The Winners and Losers of the Big Festival of Legends Buff Balance Patch

What About All the Other Buffs? There Were So Many!

25 buffs. The biggest buff patch in the history of the game. It is important to note that the effects of buffs are fully seen with more delay than the effects of nerfs. When an existing deck is nerfed, its performance drops immediately. When a card that is not played is buffed, people first need to come up with decks to use it in, and only then its new viability can be evaluated. Death Blossom Whomper in Jambre’s Big Druid is an early newcomer that found a use immediately. Others may not be as fast.

Warrior’s Riff cards are interesting. We can see from Control Warrior statistics that Verse Riff and Bridge Riff are clearly better now than they were before the patch. Chorus Riff is lagging behind: I had expected a buff for that one too, but it did not come. Is the Riff package strong enough to play with now? Control Warrior as an archetype still looks too weak, although it did gain a few percentage points from the buffs. Perhaps there is a way to refine it now with the Riffs and other buffed cards. Riffs could also see play in a more aggressive Warrior deck, some kind of Enrage or Menagerie Warrior. New versions of those are still largely untried in the new meta.

Mage buffs do not look to be enough to change anything. Naga Mage has failed even with the reverted Spitelash Siren. The other cards are not the key pieces in their decks and are unlikely to have a significant effect on the performance of Mage. Burn Mage was already playable before the buffs, so Mage is not completely lost.

I am perplexed about Hunter. The Hunter buffs were the ones I was the most excited about. Stranglethorn Heart and Halduron Brightwing should both be playable cards now. The few stats we have about Stranglethorn Heart make me believe that we will see more of it in existing Hunter archetypes in the future. Halduron remains a mystery. Arcane Hunter deck has not existed, and it is uncertain whether anyone can figure it out.

Overload Shaman does not look good. It looked miserable before the patch, and the patch did not help all that much, to be honest. I tried to come up with ways to buff the archetype before we got Blizzard’s plans, and I could not identify anything that would make it good. The four buffs it got do not seem to get the job done either.

Record Scratcher and Kiri, Chosen of Elune still look completely unplayable.

The Fatigue package in Warlock looks somewhat better now. It is still only used in Fatigue Imp Warlock, which has not replaced any cards recently, but it is doing slightly better. Above 50%, maybe can stay that way as the meta starts to stabilize. Or maybe not. It will be a close call. It will also be interesting to see if the improved Fatigue package results in any new slower Warlock decks.

Was This a Good Patch?

It will take more time to see the exact effects of the buffs. I am still expecting more from Warrior and Hunter, and perhaps something from Warlock. However, many of the buffs have been for nothing. Many of these cards will have no chance to make it into meta decks despite the buffs. The expectations for a patch with 25 buffs were high, and compared to those, the patch has not delivered major results and will not deliver them even with refinement. However, there is still hope that the meta brought by the patch will eventually weaken Death Knight enough for more variety to appear.

During the next few days, we will see the hopeless attempts abandoned and the power level of the ladder rising again. I have a suspicion that the barely viable buffed decks will fall again and Death Knight will remain in power. If anything, the biggest challenge to Death Knight seems to come from Demon Hunter that did not receive any buffs. Oh well. At the very least, we now have Deathrattle Druid as a new deck in the mix.