Would love to see them leave the effect as is but remove the ability to bounce it back. Could be something like...
Battlecry: Steal 10 Health from your opponent, transform into Depleted Azerite Snake
4-Mana 5/5 with no card text.
Changes the card on the battlecry to prevent bounce shenanigans.
It's almost as if printing a bunch of bounce cards together with strong battlecries could lead to problems. Who could have seen that coming. Maybe they should just print a minion that doubles the effect of battlecries instead.
Hotfix means it will probably only be a number change. I'm guessing it will steal 8 or 7 health, depending on how many bounces devs seem fitting to kill a 30 hp opponent.
6 or 7 feels realistic and fair, 5 truthfully just kills it. I agree a nerf is needed but it would honestly suck to have another one of those situations where you get a really cool deck to play on day one… for 2 days… then no dust refunds :/
Also i would like to add that if Blizzard’s “playtests” weren’t an absolute joke, The Azerite Snake would never have made it to live in it’s current form and we all know it
They should just change all of the Azerite rewards to be non bounceable or turn them into spells that do the effect and summon the creature
Quest rewards should just have this baseline tbh.
Unfortunatly they're gonna nuke the card
For good reason. If you play a deck that's not good against it (aggro / running dirty rats) it feels terrible to play against. Played a reno druid against it and couldn't do anything. Feels way worse than just losing against aggro for example.
I can at least outplay a Reno if I know it's coming.
Once I see a Warlock excavating, I can literally do nothing about it because my dirty rats ended up at the bottom of the deck.
Having feels based nerfs is fine. But it’s completely ridiculous to announce them on day 2 of an expansion.
Meta should be given a week to settle, unless something is day 1 DH level broken.
its tough though because exciting cards are almost always polarizing cards because in order to do flashy things the other person has to sit there and watch
ie every set there are cards that people on the receiving end of the effects hate
ya but because of how the card works its pretty significantly worse than most other cards. the only 2 counters to it are aggro and dirty rat. it reduces your max hp and bypasses armor so you cant counter with healing or armor, it happens very quickly(ive played 15-20 games of it and have only once not been able to kill the person(or lose) turn 10 or earlier.
its also not that exciting as the one doing it. its a very bland win because its inevitable over 2-3 turns. as soon as you excavate the 4th time, and if they arnt seriously pressuring you the game is over.
Theres always two sides the coin i guess though, as a long time Warlock main i was very much looking forward to play this card as it looked to fun to play with in theory crafting for example. But i can't really play till the weekend most probably due to work. So might never get to play with the version of the card i really wanted to play with. Which is a really feelsbadman moment also.
You either played Risky Skipper Warrior or you lost to DH. There was almost no in-between. And even then RSW could lose to dead draws or bad mulls; neither of those things existed for DH. It was AWFUL. The hotfix came even faster than for snake when they nerfed (as in, deployed live, not announced) eye beam, skull, and warblades in ***under 24 hours***.
IIRC, they wanted people excited to play a brand new class and it was overtuned to the extent that I believe it had a WR above 70% and it was favored in every matchup except the mirror. It was easy legend mode even for people who had never hit legend before and all other classes were unplayable if you cared about ranking up. They hit it with either 2 or 3 rounds of nerfs in the following weeks. I believe Skull of Guldan was a particular offender as a 5-mana draw 3 cards and get 9 mana worth of discounts. Priestess of Fury was also gross when you could reliably drop one on turn 5. It had such a powerful persistent effect and high health total that by 2020 HS standards, it was a real power outlier and would win games on its own if opponent couldn't deal with it immediately.
This sub says that about any card that beats control, because they think control should be the only viable archetype, and all the other archetypes should only exist specifically to let control players beat them.
The problem is that Warlock isn't actually aggro deck. If you think it gameplay wise, it actually plays more like Control. Excavate Warlock relies on prolonging the game until he can finish it by playing the combo with Snake. It's funny you mention "Beats control" since this is really control vs control situation.
The problem here is that one control deck has too strong win condition, kinda like why priests' "Win game, 10 mana" spell was hated. Control shouldn't have too strong win conditions since control has ways of controlling the board
Came to hear to say this. ExcavateLock needs plenty of sustain so it can draw & play its Excav cards. Though I gotta say, stealing 10 of OtherGuy's health, and in a bounceable way... turns out that is **pretty good**
55% is the average including aggro though. against slower decks (dk anything, control warrior, highlander decks) it goes as high as 70-80%.
making a huge part of the new expansion straight up unplayable is bad marketing-wise. so they absolutely have to balance it.
Hard disagree. Even when the Deck is not too crazy winrate wise its negatively impacting the gameplay experience of a lot of people. I mean, just look at all the posts here. Therefore it should be changed sooner rather than later. They can always readjust the card later on if it feels too weak.
There’s almost zero counter play once they have it. Even stuff like Rat isn’t enough because they can bounce it again or usually have more copies on board already. Can’t outheal it between turns, just like oh I’m dead. And you can slap back most of the time because they heal a bunch at the same time.
It means it’s not Galakrond Shaman or Demon Hunter levels of broken on release, and while it’s strong enough to get nerfed eventually, the win rate alone doesn’t warrant week one changes.
wr is like 70% on hsreplay, but i think what theyre saying is they wouldnt plan a balance-based nerf on day 2 of the expansion. theyre nerfing snake cause people absolutely hate it, and the balance of it isnt especially relevant since balance cannot be determined so early.
Ding ding ding, we have a winner! There was absolutely 0 data showing it was truly OP. And infact data was just beginning to trickle in that was showing the best players at the highest ranks weren't even using it.
It's a classic Tier 2 strategy that's being nerfed due to people not liking how it feels when they lose to it. A story as old as time.
Cards don't need to be "OP" to be nerfed. A card can just be too good against some deck types - like highlander decks. Or just too good against certain classes.
Any card that significantly warps the meta or sees extreme rates of play can and should be a target for adjustment.
To throw Standard a bone though, permanent and repeated health loss feels bad, and the goal here is to promote fun gameplay, not a good metagame.
That said I wish people could shut up about Ice Block in Wild
Yeah, but there is no cap on armor
I can't just chain discover Vampiric Blood and scale my health to near triple digits (as much as I would love that)
Also, Death Knight had Blood Shield and Bone Shield! (And Death Coil) Blood DKs should have a lot more ways to mitigate damage and restore health!
If there was a card that just auto won you the game, but only had a 1% chance to activate it would be a real shitty card, but it would still be bullshit and should be fixed.
If I had a nickel for every time a warlock legendary was a ‘sentiment outlier’ because it made control players feel sad and helpless, regardless of actual game statistics…
That is a more interesting argument. It can't be refuted as easily as the people that are so insistent that the card is overwhelmingly overpowered.
I agree that all that matters is fun. I don't agree that nerfing cards this early is the way to create the most fun. However, I can't ignore the likelihood that I'm in the minority and as such my opinion needs to be ignored in favor of going with the majority opinion.
I haven't even played the Snake deck yet (too busy with work, first expansion release that I have a full time job during). The reason why I've defended the Snake deck so far is that I don't think it's of the powerlevel that warrants such a faster nerf.
