Sure right now, DH is still the best class in the game, but more and more people are now playing Enrage Warrior, and they are still learning how to play it since it's quite a difficult deck to master.
This mean that DH will be less of a problem in one week or two since his biggest counter will be everywhere on ladder.
But yeah Priestess of Fury is too strong, it's the kind of card that if you can't kill it the turn it's played, you lose the game. And that shouldn't exist.
I think we're stuck with the current DH form, but I have a feeling next expansion will see everything else power creep much heavier that what is released for DH... I also expect some heavy tech.
Honestly find face Hunter more suffocating. I have a win rate of over 50% against DH with multiple classes and other than the odd god draw type of game, feel I've got a chance a lot of the time.
Face Hunter tends to cripple me though, unless I'm playing priest and draw really well. Toxic reinforcements is one of my least liked cards of all time and if I see it on turn 1 I know I'm facing an uphill battle.
Had a game earlier and drew extremely well with rogue, managed to bounce a bunch of cards and stall in order to stabilise bit still ended up being killed when I had lethal next turn. What's most frustrating about it is that you can kill DH minions, you can backstab them, holy nova, rush them etc and you generally get the opportunity to build a hand that can navigate through their bigger turns but killing some Hunter minions just results in taking damage anyway.
I think they would need to be very careful with merging DH yet again, it wouldn't take too much to really hit it hard and I don't personally feel it's all that problematic so I'm pretty comfortable if they leave it for the time being.
When it comes to Demon Hunter, I'm not sure if it's entirely the quantity of draw, but the quality.
Chaos Strike winds up being a noticeably better Shiv. The face damage taken by biting a minion isn't too impactful (and there can be life steal from Audachi).
With everything Outcast, I think Bliz just fundamentally messed up in evaluating the power of Outcast. It wound up being a lot stronger than they appear to have budgeted for, a lot easier to activate than they figured. "Outcast: Draw a Card" looks like it's budgeted at 0-mana, and it's worth more than that, at least 0.5 mana.
Nerf won't do anything. There were 2 already and nothing changed. This class would have to be completely revamped. How you want to nerf felscreamer into priestess into warglaives with twin slice backup?
Well, that's actually kinda easy.
Felscreamer to 3/4 or 4/3. If it does a bit less damage, or is a bit easier to clear, every little bit helps.
Priestess could easily be smaller. Just go -1 on a few of the non-mana numbers. Heck, maybe even all the way down to 5/6 shooting for 5 damage each turn.
Warglaives should probably require you to have to kill the minion you attack in order to attack again, rather than simply attack a minion. If that's insufficient, again, just shift one of the numbers. 5-mana 2/4, or 3/3, or 6-mana 3/4.
Twin Slice is a bigger problem. On paper, it looks kinda comparable to Backstab, but in practice is a lot more flexible (with Atrius BS as a rotten cherry on top). Maybe the "second slice" needs to cost 1 mana, or maybe the Second Slice gets rolled into the first part, and it's a 0-mana spell for +2 attack with nothing else.
I think what it comes down to with Demon Hunter: a lot of the numbers are just a little too good.
Crimson Sigil Runner I agree with. It should be a 1/1, as you shouldn't get damage value in addition to a draw.
Only one deck with above 10k plays runs Consume Magic and it has the second worst played winrate in the deck.
Spectral Sight in in one deck and a one-of in another and has the 3rd worst played winrate in the deck.
Feast of Souls is only played in Token which has a 47% winrate.
And Skull of Gul'dan is, across every DH deck, the worst card in the deck in terms of played winrate, dropping the winrate of each deck by an average of 3-5% when it is played. It is not a good card. It looks like a good card, and feels bad to play against, so I agree it should be changed for that reason, but in terms of actually winning the game it's garbo.
The cards carrying the deck are the same ones that got nerfed plus a couple more: Priestess of Fury, Glaivebound, and then Kayn and Metamorphosis.
Kayn needs to be "your minions ignore Taunt" and Meta should be 4 damage. That would make a huge difference in terms of winrate.
