Go Figure, Druid is Popular! Dean Ayala Talks About Monitoring the Meta & Potential for Changes
Druid has been a very popular class recently thanks to some new additions handed to them during Frozen Throne. Unfortunately though when one class succeeds too well, the community won't stop asking questions and thankfully this time around, we've reeled in a response from Dean Ayala.
Below you'll find our recap of the important points and the full quote from Dean.
- It is not abnormal to see one archetype get popular early on; people latch onto powerful decks.
- Using short term statistics to say things like "more popular than Undertaker Hunter" isn't a good comparison. The two use different sets of data (biased publicly gathered vs all players via internal stats)
- Blizzard is always watching the meta.
- TL;DR: They are discussing possible Druid changes internally, but it's too early to say if anything will be changed.
Dean talked about some the cards being used by Druids and what they've been talking about internally.
Innervate, Swipe, Wild Growth
- Class defining cards are good, but auto-include cards into decks isn't their design goal.
- Internal discussions are weighing pros and cons about each card staying with Druid for eternity.
Ultimate Infestation
- They think changing it would only impact player sentiment and not play or win rate stats.
- It doesn't appear to be statistically responsible for Druid power or popularity.
- Player sentiment and the card's draw power not being a part of their class identity leave the card up for balance discussion.
Spreading Plague
- Druids have a vulnerability to swarms of minions. They liked this method to help them with that as it fit the flavor of the class.
- They'd like to only see it used during heavy swarm minion metas and not general inclusion in all Druid decks.
- The current meta shows a lot of swarm-style decks which is likely why we're seeing it played so much. Their eyes remain on this card.
Blue Post
Quote from Dean AyalaDruid surpasses in popularity the historic Undertaker Hunter
We cite internal statistics from time to time, but I tend to be cautious of that myself because it's very difficult to find any statistic that represents everyone. Given enough time and enough access I find that it's not difficult to display data to support almost any opinion about the metagame. At the end of the Un'Goro cycle, Hunter was actually the highest win rate class among all Hearthstone players. In fact, Hunter held the highest win rate for the a large portion of the expansion. Of course, I wouldn't say that in retrospect of Un'Goro that Hunter should have been less powerful, but that is what the data might suggest. With that in mind, here are some thoughts on some of the comments I've read in this thread.
- Druid surpasses in popularity the historic Undertaker Hunter.
The statistics being used for this post are for one rank over one day. The statistics we cite about Undertaker Hunter reference all Hearthstone players at all ranks over a time range of a week to a month. Druid is popular right now, but these statistics aren't comparable. If I had to guess what the most popular class within one rank of all time is, I would probably guess Mage at Rank 25 on an average day or Warrior at Legend during the Warsong Commander / Molten Giant era.
- Blizzard disappeared after the expansion.
As with every early metagame, we are monitoring play rates, win rates, and player sentiment on a daily basis. We hop in threads like this one fairly regularly to say exactly that, but people tend to want to know exactly whether we are or are not going to change something. We are discussing what potential changes we could make if Druid increases in popularity over time, but ~5 days of popularity is not enough to make that call at this time.
- The people want to know the status of a druid nerf.
We are looking at a number of Druid cards, but for a deck or archetype to reach this level of popularity this early on in an expansion is not abnormal. The population usually finds something powerful, latches onto it, then other decks that are powerful vs that archetype come onto the scene until one of them emerges as the new popular deck before the cycle continues. It's certainly possible that Druid is in fact so powerful that it prevents the normal metagame cycle from happening, but it's too early to tell. Here are some thoughts on current Druid cards. Keep in mind that these are some of the discussions we have internally, not a list of changes.
Innervate, Swipe, Wild Growth: When we changed Keeper of the Grove and Ancient of Lore, the goal was for Druids to have more interesting decisions to make when deckbuilding rather than a large group of cards to be automatically included. Even though those cards changed, there are still some other offenders of this such as Innervate or Swipe...and Wild Growth to a lesser degree. Having some powerful cards that help define what makes a class different can be good, but those cards in particular have spawned a number of internal conversations where we have been weighing the upside and downside to having each as a part of Druid for Hearthstone eternity.
Ultimate Infestation: Changing a card like Ultimate Infestation we think would have a bigger impact on player sentiment than actual play rate or win rate statistics. It's a big, flashy, cool design but it hasn't appeared to be statistically responsible for Druid power or popularity. Power level aside, having such a powerful card draw effect in Druid is something we are wary of in Druid because we wouldn't consider it part of their identity as a class. Partially for that reason and for sentiment reasons it is still part of discussions in terms of what to do with Druid should population and power level continue to rise.
