Hearthpwn

also...how did Horizon's Edge skip the nerf bat?  15 damage for 4 mana?  It's brutal when both are in play.  Might as well just concede

are you enjoy the warrior nerf? now get tf out and enjoy your fk game

Druid who can  still ramp fast and reach 16 to 20 mana seeing the nerfs : Oh my gawd! What am I gonna do?!! 😈😈

Quote from lv426a11 >>

I genuinely think Blizz either hasn't got a clue about their own game

 I genuinly think the average Hearthstone player doesn't have the slightest clue how difficult it is to balance a game 

I agree, it's not easy to balance a game.  Every change you make creates the possibility that another deck rises to the top and people complain about that instead.  I get it.  But to repeat the same mistakes of the past over and over again and somehow expect a different outcome isnt the best strategy.

This game has been plagued by problematic boucing (or multiplied battlecries) and mana cheat repeatedly, yet a 9 mana Reno was a problem?  Dying on turn 4 should not be the norm, yet aggro can easily do that (and OTK can occasionally do it). 

At the end of the day it seems like the game blizz wants to make isn't the same one I want to play.  We've gone through so many metas which were aggro or OTK, with multiple classes not represented.  This meta is shaping up much the same, but at least we have class diversity (3 lamplighter decks!!!). 

Not to worry though...i'l shut the door on the way out.

I totally get what you're going at. 

But,

I have seen these same statements about developers being clueless about balance on forums for every online game I have ever played, Hearthstone, League, WoW, Apex, mobile games, all of them. So either every single game developer on earth is somehow incompetent, or most players underestimate how difficult it is to get it right. I'm leaning towards option B. 

The game was balanced long time ago, it has lost its way and has gotten much worse lately, that is indisputable.

We got an absurd amount of people stopping playing without counting those who were avid fans of constructed that play BGS only these days and honestly I'm joining them, after 10ish years of playing consistently I can't handle this anymore, it's too much this expansion has sealed it for me. I'm sick of this shit.

I take your point, but lets look at the past. 

We had a whole rotation where Astalor Bloodsworn killed you from hand by being bounced multiple times (or activated multiple times).  It wasn't fun (imo) and it eventaually got nerfed (although still saw play in pretty much every deck).  Astalor Bloodsworn rotated and we got Sire Denathrius who was able to reliably kill you from hand by being bounced (or activated) multiple times.  It wasn't fun (imo) and it eventaually got nerfed (although still saw play in a wide variety of decks).  Now we have Lamplighter which is able to reliably kill you from hand by being bounced multiple times.  It wasn't fun (imo) and it eventaually got nerfed (although still saw play in a wide *variety* of decks). 

Do you see a pattern here?  Maybe you're right though.  Maybe this is by design and they knowingly release broken shit just to sell stuff.

Blizz have obviously attmpted to tweak Lamplighter and lower the winrate of the decks it's in, but problem I have with this approach is that balance becomes binary problem.  Deck A beats deck B which beats C (which in turn beats deck A).  It's perfectly balanced and called rock-paper-stone.  You win or lose by the deck you bring to the match-up and the one you're drawn against, and very little (often nothing) you do in-game matters.  That is poor game design imo and it's the Dev's that keep pushing the game in this direction.

Their near obsession with OTK (or huge burst from hand) is bizzare in a game where you can't interact with the opponent in a meaningful way on their turn (imo extreme mana cheat also falls into this category because if you do enough cheating on your turn your opponent will be unable to respond if their turn is "fair").

I get that it's hard to design new, interesting and fun cards, make them relevant enough to see play over what's gone before, and prevent the game from turning to poo, but it feels like there's no real attempt at the last bit.  Honestly if Lamplighter had had a genuinely new effect (like give friendly elementals a deathrattle that does X) or something like that and it turned out OP I could see how they might miss in the original design of the card.  Lamplighter is a lazy designed card which is clearly broken and definitely not fun by any metric I can think of.

The sad reality is that most people would rather have the option to live out a power fantasy as a way to compensate for whatever is going wrong in their life than playing a balanced multiplayer game.
Additionally they're chasing that fleeting high of winning a game in the most spectacular fashion which is the reason why they want their games to be over as fast as possible.
I used to blame the devs for the poor balancing as well and as someone who cares about game balance in a multiplayer game, i still consider their general approach to balancing as extremely bad, but from their perspective they're just giving the majority of players what they actually want.

I genuinely think Blizz either hasn't got a clue about their own game, or they want the game to be mindless, uninteractive shite. 

I'm leaning towards the latter, because you would have to be a different level of stupid not to understand the problems in the game given they've repeated them multiple times already.  These "nerfs" don't really address anything except warrior, and I would argue that of all the problem decks, warrior was the one you could interact with the most.  Just "kill them before ...." that's what people say.

To an extent I agree but at the same time Blizzards goals isnt to kill things off its to adjust the consistency of the decks. Like Chia Drake and Concierge it doesnt remove the threat of the Druid combo but it will weaken the deck abit and if a deck goes from 62% to 59% winrate thats a changeup.

