I believe priest in its current form is bad for the game. It is not because it is overpowered. Rogue, hunter and DH are all favoured. However, priest is frustrating to play against. The games are often very long. You can't play around many of their cards because they get random cards. It also makes many control decks unplayable. Control is already unplayable because aggro DH is too good vs control decks when it has no right to be but priest further knocks them out of the meta. Many control decks perform very poorly vs priest because priest has unlimited resources. There really isn't any neutrals that can compete. Even if you can play ysera and it sticks for a turn, the priest is bound to discover something to deal with it, such as natalie. Or they just copy it through various means. Even if you play some control deck with archivist vs priest they tend to just be able to get your archivist at some point, usually though madam luzul because you have to keep it in your hand until the end.
Priest would be more palatable if the weaker classes had something strong to play at the end game. Paladin has a stupid 4/12 restore both players to full life. It needed something better and useful that gives immediate value such as a new hero like the galakrond classes (maybe something which works with librams, like turning paladin into ragnaros the lightlord and that having some useful effect). For warlock jarraxus needs to cost 8 mana so you can at least play a 6/6 on the same turn, in compensation for how bad having 15hp max life is, otherwise it should cost 10 mana and silence and destroy all minions. Al akir the windlord is pretty bad too for shaman. They have galakrond though but they need something powerful to play in the end game too that has an immediate effect on the board state.
One buff I would like to see for paladin would be to give its murlocs off the prime rush in addition to the divine shield. I don't think that will make librams playable since the deck needs more card draw but it would be a step in the right direction. Other primes have immediate effects on the board (mage, warrior, druid and hunter). The rogue prime is weak and so is the priest one though. The warlock prime is only weak because the warlock demons are lackluster right now. The warlock prime could be very over powered or at least an auto include in future expansions if it had better demons in standard (imagine if warlock had priestess of fury and a charge demon still?).
1
1. Not everyone plays TCGs to make decks
2. Deckbuilding is a relatively advanced skill in TCGs
3. All good homebrew players have built meta knowledge by playing netdecks extensively
4. All netdecks are just good homebrews
5. You're an idiot.
5
... Yes.
TCG card arts are basically always outsourced to freelance contracts. Many of the freelance artists show their processes on Youtube.
1
What the everliving fuck of mental gymnastics led you to this conclusion?
Not everyone wants to be NFL levels of professional. Most just want to have fun, and we can do it in pretty much any other game without spending $150 every three months.
Hearthstone being unaffordable is why the play-rate for the game has been declining so hard.
2
Whataboutism doesn't make Priest any better.
Priest, Mage and Rogue are all slot machines at this point. Blizzard pushed the RNG aspect to huge extremes.
And Priest went through this huge major rework to their classic set, but Blizzard utterly failed to fix any of the issues of Priest. They made buffs their primary strength, but then gutted their card draw so Priests can't run buffs. They made all these great battlecries, but then made it so Res Priest completely guts any ability to run battlecries. Their only viability is either with Galakrond slot value, or res Priest stall value. It's garbage design.
-7
What the fuck Priest deck has ever run Northshire Cleric since Lyra? And no Priest ever fucking run Velen.
Most of the basic cards that are actually run were buffed significantly. And then they got Ruin.
-4
No change to the dead fucking drag of a bore of brain dead res Priest.
Thanks. Can stick to Legends of Runeterra. No need to deal with the boring slog of 30 minute Priest games.
-4
Hey, look at all of the degenerates from the other Hearthpwn thread saying "STOP BEING GREEEDY. BLIZZ NEVER SAID U WONT GET DUPLICATES FROM THE CHEST. THE GAME IS CHEAP ENOUGH, THEY'RE A BUSINESS" jumping to this one to say "oh that explains why i got duplicates".
1
Its a once a month thing. To NOT have it covered by dupe protection is just stingy.
1
The problem isn't that they collectively fuck up an entire expansion. The issue is that 95% of the expansion is great, except for certain problem cards that they fuck up so majorly, that they take forever to fix. Even though the community is collectively calling for nerfs for (sometimes) months.
Let's look at some examples.
Saronite Chain Gang was such a botched combo with Shudderwock. But this card took fucking months to fix. Almost every Shaman game during the Saronite/Shudder era was just hitting turn 10, and then watching the Shaman play with themselves while they repeatedly bounce 1 mana Shudderwocks to hand.
Raza and Mind Blast.same problem, though he was much slower. Still saw a nerf due to his creation of an uninteractive board. Watching Priests play 0 mana hero powers and mind blasts was NOT fun. Again, people knew these nerfs were coming for months.
Doomguard is another example. Allowed to combo with Carnivorous Cube, creating completely unbeatable board states (again) for months until they finally rotated Doomguard to Hall of Fame.
Ice Block was in the same boat as Doomguard. Featured in OTKO Mage decks that created a completely uninteractive board state. Two turns of spamming card draws with zero possible counterplay was often enough to draw out their combo pieces. Took years till it was Hof'd
Grim Patron Warrior went through several iterations of OTKOs. Each one taking an insulting amount of time to balance. Again, these decks dominated the ladder and even pro play. It took a long time for them to eventually get gutted, and for them to invent the Standard meta and rotate Thaurissan.
Caverns Below wasn't super slow to nerf, but still could have been faster, since it was equally as dominant as DH on launch.
And then there's the whole pirate meta. Again, having to wait until they nerfed Patches and the other card was ridiculous. Because everyone KNEW they were going to get nerfed. It just took too long.
---
Most of the cards and combos I listed were from different metas, and were a black spot on each one. For the metas where these combos were nerfed after a few weeks instead of the next month, the remaining time in the expansion was mostly enjoyable.
Again, your misconception is that the meta is 100% bad, because deck X is bad. The issue is that there are singular decks that bring down an otherwise great meta. Blizzard just keeps the high popularity decks around for a few weeks before nerfing them to drive up pack sales and disenchant rates.
If Blizzard didn't act fucking stupid and buffed/nerfed in a timely manner, then this would be the best TCG on the market. But currently, it's looking like Legends of Runeterra might overtake it after launch, since it has a far better new player experience, is far cheaper, has no pack RNG, and even their draft format is far easier to run infinitely. (7 wins at a 50% winrate is max reward)
It's also unfortunate that this is the worst meta since Mean Streets of Gadgetzan. They fucked up the card draw for Priest, Shaman, Paladin and Warrior so bad that they may as well not exist, with the exception of Res Priest. A deck so awful in design it slows the game down so much that I stopped playing, and ruined the playability of the game on my lunch breaks.
7
Are you a child, or a Karen? Pick one.
On topic, Demon Hunter's only issue is their unlimited card draw. When you can make what is essentially a half deck, with the rest being cycle and draw spells, the design space for the class is severely limited. Demon Hunters can draw out their entire deck by turn 10. So any new Demon Hunter cards have to revolve around that fact.