How fast would it be nerfed already? How is this deck not nerfed yet, are you kidding me?
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Others will pretend this isn’t true, but stats don’t lie.
Go back and see how many viable (tier 3 or better) mage decks have been allowed to rotate without nerfs, vs. other classes.
Yeah, were this a mage deck? The forums, Reddit and X would be nothing but complaints, and the deck would be made unplayable in Standard, and never reverted in Wild either.
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Mage weren’t allowed to have a particular not game breaking tier 1 deck for a third of the expansion, just to be overtaken by way more polarizing Sludge Warlock (no weakness at all?) And Warrior.
It’s funny.
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Mage is probably the second most unfairly treated class, but warlock is probably 4th most unfairly treated. If you think Sludge Mage would have been nerfed already then you are mistaken
I think you just made their point for them.
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If we are speaking the truth it probably would have been given more ways to survive in the game and actually buffed. Look how long Mage was allowed to be a tyrant in the meta vs the few weeks Sludge has been.
If we want to go further and say it was Rogue well that would have probably been 6-7 weeks of tier S before they even started talking about it.
Paladin? 
“We feel Paladin is in a good place and only needs a slight adjustment” IE: Crescendo from 2—>3. All better now.
How much time It would be take to be nerf IDK.
But lightshow did take 10 months to even get a buff and even then blizzard did disguise It in the patchnotes as “bugfix” so people not come whine about it.
So if sludgelock was a mage deck your answer is that it would not even have had the buff sludgelock got at the start of the expansion in first place.
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riiiiight
because of romath right
on mage we could use the legendary to play several sludges from hand then finish on turn 9 with romath
and of course mage has acces to more spell damage cards
with stuff like explosive runes you could deal damage with more than just sludges so is good they didnt give sludge to the class known for spell damage
You mean paladin.
It’s paladins who get the most flak for being #1
They are #1 the most often after all.
The most recent example being aggro pure paladin. It was tier 1 for one and a half VS reports (half because on one of the repeorts, they weren’t the top or only tier 1) before it got nerfed.
But people were complaining about paladins even before that period. Yeah pure paladin and paladin as a whole was good for a long time, but good is not the same as being utterly broken. But that didn’t stop people from crying about them.
In fact, even after the nerf happened and pallies were no longer #1, there were still a few cries here or there about paladins, where whatever OP thing being complained about gets compared to paladin. You don’t usually get that with other classes.
But amusingly you don’t see many comparisons of sludge locks to paladin now. Probably because if they did, people might realize that sludge lock is actually really similar to aggro paladin, but that would expose how they have not been crying about sludge lock as hard as they did with paladin.
The entire problem is about concept behind certain decks when it comes to paladin.
But to resume it:
When a deck learning curve is too low it creates what in machine learning can be called as a false peak.
Basically because the player not understands fundamentals from the game certain decks can be used as a way to ignore the learning curve creating gigantic distortions at low rank play.
Not only people who are still learning play a very unfair match in the sense that it has to understand concepts the opponent does not need to understand at all to play at same level as him.
But also those decks generally aren’t really good enough to complete the climb so it creates an wall for those who use the deck to not climb after diamond demmanding they to learn to play with another deck in a rank where it should not even be in first place resulting in either stagnation or non stop loses.
That obviously ignoring when these are actual balance issues.
Historically, if we are talking raw stats, there is no class in the game that has been nerfed more than rogue, and it’s not even close.
The next class that has about half as many nerfs is druid.
Then there is everything else.
So to answer your question, if sludge Warlock was a rogue deck, the space time continuum would rip because it would never in this dimension be allowed. The laws of physics would reject the possibility.
Lightshow mage is actually kinda decent (by that i mean playable) and fun with that change tbh.
Its not good in the current meta, because you waste so many shots on 7/7s and tall wide boards, but the deck functions and I’ve gotten like a 35 damage Rommath on turn 9.
I dont think we’ll have to wait long for sludge nerfs. Reliable turn 6 30 damage combo pretty much seals its fate.
I would counter this by saying that while Rogue has been nerfed more, Mage’s nerfs have made it well nigh unplayable on multiple occasions.
It has been a very long time that rogue wasn’t viable in some format.
The nerfs made to Mage are generally very heavy, and destroy whatever deck they affect, as opposed to making it weaker, yet still viable. They also rarely get the benefit of having cards reverted in Wild, at least not until the reversion is no longer of consequence.
For a long time the sole exception to this was Secret Mage, but no more.
The nerf to Kabal Lackey has made Secret mage useless in the early game facing Pirate rogue or any early minion pressure, as the nerf not only ruined Lackey, but also made Flak Mage useless, due to it’s stats. Best mage can do is a turn 4 answer for two AOE damage to minions, which is not good enough against Shaman, Rogue, Warrior, etc.
Add in the fact that the Secret Pool has been polluted with completely useless secrets, and there you are.
