Balance Patch Next Week

Multiplayer Discussion
82

Oh nice! Nvm!! :smiley:

Any updates on if they fixed that stupid 180 beasts killed cookie task in mercs or the 200 ice lance damage being potentially soft lockable or at least in the 1-8 hr nightmare point of manually hard running encounters for a 3 turn ability to heal the 16 health enemies to prevent them from dying to a crit if you leveled all mercs to 30. XD

I thankfully completed it with a underleveled 1000 coin murk eye. If i just leveled up any ability a few points further past the 6/6, i could have literally made the task soft locked without madness. Still took like 2-3 hrs throwing 50 lvled mercs, taking a gearless unequiped 4 speed 8 dmg samuro only to find out he crit one shot and ended encounter lmao XD. F2p Mercs feels like a loveless 2 gold digger relationship sometimes lmao. Blizzard can decide which of us is the biggest gold digger, the f2p, or the monetization team haha. XD

83

Mage 100% needed the nerf. It was the Caverns Below of Stormwind. Control decks didn’t stand a chance, non-shadow priest had like 10% winrate at some point, as was big warrior or any slower deck. They likely remain unfavored, but now they might stop conceding on the spot.
The quest mage nerf alone would be very favorable to current’s best class among all ranks, aggro druid, so it got a nerf in advance that will likely weaken it A LOT.
Garrote rogue, while unfavored against warrior, is too good against other slower classes specially at high legend. Another class that might suffer greatly from the nerf, but at least it’s only one deck, and one that won’t be missed.
So what class will come on top? Pirate warrior is a strong contender for best class, being so unfavored against aggro druid, but it lost 2 good matchups (mage and rogue) and can suffer greatly against hand warlock and paladin, who both also had 2 of its worst machups nerfed (mage and druid). So I’d say they’re the big winners here.

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84

Clown nerfs aimed at reddit whiners.

Back to other modes.

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85

This will easily make hero power/freeze mage the dominant deck for the class. They were riding pretty close already.

86

It specifically hits Ignite the hardest though. Ignite is all about multiplicative damage and flat number increases buff those the best. It doesn’t mean much in regards to getting fireballed in the face but if a Mage is trying to spam Ignites over and over to kill you then they just lost quite a chunk of damage.

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87

to be perfectly honest, the biggest thing holding back Mage at this point was, well Mage.

Like Ping/Hero Power Mage and Big Spell Mage both have promise, but the problem was both decks got annihilated by Questline Mage to the point where it just wasn’t worth taking them to ladder.

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88

All ones on here saying how quest mage did not need nerf now get to eat large amounts of humble pie.

89

I think Garrote is still a stronger card than Wicked Stab, even after the nerf. Both are 2 to 6 damage, one scales based on turn while the other by going through your deck (advantage: Garrote), but Garrote can still benefit from Spell Damage multiple times. The only advantage Wicked Stab has is that it doesn’t need to go face.

And it’s not like Wicked Stab is a weak card.

Truth is, original Garrote was kinda bonkers, and apparently balanced around the fallacy that going through your whole deck takes longer than getting ten mana crystals. The nerf is well deserved.

1 Like
90

I only agree in regards to Quest Mage

but I really agree in regards to Quest Mage.

Still, sad as it is, I don’t know if a business can really afford to ignore a critical mass of Reddit whiners. Irrational though they may be.

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91

What about those that were also saying that Priest was overnerfed last expansion?

92

Big fat F to everyone who spent all that time to learn the deck only to get nerfed but i mean it was a well earned one to the high legends who could play that deck to like nobody’s mofo business.

I got to play like 10 of them when the tournament games were still around… I was playing only 1 good deck and 2 f2p junk decks on a 1000 dust budget lmao…

Literally like it was going to the olympics and just watching a bunch of #100 athletes go around. You got a pack per win with single elimination. One day i matched into 6 fish and brought back like 12 packs…

Then the next day. i literally matched into like 7 literal rank #50 something to 200 legends with the tournament lineup of like Kazakus Tournament Garrote rogue ( 1 ban, so no bad matchups), and like Surprisingly a lot of #100 legends still played even postnerf Questlock for a while teched to beat aggro, and then the third deck always seemed random. (They would play anything from Anaconda druids at #200 legend to Aggro taunt druids at #100, but the most common for #50 legends was Iglynoth dh, another combo deck with pretty good performance in top 100 legend hands.)