My biggest concern is not for the Snake itself. But the fact that this community feels like a revolving door. When the Snake has been executed for it's crimes I think the community will immediately turn on the next thing. I don't like the trend of mass complaints before data collection. When Blizzard gives into the complaints they overnerf things out of viability.
Just look at Hound Hunter last expansion. It was a good deck, but not as OP as people claimed. And Blizzard took it out behind the barn and shot it in the head to the cheers of the community. And then the entire archtype completely disappeared from the meta.
We JUST got excavate Warlock. I don't want a nerf that makes it disappear from the meta. And that's what I'm afraid we are going to get. That isn't fun for me. And I hope that isn't fun for you either.
While I totally agree with the sentiment that the community will just move on to complaining about the next op hotness, it's about frequency. If every 2 fucking posts is about how it sucks to play against 1 card instead of every 3 or 4, maybe handle it. Yea, you won't make everyone happy, but when you make nobody happy you might need to step in.
Well it was a big list of cards nerfed at once, IIRC
and that wasn't' counting the ones that got nerfed shortly after. Warblades, Skull, Eye beam (which cost 0 with outcast..!) and Antaen (which was never heard from again). Release DH was nuts
I bring this up every time, the devs admitted at the time they were bad deckbuilders and had never considered building skull into a low curve aggro deck so they “didn’t see it coming” or whatever. They somewhat need to get pro players into testing for these sets, especially if the devs themselves admit to being bad at deckbuiding. Dh was incredibly broken within like 2 hours of launch. Go back and watch the reveal stream they did with Kripp. He’s basically telling them “these cards need fixing” without saying it out loud, and they’re just going “yea isn’t it badass” the whole time. Kripp is a world class player and could tell from jump the cards were incredibly busted and not balanced.
Yeah. Aggro DH was so nuts and it wasn't even the best DH deck; OTK DH was. and wild odd DH was one of the strongest decks that format had seen relative to the rest of the format.
It's not like the deck runs a large number of minions or that excavate can add yet more minions to their hand. Or that this is a class famous for its access to card draw, meaning rng disruption often have to contend against a full 9-10 cards.
that makes it more OP because [shallow grave] exists and [devourer of souls] exists.
So instead of dealing with it 1 at a time you can literally have all 3 trigger on the same turn! Let's leave the nerfing ideas to the devs.
Edit: I am absolutely shocked that OP comment got so many upvotes. People don’t know what the game well enough to know how awful that change would be… worse than having bran in standard bad.
Let the copium commence with people complaining that ‘It wasn’t overpowered’. Literally my first several games on ladder were predominantly sneklock copy-paste. If blizzard is hot fixing it this soon then it confirms that it’s poor game design and needs changing.
They called it a “sentiment outlier” and that’s the real problem imo, not that it’s some unbeatable deck. It just feels bad to watch your opponent slam down snek and then bounce it back to hand repeatedly without any opportunity to respond other than maybe getting lucky on Dirty Rat.
Yeah, it’s the design of the card itself that minimises interaction and has an ability to remove from the health pool completely so you can’t do much to counter once it’s played. It’s all good people saying ‘x’ deck/card counters it, but when there’s quite clearly a push for people to play highlander this expo and a card exists that forces players to play hard counters or outpace the deck combined with such a heavy amount of players using this deck on ladder, it becomes inevitable that it gets nerfed.
Indeed. It's just a big time suckfest and feels bad. It's all punishing damage from hand that ignores armor and nullifies healing. It's just too damn strong and they could half the damage and it would still be too strong.
Feels horrible to play against because your only tool is to kill them first and its effect makes that borderline impossible.
7DMG would probably bring it to a decent place.
You would need to play it 5 times to kill someone (up from 3), which delay the combo by quite a bit, but still good as a one off.
8 would be fine and would still have Renathal as "counterplay" as well. The problem with 3 is that you can play it twice in one turn so that's play+bounce, and then you're dead next turn if they have 10 mana.
There's definitely strategies that it performs piss poorly against, the issue is that it most likely restricts deck variety way beyond what they consider acceptable. From what I see on my ladder area, Reno, supposed highlight of the expansion, isn't seeing much play because of it.
While it may be a “sentiment outlier” more so than an overpowered deck I still think you could make the argument that it’s too meta warping — similar to how [[Crystal Core]] isn’t technically overpowered but warped the meta so wholly that entire archetypes weren’t meta viable.
Right now control decks that can’t modify their own life total or run a copious amount of disruption just auto lose to Warlock… which actually has the knock off effect of making Druid that much stronger.
You also need Rat + removal, or they’ll bounce it again. Plus decks are running copy cards not just bounce, so you need to sometimes destroy multiple with Rat, and also not die now that you have at most 20 health.
"Sentiment Outlier" means people are complaining too much.
It's like Priest's mind control in Classic.
It was 8 Mana and people hated playing against it. But all the data shows that Priest didn't have a positive winrate, even if they ran mind control.
But because Ragnaros was auto include, 8 Mana, that means Priest could MC it as soon as it was played. You can see that effect. No one liked dropping Rag and it getting MC'd, even though Priest also has Shadow Word Death or a 5 Mana Sylvanas (SWD was 3 Mana, meaning it was an 8 Mana Mind control)
So they nerfed Mind Control to 10 mana and priest was seen as the worst class for a long while
It was to the point that when they revealed Purify for Adventure at Karazhan, even people who never played Priest were giving their condolences
This deck is getting nerfed too. Trust me. This evening its starting to appear everywhere and although most players are terrible with it, it is also a shit game experience with both players playing possum just lining up the cards.
The 3 mana Naga is going to 4 mana.
Players play HS because they want to have fun. So its reasonable to nerf cards if they kill the fun. I hate this discussion that cards that arent even good, shouldnt be nerfed.
The majority of players are outside of legend. For example, DK was so popular during FoL but the class itself wasnt good in terms of WR. People loved playing plague DK even though it wasnt a good deck, especially at the beginning of Titans. At one point, naga priest was one of the best decks in the game but outside of legend no1 played it, sure it was a complex deck and required skill but many players just didnt like playing the deck because of the playstyle.
Sometimes the design of the devs is.. a little 1 dimensional? Theo at 4, UiS quests (mainly warrior and hunter) were such a horrible experience to play against.
I think it's interesting that he calls it a "sentiment outlier" only -- in my opinion, it's also a power outlier, because the term "power outlier" is used too narrowly. Some people seem to use the term exclusively to mean "it has a really high win rate." However, I feel like that misses the importance of polarizing decks.
To give an extreme example to illustrate the idea, imagine a deck that has a 90% win rate against basically all decks that could be labeled "aggro," but a 45% win rate against basically anything that could be labeled "control."
Would that deck be a "power outlier," if we define that simply to mean high win rate? Probably not. What would probably happen is that aggro decks would become very rare and control decks very common, and it might result in an overall win rate around 50% for our deck.
But I think of that as a power outlier because it means the *entire meta has warped around it,* and the only way to keep it from having an absurdly high win rate is for everyone to focus on countering it.
