Evocation & Solarian Prime Nerf!
Blizzard just announced 2 huge Mage nerfs, both changes will be live in a patch towards the end of next week.
Quote from BlizzardHey everyone,
We’ll be making the following balance changes in a patch to be released towards the end of next week:
Evocation
- Old: [Cost 1] → New: [Cost 2]
Astromancer Solarian
- Old: Solarian Prime [Cost 7] → New: Solarian Prime [Cost 9]
Both cards will be eligible for a full dust refund for 2 weeks after the patch has gone live.
Quote from AlecWhile looking at the current environment and future metas, Evocation helped enable a lot of early game swings that could feel insurmountable. We want to smooth that out. At 2 mana, it's not as fluid with Sorcerer's Apprentice and won't be generated from Wandmaker/Cobalt Spellkin.
For Solarian Prime, we stepped back and evaluated where it stacked up compared to the other Primes. With that and some of the power spikes it can generate, moving it to 9 mana felt appropriate.
On our side, we are continuing to discuss opportunities to bring up some of the weaker classes and/or touch up other play patterns in the near future. Thank again for your feedback, we read all of it (no matter how long that twitlonger is).
They are nerfing Mage ahead of the coming expansion just like mana wyrm. That's what it means when they announce a nerf and not Balance.
Glad for the evo nerf. It's a great card but just generated too often and stretches out turns again and again. I think tempo mage should still be fine, it's just one card that doesn't always get early play and mage still gets plenty of value. Having evo to play once a game barring discover or mana cyclone seems fair.
I'm surprised that only these two cards were focused on though, it's not like tempo mage is THAT prolific. I think I've played it twice the last two days after dozens of hunters, demon hunters, and paladins. Would be nice to see some more diversity again. The top 3 classes seem like they've really started to proliferate...at least diamond 5-2 range that I've been in. Anyone seeing a different meta in that range or others?
I agree with the Apprentice nerf - I addressed this on a different thread.
Apprentice should follow the same philosophy as more recent nerfs - change it's text to read:
"reduce the cost of spells in your hand by 1. (Spells can not go below 1 cost)"
Or just limit it to the first spell you play getting the discount, or the discount cannot reduce things below 1 mana, like a normal card. Infinite discounts have always been utterly toxic. No one cares about Summoning Portal for this very reason.
I recently crafted Mana Cyclone to play this deck, now I have to hope the next expansion gives me another way to use them. This is the problem "Ben Brode" was alluding to while he worked for Blizzard.
But it's my fault I have to be responsible and a little more wary of crafting and buying.
You can't predict all nerfs, I wouldn't say it's your fault.
This is a pretty big problem especially to F2P players.
Some will say "well that's what you get as an F2P player, you didn't pay for it anyway". But that attitude doesn't change the fact that those F2P players will just leave the game after this keeps happening. And nerfs have been becoming more and more prevelant. Eventually, it will (and already has) become a problem for not just F2P players, but ALL players. If the players stop playing, then everyone loses.
This deck will still be good. I wouldn't give up on it so easily.
Do you think it would be better if they just refunded dust for the cards (like HOF), instead of allowing players to D/E the cards for full dust since its Blizzard's responsibility to test and print the cards balanced. This way it won't punish players that badly for crafting epic and legendary cards to play certain deck that nerfed cards from said deck render those crafted cards unplayable.
This method incentivizes two things 1. Blizzard to test and balance cards before release
2. Players get to keep the nerfed cards (that may or may not be unplayable), whilst getting some dust towards a new deck.
thoughts?
I know it will still be good because Astromancer Solarian and Evocation can still be generated by other cards in the pool.
Well, I got two Solarians and a golden Evocation so... Never dust until you must!
I've been questioning Blizzard's recent nerfing policy for a while now. It's clear they are nerfing cards far more frequently than they ever used to in the past. Now granted, I feel this is a smart move overall. The days of suffering through completely and obviously broken cards/decks/classes for over a year is long gone. That's a good thing. Their initial stance of, "This card/deck is OP so let's wait until the next expansion where we'll (try to) introduce new cards that help bring it in line" has been put aside to a more proactive "This card/deck is busted so let's nerf it so players don't have to suffer through it for 4 months of bullcrap" ideology. I think as a whole, that's a good thing.
