Hearthpwn

Me too.

WRT Paladin, the meta-game shifts considerably between "leagues" - the most recent VS report concludes that the best deck in Top 1000 Legend is Rush Warrior, while Secret Paladin is only marginally better than Secret Rogue, with a win-rate that tanks by about 7% compared to its performance in Diamond League, or Platinum, or 8-9% compared to Bronze through Gold. Only a single GM brought Paladin to this past weekend's GM tournament - it went 0-2. Each of Paladin's current crop of viable decks are fairly aggressive curve decks, and average or worse players will do well when they pilot them, inflating their win-rates as they regularly queue against other average or worse players who fumble decks which are more difficult to play - the higher you climb up the ladder, the worse the class seems to perform.

It seems far more constructive to suggest potential nerfs to problematic decks than to simply post an opinion piece that "OTK decks shouldn't exist." Of course they should - millions of folks only play CCGs because they enjoy winning the game by doing convoluted deck manipulation and card sequencing that results in a big, sudden, gaming winning combo. "No they shouldn't - they should enjoy the game differently," isn't exactly a helpful attitude.

It's also worthwhile recognising that there are dozens of OTK decks "out there" in Tier 4 Wild - it isn't obvious that you understand how much nerfing is actually going to be necessary in your crusade. I'd suggest watching some Wild streamers, or Hysteria, in order to get some idea of the scope of the issue. You might as well start with Spectral Pillager - it might be the most popular OTK deck that you seem unaware of.

Here's a link to a Hysteria video, Top 10 OTK combos - you'll have to nerf cards like Lightning Bolt, Da Undertaker, Emperor Thaurissan, Mayor Noggenfogger, and dozens of others not in this particular video . . .

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yhBnqoF8BUQ

GLHF.

Nothing has changed.

On the queue screen, click on the Format button. Four more buttons will pop up. One of them says "Casual." Click it if you want to play it.

HSReplays is currently tracking thirteen decks in the green. Warrior and Priest are shut out, with nothing particularly viable on ladder. The other classes don't have a great deal to choose from, apart from Paladin - the class has the top three decks on ladder.

FWIW - the devs have already tweeted that they will assess the meta-game tomorrow, with a balance patch to follow. They've explained that they will preferentially target last year's cards for nerfs, rather than the new stuff - Penflinger and Tickatus (perhaps others, as I've only read a couple tweets) have been singled out.

FWIW - most of the Mages the OP queued against were playing Secrets, even though they weren't (according to the OP) Secret Mage decks. Same with the Hunter decks the OP chose to quit against. If the OP hadn't auto-conceded 38 times, we could know how often he queued against a deck playing Secrets - in all likelihood, he queued against a fairly typical sampling of decks (a little more than 1-in-4 decks play Secrets in Wild Diamond League, judging by the HSReplays numbers.)

It's also worth asking - how often did the OP auto-concede against Secret Mage, incorrectly assuming it was something else?

Lastly - the winningest Wild deck on HSReplays is a Secret Mage deck with a 69% win-rate in 16,000 games played. Does this mean that all of those players using the deck have a 31% win-rate in the 16,000 games they've played in Wild when not using Secret Mage? Indeed, if the game is rigged to flatten win-rates to 50%, how is it possible for a deck to have a 69% win-rate with 16,000 games played? Is HSReplays part of the conspiracy?

In the olden days, before this site was sold, Flux and his crew auto-locked stupid threads like this . . .

Quote from DropDeadCynical >>

Wut?

Quote from Phoesias >>

Hunter, always Hunter. Hunter is playble on ladder since years now. Ofc this class need more love.

Better nerf Priest Blizzard, OP Class, Tier1.

???

You don't know the meaning of the word "whoosh," do you?

Here's a link -

https://www.vicioussyndicate.com/wild-vs-data-reaper-report-26/

If you can't be bothered - Hunter's best deck in the older format has an overall win-rate of 43%. Priest has a pair of decks that are liable to be nerfed - Biggie Boys and Raza.

If you still don't get it, re-read the post, then look up "whoosh" on urban dictionary.

GLHF.

It isn't particularly helpful to tell players that clearly want to begin playing a new class that they shouldn't bother . . .

VS published their most recent Wild meta-report yesterday. There currently isn't a clear top deck in the format, with a 1% win-rate differential between the top five decks at just about every skill level on ladder. Kingsbane Rogue is one of them. So is Odd Rogue, if the OP is interested. Darkglare and Odd Paladin join Secret Mage at the top of the heap.

It's very likely that Nitroboost will be nerfed when the new expansion drops in a few weeks (you can find a news article directly from Blizzard on this site, explaining that a planned balance patch to a "burst deck" had to be delayed until FitB.) Kingsbane is much less resilient to such nerfs than Odd Rogue, which has survived a bunch of Rogue nerfs over the years. Indeed, Odd Rogue was a top-tier deck prior to Nitro, so even if the card is nerfed to 2-mana, Odd Rogue should be fine. Kingsbane Rogue, in comparison, comes and goes in the meta-game.

If the OP doesn't want to craft Baku, I'd suggest crafting Kingsbane, rather than Valeera - the Hero card is fun, but the two decks in which she sees play (Mill Rogue and Burgle Rogue) are more fun-tier than competitive, and reaching D5 will be more of a chore for you.

Good luck with the new class.

I don't really have any "big" personal regrets. I used to help organise a regular FSG in Toronto, and I got to meet lots of people over the years. My biggest regrets are honestly the folks I met who dusted their way out of the game. We had a FSG during the Un'Goro launch, and one fellow decided to dust all his Legendaries that rotated that day - sixteen of them. The "return on investment" is so poor that the fellow could only craft four Legendaries from the new set. He chose the Hunter and Warlock Quests and the Warlock Legendary (and something else I can't remember.) Since the Quests didn't exactly perform as was commonly expected, he basically threw away a year of grinding and all the Legendaries he had earned, with nothing to show for it. We warned him against dusting all his cards (we always do, during rotation.) Over the next few months, he played the game less and less, and finally stopped altogether - he blamed Blizzard the whole time.

Quote from OneM00reTime >>

My apologies. I've read several times that because the core set will be given out for free, we wouldn't get any dust refunds, I didn't know about Ysera

To be clear - we are getting the dust refund because of the nerf to Old Ysera, not because she is rotating to the new Legacy set.

To be fair - this looks to be a year-long theme. The heroes introduced in the Barrens will be "levelling up" over the course of the expansions, mini-sets, and (apparently) the Book of Mercenaries, culminating at the end of the year in what looks like a big fight in Alterac valley between the Horde and Alliance. Presumably, that's why the story begins in the "levelling up" zone of the Barrens.

The Angry Chicken interviewed Liv and Joe during BlizzCon - the devs didn't exactly spoil anything, but it seems like this isn't so much the Year of the Gryphon as the Year of the Mercenary. Lots of HS content over the course of the year seems integrated with telling the evolving story of the ten new heroes we'll meet in the Barrens. It's a slightly different take on "block building" compared to Year of the Leagues.

One of the reasons few people are complaining about the current meta-game is likely because there isn't much to complain about. Judging by the numbers on HSReplays, we are currently enjoying the widest and flattest meta-game since Un'Goro. Twenty-nine different decks are in the green, each class has at least one viable deck, and each archetype has multiple viable options to choose from. Since the most popular deck has a play-rate only slightly above 5%, it's unlikely that you'll ever queue into your "least favourite" match-up very often - in my own experience, for example, I've only queued against Ramp Paladin nine times in 131 games played in Feb, and none since the nerf.

Quote from Garlicnerd >>

this operational definition of playable you're using is completely meaningless. 99% of the time when people are asking if a card is playable, they mean is it good in actual high-level decks, like could you play it at legend. there aren't any unplayable cards at Chicken rank so defining playable in the way that you are is meaningless.

FWIW - your own definition of the term seems far too restrictive. Lots of cards can be "good" without seeing any play at all - Sparkjoy Cheat is an excellent example. The card is clearly good, though there isn't currently a deck that plays the card - a few other Rogue decks are simply much better than Secret Rogue.

In addition - you are the only person using a merely "operational" definition of the term. For you, "playable" means "actually seeing play right now" and nothing else. Rotnest Drake currently isn't seeing much play - but the card isn't "bad" or "unplayable". Indeed, judging by the HSReplays numbers, Rotnest is simply underplayed, enjoying one of the highest "played win-rates" of any 5-drop in the game. But if playable only means "seeing play right now" there isn't much room for discussing most of what is interesting about card games - how best to leverage advantages against the top decks in the meta-game by testing under-played but over-performing cards.

etc, etc . . .

GLHF.

No one knows if reverting old nerfs will make Wild "better" - that likely isn't the point of the un-nerfing. What is more likely is that the devs know that the overall power-level of the format is far higher than the Standard format in which dozens of cards were formerly nerfed - given that they likely want to keep the number of "dual format" cards to a minimum once Classic format debuts, it looks like they are being very liberal with the number of old cards they are going to revert. Whether or not Wild will be "better" after the un-nerfing is pretty subjective - but it's a safe bet that plenty of folks will bitch about it, regardless . . .