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A possible explanation about the cards removed from Arena in the future patch and the issues associated with it.

So, I have been thinking about the cards removed and also read some reactions from some arena streamers and players. Some cards seem very strange. For example, why remove forgotten torch, but keep flamecannon for mages. Or why are windspeaker and dunemaul shaman removed.

I think Blizzard removed the cards they found in their statistics to be the weakest and most powerful and removed some to try and make the game mode more balanced. I think when you look at the cards removed you can see that a lot of the cards are actually pretty decent, but hard to play with and/or they are "trap" cards. For example Poison Seeds and Soul of the Forest. Both can be situationaly good, but I can also understand why they show up as terrible in Blizz's statistics. Both are very easy to draft into the wrong deck and to misplay. I think the same thing can be said about the already mentioned Windspeaker, or Cobrashot and both of the removed hunter secrets.

And here comes the problem, balancing the game around the average is never a good idea in a competitive game. The average player is bad and doesn't know how to play the game properly. When you do balance a game around the average, you are actually only making it more imbalanced. I think what Blizzard did here is first incredibly lazy, and second more proof that they don't really care about the game being a good competitive experience, they just want to keep the biggest portion of their playersbase content.

Although it might be true that given the current state of arena balance, even a chance as bad as this (in my opinion) will still be a net improvement.


  • Iksar

    Posted 7 years, 8 months ago (Source)

    We have the ability to look at card performance across all skill levels. None of the cards removed were strong at any skill level. Some of the cards removed were fun to play, but I think when you have to reach a critical mass of cards to remove, it's hard to avoid that. A great deal of effort went into choosing the right cards, but we're interested in feedback on cards you think should have been removed instead.




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