Quotes below, original tweeted question to him (and his replies) linked at the bottom.
I know we’ve heard a lot of concerns about Quests potentially still dominating the meta in AV, making the slower cards fun but nonviable. I wanted to come back to this question, now that I’ve heard from the Final design team:
We’ll always be monitoring the live state of game. We expect Alterac Valley to shake up the metagame pretty substantially and if any deck (including Questlock) is oppressive, we’ll make changes — that’s been our philosophy for quite a while.
In terms of framing expectations, one of the balance goals of Alterac Valley is to make slower strategies more viable. While we don’t want to micromanage exactly which cards are/aren’t allowed to succeed, any changes we make will have that goal for balance softly in mind.
That’s interesting. I wonder what their standards are for “oppressive” though.
It’s nice to hear them actually say they want to make slower strategies more viable. Quest Warlock definitely doesn’t allow for that. But if Quest Warlock gets smashed out of the meta (I highly doubt it does because there was no counter cards introduced) then they won’t need to do anything.
But, if this is their stance, I don’t see how Quest Warlock doesn’t get looked at. I don’t see anything changing after AV…what cards were introduced to the meta that would help counter Quest Warlock? There was no tech card. There is no way to interact with the reward or after reward effect.
I would rather just see tech other than nerfing. I wish they did that more often. You could really shake up the meta with small little tech cards.
from what I seen - the new cards are very mana heavy. But we are in the most INSANE agro meta of all times.
Pirate Warrior doesn’t give a crap what kind of awesome control cards you got at 7+ mana cost. Just doesn’t.
You can build a control deck that counters Pirate Warrior and do fairly well. Pirate Warrior isn’t really stopping the slower meta from becoming a thing.
It really is Quest Warlock. Warlocks can draw their entire deck by turn 8 and hit you with an OTK by next turn and there’s almost nothing control can do about it.
Indeed all this noise about Quest Warlock while Quest Warrior just does everything.
With Mr Smite it was the reach to to away with the most Control decks even Priest with massive healing is never safe.
But the boogie man Warlocks that losse to everything but slow decks and have already been nerfed multiple times are the issue lmao.
It’s important to note that Fatigue Warlock just took the #1 slot at all ranks according to VS and has only 1 bad matchup and that’s Celestial Druid. Quest Warrior is the next worse matchup and it’s 50/50
This does not bode well for Fatigue Warlock if it’s not looking to get nerfed.
Killing the questlock alone will only bring more pirate questline warrior and hunter to the meta or the next fastest deck inline, meta will not slow down unless it HAVE to (via a HUGE MASSIVE NERF patch).
Frankly if Demon Seed gets the hammer that’s probably all it would take. Pirates don’t lock value out of the game, and the other combos/quests aren’t really as oppressive as Warlock.
I wouldn’t recommend it right this moment. Because Priest struggles with Warlock, it cannot add in all the cards it needs to in order to deal with Quest Warrior. Quest Warrior is an uphill battle, but winnable. It likely will be a 50/50 at least when the expansion releases, but only assuming they do something about Fatigue Warlock.
Definitely can’t see “Data Reaper Live” on an Android without a Gold membership (for the app). So can’t confirm with them.
HSReplay doesn’t back this up. It has Quest Fatigue Warlock at Tier 2, with lower numbers on both performance and popularity than Quest Handlock. And it has more bad matchups than just Celestial Druid.
—
As far as everything else in this thread, though, you’ve been on point. A value deck is supposed to have the tools to crush Aggro early, so Aggro being strong isn’t the problem. In a way, the problem is Aggro not being strong enough — they haven’t pushed the combo decks out of the meta. It’s not like value decks in Hearthstone have the ability to push combo decks out — they rely on aggro to do so. Dang format is utterly dominated by Paper and barns still be like “nerf Scissors, they’re too strong” then wonder why Rock is borderline unplayable. Unreal.
I guess one problem is that it’s very difficult to design such that value decks have the tools to crush Aggro while simultaneously preventing Combo access to the same tools, which gives them better stall. For instance, it’s literally impossible to have a Warlock value deck in this format without some kind of combo finish, because it has the combo tools. So there are whole classes where the removal cards are not value deck tools.
Thank for your concern, But in the end PRIEST is not my style (slow and defensive), i’m more into a Pirate Questline Warrior. But i’ll take your advice and wait out and watch the meta a week or two then just net the fastest, most aggressive deck in the meta.
Warlock gonna dead soon if the Devs keep nerfing it.
This is because HSReplay data is corrupted. HSReplay doesn’t even show the correct Fatigue Warlock build and has it as like a 45% win rate. It’s WAY off. We can go into details about why HSReplay data is corrupted, but VS shows #1 deck with near 55% win rate.
Quest Fatigue Warlock (the PROPER build) that is on VS (that I am currently playing) feels extremely powerful. And yes, one must run the exact cards. It feels broken.
It must be this exact list. If one plays with the deck, they will know why. People are running Unstable Shadow Blast and, although it makes sense that the card should be run, is not optimal. This deck list is optimal. If one plays with this list, they will quickly see why.