Whenever a new Hearthstone expansion drops, there’s always some classes and cards that appear stronger than others.
When those classes and cards look really powerful, it can provoke a strong reaction from the player base. They take to Reddit and Twitter to cry out for balance changes to reign in the card they keep losing to.
Since the release of The Boomsday Project, it’s been Druid getting all the attention. This is nothing new—Druid has been a strong class for most of the game’s history. First it was Combo Druid, then Jade Druid that players used to hate. Nowadays it’s some of the newer tools in the class like Spreading Plague that players love to hate. That card has already been nerfed once, but some players still think it’s too strong.
According to Hearthstone senior game designer Dean Ayala, though, Team 5 have no plans to make any balance changes right now.
“Post-launch,” Ayala said on Twitter. “there hasn’t been any data driven reason to believe that Druid as a whole or as a specific archetype threatens to dominate class population or class power levels…We’re still looking at individual deck and card data every day, still checking out places like official forums, reddit, and twitter for player feedback every day. We don’t have any plans to change a Druid card in the near future, but that could always change.”
Blizzard obviously has access to much more data than anyone else, so it can be hard to contradict what Ayala is saying. Certainly the limited sources we have, like HSReplay and Vicious Syndicate, don’t suggest the meta is being dominated by Druid. But as Ayala went on to say, perhaps it’s more about how losses to cards like Spreading Plague feel “more painful” because of the potential to get blown out or hard countered.
As Ayala says, Blizzard are always open to making changes where it’s necessary, so Druid nerfs could happen—but for now players will have to keep looking for the strongest anti-Druid decklist.
