I was really hoping they'd do the DK change properly and make it so we can't discover cards outside of our rune combinations. I get that it would probably power boost DK in Standard for now with how few cards there are but it feels really stupid when your triple Blood DK opponent starts freezing your board with Frost spells or plays The Scourge and has a massive board all of a sudden. As the card pool expands the problem for Standard would fix itself, they'd just have to wait to release in the second expansion rather than now.
I'm more shocked (heh) that they plan to buff Lightning Storm. One-sided 3 damage for 5 total mana is perfectly reasonable. Yeah Hellfire's been buffed to 3 but it blows up your stuff as well and hits your face which is a big deal for Warlock. If they make Lightning Storm overload 1 it's gonna be one of the best basic board clears in the game. Though maybe that might mean they'll finally fix Flurgl + Tox in Wild so that Shaman doesn't have that stupidass crutch holding it aloft for all eternity and has to actually play fair for once.
So previously The Demon Seed required 6+7+8 (21) damage taken, now it requires 30, nearly 50% more. That's a nerf so girthy even that brokenass card probably can't withstand it. Good, better it stay a meme for the enthusiasts rather than what it used to be.
Questline Hunter may be back on the menu with the unnerf to Dragonbane Shot. The deck's surprisingly not all that awful even after the questline got nerfed and this should be a big help.
Overload Shaman isn't getting too much good new ammo in the next expansion (the deal 5 heal 5 for 2 if overloaded does look nice) so the unnerf probably won't do much.
Questline Mage and Questline DH will likely remain meh cause the reward in Mage wasn't much of an issue for wild, it was the requirement of 9 typed spells cast. DH questline was a meme before the nerf, nothing's changed for the better.
The Warrior stuff is curious. The War Axe unnerf brings with it the warm, cinnamon-scented smell of the golden Control Warrior days when this thing popped down on turn 2 and for two turns the opponent couldn't muster any aggression without it getting instantly bonked off the board. But the pace at which boards develop has sped up so much since those days I don't think the Axe is even gonna get a wistful look in the collection.
Warsong on the other hand, is interesting. We've got more ways to damage our own shit than when Warsong was in its prime (particularly the Warrior location) and we've got To the Front! to get stuff down cheaper, so a Worgen combo that used to take 6 mana just for the Worgen + Warsong can now cost 4 mana. That gives Warrior a lot more space for stuff like Rampage. Also, Frothing Berserker is still around and now we've got Risky Skipper to combo it with and I believe a Frothing, even a big one, copied by Bloodsworn Mercenary will still have Charge if Warsong gave it to the original, so there might be some solid 28 to face type of chonking going down (To the Front + Warsong + Skipper + Frothing + Bloodsworn is only 6 mana and Warrior can draw pretty fast these days).
The rest of the stuff shouldn't matter too much, maybe Pirate Rogues will start adding Cold Blood since they always seem to feel they need to get as degenerate as they can. Oh, nvm, Conviction in Odd Pally, Call to Arms Pally or the new Divine Shield pally is making me shit my pants.
The only good card among what's been revealed for Warrior seems to be the 1/3 armor booster. With Armorsmith (in Wild since it drops out of Standard) and any Whirlwind-like effect (like Risky Skipper) you can gain a ridiculous amount of armor. Not sure how that's going to help Warrior win, but it's a start. Voone joins Hogger as one of those legendary minions that has multiple versions and all of them suck.
Oh man! Warrior top tier after this exp...no, sorry, couldn't even finish the joke. I would say what they're trying to do with Warrior this expansion is not going to work but I'm honestly not even sure what it is they're trying to do. They're pushing menagerie but can't decide on the playstyle. You got soloist expecting you to have no board, Roaring Applause expecting you to have a wide board and Voone expecting you to have a hand full of gas in a board-centric deck. Are we go wide aggro, are we big chonker dropping menagerie, are we lategame value deck? Pick one.
Ok now THIS is an interesting package of cards for Wild! The armor + attack gain for Druid is incredible, plus the draw on top...umpfh, can't wait to try that out in Questline Druid. I do have the inkling this stuff is gonna get nerfed from orbit for the sake of Standard though, it seems incredibly unfun to play against. The Hunter stuff seems fun but Hunter doesn't have good enough ways to cheat or discount mana to be able to set up like a big beast Recruit package finishing with a Stranglethorn Heart, kinda like an imitation of Anyfin OTK Pally. Maybe someday.
