"In order to ensure the balance of the Hearthstone ladder, after a lot of statistics, the cards that will be modified in this update and the corresponding compensation mechanism are now announced as follows."

After opening the announcement interface, the first sentence that caught Su Ming's eyes was this reminder that seemed to be "murderous".

In fact, Glory Star usually releases some painless updates every now and then, and the content has nothing to do with the combat aspect of the ladder, and is often some mysterious changes such as "adjusting the UI layout of the card collection interface" and "adding easter eggs in the four corners of the battle board".

Updates that don't affect the actual Ladder Hearthstone battles can even be ignored by utilitarian players, but a big update like this one, which makes it clear at the beginning that changes to the cards, will definitely cause fluctuations in the future Hearthstone Ladder environment.

The specific content of the update, as Su Ming finished reading the back part of the Battle.net update announcement, he couldn't help but feel a little numb:

"This balance update adjusts the traditional card effects of the druid class."

[Wild Growth], mana cost increased from 2 to 3, other effects remain unchanged;

[Nourishment], the mana cost is increased from 5 to 6, and other effects remain unchanged;

"According to the overall statistics of the ladder environment, more than 90% of the druid decks are currently homogeneous, and the construction idea is almost identical."

"The druid's excessively strong crystal growth ability in the early stages of the battle, combined with the rapid entry into the late stage of the supply, made the game too rigid, and even lost the interaction with the opponent, turning into a pure card drawing race."

"Through the observation of the data, we have decided to adjust the cost of the two cards that support the druid's rapid acquisition of crystals, [Wild Growth] and [Nourishment], and slow down the speed of entering the full crystal stage."

"Increasing the cost of tech cards also means that druids will need to spend more energy on dealing with their opponents' offensive threats early in the battle, rather than completely ignoring the interaction between the two sides, as they did before."

“……”

Regarding the changes to the druid's [Wild Growth] and [Nourishment] cards, there was still a lot of content sprinkled with content in the update announcement, but Su Ming didn't have much interest in reading it carefully, because his judgment in this regard was even more accurate than that of Glory Star.

If nothing else, Su Ming guessed that this round of update balance, or the weakening of the druids, was more likely related to the druid card sets he had taken out before, and I have to admit that the problems with this profession are indeed quite obvious:

Each of Hearthstone's nine classes has its own unique trait that can give players who play against heroes an advantage or the potential for their opponents to take advantage of their hidden flaws.

For example, the mage's characteristic is that various spell effects can be used to a certain extent without relying on the follower scene, so the weak follower strength is also an inevitable weakness;

In other words, classes like Shaman and Warlock tend to have powerful cards, but they come at the cost of negative effects such as "overload" or "fold and self-harm", so they are also double-edged swords.

As for the druid, the original characteristics and positioning of this class have little to do with [Wild Growth] and [Nourishment], but it is another card that does not look so conspicuous, which has become the core of the entire class:

[Activate (Classic], 0 cost, in this round, get two mana crystals

This original version of the druid's 0-mana spell in Su Ming's memory is actually the ultimate embodiment of the druid's characteristics!

The growth jump fee, which is equivalent to sacrificing the rhythm of the existing round and paving the way for subsequent battles, is a double-edged sword, with high risks and rewards without considering other cards.

However, there was no "risk" in the original [Activation], and the value of this 0-cost spell was very simple and crude:

"It's cool to activate it for a while, it's cool to activate it all the time!"

Just assume a few battle scenarios to figure out how much of a cost advantage [Activation] can bring.

Both sides start the game with 1 fee, and the backhand druid directly doubles [Activation] and [Lucky Coins], and in the first round, he can shoot a big brother-level creature with 6 fees, which is completely unreasonable cost crushing!

Or, both sides have reached the late 10-mana stage, but Xiao De can force the effect of 14 crystals in a single round with double [activation]!

This is also the reason why the two sets of cards of "Cancer De" and "Roaring De" were strong in Su Ming's memory, the former was to forcibly take a picture of [Magic Energy Mecha] with 1 fee at the beginning, and take it away with a kick in the face in 4 rounds, and the latter was to forcibly play a combination of [Force of Nature] and double [Savage Roar] in rounds like 7 and 9 fees, and a huge amount of instant damage broke out.

This is the complete embodiment of the druid's technology system, and it is not at all comparable to the weak chickens who [Wild Growth] and [Nourish] those who slowly climb the technology and have to sacrifice the rhythm of the scene!

Hearthstone used to have a deck called "Hand Magic" that emphasized the thickness of the deck resources, and at the time there were hardly any decks that could compete with the hand in the late game, but there were still countless hand spells that were killed by the fast attack.

To put it bluntly, no matter how many resources as there are such as crystals and hands, which cannot be converted into actual rhythm advantages, then their value is 0 and useless.

The Druid's [Activation] provides a very crude and powerful means to directly turn resources into advantages, it's that simple!

……

It wasn't until later that [Activation] was miserably balanced and adjusted to only temporarily obtain 1 mana crystal, directly cutting Xiaode's technological explosive ability in half, that many druid players began to pay attention to the [Wild Growth] and [Nourishment] systems, and found an alternative idea of "inferiority":

If there is no instant explosion, then the druid's technology will develop in the direction of slow speed and control, and try to skip and survive as much as possible in the early and middle stages, drag it until 10 full crystals, and then use various OTK ideas that cannot be countered by the opponent to sanction the enemy.

Among them, the representative decks have "Blue Dragon De", "Change Family De", "Biting De" and even "Machine Kede", "Star De" these bells and whistles, their construction ideas, if carefully studied, in fact, the high degree of homogenization is outrageous!

Skip the fee component? That is, to grow and nourish things;

Slash components? According to the player's different ideas, stuff the required 6 or 7 single cards;

As for the rest?

Then you don't need to ask, just stuff it all with live and check, the druid's game doesn't need to interact with the opponent at all, if the stacking armor and slapping the face, building a wall to protect the face is not an interaction.

As a result, there are a lot of similarly built decks, and in fact the druids are on a slightly "deformed" path.

……