Many players underestimate just how much weaker waiting an extra turn to start drawing your top end really is.
Big difference in playing your top end immediately with the draw, and waiting till next turn when opponent has retaken the initiative
I am inclined to agree, although I haven’t played enough games post patch to say for sure. I don’t find myself losing to Paladin’s early game often, so for me this is an appropriate (if weird) nerf. Take my opinion with a pinch of salt though, I don’t really rate Paladin. I know what the data says but it conflicts with my own experience. I think Paladin is significantly weaker at the top end of T1K than the bottom end, or I am just an outlier in terms of luck against the class.
What is this paladin beater that you are playing share with us 
and leaves the paladin more vulnerable to plague decks shuffling their deck with a plague
No no no no no, everybody knows that people simply concede after seeing paladin curve out 1-2-3. That’s why boogie down has such a high win rate! Everybody just concedes after seeing it played on 3!
Heck, some people just conceded after seeing a paladin 1 drop. So there is never ever a game after the first 3 or 4 turns, if that. NEVER.
And we all know paladin ALWAYS curves out, and their opponent NEVER does. Not that anybody else could ever hope to get good curves, which is why so many decks don’t even bother building them. In no way is this a self fulfilling prophecy. It’s the paladins fault that we choose not to build early curve and mulligan hard for it against paladins, even though we just know they’re everywhere on ladder.
How dare they build a deck that does what it sets out to do! Everybody knows the only proper decks are decks that don’t do what they’re set out to do, and you’re supposed to pray for good draw/discover and have RNGesus smile on you to let you do those things.
3 Likes
There is a big difference between stating that the paladin nerf did something or that it was not irrelevant; and saying that it was a big nerf. This was not a big nerf by any means.
I don’t even think it was a very relevant nerf either, although of course it is a nerf and will affect paladin’s win rate and consistency.
5 Likes
Are people mad that their favorite autopilot deck got a teeny weeny bit of a nerf that didn’t even address the most problematic cards in their list?
1 Like
No. Mad because without a proper nerf to those OP cards, we can’t get dust to play new stuff.
1 Like
I know! I was looking forward to disenchanting paladin cards en masse! I’ll never use them in all likelihood!
I’ve played so much ranked, I’m tired of Pali, I just auto quit, all they do is curve out.
I’m so tired of Aggro Pali bs divine shield nonsense
I literally can’t stand it.
I’m also tired of facing crap decks every expansion that are over powered leaving lots of others decks not even worth playing
I’ve been playing multiple versions of hunter decks for years and I can’t even compete on any level against the Pali because of their nonsense, AND NOW it’s infected the population base and all the noobs are playing it for the easy wins
I’m triggered
It was a big nerf, I just now checked hsreplay and it supports my claim.
The statistics in Legend on up show sub 50% wr.
In Bronze - Diamond 1 maybe it’s still competitive but the nerf gutted the class at higher ranks like I knew it would.
2 Likes
I must be looking at different data. Meta data on legend in the last 24h shows Aggro paladin as the third best deck with 53.53% and showdown pala with 52.27%. Diamond to Legend Aggro Pala is the best with 56.61% and showdown pala the 4th. The most popular Aggro Paladin list specifically has a 58.3% Diamond through Legend.
And most importantly, none of this data matters much yet because 1 day worth of HSreplay data tells a very unreliable tale anyway. You may be right, but there is no data that can back up your claim yet.
2 Likes
We’ll probably find out next Thursday. Vs report.
Yeah, and they get the most accurate data on power level from top 1k legend.
Everything in that bracket trickles down the rest of ladder.
Top 1k legend data is the most accurate as that’s where the meta starts to form first.
Most current meta decks are created there.
I’m fairly certain bronze - dia still play plenty of Paladin as it doesnt began to change until data shows a certain deck or class is objectively bad/weak for the field.
Zacho frequently refers to high legend data for his insights and predictions on what’s to come.
On the one hand, this is true. Things do trickle down from top 1000 legend.
On the other hand, The rank that matters the most for balance is diamond four through one. Hands down. At the end of the day the numbers there are the numbers that matter.
Therefore, the proper way to use top legend numbers is as a predictive tool to see where diamond four through one will be a few weeks into the future, If it remains unpatched. This makes it much more relevant at the beginning of a Meta game than it is near the end.
Data to back up my claim COMES from the rank bracket I play at.
Players just go over the top on what’s considered a ‘big nerf’ based on the level of frustration they feel toward a tier 1 deck.
It’s rarely rational.
A ‘big nerf’ to them would be blizz completely gutting a deck/class which is what we may very well see with Paladin when the data settles.
Besides devs plan on an actual balance patch soon so data may not even matter by the time they release next patch.
Here’s what I think the nerf though: I think Paladin with Order in the Court is now weaker than Paladin without Order in the Court. The reason we’re seeing abnormally low Paladin stats is because people haven’t bit the bullet and replaced their Orders yet.
Killing the card doesn’t kill the deck. But I do kinda agree with you that they killed the card. It was a big nerf… to Order in the Court. It was a light nerf to Paladin.
2 Likes
Excavate mage is pretty good into paladin, but when you play excavate mage the game will not give you paladin, it will give you hunter instead which mage isn’t that good into.
I can fully understand you guys… I always hated aggro Paladin myself too… never used it, rather built own deck and tactic… but in the current state of the game… only aggro Paladin is usable… everything else is just too slow and limited to win enough… Say thank you for the developers because of that… Everyone is complaing about aggro Paladin but can’t think how hard is it to win with anything else because of the insane unbalance. Other Paladin decks had already enough problem with aggo, control, OTK, Yogi and now this stupid snake and TNT warrior came to make the fair decks fail even harder than before… don’t be suprised most of Paladins changed to aggro… Everyone wants to win and rank up… and this is the only way now… I had enough as well… the balance is just dead. I am experimenting with Reno deck now because this seems the only other option as a new strategy.
Nothing specific. I just find my win rate against Paladin in general higher than the average stats for my rank bracket. I think Top 1K, while being the smallest reasonable sample size possible if you want to break legend down into tiers, has far too wider variance in skill within it to be accurate across the whole bracket. For example, the skill difference between a (consistently) 1,000 rank player and a 100 rank player is pretty vast, but both are in the same category on stats websites (I appreciate that this is because narrowing down to top 100 will reduce the sample far too much).
1 Like