Elementals need a NERF…but which cards?

Multiplayer Discussion
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Huge Battlegrounds fan, I’ve played since launch and seen all the metas over time.

I find elementals insanely fun to play. They’re extremely versatile and have many traits of other tribes rolled in to one (divine shields, stat-buffs, card generation, economy).

That said I think they’re a little too consistent with multiple ways to survive the mid/late game vs other tribes. How do we nerf them without damaging the essence of the tribe? Let’s discuss.

Sellemental

Strong economy card early game, triggers multiple stat buffs from T2 onwards. Possible changes are the 2nd card is neutral or spawned as an instant token (stats nerfed).

This would minimize the stat buff potential late-game whilst keeping it strong early game.

Gentle Djinni

The main offender imho. Being a taunt almost guarantees it dies each round and considering elementals nature to spawn more cards means the card you generate will likely generate even more cards.

Possible nerfs would be removing taunt so you’d have to open with it and wear a lower opening attack or argus it for taunt.

I’d also advocate for removing this card as the value generation is just so strong.

Crackling Cyclone
Big stat tribes (eles, pirates, sometimes demons) generally have weakness to poison (by lacking divine shield) to create the rock-paper-scissors nature of BG.

This card effectively ignores that with multiple avenues to buff it (rag, nomi, party, domo) and can often 2 (or even 4) for 1 your opponents board late-game if tripled and sufficiently buffed.

I don’t think divine shield has a place in elementals (outside amal) so I’d suggest removing this card or buffing and increasing tier (to slow it’s snowball).

Your thoughts?
I think these are the 3 main offenders and I think just tweaking one of these would go a long way to toning down elementals power.

What are your thoughts?

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Please disregard my username, but since i do think that these need a nerf, I think that the scaling is what makes it so bad. (and the early djinnis) Although these cards do help with the scaling process and benefit greatly from the scaling. I would rather nerf garr, lil rag and molten rock by a bit. The first two are kind of obvious - lil rag even at tier six provides tons of value and garr can get to 500 health sometimes. But molten rock also often can be really good in the early game and you can get it to sixteen health by the time you’re at tier 4. I actually think that nerfing all six cards by say, making them half as good for scaling would still make elementals a good choice, but not as horrendously overpowered as they once were. My basis for this is that I got a perfect pirate build, golden eliza and hoggarr and everything, but I still lost to elementals by managing to kill exactly one of their minions. With these nerfs, I think they would still be good, since the perfect elemental build these days has 400 health garrs, so some nerfs would probably still make elementals strong, but weak enough for other builds to contest.

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only change needed is nomi to 6. all elementals are weak if you cant scale with rag or nomi, and if win cons arent allowed at tier 6 then whats the purpose of tier 6?

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Almost all of the buff minions are based on the same premise of cycling the minions from the tribe. This is the only tribe that encourages you to greedily buy and sell the minions from the tribe.

Because all of the buff minions synergize, you can create insanity in a single turn, much less the stats that grow over several turns.

To combat this insanity, they should really look at removing one or two of the minions that use cycled minions to buff other minions. In theory, you could leave nomi, rags, executus, party elemental, and gar up on a board and cycle one slot to buff beyond belief.

I think nomi and executus removal is the most obvious way to fix some of this issue, but taking out gar and moving nomi to 6 is an alternative. I think party elemental stays because it’s the only early tier buff for the tribe and the 1/1 to a single minion isn’t over-tuned, imo.

If they think the cycliing minions is good design, and it may well be, then they need to remove minions that generate additional tribe minions either in hand or in the tavern. Djinn, selemental, stasis elemental, and tavern elemental should go or be modified to not produce additional tribe specific units.

I love the tribe, and would rather see them redo other tribes to match the scaling and utility they created with elementals. I think they actually finally got the power right and cooperation correct, but it stands out because that power is so much greater than the competing tribes at the moment.