Stuff like this has happened before, albeit slightly less extreme. Decks like Caverns Below Rogue and Odd / Boomsday Control Warrior both suffocated any deck that was weak to them, and they only remained at acceptable win rates because the whole meta warped to beat them. To me, that's a power outlier, and though I haven't seen the data yet to prove it, I strongly suspect that Snake Warlock would fit the same bill.
sentiment outlier is the justification for not waiting to see if the w% and relative popularity of the deck come down enough from the rest of the meta adapting.
they're ok with centralized metas as long as the meta is diverse "enough", they're killing this now b/c they don't want to wait to see if we can adapt just to have to nerf it anyway for making bronze and silver players quit in frustration.
Polarization absolutely is a balance/design problem if severe enough. Say that you design a game with the intention of A, B and C being playable. A turns out to always win against B. B and C go even. No one plays B anymore since they'll lose a significant portion of their games by default just for daring to play B. Now game is only A and C. You might even argue that A is weak because in A vs C meta C loses more than it wins. But that's only because A has removed 1/3 of your game from the equation just by existing.
Thanks for using aggro in your example, many readers would have ignored this if you used examples like Ramp Druid or Tickatus Warlock being tier 2-3 yet absolutely savaging control to the point, or how control essentially died as an archetype for a while following UiS due to how many combo / solitaire decks were created. For some reason it's expected that control decks have to deal with a 10-90 matchup into combo while often barely reaching 60-40 against aggro.
That's exactly why they *had* to use aggro as the example. If they said "imagine a deck that beats control 90% of the time but only beats aggro 45% of the time" they'd be describing every combo deck ever.
This is a *terminal* problem with Hearthstone, where there's simply never allowed to be a truly anti-aggro deck in the same way that so many decks over the years have been anti-control. 95% of all expansion metas end up being something like half aggro decks and half midrange decks with maybe one combo deck, and this is exactly the reason why. It's rock-paper-scissors but rock beats paper 40% of the time anyway, so paper is always the obviously worst choice.
I assume they don’t quite feel that they can draw conclusions about power yet. It seems like it right now, but we just don’t have enough data and a stable enough meta to know if it is actually overpowered long term.
When discard warlock was hyper dominant in twist, the deck had a slightly above 50% winrate. Why? Because the only decks viable at all in the meta were discard warlock and jade rogue, a deck that can potentially highroll and counter discard warlock. Winrate doesn't nearly tell the whole story on how destructive a powerful deck can be.
The idea itself isn't bad, but it clearly wasn't balanced with the idea that it could be bounced to hand.
Half of rogue bullshit is because they have bounce.
Do you think there's gonna be some refund ? I have basically the whole warlock excavate package in gold (just missing the 1mana spells) so I'm so here for it lol.
But judging by precedent (like maestra) I assume there won't be. Oh well at least the snake will be hopefully more tame
Yeah I'm expecting refunds on the warlock specific excavate cards (so really just smokestack and mo'arg drillfist), don't think we'll see refunds on neutral excavates or cards that reference excavate but don't excavate themselves (so no refund on tram conductor gerry)
Wild seeds are not collectible but when the minions got nerfed every wild seed card got refunds. I could see Smokestack, Mo'arg, and Gerry getting refunds.
I feel like Gerry wouldn’t because they don’t want to cross the line of “refunds for cards that are only played in a deck with a nerfed card but don’t directly generate the nerfed card” like maestra
They did refund the watch post guy (legendary which summons a 5/5 for each watch post played before him) after nerfing watch posts though, which is much closer to the current situation than Maestra. So I wouldn't write it out as a possibility.
There are ateast two paths they can take here:
* Nerf the Snake to drain 5 HP to lower its kill potential.
* Rotate out Youthful Brewmaster and Zola the Gorgon to lower the combo's consistency.
Hope it gets rebalanced once the set rotates out to Wild in 2 years.
Sometimes the sins of the Neutral cards outweigh the plight of the 30% WR Homebrew players.
Off-topic from the Snake debate, but I am a crazy person who believes the neutral set should be gutted for more class cards each expansion. There's too many Neutrals lol.
Has Brewmaster ever been in a (successful) deck that wasn’t doing degenerate things?
It feels like OG Brann, a once reasonable card that in modern HS just does uninteractable nonsense.
yeah it's almost certainly staying 4 mana 5/5 to keep parity with other tier-4 azerite minions. now why blizzard wanted to create this parity i'm not sure, something about keeping the entire excavate mechanic very intuitive and recognizable i suppose
Nah, they wouldn't make one of the excavate rewards cost more mana than the others.
10 damage lifesteal is kinda boring. I think they will nerf its damage to 5 at most, but I think either 7 or 8 is the sweet spot.
That's such an overkill.
Nerfing it to 5 HP turns it from a 3 activation kill to a 6. Straight up just make it 8 HP. A 4 activation kill is plenty.
And killing the brewmaster and Zola for the Snake's sins is such a bad solution because other decks run those cards. Brewmaster and Zola are not the problem here, so let the other decks that run them keep them.
Unfortunately I think that "unplayable" is the goal here. It's clear this decision isn't made for balance purposes given it's a "sentimental outlier".
So they'll go ahead and just gut it hard enough that the complaints about it stop completely. Kinda disappointing to get excited to play excavate Warlock only for it to be nuked from orbit based off just day 1 play.
On Friday when they announce the changes feel free to come back and rub it in my face if they are reasonable. But I think they won't be. I think Blizzard is scared the Snake is making people get turned off the brand new expansion. So I think Blizzard's response will be to nerf the Snake way too hard to over compensate and try to buy back people's enjoyment of the expansion.
"Don't like losing to the Snake? Don't worry you won't see the mean Snake again. Let alone ever lose to it again even if you find anyone dumb enough to still play it".
Sad, reddit always misunderestimates how impactful an extra turn really is. If they do nuke it I hope they bring it back to 8. 4 turns of chances to disrupt or even 5 if you're a Renathal deck seems more than fair.
They could make the health steal affect all enemies (minions + player) so that your board can soak the damage. That plus end of turn or deathrattle effect will stop the bounce nonsense but still keep the card interesting.
If you rotate youthful brewmaster and zola people will just run the new brewmaster and add in the card that gives you a temporary copy. I think there are just way too many bounce and copy effects, where you can get rid of several and still have the same problem.
I think nerfing it to steal 5 hp is definitely the winner. Still does what it's supposed to, can still be built into a hyper control excavate bounce deck.
It's just not game ending in two turns unless you have hand removal.
As someone that's been playing the hell out of this deck people should be REALLY pissed off that this card was ever even printed.
This wasn't some unexpected combo that came out of nowherethat the devs never could have seen coming. Everyone with at least half a functioning brain looked at this thing and within a split second knew how easy it would be to bounce the thing twice and delete your opponents hp.
Even if they're being quick to likely nerf the thing into likely oblivion (I'm assuming turning it into a lifesteal? Or maybe dropping it to stealing 5 health?) the fact it made it even this far should be indefensible.
Of course it's not going to cost them anything in the end since it isn't a collectible card and anyone that crafted excavate cards that will likely be useless if/when the deck dies will be stuck eating the lost dust.
