Nerfing Aggro Druid is a nerf to Quest Mage in and of itself. That’s the main deck Quest Mages feed off of, and it’s going to become less popular.
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Nah.
I play mage and a Ton. If you wanna know something is that multicaster is a massive card for most archtypes changing even how you build mage decks on a core level.
Decks got more consistent and faster matchups got better for they.
If you put a big Warrior rising out of Control in the mix it gonna be dificult to even imagine a meta without mage.
Be It Quest mage or any other deck.
Nice, very welcome changes, the only question is why questline warrior don’t be adress in the same way? The deck have more frequence in the ladder than mage and druid together…
Just remember this post balance change meta is expiring just as fast as milk purchased on the same day.
The important thing is how are these changes going to matter after the milk expires and we’re playing with 135 additional cards for four months.
Would people have been running the Dawngrasp Hero card in QM and made the deck OP? Or did they overreact just like they did with Priest last expansion?
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It would really be thematically more sensible if the Bleeds would shuffle into the opponents deck, they’re the one who bleed not the attacker 
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I agree it’s a massive change but when that priest deck existed we didn’t really have nearly as many super aggressive decks as we do now. With quest Warlock coming back into the meta again Priest cannot really be as suffocating as it was then.
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Priest GIGA-benefits from the Garrote and Mage nerf, though. (Well Mage matchup is still probably butt but if it becomes unpopular as a deck it’ll help)
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These changes are so awkward…
Nerfing Mage (probably because it’s popular, obviously not because of power)…and not nerfing Pirate Warrior…and not nerfing Mr Smite…
…and buffing 1 card out of priest as if that is somehow going to help?
And then nerfing Rogue which isn’t even top 5 according to VS.
The only nerf that really makes any sense is the Druid one.
Really weird. The only thing these changes do is make Warrior and Hunter stay on top more?
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I really hope this change was made because the Team finally realized playing against a non interactive deck that thrives off players playing to the board but encourages them to not play to the board is not fun for the opponent.
Sure the Quest Mage is really bad against most of the very top decks but the game cannot be entirely balanced around the best decks played by the top 1%. Lowering Mages power slightly makes the games where it was oppressive against lower tier decks or decks that aimed to tackle top meta decks through the board playable. In the end making players happy and wanting to keep them playing is just as important and playing against quest Mage with a deck other than one that is the very best is not fun.
Does this hurt Mage overall? Yes it does but the designers did this to themselves when they made Mage a one dimensional deck. I sincerely hope in the next expansion and at rotation they stick a huge fork in this insane idea to have mage be a class that never plays to the board.
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This. If one is basing their conclusions off the winrate data, it’s abundantly clear that Quest Mage isn’t a problem. Therefore, it’s clear that Blizzard’s balance policy is basically to act as the servant of the loudest voices on Reddit, these forums, etc. Twitter perception is Team 5’s reality.
That is bad policy. And I’m not just saying that, it’s known that blindly doing what customers asked for might keep your business from sinking, but it makes innovation — the kind of innovation that transforms your product from a product to THE product — it makes it impossible. Malcolm Gladwell can explain it better than I can: https://youtu.be/iIiAAhUeR6Y
Now I’m not saying customer feedback is irrelevant. But it’s a lot like going to the doctor — a patient might have important information to convey regarding symptoms but they aren’t qualified to treat or even diagnose their condition, and it’s malpractice for a doctor to just give out any treatment that’s being asked for.
So in this case, lots and lots of players are complaining about how unfun it is to play Quest Mage. That is reporting a symptom, and therefore Blizzard should do something about it (I told you all, I’m not just a white knight). But that something doesn’t have to be a nerf — it just has to be a company action that resolves, or at least mitigates, the problem. (Again, it’s not the patient’s place to determine treatment.) It can start as investigating possibly nerfing in earnest, but that would begin with looking at the winrate data — I’m sure Blizzard has their own internal tool(s) similar to HSReplay — and noticing that, in the ranks where it is most popular, it is right around 50-50 winrate. So since it’s not a top performing archetype, nerfing in earnest is off the table, but then what? The intent would be to make the deck less popular but not significantly weaker. If I believed that everyone read social media, I’d just suggest Team 5 say “Quest Mage isn’t a good deck, about 50-50 winrate” and that would dissuade people from playing it, but that wouldn’t reach most players at all — lots and lots of people play Hearthstone and don’t follow social media regarding HS at all. So we need something they’ll see in their client, so I’d go for a nerf in jest. Like the one I said earlier in this thread, that’s pretty close to a non-nerf nerf. Although maybe someone could think of one more clever.
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I think that was the original design with a couple shuffle cards and it just made the cards often useless or completely rng dependent since the other player could just choose not to draw more than 1-3 cards, and kill you anyways in the next 3 turns.
Still im actually curious, the garrote nerf losing 25% of the damage actually seems HUGE. That means each garrote will go from 8 → 6 base, to like 16 → 12 base with a guild trader or +2 spell damage. Going from 32 to 24 damage might not be negliable, but it still seems big. Though, maybe adding a guild trader + a extra sp and some octobot shenanigans could help or still keep it strong. it already struggles with a lot though and it’s only really good and above 45% winrate when in 1k legend players hands where top tier players with the deck who get the right feel can definitely make it feel strong against any matchup.
