I realise that duels falls by the wayside a little bit when it comes to balancing due to its chaotic nature. However, the power of the Brann Bronzebeard discover hero power + shockspitter combination (Brann + Shockspitter + Zola if needed) is way too strong imo.
This is because it is almost assured with a number of passives which synergise to a crazy extent. Given the passives will to some extent match the deck, any weapon or discover passive tier 1 is fantastic and tier 2 treasures match this, with the added fun of battle stance or battlecry passives.
Am I bit salty? Sure, but that’s because in two duels runs I didn’t lose to a deck that wasn’t running a variation of this
Even that deck is weak after about 6 wins. Anything after 6 wins is just ignore the bored and go over the top or massive minions on turn 2 lol
Duels is hard to balance for sure. Right now both standard and duels has meta decks that feel terrible to lose too.
I played a priest deathrattle deck that ran a bunch of plague spreaders. Got mummy magic and was able to turn the spitters lol
I agree with all your points except the first, I feel like its strong even past 6 if you get a half decent passive set.
Obviously this is only anecdotal and perhaps not indicative of the statistics; but I adopted the “if you can’t beat 'em, join 'em” approach.
Went 1-2 in the first three (Humble Blessing Pally hit the nuts draw and Freeze DK), picked up Battle Stance and then went 11-0 for the rest of the run, only one game could even be described as close.
Yeah it is strong. I’m using it my first time and am at 4 wins, zero losses. Will resume the run later. It is easy to get at least 2 spitters and with the hero power, control the draw. My last game last night earning me my 4th straight win was crazy. I dropped the 1 cost bran and a couple shockspitters to do almost 60 points of damage by turn 8? Something close to that anyway.
I think we need more time to determine if it should be dealt with in duels though. Part of duels is dealing with the power swings in very powerful early game decks that fizzle out later versus weaker early decks that get more powerful in late runs. I don’t know where shockspitter rests yet in late runs. It seems, from what I have seen, the first powerful early and mid game deck but I’m yet to see it late in runs, like after 7 games.
Bomb warrior and spell druid are early run nightmares. They tend to fizzle out quick though. I haven’t used quest, deathrattle priest much but it has felt weak early but get more powerful later, at least that has been my impression so far. I tend to experiment a lot though so it takes time for me to cycle through typical net decks.
Anyway, shockspitter is definitely showing signs of being a big hitter but we need more time to determine if it’s “too strong.” There is a frost DK deck that seems even a bit stronger to me atm. I don’t have the cards so cannot run it myself but I’m paying attention to it when I see it amd it has felt more oppressive to play against than shockspitter so far, albeit that’s just my personal experience.
After about 150 runs or so since the current set I can attest to shockspitter being a really significant problem but the enabler isn’t Brann so much as To the Front! which allows them to play Brann, Zola, Shockspitter in one turn. Team 5’s inability to selectively ban cards based on the chosen hero (see Wildfire - broken for Reno, good and should be available for Mozaki) makes balancing a deck like this impossible.
There are a few decks that are almost inevitable wins (or losses facing them) in early games, this is one of them (Bomb Warrior, Discolock, and a well built Elise/Moonfire deck are the others). Simply too few cards in the deck and too little health as the opponent to realistically win if you are playing anything remotely board-based.
I think this deck though is one of the few that is fairly strong the entire run just because of the hero power.
That said, I think Discolock and Frost DK are the most broken by far, just because the loot buckets are so consistently strong (DKs only get buckets from their runes which is a massive advantage) and there are seriously broken interactions in Discolock that got Tome Tampering banned in Wild.
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