The only other exception I know of is Quest Mage, a deck that every player facing it hates, and most mage players dislike it as well. I can only imagine someone at Team 5 likes it, because it is all Mage is allowed in Wild, and even it is too slow, and not dynamic enough compared to what other classes are playing now. I blame this one on the fact that mage has not received anything of real note since Objection and Rewind. Other than playing Quest mage, one card per expansion is really all the class has received, in my opinion. Team 5 seems really reluctant to give Mage anything really competitive or synergistic with existing cards.
As I understand, Mage isn’t really playable anywhere these days.
And the dual class cards seem to be an excuse to give mage effects to other classes, as they benefit Warlock and Hunter far more than they do Mage.
I can vouch that it’s pretty much just meme status in Wild.
Mage’s nerfs, and Team 5’s continued reluctance to give the class cards that have synergy over time have rendered the class into a patchwork quilt of cards that really don’t work together that well.
But Rogue has years of cards that do.
So, while you are 100% correct in saying that Rogue has been nerfed more, I maintain that mage’s nerfs, and the general weakness of the cards mage has received over the past three or four expansions, has been far more damaging.
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Not what you said. When normal people cry about pallies, they cry in the same way they do with other classes. They don’t suddenly go all big brain intellectual about peaks or understanding.
And neither do the devs, seeing as they almost never nerf pallies - or any other class for that matter - over the reasons you gave. The devs almost never comment on which deck/class take more skill or which match ups have unfair understanding.
The devs seem to only care about what you call actual balance issues. Case in point the nerf to aggro pally was first to the showdown and beam, not to boogie down or their early game. By the time they do get to touching boogie down, aggro pallies have moved down the tier list already, and the newer pally decks might actually get more use out of boogie.
The conclusion I draw from that is they don’t really care about playstyle and skill. Or to put it nicely, the devs treat EVERY playstyle equally, from the ones that require galaxy brain down to the ones that can piloted by a bot. “Dumb” decks have just as much of a place in the game, and just as much of a shot at topping tier lists.
This is something people don’t seem to get. They cry for fairness. But fairness doesn’t mean what they think it means. Fairness means even paladins and their playstyle are valid. Fairness also mean that tier list rankings or how much “skill” a deck takes aren’t the only metric to buff or nerf classes. Hence you see pallies and their dumb decks dodging nerfs for a long time while some tier 3 deck from another class that takes galaxy brains to pilot isn’t immune from being nerfed.
But since people don’t understand that, they cry that things are unfair.
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Absolutely.
Which is why we don’t have pure aggro decks anymore. Everybody and their mum cried about “how is it possible that a deck which takes 0 brain cells to pilot can be as effective as harder ones” while it was never true anyway.
For starters, pure aggro decks always required a good judgement and execution of when to push for lethal and when to control the board.
And to top it all off, they were never top tier decks. They were just meant to counter the extremely slow decks which are punishing to any other deck on the ladder.
Well congrats, people, now you have nothing to counter the xy versions of control warrior. You’re beginning to counter one with the other. Enjoy!
Just no.
Fairness mean that blizzard will work their asses out to both stop designs like pure paladin from happening while slowly but surely giving the class tools on the other side.
Horn of windlord, aura cards all that stuff is very recent and answer to both people not liking old paladin due to everything already mention and the frustration of players who play paladin when people just want It not viable for being “braindead”.
It will take sometime to see the final result but change is already here.
That isn’t on the players: that’s on the dev team who takes game balance, which is closer to precision work…and approaches it with a trillion ton cudgel.
Like the people who try balancing eco systems without any thought as to what happens when you remove an animal from the population. TOO MANY WOLVES! Well, time to kill or move them all! What’s that, everything the wolves were keeping in check is now running amok?! NEVER HAVE I EVER CONSIDERED THAT COULD HAPPEN! Time to wipe them out or move them too! Oh, wait…there’s more! Then proceeds to hack through the entire ecosystem like reno bouncing through life, and nearly destroys the entire thing.
Then someone gets the bright idea years later to bring wolves back, but by then it will be decades, if ever by the time that local ecosystem recovers.
How, pray tell does this apply to hearthstone? One might ask. Simple:
If aggro was balancing out control, then the answer was to evenly nerf them, making several decks viable. Or raise tempo as a third way.
But, when your a dev team and company whose only tool is a hammer…everything is a nail.
I don’t think that’s happened since they were gaslighting their abuse victims, tried quashing the unionization of their employees, and tried scuttling the workplace harassment suit.
Working hard, on games? At this company? Back when it was old blizzard maybe. The current design philosophy is to take the path of least resistance, charge as much as possible until the well runs dry, then scrap the whole thing.
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Sure thing, but since I can’t address the devs directly, thought I might address people who called for it
Of course you can: make it the direction of this or another thread. Don’t make it violate coc…but be prepared for their defenders to attack you relentlessly for it.
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Yeah I did and you’re right I got attacked xD It’s to be expected.
Wasn’t relentless though, the thread’s already dead.
But I did my part, the rest is on the devs. If they don’t fix the meta ASAP, it means they got what they wanted (which is my suspicion - it’s tournament qualification season and they might be pushing the control agenda for longer and more “competitive” matches)
At their peak, control warrior was always the meta at the top, so they might be trying to repeat it
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