The BIGGEST mistake Blizzard made for these modes was not making all the old expansion packs cheaper. More people would have played for sure. They also would benefit from wild catch-up packs. It's too little too late.
That has always been HS's biggest issue. From the get go they should have put in an accessible way for people to obtain older sets. (I personally think either a pauper version of cards that can't be dusted and packs cost 10 gold and are given away extremely frequently) As of right now the average player has to decide between being remotely competitive on standard versus making old cards so they can play these dead modes. What an easy choice, it's a perpetual cycle.
nah, they need to update the dust quantities, theres too many cards and too many sets releasing thats you have to increase the drops so people can actually craft more than one of the mandatory legendaries they need, this was fine at launch when there was only 100 cards, but theres 11 classes now, the pool is too big to keep pulling randoms
@@chair42as a wild player I can assure you they could just leave the mode to sort itself out no matter how bad it ends up. There have been multiple years on end in the past where wild for example got no balance changes whatsoever and it still... Kinda worked. I know duels has more facets to it but I think it's a higher up decision because it's not monitized while wanting dev resources.
@@RiwulBarnes terrorised wild for 3 years and it didnt sort anything out
10 месяцев назад
For me, duels are the only motivation in Hearthstone. If they delete the mod I will quit the game after 8 years. 😢 Duels is like a cool sandbox mod for me, it's so much fun and offers endless possibilities for tactics. It's sad to see that they are so unhappy with this great mod. Rest in peace. Hearthstone😢
Same, I used to be big on Standard long ago but found duels was my main attraction.. I am seriously considering quitting now or atleast play once a week
Well yeah you had fun, sure ,but it was so HARD for such a small indie company to keep up such a labor intensive game mode! I totally get why they are getting rid of it. Like, i HATE having to tie my shoes in the morning so i can traverse the world without my shoes falling off, so now in order to avoid such trials and tribulations i threw my shoes out and i never leave the house! Problem solved!
Biggest thing that detracted me from duels was not only the focus on wild decks, but they never EVER updated the main heroes of the mode. All the professors were from scholomance and had hero powers and treasures around the time of darkmoon faire's introduction. They kinda tried it again at alterac with vandar and drekthar, but it was only two heroes to pick from, wouldn't it have been cool to replace them all with like all the murder suspects from nathria? It's hard to get excited with the league of explorers coming in if they're in the same pool as all the professors i'm sick of seeing with their same hero powers and treasures that get no new support
Literally this. They started the mode with "Season 1" being "Wizard Duels" and then just pretended that never happened or didn't have implications. It's like they never went past the first draft, only added some small things onto it, just like with Twist now.
I haven't played duels in forever because it seemed like everyone just played the same 3-4 broken meta decks and that was it. I like to try home made decks or off meta stuff but hardly anything could hang with the highly tuned meta decks. But its still sad to see it fade away because it was so cool when it first came out.
@@gankfrombush ....I use some homemade decks in standard and wild and have reached legend in both with them. Its not easy but possible, but in duels it was near impossible. Obviously you hardly see anyone being creative today compared to early HS but a few people out there still make their own decks and have some success.
You just need fantasy. I have a deck for rogue that there is nowhere on the internet and every time brings me at least 7-9 wins. Of course I ain’t gonna spoil it but you just need to think instead of copy/paste everything you see on internet
@barberrulzz3791 I played a hodgepodge warrior deck to 8 wins last week and was satisfied. Not every experience needs to be focused around achieving 12 wins.
Duels deserved better! Blizzards strategy of: pushing out the new mode > milking money from players > not giving good updates for it > letting it die because it didn’t meet their expectations. Not that they could do something about it like: do better marketing for it and overall HS things, making older packs cheaper, frequent updates etc. At this point new modes will have very hard starting points if they ever announce another one.
i think they won't delete mercenaries because they sold items that only work in mercenaries. with duels, any cards you own are still viable in other modes. they've sold twist sets so i think they won't cut it. they may banish it to 'modes'' one day.
duels is F2P... much easier to delete than a mode people spent hundreds of dollars on. they'd get sued. thats probably why artifact is still accessible.
The only problem with duels is how stingy they have been with wild packs of cards. If you haven't been playing since the beginning you just aren't going to have a huge variety of starting deck choices. That is actually a bummer, Duels is fun.
Part of the duels community here. Im pissed. I accepted it was unpopular, and as such, we only had very occasional balance updates, which is fine. But removing the mode they were already spending no effort on?
Don't forget that not only have Mercs and now Duels fallen to the wayside: Classic was also removed. Twist seemed like it was going to be an upgrade to it (or moreso a sidegrade) but it really hasn't panned out that way with all the new cards being pumped into it. At this point with how much active support it needs, the removal of twist is more of a "when" than an "if".
