Hearthstone Gets Druid & Priest Balance Changes This Week - Our Thoughts on the Potential Cards

Hearthstone Developer Alec Dawson stated that an upcoming balance patch will take place this Thursday and will be aimed to fix problems that are currently haunting the Standard format.

While we don't know what will be changed, we know that three cards will be hit and that they'll regard Priest and Druid.

Quote From Alec Dawson

Few balance changes coming next Thursday, three cards in total. Looking at generation/burst healing in Priest and hitting on some of the non-games in Druid.

This is probably going to be a balance patch in view of the upcoming United in Stormwind meta: the developers might have spotted some gameplay patterns that may compromise the next set's new toys, hence the changes. The same thing happened a year ago with the pre-Scholomance Academy patch, which brought nerfs to powerhouses like Galakrond, the Nightmare, Fungal Fortunes and Dragonqueen Alexstrasza to promote new play styles like Weapon Rogue, Beast Druid and various non-highlander builds.

Without further ado, let's to predict what cards will see changes.

Druid

Given Alec's Tweet, it appears that two of the three cards will be Priest ones (one for generation and one for healing ), while only one will concern Druid.

Alec stated they want to hit "some of the non-games in Druid", which is a clear reference to Token Druid, one of the best decks in the game and with fast and explosive turns, which can generate absurd amounts of stats in the very few rounds with little to no answer for most opponents. Here's one of the most common lists played on ladder.

We can easily identity 3 cards which are responsible for the non-games Alec is talking about: obviously Gibberling, but we'd also say Lightning Bloom and Arbor Up.

All these three cards contribute to create enormous amounts of stats with not much (starting) mana at disposal:

• Lightning Bloom is a pre-nerf Innervate and since Scholomance day 1, everyone knew it would be broken in both Druid and Shaman.
• Gibberling creates a large board for little to no cost, since there are spells like Nature Studies, Guidance, Lunar Eclipse and Innervate/Lightning Bloom that most Druid lists already want to run.
• Arbor Up is a 5 mana 8/6 by itself, which is not bad but also not great: the problem comes when it capitalizes on Gibberling and Solar Eclipse shenanigans.

Let's try to break these suggestions to one.

There's little to no way to nerf Lightning Bloom: you either turn it into some sort of worse Innervate or you leave it as it is. Increasing the Overload doesn't do much either, since most of the times you don't really card about your following turn, given all the broken stuff you did in the previous one. Plus it hurts Shaman, a class that's become playable only after the Wailing Caverns mini set and that doesn't deserve (yet) to be addressed.

Arbor Up is a 5 mana card: even with Lightning Bloom, Nature Studies and all the other mana cheat cards you can think of, it still has a certain cost and, most important, it needs an existing board to become really dangerous.

That, of course, leaves us with Gibberling: if you increase this unit's cost while maintaining the Spellburst effect as it is, not only you'll slow down the deck, but you'll also decrease the amount of "non-games" Alec was talking about. We've seen suggestions like turning Gibberling into an Alleycat, but that would just destroy the card, which is not Team 5's current balance philosophy.

So here's our prediction: Gibberling will be the Druid card to be hit and its cost will increase from 1 to 2 mana.

Priest - Card Generation

This is where things get spicier. As we already mentioned, two nerfs: one for card generation, one for "burst healing". Not only these changes might aim to make Darkbishop Benedictus Shadow Priest more successful, but Priest is also one of the best classes (if not the best class) in the meta and many, many pro players have shown their adversity towards the Anduin' current state.

Let's start with the card generation. Here are all the (relevant) Priest cards that generate value: Raise Dead, Draconic Studies, Renew, Sethekk Veilweaver, Palm Reading.

While Palm Reading would be a suitable nerf target, we think we should exclude it and Raise Dead from the pool: not only the latter will be important for The Demon Seed's Blightborn Tamsin, but gutting Shadow spells will hurt Shadow Priest, which is not something we think the devs would want to do.

Renew on the other hand looks like the most suitable target: while this cheap spell provides both healing and another spell, it can be generated by Wandmaker (a bigger deal that one might think, since Raise Dead can generate an infinite loop), it costs 0 after a Palm Reading discount (with a chance of Discovering another Palm Reading for even more resource generation and discount) and great (both at 0 and 1 mana) with Xyrella for early removal against aggro.

Now that we identified Renew, how could it be changed? The first, and probably most effective, change that went through our mind is increasing the mana cost - bump it to 2 mana, so that it will be out of the Wandmaker pool, it won't cost 0 with that much ease anymore and will make Priest's life more difficult overall.

Priest - Burst Healing

Now, for the second card, the term "burst healing" is king of strange: normally we associate burst with damage output, but this time we associate it with the opposing mechanic, which is resilience. There's no need to stretch out our prediction: Apotheosis is likely to be the name on Team 5's notebook.

Turning any damage into a Greater Healing Potion/Reno Jackson has proven to be too powerful, especially if you give Priest the tools to take and stay on the board (unlike in the past, where Priest was less of a board-centric class). While strapping it onto a chunky minion is pretty decent, the most broken interaction is obviously the one between Apotheosis and Blademaster Samuro: the Frenzy AoE effect is not problematic by itself (many other decks like Clown Druid and Handbuff Warrior run it and nobody has ever complained about it), but when you put a Reno Jackson effect on top of it... well, it becomes a back-breaking swing against many fast-paced decks. You want to stay on the board and keep hitting Anduin in the head, but if you go too wide, the game will end on the spot.

How could Team 5 change Apotheosis in order to make it less good? Increasing its mana cost would be almost useless, since Palm Reading exists and that would basically put change in nothing. We heard some players discussing making Apotheosis similar to Rise of Shadows' Lightforged Blessing: while we don't agree with such a drastic change, we think that might be the right direction - lowering the Attack buff granted would make the card still useful and still playable, but would create less "I have the card, I win" scenarios from which most Aggro and Midrange decks cannot possibly recover. A +1/+3 buff could do the trick.

Final Verdict

After all our babbling, we think the 3 cards Alec was talking about a few days ago are:

• Gibberling, which will see an increase in its mana cost from 1 to 2 mana.
• Renew, which (in the same fashion of Gibberling) will see in increase in its mana cost from 1 to 2 mana.
• Apotheosis, which will grant fewer stats together with the Lifesteal keyword, from +2/+3 to +1/+3.

This way, we'll have fewer Druid's non-games, less card generation and less "burst healing" for Priest and therefore more cracks into the meta for the new upcoming Stormwind archetypes to slip into and leave a mark.

What do you think about these predictions? Do you think we are right or do you have any other suggestions? Let us know in the comments below!