I disagree with the analogy. Aviana cheats mana, Corrupt the Waters generates value most of the time. Sure, maybe if they print a card that has 'battlecry: reduce the cost of all cards in hand by 1' or something like that, the analogy might hold, but until then you can't really compare the two.
Corrupt the Waters is not a combo card, it doesn't provide inevitability, it just creates lots and lots of value. A better comparison would be Dr. Boom and the other incremental value hero cards.
While I agree the analogy isn't perfect (they never are, though in this case it was only meant as an example of inevitability rather than as a direct analogy, but regardless...), it is wrong to suggest doubling battlecries does not constitute a combo effect. In fact the Star Aligner deck used Brann Bronzebeard if I recall correctly, which highlights combos are built out of multiple 'non-combo' effects, e.g. dealing damage. If that damage is only 14 then it hurts but it's not super dangerous, but when it is doubled to 28 then that is OTK territory.
My concerns with the quest are wider than OTKs though. Battlecries can do literally anything, and while shaman has currently not got anything to horrifically abuse it (except perhaps Galakrond...), the potential is there for the future. Plus this is shaman we are talking about, which by the devs' own admission is a jack-of-all-trades class, meaning the battlecries really can go in any direction.
To be clear, I think doubling most battlecries and even doubling most strings of battlecries is perfectly safe. But if and when it eventually happens it will only take 1 combination to break the game, and then people will blame the new card, even though it is the quest that has enabled it and will sooner or later enable something else too if it isn't changed.
I don't think it's a very helpful comparison. On the one hand you have cards which basically don't do anything until another card comes along and suddenly enables a busted OTK (like Dark Portal + Sn1p-Sn4p), and on the other hand you have cards that are generically powerful and get more or less strong dependent on what specific battlecries exist in the meta. Getting double value from battlecries turn after turn is powerful, but that type of incremental value is maeasured on an entirely different scale than OTKs.
Sure, it's possible to come up with a set of battlecries which would constitute an OTK, but until those cards exist that's not the way Corrupt the Waters is being played. I think the manacost is pretty prohibitive in that regard. For comparison, Brann's been around in wild for ages and it's exceedingly rare for him to be part of a broken OTK.
The quest is not the problem. Before evolve it wasn't among the strongest decks, it was just very popular. Corrupt Elementalist, Dragon's Pack and Mogu Fleshshaper are all potential candidates imo. Not to mention Faceless Corruptor, but that one isn't only shaman's fault.
Part of the problem with the quest is the 'inevitability factor'. By which I mean it may not have been a problem at the start of SoU, but sooner or later it is bound to either become a problem or forever limit design space.
The best example of this in the past is Aviana (at 9 mana). No one will say she was a problem in TGT. Even when Kun the Forgotten King turned up in Gadgetzan people would argue they were strong but not a problem. Then, over time druid gets given more effective defensive tools and eventually a meme card is released (Star Aligner) and completely breaks Wild. And this wasn't the 'I hate Big Priest' sort of breaking wild, this was OTK decks routinely killing you on turn 5. There were lots of things arguably at fault there, but as soon as Aviana was printed the game had set off down a path where she was always going to cause a problem some day. It was just a question of when and what pushes it over the edge.
I personally feel the current version of Corrupt the Waters has the same problem. The fact people are calling it out already is a bad sign, albeit not conclusive by itself. But rather than asking 'is it broken right now?', which is very hard to answer because so much of the class could be considered a problem, I am wondering 'how long will it be before 2 battlecries can be doubled on the same turn that break the game given what else Shaman can do?'
The shaman quest is so easy to complete with cards you want to use in a deck anyway, and the reward directly buffs the very same cards. All this makes a 1-dimensional deck building 'challenge' with no tension between different parts of your deck that can be used to keep a deck's power in check. All this is compounded by 'battlecry' not actually being an effect but a trigger mechanism, meaning a deck of quest + 29 battlecries can still have all of removal, buffs, board floods, AoE, etc. Basically any spell can be used as a battlecry, so you don't even have to pay a price by making a deck that cannot do something very well.
tl;dr: the quest might not be a problem right now, but I think it is just too easy to complete and too little price to pay for playing it, meaning one day it is bound to become an issue.
I disagree with the analogy. Aviana cheats mana, Corrupt the Waters generates value most of the time. Sure, maybe if they print a card that has 'battlecry: reduce the cost of all cards in hand by 1' or something like that, the analogy might hold, but until then you can't really compare the two.
Corrupt the Waters is not a combo card, it doesn't provide inevitability, it just creates lots and lots of value. A better comparison would be Dr. Boom and the other incremental value hero cards.
I wouldn't be terribly surprised if it turns out after further deck refinement that galakrond shaman and quest-shaman work better as individual decks rather than a weird hybrid. Since the quest autocompletes rather than giving you a quest reward like the Un'goro quests, you can't hold your Heart of Vir'naal until after playing Galakrond, so you'd be sacrificing all that quest progression for a pair of 8/8s. Seems like a bad deal.
