Not only is Priest at the crap end of the spectrum right now (Thief decks for Priest don't work when you have synergy-fueled trash aggro decks like demons, murlocs and treants), Mind Blast wasn't on the meta radar, even with the legendary copying a spell cast. If this was a year ago when you could fish out Velen and Malygos for a finish, yeah, it would be met with "the community has been requesting this."
Decks that rely on Inner Fire to win are lazy to me. It's even lazier when Team 5 doesn't give priest another win condition and removes a good one (when it is supported).
Even Vanish nerf puzzles me and I don't play Rogue. It's like someone at Team 5/Blizzard opened Hearthstone complaint mail from a year ago and applied it.
I get the impression these are the directions they intend to go and would like to go, not the current State of the Game.
With that said, I do feel like their actions are a bit lopsided/unbalanced. While I agree that Vanish and Mind Blast don't fit their vision for class identity, Vanish almost never saw recent play and the 4-mana 3/3 that replaced it very well could, while Mind Blast was pretty central as a win condition in many Priest decks, and the new 1-mana spell most likely won't. Looking at current class power levels, Rogue is very strong and loses a card it never plays, but gains a card it might. And Priest is.....not good, and will lose a 'build around' card, and gain something that is pretty bad.
With THAT said, I am not a game dev or tester, and I assume T5 has done quite a bit of internal testing....I'm very doubting but I will wait to make any real judgement until I've seen these changes go into effect.
Getting rid of Vanish is pretty surprising. Unless there's something gamebreaking with it in the next expansion, it seems like it kind of came out of nowhere.
Maybe it's from Pogo Rogue? It lets you pop them back into your hand while clearing the opponent's board
Will probably be only playable with Eureka/Muckmorpher. There, the +2/+2 buff might be usable thanks to cheap spells many Control Shaman decks can use and Hagatha. Dunno where else this could land - maybe as a fringe alternative in Paladin decks that utilize Prismatic Lens.
Token druid is only getting faster, adding mechs and cutting slow cards such as Soul of the Forest. An 8 mana buff needs to be game-winning for druid to even consider running a single copy of, and this card doesn't fit that bill. I doubt this will see any play.
Messenger Raven already saw some play and didn't have much synergy with other cards. This deck fills the curve nicely for dragon classes that don't have access to (good) 3-drops. Decent card.
This card is nothing more than a win more card. And those generally see little to no play.
Slow decks won't have the board to do anything with it. Fast decks don't want to rely on a single 7-drop to win the board (especially because they're more focused on going face at that point as some users pointed out already). Tempo/midrange decks want one or two stand-alone big drops that they can jam as a last ditch efford to win the game (Rafaam, The Lich King, Tirion...). And combo decks... well this card doesn't draw your combo pieces nor effectively stall the game for you so yeah...
I don't agree on your assessment of Siegebreaker and Gift of the Wild, but other than that I have the same impression of the new classic cards as you. Siegebreaker is comparable to a Violet Warden or Bog Creeper, so probably somewhere between a 2-3?
Gift of the Wild is nowhere near Silver Sword in power level, as you can invest the mana upfront and then build up your board with SS in the following turns. With GotW you'll need a board and at least three minions to be worth the high cost, so it's clearly a win more card. Why would I pick this when I can close out games much cheaper with Blessing of the Ancients or Savage Roar? Honestly I wouldn't even give this a 3 rating.
I wont disagree, i might had been a little too hyped right after seeing them haha. I definitely did have Bog Creeper and Furious Ettin in mind when evaluating Siegebreaker, so i looked at it as a taunt on similar power level with additional synergies. Probably is "just" a 2.
Gift of the Wild same thing, probably should have said "close to Silver Sword power level" rather than same. Yeah, it can totally tank in the end, but it is another finisher for a druid, which is a nice thing. You dont always get an option to draft Savage Roar either. Again, not disagreeing with you on this one per se, but im a bit more optimistic about the card than you :) Even tho i would not mind at all, if i was wrong lol.
Not to say all your views are wrong (too much of this is subjective) but it is worth viewing everything from the other side, which is my intent as I pose counter arguments.
