A nice enough set of nerfs. Assuming a full dust refund on nerfed cards I’ll get between 1200 and 3800 dust depending on if I keep the golden or regular versions (I’m going to keep two copies of everything in any case). So no complaints there. Detailed thoughts below.
Blizzard is having trouble balancing Charge so no shock that two cards lost that text.
Druid may have been hit slightly too hard taking nerfs to 3 class cards. Keeper of the Grove is possibly still playable at 2/2/2 with chose 2 damage or silence, but Anicent of Lore down to only drawing 1 card may not be good enough and FoN at 5 mana summon 3 2/2 tokens seems almost unplayable. I’d have thought that killing the combo would be enough. I’m assuming that in OG Druid decks are going to be C’Thun, Token, or Ramp. Three potential archetypes seems okay for a class and hopefully one of them will support a tier 1 or 2 deck.
Rogue is going to get either a decent new weapon or weapon buff in OG or future sets; that’s the only explanation I can see for the massive hit Blade Flurry got (2 mana -> 4 mana and damage no longer hits face).
Big Game Hunter is bumped to 5 mana. I’ll probably still run it in some decks, which I guess shows how powerful it is that a 2 mana increase in costs doesn’t make it unplayable.
“Fun” and “interesting” “changes” to keep the game “fresh”! Definitely not nerfs! Definitely not gutting the shit out of cards to the point of making them totally unplayable.
Golly, it’s so fun and exciting and fresh I can hardly contain myself.
To be fair, they have been fairly limited in the amount of nerfs they issue. These nerfs amount to more than all previous nerfs combined. But “changes” still always means nerfs.
Although technically, as someone whimsically noted on the HS Reddit, the nerf to Molten Giant is a stealth buff to Paladin’s Holy Wrath, making it a potential OTK card. Note how Paladin and Mage were otherwise untouched - clearly they are going to be the favored classes in WOG.
The charges relate mostly to design space. You wouldn’t expect buffs in these sorts of changes - the idea is that, for example, they can’t make Rogue weapons too good, or weapon buffs too good, otherwise Blade Flurry would mean Face Rogue would be unstoppable.
Similarly with Druid cards - there’s just no design space for a card that competes with AOL, because AOL is too good. Same for FON - they can’t print any cards that are too sticky with Druid, or which buff minion attack too much, since Force/Road will just kill you outright at 9, it’s already bad enough as it is. Now with FON nerfed, they open up design space for more sticky Druid cards. In particular, stickiness is an issue with Druid - without stickiness, you can’t make minion based decks work these days. But if you give Druid sticky minions, Force/Roar is just insane if you can’t clear the board.
So, from these nerfs, you can tell that they are clearing the way for a more sticky minion based Druid, and a more weapon based Rogue (Pirate Rogue finally ARRRRRRRR).
That’s not a bad thing. I’ve been wanting to play Pirate Rogue for a loooooong time.
…While I understand that design space is an issue… What the hell were they thinking with Arcane Golem? No, seriously, what was the thought process there? Did nobody look at it and think, “You know, we would never actually put out a card that’s this abysmal and uninteresting normally, maybe we should give this a second thought…”
Seriously, this card is just awful. It’s around the level of Felguard, and considerably worse than Dancing Swords. I understand that having a big charge minion at that cost is probably a bad idea, and that if you remove the drawback the card becomes essentially a completely different card, but… C’mon, guys, this guy has one stat point more than a freakin’ vanilla 3-drop, and your opponent gets a free wild growth and thus can respond by playing an on-curve 4-drop or even 5-drop that eats this thing alive. That’s abysmal. It’s not even that I liked or ran the old Arcane Golem. I get that it wasn’t the best design. I just can’t understand why they made it this bad. In terms of “If you play this on curve you lose the game”, it’s now slightly above Felguard and slightly below Millhouse Manastorm. Could’ve at least given it yeti stats, or a Darnassus Aspirant-style effect where the mana crystal goes away if it dies.
But no. 1 stat point above vanilla in a weak way (3/5 is actually much better than 4/4, particularly in the early game), and your opponent gets a mana crystal. Who thought this was a good idea? Seriously, it makes me worry that the game is not in the hands of a talented dev team but rather a bunch of morons who don’t get game balance or understand that a large part of a CCG’s attraction is your collection’s value. -_-
Someone said that the new Arcane Golem is now a shitty Millhouse.
Shitty Millhouse. Think about that.
For 1 mana crystal, I think they could have even gone to 5/5 and not have it OP. But maybe then it was stepping on some other cards’ toes.
The main thing about this card is that without charge, it is just so uninteresting. There is almost literally no reason why you would want to play this card. The cards that it can most be compared to, Dancing Swords or Ogre Brute, have at least an interesting drawback - this just straight up ramps your opponent. Why???
So yeah. I don’t know why the new arcane golem is this bad. This is Warsong levels of nerf. Ah well. shrug
Yes, but Savage Roar was always the part that caused the problem, not Force of Nature. It is the force multiplier on these new sticky minions you’re talking about adding. Even with this change, any time your opponent leaves two minions on the board, you can pay 3 mana to do 6 damage, all the way up to 16 damage if you’ve got a full board.
