I've been thinking about this for a while and after hearing Kibler talking about this same issue in one of his videos last week (can't remember the exact video), i hope I'm not the only one that sees how flawed the current design philosophy that Blizzard and Team 5 seem to have adopted regarding the balance of the game.
This is a trend that has been going on since the Descent of the Dragons expansion. Let me explain this a little bit more. The trend I'm talking about is Blizzard printing cards which looks like they had little to no testing, at least not from a competent player. In this expansion we have many examples of this, specifically the following cards: Bad Luck Albatross, Dragon's Pack, Necrium Apothecary and Galakrond, the Nightmare. This 4 cards have been nerfed at some point but even before we got to play them, just during the spoiler season, most of us were able to identify how much raw power this cards have, they simply looked way overtuned in comparison to everything else.
The design philosophy Blizzard has adopted since then is to print this sort of cards with an unholy high raw power and then nerfed them if they end up being too strong (which they of course will). A lot of players praised Blizzard during the Ashes of Outland expansion due to how fast they decided to nerf cards and how often this nerfs were happening but that was simply a consequence of how poorly their testing for this expansion was (or lack of). During the 4 months of Ashes of Outland there were 5 different rounds of nerfs, which sounds great but it's not like "wow what a great job blizzard, such a fast reaction nerfing op card", it's more like they didn't even test most of this card to begin with and they printed them in their degenerate state.
Demon Hunter got nerfed during all 5 rounds and in 4 of them (excluding the Twin Slice nerfs) at least 2 cards from the class were changed. This means that in 4 months a total of 13 cards from a single class were nerfed, this is honestly borderline mental if you ask me. I understand that when you include a new card, new mechanic, new character or whatever in any game it'll probably not end up quite right immediatly but come on, seriously, who tested Demon Hunter as a class for it to need 13 total nerfs in just 4 months. That amount of nerfs is unheard of in the 6 years that the game has been out. I actually went and checked every single nerfed card and counted how many cards have been nerfed for each class (some of them have been buffed to their previous state but for the sake of this I won't count that), here's the list:
Druid: nerfed 10 times
Hunter: nerfed 8 times
Mage: nerfed 5 times
Paladin: nerfed 4 times
Priest: nerfed 3 times
Rogue: nerfed 12 times
Shaman: nerfed 10 times
Warlock: nerfed 9 times
Warrior: nerfed 9 times
Druid, Rogue and Shaman all come close to Demon Hunter but this class still has had more nerfs than every other single one (I didn't include HoF cards either) but keep in mind that all of the other classes have existed in the game for 6 years! While Demon Hunter has been here for only 4 months, seriously, who the hell "tested" this cards? What's even more ridiculous is that after 13 nerfs in only 4 months, with a smaller pool of cards than any other class the class still survives decently well. In standard Aggro Demon Hunter is not the best deck anymore but it is still bottom of tier 1 or top of tier 2 at worst and on Wild Odd Demon Hunter is apparently still a fine tier 2 deck (not sure about that, I don't play wild and I'm using the most recent meta snapshot I could find, from July 25). How crazy this card were on their initial state that even after 13 nerfs in just 4 months, the class still has competitively viable decks in both formats and both are not lower than tier 2, it's just ridiculous to even think about it.
Sadly this trend seems to continue with latest set, Scholomance Academy, dropping in 2 days. Most of us haven't been able to play with any of the new cardsbut I think we can all agree that cards like Lightning Bloom, Forest Warden Omu, Power Word: Feast, Secret Passage and Voracious Reader are just way overtuned in comparison to the rest of the set and even most standard cards.
The problem with this, in my opinion, is that Blizzard is releasing this incredibly strong cards that would never go through with actual testing just to "keep the meta fresh" but this is just an artificial way to do so and it screws players that are not able to invest a lot into the game. To me this is irrelevant and you could say even cool, cause the meta keeps changing at least every month. But I bought the pre-order bundle (the $80 one) and saved a bunch of gold (dust as well) so with all that I ended up opening 250+ packs (not sure the exact number), so as of right now (and thanks to the pack changes) I own every single common, rare and epic card from AoO and I have most Legendaries (all the good ones and some bad ones that have seen no play) but I understand that's not the case for everyone.
