I'm just like everyone else, I didn't like druidstone. There were 5-6 druid decks that ran the same 25-26 cards, with the last of the deck being the otk combo, whatever it may be for that druid. But the problem wasn't wild growth or nourish. I think it was just the armor package and otk package. UI, the spellstone, oaken summons, branching paths, dreampetal florist, the twig, and floop. All these are top tier cards that have great synergy with eachother. I think a nerf to maybe the spellstone, UI, florist or floop was probably the best way to go about the nerfs to druid, not the ramp.
Sure wild growth and nourish are good cards, but I don't think they were game breaking. Those 2 cards are crucial to 90% of all druid's gameplans, which has pretty much been beating your opponent to 10 mana and using the mana/card advantage to win. Now that is forever destroyed because blizzard failed to realize what the REAL problem was. Druid is one of my favorite classes (who doesn't love ramping, drawing cards and smashing face with huge minions?) but I fear unless this new set doesn't provide druid with any good cards, druid may be dead for a while, and that saddens me. We'll have to see with this new set, since the armor package is rotating out maybe blizzard will reset wild growth and nourish.
Note: I don't play that much wild, I heard star alligner druid is a tier 1 deck and that wild growth and nourish are run in there, but I think that deck is entirely tier 1 because of 1 card. Juicy Psychmelon. Again, it's blizzard printing overpowered cards that HELP the otk decks, its not wild growth or nourish's fault.
Sure wild growth and nourish are good cards, but I don't think they were game breaking. Those 2 cards are crucial to 90% of all druid's gameplans, which has pretty much been beating your opponent to 10 mana and using the mana/card advantage to win.
The problem is that all of Druid's cards were balanced around 2 mana Wild Growth and 5 mana Nourish. So right now, everything is too slow.
Now that those cards are nerfed, new cards will be designed around 3 mana Wild Growth and 6 mana nourish. Things will feel better then.
It might have been overkill for sure, but ramp is always going to be a problem without enough deterrence. And ramp was essential to all those OTK decks because otherwise they still would be played - they are the cards that dramatically increase the winrate and therefore are the problem. Although I think nerfing one would have had the desired effect.
That said, I am hopeful this frees up more design space in the future where they don't need to worry about printing a strong midrange card in the fear that druid just ramps to it and out-competes the board too quickly.
That's the trade off with ramp though. You spend 2-3 turns ramping, while your opponent gains more and more tempo and stats on board. That's how ramp has always been. If you're able to stay alive after essentially not contributing to the board for the first 3-5 turns, then you'll most likely win because of the massive mana advantage you have. The armor package let you take the early turns off because you could gain an extraordinary amount of armor to counter the tempo loss ramp gives you, and then refill your hand and board with UI and spreading plague. There was no punish for ramping, because you could easily regain control of the board.
Those 2 cards are crucial to 90% of all druid's gameplans, which has pretty much been beating your opponent to 10 mana and using the mana/card advantage to win.
That's exactly the problem, almost all Druid decks till today have been Wild Growth on 2, cheat mana by play high cost stuff and hopefully win. Over the years decks changed but the core gameplan always stayed the same. Now that Wild Growth is nerfed, maybe Druid can be less reliant on ramp and explore different gameplans.
I don't play that much wild, I heard star alligner druid is a tier 1 deck and that wild growth and nourish are run in there, but I think that deck is entirely tier 1 because of 1 card. Juicy Psychmelon. Again, it's blizzard printing overpowered cards that HELP the otk decks, its not wild growth or nourish's fault.
No, the problem is Blizzard can't print slightly high powered cards for Druid because old Druid cards like Aviana, Wild Growth and Nourish to a lesser degree will abuse those cards in form of some crazy OTK or infinite value plan. Blizzard has two options in this case, either print absolutely shit cards and decent cards once in a while, so Druids don't get out of control or nerf those old cards and print decent cards for Druid. They chose the second option. I don't think they did anything wrong with nerfing Wild Growth and Nourish.
I think druid was a huge problem. You said it yourself, a class that runs 20 of the same cards in every single deck and have a good winrate is just oppressive.
HOWEVER, blizzard not touching other class cards like hunters, but taking two of druids most powerful cards is pretty rough. I think if Ultimate infestation or Spreading Plague was changed instead it would have been a bit better.
Druid became too good at too many things: playing tons of little minions, healing/armor gain, drawing, removal etc etc. i think druid will have its time in the future again, just need to see what new cards await.
I've come to have hope for brutal nerfs due to the Blade Flurry nerf. It was gross overkill at the time, but can you imagine a prenerf Blade Flurry plus a buffed up Kingsbane? That one, 2-mana card could easily OTK you. Or just serve as a ridiculously powerful board clear.
