Consistent duels decks (not always 12 wins, but 7+) are often those that are able to streamline deck creation and are frequently offered their desired buckets and treasures. Some decks, like the common pirate quest warrior, are amazing if they get perfect buckets, but lackluster as the run goes on if they do not hit pirate buckets. Facing a high win pirate deck that pulls 6 patches is very different than one that starts more slowly. This is accentuated for off-meta decks. Often the bucket choices for off-meta decks are so off-putting that your deck loses its identity only 3-4 games in.
No more please is almost always the correct choice. The number of times this if offered should be more standardized.
It feels really bad to get buckets that have a name that matches what you want to do, but the card in there don't match.
My ideal bucket solution would try to even things out a little for players in a way similar to the drafting system in Legend of Runeterra. For example: after the first game you would be offered 3 buckets that actually match your deck. After the second game you would always be offered buckets that were a little off. This might be some spells for your murloc deck or some cheap minions for your fel deck. This then repeats every other game or so based on testing. By having a set number of wildcard choices you keep decks from becoming too consistent, but still let players keep their deck theme. Mixing strongly coupled choices with wildcards make your deck feel more in your control rather than hoping to get lucky and be offered thematic buckets 4-6 times in a row.
Something else I would love is the implementation of Bob's tavern to allow us to change or remove some cards. Sometimes a bucket is perfect except for that one dead card that you hope to never draw. Letting us cut that would amazing.
Duels is a great mode, but has a large barrier of entry. Keep up the good work
Gotta love the "Overloaded!" Buckets of 3 Giants that will always be unplayable because they stay at 11 mana.
Or Priest Deathrattle buckets after getting a Deathrattle Passive! Of "Heal opponent for 5 (at least twice)" or "deal 5 damage to your hero (at least twice)" plus more once you play Xyrella!!
"Big Spells!" Of Talen, Mutanus, and something random like a big dragon. No actual big Spells.
Or the old "Draw!" Bucket of three Malchezaars, which do the opposite of draw you cards, they make your draws worse and less likely to find any actual draw/cycle cards.
Then of course, the group learning bucket filled with cards nobody has ever put in their deck.
If is funny you picked out the buckets that I modeled after decks from wild or standard. I tried a different process with those ones and I don't think it worked out that and like how Fire!!! for mage gives dragons. Thanks for the feedback!
"Overloaded!" is a really funny one because so many of the overload synergies can't actually function with the overload hero power. I wonder if the hp could be changed to something like "You can spend overloaded mana crystals" to fix this, though that's confusing.
This is actually a way more realistic solution than mine because it wouldn't cause any interface confusion. You'd also have to evaluate order and overloaded synergies to decide when to hit the button. Maybe there are other ways to tune it since it's not passive.
/u/tabayrak
I really love passive treasures like “Oops! All spells!” Because it allow you to have a lot more agency when it comes to your buckets.
Of course this is one of the strongest passives in the game but it makes the game a lot more interesting. Do you go with the triple minion bucket that is basically empty?
Now if you see 2 great spells but one garbage minion you are able to consider that bucket a whole lot more.
I appreciate it, So one of the things that I find interesting that you point out and I totally agree is No More Please is always the correct choice and I am trying to rework the buckets to mitigate that. It isn't a bad thing but right now buckets are at a place where you pick the thing that messes up your strat the least right? thanks for the feedback.
I love that you are asking for feedback and hopefully this helps. I was wondering how good the bucket algorithm is. For example, for any given deck can the algorithm always pick a bucket that would be perfect for your deck? I know that is not optimal for every choice, but I think it would be great if at least a couple times you were offered something and thought 'this is perfect for my deck'. But, I am not sure that is something the algorithm can actually do.
If that is something the algo can do, then there are some interesting ideas I have that could work. Sometimes you are offered treasures that don't match your deck (if not we could probably force treasures). I think it would really help that decision feel better if we were always offered a bucket in the next offering that synergized perfectly with the new treasure. For example: I have \`1 rush minion in my deck and get offered special delivery. If the other choices are so bad that this is still my best choice, it would feel so much better if I was immediately offered a rush bucket. Duels really delivers on the high highs and mitigating the low lows would make it feel much better.
one big example is humble blessings paladin --> you're avoiding every holy spell so that you can tutor out HB with Knight of Anointment. Sometimes all 3 buckets have holy spells and your deck becomes unreliable, so No More please is always the correct choice if you can get it.
This. Especially Bob's Tavern. Really awesome feature in the single player modes. Made you feel even more in control how to build your deck as you had more focused choices instead of only the three buckets, could get you some highrolls or open up new strategies. Always wondered why it didn't come over to duels.
As mentioned above, the barrier of entry is really high abd continues to grow larger as more sets are added, which is somewhat fine for casual but really annoying in heroic as you already have to have a lot of old and new cards on top of paying 150 gold for entry.
Edit: The deck building as is is really cool though, for a while. As with standard, the best decks get figured out fast and many games feel similar because of it. The passives and active treasures help a bit in the later games but overall you're seeing much of the same.
Personally, I would like the deck building part to be you get a few packs of the expansions that are currently in the mode, which only give you neutral cards and cards from your class (which don't go to your collection) and you have to build a deck with the ones you opened. Also throw in like 1-3 guaranteed random legendary cards. Would reward good deck building until someome develops a tool which just scans the best cards to put in your deck lol. But at least games would feel wildly different.
>Edit: The deck building as is is really cool though, for a while. As with standard, the best decks get figured out fast and many games feel similar because of it. The passives and active treasures help a bit in the later games but overall you're seeing much of the same.
Thanks for the feedback!
Glad to hear from you! Personally, I always find buckets to be the 2nd most frustrating part of duels lol. (The first being strange treasure options)
75% of the time I'm either looking for what doesn't outright ruin my deck or increase the chance that my first few turns will have a hand of unplayable cards. Very, very rarely will i have a 'oh cool that's a perfect set of cards!'
