Balance Update 20.0.2 was just announced! Or to be more specific, its contents were just announced, because we knew about the patch ever since last week. Or to be more specific, its contents were more “confirmed” than “announced”, because players predicted all of them quite easily. Yeah, it’s not a surprise, but the cards that the community wanted to get hit got hit. The patch is coming out tomorrow (April 13) and here’s a full list of changes:
- Deck of Lunacy – Now costs 4 mana (up from 2 mana).
- Sword of the Fallen – Now has 2 durability (down from 3 durability).
- Pen Flinger – Now only targets minions.
- Jandice Barov – Now costs 6 mana (up from 5 mana).
- Far Watch Post – Now has 3 health (down from 4 health).
- Mor'shan Watch Post – Now has 4 health (down from 5 health).
Now, the question is – is it enough? Paladin will get weakened with the nerfs of Sword of the Fallen and Pen Flinger. While Pen Flinger hurts the best Libram version, I’m afraid that only slightly nerfing Sword of the Fallen (it should still be a good card in this form) might just mean that Secret Paladin will be the more dominating build. Spell Mage will most likely drop Deck of Lunacy, which was the biggest complaint, but I can imagine that it will still be playable. After all, all the games where you don’t get Deck of Lunacy are absolutely winnable. Players will just need to optimize builds for the fact that they can no longer get random win conditions. Between nerfs to Jandice Barov and Pen Flinger, Rogue (the 3rd strongest class) will also get a hit – nerf to Pen Flinger not only means less burn potential but also the main way to trigger Field Contact is much worse now. And finally, two Watch Posts are easier to remove, which makes them much less annoying to face. Dealing 3 damage on Turn 2 is easier than 4, so Far Watch Post specifically should no longer lock some of the players from the game when dropped on curve (or even T1 with Coin).
Overall, I’m quite happy with the nerfs, the worst offenders were targeted, but I’m a bit worried that they might not be enough. I hope that it will give other classes some breathing room, and hopefully Blizzard will react again in case Paladin is still too strong.
On top of those, Patch 20.0.2 will contain a bunch of Battlegrounds & Duels changes (learn more about them here), as well as multiple bug fixes:
- Fixed a bug where Sunwell Initiate’s Divine Should could not be silenced.
- Fixed a bug where Shadowjeweler Hanar could Discover secrets from outside of Standard in Ranked Standard.
- Fixed a bug where the Battlecry for Reckless Apprentice would not apply the Freeze effect from Ice Walker.
- Fixed a bug where the Battlecry for Reckless Apprentice would still trigger if the Hero Power was disabled.
- Fixed a bug where playing Wildfire before Metamorphosis could cause your original Hero Power to gain an extra damage.
- Fixed a bug where Lakkari Felhound could discard newly drawn cards, such as when played in sequence with Hand of Gul’dan.
- Fixed a bug where Celestial Alignment would work inconsistently with cards that reduce mana costs, such as Librams or Cutting Class.
- Fixed a bug with Kazakus, Golem Shaper where the Firebloom ability could target the same minion twice.
- Fixed a visual bug where G’huun the Blood God would leave the blood drop mana cost icon behind when played.
- Fixed a bug where casting Twisting Nether into Oh My Yogg! would not allow for more cards to be played.
- Fixed a bug where the VFX for certain spells would continuously play after being transformed by Oh My Yogg!
- Fixed a bug where Pit Master would appear in Collection results when filtering for Nature cards.
- Fixed a bug where Holy Wrath was not tagged as a Holy spell.
- Fixed a bug where Dragon’s Pack had the Nature spell school tag. It is no longer part of a spell school.
- Fixed a Battlegrounds bug where Minions could show an outline of their Tavern Tier icon when played.
- Updated the appearance rate of cards in Arena to ensure class balance remains close to the ideal 50% win-rate. Specifically, the win-rate of Demon Hunter and Priest should now be decreased. The win-rate of Druid, Hunter, Rogue, and Shaman should now be increased.
- Removed Far Watch Post, Mor’Shan Watch Post, Crossroads Watch Post, and Kargal Battlescar from Arena.
- Fixed a bug where the Arena could fail to load properly for new players.
- Fixed a bug where some Boomsday puzzles were causing desync issues.
- Fixed a bug with the Achievement It’ll Take More Than That where credit could be granted without playing the Warrior class.
- Fixed a bug with the Achievement Barrens Neutral Collector where incorrect Collection quotas were listed.
- Fixed a bug with the Achievement Final Frontier where progress would not be credited from discounted minions.
- Fixed a bug with the Achievement Do it for the Vines where Dual-Class cards would not count as progress.
- Fixed a visual bug where Achievement XP and end of match XP gains could show incorrect numbers but reward the correct amount of XP.
- Fixed a visual bug where, in some cases, XP gains benefitting from XP bonuses were not highlighting with a green font color.
- Fixed a visual bug where the Tavern Pass bonus XP displayed on the Achievement detail view would be incorrect.
- Fixed a bug where the mass disenchant preview would count some cards twice but would give the correct amount of dust when used.
- Fixed a bug where the disenchant button would glow regardless of whether there were extra cards to disenchant.
- Fixed a bug where some player ranks and rewards were not populating from the correct ladder on the friends list and elsewhere.
- Fixed a visual bug where names on the friends list could be overlapped by their rank, and where a friend’s rank would show even when they were offline.
- Fixed a bug where a star bonus would appear on the deck selection page for Legend ranks.
- Fixed a bug where an erroneous pop up would appear saying a Demon Hunter class pack was granted for completing the Ashes of Outland Prologue.
