Uther Lightbringer, the Paladin
Unleash the Hounds Nerf Incoming
Quote from ZeriyahThe following balance change will be made in an upcoming patch:
- Unleash the Hounds (Hunter) now costs 3 (up from 2)
Over the last few months, we have seen hundreds of different decks do well in game depending on many different factors. Our community is incredibly creative, and we’ve seen players constantly trying out new things and coming up with new strategies to counter whatever decks they have trouble with.
At the very highest levels of play there are a lot of different decks performing well, and the decks at the top change from week to week. Since we’ve seen many cards and deck types in the current state of the game rise and fall as players adapt, so we did not want to change Unleash the Hounds immediately. However, Hunter decks have become increasingly more dominant and are doing better than we are comfortable across many levels of play.
We do like the idea of decks that have a really big turn and pull off a sweet combo, but when playing against Hunter decks, you may feel punished too much for playing minions. Playing minions is one of the key, fun pieces of the overall Hearthstone puzzle, and feeling like your options are limited by the opponent creates a play experience that may not be particularly enjoyable.
We take any balance changes very seriously, and we will continue to hold true to our stance that we plan on only making changes to cards if we feel it is completely necessary. After much consideration we have decided to increase the mana cost of Unleash the Hounds to 3. This change should make the card more fun to play against while still allowing for some big plays.
Yep and I'm glad that I will now be able to play my class peacefully =)
Reasonable and GOOD. Although now I'm less interesting in playing my Hunter :P
Can't say I'm surprised. Sounds reasonable.
RIP most Hunter's decks.
Blow to Aggro Hunters at least. Great change!
I think xskarma might be correct by specifically stating Aggro hunter. Midrange has less need to play the combo with wolf on 5 mana and can get away with an extra turn. In fact it may give more unpredictability for turn 6 having highmane or combo. Guess we'll see...
Even Aggro Hunter will be fine compared to other classes' options. The synergy wasn't nerfed, the mechanics weren't nerfed. It will only mean 1 turn extra to get the combo off. Hunter has plenty of options in their arsenal to still create the situation they want.
And yes, Midrange will be effected, but not as much as Aggro.
My point was that most of thehunters I met between rank 10 and 25 are using this combo (or try too) to win around turn 5 or 6. This combo will have to be delayed a bit, but that could mean it's not as useful afterward.
I'm happy with the change as it might create different type of meta for the hunters :) Not always the same build that you know from the 1st card drop what he is trying to do.
Yeah it will affect more the aggro archetype as one turn can sometimes be the difference between a win and a loss. Moreover, Leeroy based combos seems harder to pull off now ^^
However I disagree on the differents types of hunter thing as it was already the case, the main two archetypes were aggro and mid range but they are different ways to build those (I can see 2-3 relevant variants for each, check hearthstoneplayers.com for example) and even some people tried a bit with hunter control or hunter watcher. The thing is that the domination of Mid Range "Kolento's variant" made those transparent as many people were using a similar version.