The issue with that is it's not necessarily a nerf unless you make the number of self-damage instances very high. It's not difficult for Warlock to do tons of tiny increments of damage to itself for very cheap or even for free. And now since the damage amount wouldn't matter, the intended major downside of the Quest, i.e. the fact you have to chunk down half of your health pool, would suddenly be reduced to only having to take 10 or 12 damage total, and that's before the healing would come in. So you might end up in a situation where you try to nerf the quest and unintentionally leave it feeling the same.
Given what the most recent changes have been like, I'm not hopeful. It's nice they're at least finally acknowledging the problem after two patches of doing nothing to address it, but given how meek and minute the changes have been, I'm fairly confident that out of the 6+ cards that need changing in Warlock alone, barely half of them is going to get addressed. And who knows how many of the changes that do make it through actually achieve what was intended. And that's just talking about Warlock. I think it's safe to say even if Warlock takes a galactic nerfing the meta won't be any more favourable to control than it is right now, since Shamans, Mages, Hunters and potentially Paladins will take over the mantle and quest control into oblivion.
Weeell...I wouldn't say a lot of those cards are unproblematic. Animated Brromstick and Raise Dead both are absurdly busted and have been for ages. Though Warlock has been abusing them the most, it's also because Warlock has had the best deck in the format for over a year. Raza Priest was right up there with Warlock and has been abusing Raise Dead just as much. Nothing on that card is reasonable. Broom has been shitting on people's boards pre-Quest already in Darkglare and Handbuff Paladin. And again, the card is obviously broken. No reason for it to cost 1, hit your whole board (one minion should be the max), have Rush itself AND be Neutral. You could cross off two of the things about Broom and it would still be good. Board tempo used to mean something, now it's just about who can give Rush to bigger stuff from their hand. And you rarely beat 0 mana 8/8s in that fight.
It's arguable Plague of Flames has been overperforming for a long time too, since Warlocks have been doing this 1-mana spam thing for a while, and combined with Kobold Librarian and Raise Deads they seem to have infinite ammo to destroy massive boards for almost free while churning through their decks. The mana cheating with Glare and now Mithril Rod has just been making that a bit more obvious.
Nerfing at least these cards in particular along with Mithril Rod and Darkglare (yes, again, they just need to change the damn effect) would at least mean Warlocks have to play the game at the same costs and pace as everyone else. As it stands they churn out 21 self damage for quest progress, play out 8+ cards and draw a third of their deck in like 4 turns and that's with skipping turn 1 to play quest. They're too efficient and too mana cheaty. You'd think it would all come at a cost to tempo but once they've spent their time doing all that, they then get to instantly upend any board progression the opponent has made with 0 mana giants and broomstick, which they then bring back for free with Raise Dead. It's a pattern they've been abusing in Darkglare for ages, it just found a new home. They are at the same time extremely greedy on resource generation (draw and raise dead), extremely efficient, and super safe cause the board is theirs whenever they wish and they have tons of 1 mana heal 4s and 1 mana removal.
It can be balanced in Wild. It wouldn't even be that difficult to make it decent, maybe a bit niche, without touching the quest itself. They would just have to actually be trying though, which they're not. There are so many easy nerf targest there. Broom, Raise Dead, Mithril Rod, Plague of Flames, Spirit Bomb, Touch of the Nathrezim. It's pretty telling that with just a single tick from the Mithril Rod Warlocks can play an entire hand out, cause most of their hyper-efficient shit costs 0-1 mana.
Sigh...seriously? This shit again? Quest Warlock is two tiers above everything else in Wild right now and they're still meekly bumping Flesh Giant another mana, while not touching any of the 0-1 mana hyper-efficient shit Warlock is routinely doing. Place your bets people, how many times will they have to nerf Warlock this expansion until they finally get it right?
Good thing Battlegrounds is getting a big update I guess, cause I'm not touching constructed until they actually do something about it and not just pretend to be doing something about it.