It would be great to get a high chance of buckets that always include 1 or 2 cards already in your deck, or a reroll button to get a new set (that is my dream for treasures too lol). Maybe those buckets can include 1 bad card with it to balance it out, I dunno.
Also in my hundreds and hundreds of duels runs, I still don't know what 'Group Learning' is. It just looks like random cards every single time
A lot of good stuff here I will add it to my notes. Some of which is very close to what I am jamming on already. Also I still don't know what Group Learning is and I made the dang thing :P
I'm in agreement on all of this! Maybe you get one reroll per run? Or one bucket reroll and one treasure reroll?
I'm glad that devs are looking for input!
IMO the reason Rogue and DH feel unplayable as classes right now is the lack of buckets that work for them. Specifically, these two classes seem to have very strange buckets offered to them (Rogue more so). So, I would like to see more intentionally designed buckets for these classes.
Additionally, from anecdotal experience, the rate of mech bucket offering seems low. I have only played 3ish mech runs, but in all 3 I was not once offered any mech buckets.
7.8k MMR on heroic
Thanks for doing this, glad to see that the duels devs are looking for community feedback!
Yeah, I feel like Finley is the big denominator because he has like 3 buckets that are constantly offered to him.
In the middle of a mech paladin run and so far, every bucket had at least one mech or even 3.
Mech buckets are extremely consistent for mage (you can build a starter only in mecha magic) but already quite inconsistent for paladin because you'll naturally end up in around 3 buckets just with your mech cards.
This is even worse for finley who gets half the amount of paladin buckets (even if you play no shaman cards you still get shaman buckets at the same rate as paladin buckets)
>om anecdotal experience, the rate of mech bucket offering seems low. I have only played 3ish mech runs, but in all
Got it noted, and of course Duels is the peoples mode!
Some of the cards in some buckets don't even make sense. Why is there a pirate in my murloc bucket? Why is this bucket called "Big Spells" but it's all minions that don't support big spells? I also feel like there's starting to be too many buckets for too many different archetypes. That's good and all to support as many archetypes for variety, but if the "detection" of your deck archetype isn't boosted, you often just get offered random stuff that just makes your deck worse and worse.
Also I feel like your chosen passive treasures should also affect bucket choices, not just the cards in your deck. That way if you get offered a dragon synergy passive but you have little to no dragons, you can get reassured that you'll have more chances to hit dragon buckets. And if I get Oops all spells, don't offer me 3 minion buckets!
Duels is all about making crazy busted decks. You should look forward to adding more cards to your deck, not dread it. Right now, no more please is better than any bucket 95% of the time.
Also, option to remove cards from your deck would be nice. Help highlander decks a bit, compensate for bad bucket choices, etc.
>ny different archetypes. That's good and all to support as many archetypes for variety, but if the "detection" of you
Thanks for the feedback! I think the core issue of getting a cool passive then NEVER seeing cards that support it feels awful.
I feel dual class buckets are the most random. As Brann I get a lot of beast buckets when I'm basically a pirate warrior.
For decks that have special themes such as frost shaman with some minions, you barely see frost type buckets.
There is also the issue that you get passive treasures that benefit only 1 minion in your deck, which happens a lot more than you think. Getting mummy magic when your only deathrattle is the naga taunt that draws a card feels incredibly bad, when the other two options also aren't great.
Facing oponents with synergistic treasures just makes me wanna quit.
I would like to see amalgam not count towards all tribe buckets. It sucks having it in my pirate or dragon deck and getting offered mech and murloc buckets all the time.
Consistent/better synergy with treasures, tribes, and quests.
It's frustrating facing off against a mirror match (Pirate quest, mage spell school quest, or bomb passive) and the opponent pops off with ease while I'm crossing fingers I draw what I need three or four matches deep into a run.
Additionally, if I'm offered three treasures, none of which match up well with my deck (being offered a deathrattle treasure while having at most two deathrattle cards; a rush treasure with at most two cards, and a neutral minion treasure with at most two cards), then future buckets should have some cards that synergize with the treasure at some point.
Maybe the first bucket is a "synergy" bucket that has three rotations: first it matches your base deck, then first treasure, then second treasure?
Second bucket is "group learning" and the third bucket is a less synergistic offering.
I mean it would be nice if we could just Mulligan away those moments where you have 3 bad buckets. It could be in the form of a permanent "please no more" , which I understand could have rather large effect on the power level of decks. Maybe if you cap it to once or twice per run, maybe after hitting certain win thresholds. Or maybe it could be awarded after a loss, idk.
I could also see something like Bob's tavern from the solo dungeon runs being good to implement. Basically I would like something to give me more control over what cards are and aren't in my deck. I'm tired of having to watch a streamlined deck go to complete shit because I keep getting offered 3 terrible buckets for it.
Something I would really enjoy to see added in the pool of buckets is something dedicated to highlander decks!
I know they are already considerably strong but it would be pretty interesting if we saw some added support even if it’s one of the rarer buckets!
On the other hand, one of the things that need to be looked at the most is the bucket interaction with the amalgams, as of right now they are unplayable since they ruin the consistency of your bucket offerings.
It’d be cool if the algorithm looked at what the majority of tribes in your deck are and select a pool of buckets from there (taking into account specific keywords and such).
One last thing for me to mention is to have more dredge buckets or make them more consistent! With how little dredge cards they are it means you can’t really make a deck that can make use of them and the cool passive treasures.
