The problem with all of this is that your entire perspective on paladin is wrong.
Paladin was just as strong at top ranks as it was at low ranks all the way through. This did not change. It didn’t suddenly get weak because it was playing top 1k players.
What changed was the decks that people chose to play at higher ranks. It was (and is) literally a different meta.
It isn’t that there was some giant skill change, it’s that people attacked it by playing a different deck. That’s it. That’s the whole thing.
But it’s also evidence that blizzard caters to 1,000 players too much at the expense of the hundreds of thousands of other players, and that’s a huge, huge issue for the health of the game.
You’re missing the point that BLIZZARD didn’t use their own stats properly in balance. Someone looked at top line wins and said, “well, it has counters. All these plebs need to play X or Y deck and just shut up” and that was called “balance.”
They acted like paladin wasn’t an outlier because that top line number was acceptable, and that’s laughable.
Seriously, you personally would be having a fit if someone said, “well, just play pirate warrior if you want to have a top rank” but that’s fine for everyone else?
Get over yourself.
And part of playing hearthstone is enjoying the game. Just because sweaty tryhard ranks want to play uninteresting things to gain epeen doesn’t make the game balanced.
That’s not what I said. We shouldn’t all have to play spell dh or zok druid to climb because paladin is oppressive, but that’s not something you’re ready to admit.
There are a decent amount of ways to get similar results to what those decks do.
They’re just not popular since when something gain traction the alternatives usually stay on it’s shadow and it’s not easy to be a deckbuilder in the era of netdecks.
The game has 2 viable control decks, priest and DK, and dozen of others decks that kills you from hand (double 10/10 King krush charging face, Kel’thuzad with 17 skeleton stored, S’theno with a handful of buff and cheap spell, a 25/29 olgra because why not, and let’s not talk about The Jailor or Tony).
Guess which decks are getting the ire of the community?
There gonna be always that one deck everyone plays creating that lock.
That lock isn’t only the lock for fun. It’s also the lock for legend.
Have fun and learn to play the game have a direct correlation even when you don’t necessarily aim to get higher ranks.
How you gonna appreciate your “meme deck” going off if you don’t know it’s a “meme deck” ?
Still that lock would not be so strong if devs put more attention in create a learning curve for all decks in the game.
Which is an admission that you’re trolling by not playing the game as intended.
No, there isn’t.
Or if they didn’t solely balance around an artificial meta ripe with the preferences of a tiny, tiny minority of the player base that’s very frequently unrelated to the wider base as a whole.
My priest is losing far more than i am winning, i could easily switch to pure paladin or beast hunter, i have the card. I just play priest for fun, not winrate.
Blizzard is the one not appropriately using context.
The fact is you don’t understand nearly as much as you think you do, but you talk here like you’re important.
You don’t even understand what I said. It’s the same point you ignored when paladin was nerfed. You didn’t see the problem until it was beating you consistently despite the fact that paladin has been a problem since the expansion released.
