Hearthstone

I started at 3 stars into Rank 19.

While every season is tough to get to Legend (after all, it seems to be less than 1,000 per region per season), I think this season is going to be particularly competitive with everyone racing for the card back. Personally I don't have the time or the desire to get to Legend myself.

I hate uth

I just managed my first 12 win run with priest. The final boss was a shaman, on turn 5 I drew my BGH and mind visioned an earth elemental. He played the earth ele before my turn 8

That's awesome actually. I am thinking I want to try some more off-beat paths with Arena. It seems the leet beta infoz have leaked into GenPop and the meta has shifted to perhaps favor the classes that lie off the beaten path. I like to see priests getting 12 wins.

Got salty leveling up my Priest to get a gold Old Murk-Eye when I got raped by a couple of hunters on the ladder and did some math in a notebook to see just how broken the synergy between Starving Buzzard, Unleash the Hounds, and Timber Wolf really was. So after looking at the numbers, I've changed my mind on nerfing these cards and have come to the following conclusions:

1) Blizzard valued Unleash the Hounds under the assumption that the average number of enemy minions on the board is 1.

2) The only way to make these three cards "balanced" is one of the four following ways:

a) Make Unleash the Hounds 4 mana, Starving Buzzard 3 mana, and Timber Wolf 2 mana.

b) Remove Starving Buzzard, make Unleash the Hounds 3 mana, and Timber Wolf 2 mana.

c) Remove Timber Wolf, make Unleash the Hounds 4 mana, and Starving Buzzard 3 mana.

d) Remove Unleash the Hounds, make Timber Wolf 2 mana.

My favorite is option d.

Options "a" through "d" are all in fact the same thing - "delete Hunter from the game."

Those aren't real fixes. That's not what balance looks like. Those are all hyperbolic nonsense.

I think that uth was supposed to be a partial board clear: do one damage for each enemy minion, but allocate that damage where you like. The problem is that it also provides a lot of card draw, and with wolves it can do double or triple damage. I agree that hunter would be bad without uth, but I think they should give the class other options instead of making it rely around one card and it's combo pieces. My last 3 hunter arena runs did not have a combo and I think the best I managed was 7 wins, but when I did a run with 2 buzzards, 2 wolves and 3 uth I went 12-0. The class should not be all in on on combo.

How about change buzzard back to every time you "play a beast" instead of "summon" and make him a 2/2 again?

I still say redo Timber Wolf. Having one mana beasts that interact with Unleash is where things get wonky. Each wolf you have is a force multiplier and most of the bullshit cheese finishes in Hunter games involve that card.

IDK what the hell you do with it though. Make it like Dire Wolf Alpha and only for adjacent beasts?

Flank_sl said:

I think that uth was supposed to be a partial board clear: do one damage for each enemy minion, but allocate that damage where you like. The problem is that it also provides a lot of card draw, and with wolves it can do double or triple damage. I agree that hunter would be bad without uth, but I think they should give the class other options instead of making it rely around one card and it's combo pieces. My last 3 hunter arena runs did not have a combo and I think the best I managed was 7 wins, but when I did a run with 2 buzzards, 2 wolves and 3 uth I went 12-0. The class should not be all in on on combo.

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They have no clue what to do with that card, it was doomed from the start. The original was just as powerful (Give your Beasts +1 Attack and Charge. [1 mana, Spell, Common]) resulting in an early round OTK.
Blizzard has nerfed it to be useless, and then buffed it to being too powerful again.

slippery_sl said:

4 Mana 3-4 1/1's, or just make it a variable cost that is 1 mana per 1/1 it would summon

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Both of those suggestions just makes it bad for the hunter again. Have to wait to turn 8 to do any damage.

Just make it so the hounds don't count as beasts, hunters fixed. They still have leokk/raid leader/dire wolf if they want to buff their doggies and the most broken combo ever buzzard/uth is no more.

Once again if buzzard as a draw engine is all you're worried about, you could easily change buzzard back to "play" instead of "summon". I'm with Arb a bit on the Wolf too though, but I don't know how you fix that without devaluing the card. Of course there's no shortage of valueless cards out there anyway.

And its true that there's a thin line here between overplayed and underplayed hunters. We saw them disappear after the first nerf and now they are over represented again. The card draw from buzzard isn't even that insane compared to what you can do with priest at times or even like cult master and AoP. The key is that with hunter you're forced to play around it. Which isn't even that different than playing around flamestrike, just don't over extend. Its around the same turn in both cases as well. Hunter isn't at all unbeatable, but its a bit too popular. I might be willing to see how much longer it goes with the class being so ubiquitous, and I think Blizzard is too especially given their vocal reticence to do any more card nerfs/buffs.

Famm_sl said:

The card draw from buzzard isn't even that insane compared to what you can do with priest at times or even like cult master and AoP.

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Have you gone mad man? Not even insane compared to what you can do with priest or cult master or AoP? While, yes, priests can get stupid card draw with NSC, it has way too many conditions to be pulled off reliably, you need to have other minions on the board, they need to be damaged, and you need to heal them. Cult master? Has the condition you have to have minions on the board that survived a turn or charge, if you're saying using cult master with uth, well that is fine, it is 2 additional mana which is huge, plus they have to insure they sacrifice their dogs. AoP? Ummm...you have to play him for 1 and then you need to use another card to activate his one card draw in the same turn. None of these things come close at all compared to buzzard/uth. Not only does it cost less mana then any of the card combinations mentioned above, not only does the hunter's board state have zero impact on it, they also have the added benefit of charging dogs, which if they didn't already have a timber wolf in hand they are almost assuredly going to draw into one. The only condition is their opponent needs minions on the board, something everyone will always have, so its not much of a condition, and you can't simply "play around it" because if you play one big minion it is going to get silenced/hunter's marked.

As far as making hunters disappear, I agree you don't want that, and as much as I dislike hunters also, I feel they are a necessary evil to keep from everyone playing full out control. I don't think the change would be too much, that combo is just to blatantly op and needs to be nerfed, I said from the beginning of when UTH was changed to 2 cost that is the only combo I was concerned about. And with a dire wolf placed to the right of your board you can still have all your dogs with 2 attack. This only makes the combo cost 1 additional mana and they would have to sacrifice their dogs to have each one with 2 attack. 1 extra mana is enough, but not too much and the hunter would have to use uth as a board control card, as blizzard intended it, to get its insane effectiveness instead of just going face every time.

If UTH is really supposed to be about board control you could make it so the doges can only attack minions, not players. Not sure if that changes much though.

You're wrong, look deeper. It makes it the same nerf as it originally was..