Yes, it's a strong card. But it's about the only genuinely good card in the entire Priest basic set. If you think the power level of Cleric needs to be addressed, then you are basically asking Blizzard to ditch the entire basic set of priest and start over from scratch with entirely new basic cards. Because if Cleric gets nerfed without redoing the entire set of priest's classic cards, priest will drop completely off the map as a playable class forever.
Side note: "...just because priest isn't always a tier 1 deck" -- this is a hilariously under-stated comment. Between the nerf to Raza and the current expansion, priest has been so far below tier 1 that it should have had its own unique tier at the bottom as "dumpster priest." Even when other classes got nerfed, they could comfort themselves that even post-nerf, they still weren't as bad as priest.
I don't think anyone in this thread so far has disagreed with the idea that priest's evergreen cards need an overhaul. As I've already stated in this thread, I think such an overhaul would necessarily entail addressing the really good cards like Cleric and Divine Spirit, not just the crappy ones. Why do you think Priest never gets any good 2-drops? Could it have something to do with the best 1-drop in the game being evergreen
It clearly wasn't OP enough to dig priest out of the gutter for an entire year, so it cannot be that bad. Cleric was here all that time that we were seeing Priest at the dead bottom of the hsreplay class winrate listings ... clearly something else is responsible for priest finally having a viable deck again, and it cannot just be Cleric. Something tipped the scales in this new set, probably the early game, high health units.
Did I stutter? "Even if Northshire Cleric saw zero play because there was no support for it in standard, the card itself would still be OP regardless of its presence in the meta..."
The exact same stupid argument you're making can be applied to Divine Spirit. Clearly that card can't be busted because priest isn't always a T1 deck!
And I never claimed cleric was solely responsible for Priest's success, that is a complete misconstrual of what I've consistently said throughout this thread. If you have to make up arguments to refute... consider not doing that.
The best players can make almost any semi-viable deck look good. Also, "good in tournament" does not mean "good on ladder." There have been plenty of cases of decks that are just bad on ladder being brought to tournaments and doing well there, so we can't get global data on deck power from tournaments, so GM is not necessarily relevant.
And despite all of this discussion, it is actually not the poor Northshire Cleric who is at fault for the power level of the combo priest anyways (getting back to the original topic). As many people have said, it's the degenerate design of Divine Spirit.
Also, also -- why are people trying to get priests nerfed, when priests only just got near the top of the pack again after nearly an entire calendar year of being utterly irrelevant to the metagame, and the deck in question already got nerfed once recently? Let the priests have their fun for a while.
And back to the spirit of the data I shared, there are a LOT of other decks that are doing just fine in the meta game, even if priest might be pretty close to the best. Just because there is a best deck doesn't mean no other really good decks exist. There will always be a best deck - no way to avoid that (and if there were not a best deck, it would basically mean everything is equally bad, which isn't a fun meta).
Oh for the love of-
I'm not the one who dragged combo priest into this discussion, you did. For you to now pivot back to discussing only Northshire Cleric is extremely disingenuous. We've already established that combo priest does well on ladder was well, so acting like this deck doesn't perform outside of tournaments is also preposterous.
Even if Northshire Cleric saw zero play because there was no support for it in standard, the card itself would still be OP regardless of its presence in the meta, so this entire tangent is pretty much moot.
Not all of us purchase premium access to hsreplay.
Then don't post incomplete data maybe?
I didn't claim it was complete, now did I? Also, you're the one arguing for a more select data set - which is by definition LESS complete. Essentially, you're arguing that any data from lower rankings is irrelevant to the power level of a deck.
"Let's just completely ignore all the people who don't have the time to grind legend every month because they are too noob and too unskilled for their data to matter." --iWatchyousleep
This may not be your intention, but this is exactly what your argument boils down to.
You said "It's objectively not even the best deck right now." Now I'm sure you can define that in many ways, but without qualifiers I think most people would assume you're talking about the deck with the highest win-rate in the hands of competent players. It's not uncommon in hearthstone at all to have a deck that's complicated or otherwise hard to pilot that has terrible ladder stats except at high legend/competitive play. Patron Warrior is the ur-example, but it happens a lot. Topsy priest and Nomi priest are more recent examples.
The most "complete" dataset isn't necessarily the most pertinent. If I want data on peak human performance I'll look at athletes, not general population statistics. Some data is better than no data, sure, but let's not pretend combo priest isn't at the tippy-top of competitive play ATM. I'd be shocked if it weren't the most protected and/or banned class in GM right now.
Well if that was the only reason...I would then happily play it on turn 2 and do the 17 dmg on turn 3 any way? Ok I also need Elemental Evocation or Coin in that case. If they do not want that then they should have make it cost 5 mana or something.
