Balance Changes - Deck of Lunacy & More
Blizzard just announced the long awaited Balance Changes. Read the details below!
Quote from BlizzardThe 20.0.2 patch, which will release on April 13, includes balance updates across several modes and numerous bug fixes!
Standard Balance Updates
Deck of Lunacy
- Old: [Costs 2] → New: [Costs 4]
Dev Comment: Deck of Lunacy moves up to 4 mana, removing its ability to provide a game-warping effect on turn 1 or 2. When we create cards like Deck of Lunacy, we're aiming for an experience that lets you do wacky, over-the-top things at the cost of power. There's a large audience for that (Spell Mage's play-rate shows!), but Deck of Lunacy very clearly crosses the power threshold we set for these types of cards.
Sword of the Fallen
- Old: 1 Attack, 3 Durability → New: 1 Attack, 2 Durability
Dev Comment: Sword of the Fallen is not only powerful, but also creates early-game situations with too many Secrets in play. We're moving Sword of the Fallen down to 2 durability to reduce the overall value of the card and make those turns against 3-4 Secrets less common.
Jandice Barov
- Old: [Costs 5] → New: [Costs 6]
Dev Comment: Jandice Barov benefitted greatly from the Core Set refresh and the rotation of weaker 5-Cost minions. Looking ahead, we don't intend to dilute Jandice's pool of summoned minions and that's not something we'd want to rely on for her balance. With that in mind, we are nerfing Jandice Barov to 6 mana where her total stat output is much more appropriate.
Pen Flinger
- Old: Battlecry: Deal 1 damage. Spellburst: Return this to your hand. → New: Battlecry: Deal 1 damage to a minion. Spellburst: Return this to your hand.
Dev Comment: Pen Flinger equips some classes with large amounts of chip damage, whether it be to minions or to the opposing hero. This flexibility makes Pen Flinger an attractive option for many decks, but when that utility is combined with repetition it takes over the story of a match. Pen Flinger takes out your minions, might deal 10 damage to your face over multiple turns, and even had the gall to call you names throughout all of it. We're nerfing Pen Flinger to now only target minions, positioning it as a removal option rather than a dual-threat card.
Far Watch Post
- Old: 2 Attack, 4 Health → New: 2 Attack, 3 Health
Mor’shan Watch Post
- Old: 3 Attack, 5 Health → New: 3 Attack, 4 Health
Dev Comment: Watch Posts are meant to act as an interesting tech-package when dealing with certain gameplans. Currently though, they act as go-to options in many classes, sporting quite high winrates for disruption-based cards. In order to cut into their power, we're reducing the Health of both Far Watch Post and Mor'shan Watch Post. This change will make them easier to deal with on turns 2 + 3, lowering the investment barrier for removal to better match the options available on those early turns.
Battlegrounds Balance Updates
RETURNING HEROES
Queen Wagtoggle
- Wax Warband
- Old: Give a friendly minion of each minion type +2/+1 → New: Give a friendly minion of each minion type +1/+1.
Captain Hooktusk
- Trash for Treasure
- Old: Remove a friendly minion. Discover a random one from a Tavern Tier lower. → New: Remove a friendly minion. Choose one of two from a Tavern Tier lower to keep.
MINION UPDATES
Steward of Time
- Old: 3 Attack, 4 Health. When you sell this minion, give all minions in Bob’s Tavern +1/+1. → New: 3 Attack, 3 Health. When you sell this minion, give all minions in Bob’s Tavern +2/+1.
Pack Leader
- Old: 2 Attack, 3 Health → New: 3 Attack, 3 Health
Monstrous Macaw
- Old: 4 Attack, 3 Health → New: 5 Attack, 3 Health
Herald of Flame
- Old: 5 Attack, 6 Health → New: 6 Attack, 6 Health
Wildfire Elemental
- Old: 7 Attack, 3 Health → New: 7 Attack, 4 Health
Lieutenant Garr
- Old: 5 Attack, 1 Health → New: 8 Attack, 1 Health
Lil’ Rag
- Old: 4 Attack, 4 Health → New: 6 Attack, 6 Health
Duels Balance Updates
Ace in the Hole
- Old: [Costs 2] → New: [Costs 3]
Rally the Troops
- Old: After you play your first Battlecry card in a turn, draw a card. It costs (5) less. → New: After you play your first Battlecry card in a turn, draw a card. It costs (3) less.