But their decisions lately haven't made much sense to me. For example, there are some instances where I feel like they nerfed the wrong aspect of a card that doesn't address the core problem, making the nerf irrelevant. Or simply nerfed cards that didn't need nerfing. Such as Kayn Sunfury from a 3/5 to a 3/4. Who cares? The nerf was almost pointless. I personally don't think it needed to be nerfed at all and since it retained it's core functionality, why not just keep it as a 3/5?
Another example was nerfing Cabal Acolyte from 6 health to 4. While definitely a much more significant nerf compared to the Kayn example, it doesn't alter what makes this card frustrating for players playing against it. Which is to say Priests will still continue to steal your sh*t repeatedly throughout the game. The only real thing it accomplished was make it slightly less reliable for a priest player to drop an acolyte on turn 4 and have it stick around to the following turn to try and activate it (which in my experience, didn't happen much anyway). It just didn't make much sense to me. IMO, if the card needed nerfing (which is debatable) they should have kept it's stats the same, but nerfed it to 5 mana, making it slightly more difficult to utilize, addressing the card's core concept.
Then there's this example. I can't say I disagree with the nerfs as a whole, I think the changes are actually fairly okay and make some sense. What I question is their timing. We've had a settled meta for quite some time now, statistically the most balanced we've ever seen with more viable decks than we've ever had, and there's a new expansion reasonably close by. Even if they had these nerfs planned, why now? Why not let the players that enjoy these decks continue with the meta they've adapted to and simply wait introduce the nerfs to coincide along the introduction of the new cards? I mean, the meta is going to shift when that happens anyway, and it's going to happen quite soon....so why not wait? Why nerf them now? It just doesn't make much sense to me.
I don't know, these are just my opinions anyway. I'd like to think Blizzard has their reasons but as of right now, their nerfing practices hasn't seemed very cogent to me. Maybe it's just me though.
The point of the Kayn and Acolyte nerfs was so that they would be weaker tempo plays. Very sensible nerfs. They wanted the core concept of the cards to remain intact, while not being too strong on curve plays.
The point of the previous nerfs you mentioned was to make the cards worse on their own, so that the stats are more in line with what the cards can do, and define their role better.
For example, imagine Leeroy Jenkins had been a 6/5 at some point, and then nerfed to a 6/2 (I know that the actual nerf of the card was a different one). You could have also said that the purpose of the card was to be a finisher either way. But as the 6/2 that we know, you'd only play it for its finisher role. Same thing with Kayn and Cabal Acolyte: Since their statline is worse, you would mostly play them only if you can make good use of their abilities. They still do the same thing at the same cost, but they are less good outside of that specific role now. I guess Kayn could have been nerfed to a 3/1 to highlight it even more, but maybe that felt too drastic to them. And in case of Cabal Acolyte, the stats do matter quite a bit. 2 extra health on a taunt in a defensive deck after a swing turn isn't "nothing".
In this case, I agree with you that the timing seems a little odd, since the cards are not THAT problematic to warant an intervention before the "future metas" they speak of are about to come up. I guess they saw it as an opportunity to change the current meta a little bit. They were already considerng nerfs, and thought that at this point, people might appreciate a small balance patch again, even if it's not one that everyone will go crazy about. And considering that Tempo Casino Mage is one of the best decks in Standard, it's not entirely meaningless either.
Nerfing Apprentice would also completely kill Chenvaala which would suck because the card has a really fun design and doesn't come with an effect which is super broken the way Khael'thas Sunstrider was.
Apprentice is evergreen and no it's not the problem. 1 cost was always the problem. Too easy to find, generate and play for 0 mana.
are we playing the same game? try to play the deck without apprentice and then come back here to write something, mana cheating is a big problem
well, if the problem is the apprentice, then nerf the apprentice,
blame the root of the problem, not the result
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Someday, I’ll be just like you