I'm surprised we haven't heard a word on new deck slots yet. I'm pretty sure that when DH came out, a bunch of people were pretty pissed that we now have 10 classes but 18 deck slots. Seemed like a no-brainer that a new class would come with two new slots, but nope. I seem to recall that later down the line they said on reddit or somewhere that they heard our feedback and more deck slots are on the way. It's been 9 months since DH release and not a beep about deck slots has been heard since.
If by nerf you mean infinite damage loop off of one minion then yes, that totally fixes it. You've essentially recreated a 1-card lifesteal Shadowboxer combo with that wording.
Good. Glad they're not letting this one "play out" like they did with Naga Giants. Remember Naga Giants? Remember that they left that thing untouched for NINE MONTHS? Remember how long they let Darkest Hour infest the meta? I 'member. Glad this isn't that scenario. It's a bit sad that what we'll be coming back to is the same Raza Darkglare meta, I would really like to see some change there, but it's better than this.
I'm sorry but whoever was in charge of naming the later elemental lords is just....Smolderon and Thunderaan? That sounds like characters from a children's Saturday morning cartoon. It's just one short step away from going straight Burneyboy and Stormyman.
Other games like MtG have the "resurrect" mechanic as well, the difference is, the cards physically go into your graveyard when they die (or get pulled from your deck) and have to be pulled out of the graveyard to be put into play. When there's only 1 copy of a card in your graveyard, that's all you have to work with. You cannot resurrect the same Vargoth 3 times because there's only one Vargoth to pull out. It has to die again to be ressed again. If you want to get a massive Spellstone, you have to have 4 minions that have not only died, but that are now currently dead in your graveyard. If you still got a Vargoth and an Obsidian Statue in play and the only thing left in your grave is a Blood of G'huun and you play Eternal Servitude, you get your Blood of Ghun guaranteed, but Vargoth's recast has nothing else to pull, so it whiffs.
Essentially, a graveyard mechanic would prevent all "resurrect" based decks from copying the same single minion countless times (preventing Vargoth abuse) and would allow more counterplay (if you, say, kill the minion once, they res it, and then you hex it, they can only res the frog, not the original minion, cause that one's gone, whereas now unless you hex it the first time, you're screwed).
The downside is, it would also hit some fun N'Zoth decks or Deathrattle Hunters, which aren't really in need of a nerf.
Well, my best guess is they might change the basic set to consist only of the most essential cards for each class (Shadow Word: Death, Execute, Fireball, that kind of stuff), cards that should not need banning or nerfing in the future, and then they throw everything else into rotation, i.e. classic will essentially disappear. I sure hope they don't intend to just throw the stable base of the game away only to selectively reprint cards when they feel like it. Cause as a Wild player I sure as shit ain't looking forward to reopening cards I already have in a new expansion.
From what I've been able to decipher from that puddle of letters you placed next to each other, what you want is endless, unbridled power creep. If you want to see an example of how that winds up going, read up on what happened to Magic the Gathering during the Urza's Saga. Long story short, it nearly killed the game cause all the heavily invested players started leaving in droves. Games ended so fast that Naga Warlock would seem glacial in comparison. The tournament scene devolved into nothing but non-games because whoever drew the better hand won, often as soon as turn 1.
You cannot keep introducing new and new stuff and providing "more options" as you say, if all the old stuff, all the old design mistakes remain in the game. If you can never correct what you messed up in the past, and you instead build on it, over and over and over, then you're building on a rotten foundation and the whole thing comes crashing down real quick. You need to fix what's busted to make space for something new. You don't fix a game by breaking it more. Here's your free design lesson for the week.
First off, I'm starting to seriously wonder whether you spell as an 8 year old on purpose or you really give that little of a fuck about what you're saying. Either way, your arguments would be way more compelling if they were actually possible to read.
Secondly, had you played any serious amount of Wild you'd be singing a different tune. Darkglare Warlock is arguably the best deck Wild has ever seen because of all the powercreep introduced in Scholomance and the way they nerfed it has done pretty much nothing to stop it. And they've not touched it since, just let it eat the whole legend rank alive. Similarly, Raza Priest has been choking down the format for like 9 months now so don't talk about 1 expansion.
There is some upside to Reader over Divine Favour. Firstly, it's a body, even if a bad one. If you land on a poor or slow hand or a bad matchup, Divine Favour may just be rotting in your hand doing nothing the whole match while you're pressing the hero power and hoping for something playable. Reader at least gives you some stats on the board and can be preplayed if you intend to dump your hand the turn after.