So I think they might have something good lined up for druid that would've been overpowered if it were paired with a 2 mana Wild Growth or 5 mana Nourish.
I've come to have hope for brutal nerfs due to the Blade Flurry nerf. It was gross overkill at the time, but can you imagine a prenerf Blade Flurry plus a buffed up Kingsbane? That one, 2-mana card could easily OTK you. Or just serve as a ridiculously powerful board clear.
So I think they might have something good lined up for druid that would've been overpowered if it were paired with a 2 mana Wild Growth or 5 mana Nourish.
Maybe they do plan to print some really powerful cards in the next year of sets, but the last 3 sets they printed have been low on the power level, so we'll just have to see
Wild Growth has a historically high win rate when played on curve, regardless of what Meta we are talking about. The card was an auto include in every single Druid deck other than Aggro Druid.
With ramp being the way it was, Druid couldn't be given any good cards without making it OP. And it has always been a good class, ever since Beta, because of the insane strength of its Classic set. Druid tended to get "crap" in every expansion, but was always one of the best classes anyway.
Now with the worst offenders all nerfed, Team 5 can make strong Druid cards like Ultimate Infestation without breaking the game.
All of the broken Classic cards have to be either nerfed or HOF'ed eventually. Druid is not the only class that has been/will be hit. Rogue ain't keeping it's spell kit forever - I suspect Prep will be the first to go.
I personally liked druids identity as the ramp up and do big stuff class. Ramp up, cast UI, and then the game really starts. The problem was that they eliminated all the weaknesses that come with that archetype. Spell stone, huge armor gain and spreading plague completely blocked out druids original weakness which was go wide and pressure them. They went from “Try and survive while you ramp up and then pull the trigger” to “Become invincible, ramp, become even more invincible.” They could have nuked spreading plague and branching paths and maybe even UI like a lot of people were asking for but instead the deleted the entire classes identity.
The worst part though is they just turned druids into priests. Druids most core classic cards just got deleted and now druids are going to rely VERY HEAVILY on cards released in new sets. There’s a good chance druids will now be much less safe crafts because their classic core set just got eliminated.
Mage also got a HUGE hit in the last standard rotation of Ice Block and people said the class is dead etc.. but that allowed blizzard to print stronger mage cards so in the end we still got a 50%+ win rate mage deck which is a control deck (which used to run ice block).
Shaman also got a lot of his core cards nerfed and still survives, so did druid post innervate nerf.
This nerf was once of the harshest nerfs to druid since FON and ancient of lore nerfs to druid but I think that in the end it's for the better since druid will get more interesting cards without breaking the game.. like for example this expansion druid got totally bad cards on purpose because druid can ramp everything, and it blocked the ability to print any cool druid card.
I'm just like everyone else, I didn't like druidstone. There were 5-6 druid decks that ran the same 25-26 cards, with the last of the deck being the otk combo, whatever it may be for that druid. But the problem wasn't wild growth or nourish. I think it was just the armor package and otk package. UI, the spellstone, oaken summons, branching paths, dreampetal florist, the twig, and floop. All these are top tier cards that have great synergy with eachother. I think a nerf to maybe the spellstone, UI, florist or floop was probably the best way to go about the nerfs to druid, not the ramp.
Sure wild growth and nourish are good cards, but I don't think they were game breaking. Those 2 cards are crucial to 90% of all druid's gameplans, which has pretty much been beating your opponent to 10 mana and using the mana/card advantage to win. Now that is forever destroyed because blizzard failed to realize what the REAL problem was. Druid is one of my favorite classes (who doesn't love ramping, drawing cards and smashing face with huge minions?) but I fear unless this new set doesn't provide druid with any good cards, druid may be dead for a while, and that saddens me. We'll have to see with this new set, since the armor package is rotating out maybe blizzard will reset wild growth and nourish.
Note: I don't play that much wild, I heard star alligner druid is a tier 1 deck and that wild growth and nourish are run in there, but I think that deck is entirely tier 1 because of 1 card. Juicy Psychmelon. Again, it's blizzard printing overpowered cards that HELP the otk decks, its not wild growth or nourish's fault.
I disagree. The idea is to have good cards to build a deck around that are new and innovative. If you leave those 2 cards intact (Wild Growth, Nourish) then Druid will never pick a different strategy. It will always be the same cards in every deck for years and years.
Not sure what's so hard to understand about that. The other cards you describe are all good cards. Druid needs these cards to create decks with new expansions coming out. They don't need to have a 2 mana Wild Growth. And they don't need to have a 5 mana Nourish. Because these cards will be in every deck no matter what. And it will always be High roll 10 mana to win the game no matter what.