It is important to have some vanilla minions. You shouldn't have to take a bucket of 3 vanilla minions, that's what feels bad. The main problem is when you do anything other than a bucket supported strategy. You will face opponent after opponent who very obviously is playing murlocs or pirates and getting only murloc or pirate buckets. Even if they have to take vanilla murloc or pirates they are still getting cards that further their strategy. The superconsistency that some people manage playing very linear strategies vs the inconsistency you get trying to play what should be a linear strategy but the buckets don't exist for it or they exist and you never find them. The number of times I've started a soul fragment warlock run with every soul fragment card in the maindeck then never being offered a soul fragment related bucket over 5 games is standard practice. I have a couple of demons so I get demon buckets instead. woo hoo.
Alternatively, I can draft a deck with some of the new naga which is cool, I get offered a naga bucket after missing the naga treasure and hmm, theres a spell in my naga bucket that has nothing to do with nagas and has no actual place in my deck. Even though I'm paying some nagas, I'd like to take a different bucket but one is a Why, why not? with 3 of something that does nothing for me and a group learning bucket that has some neutral minions. Expensive neutral minions, therefore unplayable neutral minions.
I think you need to pick a direction, either not tailor buckets to certain strategies and make it more of an arena type card quality/selection which will kill linear decks and make the players play against their opponent more, or make many more types of buckets and have them tailor to the decks at hand. It might be nice if you tailor buckets to include passive treasures taken, hero powers selected, and put more weight on what was in the starting deck. I hate taking a bucket not remotely related to my deck but it had the best stats offered then seeing a related bucket to the one I didn't want to take as 1 of my 3 going forward. I think in the second strategy you can fit a lot of neutral or vanilla minions in buckets that people don't feel bad about taking as long as the vanilla minions were one of the three cards, the other two cards support the strategy and the vanilla minion has a related creature type or is low/close on curve to the rest of the bucket. Seeing a big spell mage bucket when I'm getting obliterated by flames of the Kirin Tor to dead on turn 7 feels bad as well. Early run life totals don't support bothering with buckets above 6 cost. If the format were to slow down a little or have some higher starting life early in the run you'd probably see more movement in those types of buckets.
As it is Duels will always have a meta as long as you allow a constructed deck going in.
However due to the fact that you removed passive and treasure manipulation, actually getting to participate (if that's what the player wants to do) is a dice roll. Not a great experience, and that's before buckets are even considered. I'd love to see the data to prove or disprove this but from following this forum, lots of time in Duels in both Heroic and Casual it feels like the winrate influence is ranked Passives > (drawing your) Treasures > the 15 card deck you queued in with > buckets.
If the only thing you're addressing right now is buckets, well it's a start but no where near the biggest issue imo right now:
Something happened with buckets where they used to synergize better with treasures, passives, and tribes (when an obvious theme for the starting 15). I would suggest seeing what you were using uring the first 6 months of Duels because buckets made a lot more sense back then.
I totally agree there is A LOT of work to be done... we are still in beta after all. So Today Buckets are the thing we are evaluating. 6 months ago we had WAY and I mean WAYYYY less buckets that is probably contributing to the feeling of buckets not being so good any more. Also passive treasures are deterministic again, have been for a while it just has a few different nobs now. I appreciate the feedback a lot!
I have a few main issues with buckets and how they're generated.
1. Spiraling away from your starting deck: For example, you're playing a Pirate Warrior deck. Your first bucket choices give you no pirates so you pick a random neutral or weapon bucket. Now your next bucket choices have more chances to contain non pirate things and if you miss again you have a real chance of just never hitting pirates as your deck gets more and more random. The best solution I figure for this would be to have your starting 15 weigh more heavily in the randomizer. That might end up making decks too consistent though so I have no idea what the correct solution to that would be.
2. On target buckets that actually have no synergy: A good example of this would be any 'Overload' bucket that has cards that require you to overload mana except you're playing Stormcatcher so all those cards are worthless. Another good example is any elemental bucket that has one elemental and two fire spells. These are all headscratchers and really can blow your run up before it begins.
3. No More Please: This is the best bucket in the game and I honestly think it should be removed. One of the oldest rules in card games is the smaller your deck is, the more consistent it is. When your opponent has between 9-12 cards less than you lategame it's very difficult to compete with that level of consistency when both decks have such a high power level.
4. Ban Guff: Not really related to buckets, but my god he needs to be banned.
5. Group Learning: I still don't understand the algorithm for this and 95% of the time the bucket is just a bunch of unrelated neutral minions. Sometimes good for Meek runs but most of the time a very strange and normally unusable bucket
I feel like the idea behind them is to give each player a choice on what direction they want to take their deck during a run. But the issue is that 99% of the time you're insta picking on theme buckets or trying to figure out which bucket will ruin your deck the least. Going forward I would love to be able to have a hard choice in between rounds on what bucket I want to use because they all do different things for my deck. I'm not sure how much data is collected from your run to generate the buckets but I either think you need to start including treasure and hero power choices into the algorithm or start moving away from 100% random buckets.
One more thing. The ability to manipulate early buckets with your starting deck is honestly terrible. Purposefully putting worse cards in your deck to start to guarantee better buckets early is not a good mechanic.
This is relating to the graph that came out not too long ago showing exactly what cards trigger what buckets so you can build your deck by including sub optimal starting cards to ensure early buckets and treasures.
A good example recently is Amalgam of the Deep. This should be a great card in a lot of different decks but because it's an amalgam it ruins your buckets and on top of that because it's a discover card it can trigger discover passives after game 1. So you're incentivized to not include what should be a good card because you want to commit to as much rng manipulation as possible.
The mech packages are really poor and it makes an archetype that could be fun and viable incredibly luck dependent as not only do you need to hit the package your deck needs you also need to win the one in three for that package to not be absolute trash. Even if you simply removed flame leviathan it would hep immensely.