I mean, there are a ton of low cost mage spell in this rotation: even without Mana Cyclone Mana Wyrm would insanely snowball at 1 mana. It was a problem before stuff like Ray of Frost, Shooting Star, Elemental Invocation and so on, I don't want to think what trouble it would cause now.
Moreover, it's not that the devs don't want that, it's more that they want it to happen less frequently/later, in order to have better chances to counter it.
Ok, but then I also want something to counter that snowballing Priest 1-3 minion...which draws you so many cards with CoH and injured blademasters etc...I mean 0 mana heal up all and get me 4 cards from my deck...that is just too much value and can be compared to a Sorcerer Apprentice / casting some spells for 0 mana / elemental evocation / Cyclone combo, although then you get random spells instead of solid well chosen cards from your deck, and you are not buffing your board. Problem with Priest is they get board, card draw and tempo, including the always looming OTK threat if you leave one big health minion up.
Lucky for you this whole thread is dedicated to discussing potential nerfs to Northshire Cleric.
And I think your analogy is flawed. Northshire cleric doesn't kill you by herself. If she sticks on board it's the cards she draws that'll give the priest an edge. With Mana Wyrm, if you don't have a direct answer for it the little pest will keep hitting you in the face turn after turn while the mage uses their spells to protect the wyrm and keep the board clear. That's the difference. A better comparison would be Lightwarden, but that already has 2 hp (hint hint).
Cleric is a bit of a different story, mainly because Priest doesn't have access to the same control or draw tools as Warrior.
If you go by their evergreen cards, Warrior has Shield block to Priest's Power word shield and Northshire Cleric. Both classes use Acolyte fairly well, warrior with whirlwind effects, priest with Wild Pyro and cheap spells, but on top of that draw-heavy priests can use northshire combos and gadetzan Auctioneer.
Even if Northshire were HoF'ed I'd still say priest would be one of the stronger classes in terms of card draw, although it'd undeniably be a huge hit, since almost any priest deck that cares about card draw would run Northshire alongside the rest of the draw suite. What I'm saying is there's a reason nomi priest was a thing.
Yeah it turns out that combo Priest made for a pretty cool midrange deck with all the healing and big health minions. The problem being, of course, that because of Divine Spirit you have a deck that can consistently shove you off the board and then just one shot you with nothing you can do about it. If they had just removed Divine Spirit we would be able to push into a more minion/buff based direction. The Quest even plays into that, but no, better just keep one of the oldest and most boring combos around forever.
Can we, instead of nerfing them, just hall of fame them?
Strong 1/3s aren't an issue in wild and Eternium Rover will rotate next year anyway. No need to hurt priest decks in wild because of standard.
Might also give Blizzard some incentive to actually add a few good classic cards for priest for once.
HoF the only basic class card draw minion for priest is a really bad idea. It will make it so that Priest will definately only be playing resurrect decks, as there is no other viable deck option available. Once those resurrect cards rotate, they will be bottom tier again.
I rather see a minor nerf instead.
Please read my entire post, thank you.
Butchering priest's early game in wild just so its dumpsterfire standard counterpart gets another band-aid fix seems like a terrible solution in my opinion.
I agree that Northshire Cleric and Eternium Rover are too strong for standard right now and that Blizzard should not print similar cards anymore in the future. But I am opposed to nerfing them.
What I want to see is Northshire Cleric hall of famed and Blizzard printing a handful of good, standalone, basic/classic priest cards. So that priest finally has a shell that its future archetypes can work with, like nearly every other class.
And yes, Tunnel Trogg was absolutely busted in standard and yet sees no play whatsoever anymore in wild. This is the main reason why I don't want to see Northshire Cleric get nerfed.
I don't disagree with your reasoning, and if the alternative is to HoF Northshire and rework priest entirely, I'd take it in a heartbeat. However, I think my proposal is a reasonable compromise if T5 don't want to take such drastic action or want to preserve one of the most defining priest cards in standard, albeit in diminished form.
Like I said I don't have very strong feelings on wild, so if you say broken is OK, I'll take your word for it. At the time when Mana Wraith got hit, I absolutely would've preferred it get rotated, although that was before Arcane Flakmage and Flame Ward. That said I don't think what I'm proposing is anywhere near as drastic as doubling the mana cost on a one-drop. I'm pretty sure that any deck running cleric would continue to do so.
Anyway, I think most people in the thread largely agree on what the issues are, if not on what the best approach is to solving them.
