Patch 20.8.2 - Balance Changes for Priest and Druid - Bugfixes
The Balance Changes coming in tomorrow, Thursday July 15th, for Priest and Druid, as well as some bug fixes. Check out the changes below!
This Patch Is Now LIVE!
Quote from BlizzardThe 20.8.2 patch, releasing on July 15, includes changes for three cards in Standard and three bug fixes for Battlegrounds.
Standard Balance Updates
Apotheosis
- Old: Give a minion +2/+3 and Lifesteal. → New: Give a minion +1/+2 and Lifesteal.
Dev Comment: We’re doing two Priest changes, targeting the burst healing available in the class and their generation capabilities. Let's start with Apotheosis—we are moving the buff down to +1/+2 to hit the card's general power and combo capabilities. While healing will always be a strength of Priest, we want to reduce the urgency felt when dealing with Priest's minions. Currently, it can feel like you must remove every Priest minion because of the threat Apotheosis poses. A slight reduction in the buff here should lessen that urgency and make the minions post-Apotheosis easier to deal with. The other side of this nerf is the Samuro + Apotheosis combo. The punishment for playing minions into this combo is too much at the moment, so while we'd like to keep some of that tension of resource commitment, we don't want the punishment to be a full heal for the opponent. The reduction in attack here helps get that combo into a healthier push/pull state.
Renew
- Old: [Costs 1] → New: [Costs 2]
Dev Comment: Renew is going to 2 mana. Heading into this patch, we wanted to knock some of Priest's generation potential as one of our main goals in Hearthstone is to have the cards you chose to include in your deck matter. We decided to change Renew specifically because we believe this change makes the largest impact towards curbing the chains of generation in Priest. At 2 mana, Renew has to be more thoughtful inclusion during deckbuilding, won't be generated by Wandmaker, and takes another mana reduction to get to 0. While Priest's identity looks different in future expansions, we wanted to take this opportunity to reign in their card generation and build a better match experience for both players.
Gibberling
- Old: [Costs 1] → New: [Costs 2]
Dev Comment: Gibberling is moving to 2 mana. Currently Gibberling is the cause of many "non-games", matches that are heavily lopsided in the early game and can have their outcome decided far too early. We want to lower the frequency of this occurrence and Gibberling at 2 mana should result in many more games where opponents can respond to an early board of this little menace.
The cards listed above will be eligible for a full dust refund for 2 weeks after the 20.8.2 patch goes live.
Game Improvements & Bug Fixes
- Updated the wording of Kurtrus Ashfallen’s fully upgraded Battlegrounds Hero Power to clarify its one-time completion (no functional change).
- Updated Archdruid Hamuul in Battlegrounds so that when your minion types are tied, he will not refresh Bob’s Tavern with minion types that are not in the pool.
- Adjusted Darkmoon Prizes to offer better Prizes for players on the bottom half of the leaderboard.
United in Stormwind Card List & Expansion Guide
Learn more and see all the cards in our dedicated Card List.
So healing for 24 (that was the threshold for Apotheosis + Samuro combo) wasn't fair, but dealing 20 off-board (unblockable) damage on top of twice as much board damage, is fair?
What in the world are you talking about?
Thanks blizzard for nerfing 2 UNFAIR decks.
Priest: bye bye to play 4-5 renew per game
Druid: nice, still a pretty good deck with good combos, BUT, now we dont need to concede on turn 1 when putting 7 minions on board
you are insane if you think these nerfs will bring priest from tier 1 to bottom tier
I like the nerfs too, but Priest was absolutely Tier 2. None of their decks had above 55% winrate.
Do me trade? Nope. Me go face? Yep. Play as Priest? Nope. Play my beasts? YEP!
The Priest is dead, long live the aggro meta!
Is this what you wanted? Welp, I hope you're happy.
"a better match experience for both players", yeah, right.
Who wants to bet, that Priest is bottom tier now?
estas cartas ya esta nerfeada thank blizzard for the nerf 😊👍
nice make hearthstone dead agian lol nerf priest instant
F**k you, Blizz!!
As expected, although the druid nerf is useless, unless it's actually targeted for the next expansion.
Wow, the team at Outof.cards were on spot with this.
Everyone and their mom predicted these changes
not my mom
only that nerf?
Wow, who saw these changes coming?! (sarcasm) SO anyway, priest is probably garbage tier now which is of course what they want. The high legend players and streamers are satisfied i'm sure. They don't want control to be tier 3, better kill it now.
Cant wait for Shadow Priest to be a thing, Priest is by far my least played class i have literally 0 interest in playing it but Darkbishop Benedictus alone makes me want to play priest, let's hope.
Go watch Kibler, most of what he plays is Control and he gets 70%+ winrates.
Kibler's a pro player. Just because it works for him (and it doesn't always) doesn't mean it's what people can pull off.
I can get 60-65% winrates with his decks, so it's not THAT hard. And I only get to Diamond maybe twice a year