Radu Dima · @G2Rdu
6th Sep 2017 from TwitLonger
Thoughts on upcoming balance changes
First, let's talk about the cards getting nerfed and their repercussions:
1)Innervate: This is a harsh nerf, we are very unlikely to see innervate played from now on because druid has so many more better tools than just playing a coin in their deck. Obviously there were many ways, some even pointed in their post, that they could have nerfed innervate but still keep it viable but I think their intent was just making the card weak enough to not see play in standard decks anymore so then my question is, why not just move it to wild? Other than that I'm not opposed to change and seeing such a dominant card like Innervate gone is probably a good step forward.
P.S.: Aggro druid will have to adapt and build without it and maybe cut cards like fledgling or hydra who were in the deck mainly for the innervate potential but I still think the deck will find a way(there was even a time where Xixo cut one innervate from the list)
2)Fiery War Axe: Same as for Innervate, this is a very big nerf which might put warrior in the ground, atleast for now. If they wanted to nerf pirate warrior, I think there were other ways to do it but we have to agree that Fiery would have continued to be a problematic card every expansion if they let it the way it was. Now it will be tougher for warriors to remove things early in the game so I'm quite interested to see how the future of the class is going to look, maybe they will get another strong 2 mana weapon the next expansion that makes up for the loss of fiery while also not being in the game forever.
3)Murloc Warleader: Very good change, murlocs were pretty dominant and this is a good way to soft-nerf them while still not destroying the card or the archtype. We could argue that rockpool is a bigger offender but as they say in the blogpost, he rotates out unlike warleader which will be in the game for much longer so again, good change.
P.S.: I still think murloc pally gets a bit stronger after this because pirate warrior got hit by a quite a bit.
4)Spreading plague: Here I'm not sure about this, is this combined with the innervate nerf enough to weaken jade druid? It definetly makes it's power level a bit lower but druid was so much ahead of the other decks that I believe it will still be insane. Spreading plague might even still be played in Jade druid decks and might be decent even for 6 mana but only time can tell.
5)Hex??? : This is quite weird because the card isn't and wasn't played in most shaman decks in Standard in the last year because most good shaman decks were aggro and the control shamans already struggled quite a bit. Now it's kind of like polymorph but the problem is that shaman isn't like mage. While it could be a problem card in the future, why not just adress it in the future? It's a digital card game after all and they can make changes whenever plus it takes away from the focuss of the patch which should have been balancing the current meta
I think Ultimate Infestation also had to be nerfed, the card not getting hit at all will just make all jade druids play the full ammount of ramp and even though they will be slightly weaker than before the deck will still very likely be top tier for the next 7-8 months. Their reasoning for not nerfing it was purely based on numbers but numbers can be flawed if you don't look at them the right way. I think they should have considered how people are going to build jade druid after the nerf and see if it's still going to be a problem(to which I think the answer is yes) and then atleast slightly nerf the card. On top of nerfing UI, I also think Blizzard should have nerfed priest a bit because priest has way too much to gain after the announced nerfs. The next step would also be nerfing aggro decks a bit but that part I think they did well. Warlock also gets quite better with these changes so I'm confident we will have a better and more varied meta game than now but still not a perfect one.
Another thing that I didn't like in the blog post was the way some of their nerfing explanations where written down, in similar fashion to the already classic not implementing more deck slots because it's too complicated for new players. Even if as game designers they need to make things very intuitive and easy, you shouldn't really tell that to the players explicitly or else a big percentage of people will have their intelligence insulted and that's not a good thing.It's kind of as if a company who makes doors would come forward and say the reason they put a push bar on the door is for the people to not pull a door that is supposed to be pushed, it's a logical process in designing anything to try to make it as simple and intuitive as possible but it shouldn't be pointed out. I think they really need to find a different way of writing things so that the players don't feel dumb or feel like Blizzard is only catering to new players.For example instead of saying that one of the reasons they nerfed Fiery War Axe is that it's easier to see the cost of the card than the attack they could just say it was a dominant card for way too much time, it could cause a lot of problems in the future and just end the explanation there.
All in all, I think the changes could have been better but the ones we got are decent enough and all I want is that if they don't work out, Blizzard should keep an open minded approach about doing another balance patch before the next expansion, which would show the community that they are carefully observing how things evolve and aren't afraid to step in more than once between expansions if they feel it's needed.