Divine shield has been historically associated with paladin (and in my mind should be exclusive to paladin such as discard, combo, choose one, etc. Are exclusive to their respective classes), but it’s execution in hearthstone doesn’t live up to its forebears in WoW.
As the game has evolved divine shield has become marginalized by pings and effects that just destroy minions instead of dealing damage (thereby ignoring the shield).
What if divine shield instead blocked the first “negative thing” that happened to the minion?
Effectively insuring that shielded minions get to make at least 1 trade before being destroyed, silenced, transformed, or bounced.
That is also more online with how the ability worked in WoW. I believe that this singular change could go a long way toward making paladin viable again.
Paladins only win condition is to get ahead on board and stay there, which is relatively impossible with all the readily available removal (regardless of health or effects) that exists in the game now.
Yah, I agree. Divine Shield should be temporary immunity to one negative effect but should only be applied sparingly to paladin cards and some rare exceptions.
I think Paladin should just get a new keyword like, “Divine favor”=only you can target this minion with spells and effects, and then make it exclusive to Paladin.
Your thing would be fun, but also rather complicated.
I don’t think it would be too hard to understand that “divine shield” means the first thing you do to this minion removes the shield.
" Only you can target this minion" is basically just as vulnerable to most AoE effects and all battlecries. Basically I just don’t think it’s strong enough to warrant inclusion, as it would require you to have the minion and a spell you want to cast on it. “Can’t be targeted” fulfils this role well enough, imo.
If I had any say in the development of this game all classes would be viable right now because we would have regular balance updates instead of just 1 or 2 after the launch of an expansion.
Other than that, these are hearthstone forums, an appropriate place to talk about all matters related to hearthstone.
That actually has always been the case. Divine shield is more effective on the offense - when it’s your turn, and you decide what your divine shield will block. Take for example that 5/3 rush dragon, or even the classic argent commander when people didn’t use it just as a charge to the face.
When it’s opponent’s turn, the best you can hope for is that it took more mana/tempo for the opponent to get rid of the shield than for you to put the shield up. It’s still up to your next turn to take advantage of the tempo gap created (which is to say, you still have to be aggressive)
One other use might be using divine shield and perhaps other buffs on a small minion to bait out big removals away from your later threats, but again, this means you’re being rather aggressive, throwing down and buffing those little dudes.
Well, divine shield in WoW can also be used offensively, especially went put on a DPS ally in PvP (where it’s actually called hand of protection, as in the basic spells in HS)
When cast on the paladin himself, the closest card to that in HS isn’t any divine shield card, but Time Out.
First, existing minions like that rush dragon mentioned earlier would become even more powerful, which I wager would help other classes more than paladin, since paladin is one of the classes that don’t have easy access to pings or transforms or hard removals.
That neutral 1 drop that deals 1 and gives divine shield would probably become an amazing utility card, and again, it’ll probably help other classes more than it does paladin.
Then future minions with shield will have terrible stats, or is very costly (ditto if it’s a spell), or have some other drawback with the card.
So instead of changing the way DS works, I’d rather they look into paladin class specific divine shield cards and buff them somehow. Particularly the three in classic/basic
Hand of Protection
Argent Protector
Righteousness (compare this to scalelord, lol)
Being the resident paladin memer who runs blessed champion, I will tell you blessed champion is actually a win condition. Rarely do you get OTK, but if you’ve been doing the usual paladin thing of fighting board and chipping at the enemy’s face, having champion gives you reach you otherwise wouldn’t have, one which usually the opponent does not expect.
And if you run a charge or two, then even if you lose board, you might still have a hail mary pass to finish them off.
Your post makes no sense. Paladin has more divine shield minions than other classes. Improving divine shield therefore naturally benefits paladin more than other classes.
You then talk about how divine shield has been more useful on offense while I’m advocating for making it more useful for defense. So again, you completely missed the point. Making divine shield more useful on defense greatly benefits paladin that doesn’t have many ways to leverage it for offense. It will have minimal effect for rush minions that come equipped with divine shield because they will still be used to make immediate trades.