I do think that not crafting anything on the first 2, maybe even 3 weeks of an expansion, is wise. Unless you're opening like 200-300 packs or you saved 20k+ dust you probably should wait and use your resources wisely to not get screwed if the thing you crafts ends up being bad, but with this current philosophy when can low resources player ever craft something and not feel like they could potentially get heavily screwed in a couple weeks? The issue is that Blizzard is not making this nerfs more frequent because they care about having a healthy meta or keeping it fresh, but because they released this stupidly strong cards and need to correct their obvious mistakes quick to avoid getting their players even angrier.
What I'm trying to say it's not a good thing that they keep nerfing things so often. Don't get me wrong, I would love if there was like a set schedule for balance changes (Runeterra does them every 2 weeks and I love that game for that reason) but Blizzard didn't to these frequent nerfs cause they cared about the balance of the meta, if that was the case they would also buff cards more often but they're either not properly testing cards before printing them or not giving a fuck about it in order to artificially manipulate the meta and make it look like the meta keeps changing and it feels more fresh.
tl;dr - Blizzard has adopted a design philosophy of printing cards that are clearly busted, with what looks like little to no testing and just thinks that nerfing them if they become a problem (which they of course will) is healthy. This is not only unethical but also can heavily screw players that can't but large quantities of packs and Blizz shouldn't be "praised" for how often they nerfed things this expansion. Read paragraph 4 for the nerfing topic.
maybe one day we can play chillwind yeti again Kappa
yugioh went on the same path, powercreeping untill synchro summons came out and at that point ive stopped because you needed to pay like 500 euros in order to stay competetive. the good thing is that when something is nerfed in hearthstone we get a full dust refund so id say is not that bad that overpowered cards are released and nerfed later on in my opinion.
I agree Buff Chillwind Yeti to a 4 mana 5/5. This will be a great change to Blizzard's current design philosophy. This will change the game of Hearthstone as we know it. All hail Chillwind Yeti (no pun intended).
maybe one day we can play chillwind yeti again Kappa
yugioh went on the same path, powercreeping untill synchro summons came out and at that point ive stopped because you needed to pay like 500 euros in order to stay competetive. the good thing is that when something is nerfed in hearthstone we get a full dust refund so id say is not that bad that overpowered cards are released and nerfed later on in my opinion.
It's not about powercreeping at all, you probably didn't even read the tl;dr at the end cause my post was not at all about new cards powercreeping old ones, that's bound to happen, and that's ok. The issue is about Blizzard printing cards that are clearly broken and will end up getting nerfed anyways, which can either be due to poor testing or negligence.
Also the "well if something gets nerfed you just get the dust back" mentality is wrong. While that is the case, Bliizzard just nerfs a few select cards and not entire decks so you can spend dust in crafting a bunch of cards and then only one gets nerfed and you get rekt. Here's an example... Kingsbane Rogue was top tier in standard and the deck run some expensive cards, I think 2 legendaries and 4 epics (maybe more epics, I can't quite remember, but let's say 4), those were Kingsbane, Captain Greenskin, Preparation and Evasion. Let's say you wanted to play that deck and had to craft all those cards for a total of 4.8k dust. The deck then got nerfed to the ground and became unplayable and the only card that got nerfed was Leeching Poison, which is a common card. So with all that investment you ended getting back 80 dust and had an unplayable deck.
Even if you're optimistic and say well Greenskin and Prep are classics and have seen play multiple times, ok sure but you still lost 2.4k dust with cards that were literally unplayable in standard just cause a common card got nerfed.
In a way I support this design philosophy in Digital Card Games because they're mostly free and errata can just be applied through patches. Its a little more frustrating because of the raw power some of these cards have, but i do have a genuine question.
Would you rather them make underwhelming cards that aren't powerful? As a business trying to get money off of a free game, they need to make purchasing packs with money seem appealing somehow.