Connections
- Old: [Passive] → New: [Costs 1]
Bug Fixes & Game Improvements
- Fixed a bug where Sunwell Initiate’s Divine Should could not be silenced.
- Fixed a bug where Shadowjeweler Hanar could Discover secrets from outside of Standard in Ranked Standard.
- Fixed a bug where the Battlecry for Reckless Apprentice would not apply the Freeze effect from Ice Walker.
- Fixed a bug where the Battlecry for Reckless Apprentice would still trigger if the Hero Power was disabled.
- Fixed a bug where playing Wildfire before Metamorphosis could cause your original Hero Power to gain an extra damage.
- Fixed a bug where Lakkari Felhound could discard newly drawn cards, such as when played in sequence with Hand of Gul’dan.
- Fixed a bug where Celestial Alignment would work inconsistently with cards that reduce mana costs, such as Librams or Cutting Class.
- Fixed a bug with Kazakus, Golem Shaper where the Firebloom ability could target the same minion twice.
- Fixed a visual bug where G’huun the Blood God would leave the blood drop mana cost icon behind when played.
- Fixed a bug where casting Twisting Nether into Oh My Yogg! would not allow for more cards to be played.
- Fixed a bug where the VFX for certain spells would continuously play after being transformed by Oh My Yogg!
- Fixed a bug where Pit Master would appear in Collection results when filtering for Nature cards.
- Fixed a bug where Holy Wrath was not tagged as a Holy spell.
- Fixed a bug where Dragon’s Pack had the Nature spell school tag. It is no longer part of a spell school.
- Fixed a Battlegrounds bug where Minions could show an outline of their Tavern Tier icon when played.
- Updated the appearance rate of cards in Arena to ensure class balance remains close to the ideal 50% win-rate. Specifically, the win-rate of Demon Hunter and Priest should now be decreased. The win-rate of Druid, Hunter, Rogue, and Shaman should now be increased.
- Removed Far Watch Post, Mor’Shan Watch Post, Crossroads Watch Post, and Kargal Battlescar from Arena.
- Fixed a bug where the Arena could fail to load properly for new players.
- Fixed a bug where some Boomsday puzzles were causing desync issues.
- Fixed a bug with the Achievement It’ll Take More Than That where credit could be granted without playing the Warrior class.
- Fixed a bug with the Achievement Barrens Neutral Collector where incorrect Collection quotas were listed.
- Fixed a bug with the Achievement Final Frontier where progress would not be credited from discounted minions.
- Fixed a bug with the Achievement Do it for the Vines where Dual-Class cards would not count as progress.
- Fixed a visual bug where Achievement XP and end of match XP gains could show incorrect numbers but reward the correct amount of XP.
- Fixed a visual bug where, in some cases, XP gains benefitting from XP bonuses were not highlighting with a green font color.
- Fixed a visual bug where the Tavern Pass bonus XP displayed on the Achievement detail view would be incorrect.
- Fixed a bug where the mass disenchant preview would count some cards twice but would give the correct amount of dust when used.
- Fixed a bug where the disenchant button would glow regardless of whether there were extra cards to disenchant.
- Fixed a bug where some player ranks and rewards were not populating from the correct ladder on the friends list and elsewhere.
- Fixed a visual bug where names on the friends list could be overlapped by their rank, and where a friend’s rank would show even when they were offline.
- Fixed a bug where a star bonus would appear on the deck selection page for Legend ranks.
- Fixed a bug where an erroneous pop up would appear saying a Demon Hunter class pack was granted for completing the Ashes of Outland Prologue.
- Fixed a bug where the Hamuul Card Back would not show properly during pack opening.
- Fixed a bug where the Play button would always be highlighted in the main menu.
- Fixed a bug where players could become locked out from creating or deleting decks when they previously were not.
- Fixed a bug where “Click to Convert” would persist on decks regardless of what mode you’d swapped to.
- Fixed a bug where mousing over decks that are behind the “You have no Classic Decks. Go create one!” pane would show pop-up info.
- Fixed a bug where mousing over a Classic deck with the mode set to Casual would display a tooltip stating: “Not useable in Wild format”.
- Fixed a bug where players could re-roll into the Win 5 Games of Ranked Play Mode weekly quest after already completing it that week.