You're right, I missed that interaction. Thing is though, Majordomo tends to be one of those scaling engines you drop the fastest since he's so restrictive on your attack order. Doesn't mean you can't get a ton of stats on Master of Realities in the few turns you keep him though. Those stats might be all you need to get a good head start. Still, the fact that he's not an Elemental himself means he's gonna be a tough buy. If you have Nomi or Newnomi even a tier 1 elemental will have better stats than Master and will help you scale your future stuff, and if you have Rag you don't want to be spending 3 gold on a non-Elemental either.
That's my point though. Pirates already essentially cannot function without Hoggar, what with Southsea Strongarm and Salty Looter heavily pushing you to just spam Pirates like there's no tomorrow (or turn timer). And the only new thing they got for scaling is another card that's only really any good with Hoggar. So you have to get Hoggar to really be able to scale those cards but since those cards are so bad without Hoggar, you're more often than not gonna find yourself in a situation where you can buy or triple into a Hoggar, but you don't have any of the cards that combine with him because they were so bad on their own. You don't even really have a good early game progression, since Southsea Captain and Bloodsail Cannoneer are now gone. A stupid little Sewer Rat on Beast Tier 2 is better stats than most of the stuff Pirates have up to tier 5.
When you look at Elementals, those bastards scale on Tier 2 with Party Elemental (and Molten Rock self-scaling), Tier 4 with Majordomo and now the new Nomi, Tier 5 with actual Nomi, Tier 6 with Rag. Not gonna count the new Master of Realities cause I think that's gonna be trash. In addition, Elementals have access to Divine Shield, Windfury and pseudo-Cleave. Pirates now only have stats, cause they lost their one Windfury minion, and they have a harder time scaling those stats at most points in the game it seems to me. We'll have to see how good the economy aspect of Pirates is, but from what I'm seeing right now, it's not great. At least not great enough to make up for the inability to scale properly without one key card. Dragons had that same problem but at least they were unstoppable in the lategame if they got there. Pirates fold to a couple poisonous Murlocs with more than 50 health.
Essentially, what I'm getting at is: Pirates are by far the worst tribe in the game right now. And yet they seem to have gotten the least out of the patch beside Quillboars. All the other tribes are getting some pretty revolutionary stuff, mostly through new ways to scale or new ways to even build a composition from the ground up. Pirates are mostly stuck to what they were already doing (economy and Pirate churning), and what they were already doing wasn't working before all this new stuff came in. Why should it work now? The only tribe that may potentially end up taking a drop in power is Beasts because almost everything they're getting seems to be heavily dependent on things dying in the order you want them to and they lost Pack Leader. Then again, if the Reanimating Rattler works the way I think it does (i.e. permanent Reborn), Beasts are gonna be insane.
Wow did Pirates get the short end of the stick. Demons and Mechs got some serious lategame scaling now, Dragons now scale without Kalecgos and can now also pop Divine Shields. Meanwhile in Pirate town: well...I guess you can scale your Pirates...if you already have Hoggar...
As interested as I am in this promised overhaul, I have to say I'm just a slight bit worried. I'm confident they'll be able to deliver on the core fantasy of the individual tribes. They've actually been nailing that pretty well since the introduction of Pirates. What they've not been nailing is the pace of the game. With every patch the game has been getting faster and faster as underperforming tribes and heroes have been brought up in power. Aside from the whole Elemental fiasco, there has never really been an overall tuning-down of the tribes. When Pirates were introduced, damage spiked to absurd levels. It was one of the most miserable patches in the game mode's history (at least until Djinni happened). When you look at Pirates now, they're an absolutely godawful tribe and yet they've only been buffed. It's just that everything introduced after them was even stronger. I doubt this overhaul will have an opposite effect to every other major introduction before it. The game is gonna get faster yet again, and half the lobby will be dead on turn 8 now instead of 10.