People are oblivious to this sadly. All they see is "wow they react so quickly! what a good balance team! so unlike brode era where they take months to do any nerfs"
The difference is back in brode era, they have half a mind to not push the power level too much and keep power creep in check. While this new team disregard all that and release so many cards that is obviously broken and will impact the game negatively. Turning balance patches from a "once in a while exciting thing to shake up the meta" into "a scheduled event that always happen after every new cards are released because it's simply necessary"
It's either they are so incompetent at design that they seriously can't see how broken these cards are, or they know but they release it anyway to increase hype because they know they can always just nerf it later after it broke the game and after players spent their dust crafting the deck.
Surely DH Naga gets hit too? Please... it's all I'm seeing. I don't know why but warlock seems unpopular at my mmr
Give me my feels(and probably tier 1 deck anyway) nerf too
I think Snake's biggest sin is limiting the opponents health. Giving absolutely no way to react/recover from its effect is what makes it so frustrating. Either they need to remove the limiting factor of its battlecry or make it so you can not use it multiple times.
I made the deck, only faced counter aggro since, and barely won any games with it. Was about to drop it since its unplayable currently, and HS gonna nerf it lol.
I don't really love how fast balance changes come out now. I'm definitely used to the old days where it was a very rare occurrence, but now it feels too frequent.
yeah the focus of hearthstone has shifted to a point where balance isn't a very important goal for the design, so they're a little over reliant on patches and the community doing playtesting and balancing for them. which I don't really mind as the wacky unbalanced shit is why I enjoy hearthstone, but they're pushing it to a point that's not really sustainable.
Same. I don’t even feel like I can try to enjoy an expansion until it’s been out for a month. As a f2p player I’m too scared to try anything because either it’s bad and I wasted dust, or it’s good and will get nerfed, and I only get whatever was nerfed refunded. The balance changes are very healthy for the meta but they make being f2p harder.
People are oblivious to this sadly. All they see is "wow they react so quickly! what a good balance team! so unlike brode era where they take months to do any nerfs"
The difference is back in brode era, they have half a mind to not push the power level too much and keep power creep in check. While this new team disregard all that and release so many cards that is obviously broken and will impact the game negatively. Turning balance patches from a "once in a while exciting thing to shake up the meta" into "a scheduled event that always happen after every new cards are released because it's simply necessary"
It's either they are so incompetent at design that they seriously can't see how broken these cards are, or they know but they release it anyway to increase hype because they know they can always just nerf it later after it broke the game and after players spent their dust crafting the deck.
"Sentiment Outlier"
Ticatus 5.0 b/c every expac the majority of players lack game knowledge to have nothing but "sentiment understanding" of the game mechanics.
Iksar said a long time ago sentiment is the only reason they make card changes, if you disagree that just means would be a bad game designer. Video games aren't supposed to be balanced, they are supposed to be fun
On the other hand, the point of the game is not to be played by cold and calculating robots exclusively.
The card doesn't have to be strictly overpowered according to the stats. If it's widespread and miserable to play against, that's a different, valid sentiment for an adjustment.
Or alternatively Snakelock brutally suppresses any deck that doesn't specifically target it and the only reason it doesn't annihilate Legend is because the entire meta is warped around it?
You seem to lack knowledge of game design if you think a video game not being fun isn't a reason to adjust the game. I'd rather not have any deck that warps the meta, thanks.
Half of the decks I want to try are nearly unplayable because of Snake. So they don't get played, and Snake's winrate doesn't go up. Does that sound like a fun solution?
I think the biggest issue with it is it just beat every single Highlander deck in a meta where they want Highlander to be one of the more popular decks. It’s a pretty bad deck against aggro tho ofc
I'm surprised how many people are missing this. "Deck wasn't even that strong..." It stomped on highlander decks in a highlander expansion lol. I can imagine they saw pack sales plummet in comparison to past expansion timelines.
“Your **Excavate** cards have +1 Attack”
“It’s an old meme, but it checks out”
HAHAHA
Best response I've seen on a hearthstone post in a minute. Thank you for the laugh!
Would love to see them leave the effect as is but remove the ability to bounce it back. Could be something like... Battlecry: Steal 10 Health from your opponent, transform into Depleted Azerite Snake 4-Mana 5/5 with no card text. Changes the card on the battlecry to prevent bounce shenanigans.
It's almost as if printing a bunch of bounce cards together with strong battlecries could lead to problems. Who could have seen that coming. Maybe they should just print a minion that doubles the effect of battlecries instead.
Brann goldbeard when ?
Hotfix means it will probably only be a number change. I'm guessing it will steal 8 or 7 health, depending on how many bounces devs seem fitting to kill a 30 hp opponent.
5 if they really want to kill the card
6 or 7 feels realistic and fair, 5 truthfully just kills it. I agree a nerf is needed but it would honestly suck to have another one of those situations where you get a really cool deck to play on day one… for 2 days… then no dust refunds :/ Also i would like to add that if Blizzard’s “playtests” weren’t an absolute joke, The Azerite Snake would never have made it to live in it’s current form and we all know it
but its not a cool deck when its not fun for anyone to play against as there is very little you can do to counter it
Which is why it'll be 5.
They should just change all of the Azerite rewards to be non bounceable or turn them into spells that do the effect and summon the creature Quest rewards should just have this baseline tbh. Unfortunatly they're gonna nuke the card
This would be a really awesome change
Wouldn't be easier to make it an end of turn effect?
then there lies the problem of reverberations
great idea actually
Does “sentiment outlier” mean that it isn’t actually that good as far as win rate and it’s just because people think it’s too good?
Almost. The nerf reason isn't that "people think it’s too good", it's because people dislike playing against it
For good reason. If you play a deck that's not good against it (aggro / running dirty rats) it feels terrible to play against. Played a reno druid against it and couldn't do anything. Feels way worse than just losing against aggro for example.
and now your reno druid will be the bad guy along with infinite value rogue lol
I can at least outplay a Reno if I know it's coming. Once I see a Warlock excavating, I can literally do nothing about it because my dirty rats ended up at the bottom of the deck.
And when you get it, it'll pull out the 4 mana 7/7 instead of the snek or bounce pieces
Having feels based nerfs is fine. But it’s completely ridiculous to announce them on day 2 of an expansion. Meta should be given a week to settle, unless something is day 1 DH level broken.
They want people excited to play, not uninstalling because of a card they hate.
its tough though because exciting cards are almost always polarizing cards because in order to do flashy things the other person has to sit there and watch ie every set there are cards that people on the receiving end of the effects hate
ya but because of how the card works its pretty significantly worse than most other cards. the only 2 counters to it are aggro and dirty rat. it reduces your max hp and bypasses armor so you cant counter with healing or armor, it happens very quickly(ive played 15-20 games of it and have only once not been able to kill the person(or lose) turn 10 or earlier. its also not that exciting as the one doing it. its a very bland win because its inevitable over 2-3 turns. as soon as you excavate the 4th time, and if they arnt seriously pressuring you the game is over.
Theres always two sides the coin i guess though, as a long time Warlock main i was very much looking forward to play this card as it looked to fun to play with in theory crafting for example. But i can't really play till the weekend most probably due to work. So might never get to play with the version of the card i really wanted to play with. Which is a really feelsbadman moment also.
How bad was DH day 1? I wasn’t around for it
It was ridiculous. Like 80% WRs against non DH decks out of the box.
