Well in this case, I am not in a position to say where the deck lies overall in the grand scheme because I don’t play the deck, I only play against it a lot. It feels a lot like Mozaki Mage vibes, which I know was nuked based on feelings and not stats. So based on that experience, I expect this to get nerfed.
But I’m also open to arguments as to why it shouldn’t be nerfed from people who ARE playing the deck regularly.
The problem is that people who play decks that are broken regularly are often the ones who don’t advocate for nerfs because people aren’t honest and don’t want their toy to be messed with.
I, on the other hand, actively ask for nerfs if I’m playing a deck that feels too powerful. IE, Paladin and now Wheel Warlock.
So I just have to take the word of people who I think are truthful and open much like how I am. For example, Sigtyr on these forums…I know he plays tons of Warrior. When he says Warrior needs a nerf, I know I can trust what he says because he’s thinking in an unbiased way.
It’s hard to find that.
I don’t know of any Shaman player on here who has come out and said the deck needs to be nerfed so I have to resort to listening to top legend players because they usually are truthful since they play a variety of stuff
I filtered by class (Shaman) and manually counted the wins and losses pertaining to Spell damage shaman only, disregarding Highlander shaman.
The stats show a total score of 117 W - 96 losses, which equal 54,93% winrate.
As I said, free ticked to top 20.
So yeah, it’s not JUST an emotional outlier. It’s a broken deck when piloted by top class abusers.
This sample has some limitations. It’s “possible” that they all just highrolled (yeah, right xD) and the sample is too low (it’s one day of stats, so yeah, it’s perfectly enough).
But to anyone reasonable, this is proof enough.
EDIT: For comparison, I did the same for Shopper DH.
Shopper DH went 200-165, which equals 54,79% win rate.
This is what we call “benchmarking”, comparing stats to the industry leader, or in this case, the most broken deck which is getting nerfed.
So what we have is, on one side, the most broken deck at the moment, Shopper DH, with 54,79% win rate, and on the other we have OTK (T stands for toxic) Shaman with 54,93% win rate.
No further discussion is needed. Shaman is more broken than DH. It’s toxic gameplay.
That’s fair. But I am absolutely on board with if they nuke this deck they have to touch Wheel Warlock. It can’t go unchecked. The other decks that are supposedly holding Wheel Warlock back are not really holding it back as much as people think.
If Control decks (other than Wheel Warlock) were given more room to tinker, it would seem to me that Dirty Rat easily counters these Shaman decks because it’s pulling combo pieces out and lowering the damage.
The problem though is that damage output right now is so high and health is still stagnant at 30. Control Warrior can get away with it because armor bypasses this, and Control Warlock can get away with it because it only needs to heal and survive to win and yet it still crumbles to fast OTK stuff. There’s nothing here for a Control Paladin, Control Priest or Control Blood DK to do because these decks can’t breathe.
It’s not that the Control decks need more removal, they really don’t They need more survival in terms of health/armor and they don’t have it except for Warrior.
No, it really isn’t. I mean, yes, if Blizzard ever did the exact thing you described then yes, of course I’d be against it. But they will never do what you described, so I’m never going to be in that position.
There is no future situation that I consider even remotely realistic in which I’d say a sentiment nerf is justified. And when you think that there is no future situation that can happen, that’s when “never” is the right word.
Heck, even if Blizzard did create your strawman deck, I kinda wonder if there would actually be enough hardcore griefers to even run it. Maybe. Maybe not. If it had below 0.1% play rate I wouldn’t even care.
Ahem… Singleton Warrior is one the greediest deck and is most popular with the ‘fatigue’ option.
Meet Tony, King of Piracy, you newb!
That’s literally interactive: playing minions, removing enemy board and whatnot, except for Magtheridons probably — which still do get removed by Reno (and they said ‘permanents’ or dormant minions are untouchable)…
Well, they literally play big boards, very much like a Classic Handlock, it’s more than just the Wheel itself, although I still don’t consider it quite ‘legitimate’.
Still reminiscent of the old Freeze Mage with its many iterations: you either are fast enough and kill it first, or you get armour, or you just die to it, most likely.
Or perhaps they are picking it because they have a guaranteed exorbitant win rate (from ‘The Algorithm’), no matter what deck they play, so they just pick this one to troll and abuse their opponents. Doubly so for so-called streamers (see also this, for instance: Why did I have this win rate if the matchmaking is rigged? - #120 by SparkyElf-2852): not only do they have ‘skilL’ (yep, ‘L’ for ‘skill’), but they can also show it off by abusing ordinary players in front of others. Apparently, some are even mentioned here:
Well, yeah, except that the ‘streamer magic’ — the very same that allows them to have 90% win rate with Sif Mage vs Odyn Warrior, for example — wouldn’t apparently work if you’re not ‘certified’ (perhaps ‘aNNointed’ — ‘official’ ™ Blizz orthography — is a better word), no matter how good and entertaining or educational you are.