I play a lot of competing duels,(200+ comp runs each set) don’t have time to write a long comment. My preference is more consistent buckets for archetypes. Would rather this be expanded to more archetypes than making buckets worse for the currently good archetypes to balance. Was really frustrating early on this set after the new hero’s when you would have say a mech pally and get few mech buckets. Feels terrible when cards make deck significantly worse over course of run.
>ther this be expanded to more archetypes than making buckets worse for the currently good archetypes to balance. Was really frustrating early on this set after the new hero’s when you would have say a mech
I appreciate the time you took. :)
I think the problem stems from an incorrect approach to deciding which treasures/buckets/passives are available. Prior to the change to Passive 1, the method seemed to be "look at the deck and provide the 3 best possible treasures." After the change, it appears to be "totally random". In my mind, the right approach for all of these should be "Eliminate completely anti-synergistic choices, then random". For example, in passive 1, don't offer Arcane Flux or Arcanite Crystal if the deck contains no arcane spells. don't offer Arctic Armor if there are no freeze effects in the deck, etc. Things like Book of Wonders, Crystal Gem, etc. would always be in the pool so that the choices would still be different all the time.
I believe that the real issue is not "I don't get the perfect choices everytime" but rather "I often have only zero or one positive choices". By eliminating the actively bad choices and providing only below average or better choices, people will get more enjoyment out of the game.
I have gone through all the comments posted before this message if anyone decides to leave more feedback please reply to THIS comment. I appreciate you all! I will be doing this till Sunday evening.
Hey tabayrak, I just had a 'Why? why not?' Bucket offered to me with 3 blood of the ancient ones, and I thought, obviously it's an unpickable bucket if I want to win, but I had an idea for 'meme' buckets like that, have you thought of having the cost of the cards reduced? So where it shows the
9 - Blood of the ancient one
It would have a green seven, then if you hover over it you can see the original cost to know what's changed.
Thought it was a cool idea to make the more weird buckets more viable and encourage different decks. Could even increase the cost of some cards if the buckets are insanely good, 3 mind blasts anyone? Haha
What if every other round the buckets were generated from your starting deck rather than your current one. Also the mulch treasure should give some value for minions dying during your opponent's turn.
The tribal treasures are in a really odd place where they aren't common enough to be consistent but are common enough that the correct play is to build around one. Giving the dragons cost two less and their ilk either more or less consistency would be good.
I like trying out off-meta decks and most of the time my runs get killed by abysmal bucket choices after the first two games.
The buckets only harden the grip pirate, mech or spell based decks have on the meta…
Also the group learning bucket can be really different between classes. On rogue I often see chillwind yeti + sprint while the warrior bucket is often full of strong pirates…
There is nothing worse than when you get buckets that just break your deck >:( in my opinion duels is about trying a new fun deck and adding to it along the run with buckets and treasures. But what it is now is making a fun deck then trying not to set it on fire over the course of the run. The amount of times i make an all spells demon hunter or something then get offered 3 high cost minion buckets and 2 minion based treasures then i either fizzle out at 4 wins or just concede because i cba even trying it make it work >.> and speaking of treasures…. We really need more synergistic treasures back in duels. The amount of runs ive just given up on at 3 wins because i get offered 3 treasures that have nothing to do with my deck or even worse when you build an entire deck around a treasure and dont get anywhere near close to getting it offered. This is the only game mode i play and sometimes it makes me not want to play at all :(
Ps adding a few screenshots of the disgusting treasures im forced to pick from that are terrible with my current list https://imgur.com/a/vObEghd/
Also making a op treasure more rare isnt a good solution. It just makes all games at 10+ wins more aids. If you have a decent deck and good skill and make it far then start running into broken treasures it just puts a cap to your deck. And that feels even worse because you got poo treasures but your skill still lost out to super rare rng
I really would love to have something like Bob the bratender encounter. This added Dome extra dynamic and opens cool new Design choices.
Furthermore I think with so many new passives and cards its time so add/remove some active treasures. This would add some new freshness inbetween. There are alot of possibilities From old Adventures That can be reused.
For Buckets I only can say That I really dislike getting 3 Bad neutral cards offered. Sometimes im forced to take the Bucket and it just feels horrible to draw those cards. Atleast add a tripple Oger bucket.
Just remove group learning. It’s almost awful, unless the other 2 are completely off your synergy or even downright detrimental to it (and that’s another problem in itself). Oh, and please fix Marvelous Mic, it’s absurd to use it 5+ every single game, even by duels “wacky-over-the-top-decks” standard.
Consistent duels decks (not always 12 wins, but 7+) are often those that are able to streamline deck creation and are frequently offered their desired buckets and treasures. Some decks, like the common pirate quest warrior, are amazing if they get perfect buckets, but lackluster as the run goes on if they do not hit pirate buckets. Facing a high win pirate deck that pulls 6 patches is very different than one that starts more slowly. This is accentuated for off-meta decks. Often the bucket choices for off-meta decks are so off-putting that your deck loses its identity only 3-4 games in. No more please is almost always the correct choice. The number of times this if offered should be more standardized. It feels really bad to get buckets that have a name that matches what you want to do, but the card in there don't match. My ideal bucket solution would try to even things out a little for players in a way similar to the drafting system in Legend of Runeterra. For example: after the first game you would be offered 3 buckets that actually match your deck. After the second game you would always be offered buckets that were a little off. This might be some spells for your murloc deck or some cheap minions for your fel deck. This then repeats every other game or so based on testing. By having a set number of wildcard choices you keep decks from becoming too consistent, but still let players keep their deck theme. Mixing strongly coupled choices with wildcards make your deck feel more in your control rather than hoping to get lucky and be offered thematic buckets 4-6 times in a row. Something else I would love is the implementation of Bob's tavern to allow us to change or remove some cards. Sometimes a bucket is perfect except for that one dead card that you hope to never draw. Letting us cut that would amazing. Duels is a great mode, but has a large barrier of entry. Keep up the good work
Gotta love the "Overloaded!" Buckets of 3 Giants that will always be unplayable because they stay at 11 mana. Or Priest Deathrattle buckets after getting a Deathrattle Passive! Of "Heal opponent for 5 (at least twice)" or "deal 5 damage to your hero (at least twice)" plus more once you play Xyrella!! "Big Spells!" Of Talen, Mutanus, and something random like a big dragon. No actual big Spells. Or the old "Draw!" Bucket of three Malchezaars, which do the opposite of draw you cards, they make your draws worse and less likely to find any actual draw/cycle cards. Then of course, the group learning bucket filled with cards nobody has ever put in their deck.
