Warlock was controlling the meta and forced you to play super super fast cause it destroys all of the control decks. We will see if things shift. I can't remember the last time I've seen a Warrior Deck.

I'd imagine the current meta was a ton of warlock, a ton of hunters to combat as well as aggro shaman, some aggro priests, a few druids, a few mage and demon hunters. Rogue is mixed in but it's a weak ass deck IMO.

Since Shaman has two very strong decks right now (Overload and Elemental), I feel the higher Diamond ranks were filled with Shamans. Pally, Hunter and Warlock were pretty common too.

Lol so I noticed yesterday I was only ~1k off of bg leaderboards and had 2 days free so I decided to grind to see if i could get there before the reset and ended up getting 2 firsts my last two games to sneak in last minute. Play a couple games of the new patch and check back and see the cut off to leaderboards is 1k lower than it was and I'm not on it. Turns out anyone who has played in the first few minutes of the new patch has had their mmr erased for the last few seasons now and instead of fixing it blizzard just expect everyone to know how incompetent they are and not play. Apparently this also wiped out dog's #1 na spot.

They reset MMR every so often. And the MMR you see is donkey **** anyways. It's a measurement of how much you play and not how good you are mostly. They won't even show you your matchmaking MMR, because crybabies want to see their #s grow rather than see where they actually are at skillwise.

Another sign Team 5 has no idea what the cards the print do. Whelp smuggler.

Really not enjoying battlegrounds atm. Seems every lobby with beasts just becomes an absolute scramble to find the frog and its just like 6 out of 8 people are just going beasts and the person who finds baron first wins the lobby. Kinda the same with the demon 3 drop but demons don't have such unbeatable endgame.

I am enjoying Battlegrounds right now. I think that the new heroes and mix up of units makes for a fresh feeling meta. The games that I have not done well have either being going well and I got crushed by someone hitting great combos, or seemed like they were almost there but just too slow for that lobby.

I like the 15 damage cap. I think that makes the game more interesting by cutting down on early exits due to 20-25 damage coming out of nowhere and eliminating any wiggle room you might have.

I think the 15 damage cap is irrelevant. If you're taking 15 or 25 you're usually drawing dead and maybe hoping for a top four. Team 5 is just bad at design. They should've instead addressed why people take so much damage. Usually one of the best tier heroes high rolling or people making very high hp stuff too early.

This is only true at low ranks for people who don't play a lot in a season. Iirc everyone above 10k was set back to 8k internal mmr this time round and that's about the point where people stopped getting well over 100 for first. Eu leaderboard is already all above the internal reset mmr.

I'm enjoying it even though frog comp and doomsayer are beyond busted. When I first saw frog I thought it was super brave of them to print a card with so much exponential growth potential and that they must have designed it super carefully to be sure it wasn't broken lol. Somehow I slept on doomsayer but in hindsight a tier 3 that generates the same value as golden djinni most of the time should have been super easy to spot.

That said I really enjoy every new bgs meta; it's super fun to try and work out the best ways to give yourself a good chance of highrolling with each hero, and the best fallback comps to salvage top 4 or cheese a win if you miss. I even enjoyed the first week of broken quillboars.

Damage cap is far from irrelevant though there were better options for solving the problem. For one it's keeping shudder somewhat in check (though it's still broken obv).

It's really irrelevant. It marginally helps already good heroes more, like Omu, and doesn't really do anything for bad heroes. If you're getting popped for 15 somewhere between turn 5 through 7 or 8, you're game is most likely over on any hero that can't power level to stabilize. Which is most heroes. You might be able to top four still, but who cares? It might have changed something, but it didn't fix the core issues with the game mode.

Also, you didn't understand my point about mmr. In chess your rating doesn't move up just because you play a lot. It goes up when you build knowledge and pattern recognition. In BGs, you climb by playing over time and picking good heroes if you understand what heroes and comps are good even if you make mistakes like positioning. Thus the external rating is just measurement of time sunk into the game.

I don't know how the damage cap is supposed to work. I could look it up, and I probably will after this last game.

I saw that there was a 15 damage cap at one point early in the game. On a later turn (at least 10 coins) I thought I was safe at 20 health, but took 27 and died to go out in 6th.

I had just gotten the Avenge (3) card that adds a random demon to your hand. I felt like I was about to take off, and I watched the Avenge trigger 3 times, and never got to play with the cards because I was dead. You have half your starting health and just got a "cool/fun/new" card, but you don't get to appreciate it because you just took almost 30 damage. And that seems like exactly what I would want to take out of Battlegrounds if I were a developer. One person REALLY has fun, at the expense of someone else getting the worst of what the mode has to offer. Is that not the whole point of the damage cap?

Maybe the damage cap goes away once you get 10 money or something.

The damage cap is gone as soon as someone dies.

I like it when the answer to a long question is a short answer.

If you're not taking damage cap into account you're just playing badly. The problem the damage cap was put in to solve was that people could take 25 on certain hero's spike turns or with random spawn rng, it wasn't supposed to smooth the wr between good and bad heroes. If you think there are other core issues in the game then fine but the damage cap wasn't put in to fix them.

