What Tweedle said. Think of it like a slightly more aggressive Stonehill Defender–it’s awesome on curve (this archetype otherwise doesn’t have a lot of strong Turn 2 plays), and the discover mechanic means that early-game you can fill a tempo slot that your mulligan missed and late-game you can drop 2 taunts on the same turn.

I also like cutting to a single Arcanite, Hoard Pillager, and Faceless. Not sure if that’s become standard or not, but it wasn’t ~2 weeks ago when I was playing Pirate Warrior and I had a lot of lost games just because my hand was full of the aforementioned.

>> So the question is – do we need another patch now?

In my eyes, that depends. If the deck populations generally stay like they are right now, we probably don’t need a patch. But the problem I have is that I think the previous patch was more a placebo effect than any real balancing. On paper, the Galakrond Shaman core package + Shudderwock is still really really strong, AND ~30% of the active population still owns most of those key cards. I believe there’s a fair chance someone invents a new variant with >60% winrate, and if (when?) that happens it probably infests the ladder again within days.

>> While new PvE content release is always fun, this one is even more important, because
>> they’ve decided to go back to the old Adventure style… including new cards.

Has this been officially confirmed anywhere?

I dunno, man. I mean: I’ll readily admit to being way too salty and emotionally invested against Shaman right now, so you’re absolutely right to be skeptical of me and others with comparable mindset. At the same time: you compare to Control Warrior. Pre-nerf Control Warrior was never unbeatable; it just had positive winrates against most other ladder decks. As I recall, it had negative winrates against decks like Rez Priest, Dire Frenzy Hunter, Pogo Rogue, etc, and there weren’t that many decks it dominated (i.e., >60 win rate) besides aggro. It was a good deck, but it was far from God-Tier.

The thing that makes me really bitter right now is that we got a lot of neat new toys for niche decks like Treant Druid, Dragon Paladin, and Cyclone Mage, and now we’ll probably never see them beyond a few meme YouTube videos. All because this damn archetype infested the ladder Day 1, and now its power level is essentially the bar for competitive play. Sure, we’re seeing other archetypes start to evolve–but they are things like DR Rogue and refined Pirate Warrior, which look like they might be even worse! Maybe you are right that this was a reasonable patch in the grand scheme of things, but please don’t deny me my righteous indignation that it didn’t go as far as I would have liked to see. 🙂

My prediction:
*Galakrond Shaman, but with replacing Mogu, Evolve, and Slurper with long-game cards like Zilliax, Hagatha Scheme, and Witch’s Brew.
*Pirate Warrior
*That Deathrattle Rogue build with a bunch of little minions and the sole DRs as two Warbringers
*Facehunter
*Quest Hunter
*Highlander Hunter

Those…sound nowhere near significant enough to change the meta. I’m not even sure they are worth dusting, TBH: Faceless Collector as two rushing 4/4s still sounds broken, and Mogu coming out ~1-2 turns later in exchange for evolving into a 10-mana sounds like a sidegrade more than a nerf. (For context: most 10-mana are either vanilla 8/8 or 4/12 on board; you do have a 1/13 change of “low rolling” a King Phaoris = 5/5, but you have the same odds for Archmage, Deathwing, and Colossus.) The Sludge Slurper and Corrupt Elementalists are obviously worse now, but just barely: you played Slurper for the lackey, not for its attack, and most Galakrond Shaman decks are more than comfortable playing the long game so they are find either waiting an extra turn to play the Elemantalist or taking it out entirely for something with more survivability like Witch’s Brew or Hex.

Overall: extremely disappointing.

“How long can this go on?”
-Saronite Chain Gang

Was there any viable way to discount Sound the Bells to 0? The only ways I could think of were Millhouse, double Generous Mummy from your opponent, or some Rogue burgle highroll that found double Apprentice plus Bells–none of which I could consider “viable”.

>>…if they do go out of their way to ensure Aggro is top tier, maybe they could spread
>>the love a little instead of guaranteeing Hunter’s place on the podium every expansion.

I think they try, it just doesn’t work out more times than it does. Pirate Warrior, (Galakrond) Zoolock, and Treant Druid all got some very nice toys this expansion, but the latter is still just a little weak, Zoolock is still being refined, Pirate is easily tech’ed against, and all 3 lineup TERRIBLE against Galakrond Shaman therefore barely breaking 50% net winrate.

Hmm; that’s…unexpected. I was madly refreshing hearthstone websites today, anticipating an announcement for today with rollout tomorrow. I’m a little perplexed at how they’re going to handle this now. Announce mid-week with a rollout on Christmas Eve? That sounds like a huge risk if anything goes wrong and everyone’s on holiday. I’m guessing they’ll rollout on a non-Tuesday before Christmas–maybe this Friday or next Monday? I can’t see them possibly waiting until after Christmas; 9 more days like this would be a death knell for this expansion, and it’s otherwise such a lovely expansion.