Secondly, it's drawn out by Crystology as you mention. The thing is Crystology actually doesn't have that many targets in the deck, many lists only run 2x Righteous Protector, 2x Tour Guide (some add a Broomstick but that's about it, some even cut the protectors for a Pirate package). Crystology can end up being a draw 1 or a dead card in your hand. With Reader in the deck you can essentially chain draw into draw so that you're never out of fuel and can tune your deck to be more aggressive to ensure your hand is empty for Reader to work its magic (cutting Lothraxion for Stewards, cutting Blessing of Authority that some decks run for something like a Pirate/weapon package).
Finally, and this is an important factor, Reader does not give a damn about your opponent's hand. If your opponent vomitted their hand fast or you forced them to commit most of their resources to clearing your board turn after turn, Divine Favour doesn't do much of anything. Reader only cares about your hand size so in aggro vs aggro matchups reader will get you the draw that Divine Favour fails to provide. And its weakness in aggro matchups is one of the main reasons why Divine Favour is being phased out to a single copy.
I'm not saying that the addition of Reader to Odd Paladin is going to break the meta. As things are Odd Paladin isn't as great of a deck as it originally seemed. But it's definitely worth considering the addition, it's not a clear cut case. Aluneth vs Sayge kinda situation.
Man there's gonna be a lot of Neutrals polluting the pool now, won't there? Not sure about this Taunt build, smells a lot like Demons and Pirates to me. Stats can only get you so far. Eventually it's about cleaves, poisons, windfuries and divine shields. And these offer none of those. Then again, if the taunt build is strong enough and hits hard enough, games may be even shorter (god please no, I can't take it anymore) so poisonous divine shield bullcrap might be harder to come by. Also worth noting that this build will be available every...single...game. Never banned. If it's good, it'll get old real fast. If it's bad, it's just gonna make the pool worse.
Besides that, the new Demon makes me think it might be a decent transitional piece for Juggler Demons. But again, at the end of the day it's just a big dumb body with no effects.
The nerf to Lorekeeper Polkelt isn't that big of a deal, the main deck it's in (Raza Priest) is just as problematic as before because it's core brokenness hasn't been addressed. Just make Raza the Chained affect only your basic hero power already and be done with it. You can't have a refreshable hero power cost 0 mana. Especially not one that kills everything. Just accept it. Until that gets changed the same exact deck will keep doing the same exact thing in Tier 1 and nothing will touch it. The deck has single-handedly killed off pretty much all control decks since its unnerf and has been doing so before Polkelt was even a thing. Yes, maybe the games won't feel as samey if Polkelt doesn't curve smoothly and has a poor body for cost so it's harder to play out, but that doesn't exactly fix the deck it's problematic in.
Voracious Reader now slots perfectly into Odd Paladin and gets drawn by Crystology which the deck already runs, but that isn't that much of a problem, Odd Paladin hasn't been as dominant as expected. The other deck it fits into is, again, still as broken as before. When your Token Druid opponent can go second and drop their entire hand turn 1, generating a board of 7 minions that faces you for 16 on turn 2, who gives a damn about drawing cards one mana later. There is quite literally no answer to most of Token Druid's early game plays because 0 mana spells like Embiggen in a world of Spellburst cards and Patches is untenable. That goes especially for Gibberling. Voracious Reader's cost going up won't fix the deck's ridiculous built-in highroll.
But the biggest offender of all is missing from the list completely. Just...give Animated Broomstick the Warsong Commander treatment for fuck's sake. How is 1 mana give your whole board Rush acceptable? And that's not even counting the 1/1 Rush body that comes with it. Games should not end turn 3. Because of this thing, they do. It should give one minion rush, at best, or cost way more than 1 mana. Nerfing Animated Broomstick would pretty much solve the Darkglare Warlock problem overnight (or at least nuke its winrate and thus play rate because it would fold to aggro). Losing the ETC OTK wouldn't be that big of a price to pay for getting this little shit out of the game.
Well, this seems to be headed in the right direction at l(e)ast. However, one thing I'd like to see addressed is the discrepancy between Standard and Wild in terms of quest completion. Play X Corrupt cards etc. may be all fine and dandy for Standard and require no extra effort on the player's part, but in Wild Corrupt is utterly useless. There's like...what, three, four Corrupt cards in the entire set that you MIGHT consider including if you wanted to get funky. I think one, two tops, see regular play, one of which is in a highlander deck. I get that tying your reward track to the set mechanic is logically sound but unless your set mechanic is viable in practice in all formats (which it never will be), Wild players get hamstrung by essentially getting worse quests.
