In a stream with his daughter this evening, Mike Donais may have just leaked two of the upcoming card changes!
A private message appeared on stream between Jared Noel, a former member of Hearthstone Analytics at Blizzard, which mentioned two changes.
- Conjurer's Calling being increased to 4 mana.
- Extra Arms being reverted to 3 mana.
Mike stated later in the stream that he "doesn't know" what changes are coming but not to expect more than 10 cards since they don't change more than that. "We aren't announcing nerfs today, at least not intentionally" comes after his announcement on reddit late last night that we may see nerf announcements this week.
Happy Birthday, Mike!
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Based on games I've played this week it looks like most Mages have already moved on to the highlander deck variants anyway, and Conjurer's Calling is equally oppresive in that (thanks in part to Luna's Pocket Galaxy). Plus it kind of makes a mockery of the limitations a highlander build brings if you still get 2 copies of one of your most powerful cards.
You're probably right that removing Twinspell from Extra Arms pushes it out of most decks, but what's the alternative? We already know it definitely doesn't work at 3, so if it is getting nerfed surely they've got to try something different?
Original highlander decks back in the day frequently used Brann to double up (or more) on Kazakus potions and none of those cards were nerfed. Taking advantage of double-dipping effects in highlander decks has been a 101 value strat from the get go. There's nothing uncharacteristic of standard highlander mage doubling up on the modern 'Kazakus potion' known as giants
Fair point, but I'd say there's a big difference between building a highlander deck which allows you to generate extra copies of cards and just being given 2 copies of CC straight off the bat with no effort whatsoever required
Extra Arms without Twinspell would just be a 2 mana give +2/+2 and wouldn't even be worth including in a deck.
On the other hand, CC without Twinspell would force players to move from the Mountain Giant build to a value one.
A better nerf to conjurer's calling would be to simply change the way the card works, make it so that if you play a mountain giant for 4 mana, then it is seen as a 4 mana card. this would make the card way more balanced. but the issue is that if team 5 were to do that everyone would complain about how they nerfed the deck but there is no dust refund.
Everyone seems to forget there will be more cards hit...
And with them saying not more than 10, makes me think it will be quite a high number, like 6-8
The idea of nerfing Extra Arms is a joke
Ikr? It just became playable and now it's going to the dumpster again.
Agreed. I don’t see Extra Arms as a problem.
I would agree. I don't see how it's a "problem". Conjurer's Calling, oh, it IS a problem.
The idea of seeing Conjurer's Calling having its cost upped in place of Mountain Giant (or outright moving it to HoF) already fails to appealing to me;
it's already a nerf to the likes of turn 10 Astromancer or any 7 Drop + CC combo which are combos that already see almost no play (unless Luna's Pocket Galaxy stays the same in which case, sigh; just a big whoop overall) although on the plus side it's an Arena nerf to Mage, so it's accettable;
then there is the issue with Warrior winning Lategame with one Hero so they can invest space in fending off Aggro all they want without investing in lategame, like old times Control Warrior had to;
finally, I feel that if they nerf Mage and Warriors only, game is going to turn into another Hunter vs Priest all over again, with Quest Paladin not quite needed anymore and I have had enough of that.
I said in yesterdays post Priest nerfs were coming but I got downvoted. Priest has the highest winrate on legend-rank 5.
And yet Warrior has been top dog for months and not a peep, Priest gets Tier 1 for 2 weeks, IT'S NERF TIME!
While I'm certainly not a fan of warriors ability to just have Dr Boom as this "catch-all" win condition in the form of a hero power and strong passive...
The issue with priest/extra arms doesn't inherently come from it's ability to "win" but how it wins.
Extra arms is arguably more popular in the aggro priest variant, and the idea with this is that all the cards together, Cleric, Lightwarden, ExtraArms, Amet, DS, IF, combine into this super strong, super resilient aggro deck.
The reason we are most likely not seeing nerf to the murloc paladin even though it's aggro is because it's reliant on RNG (drawing primsatic, and using it), and by the time murloc paladin swarms out, you generally have a way to stall, clear the board or have an answer.
In contrast to that, there are very few classes that can deal with a turn 1 cleric, much less a turn 2 cleric buffed to 3/5 with extra arms. That's just a snowballing nightmare.
I would much rather lose early in the game than let the game drag on for forever just because you *might* win and then lose to dr. boom nonetheless.
They said "All these changes", implying there are more nerfs and "basically what everyones been asking for", which might mean they finally address dr. Boom and Luna's pocket galaxy. I agree extra arms is fun but broken at 2 mana, but I just cannot comprehend how quickly they would react to aggro priest's power level in contrast to the much more broken resurrect priest which they just waited until it rotated to wild and let it wreak havoc there. Such an interesting bunch of developers.
Priest deserves to be hit only in the old summon/resurrect cards. Basically Wild. The rest of the class is absolutely fine, and hitting Extra Arms is completely undeserved.
More in general tho, reverting buffs, right or wrong, would be a huge failure. Much worse than simply nerfing cards.
I don't want the game to get in a continuous hysteria of buffs and nerfs on the same cards.
I totally agree about the risk of having no-stop changes going on every now and then, buffing and then nerfing the same cards. It seems like Team5 cannot even understand how their own game works.
It's not good for the game.
Geez, the communitiy is asking for more frequent changes and now that we finally got those, you guys start complaining allready?! Changes of any nature are super healthy for the game. Frequent changes keep the meta fresh.
I don‘t see a problem with nerfing previously buffed cards. In contrary, it‘s Team 5 admitting they did a mistake and that’s a very good attitude.
Nerfing extra arms is debatable but not for your reasons. It makes priest playable right now but the card is polarizing af. It simply wins most games when played on turn 2.
PS: they obviously can not predict the meta. Noone can. That‘s why nerfs and buffs happen in the first place.