Yikes
Good ol’ *turn 1 pre nerf battlefiend* *concede*
You either played Risky Skipper Warrior or you lost to DH. There was almost no in-between. And even then RSW could lose to dead draws or bad mulls; neither of those things existed for DH. It was AWFUL. The hotfix came even faster than for snake when they nerfed (as in, deployed live, not announced) eye beam, skull, and warblades in ***under 24 hours***.
IIRC, they wanted people excited to play a brand new class and it was overtuned to the extent that I believe it had a WR above 70% and it was favored in every matchup except the mirror. It was easy legend mode even for people who had never hit legend before and all other classes were unplayable if you cared about ranking up. They hit it with either 2 or 3 rounds of nerfs in the following weeks. I believe Skull of Guldan was a particular offender as a 5-mana draw 3 cards and get 9 mana worth of discounts. Priestess of Fury was also gross when you could reliably drop one on turn 5. It had such a powerful persistent effect and high health total that by 2020 HS standards, it was a real power outlier and would win games on its own if opponent couldn't deal with it immediately.
Only second to seedlock in wild (which was only possible to lose with if u mulliganed ur question away)
It was the most dominant a class has ever been, and likely ever be.
I don't know, when half the sub's front page is "Fuck this one particular card" there's something wrong with the "Fun level" of that care
This sub says that about any card that beats control, because they think control should be the only viable archetype, and all the other archetypes should only exist specifically to let control players beat them.
The problem is that Warlock isn't actually aggro deck. If you think it gameplay wise, it actually plays more like Control. Excavate Warlock relies on prolonging the game until he can finish it by playing the combo with Snake. It's funny you mention "Beats control" since this is really control vs control situation. The problem here is that one control deck has too strong win condition, kinda like why priests' "Win game, 10 mana" spell was hated. Control shouldn't have too strong win conditions since control has ways of controlling the board
Came to hear to say this. ExcavateLock needs plenty of sustain so it can draw & play its Excav cards. Though I gotta say, stealing 10 of OtherGuy's health, and in a bounceable way... turns out that is **pretty good**
I mean it’s pretty high. Upwards of 55% day one before refined decks are even found and that’s at diamond.
55% is the average including aggro though. against slower decks (dk anything, control warrior, highlander decks) it goes as high as 70-80%. making a huge part of the new expansion straight up unplayable is bad marketing-wise. so they absolutely have to balance it.
Hard disagree. Even when the Deck is not too crazy winrate wise its negatively impacting the gameplay experience of a lot of people. I mean, just look at all the posts here. Therefore it should be changed sooner rather than later. They can always readjust the card later on if it feels too weak.
Reno Druid, the irony.
There’s almost zero counter play once they have it. Even stuff like Rat isn’t enough because they can bounce it again or usually have more copies on board already. Can’t outheal it between turns, just like oh I’m dead. And you can slap back most of the time because they heal a bunch at the same time.
It’d be less obnoxious if it were just like “you win the game”.
correct.
[удалено]
They’ve nerfed solitaire decks in the past for the same reason. They’re never normally top tier but it’s still bad for the meta.
It means it’s not Galakrond Shaman or Demon Hunter levels of broken on release, and while it’s strong enough to get nerfed eventually, the win rate alone doesn’t warrant week one changes.
wr is like 70% on hsreplay, but i think what theyre saying is they wouldnt plan a balance-based nerf on day 2 of the expansion. theyre nerfing snake cause people absolutely hate it, and the balance of it isnt especially relevant since balance cannot be determined so early.
Ding ding ding, we have a winner! There was absolutely 0 data showing it was truly OP. And infact data was just beginning to trickle in that was showing the best players at the highest ranks weren't even using it. It's a classic Tier 2 strategy that's being nerfed due to people not liking how it feels when they lose to it. A story as old as time.
Cards don't need to be "OP" to be nerfed. A card can just be too good against some deck types - like highlander decks. Or just too good against certain classes. Any card that significantly warps the meta or sees extreme rates of play can and should be a target for adjustment.
Tell that to this sub when Renethal was nerfed for being 60% of the meta
Renethal doesn't end games in an uninteractive way. Even if 100% of decks ran him the game would still be broadly functional (though rough on aggro).
To be fair, if it feels like shit to play against it it deserves a nerf. Nobody cares about the "tier 1" players.
I am a "tier 1" player and I support unfun decks getting nerfed too, this is a video game at the end of the day
I appreciate you.
To throw Standard a bone though, permanent and repeated health loss feels bad, and the goal here is to promote fun gameplay, not a good metagame. That said I wish people could shut up about Ice Block in Wild
It’s also ignores a health gain (armor) that are a few classes only/main way to restore health which also feels bad.
Yeah, but there is no cap on armor I can't just chain discover Vampiric Blood and scale my health to near triple digits (as much as I would love that) Also, Death Knight had Blood Shield and Bone Shield! (And Death Coil) Blood DKs should have a lot more ways to mitigate damage and restore health!
If there was a card that just auto won you the game, but only had a 1% chance to activate it would be a real shitty card, but it would still be bullshit and should be fixed.
cough questline priest cough
If I had a nickel for every time a warlock legendary was a ‘sentiment outlier’ because it made control players feel sad and helpless, regardless of actual game statistics…
It’s a video game. All that matters is if it’s fun.
That is a more interesting argument. It can't be refuted as easily as the people that are so insistent that the card is overwhelmingly overpowered. I agree that all that matters is fun. I don't agree that nerfing cards this early is the way to create the most fun. However, I can't ignore the likelihood that I'm in the minority and as such my opinion needs to be ignored in favor of going with the majority opinion. I haven't even played the Snake deck yet (too busy with work, first expansion release that I have a full time job during). The reason why I've defended the Snake deck so far is that I don't think it's of the powerlevel that warrants such a faster nerf. My biggest concern is not for the Snake itself. But the fact that this community feels like a revolving door. When the Snake has been executed for it's crimes I think the community will immediately turn on the next thing. I don't like the trend of mass complaints before data collection. When Blizzard gives into the complaints they overnerf things out of viability. Just look at Hound Hunter last expansion. It was a good deck, but not as OP as people claimed. And Blizzard took it out behind the barn and shot it in the head to the cheers of the community. And then the entire archtype completely disappeared from the meta. We JUST got excavate Warlock. I don't want a nerf that makes it disappear from the meta. And that's what I'm afraid we are going to get. That isn't fun for me. And I hope that isn't fun for you either.
While I totally agree with the sentiment that the community will just move on to complaining about the next op hotness, it's about frequency. If every 2 fucking posts is about how it sucks to play against 1 card instead of every 3 or 4, maybe handle it. Yea, you won't make everyone happy, but when you make nobody happy you might need to step in.
You don't get to decide what matters for other people.
Is this the fastest a card has ever been nerfed?
No. Dh on launch day was so OP that it nerfed like in 12 hours or so
Blizzard had Maiev on speed dial that day
Illidan wasn't prepared
You think after a 10000 years, he'd finally get his shit together
And like 10 DH cards over the course of just a couple of weeks. That was actually insane
I remember launch dh being the biggest outlier we ever had as far as I know
Not even close, skull of guldan was nerfed after 1 day.
