Only played a handful of games so far, but the nerfs did not change the meta much, it’s still an ignis meta,
the big winners:
Warrior, biggest problem for warrior was secret rogue and ramp druid, the nerfs targeted basically both those decks, probably far more extremely than they should have.
arcane hunter: if you look at the spread for this deck it was slightly unfavored vs ramp druid and warrior, after nerfs is still unfavored vs warrior, but lost one of its unfavorable matches, it should take off
Big losers:
druid, obviously every key card was hit, can someone say overcompensating?
secret rogue, both prison breakers and yogg was hit, were key cards to keep aggro and face decks in check, now it’s nerfed this deck falls over, also way over nerfed in my opinion
Overall, I suspect we are heading straight into a warrior meta, possibly hunter as well. Enjoy folks this seems to be what y’all wanted.
My take is these nerfs are crazy strong, for example yogg should of been nerfed via 5 mana increase instead of complete rework.
All in all, nerfs seem to do very little to change how playing the meta will feel, but will simply limit your options to playing one deck, likely.
In my opinion, nerfs are a complete failure and miss many opportunities to make the game better. Classical knee jerk reaction we can come to expect from Blizzard recently.
My general view is that hearthstone is pretty fundamentally broken because of power creep, so at this point we are just choosing the degenerate deck that wins.
Do you want to die to infinite yoggs? How about Odyn ever hitting the board? Maybe attack power druids! Or, the good old spell damage hunter you can’t survive.
If all those are killed, how about some curse lock topped off with Sargeras?
None of it leads to particularly compelling games as blizz leaned too hard into cards that end games rather than make a back and forth.
This is what I call The Fallacy of the Leeches. As in it’s entirely wrong.
Here is The Story of the Fallacy of the Leeches. A few hundred years ago Jebediah comes upon Ezekiel, who is applying leeches to Isaiah, and asks him what he’s doing. “Well Jeb, I’m trying to cure Isaiah here of his cancer.” And sure enough, Isaiah did have cancer. “But why the leeches, Zeke?” “Bloodletting is the only hope we have, other than prayer, of draining the malicious humors from the body.” “But, look how pale he is. Is he even conscious?” “Afraid not, Jeb.” “Zeke, the leeches seem to be killing him faster than the cancer is. Maybe you should stop.” At this point Ezekiel gasps and becomes visibly upset. “How dare you! Are you actually so heartless that you don’t want to do anything to stop cancer? You’ve just told me that you want cancer to overtake Isaiah without telling me you want it to overtake him. Get out of my sight, knave!”
It doesn’t matter how big of a problem Druid was. Solutions are separate from problems and you can recognize a problem (like cancer) as legitimate while simultaneously being fiercely critical of a proposed solution to that problem (like bloodletting). Everything you’ve said so far this thread is invalid.
I believe the fallacy of the leeches is the single biggest problem facing this forum and most online communities as well.
Anyone with any knowledge of the meta knew Warrior and Paladin were going to go right back to the top again. It still amazes me how the balance team will not just bite the bullet and make the larger changes that need to be made.
You can tell the games design is massively crutched on absurdly powerful neutral cards that end games. They need to move away from this philosophy and make better in class cards.
Except thats not equally true across all classes, so when these powerful neutrals get nerfed, classes that are designed better and dont need the neutrals rise to the top.
Sadly class balance is probably broken till badlands.
They needed to hit odyn as well, ignis windfury option, rogues windfury mech, mages sif.
The rework to yogg ciuld have been done better and prison breaker was an unjustified nerf. At least drop prison breakers manabcost and statline to 3 3/3.
Besides high legend Druid wasn’t really an issue as most players played their ooga booga me aggro me 2 IQ decks a la arcane hunter, mech rogue and some control locks.
Admitting once again total failure on various levels is another classical Blizzard, but as others have mentioned they are long overdue for a some deep overhaul to fix their stuff. Before this happens, Jesus will return once again to earth and we find at least 2 other liviable galaxies.
Secret rogue is still strong enough as far as I see… it does not need for Yogg… Yogg nerf really needed… the biggest problem is when the enemy can use it up more then once… Shadowstep, Creation Protocol… these are the reasons why it needed to be nerfed for good… Because it was use able for 0 mana too easy for Rogue and Druid… 9 mana seems fine for it now.
My personal thoughs are that prison breaker should not been nerfed this idea that rogue needs board clears as a weakness does not make sense because first we had vanish a boardclear.