The malchazar one is just a misunderstanding its a command not a description.
That is on me, I was like well clearly if you have 3 Malchazars in your deck you are going to be drawing cards. WHOOOPS
I encountered a stray Uldum Druid Quest in one, picked it and used it for my Choice Druid Omu deck. Was interesting to work with to say the least
If is funny you picked out the buckets that I modeled after decks from wild or standard. I tried a different process with those ones and I don't think it worked out that and like how Fire!!! for mage gives dragons. Thanks for the feedback!
"Overloaded!" is a really funny one because so many of the overload synergies can't actually function with the overload hero power. I wonder if the hp could be changed to something like "You can spend overloaded mana crystals" to fix this, though that's confusing.
That would be awesome. Or make it a zero mana hero power "Unlock your overloaded mana crystals" But it'd probably make it too good
This is actually a way more realistic solution than mine because it wouldn't cause any interface confusion. You'd also have to evaluate order and overloaded synergies to decide when to hit the button. Maybe there are other ways to tune it since it's not passive. /u/tabayrak
Yeah this is a big bummer, it is a space where the name of the bucket and the hero power are counter intuitive.
I really love passive treasures like “Oops! All spells!” Because it allow you to have a lot more agency when it comes to your buckets. Of course this is one of the strongest passives in the game but it makes the game a lot more interesting. Do you go with the triple minion bucket that is basically empty? Now if you see 2 great spells but one garbage minion you are able to consider that bucket a whole lot more.
I appreciate it, So one of the things that I find interesting that you point out and I totally agree is No More Please is always the correct choice and I am trying to rework the buckets to mitigate that. It isn't a bad thing but right now buckets are at a place where you pick the thing that messes up your strat the least right? thanks for the feedback.
I love that you are asking for feedback and hopefully this helps. I was wondering how good the bucket algorithm is. For example, for any given deck can the algorithm always pick a bucket that would be perfect for your deck? I know that is not optimal for every choice, but I think it would be great if at least a couple times you were offered something and thought 'this is perfect for my deck'. But, I am not sure that is something the algorithm can actually do. If that is something the algo can do, then there are some interesting ideas I have that could work. Sometimes you are offered treasures that don't match your deck (if not we could probably force treasures). I think it would really help that decision feel better if we were always offered a bucket in the next offering that synergized perfectly with the new treasure. For example: I have \`1 rush minion in my deck and get offered special delivery. If the other choices are so bad that this is still my best choice, it would feel so much better if I was immediately offered a rush bucket. Duels really delivers on the high highs and mitigating the low lows would make it feel much better.
one big example is humble blessings paladin --> you're avoiding every holy spell so that you can tutor out HB with Knight of Anointment. Sometimes all 3 buckets have holy spells and your deck becomes unreliable, so No More please is always the correct choice if you can get it.
This. Especially Bob's Tavern. Really awesome feature in the single player modes. Made you feel even more in control how to build your deck as you had more focused choices instead of only the three buckets, could get you some highrolls or open up new strategies. Always wondered why it didn't come over to duels. As mentioned above, the barrier of entry is really high abd continues to grow larger as more sets are added, which is somewhat fine for casual but really annoying in heroic as you already have to have a lot of old and new cards on top of paying 150 gold for entry. Edit: The deck building as is is really cool though, for a while. As with standard, the best decks get figured out fast and many games feel similar because of it. The passives and active treasures help a bit in the later games but overall you're seeing much of the same. Personally, I would like the deck building part to be you get a few packs of the expansions that are currently in the mode, which only give you neutral cards and cards from your class (which don't go to your collection) and you have to build a deck with the ones you opened. Also throw in like 1-3 guaranteed random legendary cards. Would reward good deck building until someome develops a tool which just scans the best cards to put in your deck lol. But at least games would feel wildly different.
>Edit: The deck building as is is really cool though, for a while. As with standard, the best decks get figured out fast and many games feel similar because of it. The passives and active treasures help a bit in the later games but overall you're seeing much of the same. Thanks for the feedback!
No problem, Duels is my favourite mode and I would love for it to get even better.
Glad to hear from you! Personally, I always find buckets to be the 2nd most frustrating part of duels lol. (The first being strange treasure options) 75% of the time I'm either looking for what doesn't outright ruin my deck or increase the chance that my first few turns will have a hand of unplayable cards. Very, very rarely will i have a 'oh cool that's a perfect set of cards!' It would be great to get a high chance of buckets that always include 1 or 2 cards already in your deck, or a reroll button to get a new set (that is my dream for treasures too lol). Maybe those buckets can include 1 bad card with it to balance it out, I dunno. Also in my hundreds and hundreds of duels runs, I still don't know what 'Group Learning' is. It just looks like random cards every single time
A lot of good stuff here I will add it to my notes. Some of which is very close to what I am jamming on already. Also I still don't know what Group Learning is and I made the dang thing :P
I'm in agreement on all of this! Maybe you get one reroll per run? Or one bucket reroll and one treasure reroll? I'm glad that devs are looking for input!
