Rogue Quest Nerf Incoming! Un'Goro Q&A this Friday!
The Caverns Below will require that Rogues now play five minions with the same name. Finally?
In addition to this upcoming change, Ben Brode and Mike Donais will be holding a live Q&A this Friday, June 30 at 10:30 AM PDT (1:30 PM EDT, 7:30 PM CEST) on the PlayHearthstone Twitch.
Poll: Is this a Good Balance Change?
What do you think? Let us know more about your opinion in the comments below.
Nerf Announcement
Quote from KeganbeIn an upcoming update, we will be making a balance change to the Rogue card: The Caverns Below.
The Caverns Below now reads: Quest: Play five minions with the same name. Reward: Crystal Core.
Since the release of Journey to Un'Goro, Hearthstone has enjoyed a wider variety of competitively viable classes and decks than ever before. We’ve been monitoring overall gameplay, and we’ve decided that—even though everything is varied and many decks are viable—a change to The Caverns Below is still warranted.
The Caverns Below is uniquely powerful versus several slower, control-oriented decks and played often enough that it’s pushing those decks out of play. This change should help expand the deck options available to players both now and after the release of the next expansion.
Blog Announcement
Quote from BlizzardThe elementals are calling! Join us June 30 at 10:30 a.m. PDT for a live Q&A session where Game Director Ben Brode and Principal Game Designer Mike Donais will be answering your questions about Journey to Un’Goro and the upcoming balance changes.
Want to learn more: Check out the forum post!
Have something you'd like to ask? Here’s how you can be part of the conversation:
- Tweet @PlayHearthstone with the hashtag #QA with your question
- Post a question below in the blog comments
- Join us live in Twitch chat and direct questions to us @PlayHearthstone
Can’t make it? Don’t worry – we will be posting the full video on the PlayHearthstone YouTube channel after the Q&A has completed.
Follow the official Hearthstone Twitch channel to be notified when the stream begins.
We’ll see you there!
Sweet!
As someone who believes the card was far too oppressive to control archetypes I appreciate an effort to change it, but this feels a bit off the mark. I'm not sure what the impact of boosting from 4 to 5 will be in those control match-ups as that doesn't feel like that huge of a nerf for the slower games as it's not about activating the quest so much as what happens after it's active that's the problem. This feels like it'll maybe give control decks a better than nil % to win but further the gap between aggro vs Quest Rogue match-up. What that means is the nerf will do one of two things: won't actually fix the stated problem or just outright kill the deck entirely. That's *not* a good balance change.
I think the best fix would have been changing "For the rest of the game, your minions are 5/5s" to "At the end of your turn, your minions become 5/5s". This would at least allow decks like Shaman with Devolve to have a sensible way to clear the enemy board and most importantly it would remove the charge shenanigans that really turn the deck into an essentially 100% win rate versus control assuming the rogue player is reasonably good and doesn't actual draw dead for like 5 turns in a row.
This all comes back to problem with Charge in a game where there are neither assigned blockers or spells being playable on opponent's turns. A Quest Rogue can fairly regularly cobble together 15+ charge damage once the combo is active and in a lot of cases just straight lethal with Southsea Deckhand summoning a Patches the Pirate and any number of bounce effects and/or boars in hand. That's just silly.
Charge is fine IF they stop giving it too cheap minions. That is what fuels aggro. If charge was mostly just restricted to things like King Krush the mechanic would find a place more as a bursty win condition at the end game that costs a lot of mana (similar to Pyroblast, but weak to taunt).
Damn, I went into ladder today thinking the nerf was live... bunch of pigs and pirates still dominating the game.
Well, this'll be pretty long, do pardon that please.
So as far as the 5 minion cap increase goes, i personally thing it's rather inadequate as a balancing choice. There are variations o this deck, i personally only run 4 bounce effects, no thistle tea and no fire spirits, and for anyone who doesn't incorporate all bounce effects, well, this nerf will be very heavy. The firefly and 6 bounce variations may be relatively fine enough with this but my problem there is that i don't want to play another jade druid and that's what this deck will become, being able to put in wisps or other random and not that good things, making it fun and relatively still efficient, that's a big part of the fun for me and i believe other players too, by doing this nerf they'll force you to build the deck in almost the same way every time and it'll become like jade druid, with 28 must have cards and hey, you get to put in 2 cards you chose, that's all the variety these decks will have.
