I don’t quite follow why Owlock was massively nerfed today, or even just a little.
It’s card draw power and combo pieces remain the same.
I think blizzard believes by nerfing the Runed Mithril Rod to 4 and Mo’arg Artificer 3 is going to affect the deck.
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The weapon going to 5 mana means they get discounts later, giving other decks at least an extra turn to kill them.
This also means it gives everyone 1 extra turn to play weapon removal with the viper.
Secondly, Moarg going up in mana and going up in health means Moarg needs those discounts even more and Moarg also doesnt kill itself with the Spirit damage, so 2 less Owl deathrattles.
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It’ll take 4 from the initial cast but school spirit is a shadow spell so the free copy from tamsin will kill it
Ah yes, that is true.
I think the OTK is intended and was designed to be like that. So they will never change the owl.
the change from 4 to 5 mana for the rod is big not only due to the delay, but due to “when” the delay is happening.
a lot of midrange decks do not have great “aggro” openers. So, in effect, OWLtk missing t2 and t3 wasn’t that big of a deal. The 2drop and the 3 drop in a non hyper aggro deck is not enough to pressure the warlock.
The only real turn to develop a “treat” for such a deck was t4. And that single threat was more than easily overcome with the discounts on t5 from the warlock.
By moving the Rod to 5 there are 2 things that happen now:
warlock needs to clear the t4 play without having discounts in. Furthermore, with moarg to 3, that’s even harder.
So the warlock has to spend more mana and resources to clear the t4 play.
Then, he needs to fully waste his t5.
And t5 threats are much more meaningfull than t4.
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The OTK being available is fine. OTK decks though should be much higher risk than they are right now and take longer to pull off. This is a combo that requires at an absolute minimum:
1x Phylactery
1x Upgraded Wicked Shipment
1x Tamsin Roame
1x School Spirits
1x Owl
1x Spell that kills the owl
1x Runed Mythril Rod with at least 1 charge used
That’s a 7 card combo requiring multiple 1 of cards in the deck and they easily pull this off by turn 8 or 9 and be at a pretty comfortable life total by that point too. Something had to be done about that. It’s not as problematic because there’s two even faster combo decks out there in rogue and dh and they don’t seem to be going anywhere
I don’t think you need moarg to do the combo: imps die anyways
True. I’ve always seen it done with Moarg though because the 3/3 imps are on board and they had to use their Tamsin early to gain health.
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Confirmed. All the “nerfed” cards for Warlock are still being played and the Warlocks don’t even care.
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How did you determine they didn’t care?
You took an exit poll?
Because “they didn’t care” isn’t making claims about your opinions; but the opinions of those players.
Because the decks haven’t changed. Don’t care = doesn’t bother them.
5 manas “do nothing” turn is a massive tempo loss for a least 2 turns, the warlock take that tempo back when the rod made your job but is something, much better than only 4 manas or insane only 3 manas.
The problem is that against aggro playing it at 4 was suicide already and playing it at any point against any other deck is a winning line. So no it doesn’t really make much difference in the game still. The way the meta is structured it’s an all or nothing card for Warlock.
I’ve still never seen the actual combo go off or know what it is to be fair and I’ve played against the deck like 5 times. I think it’s just in response to the OTK hate, basically just don’t craft OTK decks, that’s been my rule for the longest time.
The rod nerf pushes back the deck’s ability to do all of the things it wants to do, which opens up weaknesses.
Decks that plan on winning on turn 10+ won’t see a difference, but in any pressure-based matchups, the OwlTK will be sweating a LOT harder.
Yes the Owl OTK is certainly hurt by the rod nerf. However i haven’t seen an OWL deck in many days. It’s been basically back to the old tried and true seeds deck.
The purpose of a card being nerfed is to lower their power / effectiveness NOT to make them completely unplayable
That is normally the objective but when a card is so powerful that it warps the game you need to take drastic measures. Unfortunately Warlock currently has multiple game warping cards. No amount of “Balancing” is going to fix them.
The card would actually be fine at 4 if Tempo, Mid and Control decks actually competed in the meta. They don’t so you end up with cards warping the game.