Yeah, that’s definitely due to a skill difference. I’ve seen that for many years: for example, a ‘top-legendary’ Ramp Druid would always start with a Wild Growth on turn 2, followed by a perfect curve, while a lower-rank or ‘perpetually Rank 5 / D5’ player would be so unskilled that he or she woud have to use a hero power instead… Really skillful players never get their Window Shoppers without a massive discount and always discover a Magtheridon or better, unlike those newbs who can’t play this game well…
Nope — because ‘kayfabe’.
Since when have so-called ‘hate cards’ — more a sign of bad design than anything — been generally successful at stopping problematic archetypes? Speaking generally there, not necessarily re a particular one.
As in, your pet troll to sic on people, so that you could flag their posts with your ‘forum privileges’, all the while playing a superficially positive ‘community rep’, and partake in forum abuse and bullying without doing the dirty work yourself?
Speak for yourself, please, wouldn’t you?
Besides, just below the very same person says:
I’m tempted to say: make up your mind.
(Highlighted by me)
That definition of ‘early’ is highly subjective, to put it mildly, that’s why I’m not content with such a formula.
The good old ‘no OTK’ rule was just so much better, in my opinion.
However, there’s apparently a niche among players for such cards — all those people with the “I’m the dung pile that smudged the boots of someone” mentality (same for resident forum trolls, by the way). There’s also the extreme ‘Jimmy’ (or was it ‘Johnny’?) mentality, as MTG players call it.
That resembles stock market a bit: you could have all the data about the past, which doesn’t mean you’ll be able to predict the future.
That’s one of the many reasons I consider those ‘deck tracker’ with ‘stats’ and so on to be ‘snake oil’ for most players. Those who gather the data are a different story, though…
Absolutely not — or, at the very least, not as trivially as you’d think.
Gotta self-quote again, tired of explaining the same thing over and over again:
Try going higher, then you might see what this game is really made of, how it’s not rigged and how skill matters.
Well, at least the DK has some interesting ones.
Precisely — I underline ‘terrible’.
Back where you ‘belong’, according to “The Algorithm’s” judgement — that’s how it generally goes.
Not necessarily.
Some people utilise also rational thinking, logic and even a mathematical approach. Having estimated somehow the ‘subjective probability’, as de Finetti would probably put it, that the game is more likely rigged than not, they have come to that conclusion — which might be right or wrong, but it’s rational from a mathematical viewpoint.
I wouldn’t take a position I know to be false just for the sake of debating. Well, at least not without clarifying that I am playing devil’s advocate or something. But generally speaking, yes, of course this. This is a discussion board. I enjoy discussing. That’s why I’m here. To agree with some things and disagree with the rest.
If someone likes the proverb “better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak and to remove all doubt,” yeah, I will probably irritate them. I hate that proverb. I think it’s far better to speak and be told you’re a fool than to remain silent and not know by what means you might be one. One can’t guarantee the quality of the incoming arguments, of course, perhaps they’re not good enough for you or perhaps you’re not good enough for them. But at least it’s trying.
I think the best course of action in such situations is not to speculate seriously on such matters with personal experience, but instead wait for data. Key word: seriously. I think speculation is good fun when it comes with the understanding that harder data is the final arbiter and predicting those results is treated as a game.
Which is a lot less fun when someone is accusing you of gaslighting and saying that you should be banned, by the way. I kinda expect Schyla to give me a little crap for being wrong about Paladin and being wrong about Shopper DH, that comes with the territory and I “lost” fair and square. But Schyla has enough common decency to limit it somewhere near “he’s been acting erratic lately” and not, you know, call for me to be banned. It’s just bad sportsmanship and your vehemence is very, very misplaced.
Not that you will even read this but, whatever.
I think it’s important to not have any such agreement. This is the one thing where I am admittedly pretty darn adamant and it’s not really data based.
Here’s the way I look at it: every game in Ranked has exactly two players. So when we’re talking about any deck, we’ve got two possibilities: mirror matches, and not mirror matches. In the case of non-mirrors, a nerf that merely takes the fun from one player and gives it to the other accomplishes nothing. The total fun is the same. So the only way a nerf can be good is if it increases the fun of both players.
How can a nerf increase the fun of both players? Only when one of the players didn’t really want to play the deck they’re playing in the first place. When they are playing the deck they’re playing simply because it wins more. Therefore the only ethical nerf is a winrate nerf.
