How To Play Hearthstone On SteamDeck / How To Install Hearthstone and Battle.net on a Steam Deck

[Funkless]

How To Play Hearthstone On SteamDeck / How To Install Hearthstone and Battle.net on a Steam Deck

r/hearthstone on steamdeck — Spent ages searching for this and tried everything, wasted many hours and finally got it working last night — so I wanted to post this in case anyone happens upon it from google or similar - many people may know about installing Windows on a microSD- but I wanted to confirm it specifically works with Hearthstone. Even if you're not great with tech.

Basically you follow this guide

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The Guide to Installing Hearthstone and bnet on Steam Decks

https://wagnerstechtalk.com/sd-windows/

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and here's what I found while doing it:

• have the guide above up on your phone as you need your PC for it, and it may help to have the guide on a separate device
  
• you only need a microSD card (some other guides have you swapping between a thumb drive and an SD), but I had to get an old laptop because my 2 year old lappy did not have an SD card reader. You will need to check how many GB (gigabytes) your SD holds as it will use up all it says — plus another 11 gig for the hearthstone install and any other games on the same SD, so if you plan on having multiple games, ensure you get a big microSD card, and of course the ability to read/write an SD with an adapter, dongle or port.
  
• you will need to follow the instructions about unzipping stuff before moving to the steamdeck as you don't want to have to futz with it once you've installed windows
  
• creating the boot ISO, loading it on to the SD, installing windows all take a long time - have several hours free
  
• once you've got windows open on the steamdeck, and it has the step to run Windows Update, this may also take an hour or two
  
• I played it safe and did one step at a time in the exact order specified and it worked
  
• I have a USB hub with keyboard, mouse and other peripherals plugged into it for my main computer, I simply plugged that into my steam deck and without drivers I was able to use my mouse and keyboard to operate my steamdeck, instantly
  
• there will be several restarts throughout the process but once I got into windows, restarting it always brought it back to windows
  
• I restarted every single time software asked me to, and once again at the end for good luck
  
• I also followed the auto-login trick a bit further down, but none of the keys existed in regedit, so I did edit > new > string for every step and it works

[h4]I then just downloaded battlenet and then hearthstone from within battlenet and it worked![/h4]

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then once Hearthstone was installed here's what I noticed

• unplugging the keyboard/mouse caused the game to give me the "you were disconnected/reconnected to your game" dialog box
  
• popups don't work very well (for tooltips when examining keywords) - you can't see them, it just gives you an empty floating translucent box
  
• I haven't tried using a decktracker with it
  
• to play the game its the same as mobile - click and drag - except that clicking on a card leaves it held / hovering - even when you let go, so be careful about not playing the wrong card
  
• you can also use the thumbsticks and triggers, but I found just touch screen works fine
  
• there was some slight delay sometimes, where it appeared to be "thinking" but no crashes as yet
  
• probably not great for APM priest or APM druid due to slightly slower controls
  
  

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  Proof that it works: https://imgur.com/a/lbNrljg
  
  (it was the Santa sleigh tavern brawl that drops presents - so although I say "pop ups don't work for tool tips" above, I did see all the dialogue boxes of presents arriving. We were both playing DK, they had frost/blood, I was triple blood Reno, I won with a 4 mana Scourge from a present on turn 6).
  
  

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[Chris]

Do note that if you want to make it act more like the ipad version you can go into the settings.txt file and change the line touchscreen=false to true, then you wont have the issue that the cursor still holds the card.. on a different note, you can install hearthstone on linus using either a script found by a quick google search or use an app called lutris, currently trying to get the deck tracker working on the game side of steamos

[Nostra]

I assigned the mouse to the right trackpad but it’s all stuttery as hell.
It would help with the card stating selected thing, you could just hover over the cards to read it instead of having to click on it. But the stuttery and even strange behaviour (sometimes the pointer goed in the opposite direction than the pad) makes it hard. Anyone has the same issues?