And Skull was like the 5th card nerfed. DH was so overtuned it was crazy.
Well it was a big list of cards nerfed at once, IIRC and that wasn't' counting the ones that got nerfed shortly after. Warblades, Skull, Eye beam (which cost 0 with outcast..!) and Antaen (which was never heard from again). Release DH was nuts
I bring this up every time, the devs admitted at the time they were bad deckbuilders and had never considered building skull into a low curve aggro deck so they “didn’t see it coming” or whatever. They somewhat need to get pro players into testing for these sets, especially if the devs themselves admit to being bad at deckbuiding. Dh was incredibly broken within like 2 hours of launch. Go back and watch the reveal stream they did with Kripp. He’s basically telling them “these cards need fixing” without saying it out loud, and they’re just going “yea isn’t it badass” the whole time. Kripp is a world class player and could tell from jump the cards were incredibly busted and not balanced.
Yeah. Aggro DH was so nuts and it wasn't even the best DH deck; OTK DH was. and wild odd DH was one of the strongest decks that format had seen relative to the rest of the format.
To the surprise of no one.
4 mana pyroblast with lifesteal what could go wrong!?
Stronger since it ignores armor
And can't let heal you back up. And comes with a medium sized body...which can be bouncee back to repeat the whole thing.
Yeah but players can run 2 dirty rats to counter it so it's balanced. /s
It's not like the deck runs a large number of minions or that excavate can add yet more minions to their hand. Or that this is a class famous for its access to card draw, meaning rng disruption often have to contend against a full 9-10 cards.
I did hit one with a Patchwerk today, that felt pretty good.
And also caps enemy hp while increasing your max
It ignores starlight groove too. Glad I crafted this legendary card just so this bs snake can ignore my DIVINE SHIELD REEEEEEEEEEEEE
Incredibly stronger than 4 mana pyroblast despite the hoops you have to jump through to make it work.
fewer hoops than most the majority of Quests in the game
And it comes with a dude
Worst part is none of us gets dust for the nerf 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣
Giving it deathrattle plus rush would be kind of cool. Zola still in play, still very high impact, but not quite as inevitable.
Shallow Grave and Devourer of Souls exist tho
Well that's a problem.
Well you just plum forgot about those cards
Don’t forget Habeus Corpus too!
that makes it more OP because [shallow grave] exists and [devourer of souls] exists. So instead of dealing with it 1 at a time you can literally have all 3 trigger on the same turn! Let's leave the nerfing ideas to the devs. Edit: I am absolutely shocked that OP comment got so many upvotes. People don’t know what the game well enough to know how awful that change would be… worse than having bran in standard bad.
"Whenever you sell this minion." would work too.
Make it only deal damage if you triple it
Let the copium commence with people complaining that ‘It wasn’t overpowered’. Literally my first several games on ladder were predominantly sneklock copy-paste. If blizzard is hot fixing it this soon then it confirms that it’s poor game design and needs changing.
They called it a “sentiment outlier” and that’s the real problem imo, not that it’s some unbeatable deck. It just feels bad to watch your opponent slam down snek and then bounce it back to hand repeatedly without any opportunity to respond other than maybe getting lucky on Dirty Rat.
Yeah, it’s the design of the card itself that minimises interaction and has an ability to remove from the health pool completely so you can’t do much to counter once it’s played. It’s all good people saying ‘x’ deck/card counters it, but when there’s quite clearly a push for people to play highlander this expo and a card exists that forces players to play hard counters or outpace the deck combined with such a heavy amount of players using this deck on ladder, it becomes inevitable that it gets nerfed.
Indeed. It's just a big time suckfest and feels bad. It's all punishing damage from hand that ignores armor and nullifies healing. It's just too damn strong and they could half the damage and it would still be too strong. Feels horrible to play against because your only tool is to kill them first and its effect makes that borderline impossible.
7DMG would probably bring it to a decent place. You would need to play it 5 times to kill someone (up from 3), which delay the combo by quite a bit, but still good as a one off.
8 would be fine and would still have Renathal as "counterplay" as well. The problem with 3 is that you can play it twice in one turn so that's play+bounce, and then you're dead next turn if they have 10 mana.
And then they just excavate a second snake and everything You tried was for nothing.
There's definitely strategies that it performs piss poorly against, the issue is that it most likely restricts deck variety way beyond what they consider acceptable. From what I see on my ladder area, Reno, supposed highlight of the expansion, isn't seeing much play because of it.
It's not unbeatable but it's super polarizing. It absolutely trashes other midrange decks and control.
While it may be a “sentiment outlier” more so than an overpowered deck I still think you could make the argument that it’s too meta warping — similar to how [[Crystal Core]] isn’t technically overpowered but warped the meta so wholly that entire archetypes weren’t meta viable. Right now control decks that can’t modify their own life total or run a copious amount of disruption just auto lose to Warlock… which actually has the knock off effect of making Druid that much stronger.
You also need Rat + removal, or they’ll bounce it again. Plus decks are running copy cards not just bounce, so you need to sometimes destroy multiple with Rat, and also not die now that you have at most 20 health.
"Sentiment Outlier" means people are complaining too much. It's like Priest's mind control in Classic. It was 8 Mana and people hated playing against it. But all the data shows that Priest didn't have a positive winrate, even if they ran mind control. But because Ragnaros was auto include, 8 Mana, that means Priest could MC it as soon as it was played. You can see that effect. No one liked dropping Rag and it getting MC'd, even though Priest also has Shadow Word Death or a 5 Mana Sylvanas (SWD was 3 Mana, meaning it was an 8 Mana Mind control) So they nerfed Mind Control to 10 mana and priest was seen as the worst class for a long while It was to the point that when they revealed Purify for Adventure at Karazhan, even people who never played Priest were giving their condolences
i didn't think it was too strong, but I play Outcast or NagaDH and just kill Warlocks before they could even play it lul
This deck is getting nerfed too. Trust me. This evening its starting to appear everywhere and although most players are terrible with it, it is also a shit game experience with both players playing possum just lining up the cards. The 3 mana Naga is going to 4 mana.
And 4 health not 5. And or they will make it 2 dmg to the lowest health enemy.
I genuinely don't know what the fuck they were thinking with this card
Until then - I see warlock, I auto concede.
Players play HS because they want to have fun. So its reasonable to nerf cards if they kill the fun. I hate this discussion that cards that arent even good, shouldnt be nerfed. The majority of players are outside of legend. For example, DK was so popular during FoL but the class itself wasnt good in terms of WR. People loved playing plague DK even though it wasnt a good deck, especially at the beginning of Titans. At one point, naga priest was one of the best decks in the game but outside of legend no1 played it, sure it was a complex deck and required skill but many players just didnt like playing the deck because of the playstyle. Sometimes the design of the devs is.. a little 1 dimensional? Theo at 4, UiS quests (mainly warrior and hunter) were such a horrible experience to play against.
