Summary of the 8/26/2022 Vicious Syndicate Podcast (First one of the 24.0.3 patch/balance philosophy discussion) – August 26, 2022 at 07:28PM

Listen to the most recent Vicious Syndicate podcast here – https://www.vicioussyndicate.com/vs-data-reaper-podcast-episode-99/

As always, glad to do these summaries, but a summary won’t be able to cover everything and can miss nuances, so I highly recommend listening to their podcast as well. Podcast this week is split into two parts – a brief overview of the current meta, as well as a “eye opening concept” to Team 5 and the Hearthstone community at large at how to approach balance changes. Next VS report for Castle Nathria will come out Thursday September 1st, with the podcast coming next weekend. We should probably expect the next balance patch on Tuesday September 13th.

General – Hat admits the podcast they recorded last week is like the current Hearthstone meta; it fell short of what they were aiming for, so it was scrapped. The good news is with them pushing this podcast back a week, there will be Blizzard developers on their next podcast for episode 100! The meta isn’t in a great spot, and with the VS Report being published yesterday it’ll likely get worse, but it’s still good that people have that information available.

Rogue – Edwin buff was obviously significant, and Edwin Rogue became an outlier immediately after the buffs. Rogue doesn’t look quite as dominant as it did a week ago due to the larger presence of Priest at higher levels of play bringing being kept down at higher levels of play bringing down its playrate and winrate. While Priest has 2 archetypes that are a hard counter into Rogue (Quest and Bless), Edwin Rogue still looks incredibly strong against all its other matchups. Most decks cannot deal with 30+ attack power that gets generated on turn 5. Even if a minion never hits face, the deck has enough over the top damage to kill you between Wicked Stabs, Sinister Strike, Tooth of Nefarian, and Draka weapon. Also, worth noting Edwin Rogue has one of the shortest average game lengths of any deck in the format, averaging at 6.5 turns. Hat points out Edwin Rogue is a resource focus deck because you often will keep 0 mana Gnolls in hand, but ZachO points out that players often overkeep Gnolls in hand. If you’re playing against a class that has no way of removing the Gnolls, it’s better to go ahead and play them so they can get chip damage in (ZachO also credits Feno for being very smart and telling people on his stream to stop holding Gnolls). Bomb Rogue is the only counter to Edwin Rogue that isn’t Priest, but it’s a softer counter (about a 60/40 matchup) and has major issues with its other matchups, and the meta will become even more hostile to it as Aggro Druid rises in popularity.

Druid – Ramp Druid’s late game is now unchecked after the Snowfall Guardian nerf. Previously you could Snowfall chain the Druid and threaten to close out the game with the big bodies you generate, but after the nerf the only hope you have as the Shaman is either getting an early Muckpool + Gnoll evolve highroll, or Theo/Mutanus chain out their Denathrius and other threats. The only things that beat Ramp Druid are things that kill it before it gets to the late game (Edwin Rogue, Implock, Aggro Druid). Ramp Druid is having a warping effect because it also directly beats the decks that are built to counter Rogue. Just nerfing Rogue is not going to stop the Rock Paper Scissor meta right now because of Ramp Druid’s presence. Because of the dramatic rise of Aggro Druid, VS’s refined list added a lot more defensive tools to Ramp Druid. When it comes to Aggro Druid, the main benefit of playing it is that it directly counters Ramp Druid while not being a terrible matchup into Edwin Rogue. Deck struggles against Mage and Priest, but they aren’t unwinnable matchups (40/60). Aggro Druid is a lot stronger on ladder compared to an open deck format, primarily because mulliganing against Druid is so hard when it could be either Aggro, Ramp, or Rogue, all of which require different cards you want to mulligan for.

Mage – Spooky Mage needs Renathal in the current format due to Rogue and Aggro Druid. Against Edwin Rogue, even if you freeze every Rogue minion every turn, they can still kill you from 30 with their over the top damage. The extra 10 health plus any additional armor gain you get helps tremendously. Still, Spooky Mage heavily teched to beat Rogue is only slightly favored (55/45). The problem with building your deck this way causes the matchup against Ramp Druid to completely tank; you have to pick your poison. Big Spell Mage is better against Ramp Druid, but it has a worse matchup against Rogue, and the deck has a lower skill ceiling compared to Spooky Mage. Hat says that if Team 5 nerfed Snowfall Guardian for play pattern experience, they need to look at Spooky Mage for the same reason, because it’s a frustrating experience getting your board frozen every turn, and Mage can freeze the board more often than Shaman ever did.