Well, here's to hoping it won't be a raging dumpster fire like Duels. But given the current track record (as in, pretty much every mode is broken in some way at this very moment), not getting my hopes up for this. Also remains to be seen how they monetise this. My guess is it's going to be similar to BGs, as in optional but not really optional if you want to improve your odds...so people are likely to be financially milked on packs, mini-expansions, BGs and Mercenaries at the same time in some form or fashion.
The issue with that blanket approach is that not all the Mercenaries actually need it. If you change Guff to 7 mana he goes from niche to worthless. Cariel slows down so much it wouldn't even be worth playing the deck anymore, because by the time you get to create your 3/3s, opponents have had enough time and mana to set up and to outpace your 1-drop deck that they'll easily keep your hero power under control from that point on. Same mostly goes for Rokara, Scabbs and Brukan. By the time these came online the deck would already be out of fuel and the value provided by these cards would not be enough to bring the game back around. Really, the issue is only with a handful of these quests, primarily Warlock, Hunter and to some extent, Mage. Nerfing all the questlines just for the sake of thematic consistency wouldn't make sense. It's a much better option to tweak the requirements on these quests so that yeah, Tamsin still costs 5, but you're NEVER playing her on 5.
I'm sure a quick Google search will get you plenty of lists. Or you can check out Vicious Syndicate or the Tempostorm Wild Meta Snapshot if you want something a little more proven. The most successful lists are all Odd.
Not all classes are created equal. Almost every expansion there's one or two classes that are completely unplayable. Getting stuck on those would be frustrating as all hell. So, no.
"Look guys, we changed things, you can now play these cutesy decks".
Meanwhile, some of the most powerful decks in Wild after nerfs: Quest Darkglare, Quest Hunter, Pirate Warrior, Ignite Mage. 3 nerfed decks out of 4. Quest Warlock merrily winning with Darkglare, Flesh Giant, Battleground Battlemaster like all three cards have been untouched.
I guess things may have been different in Standard; I play Wild. Currently 12 games in, 2 losses against tax Paladin (obviously) and 1 loss because I ran out of time on the combo. Every other game ended on turn 7 or earlier (if going second), beating Pirate Warriors (Quest and non-Quest), Odd Paladin, Warlocks (Quest and control), Odd DH, Odd Quest Hunters, one combo Mage that was slower than me because he didn't get Flow on 3. The deck feels just as broken as it did before, hence my complaints about the timidness of the nerfs.
Still getting consistent turn 7 lethals with Ignite Mage after Incanter's nerf. The combo hasn't slowed down by even a turn, I get one less discount, and still have infinite mana turn 7.
Flurgl now joins Ysera as the only tribe-focused heroes that are guaranteed to get their tribal minions on the regular. Going Murlocs will now be insanely easy for Flurgl, with the typical early game buys such as Water Droplet or Alley Cat being just as good as the Tidehunter start. Pirates will now be a great tribe to have in the tavern because Freedealing Gambler now = a murloc.
Shudder is a bit more awkward because outside of the two uses of the hero power, there is no longer a steady incentive to go for battlecries. Normally your hero power would be helping push you into buying battlecries every turn, but now you have to make the conscious decision to buy up battlecries, often even when it's not really worth it for that turn, only so that you can kick things into overdrive with your hero power several turns later. It's quite likely you'll get blown up before your hero power really gets a chance to pay off the first time. That said, lategame this will be insane. Lategame Elementals with Rag can skyrocket their stats with all the Tavern Tempests, Arcane Assistants and Stasis Elementals you'll have played, and Murlocs will essentially double in size, if not more if you have Brann.
The other hero changes are irrelevant. Malygos' hero power has way too little impact outside of early-game token transformations, Deryl, while 50 % better, will still not be able to break out of playing midrange and Maiev's problem isn't the stats, but the speed.