Spreading Plague: Part of what keeps Druid vulnerable is their weakness to minion swarms due to a lack of powerful AoE. While we think plague is a soft version of AoE that fits the Druid flavor kit, it might shore up one of points of vulnerability more than we would have originally intended. Ideally Spreading Plague is used in heavy minion swarm metas and less so as a general inclusion in any Druid deck. Token Druid, Token Shaman, and Murloc Paladin are all showing high population in the current metagame so it's possible the meta for plague just happens to be now, but it's a card we're continuing to keep a close eye on going forward.
In order to fully understand how broken Ultimate Infestation is, just compare it to cards in other classes...
Ultimate Infestation - 10 mana, deal 5 damage, summon a 5/5, gain 5 armor, draw 5 cards
Lay on Hands - 8 mana, restore 8 health, draw 3 cards
Sprint - 7 mana, draw 4
It honestly feels like they forgot to add the "choose one" text to this card, as if you assign mana value to each part of that card, it should cost 20 mana. If it was "Choose One: Deal 5 damage, Summon a 5/5 OR Gain 5 armor, draw 5 cards" I think everyone would be a little less pissed. No card offers more swing value in the entire game, it's not even close. And if we're all being honest with eachother, there's no way Blizzard would ever nerf this card as hard as say making it a choose one or the other, like I mentioned above because that would mean admitting that they made a collosal oversight by including this card the way they did in this expansion.
And for everyone who says, "Blizzard can't do updates very often because that means submitting app updates to iOS and blah blah blah" Shadowverse makes changes to their cards and updates their app once a month. It's not impossible, they're just slow and need to stop making excuses.
Innervate is really class defining.. it may solve the issue, but I feel like it would be better to nerf the other cards, and leave innervate to not lose Druid's identity
F that, they nerfed quest rogue a fresh and finally viable way to play the class aside from miracle just beacuse the comunity and mostly control players complained and they still don't want to adress a deck with no weakness aside from combo OTK (and to call it a weakness is quite a stretch) damit.
UI needs a complete rework. Maybe two Choose One or maybe something like Draw 2, deals 3, gain 4 armor and summon a 5/5. Right now, its just a ridiculous amount of value that no other class can match. Spreading Aids is boring as hell too, needs to be 6 mana I guess. With some nerfs, this meta will be the best ever. Jesus, I love every game I play (even some druids, the problem is how much druids are there right now)
I think the problem is not that but Intervate itself. We used to live in a world were Jade Druid would use all its cards to ramp and have a little to no hand. But now they just spend their whole hand ramping to drop a 10 mana card turn 3 or 4 and replenish their hand.
My friend, the counters you mentioned are not even reliable according to matchup winrates posted in vicious syndicate. Druid IS very overpowered. Almost every single player that constantly hover around top 100 Legend has said the same (tictac, cydonia, yagut, saiyan, ant, casie, xsirez, feno, many many others). UI has a 73% win rate when played. Over 60% when kept in mull. Jade druid is over 60% win rate overall, mid shammy was around 58% and was considered broken by many. Blizzard has a very hard time admitting when they fuck up.
Damn, How hard is it to put new cards in old tier 1 lists to see if something is busted? Same thing happened with pirate warrior and shaman. Im certain that they playtest cards with the garbage fun decks they show on reveal stream. Only exception to this was quest rogue because it was a completely new archetype. It seems blizzard play testing focuses wayy too much on fun rather than seeing how new fun cards can be used in toxic ways. They give people cards like spirit claws, crypt lord, patches, the new druid 2 drop, and many others expecting "cool and fun archetypes" when that never happens.
Im not sure if Im allowed to post links to other sites. You can look up "vicious syndicate live" in google and look For "top archetype matchups". You can also look at their latest meta report on their site. Hsreplays is also a good option to see winrates and see the winrates of specific cards when played/kept in mull/drawn.
Personally Im at legend rank and druid is a nightmare past rank 5, to the point I decided to stopped playing completely until blizzard changes things. I love to experiment new stuff but druid is ruining that fun. 45% of my matches are druid and losing at mulligan because you fail to guess the archetype is pretty annoying. The thing about murloc paly is that its only a bit favored in the jade druid matchup, but if the druid is teched for aggro the matchup is close to 50/50. At the start of the expansion palys seemed like a reliable counter because the jade druids were making their decks very greedy to beat the mirror.
In the case of exodia mage vs jade druid, the avg player believes EXMages are favored by a lot, but data shows druid is favored and pro players also agree druid is favored (monsanto and zalae said they were beating mages consistently with jade druid). What makes people believe that the matchup is mage favored is that a lot of players don't know how to play the matchup correctly. As druid you cant play the typical slow ramp style. You play jade druid like its aggro.
