This -will- be nerfed. (Hollow Hound)

Multiplayer Discussion
42

It’s the main card of the deck? What kind of question is this?
“What does the mage questline had to do with the problem of Questline Mage?”

Anyway

Hound Hunter is tier 1 (the sole tier 1) in D1 to D4 and second best deck from there till top 1k legend, where it falls to the bottom of tier 2. VS remarks it’s the best deck to climb to legend and resilient at high level play, matching up well with the current top dog, DH.

Granted: The hound is not the card closing games, but frequently cards can be too impactful without killing the opponent. Take Unleash Fell, as an example.

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43

That’s why if you’re smart you put lorthemar and sir finley for ultimate control killing power and trust me every control deck is a free food unless you really low roll horribly

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44

Well go check the hs reply data. Are you handicapped?

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45

Lorthemar is in the list. Sir Finley is super hit or miss when it comes to fixing bad draws with that deck, and is pretty trash outside of the control matchup, so he doesn’t make the cut.

If it weren’t for the companions into double Krush play, control would be noticeably favored against this hunter deck. Early snowball aggressive decks like paladin and enrage warrior already beat it.

It mostly farms mages, frost DK, and shadow priest.

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46

I played the 30 card version with lorthemar and sir finley and you crush every single control deck without breaking a sweat.

Sir finley is there for the situation you get king krush before using faithful companions on turn 10.

And against a control deck you will have all the time in the world to complete your game plan. You can also run queen ashara for double heart if you want ultimate greed.

For a control deck to win against you they really need to be super lucky or you to be extremely unlucky.

And even if you lose king krush you can still play lorthemar and try win with pure tempo.

This deck farms control decks with ease.

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47

Nerfing that card in anyway would kill the card and the hunter deck. It’s stats and mana cost is balanced. And there is a handful of ways to work around it so I don’t think it should be nerfed. Hunter-while isn’t a control class- needed a card like this to swing the game against other board centric decks which Hunter historically has had bad matchups against.

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48

Hound is a problem and saying it isn’t is really disingenuous.

It seems really over powered for the cost when you consider the stat line, rush, lifesteal, AND it has a cleave. That’s pretty insane and it immediately moved hunter into new heights for wins because it gave them a giant piece they were typically missing - healing.

The down side is that’s it’s not effective against decks that don’t play through the board, but I’m not sure that’s a big enough downside in the current meta.

Last time I saw numbers I trusted, this is what we saw at the very competitive diamond to legend bracket.

Best Performing Decks - HSReplay.net - June 23 : r/hearthstone (reddit.com)

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49

Hollow hound will eventually get a nerf.

It’s meta warping and at some point it will not be new anymore .

That combination is usually enough to get a nerf.

For now we should just enjoy the slower meta it creates.

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50

Just wanted to thank you guys for turning this into an actual discussion.

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51

It’s fine, sargeras alone in the next set basically negates the Krush burst if they keep your board under control with 2x 3/4 taunts every turn to soak. Plus, it’s not like there aren’t ways to target the deck if you need to.

The deck is definitely solid, it just also definitely has ways to beat it consistently. (Usually with very strong early tempo that turn 6 hollow hounds aren’t going to be clearing)

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52

I have yet to see a deck that was 100% unbeatable, so the fact that there are decks that beat this one isn’t an argument that hound is fine.

If we have a situation where your options are play hunter or the counter to hunter, that’s not really good balance or design. It has most assuredly warped the meta to an extent, and we will have to watch how it goes going forward, but I am absolutely in favor of taking hound down a notch.

53

Pure paladin was just recently very close to having no bad matchups.

Hound hunter barely breaks into tier 2 at top legend at last VS, which heavily implies there’s a good deal of things that it struggles with.

Just because those decks aren’t used as well/often at lower skill brackets doesn’t make hound hunter crazy OP.

It’s wasn’t even a large enough portion of the top legend meta to be worth trying to target.

The power of the deck drops off the better your opponents are, and it’s not a crazy outlier in the lower brackets.

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54

And it was nerfed.

This means nothing. Nothing.

For those who don’t understand, win rate is a weighted average. When you change the components, you get different answers. The top 1k meta is hardly ever representative of the preference and choices of the wider player base. (just go look at the play rates of different things at different ranks).

There are exactly 1k players at that ranking, and what they do doesn’t dictate the play experiences of literally hundreds of thousands of other players who aren’t in their pocket meta.

We as a community and they as a dev team need to stop saying, “well, it’s fine at top 1k, so it’s cool” because that’s a bald face lie and it is killing the game for the wider group of players who don’t play that level.

Lol, and you just made my point for me. Paladin had this same issue until the maul allowed it to win a couple more match ups that tend to show up at higher ranks more than lower ranks.

It’s 60% win rate in the diamond to legend ranks should be significantly more important to balance that ANYTHING that happens at top 1k.

This is false.

The actual answer is the decks that top 1k legend players like are not hunter and are bad match ups for the deck. That’s it. The meta is hostile to it for the same reason it was hostile to paladin - top 1k meta players like decks most people don’t.

55

I’m really getting tired of this argument. It’s the one that the highest-ranked players in the game used to justify not nerfing Pure Paladin for months and months.

