NoHandsGamer calling this meta one of the worst metas ever. He also says he doesnt even feel like making youtube videos at the moment because there is no fun decks to show other than the oppressive decks seeing play already.
As many know NoHandsGamer has been the brain behind so many decks in previous metas, also he is one of the best players in the world.
He then go on to talk about hes scared that coming nerfs will not fix anything because the dev team always end up killing classes instead of balancing things.
That’s exactly how the meta feels: you are behind for one turn, you lose the game.
I still find interesting games in platinum, but why is everyone playing mage?
There are 10 classes but I am only seeing mages and a bit of druid/warlock.
Before the patch I was seeing also hunters and rogues; how could all the rogue disappear after 3 buffs?
depends on your bracket, higher up Rogue is among the most popular classes. As compared to the other meta decks it grants you a tiny bit of an illusion of complexity.
on the video: while i wholeheartedly agree that we need temposwing cards like the guardian for shamans, the problem arises if one class has a lot more of them than others and so at some points completely locks out the tempo. The problem had never been the guardian, it´s always been parrot.
In my opinion this meta is what happens when you have unrestrained exponential power creep. 1 card swings that are so large that it feels like nothing else really mattered and has no ways to come back from.
I think thats only partly true though. Sure in a way you are right but the even bigger problem, which NoHandsGamer also talks about is that most classes have their strength from a few selected key cards.
If one of them is nerfed then it more often than not just kills the entire class.
I played a lot of shaman before the Snowfall Guardian nerf and i knew, if it gets nerfed Shaman will fall down. And if they did it with parrot it would be even worse. They dont have much to fall back on. And same can be said about most classes.
Nerf mage like suggested by many in this forum and it will die also. And the only result from that is one less class being played. Sure sometimes when one class die, other archetypes rise up, but more often than not that is not the case.
I assume that this is part of Blizzard strategy of getting people to buy packs. You need those very important cards. It dont matter if you have 90% of the cards as long as you missing the key cards.
A big part of all this mess is that classes dont have their power spread out in many different cards anymore. The powercreep comes from a selected few.
When they nerf these cards classes die. And the cycle continues.
My biggest issue is the decks feels prebuilded now.
They release a bunch of OP super sinergetic cards and call the day, mech paladin in previous meta and implock now are examples, they taken away the building process (for me and for many the half of fun is there) from the players and making obvious how the decks should be listed.
Remember old days? Meta decks only rises after 2-3 weeks after the release of a new expansion, now they are ready in day 1-2.
It’s tough to build an aggressive on board deck because it has to be able to compete with the speed of imp lock, token druid, and wig priest.
If it beats them, it has to be able to push through the infinite skeletons and freeze until Dawngrasp hero power kills you. It also needs to snowball hard enough that ramp, ramp, scale of Onyxia isn’t a board clear.
It needs a win condition that decisively ends games before Denathrius can do it, if your deck is slower, good luck. Also good luck doing so on board because of the stall and removal power of mage/druid.
There’s just an absurdly narrow number of decks that can compete in the same arena as the top decks.
The aggro is too fast, the inevitabilities are too fast. And then there’s the absurd blowout games of things like miracle rogue, wig priest, or evolve shaman going “lol it’s turn 4 and I win!”
If your deck can’t deal with most of that, it can’t compete. There’s very little room for creativity (which is often suboptimal) when the tuning of the good strategies is this high.
I always play with homemade decks and I can tell for sure, the gap between the top decks from the decks I made in the past is waaaaaaaaaay lower than the top decks today.
Today you have to play with one of top 5 decks or you don’t have any hope of winning.
I never was a top player but always can buid decks with 35-40% winrate against meta decks, today they can’t reach 10%.
To be honest, they lost me when they said imp warlock was at the power level they want and it’s consistently putting out massive boards from turns 3-9.
Theo is the only real defense from it. The decks are almost universally still doing that stuff, Theotar just gives you the slightest hope for a game to not be instantly decided by X swing card (which unfortunately just makes Theotar the swing card instead).
at this point they must die. There´s simply no room for any strategy that is not otk faster than denathrius or board based aggro dealing 40dmg slower than turn 5 if we continue as we are.
We need a massive reset in powerlevel and then a shift in design, which nohands also alluded to - away from those single powerful cards to more even powerlevel between cards and them relying on synergy more than raw power by itself.
Its probably not specifically to sell packs,by making a few cards a must have.
I see it as bad/cheap design. Its easier to design a big powerswing with one single card then designing one with several cards that work together. And its easier for the players as well. All they have to do is draw their powercard , they dont have to think about combo to much.
Mage seems popular at least,aliestrasza played mage and gets over 1k vieuwers which is one of the biggest constructed streams.
Mage is keeping this game alive and nerfing mage would be a big mistake,obviously.
So many sensible comments in this thread… how is it possible that the devs can’t see it? The powercreeping needs to take a step back. A mass nerfing is unavoidable unless they want the game to become Yu-Gi-Oh.
I have to agree. I’m no where near the his level, in part due to restricted time, in part due to him being better, but I occasionally make top 100 legend. It’s not a very fun meta if you like to think more than one or two turns ahead. Literally the game can end when your opponent draws any number of game winning single turn plays such as Theotar or the big D combo. There’s not much to think there, just take it on the chin and move onto the next game.
I think this meta is very friendly if not the single best meta for greedy decks. This includes decks that are just piles of high value cards dumped into a deck and called good, for example big spell mage and of course quest priest. There’s a tone of equalization tools given out (in particular Theotar) without much thought about how much it will cause unwanted effects. So we have what we have, the ultimate greedy meta.
It would not be so bad, but unfortunately greedy decks by design are almost auto pilot able, you literally play the best card in curve and hope rng swings go your way.
Very basic.
The one positive of this meta is the continued playability of imp Warlock. Imp Warlock is basically a flavored version of zoo and it’s the one deck in the entire meta that very much cares about board state and is probably the healthiest deck Hearthstone has seen in a long while. The deck has strong from hand plays but only if board state is there.