That's not how BGs mmr works at all. Don't talk so confidently about something you know nothing about, it only makes you look stupid in the long run. The top ranked bgs players are getting at least 20 points less per placement every game than the lowest mmr players in their lobby.
When I came back to the game towards the end of last season I split 3.5 in a lobby with xqn who was rank 1 eu and I saw on the vod he got -1 while i got like +25.
If you gave a random 7k player a 12k player's account i'd bet they'd drop below 10k within 100 games.

Getting hit for 25 was caused by hero imbalances. Duh... You weren't getting hit for large amounts from a great number of heroes. You're gonna get hit for 15 from the same heroes as before and have your game ruined if you're not on a good hero.

And, yes, that's exactly how BG mmr works. Go play other games and actually learn something instead of making stupid arguments and acting like a snowflake (probably because you think your external rating is something to be proud of). In most games with ELO and mmr systems people get stuck at ratings until they improve. It doesn't happen in BGs, all you need is to play more and pick good heroes consistently. There were 13k players who would routinely make bad plays (positioning and letting their time run out because they were dicking around) on their streams somewhat and are inferior to dog and some other players last season. They're 13k because the system is a grind and not based on skill. It doesn't matter if your ratings diminish at the top end or not.

Guess what happened 2 or 3 resets ago? I was in the top 25 and keeping pace with dog while playing and sleeping relatively the same amount of time as him for the first couple of days. Am I better than dog or a lot of players? No. That stuff happens the system is a grind and not skill based.

You sound like a Blizzard fanboy who hasn't played other competitive games to realize why their balance and rating systems blow.

https://news.blizzard.com/en-us/hear...-3-patch-notes

That damn frog got nerfed.

Some pretty big nerfs to Questline Warlock and Shaman there. Also it looks like they really want people to play Pirate Warrior.

That nerf to Quest Warlock makes it seem almost unplayable. I never got the feeling it had much "leeway" or "wiggle room" anyway. It was fun to do. I don't think I was playing the most powerful versions, and I definitely wasn't playing Wild.

Warlock has always been a problem when it comes to balance. They leverage their own well being to do crazy powerful stuff. I almost want to go find some YouTube highlights of people abusing the Quest in Wild to see what kind of crazy **** they dreamed up.

I just played a game that could have been really fun.

I was playing as N'Zoth, and was doing very well in the early stages. I found a beast comp, and even tripled a leap frogger to go along with a rat pack and the N'zoth beast.

It was going to be really fun. Except two turns in a row I couldn't get leap frogger to die because it kept running in to 2 attack minions. So it ends up being the last beast to die one round, and the second to last another. In those two rounds I took 36 damage. The second of those rounds was me taking 12 damage from a ghost. A guy that quit the game after the 6 or 7 gold turn, yet still did 12 damage to me because my entire board killed itself off except for the one thing that was supposed to die.

So it went from a game that was supposed to be really fun, to one that sucked ass and made me feel like a moron for thinking it would be fun to play an outstanding deathrattle board with a deathrattle hero.

On the turn after those two, I had found a houndmaster to taunt up the leap frogger. Some guy had huge elementals by that point and I lost what felt like a close fight, and took 7 damage. Which was 3 over lethal because why not take 24 from AFK, and take 12 from a dead guy because F your golden minion, you're taking 36 over two turns from people that can't come up with a minion that has more than 2 attack, apparently.

I still think Battlegrounds is fun in general, but some of the **** that happens in there just leaves me feeling stupid thinking it would be fun.

Mercenaries is cool. It's way better than I expected it to be. I don't understand why people say it isn't pay-to-win. I paid $25 for the two welcome bundles, and I definitely don't have any Mercenaries that are close to being maxed out. I feel like if I take my $25 team and go up against someone who has spend $250, their characters are likely to be straight up better than mine. Like my guy will do 10 damage and has 50 health, theirs does 12 damage and has 55 health. I get that Mercenaries are obtainable without spending money, but if you pay money and literally have stronger versions of the same cards as someone who didn't pay, it's pay-to-win. Chess is not pay-to-win, Mercenaries is.

I use this forum as a vent for nerd rage. Thank you all for putting up with it.

I really do enjoy this game. Battlegrounds is a lot of fun and I want to give the really fun side of the game some a shoutout as well.

Mercenaries seems okay. So far my favorite part is listening to Valeera's voice in the tutorial.

I'm actually enjoying it.

Seems appropriate that a mode called Mercenaries should be pay to win

Right now there are (at least) 3 Mercenaries bundles in the shop.

1. Jaina and 20 packs for $25
2. Ragnaros (plus 150 Rag coins) and 20 packs for $30
3. Two Random Legendary Mercs and 30 packs for $30

I decided to pull the trigger on bundle #3 since I've decided I quite enjoy this mode, and I am happy with the ballpark of investment it takes.

What were my two random Legendary Mercenaries? Jaina and Ragnaros! The Hearthstone gods smiled upon me this day.

New expansion dropping today.

Can't imagine this will change the meta much other than making a few tweaks to the ridiculous Stormwind decks already out there.