I've been playing Shaman recently after a long break from it due to not liking how their decks played in the recent expansions. Here is my deck just for reference. You can ignore Dungar as it is just a filler until I get my 2nd copy of School Teacher.
What I noticed is the prevalence of Weapons or Hero attacking in Pirate Warrior, Pirate Rogue and Demon Hunter. While Rustrot Viper is a good tech card to include to counter weapons, it doesn't stop the Hero from attacking, especially Demon Hunters who can dish out quite the damage without a weapon. Against these decks, getting their hero frozen usually raises the win chance quite high. If Windchill would target Heroes then I would believe it will significantly raise Shaman winrate against these decks.
Given how (a) Aggro DH is the most popular deck in the game right now with almost 30% playrate, (b) the deck relies a lot on hero attacks for the various synergies (Pufferfist, Battleworn Vanguard, Chaos Strike, Fury, Multi-Strike) I'd say that being able to freeze their face is insanely valuable. Already drawing and playing Wildpaw Cavern on curve is the single most critical thing a Shaman can do vs DH in order to have good chances of winning and this is just because these elementals can freeze the enemy face. Now imagine your deck also runs effectively 4 (thx to Sleetbreaker) cheap spells that can do the same. That would be OP.
Shaman was a surprise to me this expansion, on paper it has all the tools but somehow it has not come together to form a consistent package. Far from the worst but then the bar is quite low atm. I also think there should be more tools to freeze face in general, Mage has that with Snowflurry and it can go into the Naga Small Spell deck to counter DH. But it's a trade-off, you only run two and they don't really do anything else in the deck (except some early tempo, if you so choose) and I think that this is a good kind of face freeze, effective, not to prevalent and comes with a certain deckbuilding cost. If Windchill was able to freeze face on its own, it would be completely broken and its cost would need to be adjusted.
I hope more tools like this will come. Warrior received a lot of support for a weapon archetype (Ashvane, the card draw spell), as did Rogue. And obviously DH. There need to be ways to counter that without relying on taunts or Viper (the former don't really stop DH these days anyway). There is something in the fact that weapon-wielding archetypes are top tier decks (maybe except Rogue but Swordfish is still a nutty card). I don't want to have to put a Viper in every deck I play for the next year...
even if the freeze is meaningless, its still a 1 mana draw cycle. Besides you don't need it to go face, that's what totems are for if you need to cycle and you got no enemy targets
weapons have a lack of interaction. the opponent equip and play it directly. even if you play rustrot viper next turn like you mentioned, you still take 2-10 damages. and nothing you can do about it (doomhammer, naga dh, pirates...). except well, freezing hero yes. a summon sickness for weapon would be great, to make the game more interactive.
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"Woow..."
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I've been playing Shaman recently after a long break from it due to not liking how their decks played in the recent expansions. Here is my deck just for reference. You can ignore Dungar as it is just a filler until I get my 2nd copy of School Teacher.
What I noticed is the prevalence of Weapons or Hero attacking in Pirate Warrior, Pirate Rogue and Demon Hunter. While Rustrot Viper is a good tech card to include to counter weapons, it doesn't stop the Hero from attacking, especially Demon Hunters who can dish out quite the damage without a weapon. Against these decks, getting their hero frozen usually raises the win chance quite high. If Windchill would target Heroes then I would believe it will significantly raise Shaman winrate against these decks.
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I’d have problem with it, as it would just increase the strategy involved.
Given how (a) Aggro DH is the most popular deck in the game right now with almost 30% playrate, (b) the deck relies a lot on hero attacks for the various synergies (Pufferfist, Battleworn Vanguard, Chaos Strike, Fury, Multi-Strike) I'd say that being able to freeze their face is insanely valuable. Already drawing and playing Wildpaw Cavern on curve is the single most critical thing a Shaman can do vs DH in order to have good chances of winning and this is just because these elementals can freeze the enemy face. Now imagine your deck also runs effectively 4 (thx to Sleetbreaker) cheap spells that can do the same. That would be OP.
No, it wouldn't. Shaman is dead now, and it needs buff to get resurrected.
Shaman was a surprise to me this expansion, on paper it has all the tools but somehow it has not come together to form a consistent package. Far from the worst but then the bar is quite low atm. I also think there should be more tools to freeze face in general, Mage has that with Snowflurry and it can go into the Naga Small Spell deck to counter DH. But it's a trade-off, you only run two and they don't really do anything else in the deck (except some early tempo, if you so choose) and I think that this is a good kind of face freeze, effective, not to prevalent and comes with a certain deckbuilding cost. If Windchill was able to freeze face on its own, it would be completely broken and its cost would need to be adjusted.
I hope more tools like this will come. Warrior received a lot of support for a weapon archetype (Ashvane, the card draw spell), as did Rogue. And obviously DH. There need to be ways to counter that without relying on taunts or Viper (the former don't really stop DH these days anyway). There is something in the fact that weapon-wielding archetypes are top tier decks (maybe except Rogue but Swordfish is still a nutty card). I don't want to have to put a Viper in every deck I play for the next year...
even if the freeze is meaningless, its still a 1 mana draw cycle. Besides you don't need it to go face, that's what totems are for if you need to cycle and you got no enemy targets
weapons have a lack of interaction. the opponent equip and play it directly. even if you play rustrot viper next turn like you mentioned, you still take 2-10 damages. and nothing you can do about it (doomhammer, naga dh, pirates...). except well, freezing hero yes. a summon sickness for weapon would be great, to make the game more interactive.
"Woow..."