QFT.
And now it’s going to be a (slightly) less popular lower Tier 2 deck. And that’s clearly the intent of the change. Reduce it’s popularity. Win rate was irrelevant. I hate when they makes these sorts of design decisions, but such is the mindset of the development team (as misguided as it may be).
Someone in the german forum posted his last 20 games or so with 95% winrate after the “nerf”. It really didn’t affect the Big Spell Mage.
The problem wasn’t that you’re 1 turn too slow to contest. The problem is that the BSM can repeat it over and over again and you just don’t have anything comparable to contest with most decks.
Him pulling his combo in T5 instead of T4 won’t magically help you to deal with another two waves of 3/6 elementals with freeze or the deal 10 damage and summon a random 10 mana minion spells.
I mean, it was a bit of both. There are definitely decks that can survive that out there, and ones that can get under you.
The deck got weaker, just only marginally so. The play rate was always the bigger issue anyway.
10 years of game, a plethora of decks destroyed by single mana nerfs and you people still don’t learn how things work.
God.
This is the issue I always ran into when playing against it. It’s not the fact that they play Volley or Tsunami on turn 4 or 5, it’s when it happens again right after. A lot decks can survive or try to stabilize after one, but two is often very difficult or impossible.
But it does mean that your brain is hella smooth.
You’re projection incarnate.
Most of you misunderstand 2 crucial things. One: 1 mana nerf on a crucial enabler card is not little at all; the games are often between very similarly skilled people and most of them are close (but not quite) to a zero sum game in terms of skill and the result often hangs on the devil of the minute details; e.g. if only ONE FIFTH or even much less of your games had a Skyla on turn 4 instead of 5 and that was important to win then this is a huge contribution to the total win rate given enough games.
Two: this was never about the deck having a WINRATE that was unfavorable to the meta; it was about the PLAYRATE being too high and as a result it warped the meta around it to be too fast (because fast decks were the best counters); I think I already see a massive drop of mages - which is logical since many of them are FotM people and those only need an excuse to abandon the FotM deck - hence that is covered.
Damn, wish they nerfed Tsunami for a second time so that I could claim the refund they forgot to give last time.
I echo the sentiment that I’m more scared of a mage repeating their spells or other stuff via conman than the occasional turn 4 god curve.
Just beat a mage who got turn 6 skyla. It’s still a decent enough jank, but she failed to have the conman follow up, so I actually survived and won.
This is the Hearthstone equivalent of man vs bear. The popular answer is the objectively incorrect one
I didn’t know you kept up with the trends, old man.
I have a 14-year-old son.
It does not matter.
You can’t play anything out in turn 4 (let’s call it the “extra turn” due to the nerf) that will outperform 4x 3/6 minions which come into play with an extra attack. And you won’t be able to play something out in T5 or T6 that will deal with the second wave of another 4x 3/6 or a 10 Mana minion with 10 DMG spread across your board.
The 1 mana would only make a difference if the delay of one turn would change things, but that’s not the case for any deck that was weak against it before. And the very rare decks that could clear these boards like the warrior never were in danger because of one turn. They have enough AoE and armor to sustain those waves.
It gave aggro a bit more breathing room to get under it, and every other scam deck a bit more room to get under it as well.
Most of what’s being done in hearthstone these days isn’t really meant to be answered as much as beaten to the punch. If you get your big board off ahead of the mage, they often just lose unless they super high roll, because the class lacks answers to a large board. That’s what made the mirror so infuriating because whomever does the first tsunami, with or without Conman, was usually the one to win.
You seem to struggle to understand the actual issue despite having played this game for 10 years, but it’s okay.
I understand this argument, I just don’t respect it. “Oh noes, paper became 25-30% of the meta, encouraging people to play scissors!” That happens every meta, it’s just normally not so blatantly obvious. On top of that, rock remains viable, believe it or not; you don’t need to counter the most popular deck yourself, it’s sufficient to counter the counters. And yeah, if your deck counters neither you’re in trouble, but again, that’s true in every meta. Every meta is a paper rock scissors meta. Again, it’s just normally not so blatant.
A deck having 25-30% popularity is not a real problem. It’s a fake problem for people who are deluded about the state of metas in general. They want their non-paper non-scissors non-rock deck to become viable when nothing will ever make that so. Every time we’ve had many balance patches in a single expansion, all that happens is paper, rock and scissors keep trading places with each other on the tier lists, and meme tier decks stay meme tier.
What’s the issue then, o wise one? Give us the breakdown of what will happen from your inexperienced eyes that surely understand how nerfs works.
I did suggest in one of my posts that the nerf should’ve gone to Tsunami, by making the elementals only be able to target minions. Some mage played cried that that would kill the card wah wah.
The bigger issue with it is that it hurts the bottom line when players stop playing because they are sick of seeing the same thing that frequently.
That’s pretty much why deck popularity has always taken the front seat over win rate when it comes to balancing decisions. It has a bigger impact on the play experience than “oh man this deck beats everything 54% of the time instead of 51%”