Drakonid Operative: Pushing Priests to Dragons One Last Time
Hearthstone Game Designer, Max McCall, shed some light on Drakonid Operative's inclusion in the Gadgetzan set as being a last hurrah for Dragon Priest as many cards will be rotating out soon when Blackrock Mountain leaves Standard. They hoped the archetype had of been more powerful and wanted to provide a final solid midgame card for it.
No mention was given regarding what the future holds for this archetype, but we're hoping this won't be the last we see of Dragon Priest in Standard.
Blackrock Mountain, The Grand Tournament, and The League of Explorers are set to rotate out of Standard early this year.
Quote from /u/mbmccallIs [Drakonid Operative] Blizzard's way of saying 'we have no idea how to balance a class so the weak classes get op cards in rotation'?No. The idea is that Dragons in Priests were never quite as powerful as we had hoped for, and the Blackrock dragons will rotate soon, so Mean Streets was our last opportunity to push the deck for a long time. We didn't want to improve the deck's early game, and the Jade decks are supposed to have the strongest late game, so we made Operative a strong midgame option.
Operative is a class card that you have to build a deck around, so it has quite generous stats. It could perhaps have done the job of 'push Dragon decks before they rotate' at 6/5 or 6/4, but we were more confident in our estimation of the Dragon deck's power level than we usually are, and we knew that if we were wrong, the problem would fix itself after rotation.
If you think 'well Azure Drake is neutral and almost as strong as Operative and goes in more decks so what are you thinking' the answer is that I think Azure Drake is extremely generous, which isn't to say that it should or should not be changed.
exactly
dragon priest is not OP.Okay there are 1 man 2/3s 2 2/4taunts 5 5/6 discover from premium cards... you can freeze their board.play your alexstrasza.then,play your kobold and some burst and you won the game. :D freeze mage is not bad,if you can't deal with aggro put in some tech choices like an ooze or a Twillight Flamecaller.But you can make it without these too.
Blizzard admitting they don't care about wild.
That comment is Blizzard balancing in a nut-shell. Frankly it comes down to bottom-line. New cards=more money. Balancing old cards=no money.
OP cards aren't (generally speaking, and DO isn't an exception) unbalanced in Wild because of their amount, they only raise the power level - which was one of the goals of the formats.
I'm embarrassed for your comment.
There was a time when video game companies could monitor and care for the needs of the player and also take care of all the shareholders' needs. They could do both. Really well, actually. I know this might seem unbelievable but before you resort to defending a multi-billion dollar company in the most shameful way possible, maybe you'll consider all these things?
I hope you continue defending blizzard when you have to dust hundreds of cards every rotation to craft cards with eerily similar stats. They have to make money after all, Bobby Kotick's children need to eat !
Blizzard fans on this site are actually fucking cultists. My first Blizzard game was Diablo 2 and have been playing them ever since. I can't help but wonder what twisted stockholm syndrome would overtake a lifelong Blizzard fan, since they obviously would have had to live through and witness how a company that plainly cared so much now plainly cares so little.
A good fan holds companies/people accountable when they fuck up, instead of apologizing on their behalf. I conclude that the Blizzard cultists here must have Hearthstone as their first ever Blizzard game, with which there is nothing wrong but it puts a LOT into perspective.
Ok downvote away.
- Blizz about Wild.
I fear what will happen to all dragon decks when standard rotates again. I hope they introduce new dragons.
Drakonid Oppressitive
With the exception of Harrison Jones, Drakonid Operative is the best 5 mana card in standard right now.
There are no other cards which provide this combination of board presence, and card advantage. The downside of the card being situational is completely mitigated by dragon priest having access to so many OP cards to play turns 1-4.
Once standard rotates, the card will take a major hit in value unless they replace all of these cards.
I'm extremely worried about how the new meta will play out. Pirates are so overpowered, the only thing that's saving the meta right now is Reno, Acidic Swamp Ooze, and Dragon Priest.
