Could this be the end to Shaman’s reign?
Taking to heart the community’s plea about more active communication from developers’ side, Hearthstone game director Ben Brode took to the Blizzard forums to discuss three topics: The meta, balance, and stats.
While the first two topics were addressed with general definitions and Team 5’s core philosophies, the stats and state of the meta segment more directly approached what many players have been complaining about: How the metagame is stale, how Shaman is dominating everything, and how the Pirate Package is just too strong.
These complains were shared by the pro player community as well just recently. Competing on the last day of the ladder season—the last chance for professionals to win HCT points in bulk and maybe make the cut into the regional playoffs—Hearthstone veterans such as Jeffrey “Trump” Shih, Paul “Zalae” Nemeth and “Fibonacci” shared their own statistics where Shaman ruled everything.
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Brode had some stats of his own, not only commenting on the popularity of Shaman but comparing the deck to other oppressive builds of the past.
The worst point of imbalance in our history was Undertaker Hunter, where Hunter was played by 35% of players across all ranks.
The Pirate 'package' of [card]Small-Time Buccaneer[/card] and [card]Patches the Pirate[/card] is played in about 50% of all decks at rank 5 and above.
The average win rate of the best deck in the meta is 53%. Historically, there has never been a 'best deck' with a lower win-rate. Put another way, this is the worst 'best deck' in Hearthstone's history. The win rate is consistent across all ranks, though individual players have wildly variant individual experiences. We don't include mirror matches in our calculations.
The highest win rate of all time was Undertaker Hunter around 60%.”
Even if Shaman is indeed the worst best deck in Hearthstone history, that’s very likely to appease the Hearthstone community, which has been asking for more frequent balance changes to keep the metagame fresh. Despite Blizzard’s core philosophy of “believing that it’s importat to let good players recognize shifts in the meta and capitalize on their knowledge”—a philosophy that dates back to their early StarCraft 2 balancing days—Team 5 might have to agree to do changes soon. According to Brode, these changes might come as soon as end of February, but even if they are not introduced with the end-of-month change, Brode says their intentions in regards to balance will be made public shortly before that date.
“Our next patch is planned for around the end of this month. You can expect an announcement from us regarding balance changes either way in the week or so leading up to that date.”
If changes do in fact arrive end of February, this will mean that the HCT Winter Championship will be played in a (possibly) fresh meta. The sixteen best players from the four regions are expected to compete and split the $250,000 March 23-26.
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