That's exactly what I'm doing. I look at the overheal cards they've revealed so far and I can honestly say I wouldn't want to play a single one of them without having the perfect heal combo piece already prepped. In some cases that combo piece doesn't even exist currently. Even looking at the best case scenario, let's say I have a Circle of Healing in my mitts. That's not even enough to overheal Heartbreaker Hedanis. It summons a free 4/4 with Heartthrob, ey, that ain't bad! In this very specific combination. Anything less than Circle and, well, stick Gift of the Naaru alongside it and do the math. Let's be generous and assume you're not helping your opponent by healing their stuff, BTW, which both Gift and Circle do. With Gift you've paid 4 mana for 5/8 worth of stats for two cards. Didn't Silence Priests use to make 3 mana 4/8s for 2 cards through Humongous Razorleaf? How far did that get them? And that was back in Un'goro, we've moved forward a lot in power level. Or let's say that you have the heal location they revealed. Well, sure, you generate a 3/3 alongside your 3 drop on turn 3. But you must have spent the mana to get the location down on turn 1. Your opponent didn't. Their 1 drop in the form of Filletfighter just trades into your glorious 3/3 you got as payoff and what exactly did you achieve? Setting up your overheal just put you behind on the board so that the overheal tempo you were supposed to get is negated. Then there's Dreamboat. Just how many minions do they think Priests can stick? If this lands as a 2 mana 2/3 with heal on your 1 drop, that's a Neferset Ritualist you just put in your deck. Welcome to Arena gaming I guess.
None of this sounds like an appealing way to play the game. And even if there's just an absolute baller heal card we haven't seen yet, let's say 2 mana heal a minion for 6, then 4, then 2. That gives you a ton of stats with Heartthrob and does a bunch of clear or face damage with Hearbreaker Hedanis. How are you gonna ensure you get those cards together? Cause drawing isn't Priest's strong suit. In fact one of Priests main weaknesses has always been that they'd get stuck with a situational card in hand that they couldn't use cause they were missing the other half needed to make it do miracles. There's a reason Shamans run Firemancer Flurgl + Toxfin in almost everything but Priests never ran Wave of Apathy + Shadow Word: Horror. And that was in control decks. Now you're trying to build a proactive, board-centric Priest with these requirements. You can't spend your mana on tutoring the pieces for your deck to actually work if you intend to retain board presence. That's a solution for control and combo decks, but not zoo or aggro.
I've tried to build board-centric Priests A LOT in the past, expansion after expansion, for years. I think I finally stopped some time around Alterac Valley. It never worked, because Priest never had the tools to compete with other board-oriented decks, nor was it aggressive enough to pressure control or combo decks nor did it have the consistency of draw/tutoring to ensure they don't get stuck with big-butt minions but no buffs or a hand full of buffs but no board presence. Overheal, to me, is just the latest addition to the same failing pattern. Again, I'd be happy to be wrong. Don't think I will be though.
I'm gonna call it now, and I'd be happy the be wrong, but I think overheal will be a failure and Priest will remain a class without a keyword. Overheal only does something IF you have minons that stick around on the board and IF you have a way and the mana to not just heal them but overheal them. That's a lot of fucking ifs. You play against a control deck that just wipes anything you play and overheal does what exactly? You play against an aggro or zoo deck that's just consistently faster on the board than you are (and you're a Priest so EVERYBODY is faster than you) and there will be nothing on the board to heal cause you can't get a foothold. Every overheal minion will be coming in with an extra tax of either mana so you can overheal it the moment it hits play, or with the requirement of an extra card already on the board that heals it for you. I suspect a good portion of overheal gameplay will be sitting with an empty board and a bunch of heal effects in hand, or with a board of some low impact overheal minions with just your hero power to heal them, or with not enough healing to overheal them if your opponent is contesting you. As much as I'd like board centric Priest to be a real thing, the class is simply too oppressive when that works (cause they just value trade into everything and heal it up so no board presence was lost) and so they've been made intentionally fairly slow and low-impact in developing their board outside of Aggro Shadow Priest.
This is weird. Normally they try to lead with the good stuff and leave the neutral dump for last. Now they're essentially leading with it as if these are cards we're meant to be excited about. Either they're powering the game down, which is fine by me, or the set has little to offer, or there's something utterly broken coming up.
