I’m most concerned with the complete lack of play testing prior to releases.

Having the player base essentially play test upon release, then nerf/buff just wastes everyone’s time , money and dust. A good portion of time, when a deck is over performing – they nerf commons/uncommons, leading to minimal dust refunds. You spend thousands of dust on a deck with 3-5 legendary, X amount of epics, etc, and they nerf commons (ruining the decks), giving you back 40 dust and alot of times leaving you with useless supporting legendaries and epics in a lot of cases.

A lot of issues with the game would be fixed with private in house play testing prior to releases. If they even spent 5 minutes play testing this last set they would know it was weak prior to release. But they expect paying customers to waste their time/energy and money on it for them instead of them doing it.

This is coming from someone who does zero cosmetics and only gets packs from in game gold.

Man, I wonder what the conversation was like when they decided not to nerf the most dominant deck whatsoever…

It’s like they don’t actually play the game or something

Man, that rogue quest is balls still.

Even if you started the game as master dusk, just by having the quest in your deck, probably still wouldn’t make the cut.

Glad to see Pally got the wrong deck nerfed as well…

Blizzard should have to do a live panel discussion to answer for their crimes when they “balance” things like this.

Priest – I would say lifesteal and deal 5 dmg twice on death rattle.

For Druid – I think summon 3 (maybe 4, im not married to 3) a turn would be ok. Would guarantee activation on turn 4, play weapon turn 5. But you would still need a board to make the weapon useful.

Here are good possibilities to update quests:

1. Death Knight – lower reduce corpse cost by 2-3
2. Demon Hunter – lower 2 dmg req to 10
3. Druid – change to something like “summon 3 minions in one turn”
4. Hunter – change wording to “summon” and not “play”
5. Mage – auto equip weapon is good, or just up the durability
6. Paladin – hard cap on the bonus, or have it only affect minions currently on the board.
7. Rogue – give the ninjas rush
8. Shaman – either out requirement down to 5 or let each minion type count as one (mech/beast minion would count as two)
9. Warlock – requirement down by –
10. Warrior – make the main reward cost less, or remove it entirely and just provide the reward automatically once the quest is fulfilled

Most of the new quests are unplayable unfortunately. Too much investment and time to get them going, and a lot of times the value you get from them is nowhere near worth the payoff.

The early/mid game for the pally quest is bonkers, and beats most decks. The late game value from imbue pally, again, beats most of the new quests.

Pally is broken. Mage is ok, but again, other decks provide more value late game. The DH I think is the most promising. Otherwise, the rest of the quests are unplayable. Which really sucks because they look fun on paper.

Pally needs a hard cap on the bonus. It’s odd that drug gets a 2/3 weapon with a buff, and pally gets a never ending buff… balance is way off.

Yay….

50% of people seeing this card will love it

Fantastic article.

Please do these types of reviews for all the cards. Helps us normies figure out what the craft and save our dust for.

I’m really concerned about this custom card pool. Their ability to keep things balanced is awful, and now they just added another card pool to keep balanced…

With short arena runs, balancing would need to come ALOT faster than it already is, to keep things fun and even. But based on past balancing history/speed, I don’t see that happening.

Over half of the non rotating cards that are getting nerfed, are from the latest set/mini set. And they decide to nerf them all right before the new set comes out…

Blizzard is intentionally making the newest sets over powered, to sell the newest cards, then nerfing them when sales are about to drop.

They package it as “balance updates”, but when it’s them purposely unbalancing things, just to sell packs, I think it’s disgusting and insulting to the player base.

Ok so it’s not just me then? I only see Silas Darkmoon as available to make a deck for me at the moment and nothing else.

Just a heads up, Artanis doesn’t need a minion to activate. I’ve read it a few times on this site.

If you have no minions, you just hit the button and it gives him +1 attack and divine shield.

I had a buddy growing up who played WoW for 15 years. After he quit, I asked if he wanted to get into Hearthstone with me and just said it would make him want to play WoW again, so he might as well just do that. I never understood that, until this set, when I immediately just reinstalled SC2 again.

Glad to see starships got more love though.

R.I.P Sonya…

Can’t believe they nerfed the card out of existence like that.

You didn’t list one of the main issues…

The patch did nothing to fix the meta

A balance patch won’t happen for at least 3-4 weeks. They will wait for everyone to spend all their dust to build the deck, then they will nerf a common or rare game in that deck to bring the power level back down. Leaving all those legendaries/epics sitting there.

Welcome to the last 4-5 sets and the new blizzard business model.

Remember the days when Savage Roar + Force of Nature was considered toxic… 14 damage in 1 turn across 2 cards and 8 mana…

Blizzard said the deck wasn’t good for the game because there was nothing you could do about it, it wasn’t interactive and was ruining the game…

Step forward to 2024… decks that do 30+ damage in one turn, that your opponent can’t interact with, is literally in the Hearthstone mission statement going forward.

Sad…

That’s because you aren’t playing the OTK decks.

Blizzard isn’t interested in YOU having fun, they want the people who cash out of expensive decks to have the fun

Those more frequent balance changes are the issue. They are using the player base as beta testers, simply because they can.

It costs the players time and money to keep up with the whiplash like changes they make each and every set.

Can you imagine a physical ccg making changes at this rate? There would be an uproar

They didn’t say anything because they didn’t want to lay out all the ways they will increase the gouging and predatory business practices.

It started with the 70%+ win rate decks each set release. First, they would nerf a legendary, so you would get back 1600 dust. Now, they nerf a common so you only get back 40 dust and just spent all your resources on all the other legendaries and epics needed. Want to keep playing this set cycle? Pony up some dough.

Any now, tourists is just a fancy way to increase the card pool and legendary count of deck, which will make the above problem that much worse.

I get that hearthstone is f2p, but there are ways to do it, and ways not too.