Classic was a very bad mode it was more like a bad adventure mode than a mode against players, when i tried it I played 25 games out of 25 against a stupid bots. Very boring mode. Also easy 25 wins at raw. Gg.
Blizzard seems to have a strong policy against fun. They have a tendency to not support games/systems that have potential and letting them fall to shit.
At this point, I'm not surprised. How many people have jumped ship over the past couple years because of how toxic Blizzard has become to work at? Do they really even have the resources to support beyond HS and BG? Doubt Microsoft is capable of saving them at this point, but maybe I'm wrong.
After playing hearthstone since beta, this is probably the nail in the coffin for me. Has been the only thing I've really played since Barrens and is generally how I completed every expansion since without spending a fortune Goodbye Hearthstone 😔
Same here, I played back when you needed a freaking key to get access.. HS is really shooting itself in the foot. I could care less about BGs or even Arena, but killing Duels is killing 80% of game for me. I find standard extremely stale after first few weeks of when a new expansion is out.
Wow. Duels is my favorite mode of the game currently. It's not especially balanced at times, but why the hell would they kill it completely. It seems indicative that they don't have the resources for a team to handle it. Which is sad.
Wow. This is the most melancholy we’ve seen you in a while Zeddy. This really hits home hard. I played soooo much duels when it first came out. I’ve also returned to it every single expansion. I used to be a huge dungeon run fan, so duels coming along was such a massive thing for me. So I’m so sad it’s coming to an end 😭
The biggest problem with Duels was that it was so heavily reliant on the card collection. Battlegrounds is insanely popular because you don't need a prior collection to play it. If Duels had something like draft decks where you can play with a starter deck instead of needing to build one yourself, it would be amazing.
I might end up deleting hearthstone if Duels is done. That is literally the reason why I play this still. I basically play regular hearthstoen purly so that I can make new fun decks in duels, so I guess RIP hearthstone
This might actually kill my passion for Hearthstone. The only reason I played HS daily is because of Duels, now I don't know what to play there anymore
Even thought duels was a bit unbalanced (fault of the devs) it was a very fun to play hearthstone and you couls play some decks you couldn't play in standard Im actually pissed they did this, duels was very fun
I love Duels and play it pretty much daily (Duels makes up for 80% of all modes that I play in HS). I am VERY surprised by the low number of players honestly because as I have already mentioned I play Duels all the time and I always find games nearly instantly or within a few seconds; its nothing like Twist where it takes forever to find a match. I am very upset because I crafted A LOT of cards for Duels and I bought pretty much every single expension and mini-set specificly for Duels and NOT standard. It's heart breaking... I'll probably quit playing HS once they shut it down unless they fix up arena and get REALLY creative with it. In current state Arena is unplayable for me, I always get crappy decks and go up against what feels like meta decks (most of my Arena run end in 0 wins 50% of the time and 1-2 win the other 50%); with Duels I always at a minimum get a few wins and about 1 out of 15-20 games even get to 12 wins (most games average out around 4-6 wins). Anyways, very VERY sad about this news; I've played Hearthstone for around 4 years now and I can honestly say HS is the most playedf game EVER (1000+ hours) and I have a Switch, PS5 and a high end gaming PC but nothing had its hooks in me like HS Duels did. I'm devastated... but at least I wont be wasting anymore money on new expensions and mini-sets but I'd like too, if they kept Duels around (even if not updated like Merceneries).
Duels is the only reason I even play HS. It is insanely P2W but I recently disenchanted my entire card collection just to make ONE meta duels deck and now it's being removed. Nice.
Completely agree with you. The least thing they could do is just leave the mode in there as is, but removing it completely from the client is a really dumb move. Maybe we should all start playing Duels to crank up the numbers for the last few months it has to live.
Duels is almost the only thing I play nowadays. It's so fun getting all the right passives/cards to get a crazy combo or interaction off that you can't get in wild or standard and that is what keeps me playing. Really really sad to see this.
I've played duels since it launched. I would craft decks and play heroic runs all the time. It gave me something that no other mode could. so april will be the time I quit hearthstone. this is just depressing.
Final straw for me. This was my main game mode and most of my dust was spent keeping up with duels strategies. I never thought the day would come where I enjoy yugioh more than Hearthstone.
Wow. I stopped playing hearthstone because my favorite mode duels was getting stale and not getting any new content. I would have probably played again if they had updated it but I guess it’s gone now. Makes me feel bad, probably won’t come back ever now.
