After the last few patches, I didn’t think it could get worse, I was wrong. The team of flunkies at Blizztardo, literally re-did everything and made it worse. I didn’t think it was possible, but here we are. How do you screw up so badly on balance? From one software designer to another, you all should be ashamed. If I released unbalanced trash like this, I would have been fired a long time ago.
I am not sure if it is because you are making a video game, or pure apathy, but releasing content like this is tragic on every level from a software design point of view. I think I could have gotten drunk, harassed some interns, and thrown darts at ideas and came up with better balance. Or did I just take one out of your hand book? I know this will never happen, but you need to rollback the release branch, and start over on this new release, it is god awful.
10 Likes
I can only agree with you… I’ve played roughly 15 games since the last update and some of the combos I’ve seen were ridiculous.
For instance, last game I had
- 2 Golden Mylak Rattleheads with Reborn
- Golden Felemental
- Titus Rivendare
That alone gave minions in the tavern +32/+32 every round and that was in round 9. Picked up a Blade Collector with around 140 attack and 2 Crackling Cyclones with 160 & 180 attack.
I finally replaced Titus, Felemental and both Mylak’s in the same round with 200/200 minions and didn’t even win, as I came up against someone with 5 minions between 300/300 and 400/400.
It feels as if the number of golden minions per player has increased a lot as well. Even in the 2 games where I got knocked out 7th & 8th I already had 3 & 2 golden minions…
3 Likes
I played a game earlier where 6/8 players were dead on Turn 10. I did 28 damage to someone on Turn 7 and completely eliminated them. It’s a joke. And of course the Bob’s Tavern subreddit will defend Blizzard against any perceived attacks despite how clearly terrible the experience is.
1 Like
And I can tell you exactly where the issues:
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Power Creep. Lower tier minions in some of the tribes have far too much power. Bana Slama and Rylak come to mind as the big offenders. Being tier 3 minions that are key strategy pieces makes them very easy to find early, and with Banana Slama’s case if you get something to pair with it you can create a MASSIVE advantage that does way too much power compared to what is available. It’s like they learned nothing from Dr Boombox.
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The addition of lots of cards that provide you with resource generation. Rylak, and several of the cards that either generate random minions for free or give you copies of minions you have leads to higher than average goldens and larger RNG on your benefits. You can gain access to strong minions the opponent found that you didn’t, creating high roll scenarios more often. This is even more apparent with the lower tier minions offer such huge power spikes. If someone hits a banana slama early with support and you’re playing a normal style and you get paired against them, you’re going to take a huge hit of damage.
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Damage is going out in large amounts very early. It’s not uncommon to see someone get knocked out extremely fast even with the damage cap. Games are ending faster than ever. The power spikes and Tier 3 builds can let you get to an endgame rapidly. And when I check reddit all I see are build posts of people getting 6x golden of the same minion.
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Loss of buddies. I know the Reddit crowd hated them, but I think the Reddit crowd are morons so that’s about as much as I value their opinion. Buddies offered a stability to the heroes that prevented them from just losing outright to bad RNG. You no longer have a safety net synergy minion you can rely on to fill in gaps with rolls and the curve. Less options means more RNG, more RNG means more high roll, which makes these feel infinitely worse.
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Poison change and scaling. Venom could be an interesting change to test if they had just done that change by itself last season. But no, what they did alongside that change is make the scaling INSANELY FAST and insanely large. Minions have more health than ever, and their huge stats mandate an answer more quickly. And venom can just be wasted on RNG attacks. And look what we are back too, higher RNG and more high roll.
TL:DR
RNG was pushed by all the changes they made. No buddies = no stability to hero builds. Venom means RNG attacks can entirely decide a combat. You thought poisonous felt bad? Imagine the 5% loss because venom hit the right thing. Low tier fast builds with high power leads to large swings and less time to react. Which leads to the RNG of did you get the power T3 minion?
3 Likes
Sounds suspiciously similar to the twitterverse to my mind. Groups of narcissists thinking their opinions are of higher value and important enough to share with the world!
