Balance Changes Coming Next Week - 4 Changes In Total!
Blizzard just announced 4 balance changes that will go live early next week. Let's take a look at what's going to get changed.
[Click on the image for a better resolution]
Quote from BlizzardHello all,
We will be making some card changes in a patch going out early next week that we wanted to let you know about, to give players time to prepare for Masters Tour: Undercity, taking place from November 19-21. These are the cards that will be changing:
Razormane Battleguard
Old: 2 Attack, 3 Health → New: 2 Attack, 2 Health
Arcanist Dawngrasp (Mage Questline final reward)
Old: Battlecry: For the rest of the game, you have Spell Damage +3. → New: For the rest of the game, you have Spell Damage +2.
Garrote
Old: Deal 2 damage to the enemy hero. Shuffle 3 Bleeds into your deck that deal 2 more when drawn. → New: Deal 2 damage to the enemy hero. Shuffle 2 Bleeds into your deck that deal 2 more when drawn.
Renew
Old: [Costs 2] → New: [Costs 1]
The first three cards will be eligible for the normal full-dust refund for two weeks following the patch. Renew, which will go up in power level, will not get a dust refund. Keep an eye out for Patch Notes early next week for dev comments on these balance changes and more.
Gallon Remarks on the Changes
Quote from BlizzardCouple thoughts behind these—
Garrote: A fairly soft nerf to one of the better decks at high levels of play, this now requires 3 spell damage, up from 2, if you want to deal 30 from hand. Also opens up Armor gain to be more effective of a counter.
Arcanist Dawngrasp: Mainly a change looked at opening up more room for slower strategies in the meta.
Razormane Battleguard: Going down a health here will allow for more early game answers for the opponent. A fairly soft change to Taunt druid, and we’ll continue to monitor Taunt druid to see if any other changes will be needed.
Renew: Slower Priest decks are underperforming compared to the rest of the field, and reverting this nerf should add a bit more power back to those strategies.
With Quest Warrior, if it's turn 7 or later, I am always playing my quest reward in the same turn I generate it.
Mutanus is a failure at quest disruption, because not only does it require them to leave their quest reward unplayed and vulnerable, but it's random and might not even hit it.
Saying "quest disruption would be horrible" is obviously wrong since they have every other kind of hate in the game already. Weapon hate, spell hate, secret hate, minion in hand hate, ARMOR HATE. You could build your deck around any one of those things and get hard countered if they included tech against it. If they Dirty Rat and kill your mechathun, or your malygos, you concede, because you built your deck around it.
Why should quests be any different? They should flat out print a card that says "Battlecry: Fail your opponent's quest" and the meta would be saved simply by such a card's existence regardless if people play it.
They might go for this sometime after next year’s rotation. As of right now the quests are too fresh to counter entirely
What does that even mean? Quests should have been counterable all along. It would have saved them from having to make seven changes to Caverns Below as well.
Because lots of decks run weapons (and the new one weapon hate cards are decent minions with good stats). Also removing your opponent's quest completely from the occasion is very different than removing a single weapon.
It's an either feast or famine mechanic that applies universally to something that isn't even universal. *Most* of the quests are fine and the last one that was a problem they just nerfed the power of by 50%.
And secrets? ARMOR?
They have introduced some kind of counter to every mechanic in the game except quests. Enough is enough.
the only counter for quest is Celestial Alignment, too bad that anacondra druid loses to everything else, unless somehow druid manges to survive and/or snowball hard
Not every weapon or secret is a legendary card that encourages a deck to be built around it, is it? So creating easily splashable counters to quests, which were just released during the last expansion, would prevent people from crafting/buying packs to open those legendary cards. That’s not in Blizzard’s best interests until they give us some new toys to play with.
DH, Rogue, and Warrior are three of the classes Priest has the highest winrate against...
Quest Priest beats DH and War except full aggro variants. Aggro Shadow priest annihilates all rogue variants and all Mage variants, and all Lock except Zoo.
The problem with Priest isn't specific classes, it's that each type of Priest deck has hard counters.
"Not every weapon or secret is a legendary card that encourages a deck to be built around it, is it?"
But plenty are. Hard counters to those cards results in a completely lost game if targeted. Target the Toggwaggle and Toggwaggle Druid can do NOTHING to you. Target the weapon of a weapon rogue and they're done.
And not every quest in the game encourages a deck to be built around it either. For example, laughably, the Warlock quest is now included simply for its side effects and the deck is built around getting to 10 cards rather than actually using the Demon Seed reward like it used to. They just added it to an existing deck.
The cardinal sin with quests, like the even/odd decks which broke the game so much they had to be prematurely hall of famed - is their consistency. You ALWAYS get to play them, every game. This is why even/odd was busted, you couldn't stop their hero power from being upgraded, so they could always use it at full power from the start of the game, snowballing a marginal advantage.
They have to add a counter. It should have been added long ago. Quests are not new toys.
Secrets and certainly armor are much less specific than quest are. 5 classes have secrets at this point.
Also... again, disrupting *a* secret, or some armor is much less disruptive than just destroying a quest.
I listed them because they show they have counters for EVERYTHING in the game, even super niche strategies (massive armor gain).
Everything except quests.
And really, how would removing ice block a Mage was counting on and killing them, or removing a weapon which was the sole focus of their deck, or removing their win condition entirely by pulling their combo piece out of their hand, be less disruptive than failing the third step of their three step quest?
If the quest rewards are that integral to winning games then the quests are fundamentally flawed and far too powerful and the game has lost its identity. Wait, that is exactly why the game is in such a poor state right now!
Um, the whole point of running a quest deck is winning with the quest. Like depending on a single Ice Block isn't... really the same thing. Not every quest deck is a binary combo deck.
IF you have, at least, double digit IQ, you will play questline reward same turn you get questline reward.
Well, I was hoping for quest mage being hit, but my guess was for ignite dealing -1 damage, but -1 spell damage for everything is good too, and thanks for 3.6K next week
Garrote will die to be replaced for pirate OTK, will Mr. Smite be the next nerf target?
2 mana deal 1 damage on a card would be so, so, so bad.
The power of ignite isn't its initial damage, it's the fact that it makes your deck an infinite damage engine. It could literally deal 0 initial damage and be worth it in a quest mage style deck
It would not be. Fireball is a much more dangerous card in questline mage than Ignite will ever be. If you can draw multiple ignites in a game, you've kind of just won anyway.
Garrote was not the problem. The problem in Rogue is excessive card draw. That may be part of the class identity, but there's still such a thing as too much -- just as it's important to avoid giving Mage too much face damage.
How do you fix that, though?
I'm sort of surprised by the garrote nerf.
Increase the mana cost of one or more parts of the draw engine.