Guys guys, this isn't a priest salt thread. If that was my point I would've framed it as such. Aggro/combo priest is cancer, sure, but I don't think Cleric is the main culprit there, it's mostly Divine Spirit + Inner Fire/Topsy and enablers. And yes, I agree that priest's evergreen set and class identity need a full do-over, but again, that's not really the point of this thread and if anything, I'd argue that such a do-over *necessarily* would involve nerfing or changing some of the busted cards as well, not just the poop cards. As long as Priest has fuck-you-I-win cards like Northshire and Divine Spirit the rest of the class will remain a steaming pile of garbage, because right now priest is balanced around a handful of clearly broken cards. It's the same reason why priest is unplayable until it's suddenly the most oppressive deck in the meta (until nerfs/rotations eventually kill the deck). Priest is terribly designed at a very fundamental level and for years Blizzard has been slapping on band-aid after band-aid to cover it up.
No this thread was specifically about overstatted one-drops with upsides, which in my opinion give the player going first such a gross advantage that it's almost unrecoverable if their opponent is playing aggro. lMarcusl articulates the argument very well, although in my opinion vanilla 1/3 is an acceptable statline, IMO it becomes a problem if the minion is a priority target (like Cleric, Tunnel Trogg or pre-nerf Mana Wyrm). Hell I'd argue that Rover is a priority target due to the synergy the Warrior has with armour as well as the existence of SN1P-SN4P, Zilliax and other discoverable magnetic effects.
Regarding Glow-Tron, I'd honestly forgotten about him, but I'm a bit torn about whether that card makes the cut. Same for Voidwalker and I suppose Flame Imp. In the case of Glow-Tron, I think the card is considerably weaker than the other two I mentioned in the OP, not to mention the fact that it's just a mechanical Dire Mole if you play it turn 1. Magnetize is a powerful mechanic on cards you don't play on turn 1 because it lets you buff minions on the board; if you have a Glow-Tron in your opening hand it's almost always going to played on that turn. So in that regard, I think Glow-tron is a less threatening 1-drop than the cleric or the Rover, although I'm open to persuasive arguments to the contrary. Regarding the demon brothers Voidwalker and Flame Imp, I think the situation is comparable to priest in a sense. WL has always had trash class cards to make up for the hero power... and a bunch of hyper-aggressive evergreen cards that almost guarantee that Zoo is a viable archetype in every meta(Flame Imp, Voidwalker, Soulfire, Power Overwhelming). The reason I'm reluctant to touch the demons is that Zoo is rarely oppressively powerful, and without it the class becomes an absolute meme unless they print Voidlords and Defiles every other expansion. As with priest, the class would probably need a much more substantive revision to not have the class be carried by a couple of obviously OP cards.
I'd be uncomfortable demanding a 1 mana 1/2 Mana Wyrm as I think that type of snowball-y aggressive 1-drop is unhealthy for the game, even if it comes with only 2 health.
I don't play nearly enough wild to say anything about Tunnel Trogg balance-wise but I remember the card being bonkers in standard, so it'd probably be a more fair card that way. Whether or not Wild ought to be fair is a topic I'd rather avoid in this thread.
Regarding HoF rotation for cleric, while that's certainly an option, the class would be decimated losing two key cards so soon after each other. Not to mention, as a standard player and a fan of combo and control priest, I'd definitely miss girl. T_T
In this thread I want to discuss Northshire Cleric and Eternium Rover specifically, and (future) 1 mana 1/3s more generally. Simply put, I don't think minions with this premium statline should have more than one relatively minor benefit, like the beast tag on Dire Mole or the 5 health to armor swap on Crystallizer. On the one hand, 4 stats + goodies just too much value for one mana, but more than that, the fact that these cards can be played on turn one and in all likelihood can't be removed by the opponent means that the effects they add also stick around.
As such I think both Northshire Cleric and Eternium Rover should be nerfed to 1/2 instead of 1/3. It'd be a relatively minor nerf, certainly less impactful than increasing the mana cost, but it'd at least give the opponent a chance to remove them cleanly on turn one or two. To be clear, it's not my intention to hose these cards into the ground: You'd still be able to do massive draws with cleric later on and you'd still be able to spend one extra mana on Zilliax to attach it to a Rover, mostly you'd just lose a bit of tempo and certainty if you play these cards on turn 1.
The problem is that your solution isn't simple or minimalist at all, it's effectively introducing a new mechanic "Starts at" to address a very very minor balance concern affecting 4 cards in the whole game. Whether or not such an intervention is even warranted is a whole separate question, but this solution is deeply inelegant if you ask me.
I dislike inner fire OTKs as much as the next guy but the problem is clearly with Divine Spirit and Inner Fire, not slightly beefier-than-average minions. High-rolls on effects that randomly summon, evolve or resurrect minions will always be a part of the game, and these aren't even the most egregious examples. Warlock is full of overstatted demons with negative battlecries that are great to get if you don't have to pay the full price.
Your post oozes with salt. Agree that Priest's core sets need a rework though.
You started a thread suggesting a nerf to the injured gang of all things. I'm not sure on what basis you're calling anyone else salty.
He directly borderline insulted me, suggesting that I want those nerfs because I lose a lot against Combo Priest which is absolutely baseless. I main CW with Silence tech and don't have a specific problem with this matchup in terms of winrate. My problem is the same as everyone else: it's unfair. Since IF won't be HoF'd, something else should be done.