It is somewhere around tier 2, yeah. The issue isn't really that much in its power rating but more its popularity and its play pattern. Play pattern in particular is something they've nerfed even average decks for and Res Priest is just absolutely toxic in that regard, has been for quite a while now and yet hasn't been touched at all. It is also EVERYWHERE. I'm not at the tippity top of MMR but I get legend every month and usually I hit legend at around the 300-600 range (and then plummet as I play fun decks after the climb). So the meta I see isn't the most cutthroat and optimised to perfection, but still extremely competitive. In my laddering last month, I've met exactly 2 Quest Mages in all, and that deck got nerfed. Meanwhile, 25 % of my matchups were Res Priests. They camp at Diamond 5-3, they camp at mid-legend. If you're climbing you have to accept the fact 25 % of your games will be decided entirely by how hard the Priest will highroll you, cause there's nothing you can do to stop that. They either just fold cause they drew bad or you explode by turn 5. And the latter happens a lot more often due to their tutoring consistency.
I don't think I've ever laughed this hard at patch notes, for any game, ever. I expected disappointment as they give Parrot, Pillager and Cataclysm a mild slap on the wrist as they tend to do, and they fucking ANNIHILATED them. Pillager in particular has just evaporated from every card collection on the planet cause who'd play that pile of crap now? Honestly, I'd have probably preferred a hit to Scabbs Cutterbutter cause I don't see the Spirit of the Shark + Scabbs interaction leading to anything good in the future, but I guess for now this utter deletion will suffice. As for Parrot, I think that's a great change. It will work just fine for some fun Big Spell Mage shenanigans and there's still hope for Quest Mage to at least be playable in some form with Giants like it was before Parrot's introduction. There are still ways to get some mileage out of Time Warp through Archmage Vargoth or Queen Azshara, and the ways to complete the quest are still as lightning-fast as before, so I'm sure Quest Mage enthusiasts will still find a way to make that deck operate in some capacity at, say, tier 3 or 4. Cataclysm nerf is actually quite elegant, cause the card itself is considerably more playable outside of discard now, and some forms of discard miiight still consider playing it, it'll just have to be a wholly different deck now, which is good. Also the shift to 5 mana wrecks Expired Merchant consistency on Soul Barrage so the deck will simply have no choice but to play fair, for now. The deck might just shift to a more board-centric version with Tiny Knight of Evil, and will obviously drop down the tiers like a brick, but it might not become strictly unplayable.
Now one card that I would definitely have liked to see nerfed is Illuminate cause...I'm still not sure how they thought they could get away with printing that card. As a reminder for the old timers, there was a time, a quite long stretch of time in fact, when Innervate used to give 2 mana crystals. It was busted, it got nerfed. We had Lightning Bloom, which was old Innervate but came at the cost of overload. It was kinda busted, it got removed from the game (no, Lightning Bloom does not exist, you can't convince me otherwise). Illuminate is BETTER unnerfed Innervate for spells. Not just better current Innervate for spells, better UNNERFED Innervate. How is it ok for Priests to play Shadow Essence for 3 mana? How is it ok for them to play Idol of Y'Shaarj on turn 4 (after a Palm Reading, which itself is also kinda busted). Priest is not the ramp class and they're cheating mana faster than Druids are in the early game! To compare, if Shadow Essence was in Druid, the Druid would have to play 2 Innervates to get it down a turn later than Priest, or would have to play a Biology Project AND an Innervate to play it on the same turn as Priest, except Priest isn't ramping the opponent in the process and isn't spending an extra card doing it. If Res Priest had to wait till turn 5 to get their Shadow Essence, it'd be pretty damn annoying for anything that isn't aggro or OTK. If they're playing it on 3, sometimes even 2, they just creating non-games for every deck in the game. The brokenness of Neptulon the Tidehunter, Shadow Essence, the whole res mechanic, that's one thing and a more complex issue to address. But how has Illuminate not been touched at all if they're trying to fix Wild play patterns?
I didn't say it's beyond repair. I just have doubts this "internal wild summit" will bring about the changes required to bring the mode back to what it used to be, where all of combo, control, aggro and midrange were viable in some fashion (this was pretty much before they unnerfed Raza). But as it stands it's not unplayably broken either, there's just certain types of decks that are much more favoured to succeed (generally those that take the initiative by ending the game fast, either through aggression or an OTK). If you want to play, say, value based control, you can, but you have to accept that you're going in with a handicap, and that most of your games aren't even going to be about value, but about whether you can effectively counter the proactive opponent's gameplan.
