Blizzard pushed out a couple of Warlock balance changes live today, as promised by Alec Dawson almost a week ago. These nerfs come alongside the initial reveal of Mercenaries, and a great change to Duels' problematic Meek Mastery card. First though, let's celebrate the fact that this may not be the only Balance patch we're receiving in the next few weeks as we have confirmation that the meta will continue to be evaluated over the next couple of weeks.
Quote From Alec Dawson Balance schedule over next month
- 8/31: 2 Warlock changes (upping mana, feels focused)
8/31 to 9/10: Evaluating meta
9/10: Decide if changes are needed
Later Sept: Decided changes go live (BGs included)
Now, onto the show!
Cost is now 6 mana (Up from 4). Stats increased from 2/6 to 4/6.
This one is definitely the 'feels focused' change. Stealer of Souls represents a mechanic that was previously used with a lot of attention. In fact, not many collectible cards allow you to convert mana cost into Health points, and all of them do it with some restriction in mind, such as the card being a spell (Bloodbloom, which was nerfed last year) or having to wait until the late game in order to obtain the cost conversion (G'huun the Blood God). Well, Stealer of Souls doesn't have any of these restrictions: you just have to pay 4 mana for its effect to be abused multiple times, and it's a Demon on top of it, so you can even exploit tribes synergy cards like Free Admission.
Standing in front of your tablet and watching animations as they resolve without knowing whether you're still alive or not isn't what Hearthstone is about, and cards that do it should be as fringe and as clunky as possible. However, this was not the case of Stealer of Souls: even though we're not talking about an overpowered card in an overpowered deck, the shenanigans it was able to consistently pull off were something that shouldn't have been possible. Giving SoS the Il'gynoth treatment is definitely the right call, and we hope with our hearts that we'll never have to see that card with such a high frequency again.
Cost is now 10 mana (up from 9).
That leaves us with the mana cost increase. Flesh Giant was nerfed not more than 2 weeks ago but, as we mentioned in our commentary of that balance patch, that change was probably meant to be as light as possible, waiting for the meta to absorb it and then declare a verdict.
However, it appears that upping Flesh Giant's cost by just 1 mana wasn't nearly enough to make a relevant dent, hence this second nerf, which is hopefully going to slow down Questline Handlock more than the previous one.
What do you think about these changes? Are there any other cards you would've liked to see nerfed? Let us know in the comments below!
Comments
Congratulations for your imagination. "haha"
Good nerfs for Standard. Handlock will still be very strong but at this point it can't really cheese the bad matchups with Giants nearly as efficiently so it should eventually drop to an appropriate winrate. Stealer OTK is dead hopefully.
Problem is, this does nothing for Wild and if I have to deal with a whole expansion of Wild players lamenting how Wild is dead (isn't it always?) I'm gonna lose it. Just ban the Quest from Wild entirely until it rotates and then dumpster it afterwards. Clearly it's not possible to balance a card that suddenly enables years-worth of woefully undercosted self-damage support.
Maybe its specifically designed by team5 to wean players off wild so they go back to standard. Curious to know if that's what preventing them from nerfing wild more often.
Dean has said they do not make balance changes with monetary gain in mind. I imagine the data that they have is different than the data we have so they have been reluctant to nerf it.
no this is wat wild is tey said since the start that they dont gona nerf a lot there.
So the whining is just weird because they knew it
The biggest problem with their approach to Wild is how contradictory it is. They describe is as "a place where you can play all your favourite decks from the past" and use that as justification for almost never nerfing anything lest it alter a deck from the past. Fine, except that they routinely add cards that make it nigh impossible to actually play those decks.
The truth is there is no way to satisfy the stated aim, so they should just commit to either leaving Wild completely alone, or otherwise give it more attention and take steps to establish something that at least looks close to a balanced meta. Neither choice will please everybody, but they're better than the current approach which pleases nobody.
because it's aa pointless effort. You nerf one broken thing in wild and another one takes its place.
People were crying about Secret Mage for years and now, all of a sudden it completely fell off the map The mode is unpredictable and would need a ton of effort to ever bring into any state of balance. It's just not worth it.
It sounds like a conspiracy theory, but I had the same thought about Mercenaries when I saw the nerfs. Killing all the Reno decks might alienate a big part of the Wild player base and maybe Blizzard hopes those people will flock to the new game mode instead.