Won't even answer this argument because he obviously just came here to pick a fight.
I'm amused at how far you're willing to go to avoid a substantive conversation. I "Borderline directly insulted' you? Buddy, not only is that a contradiction in terms, no such thing happened. When I said "I dislike inner fire OTKs as much as the next guy" that was (clearly!) meant to be a conciliatory statement, agreeing that there are problems with the deck you're trying to get nerfed. For you to try to turn that into an insult is some Olympian levels of mental gymnastics, so congrats on that feat.
Instead of scrambling for reasons and rationalisations for why I am the bad guy here maybe re-read our interaction without casting everything I say in the most uncharitable light. You might be surprised at who is picking a fight with whom.
The problem is that your solution isn't simple or minimalist at all, it's effectively introducing a new mechanic "Starts at" to address a very very minor balance concern affecting 4 cards in the whole game. Whether or not such an intervention is even warranted is a whole separate question, but this solution is deeply inelegant if you ask me.
I dislike inner fire OTKs as much as the next guy but the problem is clearly with Divine Spirit and Inner Fire, not slightly beefier-than-average minions. High-rolls on effects that randomly summon, evolve or resurrect minions will always be a part of the game, and these aren't even the most egregious examples. Warlock is full of overstatted demons with negative battlecries that are great to get if you don't have to pay the full price.
Your post oozes with salt. Agree that Priest's core sets need a rework though.
You started a thread suggesting a nerf to the injured gang of all things. I'm not sure on what basis you're calling anyone else salty.
The problem is that your solution isn't simple or minimalist at all, it's effectively introducing a new mechanic "Starts at" to address a very very minor balance concern affecting 4 cards in the whole game. Whether or not such an intervention is even warranted is a whole separate question, but this solution is deeply inelegant if you ask me.
I dislike inner fire OTKs as much as the next guy but the problem is clearly with Divine Spirit and Inner Fire, not slightly beefier-than-average minions. High-rolls on effects that randomly summon, evolve or resurrect minions will always be a part of the game, and these aren't even the most egregious examples. Warlock is full of overstatted demons with negative battlecries that are great to get if you don't have to pay the full price.
"Mage has the weakness of no taunts and board flooding"
I get what you are trying to say here, but this one card does not change the core of mages identity.
people are saying that that post from blizzard was dumb and inaccurate and they are pointing out only one or two cards that break the class identity. but it is okay that in a expansion a class gets a single card that does not follow the regular guidlines.
I am a where that this is not the point of the thread but I still feel obliged to point this out.
I get what you're saying but this is less like Shaman ineffectually dabbling in Freezes and more like that time when Warrior was the king of aggro due to pirates and pre-nerf War-axe.
It's one thing to temporarily give a class access to tools it doesn't normally use and quite something else to make that class the BEST at something that's diametrically opposite of the stated class identity. I have my own issues with that whole class identity guideline but people aren't wrong to point out how much it is contradicted by recently printed cards.
Strongly disagree. Without a way to cheat out huge minions on early turns this card is totally fair. The main reason it seems busted is precisely because of the way it interacts with Mountain Giant and the fact that there's only 2 minions that cost 12 in standard. Sure, there's Sea Giant and Rabble Bouncer, but those cards provide a much more random -and fair- pool of minions, not to mention giving the opponent counterplay options if they choose not to go wide on board. It's the combination of Conjurer's Calling + MG that's the problem, not the card itself.
That said I'm not a fan of Khadgar, albeit mainly from a design perspective rather than strictly balance. The card is basically designed to push Conjurer's calling over the top in a way that feels very unsatisfying to lose against, even if it's not a problem qua WR. Sure, it can technically also double mirror image tokens and other summoned minions, but unlike, say, Spirit of the Shark, it feels like the card exists solely to be played with Conj to double it. The power level issue is debatable but I think the linearity and power-spike potential of this card are definitely a problem. I'd rather have it be a bit more consistently powerful, especially independent of Conj, but with a weaker highroll. For example, you could make him a 5 mana 5/5 with battlecry: summon a copy of a minion that was summoned earlier that game. This way you could still use it to cheat out a giant, but not two, and it'd be harder to pull off on the same turn as conj. In return you get a bigger body and you can play the card even if you don't have any conjurer's targets on the board or summoning cards in hand, putting Khadgar more in line with Astromancer.
Edit: regarding a solution for Conj + MG, the obvious would be to HoF the giant, although I'd rather they didn't. Personally, I think printing a neutral minion that can force the opponent to discard a card would be a perfect fix, not just to counter cheap giants, but also combo decks like OTK paladin. Something like a 3 mana 2/3 with Battlecry: if your opponent has 7 or more cards in hand they discard 1 random card.