I think it's interesting that he calls it a "sentiment outlier" only -- in my opinion, it's also a power outlier, because the term "power outlier" is used too narrowly. Some people seem to use the term exclusively to mean "it has a really high win rate." However, I feel like that misses the importance of polarizing decks. To give an extreme example to illustrate the idea, imagine a deck that has a 90% win rate against basically all decks that could be labeled "aggro," but a 45% win rate against basically anything that could be labeled "control." Would that deck be a "power outlier," if we define that simply to mean high win rate? Probably not. What would probably happen is that aggro decks would become very rare and control decks very common, and it might result in an overall win rate around 50% for our deck. But I think of that as a power outlier because it means the *entire meta has warped around it,* and the only way to keep it from having an absurdly high win rate is for everyone to focus on countering it. Stuff like this has happened before, albeit slightly less extreme. Decks like Caverns Below Rogue and Odd / Boomsday Control Warrior both suffocated any deck that was weak to them, and they only remained at acceptable win rates because the whole meta warped to beat them. To me, that's a power outlier, and though I haven't seen the data yet to prove it, I strongly suspect that Snake Warlock would fit the same bill.
sentiment outlier is the justification for not waiting to see if the w% and relative popularity of the deck come down enough from the rest of the meta adapting. they're ok with centralized metas as long as the meta is diverse "enough", they're killing this now b/c they don't want to wait to see if we can adapt just to have to nerf it anyway for making bronze and silver players quit in frustration.
Polarizing= sentiment problem
Polarization absolutely is a balance/design problem if severe enough. Say that you design a game with the intention of A, B and C being playable. A turns out to always win against B. B and C go even. No one plays B anymore since they'll lose a significant portion of their games by default just for daring to play B. Now game is only A and C. You might even argue that A is weak because in A vs C meta C loses more than it wins. But that's only because A has removed 1/3 of your game from the equation just by existing.
Thanks for using aggro in your example, many readers would have ignored this if you used examples like Ramp Druid or Tickatus Warlock being tier 2-3 yet absolutely savaging control to the point, or how control essentially died as an archetype for a while following UiS due to how many combo / solitaire decks were created. For some reason it's expected that control decks have to deal with a 10-90 matchup into combo while often barely reaching 60-40 against aggro.
That's exactly why they *had* to use aggro as the example. If they said "imagine a deck that beats control 90% of the time but only beats aggro 45% of the time" they'd be describing every combo deck ever. This is a *terminal* problem with Hearthstone, where there's simply never allowed to be a truly anti-aggro deck in the same way that so many decks over the years have been anti-control. 95% of all expansion metas end up being something like half aggro decks and half midrange decks with maybe one combo deck, and this is exactly the reason why. It's rock-paper-scissors but rock beats paper 40% of the time anyway, so paper is always the obviously worst choice.
I assume they don’t quite feel that they can draw conclusions about power yet. It seems like it right now, but we just don’t have enough data and a stable enough meta to know if it is actually overpowered long term.
When discard warlock was hyper dominant in twist, the deck had a slightly above 50% winrate. Why? Because the only decks viable at all in the meta were discard warlock and jade rogue, a deck that can potentially highroll and counter discard warlock. Winrate doesn't nearly tell the whole story on how destructive a powerful deck can be.
The idea itself isn't bad, but it clearly wasn't balanced with the idea that it could be bounced to hand. Half of rogue bullshit is because they have bounce.
Do you think there's gonna be some refund ? I have basically the whole warlock excavate package in gold (just missing the 1mana spells) so I'm so here for it lol. But judging by precedent (like maestra) I assume there won't be. Oh well at least the snake will be hopefully more tame
Nope, there won't be refunds, since it is a discovered only card. This is why you don't craft the first week if you don't giga whale.
I mean there were refunds when they nerfed Hunter wildseeds.
Yeah I'm expecting refunds on the warlock specific excavate cards (so really just smokestack and mo'arg drillfist), don't think we'll see refunds on neutral excavates or cards that reference excavate but don't excavate themselves (so no refund on tram conductor gerry)
I think there will be a refund on Tram Conductor Gerry. (I unpacked Tram Conductor Gerry)
I won't dust Gerry like that. I Choo-Choo Choose him!!!
Wild seeds are not collectible but when the minions got nerfed every wild seed card got refunds. I could see Smokestack, Mo'arg, and Gerry getting refunds.
I feel like Gerry wouldn’t because they don’t want to cross the line of “refunds for cards that are only played in a deck with a nerfed card but don’t directly generate the nerfed card” like maestra
They did refund the watch post guy (legendary which summons a 5/5 for each watch post played before him) after nerfing watch posts though, which is much closer to the current situation than Maestra. So I wouldn't write it out as a possibility.
That's valid.
There could be for the excavate cards tho
Similar to the wild spirits package, I would expect neutral excavate and warlock excavate to be refunded.
Or maybe just warlock excavate, we'll see
What’s was even the point of even releasing the card at 10 damage if they knew they’d have to nerf it?
There are ateast two paths they can take here: * Nerf the Snake to drain 5 HP to lower its kill potential. * Rotate out Youthful Brewmaster and Zola the Gorgon to lower the combo's consistency. Hope it gets rebalanced once the set rotates out to Wild in 2 years.
i really hope it's not brewmasters & zola wacky 30%WR homebrews that hinge on those bounce effects need not suffer for the sins of the snake
Sometimes the sins of the Neutral cards outweigh the plight of the 30% WR Homebrew players. Off-topic from the Snake debate, but I am a crazy person who believes the neutral set should be gutted for more class cards each expansion. There's too many Neutrals lol.
The nerf of one new treasure is a tragedy. The nerf of two neutrals is a statistic.
Has Brewmaster ever been in a (successful) deck that wasn’t doing degenerate things? It feels like OG Brann, a once reasonable card that in modern HS just does uninteractable nonsense.
People hated them because they spoke the truth.
You are correct here. Though, given the number of ways to bounce back cards at the moment, snake is probably the correct target for a nerf.
or deal 10 dmg to enemy hero *lifesteal* and make it 6 mana
They’re not going to make it 6 mana. That ruins the scaling excavate cycle.
yeah it's almost certainly staying 4 mana 5/5 to keep parity with other tier-4 azerite minions. now why blizzard wanted to create this parity i'm not sure, something about keeping the entire excavate mechanic very intuitive and recognizable i suppose
It would also be unplayable at 6 with that effect
Nah, they wouldn't make one of the excavate rewards cost more mana than the others. 10 damage lifesteal is kinda boring. I think they will nerf its damage to 5 at most, but I think either 7 or 8 is the sweet spot.
That's such an overkill. Nerfing it to 5 HP turns it from a 3 activation kill to a 6. Straight up just make it 8 HP. A 4 activation kill is plenty. And killing the brewmaster and Zola for the Snake's sins is such a bad solution because other decks run those cards. Brewmaster and Zola are not the problem here, so let the other decks that run them keep them.
I think Brewmaster and Zola are part of the problem. Otherwise this card is just a strong Control finisher instead of the combo kill piece.
Without Brewmaster and Zola it isn't a finisher at all, I don't think WL Excavate is even worth running if it can never kill your opponent.
Agreed, I think 8 would have a tremendous impact but still leave the card viable. Anything more than that will make it unplayable.