When people talk about “sentiment outliers” what they’re really doing is othering players. They’re saying that “real” Hearthstone players play decks that are in this group, and if you play some other deck then you’re not one of us and your fun is less important than our fun. I refuse to consider my opponent in a card game to be my political enemy. If I advocate for his deck to be nerfed, I do it not for my own personal pleasure but to hopefully free him from being chained to a deck he doesn’t like but plays anyway just because it wins too much. Nerfing Shopper DH isn’t for all the players who don’t play Shopper DH. Nerfing Shopper DH is just for the Shopper DH players, out of love for them.
That’s the way I think about nerfs. And I am honestly kinda aghast at how many people here advocate for nerfing while displaying naked hatred for other Hearthstone players. I’ve seen people I really want to like calling people scum for playing some deck or another, or for playing a tribe in BGs. And all of that makes me very sad.
What deck people want to play is their choice. It isn’t really your choice to make. Blizzard interfering with that choice should be done only with considerable care.
Why do you consider such an argument even necessary? They are voting with their feet. You can tell that they enjoy the deck because they choose it. And if it has a winrate below 50%, then you know that they’re not playing it because it wins too much. Should you be compelled to come before a panel of internet haters to articulate to them why, what and how it is that you find fun in whatever deck it is that you’re playing, or have played, or will ever play? You might not understand the how or the why but you know that the players have indicated what they want with their choice. What more do you need?
False. We have all seen countless posts where someone advocates for a nerf to a deck they’re currently playing. It’s one of the most common virtue signals, to say that they’re not biased because they play it themselves and “even they” think it should be nerfed.
And most of the others are people with their disgust response triggered, people who have never played as the deck and can’t in any way relate to the experience of people who have.
Very normal.
I don’t agree. I think most streamers have an audience to consider and are keenly aware of what their audience says, thinks and feels. And I think they have a lot of incentive to not disagree with them.
There are a few streamers out there who aren’t particularly afraid to disagree with their audiences. It’s rare, but in those cases maybe.
Again, you probably won’t read this, but if you do: thank you and, um, congratulations. I’m very glad that you’ve done your own research.
However, my concern is: what is the baseline winrate for these players? I mean, it might be that they average 56% winrate no matter what they play, and choosing Burn Shaman has actually had about a -1% effect. So if you could go and count their total collective winrate going back a week or so, that’d give the data you collected some vital context.
Well, I guess that’s a start.
Um, that’s being ridiculous. Do you honestly believe that the margin of error for your little survey here is less than 0.14%? If I was in your shoes I’d probably boast that it’s as toxic, but more? Bruh, they’re the same.
And I’d still be interested in other decks. I suspect that at least one, possibly more, of your selected streamers did play Burn Shaman but didn’t even touch Shopper DH. Or maybe you pulled Shopper DH winrate from streamers who weren’t even in the Burn Shaman pool. I think we can do better on this baseline.
So there has been a development in otk that has bumped up its win rate significantly for those who know how to play the deck, but will likely not change much at low MMR.
The basic gist of this development is twofold.
Now running the 2 mana 4pt heal actually fits the deck really well, it’s an extra chance to find burn or flash.
Fizzle is run, and this gives the deck epic range, something close to 60 damage from hand with a perfect hand. Essentially the idea is, on your flash turn you open with fizzle then you blow your entire hand and use the spell tutor minion to grab snapshot, then blow through another hand. That’s somewhere between 45 to over 60 damage in one turn. Obviously it’s hard to pull off, but it puts Reno warriors and other armor decks on notice.
Essentially I think this deck bumped from tier 4 to tier 1 with this modification.
It’s also important to note with the extra heal it can be played attrition vs demon hunter, essentially merging the best parts of Reno shaman with otk shaman. And ofc we know Reno shaman is one of the few decks with a slightly positive win rate with DH.
Essentially this is THE best deck in the game right now. If your not playing it, it’s because you don’t understand the points I described above. So your welcome.
Yes and yes. It’s all in pocket/norwis, basically, EU version.
NA is still lagging behind, but when I lose against it, I don’t really care if it’s the 51% or 55% version. I still lost to a toxic, uninteractive, broken deck.
Also, let’s not get carried away and blame it on those two cards. Sure, their addition made the deck broken, yet again. But we all know, all it takes to prevent spending pointless hours nerfing same thing again and again and again is to just deal with flash of lighting and shut down that toxic gameplay once and for all.
Enough is enough. Go play real decks, which actually makes you blink and think when you look at the opponent’s board.
Traditionally the Warrior matchup has been a complete nightmare for Burn Shaman, like 20-80 bad. Even if it stayed bad but went to 60-40, that’d be a huge gain. +20% against 10% of the meta is +2% overall right there. That’d go a little bit beyond innovation, more like a revolution!
I definitely hadn’t been running that, and that’s the kind of thing that you really have to know about.
A bit of a shame that no one even mentioned the card until dang near the 100th post. Reminds me of a line from Pulp Fiction containing the phrase “that’s all you had to say.”