Secondly they hunter used to limited card and now they have alot and my issue is that if hunter can be allowed to shed its traditional weakness why cant rogue,
Oh, Odyn Warrior isn’t what we refer to when we say Warrior is gonna be on top. Right now the popular Legend Warrior deck is Enrage Warrior. Sorry, Odyn Warrior popularity fell off.
Compare it to Plague DK’s “deal 3 to the enemy minions” card. Same mana cost, but…
1 more health on the minion to make it premium stats.
No downside or opportunity cost, just a spammable battlecry, where plague DK has to burn a plague in your deck each time.
Neutral, which should make it weaker, yet was stronger.
Hits face, where plague DK only hits minions.
If it wanted to keep the 3 damage, it would need -1 hp on the minion, not be able to hit face, and maybe even a downside.
I’ve occasionally thought about balance in a game like this, and I think the devs have a inadequate understanding of how to balance a complex system of interactions. Simply put, we are in the hands of amateurs.
They’ve also said recently that balance is a secondary or later priority to them, which is also very worrying. We have amateurs who don’t prioritize balance leading the development of this game.
FWIW, here is my take on balance,
There’s many approaches that work for balancing because, in a sense, the “thing being improved” (referred to as the objective) is essentially a subjective criteria
from the players perspective, you’d want to balance so that the “funnest” decks are also the best performing ones, call this criteria A
from the perspective of the company, be you want to entice as many players to buy new cards as possible, or whatever the means to make money is, call this criteria B
criteria B can be achieved or at least approximated very well by balancing in a rock paper scissors fashion, where a few decks always dominate, and those decks use as many different cards as possible (when compared to previous best decks.)
criteria A is far healthier for the longevity of the game, but much harder to implement, however an obvious starting point would be to measure which types of cards players love playing with and against and try to balance so that those decks are top decks to play
Regardless of which criteria they choose to optimize for, there is a separate question of how to actually balance various decks to ensure what changes they want to enact will actually change the meta in the fashion they would desire
there’s no way to really model this other than to use Monte Carlo simulations, but even so, billions of simulations would need to be run in order to get a good understanding
even so, it’s hard to predict how much a meta will change with various changes, so small changes should be preferred to large ones, as they can more accurately be predicted
assuming that a series of small changes can get you to a desired meta starting from any initial meta, one should always implement a small change, measure it, see how it matches your simulations, improve your model based on whether you find your simulations are poor or good in certain areas, repeat the process until you reach a desired meta
what we seem to have is the devs calling a meeting on a Friday afternoon, and asking what should we change? Result is, we see sweeping changes that they have no idea how they will affect the meta.
I’m amazed everyone is all over warrior and hunter yet nobody has a word to say edgewise about paladin. The stats show paladin as one of the top performers, possibly even higher than warrior. It’s gardens grace deck is pretty ridiculous. Easily on a similar level as hunter.
Balance in most cases really is adjusting numbers.
And what the “funnest” decks are is really relative.
So get your thing going and the meta changing really should be a priority over balance by the simple fact those are things you can really control while gaming balance in many times is a wild guess.
Also powercreep is just consequence of the old age of a game despite of people not liking to admit it.
With that said i don’t think people are really ready for the “big overhaul” conversation.
Are they also ready for the game to be balance broken for months for example?
Because if something like this happen we can be almost 100% sure it will not be done right in the first try.
Are they ready to throw by the window 90% of what they where made to believe by devs ?
Because if we are getting an overhaul we for sure getting rid of many concepts.
And i not even hitting the surface. This is far more than nerfing a big amount of cards because someone got tired of powercreep.
How would you guys nerf Odyn without outright killing it? The fact is that if you don’t manage to stop Odyn’s effect from activating, you probably lose the game. It is just that powerful, and warrior has many cheap ways of getting armor, as well as multiple ways of surviving via board control. Relying on Dirty Rat rng to try to pull it out can backfire if you have no way of immediately dealing with an 8/8 on board on round 2/3. The whole 1 armor for 1 weapon damage thing Odyn does is just too powerful though. I think they gave warrior too many efficient ways of clearing board or maintaining board, they really didn’t need Sanitize, just as paladin didn’t really need Keeper’s Strength. Decks should have SOME weaknesses to make them somewhat fair. What’s the weakness of Odyn Warrior and pure paladin decks?
Yogg nerf really needed… the biggest problem is when the enemy can use it up more then once… Shadowstep, Creation Protocol… these are the reasons why it needed to be nerfed for good… Because it was use able for 0 mana too easy for Rogue and Druid… 9 mana seems fine for it now.