As to why I play it, that's simple. I play it because I prefer eternal formats over rotating formats. I like being creative, having all the options to work with and I most certainly don't like the feeling of "oh, there's this new tool I can add to my toolbox, too bad I can no longer use all the other tools required to make it work". If they release new Silver Hand Paladin cards, I want to make use of them in a full on Silver Hand Paladin deck, not some bastardised version of it that uses the 6 Silver Hand cards currently in the format and fills the rest with some mediocre garbage cause Paladin doesn't have anything better to play that year. I like to play with a full theme and synergy, not a package of 6-10 cards that support my archetype while the rest of my deck feels like I'm playing Arena. If they were to completely change the mode into a rotating one, people like me would probably just quit the game, cause the idea of "here! play your favourite card game! now with fewer cards!" sounds like an outright castration of creativity.
I don't have high hopes. Wild is the only constructed format I play but it's far from a healthy one. It's burdened by issues and cards that do too much for too little that have been stacking up and up since around Scholomance without being addressed. If you were to nerf all of the best decks in the format quite brutally today, there'd be a new batch of similarly broken or uniteractive decks tomorrow because there's a lot of broken shit in the format that's just being held down by what's currently strong. The devs would have to take a holistic approach and address a lot of stuff from as far as 3 years back to bring the format back in check. Cause as it stands, the format is, and has been for quite a while, extremely polarized. You got busted uninteractive OTKs and combos, and you've got aggro decks trying to kill those OTKs before they go off. Nothing else is left. Control is dead (Shudder Shaman being the exception cause they infinitely lock aggro out of the game and have an utterly busted Murloc package holding them afloat). Midrange is dead. They have been for years.
Obviously etarnal formats will end up stacking up in power over time to create some pretty nutty play patterns, but in a game like Hearthstone where reactivity isn't nearly what it is in something like MtG, the format can't simply correct itself through proper teching (forget sideboarding, too). All the initiative is in the hands of the player who's turn it is, so when your Druid opponent starts slinging 45 mana worth of stuff because of Floop's Gloop + Flipper Friends + Celestial Alignment by turn 6, there isn't shit you can do to stop them Mecha'thuning you the same turn (they can do insane shit like this and that isn't good enough for them to be tier 1). Similar stuff with Priest's turn 3 Neptulons, Discardlock's lethals from full to dead all from hand. We're in an environment where an uninteractive deck like Quest Mage doesn't seem all that bad anymore cause at least the game isn't over turn 3 or 4.
They have A LOT to address and I don't think they have the guts to take the hammer to the format in the manner it needs.
The card wasn't changed with the release of the mini-set though. And I haven't found it reported on the bugs forum (checked before I posted). Seems weird coincidence.
I mean, at least they're being honest and axing it (though way too late already IMO) instead of pretending like they're working on improving the mode when it's obvious the mode is dead and was pretty much dead a month after release.
They got no part of it right. The PvE was a tedious, unrewarding, repetitive grind. On Normal it was laughable, you could just queue up the same line-up over and over regardless of the location or boss and just beat up everything, particularly with heal-based comps like Nature or Holy Humans. On Heroic you were force to queue blind into a boss fight the first time cause there was no way to know what you're building against at the end, so it just wasted your time, and the climb up to the boss was, guess what, also wasted time, completely unrewarding. And that's what you had to do to even enter PvP to get your stuff to a competitive level, and you better hope what you thought was competitive is actually competitive and not utter trash (would be real sad if someone worked on levelling their Murloc or Demon lineup, wouldn't it?). There was no universal currency so that if you got stuff for Y you didn't want you could turn it to X you wanted, so that was further wasted time. So all modes wasted your time and effort and prety much none of it was actually any fun. It was more fun to tinker with comps and lineups in your head and in the menu than to play any part of the game.
It was a failure from start to finish, good riddance.
I was really hoping they'd do the DK change properly and make it so we can't discover cards outside of our rune combinations. I get that it would probably power boost DK in Standard for now with how few cards there are but it feels really stupid when your triple Blood DK opponent starts freezing your board with Frost spells or plays The Scourge and has a massive board all of a sudden. As the card pool expands the problem for Standard would fix itself, they'd just have to wait to release in the second expansion rather than now.