I wouldn’t jump to that conclusion just yet, but you’ve definitely given me something to think about.
Forgot to add something, but perhaps it’s for the best — my previuous post turned out too long anyway…
For the record: I played the Window Shopper DH before it was cool , and currently I also play DK (that’s more or less all my budget right now).
Gotta admit: I sinned in the past a bit and, during some of my ‘lows’, played some decks for which I’d previously… hate people, so to speak. For example, I played post-nerf Patron Warrior (and even a few times post-unnerf in last month’s Twist — for the first time ever, but it felt disgusting), things like ‘Zoo’ Warlock after WotOG (although with a ‘bonus’ in the form of Sea Giants), the Malygos version (well, at least it was not Leeroy, I said to myself) of the goblen Rogue… There was also the Freeze Mage, especially with ‘I take your candle!’, Hunter at some point, and shortly before quitting the game, even some unsuccesful experiments with Shaman (although I tried unconventional builds). However, I’ve probably never played a broken deck just for the sake of it (all of the aforementioned examples were past their heyday at that moment), and I wouldn’t even consider it — it just doesn’t fit my definition of fun. I suppose, if you use those MTG terms, it’s a bit of a hybrid ‘Jimmy/Spyke’ (or whatever they are called) approach…
For example:
There’s also this:
I suppose those ‘Spikes’ (playing the most busted decks just for cheap wins) and ‘Jimmy/Timmy’ players (‘troll’ decks) have a right to exist… But I reserve for myself the right to… dislike them strongly , when the game should be played for fun, in my opinion.
Well that’s a weird take. I’ve only ever flagged a handful of posts ever and I don’t use Scrotie as some scapegoat. Such a weird position for you to take.
Well, they are. They as in the majority of players. This is because combo and OTK decks exist by default in nearly every single “collectible” card game.
You don’t know the difference between a solitaire deck and a combo/otk deck I see. You know there are differences, right?
Which is why I said earlier we can have an argument about where the “line” is. Mine seems to coincide with the Blizzard devs. 5-6 is entirely too early in standard if it’s consistent. Evidenced again by their nerf to Mozaki Mage.
Had to scroll up to make sure Sparky wasn’t talking about Kassadin here.
Anywho, I’m not a very good pet.
I’ve already made my stance on sentiment nerfs clear. But I absolutely believe that Blizzard has no line, indeed they can’t possibly have a line. They just occasionally check Twitter and if the anger is vehement enough they bend to the mob. That’s inevitably the way that unprincipled stances like “sentiment outliers” are enforced. The dark side of democracy, counted in Reddit upvotes.
Could have been a coincidence, but I think I spotted your dynamic duo in topics dedicated mostly to trolling or bullying some frustrated forum participants. If these were some outliers, then, well, a mistake happened — it happpens.
Not in the original Hearthstone as per Ben Brode’s initial vision — that’s my reference point, if you will, and the ‘line’ I’d argue for.
Sure, he might not have always been the greatest designer of all time, and I don’t agree with some of his ideas (regarding randomness and ‘variance’ in particular), but if you look at subsequent controversial changes in design philosophy and principles, I’d say he wins by comparison. I’d argue that remembering at least some of his ‘tenets’ wouldn’t be bad for the game at all. For example, one of them was the following: if they’d consider something ‘not fun’ for players (and to play against in particular), they’d refrain from printing it. This resonates very much with what you said about feelings in this topic, by the way, regardless of performance and whatnot, and I think it’s a good design idea: after all, the game should feel fun (sorry for tautology).
Honestly I think people just hate the deck because their boring removal cards (which make up half of most peoples decks these days) are dead cards so it feels ‘uninteractive’
Can confirm the Fizzle basically makes the Reno warrior MU favorable for OTK shaman (wow!), but the Odyn matchup is still unwinnable (they seem to have over 100 armor in the deck, easily.)
This makes me think that if OTK shaman catches on I see the meta being disrupted and becoming:
This decks has never felt as anything close to Undertaker Hunter, Oil Rogue, Patron Warrior, Secret Paladin, Pirate Warrior, etc, etc or the recent busted pre-nerf Paladin to me.
Yeah, nature shaman’s refinement there was missed in this week’s VS report because Zach pulls the data on Tuesday, and the change happened after that. It’s one of the rarer times where VS’ report is just entirely worthless on the deck because it had a massive change in win rate basically overnight.
It had a week of no bad matchups while the meta figured it out. I assume the stuff above it is going to get adjusted in a few weeks on the next scheduled balance patch, but DH needs a nerf too.
Well, yeah, except that the ‘streamer magic’ — the very same that allows them to have 90% win rate with Sif Mage vs Odyn Warrior, for example — wouldn’t apparently work if you’re not ‘certified’ (perhaps ‘
Yeah, that’s definitely due to a skill difference.