- Fixed a bug where the Hamuul Card Back would not show properly during pack opening.
- Fixed a bug where the Play button would always be highlighted in the main menu.
- Fixed a bug where players could become locked out from creating or deleting decks when they previously were not.
- Fixed a bug where “Click to Convert” would persist on decks regardless of what mode you’d swapped to.
- Fixed a bug where mousing over decks that are behind the “You have no Classic Decks. Go create one!” pane would show pop-up info.
- Fixed a bug where mousing over a Classic deck with the mode set to Casual would display a tooltip stating: “Not useable in Wild format”.
- Fixed a bug where players could re-roll into the Win 5 Games of Ranked Play Mode weekly quest after already completing it that week.
- Fixed a bug where the Sir Annoy-o Hero Skin, the Crossroads bundle, and the Barrens Tavern Pass were showing incorrect art in the purchase window.
- Fixed a grammatical error in the card text for Warsong Wrangler.
- Fixed various translation issues across several languages.
Oh my God this is ridiculous.
They nerfed pen finger which is the only possible way for poison-weapon rogue to get a win which btw is a 4 tier deck.
In paladin they could nerf much more the secret cards instead of pen fingers.Also blizzard should start considering slightly buffing some cards for some new archetypes to rise up.
For the other nerfs I am Okay because the meta so far was horrible.
Also I am currently seeing some old tournaments and the way hearthstone has been changed is ridiculous.
The meta gets broken all the time and by the time they fix it the game becomes already frustrating and annoying.
Also the wild meta is broken and they don’t even considering fixing it. I mean in wild they should be hundreds of viable archetypes and now it’s somehow trash.
Hearthstone should be a strategic – mind fun game and not this Mage or aggro paladin trash or even watch post shits all over the place.
They should start considering some things really seriously in blizzard.
Actually I’m not so sure you’d cut Deck of Lunacy. I mean, you don’t keep it in your opener anymore (duh) but in between Incanter’s Flow and Refreshing Spring Water, I’d feel perfectly fine playing it on 4.
But maybe it’ll just be discovered by Orb instead sometimes. 😉
Good nerfs in general.
With Libram Paladin lost his one of key points in the long run, I think Secret Paladin will replaced it.
I still don’t know whether Aggro Rogue gonna survive without PF.
Will Big Demon Hunter takes the meta? or Control Priest gonna dominate once again?
Can’t wait for the update.
Somehow, they still not fix rokara Book of Mercenary achievements if you finish it.
Refreshing spring water wasn’t nerfed?! Sure, let’s keep boring players to death with their 20 min turns. Everything else was barely a half measure. Deck of Lunacy just needs to be removed.
With the main culprit out of the way (Lunacy at 4 mana doing nothing), RSW not really the main problem anymore. At least I think, you’ll no longer can fast draw a cheated big spell thanks to lunacy. It’ll be the normal version of spells. That gives a breathing room for opponent (even with mana discount).
And Burn Mage is only a 2nd tier deck, so. yeah. no big deal.
Librams as always will continue to make the play experience annoying. Was really hoping that nonsense would take some hit.
Expected nerfs.
Watch posts will feel fair, but still playable. Spell mage didn’t feel that bad to play against if they didn’t have DoL, so delaying RNG is huge.
Pen flinger: who is the loser know.
Paladin however is barely touched and still problematic. By the time 3rd secret is pulled, the sword has already done a lot of damage and paladin has usually won the board. Nerf to pen flinger might just push it towards faster secret builds.
“Fixed a bug where the VFX for certain spells would continuously play after being transformed by Oh My Yogg!”
Hearthstone is now playable!
fax
Fixed a bug where players could re-roll into the Win 5 Games of Ranked Play Mode weekly quest after already completing it that week.
NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO 🙁
Oh well… it was fun while it lasted
Hehe yeah, to bad I didn’t know about this longer.
Shouldn’t have shared it here after all 🙁
Just kidding, I’m sure that they have figured it out anyway, but that’s a pretty funny coincidence.
Haha yeah I doomed us all xD Yeah they must have known about it earlier. Should be able to do it for my last quest tomorrow though, but the next week I’m going to be 1500 xp short ;( So sad.
Anyway, the only thing in this nerf I feel can give a decent impact on wild is the Far Watch Post, the other aren’t that annoying. The main problem with the fast draw mage in wild is the build your own maly legendary, and all mana cheats and draws.
How is that? 5 wins quest gives roundabout 800-something XP more than the other weekly quests… why 1.500XP?
Yes it gives 750 more (Without xp boost), and now you can do two more (3 in total) each week. 750*2=1500
Oh, it works twice. Guess I reroll my Rank-4-in-BG Quest, then. 😉
There still time for everyone to finish the weekly ranked quest before they launch the update.
I’m on the 3rd win on the 2nd quest. Gonna reroll it today before the patch to get the last quest.
But yeah. sadly, no more bonus 1500 xp every week.
Nice. I also managed to at least reroll all my weekly quests this week to 5 ranked, for one last time.
Pretty much what I wanted out of nerfs, looking forward to playing again once these are live. Gotta say though, these watch post nerfs are the bare minimum of what I would’ve wanted. Far Watch Post is a stupid card, I wouldn’t be mad at seeing that one just die. I’ll give it a chance tho.
Sword of the Fallen should be fine? I’m okay with Paladin being strong, especially since it tends to not be as popular as other classes anyway unless it’s completely broken, which I doubt it will be. I definitely don’t want to see it at 3 mana since that’ll kill the curve and I don’t want Paladin to be dead.
Zeddy is a prophet