That would make the card absolutely nutty with unleash the hounds or microbot tokens. The fletcher's problem at the moment is that its job is being done better by other cards in the decks that are currently viable: Hunter's Call in beast hunter and Ursatron in mech hunter.
Pushing the card's power level just to have it see play would make hunter as a class pretty OP. I'd much rather have them print more cards that synergise with playing 1 cost minions in the future, if the goal is to make Arcane Fletcher viable. The effect is extremely powerful, that's not the issue here.
Uhhh, not sure about that proposed beast tag bro, might still be OP in hunter or druid. Should probably hold out on that change until Predatory Instincts and Witching Hour rotate out of standard.
I don't think it's a very helpful comparison. On the one hand you have cards which basically don't do anything until another card comes along and suddenly enables a busted OTK (like Dark Portal + Sn1p-Sn4p), and on the other hand you have cards that are generically powerful and get more or less strong dependent on what specific battlecries exist in the meta. Getting double value from battlecries turn after turn is powerful, but that type of incremental value is maeasured on an entirely different scale than OTKs.
Sure, it's possible to come up with a set of battlecries which would constitute an OTK, but until those cards exist that's not the way Corrupt the Waters is being played. I think the manacost is pretty prohibitive in that regard. For comparison, Brann's been around in wild for ages and it's exceedingly rare for him to be part of a broken OTK.
I disagree with the analogy. Aviana cheats mana, Corrupt the Waters generates value most of the time. Sure, maybe if they print a card that has 'battlecry: reduce the cost of all cards in hand by 1' or something like that, the analogy might hold, but until then you can't really compare the two.
Corrupt the Waters is not a combo card, it doesn't provide inevitability, it just creates lots and lots of value. A better comparison would be Dr. Boom and the other incremental value hero cards.
I wouldn't be terribly surprised if it turns out after further deck refinement that galakrond shaman and quest-shaman work better as individual decks rather than a weird hybrid. Since the quest autocompletes rather than giving you a quest reward like the Un'goro quests, you can't hold your Heart of Vir'naal until after playing Galakrond, so you'd be sacrificing all that quest progression for a pair of 8/8s. Seems like a bad deal.
It's day 1 guys.
It'd be helpful if you quoted the person you're throwing invective at so we know who you're responding to
I don't think anyone in this thread so far has disagreed with the idea that priest's evergreen cards need an overhaul. As I've already stated in this thread, I think such an overhaul would necessarily entail addressing the really good cards like Cleric and Divine Spirit, not just the crappy ones. Why do you think Priest never gets any good 2-drops? Could it have something to do with the best 1-drop in the game being evergreen
Did I stutter? "Even if Northshire Cleric saw zero play because there was no support for it in standard, the card itself would still be OP regardless of its presence in the meta..."
The exact same stupid argument you're making can be applied to Divine Spirit. Clearly that card can't be busted because priest isn't always a T1 deck!
And I never claimed cleric was solely responsible for Priest's success, that is a complete misconstrual of what I've consistently said throughout this thread. If you have to make up arguments to refute... consider not doing that.
Oh for the love of-
I'm not the one who dragged combo priest into this discussion, you did. For you to now pivot back to discussing only Northshire Cleric is extremely disingenuous. We've already established that combo priest does well on ladder was well, so acting like this deck doesn't perform outside of tournaments is also preposterous.
Even if Northshire Cleric saw zero play because there was no support for it in standard, the card itself would still be OP regardless of its presence in the meta, so this entire tangent is pretty much moot.
You said "It's objectively not even the best deck right now." Now I'm sure you can define that in many ways, but without qualifiers I think most people would assume you're talking about the deck with the highest win-rate in the hands of competent players. It's not uncommon in hearthstone at all to have a deck that's complicated or otherwise hard to pilot that has terrible ladder stats except at high legend/competitive play. Patron Warrior is the ur-example, but it happens a lot. Topsy priest and Nomi priest are more recent examples.
The most "complete" dataset isn't necessarily the most pertinent. If I want data on peak human performance I'll look at athletes, not general population statistics. Some data is better than no data, sure, but let's not pretend combo priest isn't at the tippy-top of competitive play ATM. I'd be shocked if it weren't the most protected and/or banned class in GM right now.
Lucky for you this whole thread is dedicated to discussing potential nerfs to Northshire Cleric.
And I think your analogy is flawed. Northshire cleric doesn't kill you by herself. If she sticks on board it's the cards she draws that'll give the priest an edge. With Mana Wyrm, if you don't have a direct answer for it the little pest will keep hitting you in the face turn after turn while the mage uses their spells to protect the wyrm and keep the board clear. That's the difference. A better comparison would be Lightwarden, but that already has 2 hp (hint hint).
If you go by their evergreen cards, Warrior has Shield block to Priest's Power word shield and Northshire Cleric. Both classes use Acolyte fairly well, warrior with whirlwind effects, priest with Wild Pyro and cheap spells, but on top of that draw-heavy priests can use northshire combos and gadetzan Auctioneer.