I disagree. The parallel between Incanter's Flow and Wild Growth is not quite correct I think because the cards work differently. Wild Growth on 2 allowed you to skip from 3 mana straight to 4, which allowed you to cut a lot of the mediocre garbage on 3 and go more heavy on 4 drops, which Druid had an abundance of (Oaken Summons, Branching Paths, now Overgrowth). Wild Growth also only had value until players reached 10 mana crystals, so with Wild Growth a turn slower, its mana benefits decreased. But there's a world of difference between having 1 extra mana crystal for 6 turns or 7 and discounting 24 cards by 1 mana or 23. You still cheat way too much mana for way too little investment. With Flow you're not really changing the design and curve of your deck, you don't get to skip to a specific power turn ahead of schedule since what you really want to do with your mana is draw draw draw, without on-board progress, and if you're literally doing nothing on turn 2 with Flow nerfed, you're building your deck wrong. You can still prepare a Conjure Mana Biscuit, kill something off with Runed Orb, power up an Ignite, ping off a one-drop to slow down the opponent, in Wild you'll take that opportunity to play Ancient Mysteries before you hard-draw your Ice Blocks.
The turn-to-turn play pattern changes very slightly but the overall game-wide pattern remains the same: Control can't stop you and aggro is your counter. That hasn't changed. Aggro might have a slightly bigger window now but control is not in any better position than it was. Same goes for Darkglare. Sure, you slow the deck down a turn. It may pack a bit more removal, be a bit more defensive. Control still can't beat it. By the time they get to answer the Darkglare it will have cheated 3-4 mana (making itself essentially free, like Flow), made dramatic progress on the quest, and once the quest is online, it's over for control. Between Flow and Darkglare, the cost to complete the quest, or simply the cost to do broken stuff is too low because both cards allow that cost to go into the negatives. Mana cheating will never be balanced because if your opponent mana cheats, the only way you can keep pace with them is to either mana cheat even harder, or kill them real fast.
The devs had the opportunity to put a stop to this mana cheating pattern that has been a problem in both formats pretty much since the cards' introductions. Instead they let cheating continue and bumped it one mana. The meekest change they could have made and also one that is most prone to result in relapses in brokenness.
And they didn't even bother banning Jades and Pogos...
"Dean doesn't think Warlock's deck is out of line, its just too consistently powerful."
Facepalm...facedesk....facewall. Repeatedly.
The issue with that is it's not necessarily a nerf unless you make the number of self-damage instances very high. It's not difficult for Warlock to do tons of tiny increments of damage to itself for very cheap or even for free. And now since the damage amount wouldn't matter, the intended major downside of the Quest, i.e. the fact you have to chunk down half of your health pool, would suddenly be reduced to only having to take 10 or 12 damage total, and that's before the healing would come in. So you might end up in a situation where you try to nerf the quest and unintentionally leave it feeling the same.
Given what the most recent changes have been like, I'm not hopeful. It's nice they're at least finally acknowledging the problem after two patches of doing nothing to address it, but given how meek and minute the changes have been, I'm fairly confident that out of the 6+ cards that need changing in Warlock alone, barely half of them is going to get addressed. And who knows how many of the changes that do make it through actually achieve what was intended. And that's just talking about Warlock. I think it's safe to say even if Warlock takes a galactic nerfing the meta won't be any more favourable to control than it is right now, since Shamans, Mages, Hunters and potentially Paladins will take over the mantle and quest control into oblivion.
Weeell...I wouldn't say a lot of those cards are unproblematic. Animated Brromstick and Raise Dead both are absurdly busted and have been for ages. Though Warlock has been abusing them the most, it's also because Warlock has had the best deck in the format for over a year. Raza Priest was right up there with Warlock and has been abusing Raise Dead just as much. Nothing on that card is reasonable. Broom has been shitting on people's boards pre-Quest already in Darkglare and Handbuff Paladin. And again, the card is obviously broken. No reason for it to cost 1, hit your whole board (one minion should be the max), have Rush itself AND be Neutral. You could cross off two of the things about Broom and it would still be good. Board tempo used to mean something, now it's just about who can give Rush to bigger stuff from their hand. And you rarely beat 0 mana 8/8s in that fight.