I'm more shocked (heh) that they plan to buff Lightning Storm. One-sided 3 damage for 5 total mana is perfectly reasonable. Yeah Hellfire's been buffed to 3 but it blows up your stuff as well and hits your face which is a big deal for Warlock. If they make Lightning Storm overload 1 it's gonna be one of the best basic board clears in the game. Though maybe that might mean they'll finally fix Flurgl + Tox in Wild so that Shaman doesn't have that stupidass crutch holding it aloft for all eternity and has to actually play fair for once.
You kinda forgot to mention all the Battlegrounds changes there.
Aaaaand Patron Warriors...EVERYWHERE!
So previously The Demon Seed required 6+7+8 (21) damage taken, now it requires 30, nearly 50% more. That's a nerf so girthy even that brokenass card probably can't withstand it. Good, better it stay a meme for the enthusiasts rather than what it used to be.
Questline Hunter may be back on the menu with the unnerf to Dragonbane Shot. The deck's surprisingly not all that awful even after the questline got nerfed and this should be a big help.
Overload Shaman isn't getting too much good new ammo in the next expansion (the deal 5 heal 5 for 2 if overloaded does look nice) so the unnerf probably won't do much.
Questline Mage and Questline DH will likely remain meh cause the reward in Mage wasn't much of an issue for wild, it was the requirement of 9 typed spells cast. DH questline was a meme before the nerf, nothing's changed for the better.
The Warrior stuff is curious. The War Axe unnerf brings with it the warm, cinnamon-scented smell of the golden Control Warrior days when this thing popped down on turn 2 and for two turns the opponent couldn't muster any aggression without it getting instantly bonked off the board. But the pace at which boards develop has sped up so much since those days I don't think the Axe is even gonna get a wistful look in the collection.
Warsong on the other hand, is interesting. We've got more ways to damage our own shit than when Warsong was in its prime (particularly the Warrior location) and we've got To the Front! to get stuff down cheaper, so a Worgen combo that used to take 6 mana just for the Worgen + Warsong can now cost 4 mana. That gives Warrior a lot more space for stuff like Rampage. Also, Frothing Berserker is still around and now we've got Risky Skipper to combo it with and I believe a Frothing, even a big one, copied by Bloodsworn Mercenary will still have Charge if Warsong gave it to the original, so there might be some solid 28 to face type of chonking going down (To the Front + Warsong + Skipper + Frothing + Bloodsworn is only 6 mana and Warrior can draw pretty fast these days).
The rest of the stuff shouldn't matter too much, maybe Pirate Rogues will start adding Cold Blood since they always seem to feel they need to get as degenerate as they can. Oh, nvm, Conviction in Odd Pally, Call to Arms Pally or the new Divine Shield pally is making me shit my pants.
Smells like something I'm going to double with Vargoth till I turn blue in the face. Is it overkill? Yes. Am I gonna do it anyway? You betcha.
The only good card among what's been revealed for Warrior seems to be the 1/3 armor booster. With Armorsmith (in Wild since it drops out of Standard) and any Whirlwind-like effect (like Risky Skipper) you can gain a ridiculous amount of armor. Not sure how that's going to help Warrior win, but it's a start. Voone joins Hogger as one of those legendary minions that has multiple versions and all of them suck.
Oh man! Warrior top tier after this exp...no, sorry, couldn't even finish the joke. I would say what they're trying to do with Warrior this expansion is not going to work but I'm honestly not even sure what it is they're trying to do. They're pushing menagerie but can't decide on the playstyle. You got soloist expecting you to have no board, Roaring Applause expecting you to have a wide board and Voone expecting you to have a hand full of gas in a board-centric deck. Are we go wide aggro, are we big chonker dropping menagerie, are we lategame value deck? Pick one.
Ok now THIS is an interesting package of cards for Wild! The armor + attack gain for Druid is incredible, plus the draw on top...umpfh, can't wait to try that out in Questline Druid. I do have the inkling this stuff is gonna get nerfed from orbit for the sake of Standard though, it seems incredibly unfun to play against. The Hunter stuff seems fun but Hunter doesn't have good enough ways to cheat or discount mana to be able to set up like a big beast Recruit package finishing with a Stranglethorn Heart, kinda like an imitation of Anyfin OTK Pally. Maybe someday.