Would it be better if the evergreen sets, Basic and Classic, had a higher level of power itself, to balance out new cards entering at this standard?
In a way I support this design philosophy in Digital Card Games because they're mostly free and errata can just be applied through patches. Its a little more frustrating because of the raw power some of these cards have, but i do have a genuine question.
Would you rather them make underwhelming cards that aren't powerful? As a business trying to get money off of a free game, they need to make purchasing packs with money seem appealing somehow.
Would it be better if the evergreen sets, Basic and Classic, had a higher level of power itself, to balance out new cards entering at this standard?
No, I would like Blizzard to actually hire competent testers that care about doing their job at least a little bit. I'm not saying they should just print bland and boring cards, they obviously need to keep printing cards that powercreep the classic set cause they need to keep selling packs. But you can't seriously justify the absolute clusterfuck that Demon Hunter was at its launch and you can't deny that there are some cards (again like Passage or Omu) that just look too overtuned even before the expansion has arrived
You're basing your assumption that they do minimal testing on dissatisfaction with the cards they've produced and had to nerf. The fact of the matter is 6 months of testing between a team of 100 testers will not be nearly as effective at finding out what's truly broken as hundreds of thousands of people testing over the course of a week. Not to mention each expansion has had a number of cards between what, 5-7 at most that needed to be nerfed? Out of an average of 135 cards per expansion? That's a success rate of about 95%, which is dang near close to perfect.
I mean, you are not wrong, but they also released cards like Undertaker, Jade Idol, Mysterious Challenger, and stuff like these. Cards that were clearly overpowered at release, and some of those never even got nerfed, or they got nerfed after months. So its nothing new, and I dont praise them for frequent nerfs, yes they should test the cards more. Im just saying that HS is not worse compared to the older days when they didnt change anything for long months. At least the meta is not so stale, and thanks to the power level the wild meta is also affected greatly with new expansions. And maybe, just maybe this is why the power level is so high, because in China wild is more popular than standard, and this way they can sell more packs. And I dont complain about it since I play more wild than standard, but thats just my opinion.
Might be somewhat off topic, but they (in my opinion) have another design flaw.
They create cool deck archetypes just to abandon them at the next expansion.
Choose 1 quest druid? No support after that expansion.
No minion mage? No real support this expansion
Libram paladin? Sure, they added good paladin only cards, but none of them are librams (Authority would have been a good libram if balanced correctly).
General Archetypes will fill slots with new cards. But these cool specific mechanics just get abandoned.
Everyone makes it seem like Blizzard "accidentally" made Demon Hunter too strong. The great thing about digital card games is you can print whatever the hell card you want, and just see what happens. I think they intended for Demon Hunter to be strong, just like they intended for a lot of these other random card synergies to be strong. It's better to nerf than buff something, so it's kind of their way of keeping things "fresh" between expansions (since nerfing one class will allow other decks to creep up in the meta).
If everything were sooo perfectly balanced on day one, everyone would get burnt out earlier between expansions and they'd lose more users and, of course, money in the long run.
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Twitch name: Anatak15 NA Legend Season 48, 49, 52, 53, 54, 74
In a way I support this design philosophy in Digital Card Games because they're mostly free and errata can just be applied through patches. Its a little more frustrating because of the raw power some of these cards have, but i do have a genuine question.
Would you rather them make underwhelming cards that aren't powerful? As a business trying to get money off of a free game, they need to make purchasing packs with money seem appealing somehow.
Would it be better if the evergreen sets, Basic and Classic, had a higher level of power itself, to balance out new cards entering at this standard?
This is the reason why year of the raven was the worst standard, The witchwood, Boomsday and Rastakhan where so underwhelming in terms of good cards that the meta game never really changed
Might be somewhat off topic, but they (in my opinion) have another design flaw.
They create cool deck archetypes just to abandon them at the next expansion.
Choose 1 quest druid? No support after that expansion.
No minion mage? No real support this expansion
Libram paladin? Sure, they added good paladin only cards, but none of them are librams (Authority would have been a good libram if balanced correctly).
