Is Hearthstone taking Fatigue damage?

If you take a look at Hearthstone’s subreddit, you might realize that there’s been an increasing trend of people complaining about how stagnant things have become.

This is not the first time said topic has been brought up and people are not happy.

I count at least 4 posts that revolve around the same issue. Hearthstone’s no longer fun anymore.

Many attribute the cause to the stagnant meta of Shamans, while others feel like the game doesn’t push new content fast enough to keep the game entertaining. Then there are those that wish Pirates didn’t exist.

META? What META?
None of them are wrong. Hearthstone has become a tedious case of tug-of-war. Whereby you can either pick aggressive decks like Pirate/Dragon Warrior, Aggro Shaman or the Reno-decks.

=IF(Aggro Burst > 30 before Reno, Aggro Win);
ELSE(Reno Jackson = Heal is Cheat)

There is no in-between that people can try. Sure, players can use specific decks that can counter one archetype, but it wouldn’t be effective against the other. This makes specific counter-decks less feasible than desired.

Grinding
The ranked ladder is a grind. It makes sense for people to want to climb as quickly as possible especially in a 30-day period. This encourages people to play aggro decks to get things over with ASAP.

There are still not enough anti-aggro cards available to discourage this behavior. And I’m pretty sure players don’t want to spend 20-30 minutes just to earn a single star, or worse, lose a star.

Any new modes?
It goes without saying, Hearthstone needs new modes to keep players occupied. The introduction of Tavern Brawl was easily 1.5 years ago. With Blizzard reusing Tavern Brawls and even giving old rewards, it’s symptomatic of the development team’s ideas running dry.

The Fix
I believe Noxious has quite the solution to the problem. If Blizzard is adamant about not changing their existing cards willy-nilly, at least release 2 – 4 cards every fortnight to try and spice things up while players wait for the next expansion. It helps balance the game while keeping the game fresh all year round.

While Ben Brode has spoken out that the team’s trying to solve the outspoken problems now, we’ll have to wait till the end of February before anything reaches the Live servers.

For now, it’s back to SMOrc-ing or healing and nothing in between. No wonder people are moving to Shadowverse and Eternal.