Yesterday, a big balance update was announced. A total of six Constructed cards will get nerfed – it might not seem like THAT much, but we had patches like that change the meta completely in the past. This particular update mostly targets Demon Hunter, which is the most dominating class in the current meta (while some would argue that it’s not the absolutely BEST class, two very popular decks in Tier 1 made the ladder gameplay quite annoying).
Senior Game Designer Alec Dawson talked more about the changes on Twitter explaining some of them – including why DH was targeted and explaining each nerf, that Brann was nerfed pre-emptively for Highlander Hunter to not fill the gap left behind by DH and why Warrior wasn’t nerfed (because the deck worked well in DH-heavy meta and it might not be as good after the patch). Check out the full Twitter thread below (or click here to get straight to it):
Hello, hello! The nerfs tomorrow are mainly focused on lowering the overall power level of Demon Hunter. Demon Hunter’s population in higher levels of play was growing week over week, hitting nearly 35% last week.
Our approach was to look at the two decks (Aggro and Soul Fragment DH) separately as their power cards differed between them. The nerfs to cards like Dreadlord's Bite, Voracious Reader, and Lorekeeper Polkelt are aimed at reducing the refill and reach Aggro DH currently has.
For Soul Fragment DH, our changes to Blade Dance and Shardshatter Mystic are focused on the efficiency of their board-clearing ability. Blade Dance was a card that got significantly more powerful as DH accumulated more ways to gain attack (Twin Slice change, new weapons, etc.) and didn’t agree with one of the outlined class weaknesses Demon Hunter is supposed to have: killing big minions. Our last change is a nerf to Dinotamer Brann. This was a preemptive change as we saw a potentially dominant matchup spread for Hunter after these changes.
Finally, what about Warrior? Warrior was the class benefitting the most from a meta centered around Demon Hunter. The current matchup spread for Warrior is quite wide (strong mix of good/bad matchups) and we want to evaluate how it performs with a lower Demon Hunter population.
Looking forward to seeing how these changes play out and thank you again for your feedback!
why is there no full dust refund on nerfed cards this time, or is it just me having a bug… ?
Just a bug, I had the same. Try force closing and reopening HS, that worked for me.
Hold on to it, because the next closest nerf we gonna had probably nearing the next expansions.
We don’t get any nerf in Scholomance, and heaven forbid we see another one after this.
Might as well dust every extra you had in your collections to prepare for the next Standard rotation. I mean, it doesn’t do much for F2P players like me to keep Wild Cards, when I can’t even manage to stay competitive with what I have in Standard anyway.
Just in case you forgot, we had 7 cards nerfed during Scholomance (Kaelthas, Illucia, Secret Passage, Cabal Acolyte, Darkglare, Guardian Animals, Tortollan Pillgrim) in 3 different patches+2 cards buffed.
Oh yeah. My bad. How on earth did I forgot about these.
Superficial
What do you mean? Turtle mage was the most cancerous deck ever.