Also, blessed champion is a meme level win condition. You must first have a minion able to attack the enemy hero, the ability to clear any taunts from the board, and high enough attack to actually execute the kill. If you meet these conditions most likely you were going to win anyway. Unless opponent topdexks a way to clear your board or simply chose not to
Divine shield + “divine favor” covers most of what you want, is my point, and makes them less vulnerable to pings. I’m suggesting paladin minions get both.
hey that would be a good for a new priest mechanic given to your minions through battlecries or spell not innate so interactions with summoning destroyed minions
That’s the effect on Priest’s Prime minion, but yeah giving that to more Paladin minions would be nice actually. Hell call it “Devotion Aura”, because in WoW it’s a Paladin spell that stops you and all allies from getting silenced.
Yes and no. Without expansion cards, shamans have just as many divine shield minions (al’akir vs tirion)
As a whole though, there are actually more neutral divine shield minions than there are paladin specific minions. So I think what I said makes perfect sense: a change to the divine shield mechanic itself will benefit other classes too, and when it comes to answering a divine shield, most other classes have it easier than paladins.
What really makes divine shield paladin’s own thing is from the 3 cards I mentioned: paladin have ways to give divine shields to others. They aren’t exactly used much, which is why I prefer they buff those. Buffing them will only benefit paladin with much less risk of benefiting other classes (rogue/priest can still steal them, but not much can be done there)
I didn’t miss your point. Again, you asked for thoughts. I gave you mine.
I think that’s the tail wagging the dog. Rather than make divine shield fit paladin offense (or lack thereof), buff paladin offense so divine shield can be used more.
First, everything you said there applies to any paladin deck (that isn’t OTK, which isn’t available in standard), with or without blessed champion.
As I said already, it’s about having the reach. You might have the board. You might have the minion with good attack. They might not have taunt. But then the enemy is still at like 20 health because you’ve been busy fighting for board instead of going face. Champion gives you that reach to finish it this turn instead of giving them another turn to draw that board clear/big taunt/heal/etc
When you admit, and I agree, that paladins don’t have a lot of win conditions, you want to finish the game sooner rather than later, before the enemy’s win condition pops up.
Sure lets promote more the lack of interaction and counterplay that many of the playerbase already hates just to make a class that was one of the top dogs of the past year and a half of the meta viable again.
Lack of interaction - forcing opponents to deal with divine shield instead of ignore it with destroy, silence, transform, freeze, etc does not promote a lack of interaction, it promotes more interaction with trades on the board or targeting minions with spells, effects, or trades to remove the shield. So this would actually promote more interaction not the lack of interaction.
Top dog of the last year - Not sure where you are coming up with this. In RoS CC mage and Control warrior were the premier decks, mech paladin was a solid counter meta deck and overall performance was t2.
Savior’s of uldum - making mummies was a solid deck until control warrior was evicted from the meta, tip the scales paladin was a solid aggro deck for fast climbing, Highlander paladin was ok but outperformed by other Highlander decks, all made irrelevant by the Doom in the Tomb event which took up 2/3 of the expansion because Evolve Shaman was the only deck that mattered.
DoD - Galakrond shaman dominated the meta prior to 2 rounds of nerfs, during which time OTK paladin served as a somewhat reliable counter, afterwards Galakrond Rogue and Various Hunter decks were the strongest performers, while Aggro mech paladin was a decent deck for climbing.
I am not arguing that paladin had several decent options over the last year (almost exclusively reliant on Raven cards), but a solid year of tier 2 decks does not equal a “top dog of the meta” (to me)
Righteousness lol. It’s funny that Divine Favor got HOF’d (rightfully so) to be replaced by an unplayable spell. That’s the HS devs’ idea of “balancing the game”.
