Both get nerfed (and nerfed too hard honestly). They pretty much fall into Tier 3 garbage.
Tons of other decks pop up that over power the meta warping it left and right.
Tons of nerfs to said decks to “rebalance” the meta.
Flood Paladin and Handbuff Paladin back in the meta tearing it up at the top.
They just went full circle with the meta. It’s hilarious.
Now, don’t get me wrong. Paladin right now is fine and shouldn’t be nerfed in my opinion. It’s just hilarious to me that the broken thing they over nerfed comes back like whack-a-mole.
When the decks you nerfed into the ground come back to be top decks because of more changes, it means your game is so chaotically and disproportionally balanced between the classes. You nerf Paladin to trash Tier, re-warp the meta, and now that same trash tier deck is doing amazing…and at the same time, the other decks that were trash tier with Paladin are still trash tier (here’s looking at you, Elemental Mage)
So now we have the reverse of the beginning of the expansion. Instead of Paladin being on top because it’s broken, Paladin is now back in the top because the rest of the meta is broken (here’s looking at you, Brann Warrior).
I think this just tells us that this meta can’t be balanced and any nerf they do will just create even more chaos. Give up on this expansion, let’s get on with the next one. (and please don’t nerf Paladin as a “fix” for this current disaster)
Well, to be honest, I don’t even know what this is supposed to mean in regards to Hearthstone. From what I can gather what the devs mean, it’s that a player playing the game making decisions can impact the game more than just card drawing determining who wins.
“Draw X and win” for example. If that’s what they mean by that, then I agree they did do that to some degree by nuking Nature Shaman. So they did achieve that, wouldn’t you agree?
But I don’t know if that’s what they mean. I’m just guessing.
I think the biggest problem still is Reno, Brann, Reshka and Yogy. These cards killed the balance completely because made it almoast impossible to win with board based decks. So everyone wants to play aggro or Highlander… Since Reno became more OP then it was before… Aggro Paladin showed up again because after these changes, an early board build is the only way to win against these board removers which should not even exist… there are enough board clears already in the game… no need for such board remover at all… it was a huge mistake of the developer team again just like Wheel of Death… which could use it in OP way as I already told before even it was released… I just can’t believe no one of the developers could see this… it just amazing how this team can fail again again and again… No need to create such cards and there will be no such problem… it is that simple… What could be the best solution for this now? Create a Reno and Brann destroyer card? I just can’t see how could they fix this mess effectively… I just can’t understand who believed it is a good idea to create such card for any class like Brann again? They didn’t learn from the neutral Brann mistake at all? Everyone can remember who played at that time how big chaos could it cause when core had Brann… it was an instant lose to the other player mostly… No need for such cards at all… They all should have known that already…
New expansion drops. Something runs out of the gate and had to be nerfed quickly. That was paladin.
But that didn’t mean there weren’t other issues remaining. Those came to light after the top broken thing got nerfed. So there’s round 2 of nerfs.
That the first nerfed class came back up is really inconsequential. If anything the fact that they did would imply the nerfs to them, while a little harsh, wasn’t so bad that the class became trash.
That there are still other deck types left out in the cold is more about those decks lacking whatever it is they’re lacking to keep up with the meta.
brann cant pull early game wins like nature shaman or set up early game boards like rogue did with the giants adn breakdance
remember we were told they are goign to release a balance patch later going by the dev post changing consistently good decks wasnt the aim of this patch
This is my biggest fear with nerfing Warrior. They nerf around the problematic cards and hit everything else in warrior. Effectively destroying the whole class because there’s nothing they can play to pivot away from the problem cards.
Yep. It’s likely that any control warrior will be dead if they kill Brann (and possibly Odyn) because they’ve murdered everything else it might want to do in order to preserve those play styles.
The way I see it (total uneducated guess here tho), I think we are not fully aware that being in the position of the person that signed this letter (HS balance lead) isn’t as easy as someone looking from the outside might think. There are many different aims you may want to go for with a balance update. Usually the most risk-averse approach is to just look at the data and trim the outliers or nudge underperformers to increase meta diversity and maintain a somewhat even WR spread across decks. When they do this, they don’t care too much about whether the game is fun or if the new designs are working or not. That’s the job of the design team, not the balance team. Some things may not work now but will work down the line, so forcing everything to work out is not even necessary. In this instance, they decided to address a much bigger and abstract issue with the game that isn’t even really their fault, but the design team’s. And they did so with quite a transparent and lucid reflection in my opinion, so I think it is a commendable thing.
They also balance things with more information than we have, since they know what is next in the pipeline. This may also explain some things we don’t immediately understand. Did they not nerf Brann because they are printing huge late-game inevitability in the mini-set anyway and it would make Brann unplayable? We don’t know. They did say this was just a first step in a wider effort to make the game feel more like you have control over the outcome during the game, and not feel like the game got decided in the mulligan phase. That would need further balance changes and a few taps in the back in the design team. So, TLDR, I don’t think any of it was BS talk. This is just not an easy thing to turn around.
Seeing how this patch panned out, I’m honestly afraid of how that’s gonna look like, lol.
If the game isn’t decided on the mulligan, what else can we expect but huge tempo swings which you can’t play around?
I honestly hate this the most when I play against Rogue, for example. How do you play around a class which literally can play a card from any of the 11 classes discounted for 3 mana???
I don’t know what to expect, but I’m soiling my pants from fear.
I haven’t forgotten chestnuts like: “limits design space”, or “uninteractive”, or like you said: “class identity”. Of course; Class identity, and all the other meaningless catch-phrases only exist for select classes, as others have had their iconic cards destroyed without so much as a backwards glance.
So comforting to know that the design team remembers their words, and stands by the things they say.
