Sets it too broad a brush. The classic set will always be in the game no matter what, apparently, but is there something about the classic set that makes it special and immune to rebalancing? And certainly some cards from Naxx and GVG are worth keeping going forward - throwing out the whole thing is clunky.
They need to be much more hands-on about balancing specific cards, and if they needed an evolving meta with changing cards, they should do it in a more finely-tuned way than de-activating entire expansions at once.
I also think with the way they’re doing rewards/removing old content for sale, etc. that they’re going to prematurely kill “wild” mode. I think they could strike a balance between the two modes, but instead it seems like they intend to kill “wild” mode and just have it around so that people feel less ripped off about their previous investment in the game.
Classic will be rebalanced with this change too, so my guess is that we’ll see classic truly become a “base” set that will define what the game and the heroes are, and the expansions will simply add the flavour.
I also don’t like wild personally, but legacy is a thing in Magic so maybe I’m wrong.
They did say they were going to “rebalance” some Classic cards. But otherwise, it’s necessary to have some sort of “base” set, which Classic is, and it’s relatively large. The Basic set by itself is much too small.
ETA: Didn’t read **Tabby Cat’**s reply before this but yeah, what he said. Except about the not liking wild - I will always play it.
@Tabby_Cat: The thing you and Blizzard are missing is that they are not making Magic: the Gathering. The only reason why leaving Shredder in the game means either having a Shredder meta forever or printing even more bullshit cards to replace it is because they are shit at their jobs and refuse to simply make Shredder not broken. They are creating an always online video game, not a tabletop CCG, so there is no reason except their own laziness and/or incompetence why ban lists hundreds of cards long are a better solution than just fixing cards so that they’re fair.
Agreed. They made such changes right after or during the beta. Defender of Argus became a 2/3, Sylvanas cost 6. For whatever reason, they’ve completely given up balancing cards. They nerf them into oblivion. What’s wrong with balancing Boom down to 1-2 damage deathrattle boombots? Or Shredder to a 3/3?
This is a very real concern, and I actually kinda hope they do make “reprints” in that way. Case in point: Lightbomb. Lightbomb is really, REALLY important for priest decks. Without it, to my understanding, Control Priest is kind of hosed, and Priest in general loses one of the only decent ways to deal with those Pesky 4-power creatures (oh, and they also lose Shrinkmeister, which was one of the only other ways). So they can:
Print something vaguely similar in the next set, in which case the Wild is screwed, because we really do not need control priest having 4 Lightbomb analogues
Kind of screw over control priest for quite some time
Move Lightbomb to Standard (the smart move)
reprint it in a new set (the slightly less smart move)
Your example with Healbot is also very good - Healbot filled a rather crucial niche in pretty much any non-priest, non-warrior control deck. Even then, you’d often see him run in control priest. Any slower Warlock archetype without Healbot is going to struggle considerably. So what now? Are those decks just hosed vs. aggro?
…Granted, it’s not as bad as what happens when Reno rotates out in a year…
This.
Either way, I’m kinda cheesed about the whole affair, given that of my “good” decks, most of them are getting hosed hard now (mech mage, zoolock, aggro paladin), and the remaining one is just completely dead when BRM rotates out.
If you want to solve the problem of power creep by nerfing cards instead of releasing cards of greater power, what you’ll have is basically a rotating list of “shredders”.
The original piloted shredder is nerfed. Piloted Shredder B arrives and is used everywhere.
Piloted B is nerfed. Piloted C arrives.
And so on. Is this really better than just cycling whole sets? It’s basically the same thing, except you have the added overhead of nerfing cards. Not to mention, if you do it wrong and don’t nerf the card enough, the new cards won’t be played. And then when the card base keeps increasing, the problem just gets bigger and bigger.
EDIT: Also regarding the nerfing of cards into the ground, I think only the cards which limit design space AND which were in the classic sets were dealt with in that way. Starving Buzzard limited the design space for cheap beasts - it was nerfed into the ground. Warsong limited the design space for low power minions (they specifically mentioned that dreadsteed could not be a neutral card because of warsong), and it was nerfed into the ground as well. Same for Undertaker
But what about the nerfs like the Leeroy nerf? I thought that was rather even handed. Same for flare, Gagetzan, Soulfire. Those were fine.
No. If I was in charge of Hearthstone and the R&D team proposed this course of action, I’d fire them. Again, the point is not planned obselescence, it’s making cards that are balanced. Every single card should be fair - not overpowered, not underpowered - and the point of nerfing Shredder is to correct the failure to not make it a fair card in the first place, not to make room for a new overpowered card.
Leeroy and Gadgetzan were overly broad and boring, in my opinion. I would have preferred characterful and more tightly focused nerfs - Leeroy by replacing Charge with “Battlecry: Attack!” (so you can’t load him up with buffs and Faceless Manipulator for an OTK) and Gadgetzan by making the drawn cards cost (1) more on the turn they are drawn (so that miracle shenanigans are more expensive, but just regular cycling is not).
My assumption was that Shredder B etc were not intentional, but even if we did manage to get the most perfectly balanced Shredder, where’s left to go from there? Do we play this Balanced Shredder from now until the end of time? 10 expansions from now, what happens if the dev team releases a card that unbalances Balanced Shredder? Does the dev team have to keep looking over the entire history of the game to balance new cards?
