Priest was the best deck several time since AoO. It was before Barrens and IS currently the beck deck in the meta. So these stats you are presenting are not correct.
Vicious syndicate gave it the best meta score by far . But while the deck is very powerful and can win against anything, it’s also the most difficult, hence why the winrate isn’t skyrocketing.
The man just presented an over view of VS statistics and you still refuse to acknowledge… smh.
How do you climb with priest? I’m trying menagerie priest and it is not going well. 
MaGe Is AlWaYs A tOp ClAsS!!!
BlIzZaRd AlWaYs FaVoRs MaGe!!!
Mage is over played relative to power and seems like it always has been.
You won’t see strong mage cards until you see fewer mages.
Mage was my most played class until the last year or so and even when it has been trash tier it still sees a huge amount of play.
MmHmm. We always knew better… Now watch the false equivalence come fast and furious.
Actually, I think paladins are good because a new player doesn’t have as much need to craft stuff, because with just commons and rares you can get pretty far with paladin.
The way the class works also lend itself well to support whatever minions you happen to have, with whatever pally cards you happen to have. Pally buffs are generic, no need for specific tribes or synergies. Pally lack ways to buff their weapons, but the flip side means whatever pally weapon you do run is just solid on its own, without you having to have a full collection of other cards to make it work.
Hunters are the one other class I can think of that’s easy for new player, but even they have specific synergies (e.g beast synergies, eaglehorn and secrets)
I think this is the dumbest reason for nerfs ever given by Team 5.
All it sounds like to me is them trying to force players to play what they think they should.
Agree that priest is the best class right now. Most brought and most banned at the recent masters tour; and posted the 2nd highest winrate despite players trying to hard target Priest.
Ladder stats aren’t the completely reliable now as there is very little reason to tryhard on ladder.
5 mana LPG mage was definitely the best deck at that time as well; even though VS had it at tier 2.
Honestly it’s kinda Ironic in way seeing how middle ground Druid been even tho most of Druid early life was the “token class” - it shows basically how powerful the token/agro decks mainly will be favor in HS history if you look at the actual deck and etc that were shown as top deck and etc. very rarely it was actual Combo deck and etc, I Don’t mind if Druid move away from being token as long as they just gave druid some decent stat cards for mid-range and late game that not relyin’ on the whole Ramp to play Big minions (main neutral not class cards). Druid is the Ramp class but also “choose one” which is either weak or strong cards.
Thank you for making the data show, But I do like I said find it Ironic how Druid just kinda being chill in the middle really after blizzard butcher so many Druid “archetypes” as the meme class.
…why not?
Minions are the largest category of cards in the game.
They’re the one type of card that every class can access.
They’re 99% of the neutral card pool.
I don’t think it’s a coincidence the UI has the board - where minions are played and fight, take up large part of the middle.
The 1 aspect that is the biggest. It’s like saying paladin is just one class that has good numbers on those stats. One of the best. But hey, just one…
And I think that’s more about your lack of understanding of the topic than any problem with their reasoning.
That’s the cynical take, for sure. It would be more accurate to say they want a good spread of classes being played at any point in time. When any class is too popular, no matter the power, it ruins the game experience.
And there should be a better way to do this than literally punish players for trying to have fun.
Your way to see it is just as true as his because you’re seeing the same thing.
They want the classes spread but it not means that over nerf classes people like to play isn’t a cynical solution.
It’s on a worse level than try to solve it by literally rigging the matchmaking.
Even the decks that are mostly or exclusively spells use minion generation. No Minion Mage and Token Druid as examples.
And not everyone has weapons.
Players aren’t “literally” punished for having fun. If someone still wants to play as spell mage or whatever meme deck because they find that deck’s mechanics fun, they can. They just won’t win as much with it.
Having fun and winning a lot (at high level) are not always the same thing.
If it is for you… well go play paladin I guess (edit: not like now literally, but in the long term they seem solid). Stop being on the wrong side of history and join the light.