>>But Hunter as a class has been at or near the top for the entirety of the Year of the Dragon,
>>and I can’t even remember the last time Hunter was below-average.

I think that has to do more with Hunter always having fairly viable access to midrange / face strategies, and on the design-side its hard to screw that up too much. Most of the cards for those decks are “what you see is what you get”, so its pretty hard to either under-estimate or over-estimate their effectiveness–versus say Waxadred, who sounds really cool on paper but has been non-existent on ladder, or Devoted Maniac, who only got 2/5 stars here yet is in ~40% of decks played (admittedly largely due to the over-representation of Shaman, but most of the other Galakrond decks play him too).

How often is Elise impactful? I love seeing her, but I can’t help but feel like she’s too greedy and other than very specific matchups, by the time you play her you’ve already either lost or won. This isn’t like the DitT meta where you get a free 10 armor and 7/7 body from having Kun in hand. It makes me think an Overflow or 2nd Innervate might produce more wins.

Maybe? In my admittedly limited experience playing the Whizbang Priest deck, it feels like the biggest problem is how unwanted most of the random minions are. E.g., you’ll get a Zerek, but without spell to combo him he’s just a 6 mana 5/5… 8 mana if you count the HP. Not to even bring up cards like Test Subject or Dead Ringer… The developers said this HP use to include spells but they took them out because they were too situational, but a lot of the priest minions feel the same way. I almost wish they did Discover instead… although that can easily become overly powerful; just look at Deathstalker Rexxar and Dr. Boom’s Drone Delivery.

Hahaha 44 comments in 3 hours. At this rate, this post will be the most popular in HTD history.

My take: either the Shaman invocation needs to be weakened or the mana costs of the shaman-specific cards need to be increased. Specifically: I’d either make the elementals as added-to-hand and playable for 1 mana instead of adding them directly to board or I’d increase Invocation of Frost and Corrupt Elemental by 2. I know 2 sounds like a lot, but right now these cards are budgeted like Priest invocation cards, which have the weakest effect of all 5, whereas Shaman has the strongest effect. It ought to be budgeted more like Rogue, where both would be laughably bad if it weren’t for the invocation benefit. I’d also like to see Dragon’s Pack either nerfed hard or reworked into non-taunt since that is shoring up the deck’s only “weakness”, but realistically doing either of the aforementioned is probably enough.

I was playing Whizbang non-stop yesterday without problem. I’d recommend contacting Blizzard customer service–it sounds like there’s something jacked on your account that they need to straighten out on their end.

The Handlock, Pure Paladin, and Dragon Druid decks from here are so fun to play–I’m ecstatic every time they come up, even if they aren’t the strongest from this list. I’ll probably even craft one or two of them once the meta stabilizes a bit more.

Hero Power Hunter is surprisingly effective, although I’m still learning the optimal mulligan strategies and when to switch from board control to beatdown. Same with Dragon Mage–it looks weak, but if you play it like RoS-era Conjurer Mage you can get a powerful early board, plus Dragoncaster on curve -> either Power of Creation or Conjurer’s Calling is nuts.

Ah, I’ve been so pro-dragon I missed that bit.

I suppose you don’t even need the 2nd Grave Rune and/or Embalming Ritual if you’ve drawn shadowy figures since each lets you nearly double your Leeroy damage for 0 if discounted, 2 mana if top-decked. A combo deck with versatility–cute.

Keep in mind: right now this deck is 13 dragons, 1 Frizz, and 16 spells. So minion-wise SIN has ~6 fantastic targets from big dragons (42%), ~7 good targets from mid-sized dragons (50%), and Frizz (7%). Every minion you add beyond that is increasing the risk of a bad roll from SIN plus the Grapplesniper will only summon a dragon ~43% of the time yet draw your opponent a card 100% of the time. You do have a chance of summoning a free Deathwing, Alex, or Evasive which I imagine feels great, but most of the other dragons only have 3-4 attack and won’t have game-swinging effect. I think on average it probably loses more games than it wins; otherwise Kibler would have put it in. 😉

*Percentages actually slightly better than that when you account for mulligans, but I have a headache and don’t even want to think about how to do that math right now.

I’m having trouble figuring this one out. I see Leeroy -> Grave Rune + Reborn -> SW:Death, but that’s only 4×6 = 24 damage. I’m guessing therefore that you also need at least 1 Shadowy Figure and pop through Mass Hysteria? Even with the Fate Weaver discounts, is there enough mana for all that?

I’m guessing the trick here is to get a Grave Horror to stick (or just wait until its ~0 mana), then Grave Rune -> Shadowy Figure such that you have four 7/8s through death rattles? Clever!