The same goes for set-based achievements (which happen to be the only ones that award XP). Unless you want to go out of your way to farm these in Casual, you're not completing most of these in Wild.
Here's the issue with all this. Since these additional rewards, these seasonal events, are not part of the reward track and are essentially "extras" that come in from outside of the track, without any indication of when that is going to happen or how, it is impossible to objectively keep track of changes should any of that vary from year to year and season to season. If, at some point, they sneakily decide to not award certain XP bonuses and legendary quests at points where they previously used to, unless you have been keeping track, screencapping, archiving Blizz posts etc., it's gonna be real hard to unequivocally say "Hey! They're fucking us over this season!" The track will look exactly the same, the numbers on it will be exactly the same, yet you can be getting shafted when Blizz just don't feel like giving out legendary quests of the same value they did last season.
Moreover, we've already been getting legendary quests on set releases, adventure releases etc. Most of the calculations I've seen regarding how much a person would earn per month do not include these quests. Nor are these quests really retroactively available for review and comparison. So how exactly do these new "extras" stack up to the extra quests we've been getting in the past?
Using these extra sources of XP to balance out what is otherwise a shitty reward track seems like a really convoluted, hard-to-track, easy-to-tinker-with method to mislead people and just generally do whatever the fuck you want. I would not be surprised if a year, two years down the line, we suddenly reaslise that these extra XP sources are like 50 % as rewarding as they used to be, and that the new track is now just objectively worse than the old one unless, of course, you fork out the dolla dolla. Which, let's be frank, was likely the point from the get go.
I...why? Why are we supercharging Secret Mage and Odd Paladin? Do those decks need more of a presence in the meta? I mean yeah, sure, anything to challenge Quest Mage and Raza Priest, decks that the devs have themselves intentionally supercharged/unnerfed in the past, but does it have to be just spammy aggro?
We're gonna need a lot more Totem minions for this to be good, but the fact it has 4 health means it might be able to survive a turn at the very least. In which case, any playable Totem minions will be really good. And if it lives you can totem reflection it.
I'm surprised we haven't heard a word on new deck slots yet. I'm pretty sure that when DH came out, a bunch of people were pretty pissed that we now have 10 classes but 18 deck slots. Seemed like a no-brainer that a new class would come with two new slots, but nope. I seem to recall that later down the line they said on reddit or somewhere that they heard our feedback and more deck slots are on the way. It's been 9 months since DH release and not a beep about deck slots has been heard since.
If by nerf you mean infinite damage loop off of one minion then yes, that totally fixes it. You've essentially recreated a 1-card lifesteal Shadowboxer combo with that wording.
Good. Glad they're not letting this one "play out" like they did with Naga Giants. Remember Naga Giants? Remember that they left that thing untouched for NINE MONTHS? Remember how long they let Darkest Hour infest the meta? I 'member. Glad this isn't that scenario. It's a bit sad that what we'll be coming back to is the same Raza Darkglare meta, I would really like to see some change there, but it's better than this.
Discover always gives 3 options. Guidance only looks at 2 cards.
Boy is Spiked Wheel good for Odd Warrior. Bye bye Sword and Board.
I'm sorry but whoever was in charge of naming the later elemental lords is just....Smolderon and Thunderaan? That sounds like characters from a children's Saturday morning cartoon. It's just one short step away from going straight Burneyboy and Stormyman.
Other games like MtG have the "resurrect" mechanic as well, the difference is, the cards physically go into your graveyard when they die (or get pulled from your deck) and have to be pulled out of the graveyard to be put into play. When there's only 1 copy of a card in your graveyard, that's all you have to work with. You cannot resurrect the same Vargoth 3 times because there's only one Vargoth to pull out. It has to die again to be ressed again. If you want to get a massive Spellstone, you have to have 4 minions that have not only died, but that are now currently dead in your graveyard. If you still got a Vargoth and an Obsidian Statue in play and the only thing left in your grave is a Blood of G'huun and you play Eternal Servitude, you get your Blood of Ghun guaranteed, but Vargoth's recast has nothing else to pull, so it whiffs.
Essentially, a graveyard mechanic would prevent all "resurrect" based decks from copying the same single minion countless times (preventing Vargoth abuse) and would allow more counterplay (if you, say, kill the minion once, they res it, and then you hex it, they can only res the frog, not the original minion, cause that one's gone, whereas now unless you hex it the first time, you're screwed).
The downside is, it would also hit some fun N'Zoth decks or Deathrattle Hunters, which aren't really in need of a nerf.
