So there's been a lot of talk about Bomb Warrior in the last few days. Some people say it's broken, others say it's overhyped, but the general consensus is that it's a very powerful deck that performs best among all other theorycrafted decks.
Now I've got a few thoughts about the whole matter:
1) Bomb Warrior is not OP...yet
Right now Bomb Warrior succeeds the same way Shudderwock succeeded when it was first experimented with. It has a very strong win condition that preys on unrefined decks. For those who remember, the early Shudderwock builds included Fire Plume Harbinger and Murmuring Elemental for a guaranteed infinite combo, but were later dropped for the far superior Keleseth builds.
The same thing is happening right now, since people builld the deck by just shoving every single Bomb card into the deck and attempting to shuffle as much as possible.
This is complete nonsense, as the bombs are not the actual power of the deck, they're merely a means to an end. That end is Blastmaster Boom. This card is ridiculously powerful, but needs the bomb support to actually function. If Bomb Warrior wins, most of the time it's because of Boom and not because the actual bombs do all the work.
The second reason why it's successful, is because the control variant runs Dr. Boom Mad Genius, which, much like the other Boom, wins games by itself. Turns out in a meta where all the most broken infinite value cards are no longer in the game, the broken infinite vlaue cards that do exist are pretty good, who would have thought?
Ultimately this will lead to the following: Bomb Warriors will eventually figure all this out by themselves and start adjusting. We're not going to see Seaforium Bomber anymore, maybe they even cut Clockwork Goblin and rely entirely on Wrenchcalibur and Augmented Elekk.
Either way, they'll cut pointless cards in favour of actually good cards, while will lead to the real problem: "Bomb" Warrior completely taking over the meta with no survivors by relying on the bombs and Blastmaster for pressure while being guaranteed a safe lategame through Mad Genius. It won't matter if you counter the bombs with Archivist Elysiana or Arch-Villain Rafaam, an army of infinite Mechs will just run you out of ressources to the point where you wish for Deathstalker Rexxar to come back
Now all this sounds a bit dramatic, after all, it's just two cards with above average power levels, how are they carrying the entire Warrior class?
Here's the thing
they don't
2) Warrior's overpowered classic set
Here's why all of this is even a problem in the first place. Amongst all classes in the game, Warrior is arguably the best at removal. It's part of their class identity overall, which isn't a problem by itself. the problem is that because of thiis fact, any time Control Warrior has even a remotely viable win condition it completely dominates any deck that isn't
a) able to kill them quickly and without mercy
or
b) outvalue them in the long run
At the same time this means that Warrior usually sucks whenever these win condition aren't available, which was the case during KFT and KnC until finally Baku the Mooneater was released and gave them the basis for a straight-up grind machine, which was later enhanced by Mad Genius
The problem at this point is that Warrior excels at TOO MANY types of removal
They have Execute and Shield Slam which are the two most efficent single target removals after Naturalize, a card they had to take away from Druid to enforce their weakpoints
They have Gorehowl, which used to be amazing, but at this point is simply redundant due to how much effective removal exists
They also have Brawl, which I will address more thouroughly in a blog post about Classic/Basic cards that absolutely need to be nerfed, but consider this: Brawl is the single most powerful AoE clear in the entire game. the only thing that comes close to it is Psychic Scream and that'S purely because it gets rid of Deathrattles. Brawl is a 5-mana Twisting Nether -1 target as long as there are more than 2 minions on the board. It also has the added RNG of occasionally giving you a tempo swing by having one of your minions survive. Brawl can not be countered other than through powerful Deathrattles. Any deck that relies on getting board advantage loses to Warrior automatically because of it.
Let me repeat that it's a 5-mana boardclear that disregards health totals, Divine Shields and requires no further build around. Now remind yourself that it exists in a class that already has access to a shitload of other single or multi-target removals.
Brawl should have been nerfed years ago, but never was because Warrior never got up to S-tier status. Now it has, and a long overdue nerf is in order.
Just for perspective, even if they nerfed Brawl up to 7-mana, it would still see regular play, just because of how good it is.
