Upcoming Hearthstone Balance Changes - Wild Growth, Nourish, Level Up!, Saronite Chain Gang, Leeching Poison CHANGES ARE NOW LIVE
Five card changes are coming to Hearthstone on December 19th, which is... today!
- [Discuss this Change] Wild Growth now costs 3, up from 2.
- [Discuss this Change] Nourish now costs 6, up from 5.
- [Discuss this Change] Level Up! now costs 6, up from 5.
- [Discuss this Change] Saronite Chain Gang now summons another Saronite Chain Gang, instead of a copy of the minion.
- [Discuss this Change] Leeching Poison now costs 1, down from 2, and only gives Lifesteal for 1 turn.
Check out Blizzard's post below for more information on each of the changes.
Quote from BlizzardIn an update scheduled to arrive December 19 PST, the following cards will be changed.
Developer’s Note: This balance update is focused on improving the long-term health of both Standard and Wild. We've opted to make these changes earlier in the expansion cycle than we normally consider; we'd like to hear your feedback on the timing of this update, in addition to what you think of all the individual card changes.
Wild Growth – Will cost 3 mana. (Up from 2)
Nourish – Will cost 6 mana. (Up from 5)
Wild Growth and Nourish have been present in every mid-range, combo, and control Druid deck since their introduction in the Basic and Classic set. When cards from the Basic and Classic set are too powerful, they can have negative long-term effects on the game. Continuously playing against these cards can start to feel repetitive, and they can feel so mandatory that they stifle creative deckbuilding decisions. By increasing the mana cost of both cards by one, we expect them to be considerations in late-game control Druid decks, but more difficult to fit in strategies that don’t directly take advantage of ramping mana.
Level Up! – Will cost 6 mana. (Up from 5)
Odd Paladin has consistently been one of the most powerful and most played decks since its introduction in The Witchwood. By removing Level Up from Odd Paladin, we still expect it to be a competitive board control deck, just with more consistent damage output that should be easier to play around.
Saronite Chain Gang – Now reads: Taunt. Battlecry: Summon another Saronite Chain Gang.
Shudderwock brings an interesting combo to the table, but playing Shudderwock multiple times in a single game can be frustrating. Changing Saronite Chain Gang makes playing multiple Shudderwocks in a game much more difficult. Shudderwock should now exist as a powerful one-turn effect rather than constantly copying itself with Saronite Chain Gang’s Battlecry.
Leeching Poison – Will cost 1 mana. (Down from 2). Now reads: Give your weapon Lifesteal this turn.
We love the fantasy of building a powerful weapon over the course of a game with Kingsbane, but granting it a permanent Lifesteal effect with Leeching Poison resulted in an endgame with few weaknesses, as well as conflicting with our philosophy that Rogues should not have persistent self-healing effects. Making the Lifesteal effect only active for one turn should address some of the power level issues with Kingsbane Rogue’s late game.
Kiwii's Thoughts
Resident deck architect Kiwiinbacon had some thoughts on the nerfs.
Well holy fuck. This might just be the most radical round of changes I've seen in Hearthstone. And as a Wild player, I welcome them wholeheartedly.
Wild Growth: The popularity of Wild Growth in pretty much every Druid deck created two problems. Firstly, you had to have a damn good reason NOT to play it in your deck, rather than have a reason to include it in the first place, because skipping 2 and 3 drops and going straight to 4 is just too good. The differences between minion power are the most noticeable at these levels, so if your opponent is playing around with 2 and 3 drops and you start dropping Ironwood Golems, who really cares what they played, now they need immediate spot removal to maintain their position. So in that respect, you had very little choice, your deck essentially started with 2 Wild Growths in it no matter what it was trying to do. Secondly, it meant that pretty much no low cost card that isn't removal saw play in Druid. Why play Wardruid Loti when you can play a 4 drop in the same turn instead because you ramped? Druid's kit was thus just reduced to early game ramp and early game removal/draw and from 5 mana up is where thing started branching out. That's pretty limiting for design not only of cards but also archetypes. When even token decks play Wild Growth, it's a sign that it's just too much. And I like that Jade Blossom still isn't just a strictly better Wild Growth because you don't get excess mana from it.
