Honestly I can understand the first few weeks to build up the hype, but currently Death Knights dominate the game, only class that have the same amount of power right now seems to be paladins.
But the fact that there’s so many different Death Knight decks Unholy, Frost, Blood and they are all S tier is mindblowing to me.
Most of the people I meet in Diamond are DK’s 80% of the time.
Starting to get real frustrating honestly.
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DK where nerfed,
They normally wait a couple of weeks for the meta to settle before major nerfs. They beleive their may be decks capable of beatig dk but people are not playing them.
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Then play a counter.
The problem is that, of course they’re 3 completely different decks with different counters.
Blood DK counters the other DK decks.
Relic DH, Secret Rogue, and Tony Druid counter Blood DK.
DK is very good. But it’s not the only class that is good.
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But is the class that has the most variety in high elo and as you said yourself hard to counter since there’s different versions of decks that are currently S tier.
What would you nerf though? Much of the problem with DKs is discovery effects. You can’t blanket nerf all discover cards and raising the cost on them by 1 really doesn’t solve the issue of them being able to find solutions to every situation pretty much at will. Let’s take Blood DK for instance…they’re not that reliant on minions except as corpse fodder, discover generators, and a few specific battlecries…so what do we nerf? Vampiric Blood could stand to have its effect reduced I suppose, as 2 mana for 10 heal/10 health cap is pretty powerful. This has always been an issue with heals before DK…you couldn’t heal beyond the health cap, but DK can just boost that cap. Aside from that Blood DK mostly uses spells to control the board or heal. I just don’t know what exactly Blizzard could nerf that would have that much of an impact. Nerf Alexandros? This would be harsh, as a single Alexandros isn’t that big an issue…the issue is the ability to discover or create more copies. When you’re taking 9+ dmg per turn automatically while the DK keeps healing and clearing the board then it’s a whole other story. Blizzard kind of painted themselves into a corner with DK tbh.
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I think looking at the stats and tuning the cards down generally until you hit a certain winrate with the decks is the easiest way and probably the way Blizzard works, but yes it’s hard to nerf however that does not mean its impossible nor should not be a top priority.
But I think a good direction could be increasing corpse costs for these cards since they are they gain so much power from having that extra corpse bonus is my first step I guess.
Also making dk’s not be able to gain health but instead recover like other classes from Vampiric blood for example.
However I am not a game designer by any means but just looking at the data you can clearly see DK’s being overrepresented in high elo due to them being so powerful, or just by actually playing the game and facing the same class over and over again.
And I do think discovery in general has gone completely crazy and needs to be tuned down and made into something more rarer in the game, it makes the game more unpredictable and less about thinking and more about reacting to things (one of the reasons why my main card game I play now is Legends of Runeterra)
Body Bagger can be a 1/2, no reason it has 3 health.
Hematurge? Yeah let’s go ahead and up that corpse cost to 2, shouldn’t be auto dropping it for a free discover (free because it generates it’s own corpse on death)
Why is Death Strike a lifesteal fireball? Yeah no, that can go to 5 damage.
Screaming Banshee should be a 2/5 for how busted it’s effect is.
Soulstealer should be turned into a spell, no reason for it to leave a body behind when other classes that board wipe for 8 don’t.
For frost, let’s turn Bone Breaker into a 2 cost card.
Horn of Winter should get the Innervate treatment: Refresh ONE (1) mana crystal.
Frostwyrm’s Fury should operate similar to how Might of Menethil does: Spend corpses to freeze minions. For its 7 cost, it can continue to freeze full boards, but that’s a corpse for each freeze.
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This is a double Standard.
Why should there be a single deck to counter every possible DK deck?
We’ve had other classes had multiple good decks that required different responses.
Druid had Ramp and Aggro. Warrior had Bomb and ETC. Warlock had Heal Zoo and Even. Hunter had Secret and Cube. Etc, etc.
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You’re right. At T1KL, Aggro Frost DK is #1, Unholy DK is #3, and Blood DK is at a respectable low tier 2. This needs to be fixed.
Your berf suggestions don’t address the real problems.
Soul stealer is late enough card that it really doesn’t matter that much.
Blood boil and banshee needs to be hit
If I was a guessing man, and I’ve guessed quite a few times in my life, the devs will announce a balance patch this week.
They will be. They might even get Warrior’d.
The point is, they either didn’t see this coming, which is ridiculous, or did and left it like that anyway to pander to suits (more likely). Both are awful.
I really hope they don’t mess up by doing this. Think about the situation logically. You have ten classes that went through a rotation and are finding their feet in the new format, and one that had no rotation and enters the format with just a few new cards. Let the other classes figure out what they’re capable of before we start messing around with numbers because Death Knight is performing absolutely as expected in the early days of the format.
We are already witnessing the win rates of the three boogeyman classes (DK, DH and Paladin) drop at high MMR brackets as other classes get figured out and refined. This was already happening before the erroneous Friday patch went live. It’s like the modern day HS player just doesn’t know how to let a format cook and wait for it to settle before demanding nerfs against the decks that get off to an early lead.
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(1) have Hermaturge only discover blood rune cards that exist in your deck (2) change the neutral discovery cards to only discover cards from the opponent’s class so they can’t Vamp Blood 4+ times or use Patchwork twice in the control matchup.
The other thing that needs to happen is that Soulstealer should not give corpses and should probably have a capacity on how many minions it can kill, more Vamp Blood should either not heal for 10 (should be 5 max) OR heal 10 but remove the draw (Shield Block literally costs 1 more mana and give 5 armor so why tf does this cost 2, draw, and heal twice the amount?), there’s lots of things you could do to nerf them.
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I like this take. I think everyone expected DK decks to shine the most when rotation happened given the fact it maintains just about everything and each deck type is well tuned after four months.
However, I do think it has some cards that could use a bit of balance still. Vampiric Blood could take a hit such as 4 health instead of 5, especially with the new 5mana Screaming Banshee; I don’t think mana cost will affect the card’s use/strength. And the 8mana Soul Stealer; the card just feels too strong. Even at 10mana it would still be a big card. Destroy a whole board AND gain resources, plus you can have two of these and discover more. Outside those two, off the top of my head, everything else seems fair.
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Blood DK will probably be nerfed.
Because at low Ranks it’s likely to stay as an irritant.
But because that’s why it’s likely to get nerfed rather than it being an insane powerhouse, it’s probably taking a small nerf.
This isn’t like the past two years where the Control deck was dominating the high MMR brackets.
Or maybe Blizzard does hate Control and will gut it as some suspect. Possibly, but I don’t think we’re there.
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Do you really not see an issue with soulstealer being attached to a minion, when classes like priest and warlock do the same thing for the same mana cost but don’t leave a minion behind on the board?
Remove the body it produces. If priest and warlock can’t have it attached to a minion, neither can DK.
No, you know what? Fine. Attach the effect to priest and warlock minions too. Twisting nether now summons a 3/9 taunt. Priest now summons a 5/5 too.
*If you think this is wrong, that’s because it is. Board wipes do not produce minions, and if they do they need to be nerfed immediately.
2 Likes
It’s an obvious power creep but it’s not tge reason why bdk dominates
It really isn’t, right? BDK doesn’t feel BROKEN, it just feels bad to play against. It has so many clears with the addition of increasing their HP, plenty of Lifesteal, and such a small pool for Discovering into more of this. At best it’s a reactive deck without a WC outside of exhausting an opponent of resources, something I think the majority of people find boring on both sides of the board.
I played this on a Druid’s swing turn and then a Rogue with multiple Astalors and they both insta-conceded.