To OP’s point, I think the coding aspect would require way too much work. However, I’m game for Paladin getting more DS utilization. Honestly, Paladin’s Classic Set needs a rework similar to that of Priest. There’s a severe lack of playable cards among Paladin’s evergreen core.
It would potentially require a lot of coding as (I assume) effects aren’t tagged as negative or positive. Which would mean going through and flagging everything as one or the other then changing divine shield to cancel the first attack damage or “negative effect”.
I don’t think the paladin core set needs reworked in terms of the effects, more just the Mana cost.
Righteousness and blessed champion are basically unplayable but…
Hammer of wrath to 3
Avenging wrath to 5
Lay on hands to 6
Equality to 3
Guardian of Kings to 6
Righteousness is probably ok at 4
Blessed champion is probably ok at 3.
Significant Mana changes but that makes the core set good without being overpowered
Your idea of “balance” make no sense at all. Decreasing the cost of card as you stated, would create a balance problem.
Paladin would be OP.
Rework divine shield?
What you propose would destroy the game and force everyone to play divine shield minion as much as possible.
That’s also mean that removal as sheep wouldn’t be effective.
When your idea basically destroy the core of removal option, it’s a bad idea.
(It would destroy cards as sheep and make them unplayable)
Your idea is bad. So let it go man, let it go down the drain where it belong.
N.B : The coding aspect isn’t the problem by the way, it’s just that Blizzard/Activision woudn’t destroy 20% of it’s core cards to buff paladin.
Decreasing costs of cards to make them in line with other similar effects would be op? Please explain.
Hammer of wrath at 3 Mana would be 3 damage for 3 and draw a card. Most spells that deal 3 damage with a secondary effect cost 2, this is not op.
Avenging wrath from 6 to 5. Arcane missiles does 3 for 1, cinderstorm does 5 for 3, avenging wrath doing 8 for 5 is a natural progression here.
Equality to 3 - blizzard obviously doesn’t value the effect of changing enemy health to 1, see veranus (on curve stats with better equality battlecry) or libram of Justice, better equality and can be reduced to 0, still not good enough to make paladin even t2. Equality at 3 is perfectly fine and really not even a strong effect.
Guardian of Kings to 6 makes it 2 Mana worth of heal on a 5 Mana body for 6, not game breaking at all, just playable, as opposed to unplayable.
Righteousness at 5 is unplayable, at 4 is probably still unplayable.
Blessed champion at 5 is a joke, at 3 can probably actually be used to set up otk reliably, maybe 4 is better.
Saying those changes would break the game is laughable. Pretty much every card I suggested changing is not played in any viable deck. Buffing them to be of equal power to their counterparts is not game breaking in any way.
Divine shield change could be game breaking, it would need to be tested to see how it worked, I think it would primarily give paladin a benefit that it desperately needs vs hard removal, in the current game the shield rarely matters
Would it be too strong if it worked similar to how freeze effects make a minion unable to act for 1 full turn, the minion takes no damage for 1 full turn? Basically Time Out but on minions.
I think that sort of effect is probably ok, but it really messes with the rush minions that come equiped with divine shield, which means it would need to be an entirely different sort of effect, and that probably gets to be too complicated for what the goal is.
The goal is to make paladin be able to force trades (instead of opponent just poly, hex, Black Knight, silence, sap, whatever) they could still ping away the shield or trade an inconsequential minion first, but they at least have to deal with the minion.
In the game state right now minions are typically removed before they get to trade unless they have rush or charge. The intent is to force some trades or otherwise force the opponent to actually do something about the shield instead of just ignore it with one of a billion spells that don’t care about the shield.
As it works now the shield is really only beneficial if your opponent has no options or the minion gets to attack, which makes the paladin divine shield buffs pretty worthless (since no paladin minions get to attack on the turn they are summoned and it it unlikely they survive until the next turn.
I’m not trying to pitch ideas for anything broken, just a more level playing field that fits within paladin identity