And Skull of Gul'dan is, across every DH deck, the worst card in the deck in terms of played winrate, dropping the winrate of each deck by an average of 3-5% when it is played. It is not a good card. It looks like a good card, and feels bad to play against, so I agree it should be changed for that reason, but in terms of actually winning the game it's garbo.
I believe the played WR for Skull is skewed, just like it is for most cards of that ilk. When you can't drop it on curve, which is most times, you'll play out the other cards in your hand before playing it. Hence it gets played in a lost of last-ditch scenarios (dropping the played WR), and kept in a lot of winning ones (which would be winning with Skull played as well).
As shown in the OP, countering card draw for fast decks is not that easy...
Agree with your OP's suggestions. So I look at the DH cards again and see something...
1. Most DH drawing power seems to be coming from Outcast.
2. only 3 cheap outcast cards are craftable -- i.e. a small return-full-dust poll.
If I am to speculate what will be nerfed and is most economical for HS, it should be nerfing the Outcast mechanism.
and what to nerf? may be add some punishment for all outcasting something, e.g. use some mana, add mana cost on card drawn, give opponent something, etc.
So maybe dont disenchant any outcast card, at least. :P~~~
And Skull of Gul'dan is, across every DH deck, the worst card in the deck in terms of played winrate, dropping the winrate of each deck by an average of 3-5% when it is played. It is not a good card. It looks like a good card, and feels bad to play against, so I agree it should be changed for that reason, but in terms of actually winning the game it's garbo.
I believe the played WR for Skull is skewed, just like it is for most cards of that ilk. When you can't drop it on curve, which is most times, you'll play out the other cards in your hand before playing it. Hence it gets played in a lost of last-ditch scenarios (dropping the played WR), and kept in a lot of winning ones (which would be winning with Skull played as well).
That proves the point though. If Skull is not causing you to win games, it is not a card that needs to be nerfed. If we got a Big DH build then it might be a problem, but rn all it does is basically drop 1 and 2 cost stuff to 0.
Having played tons of DH, I can definitely tell you that SKill of Gul'dan should be nerfed more. 6 mana draw 3 reduce 3 is still incredibly broken, and allows DH to come back from a lost game, time and time again with refill and refuel of the hand. Shouldnt be possible for an aggro class like that.
Altruis also needs to not hit face, or be 5 mana.
Priestess of fury needs nerfs obviously, and getting her out on turn 5 with felscreamer is just straight up broken, and happens in alot of matches.
8 or even 9 mana, or reduce the amount of damage she deals by like 4 or 5
Having played tons of DH, I can definitely tell you that SKill of Gul'dan should be nerfed more. 6 mana draw 3 reduce 3 is still incredibly broken, and allows DH to come back from a lost game, time and time again with refill and refuel of the hand. Shouldnt be possible for an aggro class like that.
Altruis also needs to not hit face, or be 5 mana.
Priestess of fury needs nerfs obviously, and getting her out on turn 5 with felscreamer is just straight up broken, and happens in alot of matches.
8 or even 9 mana, or reduce the amount of damage she deals by like 4 or 5
Yea altruis hitting face is dumb since that's exactly why they nerfed miracle rogue to the ground. I mean it did so much face damage while destroying your whole board lol. My problem with DH though is that I can be at 10hp by turn 4 and that's even when I remove a lot of their stuff. They just have too much stuff that goes face. Glaivebound Adept should only hit minions for 4. Metamorphisis should be 6 mana not 5 or if 5 mana should not be able to go face. The hero power should be 2 mana to do 2 attack not 1 mana to do 1 attack. Priestess should cost 8 mana and not be able to attack (like a non-legendary ragnaros the firelord). A tempo deck shouldn't be able to kill you by turn 5. Tempo rogue at least usually lets you get to 10 mana so you can play your cards and have a shot at it.
I mean to be fair to DH though it's not the only broken thing. Rogue getting 7 zero mana cards is pretty insane. Priest is stupid too.