General Archetypes will fill slots with new cards. But these cool specific mechanics just get abandoned.
Etc.
They should pick one or two archetypes per class to support each year. They would be weak at the beggining of the year, but rotation would strip current archetypes, making them playable. Them they would get strong until the end of the year and them be left for two other new archetypes - limiting how strong they would get by having too many options.
It would help expansions be more unique on the class design perpective.
the only way to keep the game intersting is to print OP cards.. get people to buy preorders and craft legendaries.
Then nerf them in the 1st month to shake up the meta
release another bundle in the middle in between expansion (maybe another hero skin)
Then second nerf (perhaps a buff to some cards, dont count on it) to "shake up" the meta again.
3rd month will be stale waiting for the next expansion.
This is how they keep GAMES interesting..Overpower something.. people love to play overpowered stuff.. then nerf it to be fair.. then just stall untill next expansion. They even admit doing this for overwatch.
This is fine because you will rather have this than 3 months of balanced and boring expansion.
I think it's a fair point that Blizzard should be more generous with dust refunds when they nerf cards (I kinda think they should just comp people who have the card with dust like they do with HoFing cards rather than letting you disenchant it for full value), but otherwise I VASTLY prefer the way they've approached designing Year of the Dragon & Year of the Phoenix to the way they approached Year of the Raven or even Year of the Mammoth. And I think they've overall done a much better job balancing the game.
yugioh went on the same path, powercreeping untill synchro summons came out and at that point ive stopped because you needed to pay like 500 euros in order to stay competetive.
I think I get what you are suggesting. If I may re-express, it is like "I think Blizzard is intentionally choosing to powercreep, and it is a general trend happening in other cardgames, too." IMO, this is another interesting POV to look at OP topic. :P~~~
So this one possibility exists : Blizzard has tested those cards well, and it has chosen deliberately to power-creep them.
It seems very probable since it is some kind of inflation-economics strategy and is known to game developers. To put it simply, you are urge to spend value (bucks or time or innovation or experimenting, something rare you-know-what-I-mean) into the new cards by this inflation in card power, and the old cards have to be relatively devalued / rotated-out to make this happen. This process drives values into the game and make the game + company staying alive, somehow.
So what is seen by OP as untested cards, is actually by design. Blizzard wants to do strong powercreep.
In a way I support this design philosophy in Digital Card Games because they're mostly free and errata can just be applied through patches. Its a little more frustrating because of the raw power some of these cards have, but i do have a genuine question.
Would you rather them make underwhelming cards that aren't powerful? As a business trying to get money off of a free game, they need to make purchasing packs with money seem appealing somehow.
Would it be better if the evergreen sets, Basic and Classic, had a higher level of power itself, to balance out new cards entering at this standard?
This is the reason why year of the raven was the worst standard, The witchwood, Boomsday and Rastakhan where so underwhelming in terms of good cards that the meta game never really changed
true.. i didnt even bother with those bundles..
but for DoD, and AoO .. and Scholo .. got them all + heroes
If you include the beta then rogue was nerfed 20 times. But yeah it’s a bit ridiculous how much demon hunter needed to be nerfed. The problem is that the nerfs were too small of changes to make a difference so many had to be made. If they nerfed cards harder, they wouldn’t have needed to make so many. Changing the attack or health by one doesn’t do much and that’s what a lot of the nerfs were
Sadly this trend seems to continue with latest set, Scholomance Academy, dropping in 2 days. Most of us haven't been able to play with any of the new cardsbut I think we can all agree that cards like Lightning Bloom, Forest Warden Omu, Power Word: Feast, Secret Passage and Voracious Reader are just way overtuned in comparison to the rest of the set and even most standard cards.
OK, let's analyse those cards that you think are overtuned:
1. Lightning Bloom - a card like this existed in Hearthstone for many years, only it was much stronger. It's called Innervate. It was finally nerfed though, but there were no war drums calling for it's deletion from the game because it was brutally overpowered.