Priest – The end times are here. Quest Priest is Tier 1 at Top Legend. This isn’t for skill ceiling reasons, but because the deck hard counters Edwin Rogue, and there’s a lot more Rogues at that bracket than anywhere else on ladder. While it also has a good matchup against Aggro Druid, it has bad matchups against most of the rest of the field. The deck is part of what is contributing to the RPS meta. Devouring Plague is a consideration to run in the deck to give your Netherdrake more consistency in activating, and to help with the Aggro Druid matchup. Bless Priest does what Rogue does, but quicker. It scams the Rogue before it gets scammed. It’s still a very inconsistent deck against most of the rest of the field. Deck folds over to hard removal and silence. Despite Hat being the deck’s biggest fan, Naga Priest sees little play due to losing to Rogue.

Warlock – Class is trying to find its own niche. It’s not as good as Aggro Druid in countering Ramp Druid and is significantly worse against Rogue. Class was around a Tier 3 winrate for most of the week at higher levels of play but teetered back up slightly due to a decline in Rogue’s population. At Legend, the deck’s performance is solely tied to the popularity of Druid (good for it) and Rogue (not good for it). Outside of Legend, Warlock does better due to a higher population of Druid. Sea Giant build not worth playing now, you want to have some sort of late game ability with either Denathrius or curses. Curse build is better against Mage and Priest because they give you time to ramp up curses, but it’s significantly worse against Rogue and Ramp Druid.

Shaman – Snowfall Guardian nerf had a huge impact to the class. Snowfall might not be worth running in the deck anymore, although the alternatives don’t seem that great. Had a lot of 50/50 matchups previously, but now loses most of those matchups. Despite the positive winrate, it doesn’t beat relevant decks; it only beats bad classes (Paladin, Demon Hunter, Warrior). ZachO says the only reason Shaman is seeing some play this weekend at GM playoffs is because you must bring 5 decks, meaning at least one deck will be “sus.”

Hunter – Class is in a similar spot compared to Shaman. While it has a positive winrate, it preys on bad decks and doesn’t have good matchups against relevant ones. Quest Hunter is the Hunter deck most likely to survive because it does serve a niche of beating Mage and Priest. Problem is the deck gets destroyed by Ramp Druid. Deck looks unplayable at high Legend due to the population of Rogue and Druid but looks good on the climb up to Legend.

PalaDemArrior – You can probably find some success with Relic DH at lower ranks, but once you hit Diamond 5 and above it really struggles. Other DH decks look unplayable. Enrage Warrior got buffed, and the ceiling for the deck is….top of Tier 4. Becomes a real deck if it gets better draw. Paladin got buffed and somehow got worse. Hat says Kibler’s Quest Paladin list getting popular from his stream is also pushing down the class’s winrate even further. Fun deck when Kibler plays it, but it’s a gutter trash deck with a winrate in the low 30s. ZachO says Paladin’s playrate at Top Legend right now is 0.2%. Class needs significant help.

Balance discussion – ZachO starts out with two objective statements; every deck in the game has something that people may dislike, and every deck has some level of annoyance attached to it. A deck might have certain mechanics, synergies, gameplans, or game styles that can cause grievances among portions of the playerbase. If you ask any number of people if they dislike playing against a certain deck, there will always be some number that do. ZachO proposes a metric called the “Grievance Rate,” which if you took 100 people, how many people out of that 100 would have enough distaste for a deck that they’d want it to be nerfed. Every deck has a Grievance Rate, and the goal of the design team should be to lower this rate as much as possible, so decks are fun, compelling, and not too frustrating to play against. Hat points out that the design team will sometimes intentionally add cards like Tickatus and Illucia to the game so people who enjoy griefing others can do so. However, these cards are often overplayed relative to their winrate since they do appeal to a portion of the playerbase, and if the cards are ever too good, they’re usually immediately nerfed. They don’t want these cards to be competitive, but they still want to appeal to that portion of the playerbase that does enjoy playing those types of cards. ZachO argues that the design team wants their actual competitive and strong decks to have a low grievance rate, whereas decks that are designed to not be as competitive can have a higher grievance rate like Thief Priest. Grievance rate alone doesn’t determine how much a deck is hated by the playerbase. To get the true “Grievance Value” of a deck, you can take the grievance rate and multiply it by the playrate. As an example, take a deck that has a 5% playrate and has a 30% grievance rate. The grievance value of that deck would be 1.5. A deck with a high grievance rate and a high playrate is going to have a lot of complaints.