Same goes for Lamplighter, the threat is still there it just takes abit longer to execute it well and by moving it to 4 it removes rogues ability to abuse other things like Sonya to get insane amounts of cheap 10-15 damage battlecrys. So once again it does make it take longer to execute and will have a negative impact on the winrate for the deck.

For me personally I wouldnt cry if they killed these decks off because I've always hated combo decks they feel so uninteractive to play against but by lowering their winrate they wont be as toxic at least. Also I would argue that the biggest problem with Lamplighter is a card that should have been put to HoF ages ago but for some reason while every other classes iconic and strong cards have been moved to HoF one after another to free up design space the strongest of them all Shadowstep has somehow managed to dodge being cut from Standard year after year even though it has been a pillar in every Rogue deck ever.

They don't just feel uninteractive...they are uninteractive.  You can't do anything meaningful to stop the inevitable combo (or burst finish depending on how you view these things).  Arguably the druid combo has some defence (build a board to soak the damage), but they can output such a large amount of damage due to a zero mana spell (that they can copy multiple times) you would need an absurd board to deal with it.  I've died from 40+ health state quite easily.

There is nothing meaningful you can do against lamplighter decks other than kill them first.  The decks are all minion heavy, so dirty rat has very little chance of hitting the correct target.  Excluding rogue, they are actually quite good board-centric tempo decks in the first instance, so controling the board can also be challenging.  And while you're doing that you know you're just going to die to a lamplighter if the game goes on too long.  There is no "running them out of resources (certainly not mage)".  The fact that rogue can run an elemental deck at all (given they have no synergy in their class cards) just shows how busted lamplighter is.

It's such a stupid design for cards in general - the idea that a card has a detrimental condition in exchange for it's pay-off seems fair in theory, but in practice the pay-off is either so shit that no one plays it, or so good that entire decks are built around it.  It's like Quest mage, or no-minion mage - the pay-off's were (and still are) just busted. 

For lamplighter decks we have the condition "if you played an elemental...".  Turns out it's pretty fuckin easy to meet that condition when your whole deck is elementals. So the battlecrys end up being:

Overflow Surger - summon a board of 3/2's

Tainted Remnant - deal 7 damage split amongst...

Unchained Gladiator - draw 1-3 cards.

Aqua Archivist - the next minion you play costs 2 less

Living Prairie - summon two 3/3's with rush.

I could go on, but I'm sure you get the point. 

Coming back to your original point, I don't think just lowering the win-rate of a given deck is a clever way to design a game.  Either the deck still ends up viable and does it's thing, or it doesn't and it dies.  Look at wheel lock - it was everywhere, got nerfed, then it was nowhere to be seen.  Problem with wheel lock (imo) is that that type of card doesn't belong in hearthstone.  If it works it's really un-fun and people call for nerfs.  If it doesn't, no one uses it and it might as well not exist. 

The only quest people didn't really complain about was the priest quest.  It granted by far the least interactive card ever designed - a literal "I win".  The reason why no-one complained is that it was by far the most difficult quest to complete and even then you still had to draw the card.  My point being that it's a terrible design irrespective of whether it ends up good or bad. 

Dude who made the Tsunami artwork:

"Am I a joke to you ?"

The nerf did nothing to warrior! They just changed one card and they are still running top tier.. they need to change the virus modul… 

People need to understand that the goal with nerfs isnt to kill decks its to adjust them making em less consistent and these nerfs to warrior certainly did that I would guess somewhere around a overall 3-5% lower winrate. And trust me the Warrior deck your talking about aint top tier right now the acutal best class in the meta and kinda was before nerfs aswell and wasnt really touched more than the adjustment to Zilliax is Paladin that has two top five decks in both Flood and Handbuff that was sitting steady there prior to nerfs aswell.

So they effectively did nothing at all to concierge druid...  Great work at understanding what the problem is as always blizzard..

They did but not alot, but lowering the stats on cards does make it a tiny bit harder for them to contest the board and that can have a big impact. There has been decks in tier 1 that has been gutted with small adjustments to their ability to contest the board.

Also the Druid deck was mostly obnoxious and annoying it was never a super big problem, my winrate against them was positive despite playing mostly decks that has combo as a weakness.

I understand the reasoning on Tsunami , it summons 1 extra dude, and the Mana Cost shouldn't be relevant cause the deck that plays that card don't wants to play that card for its Mana Cost. And also, is a 10-Mana spell for The Galactic Projection Orb that I think Standard didn't had any 10-Mana spell to recast with that card.

But I still don't...see a reason to change that card. Like if there is one card in Mage that could be buffed (even if I consider that Mage got pretty solid cards this set) it would be Marooned Archmage which to me looks like they got weakest card. But I don't feel that Big Mage didn't saw play cause it needed that extra 3/6 to close the game. Dosn't see play cause there is a lot of better decks to play, and dosn't really has that many Big spells to make it worth playing.

A few of those buffs seem like arguable nerfs to me.