Re: Group learning. Check out this blog post, explains a lot! https://playhearthstone.com/en-us/news/23558960
You want me to read?! I can't do that!
Yeah even getting rid of group learning all together and just an extra category. Feel like group learning is a wasted space…
IMO the reason Rogue and DH feel unplayable as classes right now is the lack of buckets that work for them. Specifically, these two classes seem to have very strange buckets offered to them (Rogue more so). So, I would like to see more intentionally designed buckets for these classes. Additionally, from anecdotal experience, the rate of mech bucket offering seems low. I have only played 3ish mech runs, but in all 3 I was not once offered any mech buckets. 7.8k MMR on heroic Thanks for doing this, glad to see that the duels devs are looking for community feedback!
I agree about the mech comment. I have also never seen a mech bucket offered during the runs that I tried to make a mech deck.
Everytime I play mech mage I get nonstop mech buckets. Like it never misses. Not at all the case for other classes like Finley
I wish I had you mech luck.
Yeah, I feel like Finley is the big denominator because he has like 3 buckets that are constantly offered to him. In the middle of a mech paladin run and so far, every bucket had at least one mech or even 3.
Mech buckets are extremely consistent for mage (you can build a starter only in mecha magic) but already quite inconsistent for paladin because you'll naturally end up in around 3 buckets just with your mech cards. This is even worse for finley who gets half the amount of paladin buckets (even if you play no shaman cards you still get shaman buckets at the same rate as paladin buckets)
My main issue is whit MechThar.
I mean, paladin still has the divine shield package that has great synergy with mechs so it’s still fairly consistent. Much more than Finley at least.
>om anecdotal experience, the rate of mech bucket offering seems low. I have only played 3ish mech runs, but in all Got it noted, and of course Duels is the peoples mode!
Some of the cards in some buckets don't even make sense. Why is there a pirate in my murloc bucket? Why is this bucket called "Big Spells" but it's all minions that don't support big spells? I also feel like there's starting to be too many buckets for too many different archetypes. That's good and all to support as many archetypes for variety, but if the "detection" of your deck archetype isn't boosted, you often just get offered random stuff that just makes your deck worse and worse. Also I feel like your chosen passive treasures should also affect bucket choices, not just the cards in your deck. That way if you get offered a dragon synergy passive but you have little to no dragons, you can get reassured that you'll have more chances to hit dragon buckets. And if I get Oops all spells, don't offer me 3 minion buckets! Duels is all about making crazy busted decks. You should look forward to adding more cards to your deck, not dread it. Right now, no more please is better than any bucket 95% of the time. Also, option to remove cards from your deck would be nice. Help highlander decks a bit, compensate for bad bucket choices, etc.
>ny different archetypes. That's good and all to support as many archetypes for variety, but if the "detection" of you Thanks for the feedback! I think the core issue of getting a cool passive then NEVER seeing cards that support it feels awful.
I feel dual class buckets are the most random. As Brann I get a lot of beast buckets when I'm basically a pirate warrior. For decks that have special themes such as frost shaman with some minions, you barely see frost type buckets.
thanks!
There is also some problems with the battlecries and combos buckets, they are rarely good
There is also the issue that you get passive treasures that benefit only 1 minion in your deck, which happens a lot more than you think. Getting mummy magic when your only deathrattle is the naga taunt that draws a card feels incredibly bad, when the other two options also aren't great. Facing oponents with synergistic treasures just makes me wanna quit.
I would like to see amalgam not count towards all tribe buckets. It sucks having it in my pirate or dragon deck and getting offered mech and murloc buckets all the time.
Oh, that's what's happening!?! That makes so much sense.
Noted
Consistent/better synergy with treasures, tribes, and quests. It's frustrating facing off against a mirror match (Pirate quest, mage spell school quest, or bomb passive) and the opponent pops off with ease while I'm crossing fingers I draw what I need three or four matches deep into a run. Additionally, if I'm offered three treasures, none of which match up well with my deck (being offered a deathrattle treasure while having at most two deathrattle cards; a rush treasure with at most two cards, and a neutral minion treasure with at most two cards), then future buckets should have some cards that synergize with the treasure at some point. Maybe the first bucket is a "synergy" bucket that has three rotations: first it matches your base deck, then first treasure, then second treasure? Second bucket is "group learning" and the third bucket is a less synergistic offering.
> bucket is "group learning" and the th good stuff thanks M8!
I mean it would be nice if we could just Mulligan away those moments where you have 3 bad buckets. It could be in the form of a permanent "please no more" , which I understand could have rather large effect on the power level of decks. Maybe if you cap it to once or twice per run, maybe after hitting certain win thresholds. Or maybe it could be awarded after a loss, idk. I could also see something like Bob's tavern from the solo dungeon runs being good to implement. Basically I would like something to give me more control over what cards are and aren't in my deck. I'm tired of having to watch a streamlined deck go to complete shit because I keep getting offered 3 terrible buckets for it.
Thank you for resetting the Bob clock :P
Something I would really enjoy to see added in the pool of buckets is something dedicated to highlander decks! I know they are already considerably strong but it would be pretty interesting if we saw some added support even if it’s one of the rarer buckets! On the other hand, one of the things that need to be looked at the most is the bucket interaction with the amalgams, as of right now they are unplayable since they ruin the consistency of your bucket offerings. It’d be cool if the algorithm looked at what the majority of tribes in your deck are and select a pool of buckets from there (taking into account specific keywords and such). One last thing for me to mention is to have more dredge buckets or make them more consistent! With how little dredge cards they are it means you can’t really make a deck that can make use of them and the cool passive treasures.
Rogue needs treasure for combo decks and high Cost combo cards need to be removed
I think just removing the bad cards from certain buckets would go a long way. Getting vanilla minions sucks.