Edit: If those 2 cards weren't the problem then the nerf would have been unsuccessful. I don't see druid being a problem anymore.
The plan was to Push TREANT archtype and save RR expansion but it failed ....
Everyone was Begging for Druid nerf and when Blizzard did it , now you think its not good ?!
Who exactly was asking for a double nerf of wildgrowth AND nourish, while leaving hunter untouched? I wasn't. If they wanted to push treants, they should have released more support. And actually I just crafted a decent token treant druid deck the day before the nerfs were announced with no notice, and now I waste 800 dust on 2 treant transformer cards that will never be played now. The cost of ever druid card ever printed was balanced around the ramp ability, and now with that decimated, druid of course is stuff with over-costed cards and abysmal winrate.
I personally think a Wild Growth nerf would have been good enough in conjuction with any of Druids OP armour gain card. If anything they could have considered HoF-ing Nourish.
I'm just like everyone else, I didn't like druidstone. There were 5-6 druid decks that ran the same 25-26 cards, with the last of the deck being the otk combo, whatever it may be for that druid. But the problem wasn't wild growth or nourish. I think it was just the armor package and otk package. UI, the spellstone, oaken summons, branching paths, dreampetal florist, the twig, and floop. All these are top tier cards that have great synergy with eachother. I think a nerf to maybe the spellstone, UI, florist or floop was probably the best way to go about the nerfs to druid, not the ramp.
Sure wild growth and nourish are good cards, but I don't think they were game breaking. Those 2 cards are crucial to 90% of all druid's gameplans, which has pretty much been beating your opponent to 10 mana and using the mana/card advantage to win. Now that is forever destroyed because blizzard failed to realize what the REAL problem was. Druid is one of my favorite classes (who doesn't love ramping, drawing cards and smashing face with huge minions?) but I fear unless this new set doesn't provide druid with any good cards, druid may be dead for a while, and that saddens me. We'll have to see with this new set, since the armor package is rotating out maybe blizzard will reset wild growth and nourish.
Note: I don't play that much wild, I heard star alligner druid is a tier 1 deck and that wild growth and nourish are run in there, but I think that deck is entirely tier 1 because of 1 card. Juicy Psychmelon. Again, it's blizzard printing overpowered cards that HELP the otk decks, its not wild growth or nourish's fault.
The problem is that all of Druid's cards were balanced around 2 mana Wild Growth and 5 mana Nourish. So right now, everything is too slow.
Now that those cards are nerfed, new cards will be designed around 3 mana Wild Growth and 6 mana nourish. Things will feel better then.
It might have been overkill for sure, but ramp is always going to be a problem without enough deterrence. And ramp was essential to all those OTK decks because otherwise they still would be played - they are the cards that dramatically increase the winrate and therefore are the problem. Although I think nerfing one would have had the desired effect.
That said, I am hopeful this frees up more design space in the future where they don't need to worry about printing a strong midrange card in the fear that druid just ramps to it and out-competes the board too quickly.
Agreed, I started a lengthy topic about mostly this here: https://www.hearthpwn.com/forums/hearthstone-general/general-discussion/228584
That's the trade off with ramp though. You spend 2-3 turns ramping, while your opponent gains more and more tempo and stats on board. That's how ramp has always been. If you're able to stay alive after essentially not contributing to the board for the first 3-5 turns, then you'll most likely win because of the massive mana advantage you have. The armor package let you take the early turns off because you could gain an extraordinary amount of armor to counter the tempo loss ramp gives you, and then refill your hand and board with UI and spreading plague. There was no punish for ramping, because you could easily regain control of the board.
That's exactly the problem, almost all Druid decks till today have been Wild Growth on 2, cheat mana by play high cost stuff and hopefully win. Over the years decks changed but the core gameplan always stayed the same. Now that Wild Growth is nerfed, maybe Druid can be less reliant on ramp and explore different gameplans.
No, the problem is Blizzard can't print slightly high powered cards for Druid because old Druid cards like Aviana, Wild Growth and Nourish to a lesser degree will abuse those cards in form of some crazy OTK or infinite value plan. Blizzard has two options in this case, either print absolutely shit cards and decent cards once in a while, so Druids don't get out of control or nerf those old cards and print decent cards for Druid. They chose the second option. I don't think they did anything wrong with nerfing Wild Growth and Nourish.
I think druid was a huge problem. You said it yourself, a class that runs 20 of the same cards in every single deck and have a good winrate is just oppressive.
HOWEVER, blizzard not touching other class cards like hunters, but taking two of druids most powerful cards is pretty rough. I think if Ultimate infestation or Spreading Plague was changed instead it would have been a bit better.