Even assuming that all that can be solved. What does the team release in the wake of Balanced Shredder? Balanced Shredder paintjob red/blue/green? The meta would be even more stagnant than it is now, and from now until forever.
What kind of card would they have to design to make people play it over Balanced Shredder - it would have to be something more powerful. By definition, it would be overpowered. Sure, you could say synergy decks, but frankly, unless the synergy is extreme, you end up with just plain old lets put a shredder in.
The 3 drop slot now is a bit like that. I think it’s fairly unarguable that there’s no standout 3 drop. It’s mostly balanced, and mostly used for synergy minions. People just play the 3 drop that provides the most synergy. What new card could you release to displace spider tank from mech mage, for example? And Spider tank isn’t even objectively overpowered. What 3 drop could you make to have priests give up dark cultist, if they even play 3 drops at all? You would have to invent a card that’s better than a Dark Cultist, and that would by definition be overpowered.
It’s about niches. Dark Cultist is great in priest decks that run a bunch of dudes. But how about a 3/4 for 3 that has “Battlecry: Target creature gets -1 attack this turn”? Not strictly better by any means, probably worse in most cases, but I think some priest archetypes would play it over Dark Cultist. For another example, consider the non-Totem-Golem 2-drop slot in Aggro Shaman - there’s a long-standing debate about Whirling Zap-O-Matic vs. Knife Juggler vs. Flame Juggler. None of these creatures is objectively the best, even when literally nothing else in the deck changes; it’s a question of the meta (Flame Juggler is popular right now because of Shieldbot, and will probably fall out of favor in standard).
It’s just like how in Legacy, Tarmogoyf is technically the “best” green aggro two-drop, but you still see decks running Wild Mongrel because Wild Mongrel fits the deck’s goals better. I’m sure someone more well-acquainted with Legacy could provide a much better example, because this one is probably pretty awful.
Heck, in my priest deck, my 3-drop isn’t Dark Cultist, it’s Blackwing Technician. It just fits the deck much better. I don’t see why they couldn’t release other 3-drops with similar advantages and disadvantages - so long as the alternative isn’t so powerful as to be trivially the strongest card in its slot almost regardless of the deck (Boom, Tirion, Shredder, etc).
Even if two cards and two decks are equally matched, some people will choose to play one and some will choose to play the other, depending on their preferences. There are many different ways to reach the appropriate power level for a neutral 4-drop, especially as more mechanics are added to the game.
I’ve said before that the game is fundamentally flawed and not likely to last long. This is really the end of Hearthstone as we know it; it will be a new game.
Their insistence on keeping the basic and classic sets makes a bit sense by the theory that it will maintain some familiarity over the course of time, but the problem remains that some of the original cards are so flawed that they have been unable to fix them, choosing rather to nerf them totally out of play. If the cards never see play, the sense of familiarity argument loses a lot of steam.
Anybody want to predict how they nerf Knife Juggler and Savage Roar? Even the little Ironbeak Owl is OP and should probably be subject to adjustment.
Nonsense. I would have been able to fix them, and would have made them more characterful into the bargain. That Blizzard has chosen to instead take the easy way out and nerf them into oblivion implies either laziness or incompetence.
If it was me, I’d make Savage Roar give you +4 attack and your minions +1 attack - sort of like a mirror to Swipe.
That would bring combo down from the current 14 damage from an empty board to 12. That doesn’t seem like much of a nurf. Even a worst case scenario (full board for druid) it only drops the total power of savage roar by 5 (-1 from each of 7 minions +2 to hero). Who would even notice the change?
If you want to wreck combo without destroying either of the pieces outright I’d suggest something like:
FoN: Summon 3 2/2 Treants with CHARGE that die at the end of your turn. Treants cannot be targeted by spells or hero powers. (if this nurf is too much, either drop the cost to 5 or add a 4th Treant)
Savage Roar: Targeted minion gains +2 attack for this turn. Your hero and minions beside the target also gain +2 attack for this turn.
14 damage from an empty board becomes impossible. Best case from an empty board for the druid (Ignoring mana reductions) is FoN, 1/0 mana creature dropped between two Treants, SR the 1 mana minion, 12 damage for 10/9 mana and 3 cards.
Exactly, and (as I mentioned in post 1394) if that’s all combo did I don’t think you’d hear a lot of complaining about 14 to the face. Pretty much any class can do 10 - low teens of damage to the face with two cards and full(ish) mana.
The problem with combo is that it does the same burn that other classes can do plus scaling with any minions on the board. And since sticking at least one or two minions to the board is something pretty much all decks want to do anyway that extra power is pretty much ‘free’.
Either card alone is pretty fair so if you can reduce or eliminate their ability to synergize with each other the problem goes away.
Yeesh. This week’s tavern brawl is broken as all hell. I remember the first few weeks, they gave us randomized decks and mechanics that worked around that. My first Tavern Brawl was that “draft” Brawl, and that was so cool. Any character could compete, any class could play. These last two weeks have been bad. Last week had a few viable archetypes, but this week the game is either “Find ways to not die to a Rogue with a Doomhammer” or “Be a Rogue with a Doomhammer”. I cannot imagine they didn’t see that coming; in either case, it’s not exactly the most engaging event I’ve ever seen. Sure, it’s a little fun to play mech mage against that and try to make a Water Elemental or Snowchugger stick, but it feels very luck-based and not very fun. Ran into like 4 rogues in a row and then stopped.
