No One Is Prepared: How Demon Hunter Keeps Dominating the Meta

Of the three expansions featuring the class so far, Demon Hunter was far atop the win charts in two and had a very competitive deck in the third. That is despite an unprecedented amount of rapid nerfs made to its initial card pool. With Aggro Demon Hunter crushing the competition in the early Madness at the Darkmoon Faire metagame, we’ve got to ask why the class is so consistently good and what can be done to make it less overbearing.

The Tenth One

Demon Hunter is a work in progress. It marks the first time a new class has been added to Hearthstone, unburdened by the many unplayable mechanics added for flavor considerations seen elsewhere. Paladins waste valuable evergreen card slots on crappy Secrets and irrelevant buff spells, Druids ostensibly want to attack with their face, Rogues have a few stinker Combo cards like Headcrack, Perdition's Blade and Kidnapper: the list could go on. With so many years of balancing experience under their belt, it’s no wonder Team 5 did a much better job designing a class from the ground up.

The problem is they’ve done too good a job at it.

There’s absolutely no fat here, and this by itself can explain why the relative lack of a card pool makes no difference for the class which even dominated in Wild with its very first builds early on in Ashes of Outland. The Outcast keyword is strongly synergistic with two of the three big card game archetypes: combo decks aim to cycle as much as possible and aggro decks aim for a fast gameplan, featuring many cheap cards which won’t get stuck in your hand. This, by itself, would be manageable. However, the class has access to way too many redraw tools and is nowhere as fragile as advertised thanks to specific removal options.

The situation is a bit like the time when Druids dominated the meta, ramping indiscriminately and emptying their hand in the process only to refill with Ultimate Infestation. This powerful and non-interactive setup enabled three or four very similar archetypes for the class that only differed in finisher tools. There is a natural price to be paid for the ability to consistently fan out on the board in the first few turns: running out of cards. This is why Zoo Warlock was such a strong deck early on in Hearthstone – the class has built-in card draw. Now Life Tap just looks pathetic compared to Demon Hunter’s many refill options. Classic Zoo decks ran ten one-drops to ensure a consistent curve plus four cheap spells in the form of Soulfire and Mortal Coil: Aggro Demon Hunter now gets away with twelve plus two without a built-in draw ability. It boggles the mind to think that a card like Acrobatics or Stiltstepper may very well have been designed when Twin Slice was still 0 mana.

Part of the problem is due to the neutrals: Intrepid Initiate and Battlefiend offer way too many stats for a one-drop while Guardian Augmerchant and Beaming Sidekick offer incredible survivability to them early on. They can now also curve into Wriggling Horror for even more horrifying results. Likewise, Voracious Reader further exacerbates the problems with Demon Hunter’s card draw. These issues are temporary – but there are more than enough permanent ones to consider.

Vengeance Is His

Examining the Aggro Demon Hunter decks show that they are too effective at every single facet of gameplay they’re aiming to facilitate. That’s true even in the case of fringe elements. Remember Ironbeak Owl, a meta staple back when it costed 2 mana? Well, Consume Magic only costs one, making it one of the cheapest Silence effects in the game – and that doesn’t even count for the potential redraw. Similarly, the class’ burn damage output is unrivaled by any other class. This would be fine – as discussed above, hyper-aggressive approaches are naturally capped by them running of cards. That’s where all the other usual suspects come in.

Also, if you hop over to a format with a lower power level – Arena – you’ll also find Demon Hunter dominating with 57% winrate, a less consistent aggressive approach greatly augmented by ultra-powerful initiative cards in the form of Expendable Performers and Cycle of Hatred. You can also go higher with Duels and find the logical extremes of what this incredible cycling ability can get you with Outlander’s damage output.

It’s like that Steve Martin speech about Tom Hanks.

Chaining Illidan

As you may remember from the series on my grind to 1000 Demon Hunter wins, I genuinely enjoy the class and I’m glad to play with something that has no generated cards and can consistently tempo out on the board – but even I am more than happy to argue for a major reduction in its power level. Having such a powerful slate of evergreen cards simply makes it impossible to print anything of note going forward (at least without breaking things even more) – and no one wants to get stuck with “GvG Druid” or “KotFT Shaman” sort of sets.

First, let’s address the weakness, or lack thereof, when it comes to hard removal. When your class’ supposed weakness is having to use your face to remove minions, a card like Blade Dance simply should not exist. Either get rid of it completely or make it “use up” your Attack so you can’t also go face at the same time or deal with a fourth minion along the way. Chaos Nova is five mana and symmetrical – just pause and think about that for a moment. Might its removal push Demon Hunters even more towards all-out aggression? Probably. However, it would also enable better support tools for genuinely slow archetypes.

Crushing the class’ card draw would likely serve as a good solution across the problematic archetypes. While a small change, making Skull of Gul'dan a Legendary would work well from a flavor standpoint and would force players to experiment with other kinds of redraw engines – recent play data shows that it is actually superior to Acrobatics even in an aggro build as the card cost discount has such a massive impact on the subsequent plays. There’s also a good argument to be made that the card just shouldn’t have been printed, much like how Stiltstepper turned out to be to efficient with its four damage reward alongside the redraw.

Demon Hunter’s pure playstyle and nice aggressive options are a good thing to have in the game – but not in the overtuned form it’s been in for most of the year. There’s so much more to explore with the class but there’s a real risk that it will overshadow everything else, ruining the gameplay experience for most other classes in the process. Changes can’t come soon enough.