Yep, that sounds about right for the most common decks right now.
And statistically, hound hunter still isn’t the best of them right now. It’s just one good deck among several.
If the latest VS podcast is right, naga mage is currently trending toward best deck up there (albeit unplayably bad at lower skills), with enrage warrior right behind.
But yeah, hunter will almost certainly see nerfs in a few weeks once AaBJ goes in.
The responses here that tell the op to be a better player by playing different cards are pretty funny, always love those responses. Cards still broken even with 2 locations in your deck, it’s pretty obviously broken too not even close.
Hound is fine, selective breeder needs to not draw a copy.
No, that was weeks ago. It’s been Tier 3 now for nearly 2 weeks.
Meati has a 67% WR over 200 games, and he’s playing top 10 legend.
You know, cards like Hound and Hydralodon are powerful enough to make Mage viable strictly because they just got Reverberations.
I buff my hound to like, 8/14? Mage copies it and renos in response to me renoing.
I play Hydra? Mage copies it.
But then, these plays are all just distractions from double krush on 10. Control the hunter all you want, if he just instantly kills you regardless of board state and health value then no amount of nerfing Hound will make him not do this.
ignore them they are just trolling you to get a reaction, i agree hound hunter is way too strong, a healthy meta needs a potential counter for each deck and currently hound hunter only has one counter in enrage warrior, which is a very difficult deck to play even at a basic level, so hound hunter will effectively be the only playable deck until you hit d5 or even legend, where it drops off quite a bit. I am shocked that blizzard hasn’t done anything about this massive outlier, seeing as they have been very proactive in recent years of hot fixing problematic decks.
guilty as charged, eventhough most of my decks i have on my youtube do beat hunter, especially enrage warrior, but one slightly slow start can leave you in big trouble versus hound hunter.
Eh… Enrage warrior isn’t all that tough to play…
Hound hunter also loses more than it wins against totem shaman, unholy DK, pure paladin, outcast DH (at top legend), and naga mage (at top legend).
The deck still gets weaker as skill levels go up.
It’s definitely a strong deck (one of the strongest), but it’s not the strongest once you get to diamond.
You aren’t going to see nerfs do it prior to Titans launch though. It’s super rare that balance patches happen just before a new set launch.
After the set? Probably will see nerfs to it, but not because hound is too good. It’ll be because AaBJ is broken.
No, it loses more when the meta is hostile to it.
You really need to take a math class before you keep running your mouth.
You can’t keep acting like the fact that nearly 1/4 of the top 1k meta is DH isn’t changing the top line win rate of hound hunter. The deck isn’t a different power level in any universe, the meta is completely not the same.
I get that this concept is lost on you, but it would be really helpful if you would try to understand how win rate is calculated and what moving parts affect that calculation.
Hound hunter is not getting weaker, the meta is getting more hostile to it.
This idea that the average player needs to switch decks to counter a deck, but that the deck is “fine” as long as top 1k players can do this to their satisfaction, is bull.
Still talking about math and win rates. After playing the deck as much as I have, I have to say that the decks my opponents play have very little impact on how often I win. My opponents playing a deck that is “hostile to hound hunter” sounds stupid.
Hunters win from one thing and one thing only: good draw order. Just like enrage warrior winning and losing off of a mulligan, so will hound hunter.
Most games I lose involve drawing King Krush early with no way to put it back in my deck. My opponents deck doesnt influence that.
And it becomes more hostile to it as more decks flip out of favor of the hunter.
What about this do you not understand?
Hunters INDIVIDUAL matchups get worse at high legend, which lowers it’s overall win rate.
It does, because the deck performs more favorably against hunter at top legend than it does in diamond and below.
If it were all DH in diamond, hunter’s win rate would go up…
That’s why outcast DH isn’t one of the most played decks in diamond.
If they didn’t nuke DH’s best cards then DH would still have a huge advantage over Hunters. Now hunter plays like DH used to, but slower.
King Krush combo is the new Stheno, but slower.
Hollow Hound is the new Unleash Fel.
You don’t understand how math works if you keep repeating this. It is false. It’s the same stupidit that scr0tm tries to spout and all it does is make both of you look like Ronald McDonald cos play fans.
The change in win rate is less of a factor than the change in the meta.
Do you understand what a weighted average is? Exactly how it is calculated?
The fact that the win% changes a few percentage is significantly less important than when the play % of a bad match up increases.
Let’s just look quickly at enrage hunter, which goes from about 45-55 to 40-60 infavor of warrior when you compare D4-1 and top 1k L.
If you got a 45% on a test that was 5% (making you get 2.25 pts out of 100) of your grade it wouldn’t be as bad as getting .40% on the same test worth 10% (4 pts) of your grade ( you’re missing 2.75 pts per 5% on the first and 3.0 per five on the second).
When you change the weight of bad match ups you have a bigger influence than any change in those match ups outside of massive changes.
It works the other way as well, where you have fewer good match ups meaning lower overall win rate, too.
