Oops? Blizzard Accidentally Reveals Some Balance Changes And Then Confirms Them
Blizzard accidentally pushed a patch live partially in Korea that had many of the Balance changes coming next week. Here's their reaction to this faux-pas.
Quote from BlizzardDue to a small oopsy-doopsy, a patch planned for next Tuesday was partially pushed early. Some clever sleuths were able to spot a handful of card changes before things were reverted, and I can confirm that the changes seen on live are accurate.
But, there's much more!
Quote from BlizzardWe're doing a small number of nerfs this patch.
- Vile Library loses the base +1/+1
- Stag Spirit Wildseed will make a 3/2 weapon Stagpoint Wildbow
- Snowfall Guardian becomes base 5/5 but no longer grows based on minions frozen
- Celestial Alignment will no longer affect the opponent
Quote from BlizzardIn Wild, Kobold Illusionist will cost 5 mana.
In addition to these nerfs, we're also doing a substantial number of buffs! Some of these have already been discoveredbut the majority of these buffs were likely not spotted.
- Edwin, Defias Kingpin will be a 3 mana 3/3
- Relic Vault to 2 mana
Quote from BlizzardFor the rest of the buffs, stay tuned for the patch notes early next week🙂Paladin, Demon Hunter, and Warrior fans should have a lot to look forward to.
I hope you all enjoyed our impromptu "preview"!
Kael'thas and From the Depths are not getting changed this patch.
— Aleco (@AlecoGereco) August 12, 2022
The nerfs are alright but we need a ton of more buffs, which there apparently will be.
No we don't. What we need are zero more buffs and a ton more nerfs. Nerfs buff every single other card in the game. Buffs destroy metas. When was the last time a nerf didn't make things better? Sure, maybe it didn't fix everything all at once, but they always make things better. When was the last time a buff wasn't either (a) completely meaningless or (b) completely broke the game? I was thinking the boomsday buffs but that one featured 5 mana LPG so I'd say never! You need to take a longer look at things rather than just saying "ooh buffs I like those." Think about the game itself rather than cards in isolation. And I haven't even gotten started on powercreep, the decline in player enjoyment, the decrease in design space, the trend of ever more broken stuff (different from powercreep), the decline in player base itself, or any of the legions of problems I'm forgetting about!
what about the buffs to like, curse warlock. that deck was useless when sunken city came out and then they buffed it and it became a balanced 50 ish% winrate deck and now with the new expansion, even getting tools like the copy shadow spells warlock legend, it's below a 50% winrate
Buffs break the game... And the game is already broken. But this is the shitty direction they took, so...
Since when buffs destroyed metas? It's massive nerfs what destroyed metas.
Every time there is a patch with massive nerfs, the game becomes boring and stale very fast. The greatest example of this is when they butchered warrior last expansion.
High powerlevel is fun, as long as it's accessible by all classes. Buffs are way better than nerfs.
Some decks just aren't good, and that' s fine. Not all ten-twenty-plus deck archetypes need to be good every expansion. In fact, curse warlock is a prime example for what I was talking about.
It used to be that cards like Dragged Below would be 4 mana for 4 damage plus an effect. Now, thanks to previous unnecessary buffs setting a bad standard for Blizzard, these cards "need" to be 3 mana for 4 damage plus an effect or the playerbase will scream and throw a tantrum whining for buffs. Now there's no room for 3 mana deal 3 damage for an effect! Unless of course it either targets face (and even that's not good enough these days, as the rogue card got buffed to 2 mana - these have ripple effects!) or has a really, REALLY good effect a la Stag Charge.
Now take cards like Sira'Kess Cultist. 3 mana cards for an effect would be 3/4s if the effect was mediocre, but giving the opponent a curse is certainly not mediocre. While 3/3 could perhaps have been balanced, I liked the 2/3 statline because I saw a reining in of power creep. However, the idiotic and juvenile portions of the hearthstone playerbase kept throwing tantrums because they don't understand game design whatsoever, and the Hearthstone devs foolishly and cowardly bowed to said playerbase, giving them what they want because it's easier to push problems down the line (and let them grow) than it is to solve them.
Now 3 mana 3/4 cards with good effects aren't even good enough! As you said, curse warlock is not a very good deck right now. That's because of the buffs, not despite them. Because not only was curselock buffed, but a lot of other decks were buffed as well, because, again, idiots, juveniles, and tantrums. So curse warlock fell even farther behind, design space in the future got closed off for those types of effects (Fiendish Circle, Tidal Surge, etc), design space in the future got closed off for other types of effects as well, and the meta keeps hastening its rush toward utter clownishness.
Yes but only buffing can destroys wild just like power creeping dose.
This is actually the reverse of the truth, both from a player fun perspective (and I don't just mean mine, which happens to be in the majority, or yours, which happens to be in the minority, I mean the majority - Hearthstone has been hemorrhaging players, and it's accelerated with every power-crept expansion) and a game design perspective for all the reasons I mentioned. It seems like "fun" now, but not only is it not fun (except for a very small minority like yourself whom we should not be balancing for but whom we absolutely should incorporate feedback from) but it causes so much less fun down the line. So so so many cards that were never played in 2022 that would have been busted as recently as late 2020 or early 2021, all because of myopic, immature players who prefer the hot new thing to a stable game.
Celestial Alleinment.
*sigh* take my upvote and get out
Dadjokes xD