https://www.vicioussyndicate.com/vs-data-reaper-report-265/
The bulk of the report can be summarized by one thing
The current meta lives up to its name. It is truly apocalyptic. Let’s start with the obvious cause:
Paladin
Pure Paladin is broken. The deck looked quite good in the early days of the mini-set, but didn’t scare us until a build from Noodleswoop emerged, leveraging Horn of the Windlord to the max. By running both ‘Feast and Famine’ and ‘For Quel’Thalas!’, it becomes extremely difficult for the opponent to avoid the Paladin’s off-board reach.
- Pure Paladin’s play rate at top legend should have been the dead giveaway to anyone paying attention. If top legend players start piloting Pure Paladin en masse, it has to mean the deck is incredibly broken.
Balance changes are likely coming soon. We expect them to hit Pure Paladin quite hard, as this deck is unbelievably busted in its current state
In other news, spell demon hunter is back and better than ever (even more powerful than it was pre sinful brand nerf thanks to how strong through fel and flames is), and enrage warrior is the second strongest deck in the format. Also death knight’s popularity is still way too high.
It’s a good thing we have the report to tell us all this stuff ya know. I never would have been able to figure any of this stuff out from my ladder experiences.
7 Likes
Yeah, literally none of this is surprising.
The next Nerf needs to be DK and pure paladin and a few more buffs to bring the classes into more of a balance somewhat.
They better go as wide on the nerfs with pure paladin as they did with buffs with warrior.
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Once they nerf paladin we’ll just have infinite mages doing 70 solid alibis in a single game. The problem with their balance changes is they can never seem to anticipate what will happen after the balance change when its pretty obvious (i think everyone called paladin being the new tyrant after the last round of nerfs) to everyone.
I think they should start doing balance changes by cycling in prior powerful cards from wild into under performing class archetypes and try to buff up classes rather than reduce the winrate of a deck by .02% through mana changes and stat changes.
5 Likes
Easily handled by astalor.
I really, REALLY appreciate decks like Outcast DH and Enrage Warrior. When the most powerful decks also require some careful planning (and also don’t create stupid non-games like Miracle Rogue in early-to-mid MotLK), we can have a good time.
Pure Paladin is not that.
Obviously, I have no idea what you guys play for the most part, but I genuinely thing people underestimate just how oppressive Pure Paladin has been for the last year. This deck has been relevant the whole time, since before DK, and it is one of the gatekeepers for what gets to be viable.
Your deck might be good against Frost/Unholy DK, you might be good against spell DH, you might be good against Control Priest (not all at once, hopefully), but if you can’t beat Pure Paladin, you’re only going to get so far. And it REALLY sucks that you can’t just sit in a particular rank to stay away from Pure Paladin - its everywhere.
2 Likes
One thing, and not to be pedantic but it’s a point worth making, I think. Pure Paladin is not the cause, rather it’s a symptom of incompetence. It’s hard to make sense of the deck in its current state otherwise. I highly doubt it’s that some dev has a paladin bias, as some might suggest. Why explain a problem with what sounds like a conspiracy theory, when mere and simple incompetence can explain everything.
2 Likes
Mallenroh, you sound so much more polite than you usually do. You feeling okay?
(For legal reasons, this is a joke)
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Haha. I’m not quite in agreement with Mall on this. I don’t believe there’s anything suspicious about what’s happening with paladin. I chalk it up to incompetence. Sprinkle a little upper management failings and you have Hearthstone.
That aside, the whole point of Pure Paladin as an archetype was to sacrifice deck power for a great payoff later. Enter Countess.
Then they buffed Countess.
Then they supercharged it with amazing Paladin cards in MotLK, including Purator.
Then they gave Paladin MORE amazing Paladin cards in FoL.
Now Countess is one of the worse cards in the deck. Think about that.
The card that originally was intended to enable Pure Paladin as an archetype is now one of the worse cards in the deck.
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I don’t know how you can put aside the cause for this absurdity: massive incompetence. I don’t know if they have a skewed view of paladin, thinking that players enjoy this or what it is, but…
No, this is Heathstone!
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I meant to put aside the “mistaken identity” joke, I suppose I could’ve been clearer.
But yeah, while I can understand that Blizzard doesn’t have the ability to see the future or might underestimate the effects of nerfs or buffs (“we fully expect Warrior to survive these Sunken City nerfs”), how can you just keep feeding amazing class cards to a class that also has a payoff for only playing class cards?
What’d they think would happen? Pure Paladin has been relevant, even powerful, for months and they keep feeding it?
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why DK? hunter warrior and paladin have the best decks
Somewhat disagree. The thing that broke Paladin was very specifically the damage from off the board. Because it used to be you could trade away a Paladin’s board and–most of the time–that was sufficient to win the game. It’s why Pure Paladin was allowed to spike Tempo the whole game and Countess / Lightspawn turns are just the last surges of value out of them.
The card that broke the deck was Horn. Now, it’s not good enough to finally fight / remove the board away, you’re not safe anymore. It’s a very flavorful weapon, doing what it does. It’s a shame it’s reduced to a combo lethal when it’s such a neat board control tool. The damage is too high, Pally has too many buffs that grant them attack power, and too many of those are Holy spells to be doubled by Kotori Lightblade. Which is cheap itself.
Now, you can’t stabilize. You’re still in danger of getting swatted if you have less than like 15 health.
The Dk still just needs a small Nerf because if you Nerf Paladin you will see DK take over again because Paladin and DH only really counters. I would say Frost dk is the only one you would want to hit more than anything.
It’s a long time ago and I’m too lazy to find the source, but the devs have said when they design cards, it starts off with the card sounding “fun” or “cool” (of course their idea of fun and cool may not coincide with yours/the players’). Read: not whether it’s balanced or what the class “needs” at the moment.
So given the devs care about “fun”, what have the players been telling them about paladin?
Paladins are “boring”
So what’s the natural response? Give paladins more “fun” cards. Crazy fun cards. Crazy fun cards that turn out stupid strong.
Notice that these recent things are things other classes have enjoyed (so supposedly they’re not boring)
Weapon is doomhammer
Murloc is mini-bloodlust for divine shields
Lightray is the 0 mana minion you can cheat out
Countess the RNG hail mary, legendary version of cards like rune of arcehmage (be thankful not many paladins try to go for discovering multiple copies of her)
So I say enjoy the bed you made for yourselves. I’m just watching amused
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paladin isnt DK only bad match up nor the worst one
hmm i think the horn would be fine if they nerf feast and famine so you cant attack heroes
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The lifesteal with the weapon may be a problem but doomhammer + double rockbiter for 16 was in the game since I think its inception (and rockbiter used to be 1 mana) and it was never an issue.
The issue I think with paladin is the paladin game plan is too consistent. The early game is too consistent with the 1 drops and the divine shields make it easy to protect the big attack minions. THen purator on 5 always enables the double lightray (and they usually have countess on 7 too if they run order).
Too many other decks have to deal with deck randomness. Paladin can pretty much map out each turn every game thanks to tutor.