Pirate Rogue is my main deck, and Blizzard is screwing it over.
See, I’m not so sure about that. Token Druid was a thing, and Egg Druid is a thing, and neither of them are a problem without FON. It’s actually really hard to get a board of more than 4 minions that survive your opponent’s turn, and if you do, you should get a big payout.
Pirate Rogue was never as good as Pirate Warrior because of their weapons. You’d think that Rogue would synergise best with Pirates, but Warrior have always gotten the better weapons. Rogue has never worked well with Greenskin, or Bloodsail, or Dread Corsair, and all three of those cards have been played in Warrior (even without pirate synergy!).
I look forward to the weapons and new Pirate cards in the new set. It’s clear that Blizzard likes the idea of Pirate Rogue, looking at Buccaneer, Shady Dealer, AutoBarber and One eyed cheat, and I’m sure that Blizz will finally make it a viable deck type.
Why do you say that it was screwed over, anyway? Just because of Blade Flurry? I’m sure the quality of the new weapons and weapon buffs will more than make up for it.
Oh yeah, another interesting note - in wild, how do we trade with Mad Scientist? Owl is now 3 mana. BGH made Dr. Boom almost tolerable; now he’s still there but a lot weaker (hard to drop him and something that will trade with boom bots). No nerfs to any cards relevant to wild, despite many of them being far more ridiculous. So wild gets to be basically a non-entity, huh?
It was never worth it to owl a mad scientist anyway, even at 2 mana. I think Mad Scientist is just one of those cards that we’ll have to live with in wild. Either out tempo it (burn him down before he gets his secret value, hard) or out value it (harder).
I mean, how do we deal with mad scientist now? Only 2 real classes that are an issue, Hunter and Mage. Hunter and aggro in general is too easily countered, and traps need to be played in proper situations when playing a control hunter, so I see it as more of the same - face hunter will play mad scientist but the general power level will be too low to be really competitive, control hunter will not play mad scientists.
Only 2 real Mage archetypes now, Freeze and Tempo/Flamewaker. Freeze will be the same old same old - I think the general power level of wild will make freeze irrelevant anyway (given that Blizz will never print any more good burn spells for Mage). Tempo is more interesting, and gets a LOT of value/tempo out of mad scientist. Will likely increase in power level as blizz likes minions.
As for how to counter it… I dunno. =D someone smarter than me will make a deck.
It won’t be. The Blade Flurry nerf was absolutely devastating and uncalled for. If they felt they absolutely had to nerf it, there are a lot of ways they could have done it that would have been far less severe than the way they went about it.
I think Mage and Paladin will continue to reign supreme.
Anybody have the true poop on the new quests for free packs?
5 packs by winning 2 standard games in ranked
5 packs by winning 7 standard games in ranked
But I have also seen it stated as 5 packs for playing 2 and 7 games, rather then winning the games.
It appears these two quests will come up automatically, one after the other, without waiting for the next day. If the player has a full quest log, it will replace the quest with the lowest gold reward.
It’s a nice unexpected bonus, but it messes with my plan for efficient pack buying. My plan was to use the gold I have saved (about 5600) to buy new packs until I have most of the new common and rare cards, then spend the rest on Classic packs because the chances of getting epic and legendary cards are about the same but the nerfed cards dust for full value, therefore they trade one to one for new cards rather than the usual 25% rate.
If I just have to play the games to get the free packs I can just go with my current deck, expecting to perhaps not do too well, maybe losing some rank but maintaining efficiency in spending gold. If I have to win the games, however, … well … there will be a lot of confused players playing raggedy decks with new cards they don’t understand. I guess it’s still best just to try to win the 2 & 7 game quests with an old deck, then start the pack buying.
You can’t get all the commons with less than 23 packs, so buying 10 packs plus the initial 3 packs would get you a good head start to win games to earn the other 10.
It would have to be winning the games rather than just playing them, otherwise you could just auto-concede a bunch of games in a row and get the packs. But I don’t think you’ll have to play ranked; playing casual standard should also work for completing the quests (I think).
In any case, I’ll be opening about 70 packs on launch day and keeping some stats on what I get. Very excited!
Yeah, it says the quest is to play Ranked Standard. It seems sensible you have to win the games, but it is a giveaway and it is Blizzard.
Good thinking on the 23 packs. Of course, I’ll still be one of the dazed and confused, playing cards I don’t understand, but I guess my chances are at least as good as most players.
During all of the other launches, it was super easy to get wins with something like face hunter since you punished all the people playing unrefined control decks and combo decks.
I’m planning on going back to an updated Sunshine Hunter or a Ramp Druid.
I’ve put together a Standard-compatible Aggro Shaman deck to do the quests. If it can win against current decks despite having no GvG and no CoN, chances are good that it will be able to stomp the unprepared nine times in the early hours of Standard.