Duels to me is what revived hearthstone and kept me coming back…Standard gets SO DULL. Duels feels like something fresh where you can really get creative and play with duel class combinations. Why would they take this? I genuinely feel if duels is gone forever I will probably stop playing hearthstone
I only play HS for Duels 😢, now no reason to play anymore i guess...or is Arena fun to pick up? That felt boring in tje past due to same cards all the time
I think the reason that duels is removed instead of Mercs or twist is that those moments have dedicated content (Packs) that if they were removed would open them to a potential lawsuit.
Hs devs further showing their incompetence or trying to see just how much they can get away with without fan backlash. Considering how much they got away with the past year, probably a mix of both. It’s a damn shame, really.
What can we do to protest agains this? I actually play almost nothing but Duels. Ranked sucks so hard that I just play it to gain the experience points each week. It sucks because the system is useless: I know that even at Bronze 10 I play vs Platin ranked players just because my MMR is that high. Again and again the same boring decks in wild...
thats just actually pathetic theres no other way to put it. turns out banning a card every 6 months after it made duels impossible to play is too high maintenance. they got their hands full pushing half a patch every 2 years after all. All while being incredibly expensive to play aswell. just spitting in our face and we take it ig
Duels could have been great but the hero selection with their hero powers and treasures was all over the place leading to some classes only have one viable archetype. Along with the blotting of the card pull ment that meta grew steel, i like the mode too but with everything done to the mode it will probably be best to put it out of its misery. Also less free resources at the end of a duels season, can you imagine if they killed it because of that.
ive crafted so many cards specifically for duels. i play standard and then i play duesl. i dont play wild so now all those cards are useless to me after this.
So sad to see this mode leave. I loved this mode from the get go and was the only mode I played for a long time. I have spent so much time and money just to get the cards needed for duels but I guess that is not a reason to keep it around like mercs. They also say we have until april to play it but heroic duels is not playable atm due to some glitch.
Speaking of Update issues in other modes....I've noticed that when you try fighting The Lich King in single player using Illadin the game automatically exits, but no similar issue occurs if you use your own Lich King.... wonder if that might be one of those SNAFUs they mean
Well The Frozen Throne was released before DH and DK came out and, considering how you unlock the Arthas Paladin Skin, they probably felt it wasn’t worth overhauling the adventure to fit those two classes.
Yea, it really sucks. When I open HS and daily quest pop up to play certain classes first thing that comes to mind is what combo deck I can play in duels. I recently started playing Merc again and can say its "fun", it doesn't require a lot of time to invest ever day to do daily quests maybe 30-40 min.
I had crafted some cards for Duels, I was playing it every new expansion and I thought it was really fun. Also was amazing seeing Roffle play through it. Killing even a maintenance mode is absolutely heartbreaking.
I’ve enjoyed Classic, they removed it. I played Mercenaries, they discontinued it (but at least left there), I really loved duels - and now this mode is going to be deleted. Blizzard, you disappoint me so much. And I really don’t get it how popular Battlegrounds are. Why? Who prefers Battlegrounds to a regular Hearthstone? Unexplainable for me…
Battlegrounds ruined Hearthstone. I despised when everyone moved over to playing Battlegrounds, game is going downhill.. At least bring back Classic please.
This might be what makes me stop spending any money on Hearthstone. They keep screwing over every mode and then wondering why those modes do badly. Like, do the devs even have brains??
@@hondendsx786 No, only gold on duels.. I'm not that stupid. And I didn't even imply I spent money into duels itself.. I'm saying, that this is what might cause me to stop spending any money *at all* into the game, no packs no pre-orders, nothing. Aka I may quit the game over this. You could've inferred that if *you* had a brain 🤣
Duels has been on its way out for a while now, given their balance changes and lack of overall freshness (OG classes still have their original hero powers... Some of which are very specific like the Warlock one that revolves around Soul Fragments which is a singular expansion mechanic) I'm hopeful that the removal of Duels means Dungeon Runs become a thing again, since DR's stopped when Duels came out since it was the "New Dungeon Run content" but maybe I'm unduely optimistic. On a side note, I really hope they let us obtain the Duels portraits, at least for the 10 OG classes (DK ones have been used as Scamesium "Rewards" and the multi-class ones could be confusing). I'd always hoped that you'd get them as a reward for going 12 wins with the class or something. But if Duels is being removed, that won't be possible. But it would still be nice to get those portraits.
Yeah, the meta was often horrible lately (due to lack of balance patches) but I still enjoyed playing a little bit of duels at the beginning of each expansion. I think one of the main reasons for outright removing the mode is, that it was an excellent gold grab for f2p community. It wasn't too difficult to average 8-10 wins if you had even some idea what to do. Duels is the reason I've been able to f2p for years now, arena is much more difficult. Mainly because people tend to retire bad decks early there and of course bots. In duels you atleast have to play 3 games to reveal the passives.