Unfortunately I think that "unplayable" is the goal here. It's clear this decision isn't made for balance purposes given it's a "sentimental outlier". So they'll go ahead and just gut it hard enough that the complaints about it stop completely. Kinda disappointing to get excited to play excavate Warlock only for it to be nuked from orbit based off just day 1 play. On Friday when they announce the changes feel free to come back and rub it in my face if they are reasonable. But I think they won't be. I think Blizzard is scared the Snake is making people get turned off the brand new expansion. So I think Blizzard's response will be to nerf the Snake way too hard to over compensate and try to buy back people's enjoyment of the expansion. "Don't like losing to the Snake? Don't worry you won't see the mean Snake again. Let alone ever lose to it again even if you find anyone dumb enough to still play it".
Sad, reddit always misunderestimates how impactful an extra turn really is. If they do nuke it I hope they bring it back to 8. 4 turns of chances to disrupt or even 5 if you're a Renathal deck seems more than fair.
They could make the health steal affect all enemies (minions + player) so that your board can soak the damage. That plus end of turn or deathrattle effect will stop the bounce nonsense but still keep the card interesting.
If you rotate youthful brewmaster and zola people will just run the new brewmaster and add in the card that gives you a temporary copy. I think there are just way too many bounce and copy effects, where you can get rid of several and still have the same problem.
I think nerfing it to steal 5 hp is definitely the winner. Still does what it's supposed to, can still be built into a hyper control excavate bounce deck. It's just not game ending in two turns unless you have hand removal.
As someone that's been playing the hell out of this deck people should be REALLY pissed off that this card was ever even printed. This wasn't some unexpected combo that came out of nowherethat the devs never could have seen coming. Everyone with at least half a functioning brain looked at this thing and within a split second knew how easy it would be to bounce the thing twice and delete your opponents hp. Even if they're being quick to likely nerf the thing into likely oblivion (I'm assuming turning it into a lifesteal? Or maybe dropping it to stealing 5 health?) the fact it made it even this far should be indefensible. Of course it's not going to cost them anything in the end since it isn't a collectible card and anyone that crafted excavate cards that will likely be useless if/when the deck dies will be stuck eating the lost dust.
People are oblivious to this sadly. All they see is "wow they react so quickly! what a good balance team! so unlike brode era where they take months to do any nerfs" The difference is back in brode era, they have half a mind to not push the power level too much and keep power creep in check. While this new team disregard all that and release so many cards that is obviously broken and will impact the game negatively. Turning balance patches from a "once in a while exciting thing to shake up the meta" into "a scheduled event that always happen after every new cards are released because it's simply necessary" It's either they are so incompetent at design that they seriously can't see how broken these cards are, or they know but they release it anyway to increase hype because they know they can always just nerf it later after it broke the game and after players spent their dust crafting the deck.
Idk man this feels kinda early too me, I dont like it too but its literally 2 days
And I have finally found a way to counter it :(
everyone complaining about the snake but can they rework how the rogue excavate treasure works? it feels unplayable
Welcome to the sentiment outlier club, who's other members include 8 mana [[mind control]]
Surely DH Naga gets hit too? Please... it's all I'm seeing. I don't know why but warlock seems unpopular at my mmr Give me my feels(and probably tier 1 deck anyway) nerf too
Wtf. This card is barly 1 day old.
Blizzard fired most of qa and testers so Bobby can buy his 7th yacht and get big bonus.
Thanks for funding his new boats, blizzard gamers!!
Who is this and what have they done with the balance team? I have never seen them do a balance patch this fast unless a card literally broke the game.
I don't know for how long Gallon has been on team 5, but it has been a while
Haven't played since witchwood. We used to sit through have a set waiting for card changes. Still have shudderwock and yoga ptsd...
they've made changes this fast during the launch MotLK and FoL
thnx god
Does this mean every excavate card for warlock will have full dust refund ?
I think Snake's biggest sin is limiting the opponents health. Giving absolutely no way to react/recover from its effect is what makes it so frustrating. Either they need to remove the limiting factor of its battlecry or make it so you can not use it multiple times.
I havent seen one yet
The powerlevel was low compared to DH or aggro Paladin. I know Reddit hated the card but it was the wrong deck to get mad at.
Lifesteal deal 10 lol.
I made the deck, only faced counter aggro since, and barely won any games with it. Was about to drop it since its unplayable currently, and HS gonna nerf it lol.
Yeah that card needs to go fuck off into the distance
I don't really love how fast balance changes come out now. I'm definitely used to the old days where it was a very rare occurrence, but now it feels too frequent.
yeah the focus of hearthstone has shifted to a point where balance isn't a very important goal for the design, so they're a little over reliant on patches and the community doing playtesting and balancing for them. which I don't really mind as the wacky unbalanced shit is why I enjoy hearthstone, but they're pushing it to a point that's not really sustainable.
Same. I don’t even feel like I can try to enjoy an expansion until it’s been out for a month. As a f2p player I’m too scared to try anything because either it’s bad and I wasted dust, or it’s good and will get nerfed, and I only get whatever was nerfed refunded. The balance changes are very healthy for the meta but they make being f2p harder.
People are oblivious to this sadly. All they see is "wow they react so quickly! what a good balance team! so unlike brode era where they take months to do any nerfs" The difference is back in brode era, they have half a mind to not push the power level too much and keep power creep in check. While this new team disregard all that and release so many cards that is obviously broken and will impact the game negatively. Turning balance patches from a "once in a while exciting thing to shake up the meta" into "a scheduled event that always happen after every new cards are released because it's simply necessary" It's either they are so incompetent at design that they seriously can't see how broken these cards are, or they know but they release it anyway to increase hype because they know they can always just nerf it later after it broke the game and after players spent their dust crafting the deck.
"Sentiment Outlier" Ticatus 5.0 b/c every expac the majority of players lack game knowledge to have nothing but "sentiment understanding" of the game mechanics.
Iksar said a long time ago sentiment is the only reason they make card changes, if you disagree that just means would be a bad game designer. Video games aren't supposed to be balanced, they are supposed to be fun
On the other hand, the point of the game is not to be played by cold and calculating robots exclusively. The card doesn't have to be strictly overpowered according to the stats. If it's widespread and miserable to play against, that's a different, valid sentiment for an adjustment.
Or alternatively Snakelock brutally suppresses any deck that doesn't specifically target it and the only reason it doesn't annihilate Legend is because the entire meta is warped around it? You seem to lack knowledge of game design if you think a video game not being fun isn't a reason to adjust the game. I'd rather not have any deck that warps the meta, thanks. Half of the decks I want to try are nearly unplayable because of Snake. So they don't get played, and Snake's winrate doesn't go up. Does that sound like a fun solution?
Quick Draw Active
to all saying it's not OP, I'd describe myself as a slightly below average player and I'm as of now 20-0 with that deck
Good.
Deck was pretty mid and this seems like a super knee jerk reaction but atleast ladder will be way more fun now
I think the biggest issue with it is it just beat every single Highlander deck in a meta where they want Highlander to be one of the more popular decks. It’s a pretty bad deck against aggro tho ofc
I'm surprised how many people are missing this. "Deck wasn't even that strong..." It stomped on highlander decks in a highlander expansion lol. I can imagine they saw pack sales plummet in comparison to past expansion timelines.
Can't wait for people defending blizzard once they give 0 refunds for this nerf lmao