Nourish: This one I'm a bit more doubtful about. Having hit the earlier piece in the ramp chain, and arguably the more crucial one, means you're usually not just skipping your turn 1 and 2, you're also skipping your turn 3 to ramp to 4 mana. Then on turn 4...you skip again because you can't play Nourish for 5 anymore either. Exactly how many turns can you afford to skip against aggro? The answer is not this many. It makes dedicated ramp decks kinda dead in the water. I guess partially that was the point, as many of them could just opt out of playing much removal, opt out of playing mid-turn drops like Ironwood Golem (then again, now you HAVE to play Ironwood Golem, cause what else is there? That's another problem we face now) and would just ramp like crazy regardless of circumstances. Now your ramp has to be a lot more deliberate and safe. I just feel like, ramp being one of my favourite strategies, they weakened the core identity of Druid to a point I'm not sure it can recover from. I'm definitely curious how various Druid decks will shape up now, how many of them cut the ramp and curve like everyone else and how many double down and ramp even harder (innervates, Biology Projects, etc.) to maintain their identity (Aviana + Kun OTK Druids, Taunt Druids, etc.). There's no doubt a lot of Druid decks will now require a good bit of overhauling in their mana base, but there's also no doubt esentially all Druid decks will wind up significantly weaker because of it.
Level Up!: Phew dodged that one. Stopped playing Odd Pally just when Rastakhan came out. In Wild, you still got Warhorse Trainer and Quartermaster, but Level Up provided so much consistency it was kinda inevitable you were going to get pummelled into the ground on turn 5 without preemptive boardclear. And if you ever let one board stick, it was guaranteed you're taking the damage. Now everything isn't so stacked in Odd Pally's court, you don't get both the best Silver Hand Recruit generators (Muster, Stand Agaisnt Darkness) and the best support (Steward of Darkshire, Level Up, Quartermaster). However, in Even Pally it feels kinda off, as their generation isn't as bursty, but more steady and slow, it's relatively easy to keep the Silver Hand Recruit numbers down to a point where this isn't even desirable. I've faced many an Even Paladin and only a small percentage of them even bothered with Lightfused Stegodon because the Sliver Hand simply wasn't that core a piece of their strategy. They cared about the bodies to buff with Steed and Kings more than the type of body it was. This may leave Level Up kinda stranded in the middle of nowhere. And it definitely makes Odd Pally worse against high-aggression decks. That taunt saved me in many games in the past, now I'd be SOL.
Saronite Chain Gang: Here I'm not sure that was the right call. It doesn't change much in Wild because the Dopplegangster interaction remains unchanged, then again, Wild has the most ways to answer a Shudderwock deck in the first place. However, if they simply don't want this deck to be a thing, I'd say a much more prudent choice would have been to change Grumble. Without Grumble, the deck falls to pieces. It can flood a board once and cross its fingers that it's enough, or it can keep bouncing/copying Shudderwocks with Zola/Brewmasters, but then it can only ever play one Shudder a turn, making the deck relatively toothless in comparison. My guess is they didn't like the latter scenario either, seeing as the combo is massively slowed down but still devolves into "play Shudderwock every turn and hope they eventually bleed out", which isn't particularly fun. Either way the combo is either dead or weaker (Doppleganster being slower and not defensive at all), which is fine by me. I prefer a board-centric Jade Shudder Shaman anyway, and that feels like a much more healthier strategy to play than that coinflippy bullshit was.