Well winning less means you have far fewer packs and less cards to build decks from so it really is a punish. It also means that the 12 mage legendaries I’ve pulled from packs have been virtually untouched aside from aluneth. Like I can’t really say I’ve ever mained mage in standard or even had a good deck from the cards I’ve pulled.
It’s been pretty evident that they don’t want complicated interactions being in this game and yeah some of the text on mage and priest cards interact with other cards in a way that some people find complicated and people also complain about combinations of cards even though to me I think this is strategy, though the strong synergies they have is why they are so powerful in wild but terrible in a limited format.
I think it’s a question of class design. Priest especially has been a class of strange gimmicks and strange cards that don’t often pan out. That’s just the design of spell-oriented classes. Mage was a little better off I would think, with damage from hand being in their wheelhouse, but that’s also been a design of deck that Old Team 5 always tried to keep under control so I guess their numbers aren’t that big of a surprise.
Classes with a focus on Tempo or Stats have always been allowed to be a bit stronger because it’s the play pattern that aligns with the design philosophy. Priest had a good run with Dragon Priest during MSoG, even.
And Priest is getting pushback right now, when it’s only really strong in the hands of great players at Legend (so not a big problem for the majority of the people complaining about it). Because, for whatever reason, people are more okay with losing to an 8/8 Charge Windfury from DH than losing to a Priest who actually selected all the right Discover cards to counter the game plan of their linear deck.
I can’t be bothered to dig up old tweets, but it was explicitly stated in regards to Priest that it wasn’t a class intended to be a Tier 1 powerhouse. It’s a sneaky class for players that like to do cool stuff.
what is your personal views on it? (since you covered so much work)
I found it really interesting to do. And it’s great to have everything laid out in a fairly neutral format that helps to filter out some of the partiality that your memory can bring to trying to recall how the game has developed over time.
Since I personally went through all 194 VS Reports and tabulated the information from the Tier listings in a spreadsheet, I’ve also ended up seeing a lot more than even went into the final tables I created.
It was an exhausting process. When I saw Schyla’s suggestion in the other thread and thought it would be a good project to do, I underestimated just how much work it would take.
But it was also fun in a way to do a speed run through years of Heartstone meta history, even in just a schematic way, since I mostly focused just on the Tier listings themselves, only occasionally skimming the other material to give me a sense of where I was and what was happening at the time.
It was also really interesting to remind myself of some of the old metas I played through. Sometimes that was good, when I ran across a deck or something that I really enjoyed; sometimes less so when I was reminded of some of the things that I hated at the time.
Also, as an interesting side note: It was surprising (though perhaps it shouldn’t have been) how annoying translating a packed, highly diverse meta report into my simple spreadsheet form was. The really imbalanced ones were funnily so much simpler to do than trying to sort through which classes showed up how many times when there were 12+ decks listed at Tier 2 in a single report. (I think the most I saw in a single report was 20 separate Tier 2 decks.)
There’s probably more that I could do with what I’ve put together as a spreadsheet, but I’d have to think about what that might be. (I’d also be happy for suggestions.)
I had considered also doing separate breakdowns by expansion or by rotation, but there was already so much in the tables I put in the OP that I figured it would be just overwhelming to add another, even longer series of tables.
I’m also kind of curious how the tier information would line up against the reported play rates for each class in the same reports. But I’m not sure what would be the best way to translate those into a simple, easily comprehensible format. And with how exhausted I feel after doing this project, I don’t think that it’s likely to be an idea to follow up on in the near future.
Finally, even with what I’ve done, there are some pretty important restrictions, since I didn’t try to record separate archetypes or any of the other identifiers. So, while I personally think that it is a useful overview, and I’m glad that others seem to be finding it helpful too, there’s a limit to how much this sort of pointillist, schematic meta history can do.
Claiming that a class being too popular “ruins the game” is subjective at best, and if something that flimsy is what they base their decisions on, then it is no wonder the game is never balanced and no one is ever satisfied.
Perhaps you can control the power levels of decks, but you cannot control players, and Team 5 really needs to stop trying to.