It's arguable Plague of Flames has been overperforming for a long time too, since Warlocks have been doing this 1-mana spam thing for a while, and combined with Kobold Librarian and Raise Deads they seem to have infinite ammo to destroy massive boards for almost free while churning through their decks. The mana cheating with Glare and now Mithril Rod has just been making that a bit more obvious.
Nerfing at least these cards in particular along with Mithril Rod and Darkglare (yes, again, they just need to change the damn effect) would at least mean Warlocks have to play the game at the same costs and pace as everyone else. As it stands they churn out 21 self damage for quest progress, play out 8+ cards and draw a third of their deck in like 4 turns and that's with skipping turn 1 to play quest. They're too efficient and too mana cheaty. You'd think it would all come at a cost to tempo but once they've spent their time doing all that, they then get to instantly upend any board progression the opponent has made with 0 mana giants and broomstick, which they then bring back for free with Raise Dead. It's a pattern they've been abusing in Darkglare for ages, it just found a new home. They are at the same time extremely greedy on resource generation (draw and raise dead), extremely efficient, and super safe cause the board is theirs whenever they wish and they have tons of 1 mana heal 4s and 1 mana removal.
It can be balanced in Wild. It wouldn't even be that difficult to make it decent, maybe a bit niche, without touching the quest itself. They would just have to actually be trying though, which they're not. There are so many easy nerf targest there. Broom, Raise Dead, Mithril Rod, Plague of Flames, Spirit Bomb, Touch of the Nathrezim. It's pretty telling that with just a single tick from the Mithril Rod Warlocks can play an entire hand out, cause most of their hyper-efficient shit costs 0-1 mana.
Sigh...seriously? This shit again? Quest Warlock is two tiers above everything else in Wild right now and they're still meekly bumping Flesh Giant another mana, while not touching any of the 0-1 mana hyper-efficient shit Warlock is routinely doing. Place your bets people, how many times will they have to nerf Warlock this expansion until they finally get it right?
Good thing Battlegrounds is getting a big update I guess, cause I'm not touching constructed until they actually do something about it and not just pretend to be doing something about it.
You're right, I missed that interaction. Thing is though, Majordomo tends to be one of those scaling engines you drop the fastest since he's so restrictive on your attack order. Doesn't mean you can't get a ton of stats on Master of Realities in the few turns you keep him though. Those stats might be all you need to get a good head start. Still, the fact that he's not an Elemental himself means he's gonna be a tough buy. If you have Nomi or Newnomi even a tier 1 elemental will have better stats than Master and will help you scale your future stuff, and if you have Rag you don't want to be spending 3 gold on a non-Elemental either.
That's my point though. Pirates already essentially cannot function without Hoggar, what with Southsea Strongarm and Salty Looter heavily pushing you to just spam Pirates like there's no tomorrow (or turn timer). And the only new thing they got for scaling is another card that's only really any good with Hoggar. So you have to get Hoggar to really be able to scale those cards but since those cards are so bad without Hoggar, you're more often than not gonna find yourself in a situation where you can buy or triple into a Hoggar, but you don't have any of the cards that combine with him because they were so bad on their own. You don't even really have a good early game progression, since Southsea Captain and Bloodsail Cannoneer are now gone. A stupid little Sewer Rat on Beast Tier 2 is better stats than most of the stuff Pirates have up to tier 5.
When you look at Elementals, those bastards scale on Tier 2 with Party Elemental (and Molten Rock self-scaling), Tier 4 with Majordomo and now the new Nomi, Tier 5 with actual Nomi, Tier 6 with Rag. Not gonna count the new Master of Realities cause I think that's gonna be trash. In addition, Elementals have access to Divine Shield, Windfury and pseudo-Cleave. Pirates now only have stats, cause they lost their one Windfury minion, and they have a harder time scaling those stats at most points in the game it seems to me. We'll have to see how good the economy aspect of Pirates is, but from what I'm seeing right now, it's not great. At least not great enough to make up for the inability to scale properly without one key card. Dragons had that same problem but at least they were unstoppable in the lategame if they got there. Pirates fold to a couple poisonous Murlocs with more than 50 health.