Now all of this is still not even that bad if it wasn't for one other thing:
3) Warrior's tendency to keep getting better and better removal tools each expansion
This leads back to the Brawl argument and why it wasn't nerfed before. Previously, Brawl was Warrior's core, on-demand board clear. It was necessary because there was no efficient way to deal with multiple minions (big or small).
However, over the past year, Warrior has gotten a ridiculous amount of top-tier removals. Just to list them all:
Smolderthorn Lancer, Devastate, Warpath, Dyn-o-matic, Supercollider
those are the class cards. Added to that comes stuff like Zilliax and Crowd Roaster + literally anything with Rush that Warrior can use.
Effectively, there is no situation, no board state, no minion composition, that Warrior does not have an easy and efficient answer to.
Addeed to that is the entire Armor mechanic which allows you to survive a lot more than other classes given that armor is a preemptive defense mechanic as opposed to healing, which is reactive and vulnerable to burst.
4) The Conclusion
To sum it up: We have a class with access to the best defense boost, with the best removal tools and consistent draw. And this class now has access to the best late game value engine + the best instant refill tempo play...and it's doing exceptionally well with a barely optimized deck.
Do you see the problem here?
5) The Solution
This is where it gets tricky. As I explained before, nerfing the Bomb cards does effectively nothing. Sure, every once in a while you'll get blown up by 30 damage worth of explosives, but it stands to argue what you were doing while Warrior was playing vanilla minions and overstatted weapons. Clearly not taking countermeasures I'd say.
Also, Bombs are a very effective counnter to degenerate combo decks (which will exist in the future, they always do) which has always been a crippling weakness to value oriented Warrior lists so I don't feel like abandoning this mechanic is fair.
If the bombs do turn out (against all logi and reason) to be the main winning factor in the deck, then there are several ways to address this:
I) Less Bombs
Wrenchcalibur could be nerfed by either making it's effect a single Battlecry or bumping it's mana cost way up.
Alternatively, the bombs themselves could have their damage reduced by 1, which makes them much less likely to jsut kill you out of nowhere and gives you time to get on the board and retaliate.
II) Less Boombots
Blastmaster Boom is another target. The biggest issue with him is the amount of Bots he summons relating to the amount of bombs shuffled.
One approach would be to reduce the amount of summoned bots per bomb to 1, meaning you'd need six bombs shuffled for a full board. The other approach would be the indirect nerf by targetting Wrenchcalibur as explained before and make shuffling enough bombs before turn 7 much harder to do, effectively requiring you to run more bomb cards for consistency, which, as I explained before, makes the deck weaker as a result.
Either way, the best way to nerf Blastmaster (should he turn out to be the main culprit) is by forcing players to commit to the bomb package and therefore leaving less room for the many excellent removal (or tempo, if you play Rush Bombs) cards that Warrior has
III) Less Deathkinghts
Another card to look into would be Dr. Boom, Mad Genius. this card is troubling for a variety of reasons, some of which have been explained before.
Obviously he shines as the best value hero card after the Death Knights rotated. Zul'jin's long term value is determined by build around cards and comes at a price and Hagatha doesn't really give you much pressure overall.
Boom is actually really difficult to target effectively without unreasonably destroying the card. The aura effect is very pwoerful int he long run since it allows your mechs to always impact the board when they are played, but we can't remove it or else the entire point of the card would be lost.
The hero power is probably the most reasonable approach. Originally designed to be balanced around randomness versus consistency, there are a few problems with the swapping mechanic...that being the ability to highroll into certai powers every 2nd turn. It just feels bad when you're trying to outgrind Warrior and they keep swapping between armor and Delivery drone and it feels like the gods themselves are trying to punish you.
My suggestion would be to have the hero powers on a fixed rotation, something like: Blast Shield, Microbots, Zap, Kaboom, Drone.