Hostile metas are hostile. Winrate is a snapshot of a deck’s power in a given meta, not an absolute measure. If you want an absolute measure, OVERALL winrate is the better indicator than top 1k.
Nah, I understand it just fine.
The DH vs hunter matchup is NOT the same in diamond as it is at top legend, so what a lot of DH does to hunter is DIFFERENT in the two brackets.
Deck matchups don’t stay the same as you rank higher, that’s the part of this equation you willfully ignore.
Several of them are getting worse for the hunter, which allows for a different meta to rise and allows those matchup weights to shift.
Outcast DH wouldn’t rise in popularity if the matchups werent significantly better up there.
You can’t just decide to play a lot of outcast DH at the performance levels it sees in diamond. It would crash and burn.
You don’t though.
All you do is spout your bias, ignore the math, and just say “no you didn’t” without a shred of evidence.
I literally walked you through how a grade changed from 97.75 to 94 just by changing the frequency of a match up and you ignored it.
You literally don’t understand math if you say:
But that’s not the relevant factor, the change from DH being 9% to 21+% is the bigger factor than the couple percent changes in win rates because of how weighted averages work.
It was dropping three or four points without any changes in winrate when the playrate of the even match up doubled, my dude. This is the part you don’t want to admit. The change is less about the difference in the match up and much more about what isn’t played.
It’s maths, my man, maths.
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BECAUSE IT IS LESS RELEVANT THAN CHANGES IN PLAYRATE DUE TO HOW A WEIGHTED AVERAGE IS CALCULATED.
You are the one ignoring the math.
This section right here proves my point. Matchups are getting worse for the hunter. A bunch of decks getting worse for the hunter makes hunter less likely to be used, as there are more things doing better against them.
The drop in performance drives the change in meta, the meta isn’t driving the change in performance against that deck, or any other individual deck.
Hunter doesn’t lose to outcast DH in diamond. So having a lot of them at top legend wouldn’t cause a hunter win rate loss without a change in performance against outcast DH.
… having more even or worse match ups than favorable ones doesn’t lower the win rate?
Omg, I can’t.
You very clearly missed the entire discussion if you would type this.
Edit:
The TL;dr on this whole thread is this:
Normal people think hound hunter needs a nerf.
Top 1k says “just play enrage warrior as good as a top 1k player and hunter is fine”, no balance changes are needed at any level.
A discussion of why top 1k shouldn’t drive balance ensues, top 1k player ignores everything that doesn’t prove their point, illustrating why top 1k players shouldn’t drive balance decisions.
You are ignoring the context…
Your argument is that hunter is not getting worse, it’s just a different meta.
That’s factually untrue, as evidenced by matchups that are shifting further out of favor for hunter between diamond and top legend. You yourself point out a loss of about 5% win rate against enrage warrior alone (and this is an effect happening with several decks).
If this skill difference were applied to diamond’s meta, that would drop hunter’s win rate by about .23% overall.
It also encourages people to run enrage warrior more, as it’s a more decisive matchup against hunter, which you see at top legend, where there are almost double the enrage warriors.
I can’t see the exact matchup data for the other major decks because I don’t pay for HSR, but if you were to apply those differences just to the meta in diamond, you’d probably shave at least a percent off of the hunter’s win rate.
Based on Thursday’s VS report, control priest and blood DK are horribly overplayed in those ranges given how bad those decks are, which is giving hound hunter an unnatural boost in those brackets. Less people are clinging to them in top legend, which yes, is hurting hunter a bit.
Most of the decks rising at top legend are decks that can’t rise in diamond because they don’t win enough until people get better with the deck. If you copied and pasted the meta at top legend into diamond right now, hunter’s win rate would likely rise, because it would be comprised of more decks that it is favored against.
You can actually calculate it since you appear to have HSR premium.
Take the win rates of hunter vs each deck in diamond and weight them against the top 1k legend meta.
So, for example, 45 x .1038 for the diamond win rate of hunter vs enrage warrior weighted by how many enrage warriors there were in top legend according to the VS report. Then add them up for the new weighted average.
If you do that for each deck and compare it to hunter’s top 1k legend win rate, it’ll give you an idea of how much of the win rate change is from the Meta change, and how much of it is from people playing differently.
Edit:
Or unholy DK, or totem shaman, or pure paladin, or get good with outcast DH, or apparently naga mage.
What people seem to not understand, is the sensitivity of a keyword like Lifesteal.
You need to be really careful of a keyword like it, the way the developers realised the power of the Charge keyword and toned it down some years back.
When a keyword like Lifesteal gets overused, it creates a Meta game where decks start killing each other by hand to bypass the keyword, something which is not ideal.
Thankfully though the new 1 mana spell for Hunter implies that there will be a nerf for Hollow Hound next patch so no reason to fight over whether or not the card is in need of a nerf.
The developers have thrown as a bone on whether or not it is overdue for one, and it seems like its time has come.