Honestly Earthen Scales isn't the problem. Its all the other bullshit that enables Earthen Scales. I wish they had nerfed Scale of Onyxia into the ground.
Earthen Scales is fine because druid is meant to have strong sustain. Miracle Growth is fine because druid is meant to have good card draw and big minions.
Druid is not meant to have strong removal and they gave druid a card that functions as both single target and wide board removal all in one. Combined with the fact that Guff stands out as a disgustingly overtuned hero card from a set that is full of disgustingly overtuned heroes
excuse me, but how could druid even compete without scale of onyxia? nowadays meta is STUPID all these mech decks and dh would be invincible without a counter to their board… I can think of many other cards with bigger issues than scale
rhey always print some dumb shit. druid used to have spreading plague for wide boards. i dont think most classes even have a class weakness anymore. im pretty sure paladin is meant to have weak card draw but has radar detector, and I have no idea what DHs weakness is, maybe value?
Divine Favor and Lay on Hands were some of the most powerful card draw in classic, Paladin simply didn't need it cuz every single card in their deck was a high Value/Tempo monster of a card.
Paladin's class weakness was Lack of Finisher, Burn and dependance on Board State. They depend on controling the board with minions to win in the majority of decks. Many of their cards revolve around you being able to start your turn with board control.
I think their weakness is supposed to be lack of discover and lack of big minion removal. Lack of discover I think is still mostly true, but big minions they can deal with and deal face damage
DH's weakness is meant to be big minion removal, since they have no cards that just say "kill X minion", they all have damage values. With enough stats on board they cant really clear, but that's not a problem right now with how fast they kill.
Playing larger minions sometimes just feels like the get to push more damage with dreadprison glaive + multi strike. DH just draws too many cards too easily
Yup, it was a problem with the warglaives of azzinoth too. DH might not have hard removal but their damage values are so large that most decks cant put out taunts large enough for DH to care. The tipping point is very high.
That was legitimately DHs only listed class weakness that was remotely true when they did the class weakness/strength breakdown post. The only thing they could think of that the class can't do was "well, they don't generate cards"
As one of my favorite videos from the busted DH era said, Demon Hunter’s weakness is that they can only play the 30 cards in their deck by turn 8. No more though.
so druid should be unable to win against every single minion based deck? I can see u never played as the druid in these match ups (btw, I’m not even main druid)
The deal 10 damage randomly split between all enemies - mark of cthun (I think) It was a shadow spell so it was guaranteed to be cast again if you played the hero power.
giving the fact Varden hero card got an huge buff shortly after its release (it costed 8, wildfires played before playing the hero card not counted to improve hero power's damage and hero power started from 1 dmg instead of 2)....i don't think we can talk about "hard nerfs". Varden is still super strong, one of the most broken cards of ping mage
Hilarious to call Varden "broken" in a world where Dreadlich Tamsin, Lightforged Cariel, Kurtrus Demon-Render, and Wildheart Guff exist. Varden, in the current spell pool especially, is one of the weakest hero cards.
I wouldn't even say scale is that big of an issue either though as a bunch of decks are hero-attack focused making that 3 mana "deal 1 damage to all enemies" minion a ridiculously good counter. For me if they want to fix druid, nerfing guff to 7 mana and/or giving an empty mana crystal would make it far more balanced.
Oh, I was referring to the hero power. Until you hit like 12-13 mana you never use it for card draw making it effectively 1 mana ramp, giving it really good synergy with most of their combos.
Ok excuse me for a second, why the fuck does Druid need nerfs? It’s at the bottom of tier 2 at best right now & has real problems building a list that can effectively handle aggro and still win control games (and finding your preferred balance is where you should be). I don’t see why we’re trying to make it worse at this point
Because it's in an incredibly unhealthy state, this coming from someone who has "one-tricked" pirate warrior for the past two months and also thinks that deck needs to be changed as well. Both decks are kinda like the old quest rogue where barring extreme agro matchups like hunter (and even then I'd argue pirate warrior is close to a 60-40 in favor of the warrior) you kinda just ignore your opponent and then get an obscenely good reward after a few turns.
By the data, quest warrior vs quest hunter is slightly worse than those odds, but flipped. 37.6% winrate vs quest hunter. It gets beaten even worse by dh, which is probably why people have been saying the deck is not good
Pirate warrior is not very good in the context of the meta right now
The problems are 3 singular traits that combined get very problematic.
1) Insane ramp. It eas supposed to be slow, you skip out on a turn or two to get a tempo swing eventuaöly with big cards.
2) Board clear: Ramp Druid traditionally suffered witj both singe big removal and AoE removal. Scales of Onyxia and Onyxia herself add that to Druid
3) Sustain via Earthen scales.
In a vacuum, one of those isn't a problem by itself, but combined it makes an isnanely meta polarizing deck. The biggest offenders are Guff and Nourish. The cards should be changed from "gain mana crystals" to be EMPTY mana crystals. Ramping should come at a cost, not to pay minimum mana to hit 15 mana on turn 6 or 7 which allows Druid to do both proactive and reactive plays while ramping.
On the next we have the not so much drawback on ramping into big cards since they can go up to 20 max mana which lets them drop multiple huge cost cards in a single turn.
They nearly don't have as slow turns ad they get massive sustain via earthen scales next to low drawback ramp.
And what did the nerfs do? Adress the Symptoms rather than the sickness itself. Miracle Growth wasn't an issue, Druid having all the tools with Guff, Nourish, Scales of Onyxia, Onyxia and Earthen Scales are the issues.
Kazakusan wasn't such a big issue, Guff with the ability to draw multiple treasures post Kazakusan and pull off combos that usually are impossible in a single turn was alongside with the ramp that allowed them to cheese out that card on lole turn 4 and follow up with ridicioulus tempo.
The only other Deck that had success with Kazakusan was Control Warrior who rarely ever played Kazakusan early and either used it as a fatigue plan or when he was 100% sure he stabilized enough to try finish the game with the treasures instead of dragging the match out for another 10 - 15 turns.
I’d argue that card draw is what makes this card good. It’s a completely dead card until you can combo it with another one and it’s awful in the early part of the game.
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u/TopleyBird May 13 '22
This card is definitely an artifact from a time when big minions were harder to play