Hey… Wait… Iglynoth DH doesn’t get touched at all right?

All those top 50-100 players trying to tryhard a tournament didn’t get there by f2ping too many decks. I wonder if they will just go to Igynoth DH instead if it’s still viable. It’s hard to get the meta data for the deck though honestly until VS comes out or a 5$ sub so i honestly have no clue what works on it.

One of my biggest gripes with hsreplay’s free data garrote was literally nobody in the free zone knew how to play the deck past 44% so every reported ‘counter’ was a red herring dud except only the noobiest garrote rogues lmao. XD

Sadly i think the things are over so i don’t have to worry about packs for now. But i sure had my share of thrills waiting 2 hrs for my 1 pack a win and getting matched up to them. I got like 30 packs out of it on some fishes at least, But i hated that like the #52 guy was like literally 2 ranks off auto qualifying for something and literally qued like 8 games in a row where i saw him twice.

Still though, i think it’ll be fine. It’s a nerf that gives you back like 80% the dust of the deck. Just roll with it and adapt. like Quest shaman players already had to when quest got nerfed and Elemental worked but looks dead for now.

Or, just wait it out and get a early rank before the nerfs hit, coast to the next xpac in a month, and build around a meta then, losing a 2k dust deck and getting 1.6k dust back isn’t that bad.

Nobody wants to lose 10k dust, but at least you don’t have to worry about a 10k f2p dust deck getting axed and deleted overnight with a 40 dust refund. There’s still like several other classes btw. And iglynoth dh should be fine.

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F’s in chat for mage XD. Ding dong, the wicked witch is dead!

Hsreplay projections seem to indicate with lowered Quest mage and taunt druid representation, For the masses and free data, Pirate warrior and Libram / pally decks look set to improve for the general meta,

Curiously there’s a massive projected spike in winrate for Clown druid if Quest mage and/or Taunt druid completely entirely vanished, (like 46% wr to like 56% wr if it went COMPLETELY 0. But it’s a pretty awful 30% match haha) but i still think Taunt druid should be around just 1 less hp.

So i think Clown druid is still going to be a red herring to the tuned aggro druid. But if it ends up resurfacing for meme play, maybe lmao. (unlikely with only a common tweak tho that keeps deck alive.)

95

the perception of balance is more important than actual balance.
Iksar has said this himself - most of the nerfs in hearthstone are aimed more at appeasing the community rather than for actual balance.

3 Likes
96

Priest just got unnerfed.

97

Kinky sounding

Just sayin’

98

That is not a nerf for warrior

99

I think this has to be true, because I don’t believe a perfect balance is actually possible. We’re dealing with several obviously unequal things here, and given infinite time and infinite skill I believe any type of ambiguity in evaluation would ultimately be resolved and games like these could be worked out to a single ideal strategy without variation, or perhaps something very much like paper rock scissors with three perfectly equal strategies. Therefore, what we call “balance” is not an absolute quality of the card pool so much as our failure to have already worked out a series of complex interactions to determine the ideal strategy. This is why (other than business model) new cards are made available — they restart the evaluation process and keep us from ever actually solving the puzzle. The more confused we feel about which strategy is ideal, the more balanced the game feels, because balance is in our perception of the thing rather than directly in the thing itself.

It’s always worth remembering that this is, at its core, a game, and a game operates in the mind, on an experiential level.

What’s fascinating about creating this uncertainty that we call “balance” is that the confusion that is intended to prevent us from being certain can also cause us to be confident we’ve arrived at an answer when we haven’t. If the system gives you no clear vindication one way or the other when you’ve arrived at the answer, then any unclear signal can be misinterpreted as as close to vindication as you’ll ever get. For instance, some people are certain Warrior is overpowered right now because of the new cards, but Warrior is only the 4th most winning class in Top 1000 Legend the past 3 days, despite how “obviously” broken Mr Smite is.

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100

Too little too late. HS has lost me for at least some years because of how unfun UiS was.

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101

Very good nerfs and buff, me happy :+1:t2::grinning: