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!
Ultimately I think it's Auctioneer that makes Jade Druid so powerful. Jade idol is obviously still very strong against control decks, but without being able to draw your entire deck shuffling your idols becomes a much less appealing proposition.
I agree BagButt.
I'm happy they are addressing the deck because it feels awful to play against it when you can't race them but I would of rather them kept it at 4 minions but made the crystal core not interact with preparation.
Think I would have preferred The Crystal Core to be a minion, or an dormant reward like Lakkari Sacrifice gives you.
If you make the quest un-preppable I think this quest becomes balanced.
They should have nerfed the mana cost of Crystal Core instead. I would have loved to have made a control deck with this card viable, but with 5 minions you'd need a load of garbage cards in your control deck. This nerf kind of makes I nearly unplayable and makes effin Jade Druid that much more powerful.
QR will be complete trash.
Understandable, but i'm expecting many other boring decks to face the same destiny then?
Well. 1600 dust back for sure.
Control decks beat jades and fire plum by killing their opponents. A good control deck has win cons. quest rouge gets to go off too soon, hopefully the bump up to 5 helps.
So, there is one serious issue with this statement. Control has actually been doing very well in the tournament scene. Right now. With both jade idol and quest rouge in rotation, and many people are playing both jade druid and quest rogue in their lineups.
The fact that a deck has a counter does not mean that it is unplayable. Faster strategies let you grind more ladder games quickly, and thus they will always be fairly popular there. But there are currently tools in the game that let you have fairly good matchups against aggressive decks. The issue I tend to find while climbing through the lower ranks is that people think 'control' means 'put all of my favorite greedy cards in one deck'. That sort of mentality is actually put pushes control out of low ranks more than anything else, because the hyper-greedy control decks beat the control decks that are tech-ed to deal with aggro.
As a side note, I think jade idol is by far the best designed jade card. I love that there is a card that can serve as both a stand-alone win condition, as well as an ok card against faster decks. And I love that there is a card that can prevent slow matchups from devolving to drawing as few cards and committing as few threats as possible. Fatigue matchups are tiring to play and boring to watch.
How would a deck beat another deck if it wasn't by killing their opponents?
And no, it's the other way around. Jade beats Control, a Control deck can't deal with 1 mana 8/8s every turn, aggro's solution to this is killing the Jade deck before he can spam 1 mana 8/8s, but a Control deck can't do that. About Fire Plume's Heart, I think it's beatable with Control and Jade Idol is a much bigger problem.
And indeed hopefully the nerf to The Caverns Below helps. Better something than nothing.
if you ask me all this change will do is make sure that aggro beats quest rogue more consistently. right now quest rogue actually has a decent chance against aggro if they are teched for it and get a good opener. control will still have a hard time winning against quest rogue despite the nerf.
Since control means pulling multiple Tirions from stonehill defender or getting multiple packs from Elise, I really don't want control to be a thing. I think we can all agree handlock and control warrior were real control decks
This won't matter. People who lose to Quest Rogue will still complain about it. The problem isn't the number of bounces, it's that the 5/5 effect cannot be overcome. You have 5/5 minions that are, with only a few exceptions, unremovable except by doing 5 damage to them.
All they had to do is change the card effect to: "For the rest of this game, your minions all have Battlecry: this minion is 5/5."
In most QR games I play, I have a 5th bounce available anyway, and almost always playable on the same turn as the fourth.
I will boldly predict right now that this does not kill the deck and does not end the bitching. Or rather, it doesn't kill the deck where it is played now, which is almost exclusively in ranks 16-20, because QR is not competitive outside the bottom half of the ladder.
wadabout pirate warrior?
ikr? we need another golakka crawler type of card ? ... not a fan of the deck but its not as unbalanced as quest rogue is
Nice thought, man! Priest can auto concede against quest rogue with your proposal.