Duels has been my favorite game mode in hearthstone since I came back in 2022. I feel like since I started playing they didn't really add any content to it. I know that they added the Death Knight classes since then and they added Darius (which saw about 3 months of total viability in its entire run). Aside from adding those classes, no new passives were added, all the cool ones tend to be niche, lots of signature treasures seem like they're worse than normal cards (wand of dueling, ol' faithful, Reno's Hat and Lasso, that one warrior one for amalgam decks). The problem overall was that there was just content removed and viable decks constantly getting removed so the power just slowly went down over time. There was a certain period I remember which was a bit after Nathria released where there were a bunch of good and cool decks. Not really any class was entirely unviable. Unfortunately, one deck was too strong and would otk you consistently turns 1-3. It was enabled by a passive that reduced spells by 2 but overloaded each spell by 1. The solution for this should have been to make it a tier two passive as it would have made the early otk impossible but keep a high-risk high-reward card available for the future. Instead, they just removed the passive entirely. Following this, many cool passives got removed or turned into "Ultra-Rares" meaning they never saw play in any optimized decks. I think duels would have been a great game mode if they just didn't constantly remove cool cards.
Damn... duels was my fav mode, I loved playing for achievements or trying wacky stuff that wouldnt work on ranked. It also helped me with 500 wind on dk! Will be missed a lot
That's irritating... I often use duels to complete one of the weekly quests when it comes up, especially when heroic brawliseum is the current brawl. Not all brawls are worth playing, and battlegrounds takes too long.
Unfortunately we knew this was coming. How can anyone expect anything different from Blizzard after what they have done to the Wild format. Years of the community begging for changes to broken combos and they barely get scraps. Battlegrounds is basically a different game in the same client so that doesn't really count but every other game mode since Wild has flopped and just gets little to no support after their initial marketing push to get more money. Arena dead. Solo Adventures dead. Mercenaries dead. Duels dying soon. Twist likely close behind. All they care about is ranked standard and even then that care has significantly faded over time. And of course none of the costs are getting cheaper despite Blizzard apparently not supporting these different modes.
I am so sad. Duels is fun for me as a secondary mode for me to switch between. I like traditional hearthstone, but duels gives me a fun way to find alternative way to play sometimes.
We need dual mode . So we can play 2 ranks 2 modes at the same time. Man i barely have time to play 1 or 2 hours a day at max. I then just focus to get some achievements or quests
If they want to get rid of modes, they need to get rid of Mercenaries. The biggest problem with Duels was it was too much of a mix of 3 modes, Wild, Arena and Battlegrounds, you only need to play one to get your fix.
Just freeze the mode. The problem is coding the interactions with the new cards right? Then don't add any new cards. Just leave as it is so we cna play it. And unnerf the treasures. The mode is broken and that's part of the fun
Duels is 1000X better than Twist and 1,000,000X better than Mercenaries. They better come up with something to make up for this or they'll be losing me as a player :(
Exactly right. How can anyone reward this bullshit with monetary support when they just keep deleting new modes? I was genuinely excited for the 10th anniversary of Hearthstone, and then shit like this happens. O remember when they first gutted the bucket system of Duels, that was some bs. Why even bother investing?
As much as I loathed the crazy power spike in certain deck builds, this mode was actually enjoyable to get away from the same ranked standard decks. Such a shame.
I feel like they could make duels more popular again if they brought back the themed loot pools instead of the expansion themed loot pools i used to be a duels player until they made that change cus it just annoys tf out of you
I like Duels, it’s the only mode I care to play, and I liked the format since Dalaran Heist where they improve the draft a deck as you play system. I’m probably just playing BG and Solo Adventures from April onwards. I’m just glad now that I didn’t return to HS and buy anything with money! 😅
This is really... REALLY sucks. I started playing a few days ago and I was having a lot of fun, the only other mode I play is the free mode but lately I only play against the same decks over and over and it gets a bit frustrating
The ol Activision mentality. If it doesn't squeeze easy money out of people, it's bad... Fuck I hate what Blizzard has become. Hope the company crumbles and rebuilds under MS
I can only assume either it would take longer to get rid of mercenaries mode for no real benefit or they don’t mind keeping it up and having some sucker spend real money on the in-game shop while duels is tied to the regular store.
Wow…… and to think only a couple of months ago things were looking up for Hearthstone and now it seems like they don’t even want the game to survive anymore😢