And Skull of Gul'dan is, across every DH deck, the worst card in the deck in terms of played winrate, dropping the winrate of each deck by an average of 3-5% when it is played. It is not a good card. It looks like a good card, and feels bad to play against, so I agree it should be changed for that reason, but in terms of actually winning the game it's garbo.
I believe the played WR for Skull is skewed, just like it is for most cards of that ilk. When you can't drop it on curve, which is most times, you'll play out the other cards in your hand before playing it. Hence it gets played in a lost of last-ditch scenarios (dropping the played WR), and kept in a lot of winning ones (which would be winning with Skull played as well).
That proves the point though. If Skull is not causing you to win games, it is not a card that needs to be nerfed. If we got a Big DH build then it might be a problem, but rn all it does is basically drop 1 and 2 cost stuff to 0.
It really doesn't. My point was that Skull is one of few Hail Mary's available to DH. So its played winrate should be skewed incorrectly downwards, as it's the one card they'll throw out when they're struggling, and likely losing anyways.
Also, that "all it does is basically drop 1 and 2 cost stuff down to 0" is not a downside. Cards you can play immediately = tempo. Tempo = good, more so than ever in tempo DH-decks.
Most Tempo DH decks run 14-15 cards that cost 2 or less. Assuming you Mulligan for 1- and 2-drops you are expected to have 2 low-cost cards in your starting hand. Assuming the Skull is played on turn 6 and you have already drawn a total of 2 cards with Crimson Sigil Runner, Chaos Strike or Spectral Sight until then you should have 19 cards in your deck and 8~9 of them should cost 1 or 2. So the expected total discount should be around 5-6 instead of 9 on the 3 cards you draw.
A potential Big Demon Hunter or Control DH future deck type could much more easily reap the full benefit of the Skull, however such a deck might have a harder time achieving the outcast effect. Therefore overall I'd say that even though a great card, Skull is not too OP
to people who think DH is fine, why do I have under 10hp by turn 4? face hunter is broken too but at least I live until turn 7 or 8. I feel like this game is balanced around heroes having 40hp and not 30.
While I don't care much for dh since it's not as oppressive or meta-defining in wild, I'm baffled by the decision made by the devs for the class. They nerfed anything that deals damage to the face and isn't a spell to hell and back, HOF the only decent charge card and made priest literally unable to do any face damage whatsoever. One the one hand they say "oh no, face damage on the opponent's turn and otks are bad, can't have that, plus charge is toxic" and on the other they have altruis that deals damage to the face every single time and can pretty much act like a 5-6 damage aoe for your board, priestess of fury which is about 10 times better than rag, which was HOFed for allegedly being too good, and print a card that not only has charge but makes all minions and the smorc-est class of all be able to go face THROUGH taunt.
I can see why they cheated so much on their supposed "core beliefs" to make this happen, it was to lure old timers and new people in ("cool new class that's OP and smorcs like you wouldn't believe" works like wonders as an advertisement) but it still feels so disgustingly dirty. To have some of the perks of a normal dh deck you usually would have to run a highlander deck and play zephyrus but this class has no weakness whatsoever. It has appalling amounts of card draw, tons of removal, early snowballing minions, mid and late game winning minions, constant face damage, healing, charge, you name it. I guess they're missing wide board minion buffs, but don't you worry, I bet blizzard will introduce that too at some point.
This class was nerfed twice and it still dominates standard ladder more than any class since the early shaman galakrond meta. Remember that? It was nerfed so much it disappeared from ladder overnight and shaman has been lolshaman ever since. Yet this, nerfed twice, is still OP. Oh blizzard.
Made it to Diamond10 today. Started at Plat5 this morning. On my way there I ran into around 75% DH matches with the next highest being hunter. Then a sprinkle of priest and warrior.
Every single DH deck was the same. Yes I know the card pool isn't that big right now but it got really boring really fast seeing the same strat to kill me over and over.
