Shamans dominate in Hearthstone and ruin the fun of the game. But Blizzard is reacting quickly – card nerfs have never been planned this fast.
The latest expansion of Hearthstone “Heritage of Dragons” with 140 new cards has only been live for a few days, but there is already great dissatisfaction in the community. One class has risen to the top within hours – the Shaman. There is a lot of complaining on social media that Blizzard did not see this coming.
What is the problem? Right after the release, one class started to gain a lot of popularity – and that was the Shaman. With its Galakrond card (and some other innovations), it is extremely powerful. The win rate of this deck is extremely high, clearly over 60% – there is practically no deck that can successfully counter the Shaman. The only current meta deck where the Shaman has a win rate of only 50% is against itself.
The following video from Firestone shows the popularity of the classes after the release of the game based on the played matches – it is evident how much the Shaman dominates here:
Firestone – Hour-by-hour class popularity after release from r/hearthstone
This is the criticism of Blizzard: The “main thread” of criticism points out that Blizzard apparently is not able to comprehensively test and better evaluate its own cards in the current state. Each of the last three expansions has produced some nearly unbeatable decks that have been developed by the community even before the expansion’s release.
One wishes that Blizzard might perhaps set up test servers to allow a larger portion of the player base to test the cards in advance. At the same time, however, one also needs to work on Blizzard’s internal patch structures. It should not take up to 6 weeks for balance changes after a too strong combo has been discovered, especially when a large part of those players is only using that combo.
Is it too early to judge? Some players point out that it is simply too early to label the current Shaman as overpowered. Perhaps a proper counter deck has simply not yet emerged and needs to be developed first. However, a large part of the players believes that Blizzard should make drastic adjustments to the cards of the expansion so that there are different decks in ranked mode and that players are not faced with two to three months full of “Shamanstone” again.
Other decks that you can succeed with are presented here.
Blizzard reacts faster than ever: Quite unexpectedly, Blizzard responded shortly after the emergence of the large criticism thread on Reddit and announced that some balance changes for Hearthstone are currently in the works. The affected cards will grant a full refund of Arcane Dust, so no player loses anything invested. However, which cards are exactly affected is still unclear and will probably only be revealed next week.
Players are incredulous but happy: The announcement of the nerfs receives a lot of positive feedback. It is the first time in the history of Hearthstone that the developers react so quickly to criticism. On one hand, it shows that they listen to the community, but on the other hand, it also shows how drastic the problem with Heritage of Dragons and the Shaman is this time.
Whether the planned nerfs are sufficient and find acceptance with the players will be seen next week when they are revealed.
What do you think? Do you find the Shaman currently too strong in Hearthstone? Or is this just the “typical whining” from players?