Even if Northshire were HoF'ed I'd still say priest would be one of the stronger classes in terms of card draw, although it'd undeniably be a huge hit, since almost any priest deck that cares about card draw would run Northshire alongside the rest of the draw suite. What I'm saying is there's a reason nomi priest was a thing.
Amen to that.
I don't disagree with your reasoning, and if the alternative is to HoF Northshire and rework priest entirely, I'd take it in a heartbeat. However, I think my proposal is a reasonable compromise if T5 don't want to take such drastic action or want to preserve one of the most defining priest cards in standard, albeit in diminished form.
Like I said I don't have very strong feelings on wild, so if you say broken is OK, I'll take your word for it. At the time when Mana Wraith got hit, I absolutely would've preferred it get rotated, although that was before Arcane Flakmage and Flame Ward. That said I don't think what I'm proposing is anywhere near as drastic as doubling the mana cost on a one-drop. I'm pretty sure that any deck running cleric would continue to do so.
Anyway, I think most people in the thread largely agree on what the issues are, if not on what the best approach is to solving them.
Guys guys, this isn't a priest salt thread. If that was my point I would've framed it as such. Aggro/combo priest is cancer, sure, but I don't think Cleric is the main culprit there, it's mostly Divine Spirit + Inner Fire/Topsy and enablers. And yes, I agree that priest's evergreen set and class identity need a full do-over, but again, that's not really the point of this thread and if anything, I'd argue that such a do-over *necessarily* would involve nerfing or changing some of the busted cards as well, not just the poop cards. As long as Priest has fuck-you-I-win cards like Northshire and Divine Spirit the rest of the class will remain a steaming pile of garbage, because right now priest is balanced around a handful of clearly broken cards. It's the same reason why priest is unplayable until it's suddenly the most oppressive deck in the meta (until nerfs/rotations eventually kill the deck). Priest is terribly designed at a very fundamental level and for years Blizzard has been slapping on band-aid after band-aid to cover it up.
No this thread was specifically about overstatted one-drops with upsides, which in my opinion give the player going first such a gross advantage that it's almost unrecoverable if their opponent is playing aggro. lMarcusl articulates the argument very well, although in my opinion vanilla 1/3 is an acceptable statline, IMO it becomes a problem if the minion is a priority target (like Cleric, Tunnel Trogg or pre-nerf Mana Wyrm). Hell I'd argue that Rover is a priority target due to the synergy the Warrior has with armour as well as the existence of SN1P-SN4P, Zilliax and other discoverable magnetic effects.
Regarding Glow-Tron, I'd honestly forgotten about him, but I'm a bit torn about whether that card makes the cut. Same for Voidwalker and I suppose Flame Imp. In the case of Glow-Tron, I think the card is considerably weaker than the other two I mentioned in the OP, not to mention the fact that it's just a mechanical Dire Mole if you play it turn 1. Magnetize is a powerful mechanic on cards you don't play on turn 1 because it lets you buff minions on the board; if you have a Glow-Tron in your opening hand it's almost always going to played on that turn. So in that regard, I think Glow-tron is a less threatening 1-drop than the cleric or the Rover, although I'm open to persuasive arguments to the contrary. Regarding the demon brothers Voidwalker and Flame Imp, I think the situation is comparable to priest in a sense. WL has always had trash class cards to make up for the hero power... and a bunch of hyper-aggressive evergreen cards that almost guarantee that Zoo is a viable archetype in every meta(Flame Imp, Voidwalker, Soulfire, Power Overwhelming). The reason I'm reluctant to touch the demons is that Zoo is rarely oppressively powerful, and without it the class becomes an absolute meme unless they print Voidlords and Defiles every other expansion. As with priest, the class would probably need a much more substantive revision to not have the class be carried by a couple of obviously OP cards.
I'd be uncomfortable demanding a 1 mana 1/2 Mana Wyrm as I think that type of snowball-y aggressive 1-drop is unhealthy for the game, even if it comes with only 2 health.
I don't play nearly enough wild to say anything about Tunnel Trogg balance-wise but I remember the card being bonkers in standard, so it'd probably be a more fair card that way. Whether or not Wild ought to be fair is a topic I'd rather avoid in this thread.
Regarding HoF rotation for cleric, while that's certainly an option, the class would be decimated losing two key cards so soon after each other. Not to mention, as a standard player and a fan of combo and control priest, I'd definitely miss girl. T_T
Anyway, thanks for the responses guys.
In this thread I want to discuss Northshire Cleric and Eternium Rover specifically, and (future) 1 mana 1/3s more generally. Simply put, I don't think minions with this premium statline should have more than one relatively minor benefit, like the beast tag on Dire Mole or the 5 health to armor swap on Crystallizer. On the one hand, 4 stats + goodies just too much value for one mana, but more than that, the fact that these cards can be played on turn one and in all likelihood can't be removed by the opponent means that the effects they add also stick around.