Turns out that when the top 1k players all get bored out of their skulls with Pure Paladin and have a gentlemen’s agreement to cast it out of their tiny pocket meta, it doesn’t show up in their ivory tower.

Hound Hunter is the best deck in the game until you get up to that tiny sliver of players that all wanted to play something else anyway.

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56

It doesn’t mean nothing. Lots of decks drop off in power as skill increases. That keeps many of them from getting nerfed.

Paladin has many, many times had that kind of win trajectory where it’s one of the best (of not the best) deck to reach legend with, but not to climb with in legend.

And that kept it from getting nerfed.

The top 1k meta often does trickle down over time to the lower brackets, unless there is some deck there that’s particularly difficult to pilot. You don’t even need to get all the way to top 1k to see hound hunter dropping off in power.

Given time, the lower ranks would adapt what decks are most popular and that would shift hunter lower in power there. Pure paladin, enrage warrior, and unholy DK are all good picks for taking them down. There will always be a best deck. Hunter isn’t even close to the power levels that demanded nerfs, unless you just want to delete the deck (which would just spike frost DK back up in power in those ranks and get “oops all DKs” again).

Pure paladin also wasn’t super problematic until it got horn of the windlord.

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57

I interpret this as “Horn of the Windlord made a problematic deck so egregiously overpowered that even unwashed rubes like [Sigtyr], who never took part in the gentlemen’s agreement of top 1K, were able to bust down the doors of the ivory tower.” Horn of the Windlord was obviously a huge disaster on its own, it just made an existing problem too big to be swept under the rug any longer.

58

This is not measured, though. Stop saying this.

They win less because of the decks being played. The power of the deck is unchanged.
The match up spread is the difference.

You understand that you don’t know why people stop playing it, right? That it’s just as likely that it doesn’t win because people don’t want to play boring decks.

In fact, if you look at what is played at your precious top 1k, the more discover and bullcrap the better, and the more repeatable and consistent the less you see it.

This different is unrelated to power. Un. Re. Late. ed. to power. There are historically lots of times when decks that are trash at all other levels are highly competitive at top 1k specifically because of the mix of decks in that awful pocket meta.

For too long they have abused stats to make bad choices about the game, and the result is lots and lots of people who don’t play top 1k meta just walk because the game sucks.

Deck lists do, for sure, but not the meta. We aren’t going to see 25% of the meta playing some form of demon hunter in the near future because that’s what happened at top 1k.

I know you are spouting the typical line, but it’s wrong. It’s wrong now, it was wrong then. The game as a whole gets better the sooner the balance group stops holding up top 1k as proof of anything other than the top 1k’s preferences and results. They don’t generalize.

TO THE TOP 1K.

This is the elitist bullcrap that needs to stop.

Paladin was a meta tyrant from release until nerf, the only difference is that it annoyed the top 1k finally.

If it had an 80% win rate against control priest and miracle rogue at top 1k it would have been nerfed a month before the horn was a thing. The fact that it lost to their favorite decks made it “fine” for everyone despite nearly no one wanting to play those decks at other levels.

Again, read up on how weighted averages work and then go look at how changing the play rates of different things changes “win rate” and you will start to see what I am talking about.

59

Not to mention that half of those Demon Hunters are there playing Relic because Control Priest is another popular deck with no other counters.

And the other half of those Demon Hunters are playing Outcast DH because the deck is a dopamine factory that rewards pilot skill.

This is like the inverse of the Pure Paladin/Hound Hunter problem. DH is a whopping 25% of the top 1k meta but nobody complains because (A) the people up there like Outcast DH and (B) somebody has to stop Control Priest’s villainy. Top 1k players LIKE Outcast DH as a deck and they like what Relic DH is DOING. So DH being the highest winrate and most populous class is no problemo.

When the players up there have such a small community, they can curate what the entire pocket meta is doing. Again, “gentlemen’s agreement.”

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60

This is exactly what I mean when I say their experiences do not translate to the rest of the community and should not be the be all end all for balance to the degree that they are currently.

If I had to play DH 25% of my games I would just not play.

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61

What are you talking about? Their win rates and play rates drop off as you look at higher brackets. It’s absolutely measured. ZachO refers to it as a “skill trajectory” in his podcasts.

That’s… Exactly how the power of a deck is measured at all brackets. If the diamond brackets had that same matchup spread, there would be no complaints about hunter.

A deck isn’t strong without a good matchup spread. That’s why metas evolve over time as people adapt to what they are facing. The problem arises when there isn’t a reasonable way to adapt to a deck, or when the gameplay experience is incredibly negative paired with high play rates.

It wasn’t… It was a strong deck that never took over the meta because…

To be a meta “tyrant” a deck needs to be everywhere AND unable to be reasonably countered. Paladin didn’t meet that criteria until it got horn of the windlord. Prior to that, paladin never had play rates high enough to ever prevent someone from climbing to ranks where you wouldn’t see it.

Was it a bit too good at it’s stranglehold on the early game prior to horn? Yeah, probably. It utterly lost once you pulled ahead of it on board though, which kept it’s play rate pretty low as it was easy to target if you understand the game and chose a deck with it in mind.

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