Leeching Poison: This is just straight up murder of an archetype. Pirate Kingsbane with Myra's Unstable Element can still continue existing because that one just goes face until you keel over, but the endless Kingsbane + Coldlight battles are over for good with this change. And as much as I love classes sticking to their identity (Rogue is the only class that has a baseline weapon and a great number of weapon buffs yet barely ever focused on that), Kingsbane was the wrong way to go. If you're playing a control/value deck, you just could. Not. Win. Because the only counter to Kingsbane was kill them in one turn (good luck with their Saps, Vanishes, Blade Flurries, Doomerangs, Evasions, etc.) which control decks suck at anyway, rush them down before they can establish their pieces (most control decks can't muster the tempo to do that), take away enough of their pieces that they're slowed down to a crawl (Dirty Rat out Coldlights, Shinyfinders, break their weapon repeatedly) which required a significant sacrifice in deck space and still often wasn't enough with the right draw, or copy their weapon (tried that, NEVER works). Simply put, you could not reliably beat that deck as control, ever, (unless you somehow maybe managed to stick a Water Elly as Frost Lich Jaina) and there was essentially no amount of teching you could do to combat that because the weapon cannot be silenced or stolen, it just always is. Well, now...now it just isn't even a concern outside aggro. Not being able to steal upwards of 60 life every game kinda throws a spanner in the works for that deck, to the point of killing it completely, but honestly, the way it murdered every slow deck without potential for counterplay just was not healthy. Maybe Thief Rogue can pick up the pieces with Spectral Cutlass and fill in that weapon-focused gap in Rogue, but now at least you can counter it easily. Partially sad to see Kingsbane stoop to aggro instead of finally being a Control-focused Rogue, but definitely glad that that particular implementation is gone. There is the distant possibility that control Kingsbane survives by timing its Leeching Poisons on the hit + Doomerang turn, but if so, it definitely becomes an infinitely more beatable deck, cause they can only do that a few times (twice with Doomerang plus potentially two more times on hit if they nail every Mimic Pod) before their health starts depleting permanently, and even Violet Illusionist can only stave off the damage for so long.
Druid nerfs? Let's play some hearthstone ladies and gentleman, this could be a (slightly) new dawn...odd rogue is gonna still be brutal though.
Not sure about that, they just killed shudderwock shaman, that means that we're gonna see lots of new control decks that probably will counter odd rogues.
Odd rogue has survived every meta, it'll be fine; remember there are more combo decks in Standard right now than ever before, if Odd Rogue is the go to aggro deck, it might see an influx.
WOW, we'll basically play a brand new game from now on lmao, so happy about this.
I tlreally like those nerfs, but no nerf to hunter just made hunter god tier
Combo Priest Tier 1 boys
They actually making ramp druid kinda dead.
Yeah that's probably true I just wanted to be optimistic.
It's upsetting that they'll not give any dust refound for the legendaries that were killed with these nerfs rip
they could at least give us the full dust value for some of the legendaries that are heavily affected by these nerfs like Shudderwock.
this exactly why I'm upset with these nerfs...
Kingsbane is basically unplayable, same for shudderwock shaman. we should get a refound for Kingsbane and Shudderwock imo
Shudderwock is still a great minion. Really powerful in any kind of shaman with a few decent battlecries.
A lot of people crafted it only because of saronite chain gang. Basically every deck that used shudderwock was based around the chain gang battlecry (otk and midrange shudderwock shaman). So imo it's worth a refound (it'll never happen tho)
OTK-Shudderwock is dead - but Tempo-Shudderwock will be still viable! There is no reason to give the dust back.
as a wild player i can tell you that's not the case, there are many shudderwock decks based around either Jade golems or evolutions with Thrall deathseer
You have no idea how close I was to delete hearthstone... Kingsbane made me upset everyday...
This is good! some changes, maybe meta will become heathy ... I wish, and now maybe blizzard can hot fix card? without Fing up ios player?
The thing that I hate is that these nerfs are making a lot of legendary cards useless now but we'll not get a dust refound for them but only for shitty common/rare/epic cards.
These nerfs are killing Odd paladin, Kingsbane rogue, Shudderwock Shaman, and making Ramp druid kinda shitty. But we'll get a dust refound only for 2 rares 1 epic and 1 common. I don't like it this way at all.
Tempo-Shudderwock will be still viable! Odd-Pala is not dead at least in Wild because of Quartermaster. And Kingsbane has to adapt to became a more midrangy deck maybe with more pirate synergy. No need to get the full dust for the legys.
odd pala deserve a nerf? absoluty yes
but i think the nerf to level up is not acurate
this change kill the odd pala deck, really unpleayable if you can't buff your recruits silver hand
why kill instead of nerf, knowing that this is one off the budget decks for new players ?