Demon Hunter Half A Year Later – How Is the Hearthstone’s Latest Class Doing?

Demon Hunter’s launch was… let’s just be straightforward – a dumpster fire. The class’ power level was off the charts, it had unprecedented levels of play rate, and the overall experience was really poor. It also has lead to an emergency nerf patch just a day after Ashes of Outland’s release.

But that was almost 6 months ago – things have changed since then. If you started playing right now, you wouldn’t be able to tell that Demon Hunter, even if for a short moment, used to be the most broken class in the history of Hearthstone. So the question is – how is the class doing expansion and a half later?

What Went Wrong?

In a hindsight, it’s quite clear that Illidan’s launch could be handled much better, but it’s not as simple as it might seem. While you could always blame everything on the devs doing bad job playtesting the cards, and you would be somewhat right, I’m absolutely sure that they did test the cards and did see that they’re over the top. They just underestimated how much the line has been crossed.

Here’s the thing – devs more than likely WANTED Demon Hunter to be strong, perhaps even too strong. It was quite obvious that even without any testing that the cards were absolutely pushing the design limit. You don’t have to be an expert to know that 5 mana Skull of Gul'dan (a card that draws 3, which is already costed at 5, and gives you up to a 9 mana of discounts on top of that) would be too good, for example. So why did they decide to print it anyway? It’s simple – to make the release more exciting. Imagine this scenario – a new class being announced, lots of hype is built around it, everyone is waiting to play it… and then it turns out to be terrible and unplayable. It would be really, really disappointing.

No, the perfect case scenario would be Demon Hunter in Tier 1, maybe even having a #1 deck in the meta, but nothing on the level of “we need to nerf it after 24 hours”. For example, if its initial power level would be similar to the power level after first two balance updates, things would work out much better. Then people could enjoy the new class for a couple of weeks, before a nerf patch would hit it (2-3 weeks after launch is pretty standard time frame for a balance update at this point) and bring it back in line alongside any other outliers and shake up the meta. That would be an amazing launch from every perspective. But, as we already know, it didn’t work out like that.

Another issue was the amount of cards Demon Hunter had access to. With only 45 cards to start with (10x Basic + 20x Demon Hunter Initiate + 15x Ashes of Outland), it was lagging behind every other class. Which means that they had to make every card count – make the cards too weak and the class would need to rely heavily on Neutral set, which is quite boring. And that’s what we’ve ultimately ended up seeing – with more and more Demon Hunter cards nerfed, Aggro/Tempo builds were adding more Neutrals. Final builds later into the expansion had a roughly 50/50 split. That’s the reason why Team 5 wanted to make Demon Hunter cards a bit better than other class cards, but they obviously ended up overtuned.

Nerf Me Once, Shame On You…

A total of 13 Demon Hunter cards have been nerfed during Ashes of Outland between FIVE different balance updates. Given that the class had only 45 cards in total at the time, that’s almost 1/3 of its cards in total. To put things into perspective – most of the classes didn’t have that many cards nerfed ever since the game’s release 6 years ago.

It’s actually quite funny if you think about how things went. The class was getting nerfed every few weeks, time and time again. But after initial period of lower play rate (it’s common for nerfed decks to be underplayed even if they’re still good) it kept popping back into Tier 1. It was so bizarre – only after the final balance update, which happened roughly 3 weeks before Scholomance release, Illidan finally gave up and landed somewhere in Tier 2. Maybe, if given enough time, people would discover some better builds again, but everyone was pretty tired with the deck anyway and waited for the new expansion to drop.

One of the biggest downsides of all the nerfs is that they killed any diversity. Strategies like Big Demons or Token weren’t viable from the get-go, but players were attempting to run a few different play styles. OTK Demon Hunter, “Control” Demon Hunter or Highlander Demon Hunter weren’t popular builds, but were all at least semi-successful. And they were all killed by the nerfs that didn’t even target them specifically. Not to mention that at first you could build either a faster or more midrange build and both of those approaches were viable. Then the class has slowly, but surely shifted towards aggro with every subsequent nerf. In the end, only Aggro/Tempo Demon Hunter (however you want to call it) was viable, and the variation between most popular builds was minimal.

