Just a couple days ago we received the second balance patch of the United in Stormwind expansion cycle, but it appears that it's not over yet. As Hearthstone Developer Alec Dawson stated on August 25th, during the upcoming days Team 5 will take some time to evaluate the new meta and decide whether additional changes are needed or not.
There are two things about the tweet you can see below that strikes us the most.
The first one is that, after a rather long time, Team 5 is considering doing a round of buffs! Particularly appreciated by the community, buffs are an exceptional way to tweak cards that are performing below the original expectations and to give more value to the players' already existing collections. The last time we were blessed with some buffs was Patch 20.2.2 (May 12th), which brought us changes to N'Zoth, God of the Deep, Shieldmaiden, and Lilypad Lurker - just to name a few - pretty impactful we'd say!
Quote From Alec Dawson Previous changes [the ones to Stealer of Souls and Flesh Giant] were an addendum on initial round (short window, no loc). Next full patch [which will go live in late September] was created specifically for balance changes. Talking about many things (nerfs + buffs).
Approach to Wild is act in extreme cases, current case probably clearing that bar.
If you're able to disclose this, what are your reasonings for not wanting to touch Wild atm versus your reasoning for adjusting it? Is the team unsure what the best approach is currently, so there needs to be more time to find out?
Video games take an incredible amount of planning and coordination. Team has more on their plate than ever before, change in those plans causes significant disruption. Try to not disrupt unless there are even more extreme things happening (crashes, tiller). (Source)
Balancing Wild
The second, and possibly the most relevant to some, statement is that Team 5 has acknowledged that the Wild format has reached a saturation point and changes need to be made.
This tweet comes after two very intense days, during which multiple Wild content creators spoke up against the recent balance patch, complaining about the presumed lack of attention towards their format, which is currently warped around the Warlock class and, in particular, The Demon Seed shenanigans.
While we don't know what cards are going to be hit, we are fairly confident that Questline Warlock should be toned down a little. If we were you, we'd try to finish that achievement as soon as possible!
What cards do you think Team 5 should look at for potential nerfs and buffs? Let us know in the comments below!
Comments
What achievement? :o
The one that revolves around redirecting self-damage to your opponent with Blightborn Tamsin's effect.
It might be time for team5 to bite the bullet and simply admit that the stormwind quests as a whole are too powerful and too easily completed. I don't mind if the rewards are powerful, but it should at least be hard to complete, or there has to be more to the gameplay than just steamrolling towards quest completion. Handlock in standard is a good example of a powerful quest deck that at very least relies on the quest as a final last resort, and presents an infinitely better game to go against than pre-nerfed d6 warlock.
Just tweak the quest conditions in stormwind as a whole. Games are over the turn after these things come on board, usually around turn 6-8. If they're this powerful it should be coming out past turn 10 at least, and if the deck does nothing else other than finishing the quest, they should at very least be vulnerable while doing it; warlock in wild clearly isn't, shaman in standard will never lose to aggro, while mage can and will destroy you consistently the following turn after the quest is completed.
I'm not sure we're going to see games past turn 10 any time soon: I think the only thing keeping the Priest questline in check is the other questlines finishing sooner.
That said, even making it to turn 10 would be an improvement; I'd like to be able to play Sheldras Moontree.
Priest questline is ironically the most balance of them all, despite the quest reward literally reads 'destroy the opponent'. Mostly because its requirements will almost always leave priest vulnerable to a mutanus, and the fact that priest doesn't really need the quest to win. A built that curves is usually a midrange deck that is more than capable of closing games themselves and this finisher is way too slow, coming out on turn 9 at its fastest. The most the quest brings to the table is a win condition against control decks.
Most questline Priest decks run very few spells, to tutor the completion reward. That makes it far from certain that Mutanus will pull a key minion, so it may not be enough of a disruption.
The traditional win condition of mid-range versus control is to pace your threats in a way that exhausts the control deck's removal while the mid-range deck still has threats left, finding the sweet spot between under and over-committing. Questline Priest doesn't have to walk that tightrope: if it can stay alive for about 10 turns, it just wins.
While I agree that in many matchups the questline completion doesn't even matter for Priest, it does matter versus control, so if the deck starts seeing play after other decks are slowed down, it can still push control decks out of the meta. It would be like Mean Streets, where you couldn't play control because there was no way to beat Jade Druid in a long game.
By the way, for some of the questlines, like Demon Hunter and perhaps even Shaman, the intermediate rewards are probably more important than the completion reward. I've been playing a modified version of Dane's Frog Questline Shaman deck in Wild and realized that I was missing lethal opportunities because I was too fixated on playing the quest reward, while just slinging a lot of spells face without double cast is more efficient against most opponents. I wouldn't want to drop the quest though, since the overload unlock after the first stage is really useful.
Only toned down a litte? Are you joking or are you so out of touch to the Wild format like the devs?
This deck has to be toned down by a lot to give control a chance to breath in Wild again. Maybe it should even be completely banned in Wild like Stealer of Cheese before.
Would it be better if it said "at least a little"?
