Hi there forums,
First I want to say a big Thank you for finally touching wild balance again and nerfing Barnes. I really enjoy the format and even reached top 200 legend in it, but every time I’d face a priest as a deck not specifically designed to cope with it, I’d get so discouraged I’d quit the game entirely. Not a good thing since big priest still shows up around 20% of games. (and the best counter: kingsbane rogue was dismantled with the leeching poison change).
Anyway, wild aside, I had 2 reactions to the nerfs: 1) wow, great! Can’t wait to see what room gets created in the metagame with these decks being less oppressive . And 2) wow these changes seem very uninspired.
All the changes are merely upping mana, while for most of these cards that’s fine, you really had 2 good opportunities here with the buffed card reverts. You know they were unplayed in the previous state, so why not just alter the effect to a more compromised level. My suggestions: Luna’s Pocket Galaxy 5 mana “minions in your deck cost half” and “Extra arms!” 3 mana but “More arms!” 1 mana.
Lastly, some card changes I’d have liked to see on the chopping block.
- Tomb Warden: not a MECH. This makes no sense to me. This card is obviously a key power card in a taunt-based deck for warriors. But making this card a mech single-handedly kills the taunt warrior archetype because it fits perfectly into control warrior already, with no downside, giving any taunt warrior deck 0 opportunity to differentiate itself from control.
- Divine spirit: Hall of Fame. While I agree that the essence of priest gameplay is to have a single minion and keep that alive with buffs, heals and board removal spells, and I appreciate the threat of converting high hp into attack damage at a moments notice with inner fire; I disagree with the power of Divine Spirit. The current pool has many hard-to-remove, high-hp minions, making the commitment of one of these ‘combo bases’ to the board a fairly low-resource investment. While for the opponent each of these minions is potentially game-losing if not removed, mandating potentially several cards. This imbalance in resource commitment makes a match vs inner fire priest feel as if they put in much less effort for their win than you need to do to stay alive. Without Divine spirit, I feel the priests ability to capitalize on big minions remains, with absolute buffs and inner fire; giving that same threatened feeling when priest has a board, while opening up reaction time after the priest has committed some resources.
Thanks anyone for reading my thoughts, feel free to pick apart my reasoning.
-Tuonra
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Exactly my thoughts. Feels like a decision made on a friday afternoon. "How about we just increase the mana cost?" “Yeah, whatever, let’s do that, see you monday.”
Even a change of 1 mana can have a huge impact on the power level of a card. Cards have gone from auto-include to NOPE by a 1 mana increase before. Changing a cards behaviour also generates a lot more backlash than a mana change (RIP Warsong Commander). Furthermore, a lot of cards already had different effects during development, but got changed for balance reasons or for enabling certain playstyles. Changing LPG to making minions cost half would probably make it see no play.
As for Barnes, the 1 mana nerf might be enough to give several decks more of a fighting chance against Big Priest. Coupled with some tech cards, it might be enough to put Big Priest in a healthy spot in the meta. Keep in mind that Blizz should nerf in order to make a healthy meta, not to torpedo decks (like they did with Quest Rogue)
You’re probably right, except for Barnes. It changes absolutely nothing and doesn’t even come close to approaching the problem.
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Mojomaster Zihi is now actually a nice counter against Boom 
Mana changes are usually the best, albeit the most boring changes they can make. Also the easiest to implement in a timely fashion mid-expansion.
With the taunt being a mech, it’s in a pool with several warrior cards that I currently find boring, due to control warriors existence but am actually looking for to next year, when they become choices.
Devine spirit to HoF for me.emphasized text
If they nerfed it to 6mana, it would probably just get removed from the Big Priest lists: they’ll just use Shadow Essence on T6 without the added risk of summoning a 5/5 Barnes.
Anyway, if the Barnes nerf turns out to be insufficient, I just hope they don’t wait another 2 years for further nerfs…
all it does is give the opponent 2 more turns in which BP does nothing.
this nerf doesn’t address the virtually infinite value generation from resurrect effects and vargoth.
so while it’s gonna make BP even worse against aggro and now possibly midrange stuff, it does little to reduce the heavy polarization of the deck.
plus removing barnes isn’t even that big of a disadvantage because it purifies the resurrect pool. then every resurrect and every y’shaarj pull is good value. no 3/4s that pollute the full board.
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True. Resurrect as a whole needs to be revisited. I think the Barnes nerf is a step in the right direction though. Especially for the faster decks that might put that extra turn to good use.
I think I wasn’t entirely clear there: nerfing it to 6 would be too harsh imo, simply because it would not affect Priest much more than the nerf to 5, but it would probably nuke Barnes for every other deck that wants to run him.
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ok, sorry. I didn’t think about anything other than BP here.
I agree that doing something about the deck is a step in the right direction.
it’s just that in my opinion, Barnes isn’t even a big deal and back when I played lots of big priest like a year ago, I cut him eventually because he kept polluting my pulls. didn’t miss him.
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Thats what i thought too. All it does is delaying Big Priests by 1 turn. Hell, not even. Who gives 2 flying f@cks about Barnes when you have Vargoth? Pretty lazy nerfs.
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Exactly. Who needs Barnes with Vargoth, that 6/8 thing I can’t remember the name of, all the resurrection spells…