It may be interesting to compute how long 30HP lasts.... :P~~~
For a basic deck where 1mana gives 1/1 or 1 dmg,
if your oppo does absolutely nothing,
after 3 turns of play there should be 6/6 worth on broad, with 2+2 = -4 HP
4 turns 10/10, 3+4+3 = -10HP
5 turns 15/15, 4+6+6+4 = -20HP
6 turns 21/21, 5+8+9+8+5 = -35HP = DEAD
so on this scale we can see how strong DH really is.
Well Atlruis hits face for at least a bit during most games but some games it can hit face for 10+ since DH have 0 mana spells (the first cast should be 1 mana and the second 0 mana). So they have an aoe board clear which hits face at the same time which is basically unbeatable. DH has too many nut draws. It's not just the 4 into 5 nut draw. It's the just having altruis and cards to use it with nut draw. Or the weapon/adept/metamorphisis nut draw. There is absolutely no way to out heal the damage the deck can deal unless you play warrior and even then egg warrior isn't really out healing it, it's actually racing.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
To post a comment, please login or register a new account.
Sure right now, DH is still the best class in the game, but more and more people are now playing Enrage Warrior, and they are still learning how to play it since it's quite a difficult deck to master.
This mean that DH will be less of a problem in one week or two since his biggest counter will be everywhere on ladder.
But yeah Priestess of Fury is too strong, it's the kind of card that if you can't kill it the turn it's played, you lose the game. And that shouldn't exist.
I think we're stuck with the current DH form, but I have a feeling next expansion will see everything else power creep much heavier that what is released for DH... I also expect some heavy tech.
Honestly find face Hunter more suffocating. I have a win rate of over 50% against DH with multiple classes and other than the odd god draw type of game, feel I've got a chance a lot of the time.
Face Hunter tends to cripple me though, unless I'm playing priest and draw really well. Toxic reinforcements is one of my least liked cards of all time and if I see it on turn 1 I know I'm facing an uphill battle.
Had a game earlier and drew extremely well with rogue, managed to bounce a bunch of cards and stall in order to stabilise bit still ended up being killed when I had lethal next turn. What's most frustrating about it is that you can kill DH minions, you can backstab them, holy nova, rush them etc and you generally get the opportunity to build a hand that can navigate through their bigger turns but killing some Hunter minions just results in taking damage anyway.
I think they would need to be very careful with merging DH yet again, it wouldn't take too much to really hit it hard and I don't personally feel it's all that problematic so I'm pretty comfortable if they leave it for the time being.
When it comes to Demon Hunter, I'm not sure if it's entirely the quantity of draw, but the quality.
Chaos Strike winds up being a noticeably better Shiv. The face damage taken by biting a minion isn't too impactful (and there can be life steal from Audachi).
With everything Outcast, I think Bliz just fundamentally messed up in evaluating the power of Outcast. It wound up being a lot stronger than they appear to have budgeted for, a lot easier to activate than they figured. "Outcast: Draw a Card" looks like it's budgeted at 0-mana, and it's worth more than that, at least 0.5 mana.
Well, that's actually kinda easy.
Felscreamer to 3/4 or 4/3. If it does a bit less damage, or is a bit easier to clear, every little bit helps.
Priestess could easily be smaller. Just go -1 on a few of the non-mana numbers. Heck, maybe even all the way down to 5/6 shooting for 5 damage each turn.
Warglaives should probably require you to have to kill the minion you attack in order to attack again, rather than simply attack a minion. If that's insufficient, again, just shift one of the numbers. 5-mana 2/4, or 3/3, or 6-mana 3/4.
Twin Slice is a bigger problem. On paper, it looks kinda comparable to Backstab, but in practice is a lot more flexible (with Atrius BS as a rotten cherry on top). Maybe the "second slice" needs to cost 1 mana, or maybe the Second Slice gets rolled into the first part, and it's a 0-mana spell for +2 attack with nothing else.
I think what it comes down to with Demon Hunter: a lot of the numbers are just a little too good.