The Priest cards are most certainly overstatted. 2/3 1 drop. 2/4 taunt 2 drop. 3/4 buff 3 3 drop. 3/6 taunt 4 drop. 5/6 discover a card from your opponents deck 5 drop.
Saying, "Yeah, but Pirate SMOrc's so hard!" doesn't make the Priest cards any less overstatted.
The problem with Pirates is how they cheat mana and card draw, do it in the early turns of the game, and are able to go wide in doing so leading to unrecoverable victories--from the very first turn. That overstatted Priest cards still lose to this should be an indication at how messed up Pirates are atm (and not that Priest cards need MORE buffing--which would only further the problem we're talking about).
Furthermore, Priest's problems aren't from minion efficiency (although they could use some decent 2s). The big problem is that if a Priest, at any point in a game, loses board, they lose--which is why Blizzard has been forced to overstat Priest minions just to make them competitive.
1) They have virtually no way to get back on board.
2) And they have virtually no win conditions that allow them to fight back or win without a board.
Also -- (this one is minor)
3) For THE healing class, Wars, Druids, Palis, and now even Shaman have more effective healing than Priest. Which is kinda weird right? (Seriously, Druid get a powerful Portal Heal -- and Priest don't even get a portal at all. Just seems so odd).
1+2 results in games where the Priest is ahead, they can end up losing, simply because the opponent sets up one turn in which the Priest loses board. It becomes unrecoverable.
And here, you even have the Dev saying -- 1) Yeah, we overstat the Priest cards 2) we'll let the playerbase figure out if its balanced 3) If it's not, well it just rotates out.
Wouldn't it be great to see a Dev post that said, "Yeah, here's Priests issues. X, Y, Z. And here's what we're doing to fix them."
Ah,I see the good old. "Let the problem fix itself" mantra is here. Tell me. If your toilet is repeatedly overflowing, do you wait for the water to evaporate so it "fixes itself"? Genuine question Blizzard. You guys could probably learn something from the brave plumbing community.
Like how to fix your shitty game.
Do you take your coffee with a bit of milk and two teaspoons of salt?
While I do hate the mentality of "eh if it's OP just let it rotate" because that means Wild will be a shitshow where one deck will rule them all, I'm glad they pointed that the comparison to Azure Drake is dumb. 5 mana 5/6 is baseline of a card, giving spell damage takes off one point and draw takes off two, making it a 5 mana 4/4. Drakonid Operative doesn't give spell damage, and it Discovers, not draws. That means if neutral it would be like a 5/5 with no tags, but it being a class it can afford the pretty costless dragon tag and the small cost of Discover. In terms of the algorithms used to determine a cards worth, Drakonid Operative is very fair.
"Very fair" seems like an exaggeration. 5/6 is pushed baseline. You'll note that only one neutral exists with those stats and it's completely vanilla - it doesn't even have a positive typing like Spider Tank (a comparable vanilla 3 drop). Drawing a card as a battlecry is fairly expensive on a body - Novice Engineer and Gnomish Inventor both sacrifice 3 points of stats versus the "baseline" option, and Azure Drake does as well, but with the relatively minor bonuses of Spell Damage and relevant typing on top of that. which means it's already fairly pushed.
Now, this is somewhat complicated by the fact that Drakanoid Operative doesn't strictly draw a card. However, comparing Arcane Intellect and Thoughtsteal, we can see that stealing a copy of a card from the opponent's deck is approximately equal to a card, and Discover makes it yet more powerful than that. Take the drawback of needing a dragon in hand into account, and it makes sense to treat it as approximately a card draw in terms of costing.
So comparing Operative to Azure, we go from neutral to class, which is generally worth about 1 stat point, and we lose spell damage, which is also generally worth about 1 stat point. So at 5/5, Drakanoid Operative is positively comparable to an already-pushed card. And then they give it an extra point of HP on top of that.
bullshit-text won't change that.