ZachO then compares 2 different hypothetical decks. The first deck annoys a lot of the playerbase due to slipping by through design or was made intentionally weak. It has an 80% grievance rate, but only has a 3% playrate because it’s not powerful. The grievance value of that deck would be 2.4. Now take a deck that’s half as annoying as the previous deck (so a 40% grievance rate) but has a 20% playrate because it’s powerful and popular. The grievance value of that deck is going to be more than 3x the previous deck (8) because the playrate is so much higher, which means the deck likely yields 3x the amount of complaints. Because there is a cap on grievance rate, the playrate of a deck is going to exponentially scale up the grievance value of a deck. Therefore, “feels” are largely determined by a deck’s playrate. ZachO then states that he doesn’t think Grievance Rate is a static metric, but one that can dynamically change. The more common a deck is, the more likely it is that a normal player will grow frustrated or tired by it.

ZachO then gives a hypothetical scenario – imagine you have a pool of decks that are all unique and have different play styles, but are all equally annoying (meaning they have the same grievance rate). If you were to take 4 of these decks and put them into a format with 25% playrate each, the amount of grievance each deck will generate is incredibly high. When you constantly queue into the same 4 decks, you’ll see the same mechanics and synergies over and over, making it more likely for you to grow tired of them. On the flipside, if you took 10 decks from this same pool and all the decks had an even playrate of 10%, the grievance value will be much lower. Players will be less likely to grow tired of facing the same decks, even though the decks are equally annoying.

Ultimately, the point ZachO tries to make is that when it comes to balance changes, the goal isn’t necessarily about listening to specific complaints about decks but diversifying the meta. Decks can have varying grievance rates, but if the meta is diversified and you aren’t seeing certain decks over and over, there will be less complaints. Content creators might focus on grievance rates of certain decks (or at least how they personally feel about them), but ultimately the grievance rate of a deck doesn’t matter – the playrate does.

When it comes to balance changes two weeks after a set launches, ZachO says there’s two concepts you would want to nerf: the unbeatable and the unbearable. If a deck is a huge power outlier that can beat most of the field (think Galakrond Shaman, Day 1 DH, Barrens Paladin) it should be nerfed. These decks will grow in playrate due to their power, generating many grievances. For the unbearable, these would be decks that are universally toxic and don’t let you play actual games of Hearthstone because of their play patterns. Think of things like Deck of Lunacy, Drek’Thar, OG Kel’thas, and Switcheroo Priest. While it’s hard to pinpoint the grievance rate of these decks, you could say they are grievance outliers. Going into Control Shaman from this expansion, you had a deck that wasn’t a power or play pattern outlier after 2 weeks, but it was seeing a high playrate and had people who voiced their frustration with the deck due to that high play rate. Those feelings are valid, but it leads you to making a tough decision. If you nerf the deck and tone down its power and playrate, will it make the format more diversified? Is this deck preventing other decks from seeing play? If you think the answer is yes, then you can make a nerf. However, if nerfing the deck doesn’t accomplish that, but instead leads to a higher play rate of existing decks in the format raising their grievances among the playerbase, then you’ve made an error. If you’re making a balance patch based on feels, you need to be sure that it makes the meta better by having a more diverse field and a lower number of grievances. ZachO says while Team 5 has typically abided by this philosophy with the first balance patch of new expansions by only nerfing extreme outliers, they lost sight of that this go around and somewhat caved in with non outlier feels based nerfs. You can’t bow down to every content creator who calls for nerfs on specific decks, because everyone has different tastes. You can satisfy them by making balance changes that diversify the meta so they aren’t running into the same decks they hate. You have a lot more information from refined decks going into the second balance patch window of an expansion to make informed decisions on what cards or decks might need to be adjusted to diversify the meta. ZachO agrees that this was going to be a tough patch to hit, and Hat thinks that while Team 5 probably was trying to do the things ZachO mentioned, they obviously missed the mark.