Well, my best guess is they might change the basic set to consist only of the most essential cards for each class (Shadow Word: Death, Execute, Fireball, that kind of stuff), cards that should not need banning or nerfing in the future, and then they throw everything else into rotation, i.e. classic will essentially disappear. I sure hope they don't intend to just throw the stable base of the game away only to selectively reprint cards when they feel like it. Cause as a Wild player I sure as shit ain't looking forward to reopening cards I already have in a new expansion.
From what I've been able to decipher from that puddle of letters you placed next to each other, what you want is endless, unbridled power creep. If you want to see an example of how that winds up going, read up on what happened to Magic the Gathering during the Urza's Saga. Long story short, it nearly killed the game cause all the heavily invested players started leaving in droves. Games ended so fast that Naga Warlock would seem glacial in comparison. The tournament scene devolved into nothing but non-games because whoever drew the better hand won, often as soon as turn 1.
You cannot keep introducing new and new stuff and providing "more options" as you say, if all the old stuff, all the old design mistakes remain in the game. If you can never correct what you messed up in the past, and you instead build on it, over and over and over, then you're building on a rotten foundation and the whole thing comes crashing down real quick. You need to fix what's busted to make space for something new. You don't fix a game by breaking it more. Here's your free design lesson for the week.
First off, I'm starting to seriously wonder whether you spell as an 8 year old on purpose or you really give that little of a fuck about what you're saying. Either way, your arguments would be way more compelling if they were actually possible to read.
Secondly, had you played any serious amount of Wild you'd be singing a different tune. Darkglare Warlock is arguably the best deck Wild has ever seen because of all the powercreep introduced in Scholomance and the way they nerfed it has done pretty much nothing to stop it. And they've not touched it since, just let it eat the whole legend rank alive. Similarly, Raza Priest has been choking down the format for like 9 months now so don't talk about 1 expansion.
Ah at last, a balance patch! Wild is sav....oh...oh, never mind then. I guess I can find solace in the fact I don't have to climb anymore this month.
There is some upside to Reader over Divine Favour. Firstly, it's a body, even if a bad one. If you land on a poor or slow hand or a bad matchup, Divine Favour may just be rotting in your hand doing nothing the whole match while you're pressing the hero power and hoping for something playable. Reader at least gives you some stats on the board and can be preplayed if you intend to dump your hand the turn after.
Secondly, it's drawn out by Crystology as you mention. The thing is Crystology actually doesn't have that many targets in the deck, many lists only run 2x Righteous Protector, 2x Tour Guide (some add a Broomstick but that's about it, some even cut the protectors for a Pirate package). Crystology can end up being a draw 1 or a dead card in your hand. With Reader in the deck you can essentially chain draw into draw so that you're never out of fuel and can tune your deck to be more aggressive to ensure your hand is empty for Reader to work its magic (cutting Lothraxion for Stewards, cutting Blessing of Authority that some decks run for something like a Pirate/weapon package).
Finally, and this is an important factor, Reader does not give a damn about your opponent's hand. If your opponent vomitted their hand fast or you forced them to commit most of their resources to clearing your board turn after turn, Divine Favour doesn't do much of anything. Reader only cares about your hand size so in aggro vs aggro matchups reader will get you the draw that Divine Favour fails to provide. And its weakness in aggro matchups is one of the main reasons why Divine Favour is being phased out to a single copy.
I'm not saying that the addition of Reader to Odd Paladin is going to break the meta. As things are Odd Paladin isn't as great of a deck as it originally seemed. But it's definitely worth considering the addition, it's not a clear cut case. Aluneth vs Sayge kinda situation.
Man there's gonna be a lot of Neutrals polluting the pool now, won't there? Not sure about this Taunt build, smells a lot like Demons and Pirates to me. Stats can only get you so far. Eventually it's about cleaves, poisons, windfuries and divine shields. And these offer none of those. Then again, if the taunt build is strong enough and hits hard enough, games may be even shorter (god please no, I can't take it anymore) so poisonous divine shield bullcrap might be harder to come by. Also worth noting that this build will be available every...single...game. Never banned. If it's good, it'll get old real fast. If it's bad, it's just gonna make the pool worse.
Besides that, the new Demon makes me think it might be a decent transitional piece for Juggler Demons. But again, at the end of the day it's just a big dumb body with no effects.
This seems like a miss, at least for Wild.