Now i know the strongest variations of this deck can be quite frustrating, i myself have been demoralized when i finish the quest on turn 8 and that fire fly deck just did it on turn 3, but i think there are several better ways to balance it than limiting it so much.
First let's look at the core, there have been ideas such as make it unaffected by preparation, which isn't a bad idea for a more balanced balancing
Other ideas are to place it on the field like the warlock portal. I like this as i think it would be more amusing to actually have it there, i'd be cooler as we say. This can actually be a buff though. The thing with quest rogue is that they're 5/5s, when you reach 7 it's really hard to lose, so you don't really need all those slots and if you have a portal and can use it for position to dodge meteors, betrayals and other such that is pretty much a buff. A good way to make this a minor nerf would be rather to place it always on the left or right side so they have their minions restricted to 6 without being able to abuse it for positioning.
Ok, this next one will be a pretty hated idea i'm sure, but i think it might be a very interesting one. Make the core stay on the field and it'll only buff adjacent minions. Now, this will be an entire rework on the quest, and i myself admit i won't really like it being completely changed, but i still think this would be better than turning it into a jade druid with no whatsoever variations, not to mention the position would be a more tactical and intriguing uptake on it, though this would both be a complete rework and possibly very big nerf.
Well, the final idea will most likely be the most hated. Make it stay on the field but make it destroyable. Now when i say destroyable, this is a quest reward, it needs to be hard to kill, maybe make it have 15 health, absolute immunity to any and all destroy effects and also it can be used for positioning. Now this would mean 1 meteor would end the game for you so maybe making it untargetable would be better, while this might make it a bit too durable, you could still destroy it relatively well with minions and aoe or non-targeted spells.
Well to anyone who lasted through this thank you for sticking with my silly ideas I know some of these are quite eccentric and they're all pretty much absolutely unlikely aside from the preparation one and maybe placing it on one of the two sides of the field but i'm glad i was able to share some my thoughts on this. I'd love if you'd give me feedback on what you think on these ideas and i do hope that they manage to adjust this card without turning it into another jade druid.
Why not hotfix the card? It's broken.
Every person who voted 'NO' is a salty Rogue Quest player
Or a Pirate Warrior player who doesn't want to lose one of their main sources of easy wins.
I hope they understand not every control deck is bad against the Rogue Quest. I do just fine with mine playing against it but then i'm not playing Discover Mage hoping for 3-4 Ice Blcoks to win me the game.
Lets also not kid ourselves here. Pirate warrior win on turn 4-5 even with taunts in the way is WAY more cancerous.
"The Caverns Below is uniquely powerful versus several slower, control-oriented decks" ...same as Jade Idol, so stop print cards with power to destroy an entire archetype
In theory that sounds like a good idea but then you realize druids also have Feral Rage and Earthen Scales so is pretty unlikely to rush them down if you're playing any kind of slow deck. Jade druid has at minimum 65% winrate against any control decks outhere according to tempostorm, basically same as quest rogue but without lack interaction
the deck has less than a 50% win rate but b/c people cry and cry loudly they are nerfing a perfectly fine card into the ground...unless they are doing this to free up some design space for the next expansion this is a ridiculous nerf and only pandering to the cry babies on the forums...get over yourself
It has a low winrate because most people don't actually know how to handle aggro match-ups. I got legend with quest rogue last month by beating token shamans and aggro druids. The card is broken but perhaps this nerf is a little too painful against aggro. I agree there wasn't much thought about how to nerf the card, but it definitely had to be nerfed for a healthier game
When does the real cancer of the meta get nerfed? (IE Discover Mage)
I think a lot of people are missing the point here. This nerf isn't just because of quest rogue's current performance, but because of it's performance in the unreleased expansion. It must hard counter some of the new archetypes.
While I understand the nerf; Quest Rogue and literally every single other hard face aggro deck could have been slightly more "efficiently" nerfed to give other "off the wall creative decks" a decent opportunity by just making charge's ability always state "Can't attack heroes the turn it's played." We saw this or different kind of nerf happen with Warsong Commander, Charge, Arcane Golem.
My argument aside, Quest Rogue's use of the boar did require the quest to be completed for the 1 mana 5/5 with charge to be a thing.
I'm looking forward to the announcement of the announcement of the next Hearthstone expansion. :D
So what if it is?
With "pandering" you actually mean "people are asking for it". Indeed they are. They have reasons for it too, and arguments.
Compare the "pandering nerf" to Shaku, the Collector. Oh wait.
So...if I agree with you I should downvote?