this way
a) you get more consistent results and can plan around them
b) your opponent gets to do the same
c) noone can highroll into multiple delivery drones and just amass value, Rexxar-style
Whether the HP rotation always starts on the same one or is determined by RNG is up to preference at that point
A different solution would be to change Delivery Drone from discover to just straight-up random. A big point of frustration is the sheer amount of great value mechs, meaning there is usually a really strong overall pick from the drone. Combine it with Omega Assembly and Warrior is basically guaranteed to always have an answer and prevents you from ever really gaining back any sort of tempo. By changing it to random it's still consistent value (since all Mechs have rush anyways) but far less oppressive and far less overwhelming than just picking your Omega Devastators and Zilliax at your leisure
IV) Less Bullshit
The final and in my opinion most beneficial nerf concerns the classic set. As said before Brawl is busted, but aside from that it's also design-limiting. As long as Brawl exists Warrior can#t get any other relevant board clears, because they would either be overshadowed, or good enough to be run alongside Brawl, which leads to the situation we're currently in, where nobody can every build a reasonable board against a Warrior and hope to win with it (see Warpath)
In my opinion, wide removal is not part of Warrior's class identity. Single-target it. I'm fine with Shield Slam, Execute, Dyn-o-matic, Smolderthorn Lancer and Supercollider, since they are all very different and operate on various conditions.
I'm also fine with Warpath, Reckless Flurry, Sleep with the Fishes as they all promote different builds and counters.
I'm not fine with Brawl because it is unconditional removal that can only be countered via mechanics and not by strategy or legitimate deckbuilding.
Brawl is the Wild Growth of Warrior. As long as it exists it will always elevate Warrior to tier-1 status whenever a control build is viable while eclipsing all other, potentially more interesting options (remember Deadly Arsenal? that card isn't even half-bad, but it doesn't compare to Brawl whatsoever)
So ultimately my suggestion would be to just increase the mana-cost of Brawl anywhere up to 8 (yes I am serious, Warrior has enough removal to the point where a "worse" Twisting Nether is still good. 7 would probably be enough though) to give board centric strategies an actual possibility to play around it or apply enough pressure, similar to how they would against a Priest deck (imaginePsychic Scream being 5-mana and despair)
Another idea would be to just remove the RNG component entirely and have the minion with highest attack always win the Brawl. This way it's still a good clear against boards of tokens, but significantly worse against decks that play singular big minions (like various Giants or just midrange decks in general) while at the same time stilll not being useless, since Warrior always has cheap single target removal to fall back on.
Either way, there needs to be some counterplay. 5-mana boardwipes with no build around or counterplay are not healthy for the game.
6) Final Thoughts
This turned out much longer than I intended to. I've actually thought about this a lot and feel confident in saying that if Blizzard ends up nerfing Warrior in any capacity, they'll come to similar conclusions.
ULtimately I want Warrior to be a playable class. I like the idea of Control Warrior and I at least respect the general deck building idea of Bomb Warrior. I just feel they should hold Warrior up to the same scrutiny as Druid and get rid of the evergreen autoplay cards that make any sort of innovation moot by virtue of being the all time best option.
If you have anything to add or subtract, feel free to do so
If you liked my line of reasoning you have another post about nerfs (and buffs) to certain Classic/Basic cards to look forward to. A small spoiler: I fucking hate Tundra Rhino with every fiber of my being
2
For 3 mana 3/2 get a good card and get information what your opponent holds? This is autoinclude in all priest decks. Can't imagine (maybe except Big Priest) any deck where this is not AWESOME!!
2
Keleseth will not work.
32
You do not know that, only like 10% of cards are revealed. This applies to rest of your comments.
Also, most people find Hagatha or Rafaam exciting. You probably cannot see the true potential, this is why you call them Kazakus or Elise.
And having the power level down is great, even if you think it is "bored".
2
Today will be (I beieve) a video showing the cards.
At least this is what they did last few expansions.
2
You are welcome
https://www.facebook.com/Hearthstone.en/posts/2018609114918775
25
You are missing this
1
Dave Kosack confirmed, that more Lackeys will be added during the year.
And each lackey belongs to one villain.
That means more villains in League of Evil in later expansions!! Which one characters would you like to see?
Lackeys in order:
Rafaam | King Togwaggle | Dr. Boom | Madam Lazul a.k.a. Old Gods Fortune Teller | Hagatha the Witch
4
Actually, the Hero skins started as paid.
1
Except, you can cast the spell on different turns, which is definitely better then Echo.
16
Not worth to dust. Keep the cards, For 32 legendaries you can create 8 new. When you dust them when rotate you can create 2 new. In 2 rotations 32 legendaries turn into 2.