Druid became too good at too many things: playing tons of little minions, healing/armor gain, drawing, removal etc etc. i think druid will have its time in the future again, just need to see what new cards await.
I've come to have hope for brutal nerfs due to the Blade Flurry nerf. It was gross overkill at the time, but can you imagine a prenerf Blade Flurry plus a buffed up Kingsbane? That one, 2-mana card could easily OTK you. Or just serve as a ridiculously powerful board clear.
So I think they might have something good lined up for druid that would've been overpowered if it were paired with a 2 mana Wild Growth or 5 mana Nourish.
What was utterly wrong was the timing.
You can't nerf a class from solid strong to entirely off-meta.
Maybe they do plan to print some really powerful cards in the next year of sets, but the last 3 sets they printed have been low on the power level, so we'll just have to see
I would let Druid have nourish back if they instead nerfed just one of hunter’s OP decks
Wild Growth has a historically high win rate when played on curve, regardless of what Meta we are talking about. The card was an auto include in every single Druid deck other than Aggro Druid.
With ramp being the way it was, Druid couldn't be given any good cards without making it OP. And it has always been a good class, ever since Beta, because of the insane strength of its Classic set. Druid tended to get "crap" in every expansion, but was always one of the best classes anyway.
Now with the worst offenders all nerfed, Team 5 can make strong Druid cards like Ultimate Infestation without breaking the game.
All of the broken Classic cards have to be either nerfed or HOF'ed eventually. Druid is not the only class that has been/will be hit. Rogue ain't keeping it's spell kit forever - I suspect Prep will be the first to go.
I personally liked druids identity as the ramp up and do big stuff class. Ramp up, cast UI, and then the game really starts. The problem was that they eliminated all the weaknesses that come with that archetype. Spell stone, huge armor gain and spreading plague completely blocked out druids original weakness which was go wide and pressure them. They went from “Try and survive while you ramp up and then pull the trigger” to “Become invincible, ramp, become even more invincible.” They could have nuked spreading plague and branching paths and maybe even UI like a lot of people were asking for but instead the deleted the entire classes identity.
The worst part though is they just turned druids into priests. Druids most core classic cards just got deleted and now druids are going to rely VERY HEAVILY on cards released in new sets. There’s a good chance druids will now be much less safe crafts because their classic core set just got eliminated.
Mage also got a HUGE hit in the last standard rotation of Ice Block and people said the class is dead etc.. but that allowed blizzard to print stronger mage cards so in the end we still got a 50%+ win rate mage deck which is a control deck (which used to run ice block).
Shaman also got a lot of his core cards nerfed and still survives, so did druid post innervate nerf.
This nerf was once of the harshest nerfs to druid since FON and ancient of lore nerfs to druid but I think that in the end it's for the better since druid will get more interesting cards without breaking the game.. like for example this expansion druid got totally bad cards on purpose because druid can ramp everything, and it blocked the ability to print any cool druid card.
I disagree. The idea is to have good cards to build a deck around that are new and innovative. If you leave those 2 cards intact (Wild Growth, Nourish) then Druid will never pick a different strategy. It will always be the same cards in every deck for years and years.
Not sure what's so hard to understand about that. The other cards you describe are all good cards. Druid needs these cards to create decks with new expansions coming out. They don't need to have a 2 mana Wild Growth. And they don't need to have a 5 mana Nourish. Because these cards will be in every deck no matter what. And it will always be High roll 10 mana to win the game no matter what.
Edit: If those 2 cards weren't the problem then the nerf would have been unsuccessful. I don't see druid being a problem anymore.
The plan was to Push TREANT archtype and save RR expansion but it failed ....
Everyone was Begging for Druid nerf and when Blizzard did it , now you think its not good ?!
Who exactly was asking for a double nerf of wildgrowth AND nourish, while leaving hunter untouched? I wasn't. If they wanted to push treants, they should have released more support. And actually I just crafted a decent token treant druid deck the day before the nerfs were announced with no notice, and now I waste 800 dust on 2 treant transformer cards that will never be played now. The cost of ever druid card ever printed was balanced around the ramp ability, and now with that decimated, druid of course is stuff with over-costed cards and abysmal winrate.
I was pushing for a spellstone and UI nerf. I thought wild growth and nourish were fine
I personally think a Wild Growth nerf would have been good enough in conjuction with any of Druids OP armour gain card. If anything they could have considered HoF-ing Nourish.
I guess we'll see. It took warrior a full year to come back from the fiery war axe nerf.
Hopefully they actually have a plan... Wild growth (and less so nourish) were Druid's defining 'thing'.