Finally Balanced

Soul Demon Hunter is currently one of the strongest decks in the meta, but – at least at the time I’m writing this – is not overpowered. Aggro Demon Hunter is also there – but it’s more of a Tier 2 deck. Luckily, the class is no longer dominating – neither in terms of power, nor popularity. Right now it’s in a perfect spot, although Soul Demon Hunter is getting pretty close to repeating the class’ success from Ashes of Outland. Maybe another nerf patch, a few meta shifts, and it might raise to the top once again. However, the situation is still quite different. The deck has a few clearly strongest cards it bases its play style on – nerfing those would bring it back in line in case it would get too strong. It’s not like Aggro/Tempo Demon Hunter was, where 2/3 of the deck was powerful and yet it didn’t have any key card it needed to work.

We still have one expansion during which Demon Hunter will get more class cards than everyone else (15 vs 10), and it will probably be the last test for now. It doesn’t mean that the class will never be overpowered in the future – it’s just that it’s easier to give it “too much” good stuff when adding 15 and not 10 cards. At the same time, if they manage to keep it balanced and – even better – expand the number of viable options, I’ll be pretty happy with how things went overall, despite the early turbulence.

What I like about the class most is that it doesn’t rely on random card generation. The past few expansions were not even that RNG heavy, but they added a lot of strong cards which generate other cards. Many Discovers, Lackeys as a whole (not only you got them randomly, but some of them gave you more “random” resources), Galakrond Priest (one of the most hated decks because at one point you realize that you’re mostly playing against random Priest minions) etc. But Soul Demon Hunter is different. The biggest RNG factor of the deck, besides draw RNG, are Soul Fragments – sometimes you can draw them when you don’t want to and render your other cards useless, other times you need the healing but never see your Fragments. Still, that’s a really low amounts of RNG and the deck mostly comes down to matchup knowledge, planning ahead and – yeah – drawing the right cards at the right time (but that’s one type of RNG you can’t completely eliminate in a card game).

While it’s only my personal opinion, Soul Demon Hunter is an incredibly fun deck to play. Even though it has no RNG, it comes with many interesting decisions – how much damage can you sacrifice to kill minions, how far can you go before you need to drop the AoE, whether you can deal damage in chunks or you need to prepare 2-3 burst turns and so on. Because of that, you feel like you’re in charge and your decisions really matter – no matter if you win or lose, you can often pin-point a few specific plays that lead you there. In a similar vein, I find it really nice to play against. It has a very clear game plan and, like I’ve mentioned, not that much RNG, meaning that you can more reliably predict what they want to do each turn and try to counter it with your own plays. Playing e.g. a Soul Demon Hunter vs Pure Paladin matchup feels a lot like oldschool Hearthstone (but with much, much stronger cards).

And as for what we might see from the class in the future. We already have solid groundworks for archetypes like Token or Big Demon, but they didn’t decide to pull the trigger on those in Scholomance. I hope that we’ll get some support for those in the next expansion, because they honestly don’t need that much to work well. Other than that, I would love to see more Demon Hunter cards that synergize with the Hero Power. They went a bit overboard with those in the initial set, but Scholomance didn’t really have those. Other than that – I have no clue. For example, I didn’t expect something like Soul Demon Hunter to be such a viable build. It has an interesting plays tyle that fits the class so well, so if they come up with more similar builds, I won’t complain.

Conclusion

Demon Hunter has been fixed. Most of its overpowered cards were tuned down – lots of them are still strong (Altruis the Outcast, Kayn Sunfury or Eye Beam just to name a few), but no longer in “broken” territory. The new Scholomance cards, while powerful, are also not over the top (maybe devs have tuned them before the expansion’s release, or maybe – like I’ve mentioned at the beginning – the plan was to make the class broken only right after the release). And Demon Hunter, at least for me, is incredibly fun in its current form.

The release was awful, but looking back at things from the perspective of nearly 6 months, I’m glad that Blizzard has decided to add another class. It feels fresh, it has a clear design and a lot of room to grow. When the meta is quite balanced, just like right now, having even more class/deck options makes the game more diverse and enjoyable.

At the same time, I don’t think that they will be adding another class in a while. I’ve heard some players calling for a new class in 2021, but I feel like it’s just too early. Demon Hunter is finally balanced (and hopefully it will stay that way), but the dust still hasn’t settled. I would imagine that eventually we might get another class – be it Monk, Death Knight or maybe something not yet introduced by WoW. Just not yet.

And what do you think about it? Did you already get over the terrible Demon Hunter launch? How do you like the new class? Would you like to see more in the future? Let us know in the comments!