2. Forest Warden Omu - I'm trying really hard to imagine a situation in which this card will be broken, and I simply cannot find any. It can potentially pull of some strong combos, but nothing that we haven't seen before.
3. Power Word: Feast - potentially strong arena card, but for constructed......far from being overtuned.
4. Secret Passage - just another overhyped card. It will be strong in aggressive deck types, pointless in others.
5. Voracious Reader - again, some aggro decks may love it, useless for anything else.
If that's the best SA expansion has to offer, then we'll be fine.
Whats worse about the recent OP cards is that they're OP in a vacuum, not because of some wierd combo no one spotted, and this is an important point imo. While "the interent" can come up with super powerful combinations through the sheer number of people thinking about all the possible combinations, this is really difficult to test within a company unless you have some sort of public beta test with a large number of people.
But these cards (for the most part) aren't part of some combo no one could have forseen. They're super solid, overtuned cards in their own right (looking at you DH cards...). Skull of Guldan is always gonna be auto include in every DH deck forever. Who wouldn't want draw 3 for 5 (now 6) with the possibility of a mana reduction on all of them?
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I've been thinking about this for a while and after hearing Kibler talking about this same issue in one of his videos last week (can't remember the exact video), i hope I'm not the only one that sees how flawed the current design philosophy that Blizzard and Team 5 seem to have adopted regarding the balance of the game.
This is a trend that has been going on since the Descent of the Dragons expansion. Let me explain this a little bit more. The trend I'm talking about is Blizzard printing cards which looks like they had little to no testing, at least not from a competent player. In this expansion we have many examples of this, specifically the following cards: Bad Luck Albatross, Dragon's Pack, Necrium Apothecary and Galakrond, the Nightmare. This 4 cards have been nerfed at some point but even before we got to play them, just during the spoiler season, most of us were able to identify how much raw power this cards have, they simply looked way overtuned in comparison to everything else.
The design philosophy Blizzard has adopted since then is to print this sort of cards with an unholy high raw power and then nerfed them if they end up being too strong (which they of course will). A lot of players praised Blizzard during the Ashes of Outland expansion due to how fast they decided to nerf cards and how often this nerfs were happening but that was simply a consequence of how poorly their testing for this expansion was (or lack of). During the 4 months of Ashes of Outland there were 5 different rounds of nerfs, which sounds great but it's not like "wow what a great job blizzard, such a fast reaction nerfing op card", it's more like they didn't even test most of this card to begin with and they printed them in their degenerate state.
Demon Hunter got nerfed during all 5 rounds and in 4 of them (excluding the Twin Slice nerfs) at least 2 cards from the class were changed. This means that in 4 months a total of 13 cards from a single class were nerfed, this is honestly borderline mental if you ask me. I understand that when you include a new card, new mechanic, new character or whatever in any game it'll probably not end up quite right immediatly but come on, seriously, who tested Demon Hunter as a class for it to need 13 total nerfs in just 4 months. That amount of nerfs is unheard of in the 6 years that the game has been out. I actually went and checked every single nerfed card and counted how many cards have been nerfed for each class (some of them have been buffed to their previous state but for the sake of this I won't count that), here's the list:
Druid, Rogue and Shaman all come close to Demon Hunter but this class still has had more nerfs than every other single one (I didn't include HoF cards either) but keep in mind that all of the other classes have existed in the game for 6 years! While Demon Hunter has been here for only 4 months, seriously, who the hell "tested" this cards? What's even more ridiculous is that after 13 nerfs in only 4 months, with a smaller pool of cards than any other class the class still survives decently well. In standard Aggro Demon Hunter is not the best deck anymore but it is still bottom of tier 1 or top of tier 2 at worst and on Wild Odd Demon Hunter is apparently still a fine tier 2 deck (not sure about that, I don't play wild and I'm using the most recent meta snapshot I could find, from July 25). How crazy this card were on their initial state that even after 13 nerfs in just 4 months, the class still has competitively viable decks in both formats and both are not lower than tier 2, it's just ridiculous to even think about it.
