The meta has existed for around 6 months now and is fully established/stale.
There’s the three dominating strategies of Darkness, Sandstorm and AOE with a few others slightly below. As these are the three main strategies I’ll mostly talk about them rather than every change.
Darkness
Darkness was probably A tier in BFA as AOE was by far the most powerful strategy back then and countered it pretty hard. The damage increase has changed that to some degree especially with teams built around Twilight. Darkness still struggles against AOE but is the best counter to Sandstorm.
Sandstorm
Sandstorm is now the best and most reliable strategy you can use. It was already the most reliable in BFA because it countered AOE which you would face most games. The damage levels have pushed it to new heights as you can’t easily play around both the weather effect and it’s output.
AOE
AOE was the most powerful strategy in BFA and it still is now. It provides crazy value that has to be mitigated or you will not be able to compete with its damage output. It’s power level makes Sandstorm almost needed on every team to be able to compete.
These changes have had mostly negative impacts.
Damage increase
Games now often last around 10-15 rounds with two shots common and even one shots possible. The power level is simply too high for most games to have any meaningful decisions. The AOE abilities were too powerful and bringing single target damage to be in line with that level compounds the damage issue. Even if the abilities didn’t have the weather effect baked in they would still be too powerful. Something needed to be done to bring other strategies in line with AOE but reducing AOE damage would have solved the problem without creating another.
10% hit reduction weather effect.
The 10% hit reduction for Darkness and Sandstorm have been in the game since inception however this was when abilities didn’t always have a 100% hit chance. This was changed for quality of life as it’s not a engaging or fun mechanic. The legacy mechanics retained by Darkness and Sandstorm creates the same non engaging and not fun mechanic. I’ve recorded how impactful these misses are in a game and usually if one team is running a 10% hit reduction weather around 1 in 4 games have game deciding misses. When both teams run 10% hit debuffs then this increases to 1 in 2 games. These are too high for something that isn’t very fun or engaging.
(Some caveats for how I determined impactful misses: either at least two misses one being a cooldowned ability or a miss that directly determined the outcome of the game.)
Two tier system.
More than ever there is what feels like a two tier system where there’s a group of pets with the weather or AOE abilities and then those without. This has always been the case with stuff like traps, RI, Jar of Smelly Liquid etc but with more pets with access to OP abilities the higher the power level will scale due to an increased opportunity.
Overall I think that for around 6 months it’s been ok to experiment with what these changes have done as it changed the meta fairly significantly. However the meta is much worse than before especially as some issues were solved such as over budget stats only to throw this curve ball to the players. One frustrating thing is that there are some issues or abilities that now won’t get changed because the most recent changes are the bigger problem.