Draw in shaman: your sentence could exchange 'shaman' -> 'rogue' and 'card draw' -> (most of rogue's weaknesses) and make something people have asked for years. In short the answer is: probably yes. You are free to make traditional control decks for these classes, in the same sense as control warrior or priest, but of course they won't be as good. Instead you modify them to fit the tools available until you might not even call them control decks anymore.
Quite frankly: good. The whole point in having 9 classes is to limit tools available to any given deck. Every class should end up better than everyone else at something, to the point where other classes trying to mimic them are liable to be weaker and be considered 'not viable'. They might be OK in the grand scheme of things (e.g. control shaman > control rogue, hunter and druid), but being middle strength means nothing for the meta.
Anyhow, how does this respond to your question? It says if you want to make a control deck and card draw is important for you, you weigh up the options and discount shaman. Which I believe is much better than having the situation where you look at all 9 classes and all are equally good at everything.
Draw in hunter: firstly, draw came under 'limitations' (not a nicely defined thing in my book) rather than 'weakness', so by they made no suggestion of never printing conditional card draw again. Just that it will happen rarely. Even if they chose not to, I would be OK with it. As with shaman above, I think it is good to have the capacity to draw cards factor into decisions on which class to choose for a given archetype.
Priest only has Inner Fire: cf Nomi, Mecha'Thun, and others exist. A lot of decks do use Inner Fire because if the plan is for things to ever stick anyway, then it is an easy and cheesy win. E.g. silence priest doesn't have to run Divine Spirit + Inner Fire, but it lines up with the plan since it wins with minions punching the face anyway. In this case I would argue big, cheap, silenced minions are the primary win condition, with DS+IF as a powerful alternative in case the situation arises where it does the job.
Demons as a 'strength': if neutral demons didn't exist I would agree with you. However, they do and there is no denying warlock generally has a much greater capacity to exploit them than other classes do, just because they have the demon tribe.
As for whether demons (and totems, and every other tribe since none are made use of equally well by all classes) should be listed as weaknesses of other classes: sure, if you want the full list they'd be there. But does this really need writing down?
Warriors not caring about going wide: well, it's never part of their game plan because warriors suck at it. If they were good at going wide you can be sure they would do it sometimes. View it this way: you want to make a deck that goes wide, but are yet to even pick a class. Among others you discount warrior because it has nothing to make the deck work, and instead land on druid, shaman, warlock or pally (possibly hunter if you are a fan of the class). Why? Because the chosen archetype plays to their strengths, while the other classes are weak at it.
Same goes for armour in mage. Its not part of the game plan precisely because they are weak at it. If you try to instead argue mage just happens to not include it in their game plan through choice, then be my guest and make an effective armour-focused mage....
The rule of thumb is: if a mechanic is never part of a class' game plan, its probably because they are weak at it.
Druid/rogue auto-lose to a tall and wide board: well yes, they can struggle to deal with it effectively. But that doesn't mean they cannot beat decks that build such boards; they just have to prevent the board being built in the first place. E.g. rogue can single target kill minions as they come down before they build up. Yet again this is good as it means each class plays differently.
Re turn 4 Mountain Giant in mage: turn 4 Mountain Giants are nothing new (see Handlock), and that is something I don't mind. How they multiply if you cannot deal with them is however a problem and I agree it is much too punishing just for a choice of class. Mana cheating and giants have caused so much grief over HS's history that I have to wonder whether they should change a minion's mana cost to its played cost rather than base one...
Could definitely see this working in wild. Resurrect this together with Mal'Ganis and a few Doomguards for pretty good burst damage. Maybe.
Better in my opinion than Voidlord for a Cubelock deck. This way you get good taunts, attack buff(s), and no annoying 1/3 demons when you play Bloodreaver Gul'dan. Yes, you miss out on the ever expanding 1/3s when playing against an aggro deck, but whatever.
Those annoying 1/3s are a swarm of 3/5s or even 5/7s. Cubelock uses doomguards for slow matchups and voidlords for fast matchups. This card is far inferior to voidlord to do the latter.