- Fixed a bug where the Sir Annoy-o Hero Skin, the Crossroads bundle, and the Barrens Tavern Pass were showing incorrect art in the purchase window.
- Fixed a grammatical error in the card text for Warsong Wrangler.
- Fixed various translation issues across several languages.
Really??? The battkeground minion changes, you call these "balance" changes???
These nerfs won't change anything and only weaken rogue decks both in wild and standard. What a joke
At what time will the patch be up?
10am pacific, as it pretty much always is for new things
While all these nerfs itself are very good, I think they won't be enough to tone down Mage and Paladin significantly. Librams and Paladin secrets are still very strong cards and no minion Mage has all the tools even without Lunacy. We'll see how the meta settles after nerfs but I wouldn't hold my breath for huge changes. I think the HS balance team should seriously consider some buffs for the weaker classes too.
Yeah, also buffing weaker cards Imo is better than nerfing
nice bg patch a lot a stuff need to change in this mode like some heroes twerks and they just throw some useless atk changes..gj as always small indie company
They nerfed the wrong mage card. Refreshing Spring Water is the truly broken card. Turn 4, I have seen more than once a mage player drawing 4 cards and then still having 4 mana to spend. That is completely and absolutely broken. Spell mage will be very good even without the cheap DoL. Mage, Warlock, and Pally are the “anointed” classes at the moment.
I think the nerf is fine. Why shouldn't spell mage be a tier 1 deck for this expansion? Deck of Lunacy is the card that everyone hates playing against. Spell Mage without it is balanced just fine. Hell, even pre-nerf it wasn't as bad as people are acting like it is. Spell Mage dies to a lot of things, but Deck of Lunacy made you able to highroll through bad match ups. Now you can't. Mage has been bad for a long while, so why shouldn't they have a tier 1 deck now?
Lotto decks should NEVER be #1; they should be a meme. They even hinted at this in the dev comment about Deck of Lunacy.
bingo
who is the loser now?
It was basically what everyone expected and the safest changes. Watch towers are pretty crippled now. No dust refund for the now useless legendary.
Watch Towers still demand to be answered and will continue to see play for sure.
Not so certain. 3 health is weak on minion that can't attack, it's basicaly 2/3 with taunt now with extra effect (usually will be 1 time only, 2 times max). 3 mana watch post will be even worse because the same - it's 3 mana 3/4 taunt now. Not good enough, if annoying it can be answers relatively easily if not, than it stays on board and does nothing. That's the reason this card started being cut from some lists. Assuming that control warlock will be better i don't have much hope for it but still more than for 2 mana watchpost (which was by far better) but now it's too easy to remove for every single class.
They're going from the 2 mana one being great, the 3 mana one being ok, and the 4 mana one being terrible to the 2 mana one being good, the 3 mana one being bad, and the 4 mana one being terrible.
The package isn't good enough to support the legendary. 2 mana one is the one that will continue to be used, the rest are gone, as is the legendary.
Also, if the 3 mana watchpost was so broken, why didn't Ogremancer also get nerfed?
In the meantime, they've actually announced Kargal Battlescar WILL be disenchantable for full dust after a hotfix later this week. (Which must have been the first time they did so for indirect nerfs?) If you disenchanted him at any point since the patch notes for this nerf patch went live, you'll even get retroactive compensation in the following days.
Tickatus and Spring water not being touched. Interesting.
Tickatus complains are mostly for Priest (as me) and Warrior players. And i mean warrior control players not tempo warrior. Its a card that acomplish his goal of being a powerfull tool against slow combos and control decks. They said they will keep an eye on the card if they want to introduce stronger tools for control warlock. Yes, that is what they said, is not like control Warlock needs Tickatus to win the control match when lord jaraxxus already prevent any priest or warrior deck unless you high roll a "fast" C thun roll (and control warrior dont have any finisher cause C thun sucks on warrior control). So i wont said that Tickatus is the actual problem but the fact that Warlock is just far better than Priest and Warrior, so there is not point in playing those decks on ladder.
"Ooh but Priest see competitive plaaay" yeah because it has a good matchup against other decks, Warlock and Mage still destroy priest period on ladder.
mh, penflinger nerf hits Darkglare warlock hard in Wild. Libram paladin could run pyromancer maybe