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.
Monday - Penny Arcade makes fun of annoying Hearthstone classes.
Tuesday - annoying class nerfed.
Coincidence? :p
I say they just increase the traps to 3 is as well. Then I will feel more comfortable.
such nerf, wow! (sarcasm)
So is everyone is going to stop playing hunter because the cost of one card was raised by one mana? I feel like the answer is yes, even though its really a very small nerf that's now going to make a difference most of the time.
What? No miracle rogue nerf? Auctioneer + conceal beats pretty much any answer except flamestrike.
Blizzard is looking at the stats, and since Hunter is really easy to construct they are seeing it played a lot. Oh well, this card has been nerfed, buffed, and now nerfed again (but not quite to the level it was originally). I guess that is the risk of redoing a card.
you can build anti-zoo decks, but even the anti hunter decks and iffy in their ability to counter.
Shaman seems like the only non-gimmick deck right now (priest generally don't do gimmick decks in higher ranks either).
Leeroy + Windfury + Rockbiter is not gimmicky for Shaman?
Everything about any priest deck is gimmicky, it basically defines the class.
this will change nothing. if it was a 9 cost card becoming 10 it would be huge but 2 wasn't that expensive in the first place
"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."
You are still completely punished for playing minions against Hunters running UTH even with this "nerf." Here is the problem that Blizzard is clearly to daft to realize: The absolute strongest part of this combo has and will forever be the card draw and board control. The only thing that you can't do as a Hunter now is double combo it as early. Having to wait one additional turn to play UTH and letting your opponent play another minion/over-extend is fine and dandy for the Hunter. In fact, most Hunters that I go against now at the top of the ladders don't even do the first UTH + Buzzard combo until turn 6 or 7. Hunters Mark is still zero mana. Buzzard is 2 mana. Soon UTH will be 3 mana. So turn 4 with the coin or turn 5 without it and you still are able to rampage through whatever defenses have been mounted and draw far too many cards in the process. The only thing that I can really see this doing to Hunter is hurting them against Blitz decks.
There were only two logical ways that I could think of to fix the actual issue:
1. Make UTH always create 2 dogs, still only 2 mana, still makes 1/1's, and with charge. No more, no less, and it doesn't matter what your opponent has. This would have solved the whole problem of, "punishing people for playing Minions against Hunter..."
2. Make the Buzzard only proc its card draw on non-Spell summoned creatures (ie, UTH and Companion wouldn't proc card draw with Buzzard down). I'd much prefer my first example, but this would at least destroy the overwhelmingly powerful card draw advantage. One of the absolute strongest parts of the combo is being able to fish for whatever you want through your deck.
I'm sure there are more ways, but only increasing the mana by one? I don't think that is going to do much at all.
I feel like this is a very poor read on the competitive environment by Blizzard here. I don't know exactly what they thought was so good about UTH... (how fast you could play it?) Don't get me wrong this might stop Hunter from playing maybe an extra card on the same turn, but the player is still punished for playing minions against Hunter, end of story.
Long story short, I still see no reason to ever be comfortable playing more than 2 creatures against Hunter unless they all have Taunt + Divine Shield and you have a sweeper next turn..
Ya I agree with you and also see what you are saying, that would have been another solid Nerf, basically UTH would make your board match the other players board, so if you already have 3-4 creatures on the board, you may have to trade down just to get the full value out of your UTH + Buzzard.
I'm quite surprised by this. I didn't think Hunter was ever really dominant, I think people just noticed it a lot more because it was high profile. It's no stronger than the other top classes. It will be interesting to see which deck people start to whine about next...
The surprising thing is that they did nothing when the class was overplayed and now that people starts to shift to something else they nerf it ... it feels weird but I'm ok with that ^^
For the complaints, I think Zoo (obviously and maybe justified) and Miracle Rogue (saw some posts on reddit) are next ^^
Warlock Zoo again. Not a single doubt in my mind about that. Trouble is that Zoo doesn't have a focal point card that can be nerfed.
Because the focal point with this class is the hero power, not the cards ;)
I saw some suggestions about it costing 3 life instead of 2, I don't really know, "free" card draw is always an issue in card games ^^
And for fullness' sake, I play Zoo in ranked most of the time. I've played aggro/pressure/swarm warlock in various incarnations throughout beta and launch. I know perfectly well that it's hard to play against and even harder to find a point to nerf it at. That doesn't mean I wouldn't accept any changes Blizz would make to Zoo decks if they had a good reason to do it and the measures they took were reasonable.
Or Unleash the Hounds =D (just kidding)
As a Hunter player (yes I love this class, and I loved it before UTH was broken, stop judging me) I think this change is welcome, and I'm really happy that people will stop to spam my beloved class and makes the community hate it.
As for the playability, I think Hunter Mid Range will still be a thing as the combo is sometimes pulled off later in the game and the deck is resilient besides this card. My only worry is that now Zoo is completely free to crush this kind of Hunter as it will be hard to combo UTH with something against them due to their heavy pressure and you'll basically have a hard time using this card efficiently, so this hard match up is now really really hard =( Maybe more Mid Range Hunter will run explosive trap now to fight against this particular deck.
I think that overall Warlock will be the big winner of this change as Zoo is already flooding the ladder and I can see many people switch to that =/ I guess it's time to think about Warlock Hero Power ...
As for Rushdown Hunter, I don't care about this s*** =)
No information about that yet. "in an upcoming patch". That could be maintenance next week, or with the release of Naxx and anywhere in between. I suspect it will be soon though.
Well, it's allready on the servers for datamining, so it should be live a.s.a.p.
That took shorter then I had ever imagined. What happened to Soon™?!
I hate UTH, the text on the card that is. Mana cost 3 is a good change, but I wish they had come up with something else back when this card got reworked to begin with.
It's a nice, small debuff to Hunter; the 1 mana only makes the difference in certain very tight situations, mainly in the early game. This by no means will kill Hunter, though many more people may ditch the class than is actually reasonable.