> Crimson Sigil Runner, Consume Magic, Spectral Sight, Feast of Souls and Skull of Gul'dan
Let's review these five cards, shall we?
Crimson Sigil Runner I agree with. It should be a 1/1, as you shouldn't get damage value in addition to a draw.
Only one deck with above 10k plays runs Consume Magic and it has the second worst played winrate in the deck.
Spectral Sight in in one deck and a one-of in another and has the 3rd worst played winrate in the deck.
Feast of Souls is only played in Token which has a 47% winrate.
And Skull of Gul'dan is, across every DH deck, the worst card in the deck in terms of played winrate, dropping the winrate of each deck by an average of 3-5% when it is played. It is not a good card. It looks like a good card, and feels bad to play against, so I agree it should be changed for that reason, but in terms of actually winning the game it's garbo.
The cards carrying the deck are the same ones that got nerfed plus a couple more: Priestess of Fury, Glaivebound, and then Kayn and Metamorphosis.
Kayn needs to be "your minions ignore Taunt" and Meta should be 4 damage. That would make a huge difference in terms of winrate.
I believe the played WR for Skull is skewed, just like it is for most cards of that ilk. When you can't drop it on curve, which is most times, you'll play out the other cards in your hand before playing it. Hence it gets played in a lost of last-ditch scenarios (dropping the played WR), and kept in a lot of winning ones (which would be winning with Skull played as well).
Agree with your OP's suggestions. So I look at the DH cards again and see something...
1. Most DH drawing power seems to be coming from Outcast.
2. only 3 cheap outcast cards are craftable -- i.e. a small return-full-dust poll.
If I am to speculate what will be nerfed and is most economical for HS, it should be nerfing the Outcast mechanism.
and what to nerf? may be add some punishment for all outcasting something,
e.g. use some mana, add mana cost on card drawn, give opponent something, etc.
So maybe dont disenchant any outcast card, at least. :P~~~
:P~~~
That proves the point though. If Skull is not causing you to win games, it is not a card that needs to be nerfed. If we got a Big DH build then it might be a problem, but rn all it does is basically drop 1 and 2 cost stuff to 0.
Having played tons of DH, I can definitely tell you that SKill of Gul'dan should be nerfed more. 6 mana draw 3 reduce 3 is still incredibly broken, and allows DH to come back from a lost game, time and time again with refill and refuel of the hand. Shouldnt be possible for an aggro class like that.
Altruis also needs to not hit face, or be 5 mana.
Priestess of fury needs nerfs obviously, and getting her out on turn 5 with felscreamer is just straight up broken, and happens in alot of matches.
8 or even 9 mana, or reduce the amount of damage she deals by like 4 or 5
Yea altruis hitting face is dumb since that's exactly why they nerfed miracle rogue to the ground. I mean it did so much face damage while destroying your whole board lol. My problem with DH though is that I can be at 10hp by turn 4 and that's even when I remove a lot of their stuff. They just have too much stuff that goes face. Glaivebound Adept should only hit minions for 4. Metamorphisis should be 6 mana not 5 or if 5 mana should not be able to go face. The hero power should be 2 mana to do 2 attack not 1 mana to do 1 attack. Priestess should cost 8 mana and not be able to attack (like a non-legendary ragnaros the firelord). A tempo deck shouldn't be able to kill you by turn 5. Tempo rogue at least usually lets you get to 10 mana so you can play your cards and have a shot at it.
I mean to be fair to DH though it's not the only broken thing. Rogue getting 7 zero mana cards is pretty insane. Priest is stupid too.
It really doesn't. My point was that Skull is one of few Hail Mary's available to DH. So its played winrate should be skewed incorrectly downwards, as it's the one card they'll throw out when they're struggling, and likely losing anyways.
Also, that "all it does is basically drop 1 and 2 cost stuff down to 0" is not a downside. Cards you can play immediately = tempo. Tempo = good, more so than ever in tempo DH-decks.