Sadly this trend seems to continue with latest set, Scholomance Academy, dropping in 2 days. Most of us haven't been able to play with any of the new cardsbut I think we can all agree that cards like Lightning Bloom, Forest Warden Omu, Power Word: Feast, Secret Passage and Voracious Reader are just way overtuned in comparison to the rest of the set and even most standard cards.
The problem with this, in my opinion, is that Blizzard is releasing this incredibly strong cards that would never go through with actual testing just to "keep the meta fresh" but this is just an artificial way to do so and it screws players that are not able to invest a lot into the game. To me this is irrelevant and you could say even cool, cause the meta keeps changing at least every month. But I bought the pre-order bundle (the $80 one) and saved a bunch of gold (dust as well) so with all that I ended up opening 250+ packs (not sure the exact number), so as of right now (and thanks to the pack changes) I own every single common, rare and epic card from AoO and I have most Legendaries (all the good ones and some bad ones that have seen no play) but I understand that's not the case for everyone.
I do think that not crafting anything on the first 2, maybe even 3 weeks of an expansion, is wise. Unless you're opening like 200-300 packs or you saved 20k+ dust you probably should wait and use your resources wisely to not get screwed if the thing you crafts ends up being bad, but with this current philosophy when can low resources player ever craft something and not feel like they could potentially get heavily screwed in a couple weeks? The issue is that Blizzard is not making this nerfs more frequent because they care about having a healthy meta or keeping it fresh, but because they released this stupidly strong cards and need to correct their obvious mistakes quick to avoid getting their players even angrier.
What I'm trying to say it's not a good thing that they keep nerfing things so often. Don't get me wrong, I would love if there was like a set schedule for balance changes (Runeterra does them every 2 weeks and I love that game for that reason) but Blizzard didn't to these frequent nerfs cause they cared about the balance of the meta, if that was the case they would also buff cards more often but they're either not properly testing cards before printing them or not giving a fuck about it in order to artificially manipulate the meta and make it look like the meta keeps changing and it feels more fresh.
tl;dr - Blizzard has adopted a design philosophy of printing cards that are clearly busted, with what looks like little to no testing and just thinks that nerfing them if they become a problem (which they of course will) is healthy. This is not only unethical but also can heavily screw players that can't but large quantities of packs and Blizz shouldn't be "praised" for how often they nerfed things this expansion. Read paragraph 4 for the nerfing topic.
maybe one day we can play chillwind yeti again Kappa
yugioh went on the same path, powercreeping untill synchro summons came out and at that point ive stopped because you needed to pay like 500 euros in order to stay competetive.
the good thing is that when something is nerfed in hearthstone we get a full dust refund so id say is not that bad that overpowered cards are released and nerfed later on in my opinion.
I agree Buff Chillwind Yeti to a 4 mana 5/5. This will be a great change to Blizzard's current design philosophy. This will change the game of Hearthstone as we know it. All hail Chillwind Yeti (no pun intended).
Keymaster Alabaster come faster
It's not about powercreeping at all, you probably didn't even read the tl;dr at the end cause my post was not at all about new cards powercreeping old ones, that's bound to happen, and that's ok. The issue is about Blizzard printing cards that are clearly broken and will end up getting nerfed anyways, which can either be due to poor testing or negligence.
Also the "well if something gets nerfed you just get the dust back" mentality is wrong. While that is the case, Bliizzard just nerfs a few select cards and not entire decks so you can spend dust in crafting a bunch of cards and then only one gets nerfed and you get rekt. Here's an example... Kingsbane Rogue was top tier in standard and the deck run some expensive cards, I think 2 legendaries and 4 epics (maybe more epics, I can't quite remember, but let's say 4), those were Kingsbane, Captain Greenskin, Preparation and Evasion. Let's say you wanted to play that deck and had to craft all those cards for a total of 4.8k dust. The deck then got nerfed to the ground and became unplayable and the only card that got nerfed was Leeching Poison, which is a common card. So with all that investment you ended getting back 80 dust and had an unplayable deck.