This ain't being out of tune with Wild, this is setting expectations. I don't know why folks think that Wild is going to get this massive balance overhaul. Blizzard has repeatedly stated that the format is not meant to be balanced except in the most exceptional of circumstances. One can desire more, but there's no reason to throw an attack at Avalon for bringing us the news.
I agree with Avalon, we can be confident that Questline will receive a little bit of a tone down and that we should not expect massive changes.
First of all, it's a figure of speech.
Secondly, please calm down. Directing the frustrations Wild is currently towards content creators (and in this case me) is quite the useless move, since we (I) don't have the slightest power to decide wether something will be done or not. We (I) can only speak up based on what we think, but that is all.
Finally, if a large part of the Wild community has been interacting without proper manners in the last few days, that does not mean that you are allowed to do the same.
Given what the most recent changes have been like, I'm not hopeful. It's nice they're at least finally acknowledging the problem after two patches of doing nothing to address it, but given how meek and minute the changes have been, I'm fairly confident that out of the 6+ cards that need changing in Warlock alone, barely half of them is going to get addressed. And who knows how many of the changes that do make it through actually achieve what was intended. And that's just talking about Warlock. I think it's safe to say even if Warlock takes a galactic nerfing the meta won't be any more favourable to control than it is right now, since Shamans, Mages, Hunters and potentially Paladins will take over the mantle and quest control into oblivion.
Any kind of persistent reward is going to be good versus control. I think that similar to when Death Knights were in Standard, almost every control deck will have to run the questline itself.
Questline Shaman and Mage are indeed very powerful and may continue to be a problem for control decks.
Hunters can run out of resources, so if you can heal enough or put down minions they can't ignore, I think a control deck should be able to outlast them.
The Paladin questline currently seems the strongest when you play as many 1-drops as possible, but against control that's unlikely to be favored. If that deck is retooled to have more staying power, its quest completion will come later, which weakens it considerably against non-control decks. The more expensive cards are included, the more likely you'd be better off playing Handbuff instead.
I'm sure we'll finally see warlock demon seed get nerfed, I just think fundamentally circumventing the fatigue mechanic is what is making it broken. I have a feeling that we'll see a change to how tamsin interacts with fatigue, but we'll have to wait and see how things flesh out...
I mean... we know it's easy to say this from an amateur game-designer perspective.. but if Warlock quest would count times of dealt damage instead of actual damage it could easily be balanced. Like for example if it said: Deal damage to your hero 5 times to progress etc...
Sure the final reward is crazy strong still but at least it would be a start...
Shaman Quest works the same way. It doesn't count overloaded crystals but the frequency of your overload.
A man can dream... (which Blizzard is obviously doing too lol)
The issue with that is it's not necessarily a nerf unless you make the number of self-damage instances very high. It's not difficult for Warlock to do tons of tiny increments of damage to itself for very cheap or even for free. And now since the damage amount wouldn't matter, the intended major downside of the Quest, i.e. the fact you have to chunk down half of your health pool, would suddenly be reduced to only having to take 10 or 12 damage total, and that's before the healing would come in. So you might end up in a situation where you try to nerf the quest and unintentionally leave it feeling the same.
yeah i agree.. instead of progressing the quest 5/6 with a single Crystallizer (with no drawback), they can make it like 'deal damage to urself 3/4/5 times' or sth.
It would be a massive chore to work out the balance though because the amount of damage you actually do to yourself becomes hidden behind the statistics of what 'hurting yourself X times' actually means. Is it as small as X damage? Or is it closer to 3X, or even 5X? So I doubt they'd want to rework it that way.
Better just to change the wording of Crystallizer to convert your health into armour like High Priest Thekal does (with an appropriate mechanical change in the code too). That way Crystallizer doesn't actually deal damage to you, and no longer violates the balance of the card because you actually have to deal 6+7+8-2*3=15 damage to yourself.
I agree that's the best way to deal with Crystallizer: it doesn't destroy the card (in fact it becomes better in most other decks) but it does limit its usefulness in questline Warlock to a point where it probably won't be included anymore.
What makes Crystallizer very powerful at the moment is not only how much it helps quest completion, but also that the damage + armor after completion makes it very hard for the opponent to win a damage race after quest completion.
I don't know if I should be grateful that they acknowledge the situation in Wild at all or appalled as we have to endure another month of this shit meta. Probably the latter. Nerfing a single card should not take that long.
Here are just a couple reasons that explain why you're wrong:
Wild already has very little balance changes per year: at least let them be as impactful as possible!
Hi there,
appreciate your opinion. Thanks for the response. I think you are a bit lenient with them though and you overestimate the effort needed here from their side.
1. Yes they obviously have other things to do, but that would be a small thing for them which could be prioritized (obviously this is subjective); also this can be said for any change at any time as they always have other things to do
2. Why not? Many games do it and this would not take much time and effort (I am working in IT myself and no, tweaking one or two cards would definitely not take much time or effort)
3. I don't decide but I 100% believe that The Demon Seed is the right target here. Why nerf multiple cards that were not a problem at all before when one would do? Also this card in its current form limits design space for the future
That would be a rather impactful change imo by the way but that might just be me (might be a bit prejudiced since last week when I lost like eight games in a row against Quest Warlock without seeing any other deck)
Cheers