We've got three card nerfs arriving into Hearthstone this week in a patch on Thursday, July 15. These nerfs are targeting Druids and Priests who have both been a bit of a pain to deal with in recent times. The following cards are being hit:
- Gibberling - Cost is now 2 mana. (Up from 1)
- Apotheosis - Now gives a minion +1/+2. (Down from +2/+3)
- Renew - Cost is now 2 mana. (Up from 1)
Our predictions were almost spot-on - we were a bit too lenient on Apotheosis! Read on for Blizzard's reasoning behind the nerfs.
Quote From Blizzard The 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.
Comments
The issue was never sam+apo (It happens at best once a game, and the chances of drawing sam along with one of your apo's are pretty low. )
The issue was the idiotic priests who galvanized the matchup by including southsea scoundrel. I agree that including that card was a dumb greedy decision and I don't run it in any of my matchups (why would I include a card that MAYBE edged my chance to win the mirror slightly more instead of including anti-aggro cards?)
It was really stupid when Priest added cthun in just to prevent fatigue in the mirror. Honestly as VS said before: Priests trying to beat other priests were making the deck stupid with the recursive generation.
I really don't think Flesh Giants is good enough any more though. There's a reason it fell off the radar. The only reliable way to discount it enough early on to be relevant was Devouring Plague. And with premium 1/3 or 2/3 minions being played 3 mana: deal 4 random damage doesn't cut it for stabilizing.
I guarantee with these nerfs, you're gonna see priests gravitate back towards full Sethhek/Bloodweaver builds. As that will probably be the only way they are able to generate the resources necessary to stabilize on board. Priest has no win condition other then generation, and they just nerfed it hard.
Southsea Scoundrel was also decent vs. Hunter as a way to prevent Warsong Wrangler buffs on Trampling Rhino or as a combo with Apotheosis. The turn before you needed to heal, you could use your Scoundrel to try to discover a Rhino and bait the removal with the opponent's Rhino (which would only damage you for 2), then mega-heal using your own Rhino + Apotheosis to overkill the Hunter's 1-health Rhino. I rarely hit the combo because it comes down too late in the game and is only effective as single-target removal (unlike Samuro's AOE effect), but I never lost a game when I pulled it off.
yes, those goddamn greedy Priests who realized samu + apo was enough to instawin the aggro matchups so they eventually started to tech against the mirror because they realized that the only way they actually lose is if they build suboptimally into the mirror. They should be punished for optimizing a deck around its matchups, if only we all just played like the 99% then we wouldn't have to nerf good decks.
Noone'S gonna play Sethek/Bloodweaver, that deck loses to everything. If anything Control Priest will just go back to being as defensive as possible and trying to capitalize on the plethora of aggro decks that gas out if you remove their board once (which they can still do via Against all Odds!)
These nerfs will weaken priest but I doubt they will make it much less frustrating to play against. Priest has many situationally very strong removal spells so if you ever want to develop a board then your game plan is to hope they do not draw/create the spell they need. You cannot 'play around' what a priest can do.
The best way to hurt priest is with non-board damage, such as weapons (Doomhammer shaman) or burn spells (mage). A combo finisher should be great but is stopped by Illucia.
I have been experimenting with control shaman and the Al'Akir + Nightmare combo would be great against priest but Illucia ruins it. Likewise Illucia stops rogue playing for an Alexstrasza + Tenwu finish. I was hoping they would effectively remove Illucia, as they once did to Warsong Commander. It didn't seem likely based on what they said they wanted to target, but I was hoping to be surprised.
Not that Priest wasn't a problem at high legend... but now that Apotheosis got nuked from orbit, I'm pretty sure I've played my last game of Hearthstone this expansion, and I suspect this is the case for quite a few other players. Don't even care that I haven't hit legend yet... now that Priest's biggest healing card is nerfed, Doomhammers and Trampling Rhinos and Illidari Inquisitors keep flashing before my eyes. Not that they didn't before (I'm in the minority who thinks the real problem with the current meta is off-board damage), but now that the only viable control deck is tier 3 at best, it's just not worth it anymore.
If changing a common card (!!) had this much impact, maybe it was overtuned.
That's the thing though--certainly it was one of the highest winrate cards in the deck, but it was right in line with a bunch of other cards. If I correctly understand "overtuned" to mean "significantly higher than average winrate," it certainly wasn't overtuned--if you look at the cards that top the list in terms of played winrate, it's right in line with the likes of N'Zoth, God of the Deep, Mutanus the Devourer, and Xyrella in the 59-60% range (Blademaster Samuro is sitting at the top of the next tier at 57.5%). What that tells us is that alongside everyone's favorite Tickatus eater and two significant board swings, Apotheosis + Blademaster Samuro was one of Priest's win conditions--it acted as sort of a second Xyrella in terms of healing a bunch and swinging the board. If Apotheosis were sitting at a 63-65% winrate, then I'd definitely agree with you that it was overtuned! But since its played winrate was right in line with the other three win conditions, I don't think we can legitimately say it was overtuned--the problem with the card was not power level but how it felt. And I would even argue that if it had been correctly identified by the majority of players as a win condition (rather than simply your average board clear + heal), it wouldn't have felt as bad as it did.
On another note, I was expecting the card to get nerfed, but I was expecting them to bump the mana cost to 4, not take away half of Priest's answers to a 3-health board. I think a lot of the outrage is coming not from the fact that Apotheosis was nerfed, but rather that it was nuked to the point of near unplayability.
