Dean Ayala on Shudderwock: Revisiting the Topic Early Next Week
Dean Ayala tweeted this evening that the team is going to be looking into Shudderwock feedback early next week.
How do you feel about Shudderwock? I can definitely agree with the animations being a bit on the long side and would definitely at least appreciate a less excruciating death.
Quote from Dean AyalaWe’ll be reading more feedback over the weekend and will revisit the Shudderwock topic early next week. Checking out both animation timings and feedback on the deck playstyle itself. Let us know what you think and enjoy Witchwood!
Good thing they are acting fast on this one.
While they are fixing this, they should do something about Divine Favor and some key card fron Cubelock... we all know that this nerfs are coming someday, but I guess it's better to wait several months to anounce a nerf and take another month to make the changes after the announce
-_-
Issue spotted! Nerf incoming in 2 months.
The moment that a player presses that Concede button, the match is over. ALL animations should stop and the game ends. This applies to everything, not just Shudderwock. Currently it is better to Quit Game than to Concede as at least then you don't have to watch several minutes of you dying while a lizard yells at you.
If you're enraging players enough to quit the game, they may just not start it back up again.
That being said, Shudderwock *is* the problem, not Grumble. Shudderwock limits all future battlecry *card* design space. Think about that for a moment. Shudderwock existing limits the ability to make any powerful battlecry for shaman or neutral cards in the future. Yes it's mostly minions, but hero cards and weapons have battlecries too.
If you made Shudderwock so that it cast random battlecries played this game, but only up to a certain amount (somewhere between 3 to 5 or so) then it would be fine. The animation wouldn't be that annoying, and there would be no infinite battlecries.
Yup, is not the card itself, it's how long the combo takes. The card is strong, yes, but not overpowered.
What I think the solution should be: Change Grumble, Worldshaker Battlecry to only affect Elementals
My personal opinion:
Remove Shudderwock and bring a card that fits the shaman lore and has some decent power on it's own.
No one wants to watch a 10min animation loop, knowing they are just dead at the end of it.
Let's memorize cards that actually fit the shaman's lore ...
RIP Hallazeal the Ascended. RIP Thunder Bluff Valiant. RIP Ancestor's Call. RIP Lava Shock. RIP Totem Golem.
True, shaman has lost all of it's class identity.
As a Shaman player both in WoW and Hearthstone, I agree with you.
This Shudderwock crap is totally non-shaman BS only used by tryhard players.
I was really hoping that the elemental deck would take off but right now only this nonsense deck is "viable".
My suspicion is that the whole testing and balance team uses a build with disabled or extremely fast animations, so that they can test more efficiently. That's how they missed the issue with Shudderwock. And of course none of them uses the mobile client more than absolutely necessary to test the mobile client itself. Otherwise they would have noticed that Echo cards are really unfun on mobile. Try to play 5 Squashlings to heal your face once the rope starts burning.
You want my opinion, Grumble, Worldshaker is the problem, not Shudderwock. Grumble‘s battlecry is too good, bounces your minions back and makes them 1 mana. So when you make copies of Shudderwock they get bounced back, allowing you to combo with the Lifedrinker to get infinite Shudderwocks and a OTK.
So my advise? Change Grumble’s Battlecry. Make it so it’s a battlecry that benefits Elementals, like “Add two friendly Elementals that died this game to your hand that cost (1)” or something. Doesn’t kill the card, destroys the BS OTK but keeps Shudderwock good, and opens up new possibilities for Elemental Shamans.
What this does is make control match ups that plan on seeing the entire deck unplayable which in turn makes people just default to playing aggro decks.
to their credit, the response time has greatly improved.
Yeah for their standards. Compared to any other online game there is still lots of room for improvement.
Like most people are saying, the issue isn't with the power level of Shudderwock its in the long animation run times. In terms of power level Shudderwock is no more powerful than Cube Warlock or Quest Mage, and the combo itself is slow to set up. Certainly much slower than Cube Warlock, making it quite susceptible to faster decks. I honestly hope they don't change the card too much (outside of the animations fix and maaaaybe nerfing him to 10 mana), since Shaman needs a way to win games too.
Ithink that the problem is with Murmuring Elemental since it doubles the animation time. I would much like it to change so that it reads: Battlecry: Double the damage of the next battlecry.
But then that punishes legit decks. You want my opinion, Grumble is the problem since it makes the copies of Shudderwock 1 mana, meaning you can just spam them. Shudderwock is a great card, but the fact you can make more and spam them into an OTK is broken and needs fixing.
I get your point, but whats to stop changing Gumble with cards like Youthful Brewmaster. Turn 9 fill your board with 6/6s and repeat every other turn from now on.
so blizzard, you can just make saronite chain gang summon another saronite chain gang and this degenerate combo is over.
In the presentation video at the end Ben Brode say "it's too OP" and then we see Hagatha. I think they swapped Shudderwock by mistake.
https://youtu.be/4roAY-6Lrdk?t=6m40s
I actually don't have all key cards for playing Shudderwock Shaman(even Shudderwock himself) but let look on hsreplay's statistic - Shudderwock Shaman 41.69% winrate, lol. So maybe they needed nerf and Kingsbane Rogue at winter in this case. Maybe only fix of animation and that's all. Deck can be strong but mostly sucks against fast archetypes.