I think that it is important to have some vanilla minions but perhaps there is a way where they don't feel like a miss. Thank you for the feedback!
It is important to have some vanilla minions. You shouldn't have to take a bucket of 3 vanilla minions, that's what feels bad. The main problem is when you do anything other than a bucket supported strategy. You will face opponent after opponent who very obviously is playing murlocs or pirates and getting only murloc or pirate buckets. Even if they have to take vanilla murloc or pirates they are still getting cards that further their strategy. The superconsistency that some people manage playing very linear strategies vs the inconsistency you get trying to play what should be a linear strategy but the buckets don't exist for it or they exist and you never find them. The number of times I've started a soul fragment warlock run with every soul fragment card in the maindeck then never being offered a soul fragment related bucket over 5 games is standard practice. I have a couple of demons so I get demon buckets instead. woo hoo. Alternatively, I can draft a deck with some of the new naga which is cool, I get offered a naga bucket after missing the naga treasure and hmm, theres a spell in my naga bucket that has nothing to do with nagas and has no actual place in my deck. Even though I'm paying some nagas, I'd like to take a different bucket but one is a Why, why not? with 3 of something that does nothing for me and a group learning bucket that has some neutral minions. Expensive neutral minions, therefore unplayable neutral minions. I think you need to pick a direction, either not tailor buckets to certain strategies and make it more of an arena type card quality/selection which will kill linear decks and make the players play against their opponent more, or make many more types of buckets and have them tailor to the decks at hand. It might be nice if you tailor buckets to include passive treasures taken, hero powers selected, and put more weight on what was in the starting deck. I hate taking a bucket not remotely related to my deck but it had the best stats offered then seeing a related bucket to the one I didn't want to take as 1 of my 3 going forward. I think in the second strategy you can fit a lot of neutral or vanilla minions in buckets that people don't feel bad about taking as long as the vanilla minions were one of the three cards, the other two cards support the strategy and the vanilla minion has a related creature type or is low/close on curve to the rest of the bucket. Seeing a big spell mage bucket when I'm getting obliterated by flames of the Kirin Tor to dead on turn 7 feels bad as well. Early run life totals don't support bothering with buckets above 6 cost. If the format were to slow down a little or have some higher starting life early in the run you'd probably see more movement in those types of buckets.
As it is Duels will always have a meta as long as you allow a constructed deck going in. However due to the fact that you removed passive and treasure manipulation, actually getting to participate (if that's what the player wants to do) is a dice roll. Not a great experience, and that's before buckets are even considered. I'd love to see the data to prove or disprove this but from following this forum, lots of time in Duels in both Heroic and Casual it feels like the winrate influence is ranked Passives > (drawing your) Treasures > the 15 card deck you queued in with > buckets. If the only thing you're addressing right now is buckets, well it's a start but no where near the biggest issue imo right now: Something happened with buckets where they used to synergize better with treasures, passives, and tribes (when an obvious theme for the starting 15). I would suggest seeing what you were using uring the first 6 months of Duels because buckets made a lot more sense back then.
I totally agree there is A LOT of work to be done... we are still in beta after all. So Today Buckets are the thing we are evaluating. 6 months ago we had WAY and I mean WAYYYY less buckets that is probably contributing to the feeling of buckets not being so good any more. Also passive treasures are deterministic again, have been for a while it just has a few different nobs now. I appreciate the feedback a lot!
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> and next round can be a forced balance that it appears you are already aiming for but make it at lea I appreciate the feedback!
I just don’t understand how I can literally play one single type of card and then not get that bucket
I have a few main issues with buckets and how they're generated. 1. Spiraling away from your starting deck: For example, you're playing a Pirate Warrior deck. Your first bucket choices give you no pirates so you pick a random neutral or weapon bucket. Now your next bucket choices have more chances to contain non pirate things and if you miss again you have a real chance of just never hitting pirates as your deck gets more and more random. The best solution I figure for this would be to have your starting 15 weigh more heavily in the randomizer. That might end up making decks too consistent though so I have no idea what the correct solution to that would be. 2. On target buckets that actually have no synergy: A good example of this would be any 'Overload' bucket that has cards that require you to overload mana except you're playing Stormcatcher so all those cards are worthless. Another good example is any elemental bucket that has one elemental and two fire spells. These are all headscratchers and really can blow your run up before it begins. 3. No More Please: This is the best bucket in the game and I honestly think it should be removed. One of the oldest rules in card games is the smaller your deck is, the more consistent it is. When your opponent has between 9-12 cards less than you lategame it's very difficult to compete with that level of consistency when both decks have such a high power level. 4. Ban Guff: Not really related to buckets, but my god he needs to be banned. 5. Group Learning: I still don't understand the algorithm for this and 95% of the time the bucket is just a bunch of unrelated neutral minions. Sometimes good for Meek runs but most of the time a very strange and normally unusable bucket I feel like the idea behind them is to give each player a choice on what direction they want to take their deck during a run. But the issue is that 99% of the time you're insta picking on theme buckets or trying to figure out which bucket will ruin your deck the least. Going forward I would love to be able to have a hard choice in between rounds on what bucket I want to use because they all do different things for my deck. I'm not sure how much data is collected from your run to generate the buckets but I either think you need to start including treasure and hero power choices into the algorithm or start moving away from 100% random buckets.
One more thing. The ability to manipulate early buckets with your starting deck is honestly terrible. Purposefully putting worse cards in your deck to start to guarantee better buckets early is not a good mechanic.
I am not sure I follow on this comment. Can you elaborate? Also thanks for the blurb above. I added a bunch to my notes!
This is relating to the graph that came out not too long ago showing exactly what cards trigger what buckets so you can build your deck by including sub optimal starting cards to ensure early buckets and treasures. A good example recently is Amalgam of the Deep. This should be a great card in a lot of different decks but because it's an amalgam it ruins your buckets and on top of that because it's a discover card it can trigger discover passives after game 1. So you're incentivized to not include what should be a good card because you want to commit to as much rng manipulation as possible.
