Game Designer Max McCall Talks About Shamans
Max McCall, a Game Designer on the Hearthstone team had some things to say about the current state of Shamans in the game.
To summarize:
- There are three different types of Shaman decks currently popular, but they are not different enough to feel like that when playing against them.
- Dragon decks like Priest and Warrior as well as Reno decks are good against them. If you want to win versus a Shaman, play Reno Warlock.
- In general, about 1 in 4 of your opponents is a Shaman, which is kind of boring and they are not fine with it.
- The problem with Shaman is not that they are winning too often.
- Shamans are more popular than they like, and if it continues to be this way they might do something about it.
Read his full thoughts below:
Quote from Max McCallWe are keeping an eye on Shaman decks and we’ll see how they develop. We say that a lot. Here is what it means:Okay, so: there are a few different kinds of Shaman decks:
- There are aggressive Shaman decks that play a Pirate package and no Jade cards
- There are slightly slower Shaman decks that play Pirates and Jade cards
- And there are even slower Shaman decks that play the Jade cards but no Pirates
All of those decks are strong, but they are all weak against Dragon decks (like Priest and Warrior) and Reno decks. If you’re tired of losing to Shamans, play Reno Warlock. In some ways, that is fine: Shamans are popular, but there are strategies that are good against them.
In other ways, it is less fine. Collectively, Shamans are popular; you play against a Shaman about one game in four. Now, the reason that a ‘balanced’ metagame is desirable isn’t because ‘balanced’ metagames don’t have dominant strategies. They are desirable because you play against different classes more frequently, which means you have a wider variety in the types of Hearthstone games that you play. Playing Shaman isn’t a dominant strategy – again, they lose to plenty of decks – but it is still boring to play against the same class over and over again.
And even though the Shaman decks have distinct differences, those differences are small. If you played against Warlocks one game in four, but half of your Warlock opponents were playing slow Reno control decks and the other half were playing aggressive minion decks, those games would feel very different from one another. On the other hand, when you lose to Tunnel Trogg, Totem Golem, Feral Spirit three times in a row, it doesn’t matter if some of those Shamans had a Pirate package or if one of them had Jade cards. Your games still felt very homogenous and weren’t that fun especially the third time around.
The point I am trying to make is ‘classes can be problematic even though they do not win too often.’ Shamans don’t win too often. Right now, they are more popular than we’d like. If they are too popular for too long, we will do something about it, as we did when we nerfed them a couple of months ago. However, it takes time to assess whether or not a class will cause the game to feel too homogenous for too long. On release, Mech Mage and recently Pirate Warrior were more popular than Shamans have ever been – but only for a few weeks, then people discovered alternative strategies and the decks became less popular. Because we know that Shamans have weaknesses, we hope that those strategies will become more popular and drive down Shaman popularity a bit so that you play against more classes more often.
We are going to keep evaluating Shaman popularity in the near future, and if we don’t like what we see, we will change something about the metagame. Perhaps we will change a card. Perhaps we will see Shaman popularity fall and not have to step in at all. Perhaps we will wait to introduce a new set and see if that creates the metagame change we want. Either way, it is a thing we are actively concerned about and paying attention to.
Since when? I play a control Evolve Shaman, and I play those early game and so has every other Evolve Shaman I've played against.
Agreed. I play crusher shaman and one of its main strengths is that my first 5 turns look exactly like aggro shaman
Well, then you are both not really playing Evolve-Shaman. You playing Aggro, who is wanna-be Evolve.
But the point is that they HAVE to include these cards to stay competitive, meaning they are mandatory inclusions for the purposes of ranked, which is literally the only thing people play. They COULD play without them, but their deck would be considerably weaker because there isn't a single opener for shaman that's anywhere near the power level these cards provide.
People just afraid to think and experiment. There's a channel on YouTube - Dane Hearthstone. He really tries to think and make some new decks. But in the same time he's not Pro - not mastering one deck over-and-over again. And that is The Point. People know one combo and they afraid to go try something new. Like for Shaman:
I don't have an early game package. But, for example, that is why I put in my deck Elemental Destruction. So I can come back on the board later. But don't really know, how to use it, cause they never try. Do I blow up on turn 3? On 4? Do I totem? Against which class?
Dane is reaching Legend every season. And he never plays standard decks.
Very well said, people are afraid to go out from their comfort zone. They want to play the same deck over and over with the same results. Meta is an organic thing, it is changing permanently so you have adapt permanently. In a matter of fact not Hearthstone is stale but this kind of players.
Your example is great, someone that is enjoying this game like Dane Hearthstone will always see popular decks, or so called broken ones, as challenges for finding a counter deck.
I'm laddering with a control Jade Shaman that does not play Tunnel Trogg, Totem Golem, Spirit Claws, 4/7/7, or Feral Spirit. Mandatory is subjective.
But I'll agree these cards are indeed highly recommended.
Are they serious? 1 out of 4 games shaman? Well atleast it is not 1 out 2 games pirate warrior - Pirate warrior is the real cancer of this expansion and have to be dealt with
They are doing more and more?Of what?Pr?Drop the fanboy glasses for a second.
a)The game suffers serious balance issues.There are 3 mainly decks with different skins(reno decks,face,miracle rogue).Do you dare to deviate ?GG get rekt and this after months of shamanstone.--->They do nothing
b)There are evelasting bugs in the game,some of them since beta(nozdormu,floating cards etc) -->They do nothing
c)Their ''communication'' is full of embarassing for themselves posts,some ifs,maybes,general bs and they show poor understanting to their own game.You don't believe me?See the moderators posts at the homepage.
Look we all love the game,that's why we play and even bother to comment in sites like this.They make the same mistakes over and over again so we critise them to make the game better and NOT because we personally hate them.The game has competion now and if you play other card games(like i do) you will realise that the devs are doing poor jobs comparing to devs of games like faeria.
I was playing Thief-Rogue today. Got 62% win-rate overall. Thru Pirate Warriors and Reno decks. Gone from 14 rank to 8.
Before that I played Silence Priest. And it worked as well.
You are clearly mad and don't know, what are you talking about. Please stop Net-decking from main page and just try to make some deck work, that isn't played by 30% of community.
Only 5% of players play Rank5 and beyond. So I disagree, that they matter the most. State is not purely decided, on what people grind the ladder with or what pros play on championships. It's more than that.
Silence priest reaches Legend. But that deck was on main page, so you must know.
Meta isn't stale. People still try things out. It evolves and continues. And we are almost half-way to new expansion. I call it "pretty good".
This is typical blizzard buffing strategy.
Shaman is the worst class (pre-WotOG) ?? Buff him through the roof.
Blizz likes when every class has it's moments of shine and moments of shame. It has worked like that in WoW for the last ten years.
Hearthpwn tracks the decks created and uploaded on the site.
No point in creating shaman decks, if there is only one that works.
What you see on the front page is the popularity from people making decks on Hearthpwn. Blizzard has the actual data on all games played.
That data relates to the popularity of classes in this site. Basically 15% of people are creating Shaman decks or something along those lines. There is no precise way to get such data on Hearthstone without players consenting to services such as those provided by Vicious Syndicate to track player data to create an approximation of the meta-game (never the actual situation since only a few people submit their game data to VS over all HS players).
They should see how well shamans do after rotation before changing anything.