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only change needed is djinn and nomi, getting a guaranteed free minion every round is seriously unfair even moreso if it’s a specific tribe minion, and nomi/djinn being in tier 5 makes everyone just bum rush to tier 4 for the golden triple making tier3-tier4 builds irrelevant

compare djinn to nat pagle:
djinn’s effect always works, baseline stats djinn will always be better than nat pagle (djinn + deathrattle minion summoned)
nat pagle you need to kill a minion (can trigger once or twice, sometimes not at all - has to cycle through all of your 7 minions or more [with deathrattle] in order to attack again) in order to get a free minion, and the minion given is so random it can be basically getting 1 coin

the fact that these two minions (djinn and nomi) are in tier 5 is why almost every game is a rush to T4 to get a golden into one of these two, I’m at 8.5k and maybe 8/10 of every game is this same strat…

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Molten rock is a possibility although it’s attack stays low for a while unless you’re also running party eles. E.G. even a 2/30 isn’t much of a threat mid-game when most players have 8/8 to 10/10 units.

Garr is poison fodder without amals with taunt and divine protecting them.

I could see that. It would massively slow down those turn 6/7 nomi highrollers that usually place 1st or 2nd.

Yep, that’s why 2 of the 3 changes I suggested were these types of elementals. I quite enjoy the cycle-style play but it’s a little overtuned atm.

This. It always procs when at lower stats, a light nerf to it may be to remove taunt so players need to send it in first.

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why not just buff everything else

if everyone is super, no one is

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Elementals do not need nerfs. Heroes that allow you to cheat scale and ramp way fast need some.

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Spot on. I don’t play BG’s normally, decided to watch a friend play some and play some myself since Elementals were introduced…

the OBVIOUS problem to me is that too many elementals generate more elementals which causes a cycling problem.

In short, the reason Elementals are OP is the same problem we have in standard - card generation is out of hand.

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Just remove them all. Tired of playing against an inflated board every game.

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Good point. They either need to give other tribes similar (read: not the same) abilities or nerf elementals.

This. Djinni spawns elementals that spawn elementals that buff elementals and give economy advantage. It’s just too much.

It’s interesting how each tribe seems to have a period of dominance (divine murlocs, demons, old cobalts, now eles).

I suppose they acknowledge this mode is ‘beta’ and that tribe identity will take time to balance.

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Lil’ Rag - give stats HALF the minion tier
Djinni - spawn a random MINION, not specifically elemental. Pagle doesn’t spawn just pirates! Also remove taunt.
Garr - maybe give health equal to the minion tier played?

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I think the problem with elementals isn’t Nomi or Garr or Lil’Rag. Those ability’s are good but by themselves are a bit limited unless you get a constant stream of elementals to play. The problem with elementals is how easy it is to consistently get multiple in a turn.

Elementals are entirely powered up by just playing any elemental and there are so many options to either get multiple from a single play or make it easier to find them in the tavern that it is just consistently triggering their powerups multiple times a turn even when multiple people are plying them. Its not uncommon for 2 if not 3 of the top 4 to be plying elementals and none of them are getting strangled out. Between, Sellemental, Refreshing elemental, Stasis elemental, Gentel Dejin and Tavern Tempest it’s not hard to play 4+ elementals a turn to trigger all the powerups. Not to mention some of those options help avoided Tavern Refresh RNG completely.

Aside from that, just remove Devine shield from Crackling Cyclone. I know unbuffed he would be worthless, but Mega Windfurry on the gold is just too good with DS when all you need is a single Executus to buff him to insane levels (though admittedly if they tone down the number of free elementals it might not be that big a problem anymore)

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Great change. Consistent with other card-generating cards. Otherwise, Pagle only spawns PIRATES! :slight_smile:

Yep, basically 2 of the main points I made in my OP.

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yes, lets make it able to spawn brann, baron, and other win cons at tier 5, that will reduce the high rolls

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Oops haha didn’t think of those cards. That said it’d be very unlikely to happen but agree you’d get more chances than with Pagle.

Maybe Djinni should need to overkill like Pagle?

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I agree entirely that Elementals are EASILY the best tribe in the game as of current. Their issue is that fact that they scale EXTREMELY quick, being with some luck, you can start setting up your wincon Cyc by T2. As of the moment, I’d say what would make elementals playable against without ruining the playability would to remove mega-windfury from the gold version of Cyc, being a T3 w/ Divine Shield. If this helps explain it, not many other tribes have early/mid game cards that scale quite this well into the late game.

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holy necro batman, like golly mister, wow