Even if you're optimistic and say well Greenskin and Prep are classics and have seen play multiple times, ok sure but you still lost 2.4k dust with cards that were literally unplayable in standard just cause a common card got nerfed.
In a way I support this design philosophy in Digital Card Games because they're mostly free and errata can just be applied through patches. Its a little more frustrating because of the raw power some of these cards have, but i do have a genuine question.
Would you rather them make underwhelming cards that aren't powerful? As a business trying to get money off of a free game, they need to make purchasing packs with money seem appealing somehow.
Would it be better if the evergreen sets, Basic and Classic, had a higher level of power itself, to balance out new cards entering at this standard?
Hearthstone needs more birds
No, I would like Blizzard to actually hire competent testers that care about doing their job at least a little bit. I'm not saying they should just print bland and boring cards, they obviously need to keep printing cards that powercreep the classic set cause they need to keep selling packs. But you can't seriously justify the absolute clusterfuck that Demon Hunter was at its launch and you can't deny that there are some cards (again like Passage or Omu) that just look too overtuned even before the expansion has arrived
You're basing your assumption that they do minimal testing on dissatisfaction with the cards they've produced and had to nerf. The fact of the matter is 6 months of testing between a team of 100 testers will not be nearly as effective at finding out what's truly broken as hundreds of thousands of people testing over the course of a week. Not to mention each expansion has had a number of cards between what, 5-7 at most that needed to be nerfed? Out of an average of 135 cards per expansion? That's a success rate of about 95%, which is dang near close to perfect.
I mean, you are not wrong, but they also released cards like Undertaker, Jade Idol, Mysterious Challenger, and stuff like these. Cards that were clearly overpowered at release, and some of those never even got nerfed, or they got nerfed after months. So its nothing new, and I dont praise them for frequent nerfs, yes they should test the cards more. Im just saying that HS is not worse compared to the older days when they didnt change anything for long months. At least the meta is not so stale, and thanks to the power level the wild meta is also affected greatly with new expansions. And maybe, just maybe this is why the power level is so high, because in China wild is more popular than standard, and this way they can sell more packs. And I dont complain about it since I play more wild than standard, but thats just my opinion.
Might be somewhat off topic, but they (in my opinion) have another design flaw.
They create cool deck archetypes just to abandon them at the next expansion.
Choose 1 quest druid? No support after that expansion.
No minion mage? No real support this expansion
Libram paladin? Sure, they added good paladin only cards, but none of them are librams (Authority would have been a good libram if balanced correctly).
General Archetypes will fill slots with new cards. But these cool specific mechanics just get abandoned.
Etc.
Lightning Bloom is created already, so how would they nerf this one around? More overload, or delete the card?
I like elementals and totems.
Everyone makes it seem like Blizzard "accidentally" made Demon Hunter too strong. The great thing about digital card games is you can print whatever the hell card you want, and just see what happens. I think they intended for Demon Hunter to be strong, just like they intended for a lot of these other random card synergies to be strong. It's better to nerf than buff something, so it's kind of their way of keeping things "fresh" between expansions (since nerfing one class will allow other decks to creep up in the meta).
If everything were sooo perfectly balanced on day one, everyone would get burnt out earlier between expansions and they'd lose more users and, of course, money in the long run.
Twitch name: Anatak15
NA Legend Season 48, 49, 52, 53, 54, 74
This is the reason why year of the raven was the worst standard, The witchwood, Boomsday and Rastakhan where so underwhelming in terms of good cards that the meta game never really changed
They should pick one or two archetypes per class to support each year. They would be weak at the beggining of the year, but rotation would strip current archetypes, making them playable. Them they would get strong until the end of the year and them be left for two other new archetypes - limiting how strong they would get by having too many options.
It would help expansions be more unique on the class design perpective.
You and kibler has no idea.... Team5 is on point.
the only way to keep the game intersting is to print OP cards.. get people to buy preorders and craft legendaries.
Then nerf them in the 1st month to shake up the meta
release another bundle in the middle in between expansion (maybe another hero skin)
Then second nerf (perhaps a buff to some cards, dont count on it) to "shake up" the meta again.
