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Hi everyone,
it was clear to everyone that Naxxramas will be a joke (difficulty wise) when they announced that "even veteran players will have a hard time". Maexxna heroic is the only boss which you probably can't defeat with a current meta ladder deck. Even this assumption could be wrong, because there could be Freeze Mages out there running double Earthen Ring Farseer and double Ice Barrier.
Do you think the difficulty will increase with each wing? Maybe Saphiron and KelThuzad will be extra difficult and the rest on par with the Arachnid Quarters? Do you even think the difficulty needs a raise? I am close to a point where I might not grind the remaining gold for the last two sections. Having a couple cards does not make or break your ranking and so far the encounters where kinda boring. I am trying to find out, if I am alone with this feeling.
Please vote only if you have already beaten all encounters in all modes/difficulties.
Poll: How did you find the overall difficulty of the Arachnid QuarterEverything is where it should be (305) 59% Heroics way too easy (178) 34% Heroics way too hard (36) 7% 519 total votes Your vote: How did you find the overall difficulty of the Arachnid Quarter (Vote): Everything is where it should be
(Vote): Heroics way too hard
(Vote): Heroics way too easy
(Please excuse my horrible orthography and grammar, I am no native speaker.)
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Hmm well I for one tested out my "clear b**lsh****ness" mage spells deck that has very low chances to win in an attempt to see if any of the normal bosses were easy enough to beat with even the most random deck. Well in short no, maybe it was my bad luck for draws, but I didn't get to kill Rekan with that deck. Though I kind of take it that for most decks it should be a decent trial. I managed to beat him pretty easy with Reynad's old Tryhard warrior deck pretty easy.
I hope too that the next ones will be harder. I went in hoping to complete it as a challenging puzzle because the bosses had custom cards, but in that regard it was a letdown. Let's hope the next ones will be more hard.
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On July 24 2014 01:33 blackguard4 wrote:
Hmm well I for one tested out my "clear b**lsh****ness" mage spells deck that has very low chances to win in an attempt to see if any of the normal bosses were easy enough to beat with even the most random deck. Well in short no, maybe it was my bad luck for draws, but I didn't get to kill Rekan with that deck. Though I kind of take it that for most decks it should be a decent trial. I managed to beat him pretty easy with Reynad's old Tryhard warrior deck pretty easy.
I hope too that the next ones will be harder. I went in hoping to complete it as a challenging puzzle because the bosses had custom cards, but in that regard it was a letdown. Let's hope the next ones will be more hard.
Exactly my thoughts. Two friends of mine which play basically no hearthstone at all stomped through all encounters and all modes with free cards in under an hour. To be honest, those guys are not your average noob, but highly intelligent people and experienced card players, but they have no clue about the ins and outs of Hearthstone. They play Hearthstone less than once a month. Just I write these lines, another friend whispered me that he beat all the modes using the same deck in all encounters: an almost F2P trap-heavy mid-range hunter deck. He didn't even consider making another deck because he stomped through all of it. If these guys can beat the encounters in half an hour, everybody can. Should everybody be able to beat the encounters? Yes, of course, but they should either make the process a bit longer/more difficult or more entertaining or even provide replay value. You are basically buying a bunch of cards which you will probably only sparsely use and half an hour of gameplay for 7 bucks. That is overpriced even by Blizzard's standards.
Second thought: I hoped to see some interesting mechanics which made the games interesting, challenging and somewhat different.
Remember back to the tutorial where you had to kill a special card, before you could damage the hero. Maexxna was the only encounter out of the 8 we got which had something like that. Imagine the possibilities with such simple things as a 0 mana hero power every turn.
