I Am Not Prepared: My Race to 1000 Demon Hunter Wins (Grand Finale)

As I stare into the mirror again, 1000 wins later, bent but not broken, it feels like I’ve achieved all the VENGEANCE I wanted to. For the foreseeable future, that is: this was a fun experience overall but no facet of gameplay can be interfaced with so thoroughly without getting at least a little sour on it in the process. So how does Demon Hunter feel like with almost 2k games in the mirror? Was it a good inclusion and what could have gone better? It’s time to look back at my journey and reflect on what the tumultuous arrival of Illidan was like for Hearthstone as a whole.

CLIMB LOG

• Introduction – 0/1000
• Week 1 – 118/1000
• Week 2 – 147/1000
• Week 3 – 208/1000
• Week 4 – 280/1000
• Week 5 – 388/1000
• Week 6 – 421/1000
• Week 7 – 529/1000
• Week 8 – 597/1000
• Week 9 – 640/1000
• Week 10 – 672/1000
• Week 11 – 704/1000
• Week 12 – 752/1000
• Finale – 1000/1000

So… What Was It Like?

I spent almost the entirety of the Ashes of Outlands meta playing Demon Hunter, with the explicit goal of grinding out the 1000 wins as part of this weekly article series. Aiming for 70 wins a week (or ten per day on average), it was a target I met fairly comfortably at the end, pulling back the past fortnight for a chance to play a bit in the post-nerf metagame before I close out this column.

It says a lot about the monstrous nature of the class that this marks the first time it hasn’t topped the HSReplay winrate charts since its arrival, surviving a plethora of nerfs and still posting a healthy 50.1% winrate, placing it third at the time of writing. At the end of the day, not much has changed in the Tempo Demon Hunter decklists even after this nerf, with Escaped Manasaber (a card already seen in Chinese builds early on in the expansion) slotted back in to bridge the extra mana gap. Kayn Sunfury and Warglaives of Azzinoth both stayed in the builds, though not every high Legend archetype features Metamorphosis at this point.

The general playstyle of Tempo Demon Hunter was one I enjoyed greatly, mainly because it harkened back to a more innocent time in Hearthstone where the cards you actually put in your deck comprised the majority of your gameplan. The ability to flood the board early and then go for an aggro-control playstyle reminded me of classic Zoo archetypes, and the weapon-based removal and carefully managed health totals brought back fond memories of aggressive Rogue and Warrior archetypes from metas long gone.

Of course, I can only report on what it was like playing with Demon Hunter: I shudder to think what it must have been like going up against it over and over again. There’s no denying Demon Hunter arrived in a busted form and it was fairly easy to rack up wins in the early portion of the expansion, especially before the fabled day one patch. Of all the different lists out there I’ve got to play over the last few months, I probably enjoyed the Priestess of Fury builds the most: it provided a consistent early-game curve with way too effective burn finishers at the end of it, and every build from that point on felt somewhat awkward and clunky to play with, susceptible to Warrior clears. I don’t mind running out of gas but let me have my first few turns of board lead until that point, please.

All in all, had the class been significantly weaker or built around a more “created by-y” playstyle, I probably would have been a lot more frustrated by this project. Even so, the last leg of the journey was quite the grind, and I’m looking forward to taking a break from Constructed until the arrival of the new set. After all, I only really had one archetype to play with over the course of this entire experiment.

Demon Hunter: Was It Worth It?

It begs the question – how much did we get out of the long-awaited addition of a tenth class to the game? Though its gameplay style is quite unique, it remains to be seen how much variety you can get out of Demon Hunter in the long run. A cheap damage-dealing hero power will always naturally push the class towards a more aggressive style, and any strong defensive weapon or card draw – tools you would naturally use to bolster different archetypes – could very well end up being co-opted by aggressive builds, a trend we’ve often seen in the past.

There’s also no denying the fact that the final design team has made monumental errors during the set’s development, as a whopping 33% of the original Demon Hunter cards ended up being nerfed in just a few months’ time as the class dominated the metagame. No matter what you think of faster balance cycles, this is simply unacceptable. The cascade of ineffective nerfs was also quite frustrating from the Demon Hunter player’s perspective: over time, I ended up having to play a progressively weaker version of the same deck with little room for innovation, which was not a particularly fun experience with a lack of alternatives. As I alluded to before, it’s no exaggeration that the final 150 wins were more taxing than the 850 which preceded them.

The constant chopping and changing of the Standard meta has also made it somewhat pointless to post expansion-encompassing stats, which was how I originally planned to close out the series. Much like with Battlegrounds and the many aborted Arena changes, it’s clear that Demon Hunter still remains a work in progress by Team 5, with us playing the role of beta testers.

At the end of the day, Demon Hunter is a double-edged sword. I find it fun to play but there’s no question Team 5 dropped the ball on its design. It harkens back to what I consider a better time in Hearthstone but it’s so powerful that it outdid all other present-day archetypes even after multiple rounds of nerfs. It’s a nice spice of new gameplay but there’s little to suggest we’ll have more than the usual number of playable decks and archetypes in the meta regardless of having an extra class in the game.  In the end, it will live and die on the variety of builds it can offer to the playerbase, especially with its basic tempo archetype getting such monstrous playtime in the first few months.