If you read through the twist article last week, you would remember they said they wanted to use twist as an experimental ground to try stuff they wouldn’t initially try in Standard. Specifically, with this twist season they mentioned they want to try a system to balance heroes faster through health changes each week, aside from making more careful balance changes to cards and decks.
This seems to imply this is a system they might consider introducing in standard. I would imagine the way this would work would be like, whenever they see a class that is a significant outlier, instead of making knee-jerk balance changes to cards that could prove premature; they could instead tweak the starting health of some classes over others each week, while they assess what card changes would be most appropriate to make on each balance window.
What do you think of this idea? I personally think it is interesting. The most obvious problem is that classes often have more than 1 deck, and a health change to a class would hurt all decks in that class unnecessarily. But still, this is an interesting idea and I am not against it in principle.
That’s why this wouldn’t work in Standard. It would punish the other archetyps of a class and would also force the players to only play 1 specific netdeck archetyp of a class.
Yeah that’s the main concern. It would be interesting to attach a health penalty, or even a health buff, to specific cards instead. They could develop the technology to attach these effects to key deck pieces to make inmediate balance tweaks without the need for card changes.
So for instance, while Shopper DH was OP, they could have a system that highlights Shopper as a debuffed card in your colection, and if you slot that card in your deck your starting health is 25. Maybe other kinds of handicaps different than starting health could be thought of. They could design simple visual queues to indicate which cards have buffs/debuffs each week in your collection, and a system like this would give them a tool to balance the meta while they assess more permanent balance changes.
They can implement a system where the health change is directly linked to specific cards
Yout deck includes a high winrate card ? -1hp. A bad winrate card ? +1 hp
That’s obviously simplified but that could be how
Not sure I’d like it though but it would be an interesting thing to have twist has a testing ground. They could even do a Twist season with standard format and this change
I think you are conflating two entirely unrelated things. Social justice has nothing to do with competitive multiplayer balance. A dev team being ‘SJWs’ is unrealted to their competence in game design/balance so no need to bring your politics into this.
This is what any balance change does. It handicaps or gives an advantage to some cards so the overall meta reaches a more diverse equilibrium. Why is making Grasp 4 mana more fair than temporarily attaching a debuff to it.
Yeah, tell that to the designers. They’re the ones trying to “balance” a game by making it unfair from the start
No? Not even close.
Balancing a card which is broken is fair and it’s not discrimination.
Balancing a starting health of a class running a broken card, is not fair, and it’s a discrimination, and it punishes not just other classes, but every other deck of that same class.
This is the single worst idea I’ve ever heard. Nothing will ever come close to this.
Ah yeah, that’s the problem with this approach I agree. That’s why we started to discuss a similar alternative system that targets individual cards instead. I think that would be a far more interesting approach. Regardless, I don’t think the devs’ politics influence any of this, I think that’s reading too much into it.
I don’t know if this health balancing idea is something the devs intend to implement tho, but they seem to be at least entertaining the idea, since they explicitly said that was their ‘experiment’ with this twist format. Maybe if it’s more targeted to individual cards than just applying it whole classes, it could work.
True, tbf it’s kinda lazy and overbearing. But it being a temporary measure makes it more flexible. I think they need a system to intervene the meta promptly before making knee jerk changes that then prove to be bad for the game. If they can make softer, temporary touches to some things while the meta develops instead of going in full throttle with the nerf bat, I think the game would benefit.
Call me conservative, but I’d still prefer them to try normal balance changes and then fix them promptly if the changes aren’t good
I really don’t mind meta reversal (like what we have with handbuff pally now) because of nerfs - you can just fix it another patch, and at least we aren’t forced to learn entirely new decks again because of 1 mana change of 1 card of the meta tyrant
This health change balance method they implemented has nothing to do with them “trying new stuff, but not in Standard.”
It’s a lazy way to provide “balance changes” (if you can even call them that) in Twist weekly as they promised. Even they probably know it’s a bad move, but since they will be changing health caps every week in Twist, they’ll be able to claim that they are “working on the mode.” But it’s a stupid way to balance stuff.
Like, do you make Arfus have 15 Health? And will that even change anything if the deck is on the board immediately?
Should never be in Standard, unless it’s a global change, and everyone’s health cap changes. Not balance related, but relating to player agency since being 0 or 30 in today’s game can change from one turn to another.
Forgot to add, health changes will make certain matchups polarizing.
Also, it’ll create another layer of nerfing stuff, which will be decks that exist solely because the health pool for X class has changed. And if something like that is good solely for that, cards can get nerfed unrelated to their power level but only because the class’s health cap allows them to be broken.
That’s why I kind of hated the way they nerfed Brann.
It’s the effect of the card that is the problem. Sure, you can balance the win rate by just making the deck worse, but it really doesn’t change that the games aren’t really fun when decided by Brann’s effect.
Other classes have to race the effect. If they can’t, the nerf didn’t really improve the game for them.
The same thing really applies here in twist. If you dropped arfus to say, 15 starting health, sure, some decks now beat it more, but it’s still going to roll over things in the same overwhelming way that can’t sneak in that face damage.
So yeah, just me again being frustrated that Blizzard doesn’t like to change what cards do, when that’s often what is the oppressive part of the card rather than what turn it’s happening on.
Aggro is a lot easier to tune with Mana nerfs than grindy late game stuff.
Someone always gonna be the lategame king and anyone playing slow decks gonna always cry about any lategame king Nonstop.
There isn’t anything that can really be done regarding that and If we did let that opnion get their way with the game we would be playing chillwind yetis in no time despite of any good intention said person has.
Yeah, Blizzard can fix this, they just don’t. It’s lame to just accept that one deck is going to demolish every other late game deck.
You just keep card interactions from making the game uninteresting up there, thus keeping any one deck from being the obvious late game winner.
It’s way easier to balance the early game through Mana adjustments as cards that early usually aren’t locking out everything else. In the late game, effects are often doing that, and Mana nerfs aren’t the way to fix it, but it’s all we usually get until Mana nerfs fail to make an impact on the play patterns for an extended time.
It is the same for fast decks and no one here is wanting nerfs because one deck is better at it than other aggro decks.
As long as cards and decks do different things they gonna have different powerspykes.
Period.
It does not matter how much someone wants.
And it also isn’t the end of the world for your Control deck to have someone who puts it as agressor due to the inevitability.
In the end you’re at the level of trying to justify the old meme of Control players hating everything including other Control players and why we should think it is good when in reality It isn’t.