Our Thoughts on Today's Warlock Balance Changes Targeting Stealer of Souls and Flesh Giant

Blizzard pushed out a couple of Warlock balance changes live today, as promised by Alec Dawson almost a week ago. These nerfs come alongside the initial reveal of Mercenaries, and a great change to Duels' problematic Meek Mastery card. First though, let's celebrate the fact that this may not be the only Balance patch we're receiving in the next few weeks as we have confirmation that the meta will continue to be evaluated over the next couple of weeks.

Quote From Alec Dawson

Balance schedule over next month

- 8/31: 2 Warlock changes (upping mana, feels focused)

8/31 to 9/10: Evaluating meta

9/10: Decide if changes are needed

Later Sept: Decided changes go live (BGs included)

Now, onto the show!

Cost is now 6 mana (Up from 4). Stats increased from 2/6 to 4/6.

This one is definitely the 'feels focused' change. Stealer of Souls represents a mechanic that was previously used with a lot of attention. In fact, not many collectible cards allow you to convert mana cost into Health points, and all of them do it with some restriction in mind, such as the card being a spell (Bloodbloom, which was nerfed last year) or having to wait until the late game in order to obtain the cost conversion (G'huun the Blood God). Well, Stealer of Souls doesn't have any of these restrictions: you just have to pay 4 mana for its effect to be abused multiple times, and it's a Demon on top of it, so you can even exploit tribes synergy cards like Free Admission.

Standing in front of your tablet and watching animations as they resolve without knowing whether you're still alive or not isn't what Hearthstone is about, and cards that do it should be as fringe and as clunky as possible. However, this was not the case of Stealer of Souls: even though we're not talking about an overpowered card in an overpowered deck, the shenanigans it was able to consistently pull off were something that shouldn't have been possible. Giving SoS the Il'gynoth treatment is definitely the right call, and we hope with our hearts that we'll never have to see that card with such a high frequency again.

Cost is now 10 mana (up from 9).

That leaves us with the mana cost increase. Flesh Giant was nerfed not more than 2 weeks ago but, as we mentioned in our commentary of that balance patch, that change was probably meant to be as light as possible, waiting for the meta to absorb it and then declare a verdict.

However, it appears that upping Flesh Giant's cost by just 1 mana wasn't nearly enough to make a relevant dent, hence this second nerf, which is hopefully going to slow down Questline Handlock more than the previous one.