Essentially, what I'm getting at is: Pirates are by far the worst tribe in the game right now. And yet they seem to have gotten the least out of the patch beside Quillboars. All the other tribes are getting some pretty revolutionary stuff, mostly through new ways to scale or new ways to even build a composition from the ground up. Pirates are mostly stuck to what they were already doing (economy and Pirate churning), and what they were already doing wasn't working before all this new stuff came in. Why should it work now? The only tribe that may potentially end up taking a drop in power is Beasts because almost everything they're getting seems to be heavily dependent on things dying in the order you want them to and they lost Pack Leader. Then again, if the Reanimating Rattler works the way I think it does (i.e. permanent Reborn), Beasts are gonna be insane.
Wow did Pirates get the short end of the stick. Demons and Mechs got some serious lategame scaling now, Dragons now scale without Kalecgos and can now also pop Divine Shields. Meanwhile in Pirate town: well...I guess you can scale your Pirates...if you already have Hoggar...
Also, Elementals now have a tier 4 Nomi?
As interested as I am in this promised overhaul, I have to say I'm just a slight bit worried. I'm confident they'll be able to deliver on the core fantasy of the individual tribes. They've actually been nailing that pretty well since the introduction of Pirates. What they've not been nailing is the pace of the game. With every patch the game has been getting faster and faster as underperforming tribes and heroes have been brought up in power. Aside from the whole Elemental fiasco, there has never really been an overall tuning-down of the tribes. When Pirates were introduced, damage spiked to absurd levels. It was one of the most miserable patches in the game mode's history (at least until Djinni happened). When you look at Pirates now, they're an absolutely godawful tribe and yet they've only been buffed. It's just that everything introduced after them was even stronger. I doubt this overhaul will have an opposite effect to every other major introduction before it. The game is gonna get faster yet again, and half the lobby will be dead on turn 8 now instead of 10.
Well, here's to hoping it won't be a raging dumpster fire like Duels. But given the current track record (as in, pretty much every mode is broken in some way at this very moment), not getting my hopes up for this. Also remains to be seen how they monetise this. My guess is it's going to be similar to BGs, as in optional but not really optional if you want to improve your odds...so people are likely to be financially milked on packs, mini-expansions, BGs and Mercenaries at the same time in some form or fashion.
The issue with that blanket approach is that not all the Mercenaries actually need it. If you change Guff to 7 mana he goes from niche to worthless. Cariel slows down so much it wouldn't even be worth playing the deck anymore, because by the time you get to create your 3/3s, opponents have had enough time and mana to set up and to outpace your 1-drop deck that they'll easily keep your hero power under control from that point on. Same mostly goes for Rokara, Scabbs and Brukan. By the time these came online the deck would already be out of fuel and the value provided by these cards would not be enough to bring the game back around. Really, the issue is only with a handful of these quests, primarily Warlock, Hunter and to some extent, Mage. Nerfing all the questlines just for the sake of thematic consistency wouldn't make sense. It's a much better option to tweak the requirements on these quests so that yeah, Tamsin still costs 5, but you're NEVER playing her on 5.
I'm sure a quick Google search will get you plenty of lists. Or you can check out Vicious Syndicate or the Tempostorm Wild Meta Snapshot if you want something a little more proven. The most successful lists are all Odd.
Not all classes are created equal. Almost every expansion there's one or two classes that are completely unplayable. Getting stuck on those would be frustrating as all hell. So, no.
"Look guys, we changed things, you can now play these cutesy decks".
Meanwhile, some of the most powerful decks in Wild after nerfs: Quest Darkglare, Quest Hunter, Pirate Warrior, Ignite Mage. 3 nerfed decks out of 4. Quest Warlock merrily winning with Darkglare, Flesh Giant, Battleground Battlemaster like all three cards have been untouched.
