Priest in Arena - April 2023

Have been playing a lot of arena lately. It’s my go-to once I hit legend; I use my stacked gold in Arena because playing against the same 4 decks over and over again makes me want to vomit (I played aggro mage this month to get there, pre-festival, you can imagine my dismay as a mage player now).

Anyway, since seeing a death knight or a pure paladin every match makes me want to stand outside Blizzard headquarters and take a huge hot steaming dump, Arena it is.

I’ve noticed in Arena, Priest is absurdly strong. Their steal cards always seem to get your best cards, and believe me I know because I pick them too. I’ve played around 40 arena runs this month. I’ve noticed when I have an amazing deck that should be 7+, if I run into a Priest I just lose, 80% of the time. Not an exaggeration. I had a Warrior deck that was 3-0 and my next 3 games were against Priests, lost them all. However, if I have an absolute dogwater deck I am able to 50/50 them.

It’s just not fun to play against, and when I get Priest in Arena I find myself just cackling at my monitor evilly, just letting out all my rage and BMing emotes because when I run into them the same crap happens. It is my belief, some might even call me a conspiracy theorist because of it, that these Priest cards - even non Priest cards, discover - have a VERY high chance to give you what you need, or pull the best card from your deck/hand. The perfect cards. Zephrys the Great anyone?

Is it possible blizzard has done some “adjusting” behind the scenes to increase the likelyhood of said discovers/steals happening? We know they can do it, they literally created a card (Zephrys) to give you exactly what you need - 3 choices of it too. So, is it possible they are doing it without saying anything, with some micro-adjustments?

Like “hey, we really hate our players and don’t really like listening to what any of them say in the forums and we 100% do not play our own game because it’s a meme, you guys wanna mess with them? Let’s add some rng but really let’s make that rng not really rng and not talk about it, just for the heck of it because hey why not worst they can do is taking a huge dump outside our headquarters”.

Like, I came back to this game after swearing it off a couple years ago because I had 180 free packs in my inventory. I was like, sure why not man that’s awesome of them! Then I realized all it did was make me drop 100 on the pre-order expansion only to be pissed off at them and not even feel like I’m good at the game because all I did was play a meta deck to hit legend which unless you have a mongrel’s brain should be pretty easy to do.

Back to the original questions - Is Priest too strong in arena?

This is what happens when you nerf 3 classes out of Arena and have 3 classes that were bad to begin with get no buffs and the 2 buffed classes still meh after being buffed. Priest dodged it all and came out on top. Smaller card pool gives you better chances to discover good cards and there and fewer whammies so getting all 3 cards in a discover being junk also happens way less. People also don’t draft crap when they can help it so steals are going to have a lot of big hits and few misses also.

Priest could probably use some offering rate nerfs and Shaman could use slightly more nerfs and Hunter should be unnerfed it wasn’t that great to begin with in this new meta and its doing terribly now with its nerfs and Warlock could use a huge buff.

Discover for priests are insanely good atm, but no arena isn’t rigged… played a priest yesterday that had the legendary that gave him a free spell discovery for 3 mana permanently, basically he was able to remove everything I played, was pretty sick:)