How easy would it be to add off-map doodads which would actually influence the game, like catapults firing from the distance which would poison the battlefield, reducing the maximum amount of minions you could play or otherwise they'd take damage every turn. Or a boss which gains 5 armor at the end of every turn, making him a race to fatigue. Or special blow-out scenarios where both players start with 9 cards in hand and 10 mana crystals. Or you would have to defeat two enemies at once, both having 20 hp and both play a card from a 10 mana pool every turn to the same playing field. The possibilities are endless and they didn't even scrape the possibilities they exhibited in their own tutorial.
It is so frustrating from a game designer's and from a player's perspective. That they didn't include anything of the sorts gives me little hope that there will be anything like that in the upcoming encounters because they would have shown at least a little bit of awesome mechanics to get people hooked, if they had some.
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its AI. How do you expect it to be hard?
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On July 24 2014 01:49 Emnjay808 wrote:
its AI. How do you expect it to be hard?
By adding unusual mechanics to the playing field which you have to cope with. It will make the games harder and more entertaining because you have to think totally different. For example, imagine a bomb card at the edge of the playing field which is 0/10. You will have to kill it within 4 turns or else you will take 20 damage to the face. A fresh bomb card will spawn after every 4 turns.
This simple thing alone will require you to make interesting decisions if you clear the board, attack face, or deal damage to the bomb card. There is countless things possible. Check out my post above to get even more examples. Wouldn't you agree that my rough ideas would give the encounters a more interesting and more challenging twist than what is currently in place?
Also, the class challenges. Why not make you beat the boss in a specific way, for example without taking damage or without using spells or with capped mana-max of 5 or with 10 locked-in cards which you have to use or whatever. Instead, you just get a random deck which has enough synergies that everybody who is not completely unlucky can beat the boss on the first try and be done with it. <end rant>
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If its too easy, put self imposed rules in, such as no legionaries, no spells, only minions with 2 words in them, only minions who are the colour green or some kind of gimmick; so many fun decks to try out. The naxx bosses can be difficult, but only if you want them to be... or your not good at the game. 
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you know, just a simple thing such as giving the bosses 15-20 armor instead of 15 extra max hp woulda gone a long way in making them more difficult for anyone with access to Alexstrasza. Or making them immune to it.
Giving Maexxna Power of the Wild or Bloodlust or Savage Roar (so you can't just heal and sit back and wait with 2x Earthen Ring Farseer). Making the first heroic guy spawn a 3/2 guy for 0 mana every turn instead of a 4/4 for 2 mana (so his early turns are more consistent) and giving him better cards than Shadowbolt. Helping the 2nd heroic challenge not kill itself by the dumbest use of Inner Fire ever. Giving the AI some better cards in general really (maybe even the new Druid card or other hard board clear).
While I did have fun putting together a specific deck for Maexxna, the other stuff wasn't much fun at all. Also the server downtime/heavy lag after release didn't help either.
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Heroics clearly aren't "way too easy". I assume people picked that poll option because there isn't a "somewhat too easy" option. The problem imo is the fights aren't that interesting -- you don't have to be particularly creative or clever to come up with lame ways to trick the AI and win. In many cases you know that any normal play by the enemy would kill you easily and it really reduces the satisfaction you get from cheesing it out.
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The fun of heroics is trying out different stuff.
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On July 24 2014 02:13 KnowNothing wrote:
Heroics clearly aren't "way too easy". I assume people picked that poll option because there isn't a "somewhat too easy" option.
qft
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I feel like I have an understanding of most of the cards in the game. I have a general idea what to expect from class cards. I would consider myself competent but I don't consider myself good. I think I rarely make the most cost effective play except when I am extremely limited in play choices. All that being said. I cleared the first wing, including heroics, all last night. I think I spent a total or 3-5 hours on hearthstone and I played a few play mode matches.
I think it's very hard to balance but I think the difficulty was in a good spot. I thought the bosses fights were pretty fun but I meta'd them pretty hard, especially the last one.