It feels like a whole lot of rhetoric spun just to justify the removal of yet another two cards from the evergreen collection after-the-fact. I'm so tired of Blizzard twisting every which way to avoid doing the inevitable and rotating out classic. Even the new cards leave me with a bad taste in my mouth knowing why they're being introduced and what could have been instead. Not to mention them mostly being bland or unplayable.
I find that post by Team 5 pretty delusional: they've stated things that they couldn't keep up with in the first place while also wondering on a "dangerous" argument. Why putting label on each class, when no one asked for them? Players have asked for ages to shake up those same identities in some way because in the long run that kind of mentality was locking each class into some predictable (and than boring) style.
They've made such a long and pointless explanation to just end up saying that Vanish and Mind Blast don't fit what they think are Rogue's and Priest's themes, so they're moving them to the HoF. Why they cannot wrote down the gameplay reasons behind that choice, as they've always done before, while giving us real insights and datas on that?
On top of that they've tried to justify how terrible almost all of the new cards are by repeating the same old mantra about "controlling the powerlevel of Basic and Classic because they don't rotate", while deciding in the exact same moment to push into Basic and Classic new cards after having moved out so many of them. Instead of this in/out things at random moments, they should instead thinking of completly rework the idea of a fixed amount of cards for Standard.
Anyone else think the recent post about class pros/cons is incredibly lopsided?
Them: Priest should not hit face with spells.
Reality: Priest has shadowform.
Not only is Priest at the crap end of the spectrum right now (Thief decks for Priest don't work when you have synergy-fueled trash aggro decks like demons, murlocs and treants), Mind Blast wasn't on the meta radar, even with the legendary copying a spell cast. If this was a year ago when you could fish out Velen and Malygos for a finish, yeah, it would be met with "the community has been requesting this."
Decks that rely on Inner Fire to win are lazy to me. It's even lazier when Team 5 doesn't give priest another win condition and removes a good one (when it is supported).
Even Vanish nerf puzzles me and I don't play Rogue. It's like someone at Team 5/Blizzard opened Hearthstone complaint mail from a year ago and applied it.
Anyone else think the recent post about class pros/cons is incredibly lopsided?
I get the impression these are the directions they intend to go and would like to go, not the current State of the Game.
With that said, I do feel like their actions are a bit lopsided/unbalanced. While I agree that Vanish and Mind Blast don't fit their vision for class identity, Vanish almost never saw recent play and the 4-mana 3/3 that replaced it very well could, while Mind Blast was pretty central as a win condition in many Priest decks, and the new 1-mana spell most likely won't. Looking at current class power levels, Rogue is very strong and loses a card it never plays, but gains a card it might. And Priest is.....not good, and will lose a 'build around' card, and gain something that is pretty bad.
With THAT said, I am not a game dev or tester, and I assume T5 has done quite a bit of internal testing....I'm very doubting but I will wait to make any real judgement until I've seen these changes go into effect.
Radiance
BEST CARD IN THE GAME.
Hall of Fame Mt. Giant
Perhaps you're looking for this?
Salt Thread
Otherwise, why do you think it needs to be HoF'd?
10 New Hearthstone Cards Coming to the Game, New Hall of Fame Additions
Maybe it's from Pogo Rogue? It lets you pop them back into your hand while clearing the opponent's board
Hall of Fame Mt. Giant
For the love of god please hall of fame this card already!!
New Neutral Minion - Arcane Devourer
Will probably be only playable with Eureka/Muckmorpher. There, the +2/+2 buff might be usable thanks to cheap spells many Control Shaman decks can use and Hagatha. Dunno where else this could land - maybe as a fringe alternative in Paladin decks that utilize Prismatic Lens.
New Druid Spell - Gift of the Wild
Token druid is only getting faster, adding mechs and cutting slow cards such as Soul of the Forest. An 8 mana buff needs to be game-winning for druid to even consider running a single copy of, and this card doesn't fit that bill. I doubt this will see any play.
New Neutral Minion - Brightwing
Messenger Raven already saw some play and didn't have much synergy with other cards. This deck fills the curve nicely for dragon classes that don't have access to (good) 3-drops. Decent card.
