Alongside the Hysteria change in tomorrow's Hearthstone patch, Blizzard is also making some long-awaited balance changes to Duels. Here are the highlights:
- Demon Hunter's Outlander Hero Power is no longer passive but costs 1.
- Hunter's Death Games Hero Power can no longer target minions but instead triggers a random friendly minion's Deathrattle.
- Hunter's Bonecrusher treasure now costs 8 (up from 6).
- Cannibalism has moved from Passive Treasure pool 1 to pool 2.
- Sandy Surprise has been removed from the Passive Treasures pool.
You can find all the details about the Duels changes below.
Quote From Blizzard Duels Balance Updates
HERO POWER UPDATES
Outlander
- Old: [Passive] After you play the left- or right-most card, gain 1 Attack this turn. → New: [Costs 1] After you play the left or right-most card in your hand, gain +1 Attack this turn.
Death Games
- Old: Trigger a minion's Deathrattle. → New: Trigger a random friendly minion's Deathrattle.
SIGNATURE TREASURE UPDATES
Bonecrusher
- Old: [Costs 6] → New: [Beast, Costs 8]
- Dev Comment: Turns out Bonecrusher is a silly rabbit.
Fractured Spirits
- Old: [Costs 5] → New: [Costs 4]
Royal Greatsword
- Old: [Costs 6] → New: [Costs 5]
Herald of the Scaled Ones
- Now has the Dragon tag.
TREASURE POOL UPDATES
- Cannibalism has moved from Passive Treasure pool 1 to pool 2
- Sandy Surprise has been removed from the Passive Treasures pool.
Miscellaneous Updates & Game Improvements
- Fixed a Duels bug where the animation for Harvest Time! would play twice.
- Fixed a Duels bug where Shadow Word: Void would summon minions based on the target minion's default Health rather than current Health remaining.
Comments
Still no fix for the Battlegrounds zombie players... It's been around for more than a month.
When does this go live? I'm holding off on starting a Duels run. Figured it would be 1pm EST but nothing yet.
That's what I/we were expecting too. They don't have another "usual patch time" so it's impossible to say.
There was also a long maintenance downtime announced a few days ago for today in Battle.net client (6:30 p.m. till 8 a.m), but the announcement is gone now.
Welcome changes that should do the job for balance purposes. That 1 mana cost for Outlander is a great choice to slow the strategy down without killing the theme. It will still be strong but they can always increase it to 2 if necessary. Now they need to stop making insanely efficient, 1 mana DH cards. :)
I love the reduction to Royal Greatsword. The change to Death Games is nice but very easy to work around since the fast start is a bigger problem than targeting the HP. I think the bump to 8 for Bonecrusher is too much.
Honestly I just think they are trying to tone down some of the obvious synergies in duels. Duels should be partly about starting deck synergy, and partly about treasure/bucket RNG.
Right now it feels like people still force certain starting decks/archetypes because of the OPness of certain strategies. This should do a good job of keeping that in check and fostering a more experimental environment (at least I hope).
Thank the Gods! I am on win 9 of my run with my Mage and the only thing that has stood in my way are those damned Deathrattle Hunters with Death Games, Cannibalism, and Bonecrusher. Seriously, I know that the elemental mage build I have been playing around with has caused many of my opponents to outright quit once I get going, but the fact that those Hunter abilities flow so easily is a joke.
A welcome change, though a bit late. A little strange that they suddenly decided to destroy bonecrusher with a 2 mana nerf. I mean, honestly the best deathrattles often cost more than 6 anyway, so why the nerf? Unless you somehow got the rush passive, deathrattle hunter isn't really all that powerful. That hp nerf to me would have been more than adequate.
The 3 people still playing duels right now must be overjoyed by these changes
Classic hs balance team. Instead of changing the wild cards, they completely kill one of the best aspects about the new priest card. Shitting on priest for no reason even though its already in a bad state. Brilliant job
Also, wrong complaint for this change. The problem was in Hysteria rather than Tiller, and people would have found a new way to abuse the card if it wasn’t fixed.
So happy about the Cannibalism nerf. Those who got it with From the Swamp felt unstoppable and it created a noninteractive game experience.
Outlander is kinda nerf, but if you get Stargazing it suddenly becomes a buff