3rd month will be stale waiting for the next expansion.
This is how they keep GAMES interesting..Overpower something.. people love to play overpowered stuff.. then nerf it to be fair.. then just stall untill next expansion. They even admit doing this for overwatch.
This is fine because you will rather have this than 3 months of balanced and boring expansion.
I think it's a fair point that Blizzard should be more generous with dust refunds when they nerf cards (I kinda think they should just comp people who have the card with dust like they do with HoFing cards rather than letting you disenchant it for full value), but otherwise I VASTLY prefer the way they've approached designing Year of the Dragon & Year of the Phoenix to the way they approached Year of the Raven or even Year of the Mammoth. And I think they've overall done a much better job balancing the game.
I think I get what you are suggesting. If I may re-express, it is like "I think Blizzard is intentionally choosing to powercreep, and it is a general trend happening in other cardgames, too." IMO, this is another interesting POV to look at OP topic. :P~~~
So this one possibility exists : Blizzard has tested those cards well, and it has chosen deliberately to power-creep them.
It seems very probable since it is some kind of inflation-economics strategy and is known to game developers. To put it simply, you are urge to spend value (bucks or time or innovation or experimenting, something rare you-know-what-I-mean) into the new cards by this inflation in card power, and the old cards have to be relatively devalued / rotated-out to make this happen. This process drives values into the game and make the game + company staying alive, somehow.
So what is seen by OP as untested cards, is actually by design. Blizzard wants to do strong powercreep.
:P~~~
In a way I support this design philosophy in Digital Card Games because they're mostly free and errata can just be applied through patches. Its a little more frustrating because of the raw power some of these cards have, but i do have a genuine question.
Would you rather them make underwhelming cards that aren't powerful? As a business trying to get money off of a free game, they need to make purchasing packs with money seem appealing somehow.
Would it be better if the evergreen sets, Basic and Classic, had a higher level of power itself, to balance out new cards entering at this standard?
This is the reason why year of the raven was the worst standard, The witchwood, Boomsday and Rastakhan where so underwhelming in terms of good cards that the meta game never really changed
true.. i didnt even bother with those bundles..
but for DoD, and AoO .. and Scholo .. got them all + heroes
If you include the beta then rogue was nerfed 20 times. But yeah it’s a bit ridiculous how much demon hunter needed to be nerfed. The problem is that the nerfs were too small of changes to make a difference so many had to be made. If they nerfed cards harder, they wouldn’t have needed to make so many. Changing the attack or health by one doesn’t do much and that’s what a lot of the nerfs were
OK, let's analyse those cards that you think are overtuned:
1. Lightning Bloom - a card like this existed in Hearthstone for many years, only it was much stronger. It's called Innervate. It was finally nerfed though, but there were no war drums calling for it's deletion from the game because it was brutally overpowered.
2. Forest Warden Omu - I'm trying really hard to imagine a situation in which this card will be broken, and I simply cannot find any. It can potentially pull of some strong combos, but nothing that we haven't seen before.
3. Power Word: Feast - potentially strong arena card, but for constructed......far from being overtuned.
4. Secret Passage - just another overhyped card. It will be strong in aggressive deck types, pointless in others.
5. Voracious Reader - again, some aggro decks may love it, useless for anything else.
If that's the best SA expansion has to offer, then we'll be fine.
In death, I exact my revenge!
Whats worse about the recent OP cards is that they're OP in a vacuum, not because of some wierd combo no one spotted, and this is an important point imo. While "the interent" can come up with super powerful combinations through the sheer number of people thinking about all the possible combinations, this is really difficult to test within a company unless you have some sort of public beta test with a large number of people.
But these cards (for the most part) aren't part of some combo no one could have forseen. They're super solid, overtuned cards in their own right (looking at you DH cards...). Skull of Guldan is always gonna be auto include in every DH deck forever. Who wouldn't want draw 3 for 5 (now 6) with the possibility of a mana reduction on all of them?