Source: @hsdecktech on twitter
No preview given
1 Like
Donât like that.
Because this is probably the last patch of the year and there is good chance of we having to deal with it until february.
Also things arenât bad at all right now.
I can be wrong but i feeling a really bad meta incoming.
We should not even have a balance patch right now.
They did say (last week) that another balance patch was coming (this week), glad to see they didnât forget about it! With the lack of preview it had been suspicious.
I wonder what itâll be? Knowing nothing is about the same as getting the infographics, which barely give any info.
It might be a buff patch rather than a nerf patch, which could definitely result in a completely upended meta. I think weâve had tons of discussions on the virtues of nerfs versus buffs, and nerfs are always more âstable,â and often easier to manage.
Buffs to cards from FoL and Badlands would be great to increase variety in many classes like DH, Warlock, and Priest.
Iâm also putting my money on nerfing Year of the Hydra cards wholesale because the meta right now might be stable, but itâs STALE thanks to Paladin and Mage. Weâre still seeing decks defined by Nathria and MotLK, which were egregious in power level. Maybe theyâll start phasing out Year of the Hydra with some nerfs before the actual rotation.
WellâŚ
I feel more like itâs the intention.
The cards are in their last cycle so might as well design some stuff that can put they into play.
While the mechanics are fun we had just too little cards who really use those mechanics in the meta.
Biggest example being we never even being near a deck that specializes in infusion despite of individual card with the keyword seeing sucess.
2 Likes
No preview means that this patch is rushed, they donât have confidence in it, or both. Itâs going to suck.
4 Likes
Theyâre gonna delete Sif and any other cards that can actually deal damage to close out games so weâre left with 2 months of âReno Renethal attrition onlyâ decks running the meta. You know it, I know it, we all know it. Last year they pushed a patch before christmas and we were stuck with a miserable meta until February. Then when the balance patch finally happened we had 2 weeks of a playable meta before the mini set dropped and turned everything to unplayable crap again. Who wants to bet weâre in for a repeat.
4 Likes
I donât know if we can predict HOW theyâll mess it up. But I think we can predict that theyâll mess it up.
I think the best way to guess would be to do an analysis of âinfluencersâ on Twitter and what they complain about, but that way lies madness.
This is super dry but maybe they literally didnât put room in the budget to pay for 2 back-to-back infographics. Or just didnât want to justify those employee-hours since they were planning on the initial one for a while, and have been tracking the changes for this second one and didnât make time to create another preview.
Please no, my precious CNE did nothing wrong!
Now that I think about it, CNE is the same as Sif and Denathrius: you play the game the way you normally would, and get a game-ending reward for doing the things you already wanted to do.
But Rainbow DKâs cards are of way lower quality than Mageâs, and Rainbow Mage is insanely good at surviving and applying pressure, so Sif is in a way higher league than CNE. If Rainbow DK could constantly generate additional ways to spend corpses and gain them in bursts, itâd be a strong deck, too.
Until March.
You can buy the current tavern pass until 11 March, which is a Monday. The following day is a Tuesday, and will be exactly 17 weeks since Badlands was released. New expansions always drop on Tuesdays.
So, the next expansion (and the new HS year) will start on March 12. Thatâs still over 3 months away, and the miniset should be out in January.
So, plenty of time for nerfs.
The point is that there isnât going to be another patch until after New Yearâs. That means that this next patch will set in stone the meta that the majority of players will have the majority of time off for.
VS didnât put out a report this week, because Zach O (whom this board normally reveres, like some kind of God), said the current standard experience is so god damned terrible he canât stand to bring himself to play it. And yet, this board acts like thereâs nothing wrong at all about it! Go figure.
I share your cynicism. But I doubt that Team 5 does; I think they are more devout than anyone here. Most likely Blizzard will nerf whatever Zach0 is whining about now. Maybe you could illuminate us; Iâm not creating a Twitter account.
I think heâs exaggerating a little bit â things have been even worse in the distant past â but at least using polarization as a metric, Standard after Badlands is less healthy than it was before. The average match went from 54.8-45.2 to 57.0-43.0. Players are pretty sensitive to polarization so I canât see how this expansion can feel better than the previous one to the playerbase overall.
That said, nerfs are not a very efficient method for fixing polarization. Nerfs reduce winrate, but reducing winrate doesnât directly reduce popularity; fanatics of the deck can have diamond hands. So itâs difficult to really solve the most polarizing archetypes (Dragon Druid and Cleave Hunter as of last VS report). Polarization doesnât have easy fixes and no matter how much Zach0 gets this or that deck nerfed heâs probably going to hate this meta anyway until the next Standard rotation.
Nerfs simply arenât some magic panacea that fixes everything. People screaming âfix your game NOWâ simply are not going to get what they want.
Nah, thatâs reddit. This place stopped simping for VS around FoL miniset I think. Or maybe even mid-MotLK when they nerfed Brann-Anub Druid in exactly the ways that VS wanted.
But Reddit is the real pro-VS cult. You get eviscerated for being negative about them there, while here you at least get a discussion.
However, I think the cracks are starting to show there, too. People are learning to use them for the raw numbers and ignore the commentary on balance.
1 Like
I still think VS has the best numbers in the business. The problem is that the commentary that they write is increasingly disconnected from the numbers, and the vast majority of readers donât even look at the numbers in the first place. In recent reports Iâve even caught instances of their own numbers directly refuting claims that are being made in the commentary.
VS has become more concerned with giving their audience what they want to hear, than giving them the truth. Zach0 is clearly spending more time on social media than he is looking at his own data, and this warps his perception.
2 Likes
I personally am hoping for buffs more so than nerfs this time around, about the only nerf I would like to see at this point could possibly be Sif to start at 0 spell dmg, but that might kill the card, so I dunno
Sif starting at 0 makes it no longer a âspell damage minionâ meaning cards and effects that discover/interact with spell damage minions wouldnât work for Sif any longer. I think thatâs more than just a power level nerf itâs a functional one as well.
Probably negligible issue in current standard, and the type of thing that would get reverted when it rotates to wild.
I think thereâs too much lethality in the game for that, theyâd have to nerf Sif and Odyn A LOT to render them useless.
Eh⌠kinda. CNE is so much bigger of an ask. Youâre not just discovering decent cards and playing them, and you need to spend a lot of corpses to get it big enough.
Ehh⌠I dunno what they could buff. I donât think thereâs much room on anything.
The lowest WR decks are Rogue and DH, but their primary archetypes are so annoying to the general player base. They donât want to create just another from hand snowball monster.
Rogueâs other deck is a value casino deck. Which they really shouldnât buff. Thief Rogue is such a problem design and they keep pushing it into this weird RNG-y space.
Though wow, 37.2% is the lowest Iâve ever seen an overall class winrate I think. (DH on HSReplay) But I dunno what they could buff for it.
Friend, the Battlegrounds await a skilled player such as yourself. There is salvation!
1 Like
Those numbers are crap and canât be trusted at all.