I guess things may have been different in Standard; I play Wild. Currently 12 games in, 2 losses against tax Paladin (obviously) and 1 loss because I ran out of time on the combo. Every other game ended on turn 7 or earlier (if going second), beating Pirate Warriors (Quest and non-Quest), Odd Paladin, Warlocks (Quest and control), Odd DH, Odd Quest Hunters, one combo Mage that was slower than me because he didn't get Flow on 3. The deck feels just as broken as it did before, hence my complaints about the timidness of the nerfs.
Still getting consistent turn 7 lethals with Ignite Mage after Incanter's nerf. The combo hasn't slowed down by even a turn, I get one less discount, and still have infinite mana turn 7.
The Shudder and Flurgl changes are kinda crazy.
Flurgl now joins Ysera as the only tribe-focused heroes that are guaranteed to get their tribal minions on the regular. Going Murlocs will now be insanely easy for Flurgl, with the typical early game buys such as Water Droplet or Alley Cat being just as good as the Tidehunter start. Pirates will now be a great tribe to have in the tavern because Freedealing Gambler now = a murloc.
Shudder is a bit more awkward because outside of the two uses of the hero power, there is no longer a steady incentive to go for battlecries. Normally your hero power would be helping push you into buying battlecries every turn, but now you have to make the conscious decision to buy up battlecries, often even when it's not really worth it for that turn, only so that you can kick things into overdrive with your hero power several turns later. It's quite likely you'll get blown up before your hero power really gets a chance to pay off the first time. That said, lategame this will be insane. Lategame Elementals with Rag can skyrocket their stats with all the Tavern Tempests, Arcane Assistants and Stasis Elementals you'll have played, and Murlocs will essentially double in size, if not more if you have Brann.
The other hero changes are irrelevant. Malygos' hero power has way too little impact outside of early-game token transformations, Deryl, while 50 % better, will still not be able to break out of playing midrange and Maiev's problem isn't the stats, but the speed.
I disagree. The parallel between Incanter's Flow and Wild Growth is not quite correct I think because the cards work differently. Wild Growth on 2 allowed you to skip from 3 mana straight to 4, which allowed you to cut a lot of the mediocre garbage on 3 and go more heavy on 4 drops, which Druid had an abundance of (Oaken Summons, Branching Paths, now Overgrowth). Wild Growth also only had value until players reached 10 mana crystals, so with Wild Growth a turn slower, its mana benefits decreased. But there's a world of difference between having 1 extra mana crystal for 6 turns or 7 and discounting 24 cards by 1 mana or 23. You still cheat way too much mana for way too little investment. With Flow you're not really changing the design and curve of your deck, you don't get to skip to a specific power turn ahead of schedule since what you really want to do with your mana is draw draw draw, without on-board progress, and if you're literally doing nothing on turn 2 with Flow nerfed, you're building your deck wrong. You can still prepare a Conjure Mana Biscuit, kill something off with Runed Orb, power up an Ignite, ping off a one-drop to slow down the opponent, in Wild you'll take that opportunity to play Ancient Mysteries before you hard-draw your Ice Blocks.
The turn-to-turn play pattern changes very slightly but the overall game-wide pattern remains the same: Control can't stop you and aggro is your counter. That hasn't changed. Aggro might have a slightly bigger window now but control is not in any better position than it was. Same goes for Darkglare. Sure, you slow the deck down a turn. It may pack a bit more removal, be a bit more defensive. Control still can't beat it. By the time they get to answer the Darkglare it will have cheated 3-4 mana (making itself essentially free, like Flow), made dramatic progress on the quest, and once the quest is online, it's over for control. Between Flow and Darkglare, the cost to complete the quest, or simply the cost to do broken stuff is too low because both cards allow that cost to go into the negatives. Mana cheating will never be balanced because if your opponent mana cheats, the only way you can keep pace with them is to either mana cheat even harder, or kill them real fast.
The devs had the opportunity to put a stop to this mana cheating pattern that has been a problem in both formats pretty much since the cards' introductions. Instead they let cheating continue and bumped it one mana. The meekest change they could have made and also one that is most prone to result in relapses in brokenness.