New Warlock Minion - Siegebreaker
Seems like it's right on the cusp of being playable. If nothing else, I think this is a reasonable option for budget decks.
Quest Trading - Play A Friend!
Done.
New Neutral Minion - High Inquisitor Whitemane
This card is nothing more than a win more card. And those generally see little to no play.
Slow decks won't have the board to do anything with it. Fast decks don't want to rely on a single 7-drop to win the board (especially because they're more focused on going face at that point as some users pointed out already). Tempo/midrange decks want one or two stand-alone big drops that they can jam as a last ditch efford to win the game (Rafaam, The Lich King, Tirion...). And combo decks... well this card doesn't draw your combo pieces nor effectively stall the game for you so yeah...
New Neutral Minion - Brightwing
Will definitely making Dragon-Shark Rogue when this drops.
And Dragon-of-the-Dead Priest.
[Arena Impact] 10 New basic/classic cards
I wont disagree, i might had been a little too hyped right after seeing them haha. I definitely did have Bog Creeper and Furious Ettin in mind when evaluating Siegebreaker, so i looked at it as a taunt on similar power level with additional synergies. Probably is "just" a 2.
Gift of the Wild same thing, probably should have said "close to Silver Sword power level" rather than same. Yeah, it can totally tank in the end, but it is another finisher for a druid, which is a nice thing. You dont always get an option to draft Savage Roar either. Again, not disagreeing with you on this one per se, but im a bit more optimistic about the card than you :) Even tho i would not mind at all, if i was wrong lol.
Keeping Hearthstone Unique - Class Identity Breakdown
Not to say all your views are wrong (too much of this is subjective) but it is worth viewing everything from the other side, which is my intent as I pose counter arguments.
Draw in shaman: your sentence could exchange 'shaman' -> 'rogue' and 'card draw' -> (most of rogue's weaknesses) and make something people have asked for years. In short the answer is: probably yes. You are free to make traditional control decks for these classes, in the same sense as control warrior or priest, but of course they won't be as good. Instead you modify them to fit the tools available until you might not even call them control decks anymore.
Quite frankly: good. The whole point in having 9 classes is to limit tools available to any given deck. Every class should end up better than everyone else at something, to the point where other classes trying to mimic them are liable to be weaker and be considered 'not viable'. They might be OK in the grand scheme of things (e.g. control shaman > control rogue, hunter and druid), but being middle strength means nothing for the meta.
Anyhow, how does this respond to your question? It says if you want to make a control deck and card draw is important for you, you weigh up the options and discount shaman. Which I believe is much better than having the situation where you look at all 9 classes and all are equally good at everything.
Draw in hunter: firstly, draw came under 'limitations' (not a nicely defined thing in my book) rather than 'weakness', so by they made no suggestion of never printing conditional card draw again. Just that it will happen rarely. Even if they chose not to, I would be OK with it. As with shaman above, I think it is good to have the capacity to draw cards factor into decisions on which class to choose for a given archetype.
Priest only has Inner Fire: cf Nomi, Mecha'Thun, and others exist. A lot of decks do use Inner Fire because if the plan is for things to ever stick anyway, then it is an easy and cheesy win. E.g. silence priest doesn't have to run Divine Spirit + Inner Fire, but it lines up with the plan since it wins with minions punching the face anyway. In this case I would argue big, cheap, silenced minions are the primary win condition, with DS+IF as a powerful alternative in case the situation arises where it does the job.
Demons as a 'strength': if neutral demons didn't exist I would agree with you. However, they do and there is no denying warlock generally has a much greater capacity to exploit them than other classes do, just because they have the demon tribe.
As for whether demons (and totems, and every other tribe since none are made use of equally well by all classes) should be listed as weaknesses of other classes: sure, if you want the full list they'd be there. But does this really need writing down?
Warriors not caring about going wide: well, it's never part of their game plan because warriors suck at it. If they were good at going wide you can be sure they would do it sometimes. View it this way: you want to make a deck that goes wide, but are yet to even pick a class. Among others you discount warrior because it has nothing to make the deck work, and instead land on druid, shaman, warlock or pally (possibly hunter if you are a fan of the class). Why? Because the chosen archetype plays to their strengths, while the other classes are weak at it.