I think ultimately we need to talk about why it was easy. What is the root of the problem? It's the AI, the AI is too easy to abuse. That might be fine on the normal mode but the Heroic should not be like that. I think they should have AI difficulty levels and then they don't have to change their OP mechanics like the 4/4 for 2, and 1 for X amt of damage (that isn't random but rather targeted.. cheating AI...//QQ)
For reference. I do not have Alexstrazza and I typically am lvl 14-16 at the end of seasons.
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It's still only the first wing! Clearing the arachnid quarter was generally considered the easiest! I'm sure there will be some more difficult challenges in the later wings.
Anyway, I found the difficulty to be pretty good. A custom deck was needed for maexna which is to be expected from the harder bosses.
The AI was still pretty bad. I got shadow flamed for 1 at one point which was a pretty big facepalm.
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United Kingdom38205 Posts
Everything seems straightforward till HC Maexxna where it feels like you actually need to tailor your deck a bit rather than just pick one vaguely suited.
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I thought the content was really fun, but much too brief. The entire adventure would take more time and feel more memorable if we got it all at once, but since they are releasing it in such short pieces it's much less interesting.
Heroics are challenging though, so that's good! Some people with god-like decks (or zoo...) probably breezed through them but that's to be expected. You only have to beat each one once so 12 losses and a win, is a win.
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Class challenges was way too easy. I passed in the first attempt with no problem at all.
Heroic mode seems hard, but just needs very specific decks to make things easier.
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The wing only took 1-2 hours to complete. When I think of other games with similar style "challenges," namely scrolls, Naxxramas has been much, much easier so far. It's pretty disappointing to think that if they released all the wings at once, a lot of players would have completed the adventure within a day.
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On July 24 2014 04:22 rd wrote:
The wing only took 1-2 hours to complete. When I think of other games with similar style "challenges," namely scrolls, Naxxramas has been much, much easier so far. It's pretty disappointing to think that if they released all the wings at once, a lot of players would have completed the adventure within a day.
not within a day, within 5 hours :/
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On July 24 2014 04:26 Fi0na wrote:Show nested quote +On July 24 2014 04:22 rd wrote:
The wing only took 1-2 hours to complete. When I think of other games with similar style "challenges," namely scrolls, Naxxramas has been much, much easier so far. It's pretty disappointing to think that if they released all the wings at once, a lot of players would have completed the adventure within a day. not within a day, within 5 hours :/
5 hours of gameplay is a little bit more than a 'day' for most people. Especially the kind of people Hearthstone is aimed at.
On July 24 2014 01:58 Qwicker wrote:If its too easy, put self imposed rules in, such as no legionaries, no spells, only minions with 2 words in them, only minions who are the colour green or some kind of gimmick; so many fun decks to try out. The naxx bosses can be difficult, but only if you want them to be... or your not good at the game.
This. I have no idea why they didn't add Achievements into this game.
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Does it mean someone is just really bad if they can't seem to beat the wing? My friend gave up after complaining about Maexxna for 45 minutes.
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On July 24 2014 04:31 Hurricane Sponge wrote:Show nested quote +On July 24 2014 04:26 Fi0na wrote:On July 24 2014 04:22 rd wrote:
The wing only took 1-2 hours to complete. When I think of other games with similar style "challenges," namely scrolls, Naxxramas has been much, much easier so far. It's pretty disappointing to think that if they released all the wings at once, a lot of players would have completed the adventure within a day. not within a day, within 5 hours :/ 5 hours of gameplay is a little bit more than a 'day' for most people. Especially the kind of people Hearthstone is aimed at. Show nested quote +On July 24 2014 01:58 Qwicker wrote:If its too easy, put self imposed rules in, such as no legionaries, no spells, only minions with 2 words in them, only minions who are the colour green or some kind of gimmick; so many fun decks to try out. The naxx bosses can be difficult, but only if you want them to be... or your not good at the game. This. I have no idea why they didn't add Achievements into this game.
There are achievements. There just aren't many, and aren't really in depth achievements.
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EPT