That's exactly what I'm doing. I look at the overheal cards they've revealed so far and I can honestly say I wouldn't want to play a single one of them without having the perfect heal combo piece already prepped. In some cases that combo piece doesn't even exist currently. Even looking at the best case scenario, let's say I have a Circle of Healing in my mitts. That's not even enough to overheal Heartbreaker Hedanis. It summons a free 4/4 with Heartthrob, ey, that ain't bad! In this very specific combination. Anything less than Circle and, well, stick Gift of the Naaru alongside it and do the math. Let's be generous and assume you're not helping your opponent by healing their stuff, BTW, which both Gift and Circle do. With Gift you've paid 4 mana for 5/8 worth of stats for two cards. Didn't Silence Priests use to make 3 mana 4/8s for 2 cards through Humongous Razorleaf? How far did that get them? And that was back in Un'goro, we've moved forward a lot in power level. Or let's say that you have the heal location they revealed. Well, sure, you generate a 3/3 alongside your 3 drop on turn 3. But you must have spent the mana to get the location down on turn 1. Your opponent didn't. Their 1 drop in the form of Filletfighter just trades into your glorious 3/3 you got as payoff and what exactly did you achieve? Setting up your overheal just put you behind on the board so that the overheal tempo you were supposed to get is negated. Then there's Dreamboat. Just how many minions do they think Priests can stick? If this lands as a 2 mana 2/3 with heal on your 1 drop, that's a Neferset Ritualist you just put in your deck. Welcome to Arena gaming I guess.
None of this sounds like an appealing way to play the game. And even if there's just an absolute baller heal card we haven't seen yet, let's say 2 mana heal a minion for 6, then 4, then 2. That gives you a ton of stats with Heartthrob and does a bunch of clear or face damage with Hearbreaker Hedanis. How are you gonna ensure you get those cards together? Cause drawing isn't Priest's strong suit. In fact one of Priests main weaknesses has always been that they'd get stuck with a situational card in hand that they couldn't use cause they were missing the other half needed to make it do miracles. There's a reason Shamans run Firemancer Flurgl + Toxfin in almost everything but Priests never ran Wave of Apathy + Shadow Word: Horror. And that was in control decks. Now you're trying to build a proactive, board-centric Priest with these requirements. You can't spend your mana on tutoring the pieces for your deck to actually work if you intend to retain board presence. That's a solution for control and combo decks, but not zoo or aggro.
I've tried to build board-centric Priests A LOT in the past, expansion after expansion, for years. I think I finally stopped some time around Alterac Valley. It never worked, because Priest never had the tools to compete with other board-oriented decks, nor was it aggressive enough to pressure control or combo decks nor did it have the consistency of draw/tutoring to ensure they don't get stuck with big-butt minions but no buffs or a hand full of buffs but no board presence. Overheal, to me, is just the latest addition to the same failing pattern. Again, I'd be happy to be wrong. Don't think I will be though.
I'm gonna call it now, and I'd be happy the be wrong, but I think overheal will be a failure and Priest will remain a class without a keyword. Overheal only does something IF you have minons that stick around on the board and IF you have a way and the mana to not just heal them but overheal them. That's a lot of fucking ifs. You play against a control deck that just wipes anything you play and overheal does what exactly? You play against an aggro or zoo deck that's just consistently faster on the board than you are (and you're a Priest so EVERYBODY is faster than you) and there will be nothing on the board to heal cause you can't get a foothold. Every overheal minion will be coming in with an extra tax of either mana so you can overheal it the moment it hits play, or with the requirement of an extra card already on the board that heals it for you. I suspect a good portion of overheal gameplay will be sitting with an empty board and a bunch of heal effects in hand, or with a board of some low impact overheal minions with just your hero power to heal them, or with not enough healing to overheal them if your opponent is contesting you. As much as I'd like board centric Priest to be a real thing, the class is simply too oppressive when that works (cause they just value trade into everything and heal it up so no board presence was lost) and so they've been made intentionally fairly slow and low-impact in developing their board outside of Aggro Shadow Priest.
This is weird. Normally they try to lead with the good stuff and leave the neutral dump for last. Now they're essentially leading with it as if these are cards we're meant to be excited about. Either they're powering the game down, which is fine by me, or the set has little to offer, or there's something utterly broken coming up.