1 Like
It’s a good thing no one here acts like that, sharing high value opinions. Wouldn’t want to be a narcissist.
Instead of introducing a bunch of new minions, they should’ve done a bunch of small updates that introduced a few minions at a time to check what needed nerfs and what didn’t. It is a mess right now.
Also, I get some buddies were unbalanced, but they were really fun and always gave you a chance to turn games around incase you got screwed over.
2 Likes
Honestly remove Banana Slamma and the Duo from the game and everything else seems fine. Murlocs can be op but seem high skill cap so I am fine with that. The banana slamma + bear + Baron combo is just dumb. Not just because of how ridiculously strong it is, but also because sniping the key pieces or the baron is now almost entirely dependent on RNG. Every game with beasts in the pool feels miserable and every other game where something insane and broken happens is usually just the duo’s fault.
Yeah well they can’t afford decent developers so you get bad ones for whatever you can spare to spend. It sucks it really does.
My biggest issue is that mantid and leeroy is still in the game when they should have never even been put in the game.
I mean why the f would you be able to buy a minion that kills an entire minion?
If I spend the entire game buiding a board it shouldnt be killed buy something that was bought for 3 gold. Pathetic.
Edit. I have to add the 3 turn rotation of facing the same opponents aswell.
Losing a game because you face only 3 players is sad af. This was a problem with 2 turn rotation before that they fixed but 3 turn is still a massive issue.
This is a very new player, pre-school sort of take, though.
The game mode is awful without counter play, and I think much of the problems people are seeing right now are directly related to a world without poison.
Stats have never been bigger across the board than they are in this expansion, yet the best counter to stats has been removed.
I think this is one of those “be careful what you wish for” moments for the idiots who couldn’t play around poison.
Venomous is a HUGE error and the mode has suffered because of it.
1 Like
This is why damage should always be capped at 10.
They did all this rebalancing and yet still left Magmaloc in for some unfathomable reason.
Your RL name isn’t James, is it?
The banana guy is just too banana. Doubling stats on summoned minions , triple or double triple.
You see Beast, you always take Beast.
2 Likes
Magmaloc is one of the weaker murloc cards right now. Think about that.
3 Likes
It’s a double kick in the pants because prior to their recent sabotage of this mode, battlegrounds was the most fun it had ever been! Now it sucks so bad it is unplayable. 
Banana Slamma is just the most stupid thing they introduced ever. While other stuff can escalate similarly. Banana Slamma basically works by itself, and escalates with itself. Nothing else really required. It’s the entire package in a single card.
3 Likes
really just after playing like 10 games you know for yourself that some cards are so stupid broken atm. This stupid banana ape is ruining everything
3 Likes
This is going to be some rough growing pains for BG’s. They really did need to make a new fresh pool of minions though. I’m treating these first 2 weeks as a beta for BG’s with the goal in mind that after that they will bring out a big patch and correct all of the errors.
I can see why players are upset. If an internal tester with even half a brain would have looked over these cards they could have spotted a half dozen issues immediately. There’s just no way someone doesn’t notice in testing how busted Duo and Slamma are. It’s only through the first early access of the new BG changes that they saw how OP fireworks was. When you are forced to remove a half dozen or more cards from the pool to make the game playable that’s a problem.
I really hope after they do the balance patch they also just increase the cost of going to tier 6. We are right back to a race to 6 in most lobbies again.
It’s very difficult for me to sit back and think that Banana Slamma’ is working as intended. I get that the card doubles a beasts stats on summoning in combat, however, where I grow a bit hazy is wondering how on earth the developers thought…
“Yeah so this slamma guy….it’s pretty good right? Well, let’s make it stackable. That will really balance things off nicely. While we’re at it, let’s exclude poison and switch to something that has much more difficulty when it comes to combatting these heavily stacked minions. Ohh, and let’s make it much easier for players to find triples, thus adding more flame to the fire when it comes to problematic builds. To cap it off, how about how about we take the current iteration of beasts, and essentially do the same thing with them as we did before…Titus, frogged, mamma bear….except we will make it worse by not vigorously testing our own game.”