As such I think both Northshire Cleric and Eternium Rover should be nerfed to 1/2 instead of 1/3. It'd be a relatively minor nerf, certainly less impactful than increasing the mana cost, but it'd at least give the opponent a chance to remove them cleanly on turn one or two. To be clear, it's not my intention to hose these cards into the ground: You'd still be able to do massive draws with cleric later on and you'd still be able to spend one extra mana on Zilliax to attach it to a Rover, mostly you'd just lose a bit of tempo and certainty if you play these cards on turn 1.
I'm amused at how far you're willing to go to avoid a substantive conversation. I "Borderline directly insulted' you? Buddy, not only is that a contradiction in terms, no such thing happened. When I said "I dislike inner fire OTKs as much as the next guy" that was (clearly!) meant to be a conciliatory statement, agreeing that there are problems with the deck you're trying to get nerfed. For you to try to turn that into an insult is some Olympian levels of mental gymnastics, so congrats on that feat.
Instead of scrambling for reasons and rationalisations for why I am the bad guy here maybe re-read our interaction without casting everything I say in the most uncharitable light. You might be surprised at who is picking a fight with whom.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
You started a thread suggesting a nerf to the injured gang of all things. I'm not sure on what basis you're calling anyone else salty.
The problem is that your solution isn't simple or minimalist at all, it's effectively introducing a new mechanic "Starts at" to address a very very minor balance concern affecting 4 cards in the whole game. Whether or not such an intervention is even warranted is a whole separate question, but this solution is deeply inelegant if you ask me.
I dislike inner fire OTKs as much as the next guy but the problem is clearly with Divine Spirit and Inner Fire, not slightly beefier-than-average minions. High-rolls on effects that randomly summon, evolve or resurrect minions will always be a part of the game, and these aren't even the most egregious examples. Warlock is full of overstatted demons with negative battlecries that are great to get if you don't have to pay the full price.
I get what you're saying but this is less like Shaman ineffectually dabbling in Freezes and more like that time when Warrior was the king of aggro due to pirates and pre-nerf War-axe.
It's one thing to temporarily give a class access to tools it doesn't normally use and quite something else to make that class the BEST at something that's diametrically opposite of the stated class identity. I have my own issues with that whole class identity guideline but people aren't wrong to point out how much it is contradicted by recently printed cards.
Strongly disagree. Without a way to cheat out huge minions on early turns this card is totally fair. The main reason it seems busted is precisely because of the way it interacts with Mountain Giant and the fact that there's only 2 minions that cost 12 in standard. Sure, there's Sea Giant and Rabble Bouncer, but those cards provide a much more random -and fair- pool of minions, not to mention giving the opponent counterplay options if they choose not to go wide on board. It's the combination of Conjurer's Calling + MG that's the problem, not the card itself.
That said I'm not a fan of Khadgar, albeit mainly from a design perspective rather than strictly balance. The card is basically designed to push Conjurer's calling over the top in a way that feels very unsatisfying to lose against, even if it's not a problem qua WR. Sure, it can technically also double mirror image tokens and other summoned minions, but unlike, say, Spirit of the Shark, it feels like the card exists solely to be played with Conj to double it. The power level issue is debatable but I think the linearity and power-spike potential of this card are definitely a problem. I'd rather have it be a bit more consistently powerful, especially independent of Conj, but with a weaker highroll. For example, you could make him a 5 mana 5/5 with battlecry: summon a copy of a minion that was summoned earlier that game. This way you could still use it to cheat out a giant, but not two, and it'd be harder to pull off on the same turn as conj. In return you get a bigger body and you can play the card even if you don't have any conjurer's targets on the board or summoning cards in hand, putting Khadgar more in line with Astromancer.
Edit: regarding a solution for Conj + MG, the obvious would be to HoF the giant, although I'd rather they didn't. Personally, I think printing a neutral minion that can force the opponent to discard a card would be a perfect fix, not just to counter cheap giants, but also combo decks like OTK paladin. Something like a 3 mana 2/3 with Battlecry: if your opponent has 7 or more cards in hand they discard 1 random card.
That would make the card absolutely nutty with unleash the hounds or microbot tokens. The fletcher's problem at the moment is that its job is being done better by other cards in the decks that are currently viable: Hunter's Call in beast hunter and Ursatron in mech hunter.
Pushing the card's power level just to have it see play would make hunter as a class pretty OP. I'd much rather have them print more cards that synergise with playing 1 cost minions in the future, if the goal is to make Arcane Fletcher viable. The effect is extremely powerful, that's not the issue here.
Uhhh, not sure about that proposed beast tag bro, might still be OP in hunter or druid. Should probably hold out on that change until Predatory Instincts and Witching Hour rotate out of standard.