Hearthpwn

I mean I'm happy that Gnoll has finally been changed to what it should have always been, but I'm embarrassed to play a game whose developers changed the card four fucking times to get to this point, despite the whole community asking for this very change.

Astalor is still autoinclude in every single deck, it's barely changed. He does 2 less damage, very wow, such balance.

The whole issue is anub'arak really, undead would be fine without it. Since you generally have to kill the board 2-3 times to fully clear an undead board, you end up with like over 20 minions each with 30+ attack and win by sheer hit advantage. The whole eternal knight package isn't even that amazing, it's just eternal summoner provides 3 bodies to get anub'arak buffs, 6 if it gets reborn which often happens.

I don't think deathwhisper is in need of changes - you do need strong turn 6 tribe minions, it just feels OP because anub'arak makes everything under seem broken.

Just as an aside on the card itself, I don't really understand how the battlecry/manathirst split interaction works (probably because no other manathirst battlecries are played)

On 5 mana, brann+astalor deals 2 damage and adds two to hand.

On 8 mana, brann+astalor gains 5 armor and adds two to hand.

On 10 mana, brann+astalor does 32 damage? Why does the manathirst suddenly also get doubled? Or is a double fire astalor doing 24 damage and I can't count?

This card seems a bit nuts to me in terms of how much one standalone slot in your deck is able to accomplish, it's a neutral Pyros on steroids. The guy is in practically everything except DH, with a current HSreplay stat of 47% in all decks, beating out the next card (Brann) by 14%. I'd imagine DH is getting looked at in the upcoming patch which is inevitably going to reduce its playrate and skyrocket Astalor above 55%ish.

He fits into aggro, combo, midrange, control decks.. anything except no-minion DH. In one card you get curve minions to plop down when you have no other plays, some board control, some healing, and an omegalol burst win condition which often times checkmates people because they know it's in hand. The card gets exponentially dumb when you double it up via Brann, Shadowstep, Bolnar/Macaw, etc.

Personally I feel like this card is a bit over the top and it's very surprising it got printed after all the rage over Denathrius, and now Astalor is even better than Denathrius for face burst due to no infuse needed and easier combo potential. The final form needs some toning down, perhaps 6/12 damage or 8/16 damage to minions only? Thoughts?

Revert the renathal nerf.

Revert the rogue nerfs, and just make illusionist 5 mana (so sketchy can't pull it), and change trickster to "your next spell this turn costs (6) less" so at best you can coin the combo on turn 5. Gnoll+maestra needs to stop working, it's been nerfed and reverted three times now and changing the mana obviously isn't working, fix the core issue.

Goldshire gnoll+evolve is really dumb facing a 10 drop on turn 3. I don't really see a way of fixing it unless they overhaul how original mana costs work on cards, so you could just make it 12 mana for now until they do.

Face mage/Frost DK at the top of the meta? Is it time for the forbidden class to be played, warrior? Call to the Stand is pretty good against druid too to fish out astalor, brann or anub'rekan. 

Just immediately concede against rogue though.

Quote from OoZuNoO >>

 Frost cant generate many corpses cuz its spell based, so lets make the class work great w/o any need for them? Does that make sense to you?

 

 Yes. That makes sense to me, and I'm 100% fine with it.

There's more pressing matters with DK right now such as its ability to discover rune cards outside of its deckbuilding (triple blood DK getting shit like scourge/frostwyrm fury as a control deck is a bit silly), leading to DK decks being 1/3 discover cards (vizier, pandaren, school teacher, scorpid, vulpera etc). Also the complete unusability of corpse cards from spell generation marks the first in cards that can never ever be used no matter what else you could possibly steal in the game (army of the dead, corpse explosion will forever do nothing in any other class).

Quote from OoZuNoO >>

Quote from Hearthsam >>

Forcing DK into "everything must use corpses" is also terrible design? That's like saying "rogue decks MUST all use some combo cards" or "demon hunters MUST use lots of outcast cards" when the top decks of them hardly use any, if at all. Defrost and marrow manipulator aren't even bad cards, I don't see why a frost DK can't also be successful with those.

 When DH was released, Outcast was THE best mechanic in the game. Skull of Gul'dan remains to this day one of the most powerful draw engines ever made. Even after everything was nerfed, Outcast remained a great mechanic for many expansions. They got it right multiple times, same with combo. They didnt get it right at all with corpses, its been a failure, and im wondering why.