The nerf to Lorekeeper Polkelt isn't that big of a deal, the main deck it's in (Raza Priest) is just as problematic as before because it's core brokenness hasn't been addressed. Just make Raza the Chained affect only your basic hero power already and be done with it. You can't have a refreshable hero power cost 0 mana. Especially not one that kills everything. Just accept it. Until that gets changed the same exact deck will keep doing the same exact thing in Tier 1 and nothing will touch it. The deck has single-handedly killed off pretty much all control decks since its unnerf and has been doing so before Polkelt was even a thing. Yes, maybe the games won't feel as samey if Polkelt doesn't curve smoothly and has a poor body for cost so it's harder to play out, but that doesn't exactly fix the deck it's problematic in.
Voracious Reader now slots perfectly into Odd Paladin and gets drawn by Crystology which the deck already runs, but that isn't that much of a problem, Odd Paladin hasn't been as dominant as expected. The other deck it fits into is, again, still as broken as before. When your Token Druid opponent can go second and drop their entire hand turn 1, generating a board of 7 minions that faces you for 16 on turn 2, who gives a damn about drawing cards one mana later. There is quite literally no answer to most of Token Druid's early game plays because 0 mana spells like Embiggen in a world of Spellburst cards and Patches is untenable. That goes especially for Gibberling. Voracious Reader's cost going up won't fix the deck's ridiculous built-in highroll.
But the biggest offender of all is missing from the list completely. Just...give Animated Broomstick the Warsong Commander treatment for fuck's sake. How is 1 mana give your whole board Rush acceptable? And that's not even counting the 1/1 Rush body that comes with it. Games should not end turn 3. Because of this thing, they do. It should give one minion rush, at best, or cost way more than 1 mana. Nerfing Animated Broomstick would pretty much solve the Darkglare Warlock problem overnight (or at least nuke its winrate and thus play rate because it would fold to aggro). Losing the ETC OTK wouldn't be that big of a price to pay for getting this little shit out of the game.
I don't have to luxury of having Roffle's heavily tanked MMR ;)
Well, this seems to be headed in the right direction at l(e)ast. However, one thing I'd like to see addressed is the discrepancy between Standard and Wild in terms of quest completion. Play X Corrupt cards etc. may be all fine and dandy for Standard and require no extra effort on the player's part, but in Wild Corrupt is utterly useless. There's like...what, three, four Corrupt cards in the entire set that you MIGHT consider including if you wanted to get funky. I think one, two tops, see regular play, one of which is in a highlander deck. I get that tying your reward track to the set mechanic is logically sound but unless your set mechanic is viable in practice in all formats (which it never will be), Wild players get hamstrung by essentially getting worse quests.
The same goes for set-based achievements (which happen to be the only ones that award XP). Unless you want to go out of your way to farm these in Casual, you're not completing most of these in Wild.
Here's the issue with all this. Since these additional rewards, these seasonal events, are not part of the reward track and are essentially "extras" that come in from outside of the track, without any indication of when that is going to happen or how, it is impossible to objectively keep track of changes should any of that vary from year to year and season to season. If, at some point, they sneakily decide to not award certain XP bonuses and legendary quests at points where they previously used to, unless you have been keeping track, screencapping, archiving Blizz posts etc., it's gonna be real hard to unequivocally say "Hey! They're fucking us over this season!" The track will look exactly the same, the numbers on it will be exactly the same, yet you can be getting shafted when Blizz just don't feel like giving out legendary quests of the same value they did last season.
Moreover, we've already been getting legendary quests on set releases, adventure releases etc. Most of the calculations I've seen regarding how much a person would earn per month do not include these quests. Nor are these quests really retroactively available for review and comparison. So how exactly do these new "extras" stack up to the extra quests we've been getting in the past?
Using these extra sources of XP to balance out what is otherwise a shitty reward track seems like a really convoluted, hard-to-track, easy-to-tinker-with method to mislead people and just generally do whatever the fuck you want. I would not be surprised if a year, two years down the line, we suddenly reaslise that these extra XP sources are like 50 % as rewarding as they used to be, and that the new track is now just objectively worse than the old one unless, of course, you fork out the dolla dolla. Which, let's be frank, was likely the point from the get go.
I...why? Why are we supercharging Secret Mage and Odd Paladin? Do those decks need more of a presence in the meta? I mean yeah, sure, anything to challenge Quest Mage and Raza Priest, decks that the devs have themselves intentionally supercharged/unnerfed in the past, but does it have to be just spammy aggro?
We're gonna need a lot more Totem minions for this to be good, but the fact it has 4 health means it might be able to survive a turn at the very least. In which case, any playable Totem minions will be really good. And if it lives you can totem reflection it.
Well, at least this is randomness that won't power Quest Mage even higher than it already is. Hopefully. Stranger things have happened.