It is somewhere around tier 2, yeah. The issue isn't really that much in its power rating but more its popularity and its play pattern. Play pattern in particular is something they've nerfed even average decks for and Res Priest is just absolutely toxic in that regard, has been for quite a while now and yet hasn't been touched at all. It is also EVERYWHERE. I'm not at the tippity top of MMR but I get legend every month and usually I hit legend at around the 300-600 range (and then plummet as I play fun decks after the climb). So the meta I see isn't the most cutthroat and optimised to perfection, but still extremely competitive. In my laddering last month, I've met exactly 2 Quest Mages in all, and that deck got nerfed. Meanwhile, 25 % of my matchups were Res Priests. They camp at Diamond 5-3, they camp at mid-legend. If you're climbing you have to accept the fact 25 % of your games will be decided entirely by how hard the Priest will highroll you, cause there's nothing you can do to stop that. They either just fold cause they drew bad or you explode by turn 5. And the latter happens a lot more often due to their tutoring consistency.
I don't think I've ever laughed this hard at patch notes, for any game, ever. I expected disappointment as they give Parrot, Pillager and Cataclysm a mild slap on the wrist as they tend to do, and they fucking ANNIHILATED them. Pillager in particular has just evaporated from every card collection on the planet cause who'd play that pile of crap now? Honestly, I'd have probably preferred a hit to Scabbs Cutterbutter cause I don't see the Spirit of the Shark + Scabbs interaction leading to anything good in the future, but I guess for now this utter deletion will suffice. As for Parrot, I think that's a great change. It will work just fine for some fun Big Spell Mage shenanigans and there's still hope for Quest Mage to at least be playable in some form with Giants like it was before Parrot's introduction. There are still ways to get some mileage out of Time Warp through Archmage Vargoth or Queen Azshara, and the ways to complete the quest are still as lightning-fast as before, so I'm sure Quest Mage enthusiasts will still find a way to make that deck operate in some capacity at, say, tier 3 or 4. Cataclysm nerf is actually quite elegant, cause the card itself is considerably more playable outside of discard now, and some forms of discard miiight still consider playing it, it'll just have to be a wholly different deck now, which is good. Also the shift to 5 mana wrecks Expired Merchant consistency on Soul Barrage so the deck will simply have no choice but to play fair, for now. The deck might just shift to a more board-centric version with Tiny Knight of Evil, and will obviously drop down the tiers like a brick, but it might not become strictly unplayable.
Now one card that I would definitely have liked to see nerfed is Illuminate cause...I'm still not sure how they thought they could get away with printing that card. As a reminder for the old timers, there was a time, a quite long stretch of time in fact, when Innervate used to give 2 mana crystals. It was busted, it got nerfed. We had Lightning Bloom, which was old Innervate but came at the cost of overload. It was kinda busted, it got removed from the game (no, Lightning Bloom does not exist, you can't convince me otherwise). Illuminate is BETTER unnerfed Innervate for spells. Not just better current Innervate for spells, better UNNERFED Innervate. How is it ok for Priests to play Shadow Essence for 3 mana? How is it ok for them to play Idol of Y'Shaarj on turn 4 (after a Palm Reading, which itself is also kinda busted). Priest is not the ramp class and they're cheating mana faster than Druids are in the early game! To compare, if Shadow Essence was in Druid, the Druid would have to play 2 Innervates to get it down a turn later than Priest, or would have to play a Biology Project AND an Innervate to play it on the same turn as Priest, except Priest isn't ramping the opponent in the process and isn't spending an extra card doing it. If Res Priest had to wait till turn 5 to get their Shadow Essence, it'd be pretty damn annoying for anything that isn't aggro or OTK. If they're playing it on 3, sometimes even 2, they just creating non-games for every deck in the game. The brokenness of Neptulon the Tidehunter, Shadow Essence, the whole res mechanic, that's one thing and a more complex issue to address. But how has Illuminate not been touched at all if they're trying to fix Wild play patterns?
I didn't say it's beyond repair. I just have doubts this "internal wild summit" will bring about the changes required to bring the mode back to what it used to be, where all of combo, control, aggro and midrange were viable in some fashion (this was pretty much before they unnerfed Raza). But as it stands it's not unplayably broken either, there's just certain types of decks that are much more favoured to succeed (generally those that take the initiative by ending the game fast, either through aggression or an OTK). If you want to play, say, value based control, you can, but you have to accept that you're going in with a handicap, and that most of your games aren't even going to be about value, but about whether you can effectively counter the proactive opponent's gameplan.