 But they did get it right. Both blood and unholy DK heavily use corpses, just because one archetype of the class isn't using corpses doesn't mean the class has just failed design wise. DK has a really tiny card pool, and until it stops having like 1/3 the current card pool that other classes do, I wouldn't expect much in terms of new developments, If it had 3x the available cards you bet your ass there would be some more cards that use corpses in frost.

Frost was also designed to be spell heavy so it would make sense corpses aren't heavily involved, since you'd need minions to actually get them. Unholy by design has heavy corpse generation in plagued grain, meat grinder, etc. Not all DK runes have to use corpses as aggressively as unholy does.

Forcing DK into "everything must use corpses" is also terrible design? That's like saying "rogue decks MUST all use some combo cards" or "demon hunters MUST use lots of outcast cards" when the top decks of them hardly use any, if at all. Defrost and marrow manipulator aren't even bad cards, I don't see why a frost DK can't also be successful with those.

It doesn't fix anything either, thanks to guff existing. You can just do brann->astalor->anub'rekhan->astalor->double fire astalor with no issues.

What are we actually supposed to do with banned cards going forward? Seems a bit weird to just have cards in the collection unusable anywhere (they forgot to ban them in duels because it's neglected, tome needs to be gone from there too). Surely balancing them or remaking them would be better than having cards that are literally unusable anywhere.

There's nowhere you can play demon seed warlock except duels, and it sucks there because the warlock hero powers don't support it.

They literally just needed to push illusionist to 5 mana so that sketchy can't draw it, and something like swiftscale "Your next spell this turn costs (6) less" so that the smokescreen combo can't happen until turn 6.

Biggest nerfs here are sketchy, sinstone and lieutenant but man everything else is pretty unaffected. What shocks me is that neither illusionist or swiftscale got addressed which are the two cards that put DR rogue into overdrive.

Renathal didn't need a nerf, now it's just a drawback to have him in your deck, 35HP isn't worth it. 

DK got so many meaningless buffs.. one health on blightfang? One attack on rime sculptor? One more corpse on meat grinder? I'm not seeing these push any relevance except Obliterate, and rime sculptor would have still seen play at 3/3 because it's pretty damn strong.

Quote from Suikiele >>

 Oh, the winrate isn't how I'm gauging how offensive it is: It's that I've been facing nothing but Neptulon Priest, Even Shaman and Secret Mage for like 6+ months now, and it's pretty damned boring. I'll embrace the cancer and enjoy the mirror-matches until nerfs, but I'm not clamoring for them, as I know it'll just go right back to those previous 3 I mentioned.

 This seems like a really weird mentality to me, discolock has the ability to make you feel just as powerless to play the game. Illuminate->essence->neptulon happens only rarely, big priest doesn't get going until turn 5-6 otherwise, with disco you just die by those turns. Losing to broken things in different form doesn't make it any more interesting.

Quote from Dr_Scaphandre >>

Quote from Ace12345 >>

Discardlock broke wild. Im surprised my homemade Renolock even managed to beat a few of them and hit diamond 4. Waiting for a few of those cards to get nerfed next week. That tier 0 deck is everywhere now and ruined wild.

 What are you talking about? My Blood DK deck absolutely mops the floor with Discardlock decks thanks to Asphyxiate instakilling the Tiny Knights of Evil and Vampiric Blood and all the lifesteal cards putting me in a position where it’s mathematically impossible for the Warlock to kill me

If Discolock is giving you problems, just play Blood DK.

 I didn't lose to any version of DK during my climb to legend with the deck, just because you can gain 20 more life doesn't mean much. Perhaps you're playing against discolock players who aren't good at piloting the deck, because the amount of burst the deck is capable of is obscene - you can very handily win against a druid who has gained 30 armor for example.

To be honest I feel like discard never should have been made strong with cards that want to be discarded, they should have only ever made discarding cards which are overpowered for their cost with the discard drawback. It was only a matter of time before a critical mass of cards made it break - discard was supposed to give the ability to print super strong cards but at a price. Now there is no price, only advantage, letting you play extreme amounts of power and mana for free. You can play incredibly strong cards that get even more powerful because they get free bonus effects like a 3/3, 2/5 taunt, drawing 3 cards, fireballing your opponent - there's just no risk to it anymore.

Of course they playtest their game silly, who else would have caught Ice Revenant becoming too big too early in one dream scenario?!

Meanwhile in rogue land they have two obvious ways to generate game-ending boards of over 20 attack by turn 4 which no class can deal with. It's not like sketchy+illusionist wasn't obviously broken even in concept, I'm not sure how it wasn't tested and more importantly, been given the pass to be in the game. I'm trying to rack my brain on why a FOUR MANA discount is on the card, of course you're going to break shit easily with that.