Game balance is one of the most important parts of any multiplayer experience. Each player needs to have exact or equal tools to utilize in order for a game to be fair, yet the format must differ enough in each instance that the game still feels fresh with each play. It’s how games like Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft have managed to maintain such widespread appeal—with nine classes and hundreds of cards, there’s a lot to internalize and balance, but the payoff is a wildly inventive and exciting adaptation of card games to a digital format.
In any competitive game, there will always be a prevalent set of strategies that define the top tier of play. Affectionately referred to as “the meta,” in Hearthstone these are the decks that often take precedence due to their consistent success against other decks. It’s an idea that can be summed up simply with the idea of unequal perfect balance—a rock-paper-scissors-esque rotation where one deck can beat another, but then is countered by a third, and so on.
What happens when a deck is so prevalent that it defines the landscape? Where, through every tournament, a deck is not just one pillar for competition but an overwhelming presence that all others have to organize around? This is where we come to Patron Warrior, a Hearthstone subclass so powerful that Blizzard had to take drastic steps to “nerf,” or reduce in power, a sole card.
It wasn’t just about current balance, it was about the balance of Hearthstone present and future.
The goal of each match of Hearthstone is to reduce your enemy’s health to zero through a combination of minions, spells and weapons. You draw and play these cards, which each cost a certain amount of mana, a resource your hero gradually gains each turn.
Patron Warrior is a specific variation on the Warrior class. Warrior has always been one of the more aggressive deck choices, utilizing weapons, attack bonuses and “Charge.” (A minion that has Charge can strike when it’s played instead of waiting a turn.) Patron Warrior combined certain cards into a combination, where if the player had the right cards in their hand, it was an immediate kill. I’ll list out the major players of the deck below to see if you can suss it out.
Patron Warrior’s Usual Suspects
Grim Patron—A five-mana cost minion with 3 attack damage. Create a copy of this card whenever it takes damage and survives.
Warsong Commander—A two-mana cost minion. Whenever you summon a minion with 3 or less attack, give it Charge.
Frothing Berserker—A three-mana cost minion with 2 attack damage. Whenever a unit takes damage, gain +1 attack.
The Warrior dumps out their Warsong Commander, then Berserker, then Patron, and then utilizes a variety of Warrior-specific cards that deal damage to their own minions to get a high-damage Berserker and strike the enemy hero with it. This combo can often result in a one-hit kill, due to how fast the Berserker’s damage starts scaling when multiple Patrons take damage and replicate.
This particular subset was so effective that the entire competitive scene became defined by it. Every deck had to be able to beat Patron, or at least stand on even footing, and few other cards retain that level of synergy that a Patron Warrior deck does. Every card in the commonly-accepted versions of the deck could be utilized to either maintain board control or effectively buff a Frothing Berserker or Patron.
Blizzard saw this and managed to strike only one card down to neuter the whole concept: the Warsong Commander effect was changed to give +1 attack to all Charge minions.
Now, you not only have to expend extra resources to get it out, but it doesn’t provide Charge for your Patrons or Berserkers anymore—a key component to getting that Berserker swing out before your opponent can react. Grim Patrons can’t slam their faces into small-cost minions to grow their numbers, and Berserkers have a single turn left hanging in the wind, which isn’t good for a four-health minion already weakened by the self-damage inflicted to up their attack.
Many saw this as a rash decision, one made hastily and without regard to the Warrior class as a whole. Patron Warrior needed to go, before the approaching Hearthstone World Championships at Blizzcon, or it would be a tournament full of Patron Warrior and the few decks that could match it. Yet this was seen as an overreaction by those who stubbornly play Warrior.
A game needs to stay in some modicum of balance for it to be entertaining. Patron Warrior was a clear disruption to Hearthstone’s balance, and it wasn’t the first. Starving Buzzard, Nat Pagle and Gadgetzan Auctioneer all received similar heavy-fisted power reductions due to their prevalence in competitions. Yet many cards considered universally powerful have never seen a slam like this—cards like Knife Juggler, Molten Giant, Alexstraza and Antonidas have all gone untouched.
Game developers adjust abilities like this to future-proof against imbalances, and to keep games naturally in-check rather than artificially. One of the tenants of unequal balance is that players will discover something powerful, abuse it, then find a counter to it. It’s a cycle that emerges from many multiplayer games that allow players to emergently interact with their current situation, something natural that’s even seen in sports. You adjust on the fly, learn what’s powerful and use your knowledge of the game and skill to find a way to stop it.
Although Patron Warrior was an issue, it was endemic of a greater problem—the concept that a player could horde cards in their hand and work for a one-turn kill, a kill that their opponent couldn’t stop barring extreme circumstances. Every Patron game was either a race against the clock or an attempt to stall and prepare a wall, one you hoped the Patron Warrior couldn’t surmount (they often did).
It wasn’t that the Berserker got powerful from all the Patron-self-harm; that’s a risk-reward play, one that forces your opponent to react. The Charge mechanic allows immediate offensive reaction, and combined with the natural strengths of the Warrior, it was a specific facet that couldn’t exist in Hearthstone any longer.
In the blog post detailing this change Christina “Zeriyah” Sims, a community manager for Blizzard and Hearthstone, put it best:
“In the case of Warsong Commander, we felt this change was necessary to help expand both future design space and to stand by our overarching game philosophy that battles between minions and fighting for board control is what makes Hearthstone fun and compelling.”
Whether you believe this move to be over-the-top or not, it raises an interesting issue for games. So many titles we see nowadays are purporting e-sports and years of content, but how do you balance for that? As new content rises, oversights can cause complications—Warsong Commander was strong for sure, but it took the addition of Grim Patron and several other cards to see it rise to prominence.
Future-proofing hasn’t been perfected yet, but at least at Blizzard, they’re concerned about more than just the coming expansion or adventure. The wisdom to know when to make drastic changes and when to let players figure it out on their own? That’s what keeps Hearthstone fresh for me, and I’m content with silently doing away with my Patron deck and trying something new.
Eric Van Allen is an Atlanta-based writer and Paste intern. You can follow his e-sports and games rumblings @seamoosi on Twitter.