Not a Standard player myself but I feel the Apotheosis nerf is kinda...misplaced. It's Samuro that's the problem, not a 3 mana +2/+3. Samuro is like the fucking Crabrider, a neutral minion that goes into essentially every deck capable of buffing the guy. Handbuff Pally plays it in Wild and even +1/+1 on the guy turns it into Consecration that leaves a body behind. But usually it's more of a Flamestrike for 4 mana...with a body afterwards.
Between this and Animated Broomstick, they devs are essentially starting to turn minions into removal spells with an upside, to the point where if you just play an honest dude with some stats on the board, you're left standing there like an idiot when your opponent Battlecries and Rushes your board into oblivion. Instead of these abilities coming at a premium, they're being slapped onto already decent minions that are just asking to be broken.
It's good that abomination of a card Gibberling is getting its overdue nerf, but there's still plenty left they've released since Scholomance that's out of line.
In my opinion, Blademaster Samuro is not the problem in this case, since the card sees play in other decks (Rush Warrior, Clown Druid, some forms of Libram Paladin) and no one really complains about it. However, the problem comes where its AoE damage effect comes with a Reno Jackson on top of it.
Not saying Samuro won't be touched in the future, but rather that he's not the main offender when it comes to Apotheosis shenanigans.
I think the ideal solution would have been to apply damage to enemy minions without it coming directly from Samuro, like if it said "Frenzy: enemy minions take damage equal to Samuro's attack." That way the only thing that changes is a single minion would be hit with the lifesteal effect.
Except Samuro is fine in literally any other scenario. Apotheosis was a problem even without Samuro just because of how much health they'lll regain with just a single large minion (and the cost of having to remove that minion without giving them even more heal).
It's not the boardclear, it's the subsequent Reno heal that's the problem...and that's all on Apo
Except the nerf changes nothing about that. It doesn't matter if your opponent winds up with an 8/9 or a 9/10, they still regain a crapton of health and have a beefy boy left over after. In mid-game tug-of-war situations over the board, the lifesteal is mostly irrelevant since at that point most damage will have gone into the minions. In that scenario, the nerf to Apotheosis essentially kills the card, because on small to mid-sized minions the -1/-1 is a big deal. So the nerf has changed nothing significant on big minions and absolutely massacred the card in situations where nerfs weren't really warranted. All of that to essentially nerf just the interaction with Samuro. I don't play Standard but I watch it on Youtube a fair bit and not once have I seen a streamer groan about Apotheosis on anything other than specifically Samuro. Because most of the time, you want to kill all Priest minions anyway so they can't value trade them and heal or buff them in a myriad of ways. But when you stick it on a rush minion, which Priest doesn't normally get access to outside neutrals, and stick AoE on the lifesteal, then it's a problem. And it's a problem only Samuro creates.
As for people not complaining about Samuro, @Avalon, I'd say a good portion of the reason is that many (not all) of the decks that include it or could include it aren't top of the meta for other reasons, so if you get blown out by Samuro in the midgame every 1 in 15 games, it doesn't stick as much. When Handbuff Paladin was doing well in Wild (pre-Crabrider nerf, pretty much), the card was absolutely backbreaking. Between it, Broomstick and unnerfed Crabrider, all of which get pulled by Crystology, there was pretty much no hope for any deck to maintain a board against it.
If you think playing Apotheosis on mid-sized minions is what made the card playable then I have nothing else to say here.
Samuro is literally a dead card without buffs and is one of the few things that handbuff (and board buff) centric decks have going for them in terms to actually swing the game around.
Hell, it's one of the only reason why Rush Warrior doesn't just roll over to aggro. Their early game is crap, they need to actually get to conditioning to make proper use of most of their minions since an unbuffed Crabrider or Bumper Car doesn't do fucking anything. Samuro is their one gambit to actually have a chance if their opponent has a strong opening.
Samuro is literally just a boardclear on a stick that usually requires way more investment to make him useful. Meanwhile Apotheosis turns him into Lifesteal Hellfire for 7-mana in a class that you cannot outvalue or even outpressure once the game gets to a certain point.
Not sure, with the mana generation Druid has, I don't think a 2 cast on Gibbering is going to effect it much, just my 2 cents.
it should prevent overwhelming board states on turns 1-2 (maybe 3) though, which was the point. Shouldnt matter as much once the druid has ramped, which was the point.
Dunno about Standard but in Wild I'm pretty sure the nerf kills Token Druid...or, well, re-kills, since the deck is mostly dead already. Anyway, there's a world of difference between it being 1 or 2 mana. If a Wild Token Druid went first with Gibberling in hand, you might as well call it right there, cause you were dead around turn 4 (sometimes turn 3). Now the pressure would start a turn later and give the opposing player many more options to deal with the card before it can grow out of control. A turn 2 Gibberling followed by an Innervated +1/+1 board buff dies to a Breath of the Infinite, for instance, where previously the Druid would follow that up with another board buff on turn 2 before you even get to coin the Breath. I'm sure there are similarly unclearable scenarios in Standard that are now solvable when the problem starts a turn behind the curve.
That's the whole point: the Gibberling nerf doesn't have to nuke the card, but just slow it down/make it a little less good.
If the change is going to make an impact, even though not of outstanding proportions, we should be okay about it.
That means that those Reddit rumors were spot on. I guess I'll look out for those in the future.
Also you really did nail the predictions. Now do it again.
Bet.
Can't believe you are getting downvoted for this. I also immediately thought of Reddit. I wonder how they got it?