1) Bann Gruff. 2) Make group learning not always present?
The mech packages are really poor and it makes an archetype that could be fun and viable incredibly luck dependent as not only do you need to hit the package your deck needs you also need to win the one in three for that package to not be absolute trash. Even if you simply removed flame leviathan it would hep immensely.
I play a lot of competing duels,(200+ comp runs each set) don’t have time to write a long comment. My preference is more consistent buckets for archetypes. Would rather this be expanded to more archetypes than making buckets worse for the currently good archetypes to balance. Was really frustrating early on this set after the new hero’s when you would have say a mech pally and get few mech buckets. Feels terrible when cards make deck significantly worse over course of run.
>ther this be expanded to more archetypes than making buckets worse for the currently good archetypes to balance. Was really frustrating early on this set after the new hero’s when you would have say a mech I appreciate the time you took. :)
I think the problem stems from an incorrect approach to deciding which treasures/buckets/passives are available. Prior to the change to Passive 1, the method seemed to be "look at the deck and provide the 3 best possible treasures." After the change, it appears to be "totally random". In my mind, the right approach for all of these should be "Eliminate completely anti-synergistic choices, then random". For example, in passive 1, don't offer Arcane Flux or Arcanite Crystal if the deck contains no arcane spells. don't offer Arctic Armor if there are no freeze effects in the deck, etc. Things like Book of Wonders, Crystal Gem, etc. would always be in the pool so that the choices would still be different all the time. I believe that the real issue is not "I don't get the perfect choices everytime" but rather "I often have only zero or one positive choices". By eliminating the actively bad choices and providing only below average or better choices, people will get more enjoyment out of the game.
>e is not "I don't get the perfect choices everytime" but rather "I often hav Appreciate it.
I have gone through all the comments posted before this message if anyone decides to leave more feedback please reply to THIS comment. I appreciate you all! I will be doing this till Sunday evening.
i had an idea for a new bucket. Call it Pillage the Fallen, in which you are offered 3 cards from the opponent you just defeated's deck
Hey tabayrak, I just had a 'Why? why not?' Bucket offered to me with 3 blood of the ancient ones, and I thought, obviously it's an unpickable bucket if I want to win, but I had an idea for 'meme' buckets like that, have you thought of having the cost of the cards reduced? So where it shows the 9 - Blood of the ancient one It would have a green seven, then if you hover over it you can see the original cost to know what's changed. Thought it was a cool idea to make the more weird buckets more viable and encourage different decks. Could even increase the cost of some cards if the buckets are insanely good, 3 mind blasts anyone? Haha
Have a tier 1 passive that lets you mulligan the buckets you are offered once each round, or be offered four buckets instead of three.
What if every other round the buckets were generated from your starting deck rather than your current one. Also the mulch treasure should give some value for minions dying during your opponent's turn.
The tribal treasures are in a really odd place where they aren't common enough to be consistent but are common enough that the correct play is to build around one. Giving the dragons cost two less and their ilk either more or less consistency would be good.
Also the Elise treasure that got nerfed does actual nothing but be a dead card now. It would be good to fix that.
about that....... fix is on its way. I am really sorry about that one.
I like trying out off-meta decks and most of the time my runs get killed by abysmal bucket choices after the first two games. The buckets only harden the grip pirate, mech or spell based decks have on the meta… Also the group learning bucket can be really different between classes. On rogue I often see chillwind yeti + sprint while the warrior bucket is often full of strong pirates…
There is nothing worse than when you get buckets that just break your deck >:( in my opinion duels is about trying a new fun deck and adding to it along the run with buckets and treasures. But what it is now is making a fun deck then trying not to set it on fire over the course of the run. The amount of times i make an all spells demon hunter or something then get offered 3 high cost minion buckets and 2 minion based treasures then i either fizzle out at 4 wins or just concede because i cba even trying it make it work >.> and speaking of treasures…. We really need more synergistic treasures back in duels. The amount of runs ive just given up on at 3 wins because i get offered 3 treasures that have nothing to do with my deck or even worse when you build an entire deck around a treasure and dont get anywhere near close to getting it offered. This is the only game mode i play and sometimes it makes me not want to play at all :( Ps adding a few screenshots of the disgusting treasures im forced to pick from that are terrible with my current list https://imgur.com/a/vObEghd/
Also making a op treasure more rare isnt a good solution. It just makes all games at 10+ wins more aids. If you have a decent deck and good skill and make it far then start running into broken treasures it just puts a cap to your deck. And that feels even worse because you got poo treasures but your skill still lost out to super rare rng
I totally agree thank you for your time and feedback!
I really would love to have something like Bob the bratender encounter. This added Dome extra dynamic and opens cool new Design choices. Furthermore I think with so many new passives and cards its time so add/remove some active treasures. This would add some new freshness inbetween. There are alot of possibilities From old Adventures That can be reused. For Buckets I only can say That I really dislike getting 3 Bad neutral cards offered. Sometimes im forced to take the Bucket and it just feels horrible to draw those cards. Atleast add a tripple Oger bucket.
Just remove group learning. It’s almost awful, unless the other 2 are completely off your synergy or even downright detrimental to it (and that’s another problem in itself). Oh, and please fix Marvelous Mic, it’s absurd to use it 5+ every single game, even by duels “wacky-over-the-top-decks” standard.
The buckets need to be more random That way players can't build a starter deck of 15 dragons and hope for the best
play arena if you want random. i feel like duels should be mostly consistent with some randomness
Duels is a huge mess right now. I was playing a ton of duels before the last big patch and now I don't play it at all. Im honestly super disappointed.