A lot of frustration from jade druid has been there since day 1 of mean streets. A lot of people already knew jade idol was a really bad idea. The deck completely destroys an entire archetype. Quest rogue was guilty of this as well and was nerfed. Another thing that made jade druid annoying is that is wasnt a deck that was "discovered", it was a deck forced on players by blizzard (like many others in MSoG, hence why many people disliked MSoG). People were playing it day 1. Right now the frustration is much more because blizzard gave us a really good expansion with a lot of potential, but Druid is pooping on the exploration phase and makes experimenting and trying new things not fun.
Finally, you are not the only one that dislikes Exodia mage. I personally dont like it, especially after blizzard spent weeks talking about interactivity with decks like old freeze mage and miracle rogue with conceal and then gave us quest mage and quest rogue. The thing about Exodia mage is that is has a pretty bad win rate overall (40%) and its not super popular. So that deck wont see any changes for a good time unless next expansion makes it completely busted.
I actually do hate exodia a ton more than jade, just because there is literally nothing you can do.... also I play mill rogue so jades are like card draw suicide bombers.
Its called eater of secrets. remember the tech card everyone played last expansion against mage? but no one does now because jade is busted so tech cards are used towards that deck instead. not hard to counter quest mage. I even played against a hunter who played the Weasel Tunneler and it was annoying as fuck to dig into my deck and pull Weasel Tunneler out of it. Quest mage will win a lot of the control match ups because you're just giving it time to get the cards it needs. Aggro decks do fine against it.
If we go by our previous experiences with nerfs, blizzard will touch the most unlikely card and nerf it to oblivion LUL.
Innervate, UI and SP are the biggest offenders, innervate being the worst one (I wont be surprised if innervate doesn't get changed but one can hope). I believe innervate should be changed to refresh 2 mana crystals. That way people cant get cheesy wins with turn 1 vicious/hydra or innervate UI out on turn 4/5. I personally hate the jade mechanic, its unfun and its something blizzard forced on us on MsoG, but I dont think Jade idol will be touched since every jade card is rotating in 2018. Ill be very surprised if they do change jade idol. UI will most likely see change since iksar said powerful card Draw is not part of the druid identity. The most important thing about this change is that it needs to come out FAST.
I think wild growth and swipe should not be touched.
Innervate is kind of touch and go i think honestly they should just start with ultimate infestation. Cut it to 3/3/3/3 I honestly lean to that over 4/4/4/4 as putting it at 4/4/4/4 off sets it vs priest even at 3/3/3/3 it would probably still see play. or keep the armor and damage and make it 5 damage 5 armor 3 cards and a 3/3 would actually be a more ideal balance as that is still strong.
If they are going to touch innervate instead just move it to wild and start actually rotating the core set. With fandril cycling out some of the card power levels will go down in druid and it wond be quite as bad. Nerfing ultimate infestation i think will be enough.
I hate the idea of nerfing core cards. Innervate defines what druid is. It's allowed to be a little op because Druid is (was) based around it. The problem is the new cards remove druids weaknesses and buff their strengths. If bliz starts removing class core cards you get even worse power swings, like hunter, were their base deck is so bad the need really strong cards every expansion. Even if they can do it, its more cards to buy every time.
Admitting you made a mistake is harder than passing Calculus II when you have an ego the size of the moon. Dean and the dev team have never made a mistake in their entire lives, just ask them.
Innervate should say 'the next minion you play this turn cost 2 less'
I think that would make it a fair nerf, and it wouldnt destroy the card completely.
Swipe is fine as it is, its one of the least powerful cards in the really powerful druid decks. (im not saying the card is bad, but i dont think it needs to be nerfed)
Wild Growth change could be something like Excess Mana cost 1 or 2 from 0
Ultimate Infestation could be all 4s instead of 5s, not sure if it would change the power level enough.
Spreading Plague is balanced i think.
I think the same about Innervate.
Swipe isn't so strong, it's an auto-include because all other Druid AOEs are shit.
Wild Growth isn't a problem I think because it's not an auto-include.
UI should draw less cards, 3 or 2.
Spreading Plague is very situational so it will hardly became a problem.
The real problem of innervate is that he gives you too much power too early. My idea is change it to 3 mana cost give you 5 mana this turn to fix those nasty turn 1 fledgelings and such.
nerfing innervate removes a lot of druids personality, its a core card that can be overpowered because its what druid is based around. Removing core cards is like removing the class. Whats the point of playing druid if you cant ramp? Sure its a strong card but so is fireball, so is prep, so is antonidas, so is eviscerate, so is fiery war ax, so is pwd. Every class needs strong core cards to define what it is and make it unique. Similair to the charge ad bf nerfs, they got rid of entire playstyles and I simply would rather not see blizzard do that, because you know that in a few expansions Druid will be absolute trash like every class is at some point if they don't have those few core cards. This is a big reason hunter is so trash/op in standard, they are entirely reliant on the cards blizz gives them, and blizz is completely retarded when it comes to new card design/balance.
Actually it's rotating out in 8 months.