Hearthstone’s latest mini-set, The Maw and Disorder, was released last week. While it changed the meta a bit, the current balance is far from perfect. I talk about it more in this week’s Legend decks compilation post, but long story short is that XL Beast Hunter seems to be dominating a bit too much, with no real counters. It has an insane win rate across the ladder, all the way from low ranks to high Legend (but especially around Diamond, outclassing every other deck you might want to climb with).
Because of that, I think that a balance update is inevitable – the question is when. Even though that question was not answered, we at least know when it won’t release – this week. Hearthstone’s Product Manager Abar relayed the info on Twitter, alongside the fact that Dew Process should get fixed before this week’s Masters Tour (October 7-9). In case you’re not aware of the bug, every time someone changes into a new Hero (so e.g. play a new Hero card), the extra card counts again. So if you were supposed to draw 2 per turn thanks to Dew Process, after you play a Hero card you will draw 3 instead.
Theo fixed. Chakki confirmed no balance patch before the MT. Dew is expected to be fixed next week before the tournament starts (I will make sure the admins comm this in the Discord server).
— Abar (@Abar_HS) September 30, 2022
And it’s no surprise that no balance patch is coming this week – unless the meta is in a really dire state, Blizzard is very hesitant to release patches shortly before major tournaments, simply to not mess up with the competitors (they wouldn’t have time to playtest new decks before deadline to submit their line-ups). Right now, despite Hunter’s domination, I wouldn’t call the situation “dire”, because at the very least XL Beast Hunter is not that annoying to face for most of the players.
It’s also been pretty standard for Team 5 to push balance updates ~2 weeks after content releases and I suspect that this one might be the same. If we’re getting any balance changes at all before the next major patch (24.6), I suspect that it will be next week, or the week after at the very latest. It’s obviously not a big deal, but I’m posting it just so you know that you shouldn’t expect any news this week.
So the whole player base is stuck with a bad meta because of a tournament. Meh.
Why not do a small patch and nerf Harpoon Gun, Ara’lon and maybe Stag Spirit Wildseed.
They should just do away with tournamants and competitive play at this point. Nobody watches them anymore and the players make no signifcant income. Blizzard greed ruins all good things.
I understand both sides of this argument, but I think that if they pushed the patch on Monday, that would be enough to do at least some playtesting for the tournament.
If they wanted to do something like Thursday-Friday patch then I would be against it, because the decks would change after they were already sent and locked in, that wouldn’t be very fair for people attending the tournament.
There always need to be some compromises, and doing pros dirty is also not good. But overall, I think that the general playerbase should be prioritized when it comes to balance update timing (maybe outside of something like World Championship, but that’s once per year).