Changes in Upcoming Patch

Here we go! Finally some news from Blizzard about some upcoming changes to Hearthstone.

The first big thing in their post is that they will be limiting the amount of gold able to be acquired in a 24 hour period to 100. This effects only gold gained through actually winning games (10 gold per 3 matches) - meaning you can win 30 games a day before reaching the cap, and of course that’s not counting in losses - so at a 50% win/loss you can play 60 games a day. I think that covers the casual player pretty well, and effectively does what they want it to do to people who might exploit it.

[su_quote cite=”Takralus” url=”https://eu.battle.net/hearthstone/en/forum/topic/8882579138?page=1#1″]In regards to card balance, there are a few cards we’ve noticed that have sprung up that warrant some tuning, and we’ll be making these changes in the next patch. Our goal is to change as few cards as possible over the course of time, but we felt the need to address these six cards in particular. The cards are:Shattered Sun Cleric, Flame Imp and Argent Commander. These cards will be adjusted along with the other cards we mentioned at BlizzCon: Mind Control, Starving Buzzard and Unleash the Hounds.[/su_quote]

Aside from that we’ll be seing some card balance changes that I think most people saw coming a mile away. The changes are listed below:

Shattered Sun Cleric is now a 3/2 (was a 3/3)

• Most people saw this one coming a mile away. It was talked about on our recent Turn2 podcast, to death, and definitely throughout other podcasts and communities as well. Many people will welcome a nerf to this card.

Argent Commander is now a 4/2 (was a 4/3)

• In the post, they mentioned the fact that too many people used this card in too many decks. I’d tend to agree. If you see a card being used so heavily in comparison to any other card, I think that helps to lead to stagnation, so I appreciate a change to this card, so we hopefully see a bit more diversity.

Flame Imp’s Battlecry now deals 3 damage (up from 2)

• This change is very typical of Blizzard development. Small changes over time. I like it!

Mind Control’s mana cost is now 10 (up from 8)

• There is a LOT of controversy about this change, and it’s been talked to death. In short though, I like it.

Starving Buzzard is now a 2/1 (was a 2/2)

• This card is extremely powerful, to the extent that even when you don’t get a single card draw out of it, it often serves to force your opponent to use something to deny it, very often not cost-efficiently. I don’t like that this card will be quite so easily dismissed against Mages now though.

Unleash the Hounds has been reworked and now reads: “(4) For each enemy minion, summon a 1/1 Hound with Charge”.

• Huge change. OTK hunter basically not viable anymore? I’m torn on this. From a spectator point of view, it’s sometimes fun to see an OTK come out and maybe swing a series - we saw in Savjz vs. Ekop, a relatively quick and easy match went hard n’ dirty to game 7 due to OTK hunter. As a player, I probably won’t miss playing against it!

Kudos Blizzard, you guys are making some good changes. I think they are definitely on the right track and this patch definitely goes to show that they do most certainly pay attention to the community. It’s interesting that we had an article talking about Hearthstone updates just today. I tend to agree with that article that this kind of communication from Blizzard would be very much appreciated on a much more frequent basis.