Same goes for armour in mage. Its not part of the game plan precisely because they are weak at it. If you try to instead argue mage just happens to not include it in their game plan through choice, then be my guest and make an effective armour-focused mage....
The rule of thumb is: if a mechanic is never part of a class' game plan, its probably because they are weak at it.
Druid/rogue auto-lose to a tall and wide board: well yes, they can struggle to deal with it effectively. But that doesn't mean they cannot beat decks that build such boards; they just have to prevent the board being built in the first place. E.g. rogue can single target kill minions as they come down before they build up. Yet again this is good as it means each class plays differently.
Re turn 4 Mountain Giant in mage: turn 4 Mountain Giants are nothing new (see Handlock), and that is something I don't mind. How they multiply if you cannot deal with them is however a problem and I agree it is much too punishing just for a choice of class. Mana cheating and giants have caused so much grief over HS's history that I have to wonder whether they should change a minion's mana cost to its played cost rather than base one...
New Warlock Minion - Siegebreaker
Those annoying 1/3s are a swarm of 3/5s or even 5/7s. Cubelock uses doomguards for slow matchups and voidlords for fast matchups. This card is far inferior to voidlord to do the latter.
Quest Trading - Play A Friend!
Done.
New Paladin Spell - Righteousness
If it's weak in standard then it often is even weaker in wild unless there's some crazy synergy with old cards.
This isn't the case. Card is terribly overcosted.
Let’s Make An Expansion!
New Neutral Minion - Brightwing
Am I the only one who thinks she should of been a neutral silence/ polymorph effect instead of a randomly legendary ?
Golden probably looks amazing , and I can't wait to see her voice entrance.
[ My Sweet Shinobi ]
Deck looks fun! Is there a reason (outside of budget) that the one Rusty Recycler isn't a Zilliax?
Keeping Hearthstone Unique - Class Identity Breakdown
Now i've noticed they didn't even mention the Combo, Overload or Choose One mechanics as class Strenghts, thats weird...
10 New Hearthstone Cards Coming to the Game, New Hall of Fame Additions
The two legendaries look promising. Brightwing should of had a silence / or polymorph effect though.
SI7 infiltrator isn't an awful stat line for a tech card.
Only other one that might see play is gift of the wild in token Druid.
Barrens Stablehand's best outcomes
Oondasta , Akali , Gonk , Ironhide defender, Savannah Highmane, Kingcrush, Shirvallah, King Mukla, Witchwood Grizzly, Loose Specieman, The Beast , Core hound & Amani Warbear..
But you'll most likely get a 1/1 ..
Still super happy they're doing this before the next expansion. looks like they've learned from their mistakes.
Anyone else think the recent post about class pros/cons is incredibly lopsided?
It feels like a whole lot of rhetoric spun just to justify the removal of yet another two cards from the evergreen collection after-the-fact. I'm so tired of Blizzard twisting every which way to avoid doing the inevitable and rotating out classic. Even the new cards leave me with a bad taste in my mouth knowing why they're being introduced and what could have been instead. Not to mention them mostly being bland or unplayable.
Anyone else think the recent post about class pros/cons is incredibly lopsided?
I find that post by Team 5 pretty delusional: they've stated things that they couldn't keep up with in the first place while also wondering on a "dangerous" argument. Why putting label on each class, when no one asked for them? Players have asked for ages to shake up those same identities in some way because in the long run that kind of mentality was locking each class into some predictable (and than boring) style.
They've made such a long and pointless explanation to just end up saying that Vanish and Mind Blast don't fit what they think are Rogue's and Priest's themes, so they're moving them to the HoF. Why they cannot wrote down the gameplay reasons behind that choice, as they've always done before, while giving us real insights and datas on that?
On top of that they've tried to justify how terrible almost all of the new cards are by repeating the same old mantra about "controlling the powerlevel of Basic and Classic because they don't rotate", while deciding in the exact same moment to push into Basic and Classic new cards after having moved out so many of them. Instead of this in/out things at random moments, they should instead thinking of completly rework the idea of a fixed amount of cards for Standard.