Getting hsreplay data to find out a counter for #50-70 end of month standard legends was a headache since a lot of the free data is for the 44% wr pilots who aren’t that good.
I definitely knew a lot of high legend players playing it when i was just trying to enter my 1 decent f2p deck and 2 f2p dust junkaroonies for some bait packs haha (Enter for the 1 pack a win, leave with 6 instead of 9 after having 20x top 100 legends play each game lmao. It was almost just a literal circle of the same 50 top 1-100 Standard legend players and a couple fodder f2ps just all competing to various degrees of success lmao. )
I think a maybe unrelated thing was garrote rogue in tournament vs ladder could do even more nuts and insane play when they knew your deck, the hp limit of all cards you could play, and also what plays they could make. The ladder and tournament experience was night and day while they were going around. Any tech card you tried to include, you could get away maybe 50 50 with any legend below #200, But when it was #50-100… They always flipping read the lists lol and seemed to know every play you could make, every card you could play for each turn (Even if it was completely off meta! I had a flipping garrote rogue save the smack combo for a 4/6 watchpost i snuck in to my Deathrattle demon hunter as a 4 drop corruptor + ladder mage tech + decent value after a board was built… The high rank garrote rogues just always had enough cards saved to ping it whenever it came out, ditto for any troublemakers in warrior, but whenever i took it out, they went ham lmao. )
Still, who knows how this will change. I feel like it’s hard to tell, Garrote rogue is still a deck that likely just needs the deck to be thinned to do combo, so it’ll still likely do a huge burst, the damage just might be 75%, but 32 → 24 dmg is still enough to kill non armored classes with just 6 face damage. But there aren’t standard Renos, so who knows what happens.
Aggro taunt druid going from 2/3 to 2/2 still probably keeps a lot of cheating and snowballing, but now it’ll be a hard synergy card. Not really too major except quest mage can destroy it in 1 flame, but quest mage also gets nerfed by 1 sp in meta Warrior got smite.
Which is probably gonna take it from 5x +3 spell damage spells to kill face, to like, 6-7x +2 spell damage spells to kill face. With Probably a more important change being cram session going from a draw 4 to a draw 3.
Probably a big hit to the speed of immediately being hand burned 30 to 0 or 60 to 0 in a couple turns after varden while constantly taking 6 aoe to the board and 5-> 4 minion damage for 1 mana first flames. Very welcome.
It’s actually kinda curious with how fast this seemed to come out after the miniset that Smite for now seems left alone. But he also just barely came out.
Druid is indeed on top, and garrote rogue pretty strong at high legend play. (But not 44% wr diamond joe plays) . Interesting. But it seemed the data was saying Despite all the outclaim warrior was a bit slower and Aggro taunt druid the #1 strong at everything.
Aggro taunt druid shrinking a tiny might make smite a lot better though. But it’s still going to look like a very powerful deck. Elemental shaman took a 4/5 to a 4/4 on a clearly undercosted 4 mana 4/5 → 4/4 and pretty much stayed fine. A class that can play greyboughs and 0 mana 2/3 taunts is probably good. Lets see how this goes, haha.
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Again, you’re looking at data for all ranks, not T1KL. Rogue is the second best class at that level (first being Hunter) and Garrote Rogue is a tier 1 deck at that level of piloting skill.
No, I’m looking at Live Data from VS
https://www.vicioussyndicate.com/data-reaper-live-beta/
I’m not looking at ALL ranks. I am looking at each rank individually and Rogue isn’t on the list. I don’t have access to top 1k yet as the report isn’t out, but if Rogue isn’t even top 5 in Legend rank, it’s likely not at top 1k either.
I don’t use VS myself, but do they separate Top 1000 Legend from Legend? If one is only looking at Legend generally, Rogue doesn’t appear particularly problematic according to the data.
I still stand by what I posted in the other thread.
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So for all this time, players weren’t delusional about mage
No, they’re doing this precisely because the community was delusional
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But even if we go with the logic that Rogue is nerfed because of its performance at 1k Legend, it doesn’t make any sense as to why Hunter was untouched since the stats you quoted show Hunter clearly on top.
Yes nerf mage again a terrible class, but give nothing back for it. This game is a joke just like the people who make it.
Lol didn’t touch pirate warrior. Joke of a dev team
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Saints be praised, they fixed Renew. Even though Priest will still be basically dead, it’s nice to see them realize that the card should never have been nerfed.
The Quest Mage change should be just enough to make the ‘kill you in one turn from nowhere’ far more difficult to pull off, along with the Garrote change, meaning we’re one decent burst healing card away from possibly bringing some sort of control back to life. It’s amusing because I was going to write a post on how you could bring Reno Jackson back with no deckbuilding restriction and it still wouldn’t matter for control (other than combo decks playing it to beat aggro, lol), but I rescind that thought based on these changes.
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