Most Tempo DH decks run 14-15 cards that cost 2 or less. Assuming you Mulligan for 1- and 2-drops you are expected to have 2 low-cost cards in your starting hand. Assuming the Skull is played on turn 6 and you have already drawn a total of 2 cards with Crimson Sigil Runner, Chaos Strike or Spectral Sight until then you should have 19 cards in your deck and 8~9 of them should cost 1 or 2. So the expected total discount should be around 5-6 instead of 9 on the 3 cards you draw.
A potential Big Demon Hunter or Control DH future deck type could much more easily reap the full benefit of the Skull, however such a deck might have a harder time achieving the outcast effect. Therefore overall I'd say that even though a great card, Skull is not too OP
to people who think DH is fine, why do I have under 10hp by turn 4? face hunter is broken too but at least I live until turn 7 or 8. I feel like this game is balanced around heroes having 40hp and not 30.
While I don't care much for dh since it's not as oppressive or meta-defining in wild, I'm baffled by the decision made by the devs for the class. They nerfed anything that deals damage to the face and isn't a spell to hell and back, HOF the only decent charge card and made priest literally unable to do any face damage whatsoever. One the one hand they say "oh no, face damage on the opponent's turn and otks are bad, can't have that, plus charge is toxic" and on the other they have altruis that deals damage to the face every single time and can pretty much act like a 5-6 damage aoe for your board, priestess of fury which is about 10 times better than rag, which was HOFed for allegedly being too good, and print a card that not only has charge but makes all minions and the smorc-est class of all be able to go face THROUGH taunt.
I can see why they cheated so much on their supposed "core beliefs" to make this happen, it was to lure old timers and new people in ("cool new class that's OP and smorcs like you wouldn't believe" works like wonders as an advertisement) but it still feels so disgustingly dirty. To have some of the perks of a normal dh deck you usually would have to run a highlander deck and play zephyrus but this class has no weakness whatsoever. It has appalling amounts of card draw, tons of removal, early snowballing minions, mid and late game winning minions, constant face damage, healing, charge, you name it. I guess they're missing wide board minion buffs, but don't you worry, I bet blizzard will introduce that too at some point.
This class was nerfed twice and it still dominates standard ladder more than any class since the early shaman galakrond meta. Remember that? It was nerfed so much it disappeared from ladder overnight and shaman has been lolshaman ever since. Yet this, nerfed twice, is still OP. Oh blizzard.
Made it to Diamond10 today. Started at Plat5 this morning. On my way there I ran into around 75% DH matches with the next highest being hunter. Then a sprinkle of priest and warrior.
Every single DH deck was the same. Yes I know the card pool isn't that big right now but it got really boring really fast seeing the same strat to kill me over and over.
There have been far worse metas over the years.
Gala Rog is 50/50. Control Priest has a good chance. Egg Warrior mops the floor with tempo DH.
DH is far from oppressive.
Unless you like playing shaman, warlock or paladin. It's also very oppressive when they play a turn 5 priestess. Almost no one can deal with it.
It may be interesting to compute how long 30HP lasts.... :P~~~
For a basic deck where 1mana gives 1/1 or 1 dmg,
if your oppo does absolutely nothing,
after 3 turns of play there should be 6/6 worth on broad, with 2+2 = -4 HP
4 turns 10/10, 3+4+3 = -10HP
5 turns 15/15, 4+6+6+4 = -20HP
6 turns 21/21, 5+8+9+8+5 = -35HP = DEAD
so on this scale we can see how strong DH really is.
:P~~~
Well Atlruis hits face for at least a bit during most games but some games it can hit face for 10+ since DH have 0 mana spells (the first cast should be 1 mana and the second 0 mana). So they have an aoe board clear which hits face at the same time which is basically unbeatable. DH has too many nut draws. It's not just the 4 into 5 nut draw. It's the just having altruis and cards to use it with nut draw. Or the weapon/adept/metamorphisis nut draw. There is absolutely no way to out heal the damage the deck can deal unless you play warrior and even then egg warrior isn't really out healing it, it's actually racing.