behind achievements. While there was mercifully an option to play Casual for free, the primary mode cost gold/cash just like an Arena run (with similar prizes). And, yeah, even though I always played Duels for free, I did also spend dust crafting otherwise useless epic cards to unlock some of the hero powers/other cards, so Blizzard did get cash out of the economy in a roundabout way.
For the record, Blizzard did end up changing things within Duels and unlocking everything for everyone eventually. Whether that was for marketing reasons or the simple fact that they’d have riots on their hands if players had to craft cards from 3+ expansions ago to stay current within the game mode, who can say.
What we can say though is that Blizzard is apparently in a period of… consolidation. Classic? Removed. Duels? Removed. Mercenaries? Still exists, but has been sunsetted permanently. Twist? It is on a “scheduled” hiatus, but it is difficult to imagine the thought process behind introducing a completely new competitive format, selling literally brand new cards and decks, and then going on a break three months later.
Well, maybe it’s easier after seeing graphs like this:
Caveats abound here, of course. These are not “official” numbers and since the data comes exclusively from players with the Firestone overlay mod installed, it’s not representative of the overall playerbase. Hell, I don’t even use Firestone (Hearthstone Deck Tracker for me). But… yeah. There’s Standard, Battlegrounds, and Arena up at the top, an enormous gap down to Wild – a format that Blizzard literally can’t kill without total collapse – and then, well, all the rest. Duels has a respectful showing there, but it’s also a format that requires constant upkeep and maintenance since every expansion set could radically imbalance the mode based on off-the-wall interactions. Twist basically doesn’t exist, and this was before the hiatus. Not a great look.
Look, we all get it. Corporations goin’ to corporate. It’s fun to imagine Bobby Kotick personally flushing these modes and now that he’s gone it’ll be rainbows and sunshine. But I doubt it. There has apparently been a lot of shuffling of designers over on the Hearthstone team, and whomever is still in charge is no Ben Brode or Ghostcrawler in the communication/hype-man department. And that makes me suspect that we may end up getting less spaghetti on the wall instead of more. Reminds me of the Google graveyard of apps in how they axed things like Reader (RIP) and now seem to exclusively focus on inserting four ads in my Gmail account instead. Classic enshitification.
So, yeah, kinda sad about Duels. If this allowed them to get back to Dungeons Runs or similar PvE content, that’d be great, but it won’t. I’m playing a lot of Battlegrounds actually, so I’m still in the ecosystem, and I do enjoy certain Brawl weeks, but the end of my interest may be nigh.
Which may be just as well – after more than 10 years, I have other shit I need to do.
Shadowlands Warlock PvP
One of my stated goals in Shadowlands was to level up a Warlock alt and do some PvP. In retrospect, I’m not entirely sure WHY I had thought that was a good idea. Perhaps memories of ages past in which Warlocks were Battleground gods. That is, unfortunately, no longer the case.
Or maybe it still is, and I just suck.
Once I hit level 55 I was terribly tempted to use the Threads of Fate feature and otherwise abandon a rehash of the same storyline I had just completed a few weeks ago. What was stopping me was just the idea that perhaps slogging through the story again was going to be the fastest way to level, and thus using Threads would be a mistake. While waffling, I realized that there was the 50% bonus Honor buff active for only the next few days (at the time), so why not just head into BGs and see how it goes.
At the time of this writing, I have gone through roughly 50 BGs on the Warlock and hit the level cap, the majority of that being Affliction. And what I have come to realize is how many other classes/specs seem tailor-made to counter all of my shit. Kicks, stuns, magic immunity. Rogues are BG gods again, because of course they are, but it’s not just them. Monks have Diffuse Magic to send all my DoTs back to me, Touch of Karma for basically a 10 second immunity which also, hey, sends my damage back to me, mobility out the ass to counter my portal shenanigans, along with the usual stuns and interrupts. DKs are hard counters, but I guess that is what they are designed to be, so whatever. Retribution is Retribution. Warrior is Warrior.
So, yeah. The general sense I get is that if any melee actually gets in melee range, I am just stuck refreshing Agony and Corruption until I die. Even if I juke an interrupt and have already survived their stun and am not facing what appears to be a direct Warlock counter, the damage I deal is mostly garbage within the timeframe of my remaining health.
Can I deal a lot of damage when left alone and DoTing the whole team from the bushes? Yeah, sure. It’s fun throwing everything out there and then Malefic Rapturing everyone without actually giving away your position. But what caster CAN’T deal a lot of damage when left alone to freecast at the enemy team from the bushes? And what’s more, my overall damage pressure really isn’t enough to change the direction of a team fight at the time.
Compare Affliction to Destruction, for example. If I’m able to turret from the bushes, I can pretty much delete people with Chaos Bolt – that has a much more immediate impact to the current fight than everyone being at 50% HP thirty seconds from now. Getting trained by melee is still a bad time, but I’m a little less concerned about eating a kick when I actually have more than one spell school. Also, you can use Infernal as another emergency CC to try and get space for when Mortal Coil is on cooldown.
Why not just play BGs as Destruction then? Well… why not just play Mage instead? Or Boomkin, for that matter? There is something very satisfying about absurdly slow-moving Chaos Bolts hitting for 4700+ but I have all the same issues with melee as Affliction.
What I keep coming back to with both specs is this: what is the Warlock niche? What do Warlocks counter? With the ascendance of Shadow Priests, it’s not as though Warlocks are “the DoT class.” Destruction hits hard, but so do any freecasting caster. It’s not as though Warlocks possess an abundance of CC, especially when Fear takes 1.6 seconds to cast at a short range (well, shorter than normal spell range) and a single interrupt locks you out of everything for 3+ seconds.
Way back in the day, I remember Warlocks basically having all the same issues but they were at least extremely difficult to kill. Am I remembering wrong? Has it just been a general ability creep over the years that made melee so potent a counter? Or perhaps I am just doing everything wrong.
All I know is that I’m not having the best time as Warlock. I will stick with it a bit longer, focusing on Destruction. Having Covenant abilities might improve the experience, along with the Affliction legendary that basically makes Corruption a 50% snare for 24 seconds. Perhaps that will cause enough annoyance/disruption to the other team to make my presence on the field worth the pain.
In An Age 