Small-Time Buccaneer & Spirit Claws Are Being Nerfed, Ranked Changes Incoming
Nerfs are coming! Hopefully there's going to be a little less Yaaarrrr and guiding spirits in the future. The Patch does not yet have a release date, but is scheduled for the end of February.
- Small-Time Buccaneer's Health is now 1. (Down from 2)
- Spirit Claws's Mana is now 2. (Up from 1)
Discuss This Nerf
Discuss This Nerf
The new and improved cards!
Oh yeah, there's a wicked ranked change too.
- Once you hit Rank 15, 10, or 5, you cannot de-rank past that rank - exactly how it works at Rank 20 today.
Quote from ZeriyahUpdate 7.1 Ranked Play Changes – Floors
We’re continuously looking for ways to refine the Ranked Play experience. One thing we can do immediately to help the Ranked Play experience is to make the overall climb from rank to rank feel like more an accomplishment once you hit a certain milestone. In order to promote deck experimentation and reduce some of the feelings of ladder anxiety some players may face, we’re introducing additional Ranked Play floors.
Once a player hits Rank 15, 10, or 5, they will no longer be able to de-rank past that rank once it is achieved within a season, similar to the existing floors at Rank 20 and Legend. For example, when a player achieves Rank 15, regardless of how many losses a player accumulates within the season, that player will not de-rank back to 16. We hope this promotes additional deck experimentation between ranks, and that any losses that may occur feel less punishing.
Update 7.1 Balance Changes
With the upcoming update, we will be making balance changes to the following two cards: Small-Time Buccaneer and Spirit Claws.
Small-Time Buccaneer now has 1 Health (Down from 2)
The combination of Small Time Buccaneer and Patches the Pirate has been showing up too often in the meta. Weapon-utilizing classes have been heavily utilizing this combination of cards, especially Shaman, and we’d like to see more diversity in the meta overall. Small Time Buccaneer’s Health will be reduced to 1 to make it easier for additional classes to remove from the board.
Spirit Claws now costs 2 Mana (Up from 1)
Spirit Claws has been a notably powerful Shaman weapon. At one mana, Spirit Claws has been able to capitalize on cards such as Bloodmage Thalnos or the Shaman Hero power to provide extremely efficient minion removal on curve. Increasing its mana by one will slow down Spirit Claws’ ability to curve out as efficiently.
These changes will occur in an upcoming update near the end of February. We’ll see you in the Tavern!
Patches is far from useless. He's the one thing that actually makes Pirate decks finally viable. STB allowed for aggro to apply too much early damage, but Patches still works with Rogues, and any deck that has Pirates in it. Hell, I've been seeing Pirate Warlocks using just Bloodsail Corsair and Patches.
This is bullsh1t, they nerfed only aggro cards, but didnt nerf any of the true cancerous Reno ones. Welcome 30 minute boring games cause the only viable decks now will be Jades and Reno focusing on control and anti-midrange cards delaying the game to turn 20, no normal midrange nor aggro will be viable now.
Too bad Reno isn't leaving soon... oh wait...
I know it hurts to think you may not *always* be able to end games on turn 4/5 after this, but open your mind to the possibilities of playing a less braindead deck and you may actually have fun!
Aggro is still gonna be a thing bud.
Pirate warrior was still a strong deck pre buccaneer and will continue to be. Aggro shaman will simply go back to troggs and totem golems rather than the pirate package (Until they cycle out of standard).
There will always be fast and slow decks. The problem both these cards caused was almost completely erasing most anything tempo, combo or mid range. The fact that these fast cards exist is the main reason control decks became so prevalent because the only way to stop a drastically fast deck is to play a drastically slow deck with multiple recovery mechanics or play a fast deck yourself leaving very little in between.
I gotta say, the nerfs are well balanced and definitely needed, but I'm most excited about the ladder "floors". This is something ladder sorely needed for a while. Nothing more heartbreaking than hitting a bad streak from rank 3 to 7 or 8. Good to know there's a point where you can relax and feel less anxiety about pressing play and really dig into some more fun and experimental decks rather than all decks after 5 (or honestly after 15 it seems lately) being tryhard meta net decks.
I CAN PLAY PALADIN AND HUNTER NOW!!!!!!
The true champions already play Paladin or Hunter.
Nope.. Those are just masochist in disguise
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At least the main thing you were concerned about removing on curve is also being nerfed :D
Control Shamans may still run spirit claws, since it doesn't care about curving out too much. Unplayable in Aggro tho.
i wanted them to buff some garbage cards...i just wanna play my backstreet lepers man.....
YEAHH BOIIII
This will hurt Pirate Warrior quite a lot, cards like Maelstrom Portal, Fan of Knives, Ravaging Ghoul, etc. will now kill every single one of their 1-drops, not to mention the buff to Rogue/Mage/Druid hero power.
Miracle Rogue probably can't run pirates anymore since they no longer provide enough tempo early on to hold off aggro.
The hyper-aggro versions of Shaman probably won't be very good anymore since this takes two cards out of their arsenal. More midrange versions can easily do well without both of these.
It will be interesting to see if this will actually remove the turn 4-7 kill decks from the meta, because that will certainly have big implications. Pirate Warrior was sort of the "you have to be this high" bar that all decks had to overcome, which means a critical amount of your deck had to be anti-face tech. Less Pirate Warrior means less need for those anti-face cards, which means more room for anti-midrange and anti-control cards. Sadly it might also mean the death of Control Warrior, since its entire niche was beating hyper-aggro.
Personally I didn't really see the need to nerf the Claws, I've never felt that it was particularly oppressive, at least not against the decks I play. Doubling the mana cost will completely kill it off, really sad, but that is the Blizzard way of nerfing I suppose...
Buccaneer will probably live on just because Patches is still bananas.
I never felt that the Spirit Claws were broken beyond belief, either--a lot of times Shamans were rolling Totems to see if they can get a 1 in 4 spell damage. The nerf seems to make this card a very poor man's Fiery War Axe with an extra durability. I was thinking that it would be a much more interesting weapon if it had +1 damage per spell damage in play for the Shaman. That way, it is overall a weaker card, but can be buffed in certain situations like when you have Spell Damage Totem/Bloodmage Thalnos, and Azure Drake in play, for instance, when it would come into play as a conditional 4-3 weapon for one mana, but wouldn't necessarily be anywhere near on curve. What do you think? Would that make more sense?
I think this card is a reaction to the whole Shamanstone meme--but as a broken-hearted Dragon Priest player, I'm kinda giddy about this.
"Personally I didn't really see the need to nerf the Claws"
yeah, being able to do 9 damage with only 1 mana seems perfectly balanced
The best case is certainly crazy, but the worst case is a worse Light's Justice. I find the average case to be that they get one hit with 3 attack, two with 1 attack. Plus it locks them out of playing another weapon (like Jade Claws) if they want full value.
It's only an annoyance because of how much better the spell power totem becomes compared to the rest.
Of course if you run a deck with low health minions and no way to kill spell damage minions, then it might feel op.
Wow, strange things happens - Blizzard makes actually the right decisions.