As to why I play it, that's simple. I play it because I prefer eternal formats over rotating formats. I like being creative, having all the options to work with and I most certainly don't like the feeling of "oh, there's this new tool I can add to my toolbox, too bad I can no longer use all the other tools required to make it work". If they release new Silver Hand Paladin cards, I want to make use of them in a full on Silver Hand Paladin deck, not some bastardised version of it that uses the 6 Silver Hand cards currently in the format and fills the rest with some mediocre garbage cause Paladin doesn't have anything better to play that year. I like to play with a full theme and synergy, not a package of 6-10 cards that support my archetype while the rest of my deck feels like I'm playing Arena. If they were to completely change the mode into a rotating one, people like me would probably just quit the game, cause the idea of "here! play your favourite card game! now with fewer cards!" sounds like an outright castration of creativity.
I don't have high hopes. Wild is the only constructed format I play but it's far from a healthy one. It's burdened by issues and cards that do too much for too little that have been stacking up and up since around Scholomance without being addressed. If you were to nerf all of the best decks in the format quite brutally today, there'd be a new batch of similarly broken or uniteractive decks tomorrow because there's a lot of broken shit in the format that's just being held down by what's currently strong. The devs would have to take a holistic approach and address a lot of stuff from as far as 3 years back to bring the format back in check. Cause as it stands, the format is, and has been for quite a while, extremely polarized. You got busted uninteractive OTKs and combos, and you've got aggro decks trying to kill those OTKs before they go off. Nothing else is left. Control is dead (Shudder Shaman being the exception cause they infinitely lock aggro out of the game and have an utterly busted Murloc package holding them afloat). Midrange is dead. They have been for years.
Obviously etarnal formats will end up stacking up in power over time to create some pretty nutty play patterns, but in a game like Hearthstone where reactivity isn't nearly what it is in something like MtG, the format can't simply correct itself through proper teching (forget sideboarding, too). All the initiative is in the hands of the player who's turn it is, so when your Druid opponent starts slinging 45 mana worth of stuff because of Floop's Gloop + Flipper Friends + Celestial Alignment by turn 6, there isn't shit you can do to stop them Mecha'thuning you the same turn (they can do insane shit like this and that isn't good enough for them to be tier 1). Similar stuff with Priest's turn 3 Neptulons, Discardlock's lethals from full to dead all from hand. We're in an environment where an uninteractive deck like Quest Mage doesn't seem all that bad anymore cause at least the game isn't over turn 3 or 4.
They have A LOT to address and I don't think they have the guts to take the hammer to the format in the manner it needs.
The card wasn't changed with the release of the mini-set though. And I haven't found it reported on the bugs forum (checked before I posted). Seems weird coincidence.
Man they're fast, I reported that Vengeful Walloper bug yesterday and it's already fixed.
I mean, at least they're being honest and axing it (though way too late already IMO) instead of pretending like they're working on improving the mode when it's obvious the mode is dead and was pretty much dead a month after release.
They got no part of it right. The PvE was a tedious, unrewarding, repetitive grind. On Normal it was laughable, you could just queue up the same line-up over and over regardless of the location or boss and just beat up everything, particularly with heal-based comps like Nature or Holy Humans. On Heroic you were force to queue blind into a boss fight the first time cause there was no way to know what you're building against at the end, so it just wasted your time, and the climb up to the boss was, guess what, also wasted time, completely unrewarding. And that's what you had to do to even enter PvP to get your stuff to a competitive level, and you better hope what you thought was competitive is actually competitive and not utter trash (would be real sad if someone worked on levelling their Murloc or Demon lineup, wouldn't it?). There was no universal currency so that if you got stuff for Y you didn't want you could turn it to X you wanted, so that was further wasted time. So all modes wasted your time and effort and prety much none of it was actually any fun. It was more fun to tinker with comps and lineups in your head and in the menu than to play any part of the game.
It was a failure from start to finish, good riddance.
Wow that Ghoul of the Feast, Eternal Knight and Eternal Summoner nerf is HUUUGE! Nobody will ever play those garbage cards again. /s