Guide: Want 1300-1500 MP Rating?

I've been alternating between two decks over the last week and a half - a warrior/priest/priest buff deck and a wizard/wizard/priest "cheese firestorm" deck. I am still reaching that 1300 ceiling - meaning I can reliably get up to 1300, but never over and inevitably a two or three-loss streak bumps me back down to the low or mid 1200s.

As I start to slowly acquire better items (and lately they've been coming on the firestorm deck side rather than the warrior side) I seem to be getting a little bit better, but it's almost becoming a slog. I've started to question my own goal for MP. Do I want the "prestige" of a high ranking or do I just want to get my wins in and get my golden chests for the loot?

There are definite tiers with the rankings as to what kind of decks you see. I have only played a handful of the top 50-100 ranked folks and those decks are supremely better than mine. There seems to be the most "variety" among regulars in that 1000-1100 range. So the question becomes, what tier do I want to be in? There are a couple of builds I'd love to try (I think Pilgrim even said in chat that he can't wait until he can use his wiz again.. that's the main reason I built the firestorm deck was so I could actually use wizards) but tanking on purpose to move back down the ranking ladder goes against everything I believe in in playing a game. I understand those who do it, though, and the motivations behind it.

 

I guess I just wanted to add my 2 cents to this discussion from my own personal experience.
I've been playing a 2 draw priest, 1 firestorm wizard deck on-and-off for a number of weeks now.

I find the deck fun to play and I do think there is a fair amount of strategy involved in playing it.
It is far from being a face-roll deck though, I go through winning streaks and losing streaks like any deck.
I've faced many draw decks and many non-draw decks and (imo) any well-played deck has a chance against any other well-played deck, draw or not.
My rating goes between 1450 - 1550 depending on my streak.

I do think that draw decks are "not fun" to play against, since pressing Pass, Pass, Pass, etc isn't enjoyable while your opponent strengthens his position or destroys your team.
Now this might feel hypocritical to say that, but right now I have the best consistent wins with this deck (I put together new decks periodically just to switch things up), but winning is more fun than losing, so I generally go back to my draw/firestorm deck for wins.

As far as draw, firestorm, nimbus, nimble strike, etc being OP, my personal opinion is any well put together, well played deck can *feel* OP, but when your deck is coming together and working, it feels just as OP to your opponent getting beaten that round as well.

 

No kidding. I finally faced one last night. Opponent just stayed back and kept spamming firestorms, heals, and drawing cards. It was so boring, but I played it through to the end. Luckily I'm a 1100-1200 player, so I don't tend to face these very often. Just not fun.

 

I mean, draw decks were already beginning to saturate the 1000-1300 zone a week ago. I was suddenly seeing people I'd stomped back in the 900s playing drawspam poorly in the 1200s. I wouldn't say that the influx is Pilgrim Bailey's fault. Maybe a few people are doing it because of this thread, but probably most of the people doing it don't even read the forums. It is a self-evident strategy and once you've been beaten by it you kind of know how it works. Most of the items are uncommon. Dwarf priests are 10 gp a pop. I like the humor of the OP. I like the point of the OP. I like that Pilgrim's playing this one more or less straight by saying things like "if the devs haven't changed it or discouraged it, it's fair play for now," because that further forces the situation. The devs really do need to hurry up on this one. As I've said elsewhere I appreciate everything they do and I am pretty patient with all the other things that are in the pipeline, but people are quitting PvP entirely because of this. It's a showstopper.

 

Your only options for farming level 18 items as far as I know are:

- Clearing level 17, 16 maps (maybe 15 also) in singleplayer over and over
- Getting lucky in an MP chest
- Getting lucky in Randimar's

Hopefully that helps.

Another option for you, is to farm a different staff with volcano on it:

Here is a list of all items with volcano: http://wiki.cardhuntria.com/wiki/Cards/Volcano

To farm those, just look at the item levels, and farm maps that are the same level, or 2+- as a general rule.

 

Pengwin I could have posted something petulant about draw decks being op and everyone being noobs or something of that nature, but, I thought the best way to highlight the issue, while simultaneously helping the people that were getting griefed by people using these decks was to expose the strategies behind each composition. My hope was that this would result in a shift in the rating for some of the players who were high and abusing this method, and result in lower players getting easier victories and increasing their ratings; hopefully putting all of us on a level playing field and possibly leading to more strategies to counter these kinds of decks being viable (3 wiz for example), or devs understanding that this issue is more serious than they realized.

Already, people are complaining in chat about how bad the game is past a certain rating and how they encourage people to quit this game and go play something like Hearthstone. I hate that this is happening.

The sad part, is that a simple hotfix would alleviate the problem until a more permanent solution could be found; simply disallow demonic charm of the 2nd circle in multiplayer, or temporarily raise it's item level to cost 1 blue token until something more meaningful, a cure rather than a bandaid, can be found.

Ironically, if everyone starts playing draw decks, some of the fun comps may also come back too (triple wizard) because draw decks are vulnerable to coin flip type WWE/WW strategies, or at least they used to be before everyone got team move boots and tons of nimbuses.

 

I wouldn't be hating on the OP. All of that information is available elsewhere in the forums if you're willing to look. He simply condensed it all into one clean post.

And it's not like any discovering those builds is like inventing the wheel. When you play against a build once or twice it's pretty easy to determine what you need to do to copy it, if you're so inclined. There is no rocket science going on here, and there are only a finite number of possible "good" builds.

I also think that, if you spend a lot of time in the forums, you tend to assume that everyone else does too. The reality is that probably only a small segment of the playerbase is actually reading this stuff. To put it another way -- the impact of one forum post on the meta is most likely negligible.

This. Pick the elo ranking that's the most fun for you and play there. Play less than idealized builds if it gets you [quicker/more fun] games. The ratings aren't really a sign of "prestige" anyway, unless you're top 10 or something.

How many really different builds are in the top 10 right now?

 

Fantastic. Keep up the great work!

 

Nevermind. Just frustrated.

 

Excellent. Please continue to do as you have been doing: supply us with a well thought-out game. I much prefer that the devs come up with a good solution over a fast solution.

That being said, please keep in mind the following:
-Multiplayer balance is extremely difficult to get to a perfect level. I can't think of any games which reached a high level of balance without dozens of patches/changes/iterations
-MP balance is hard to achieve if you don't take into account feedback from top level players. Please either take into consideration their feedback, set up some kind of private chat, or make sure someone on your balance team is actually able to play at the top level in the ladder.
-Taking your time to find a perfect solution is good: but don't take too much time -- dedicated players who joined the club are paying what amounts to a monthly subscription fee, and days and weeks are ticking off from their club membership while they wait for dev action on a clearly intolerable situation.