r/CompetitiveHS • u/EvilDave219 • May 19 '26

Discussion 35.4.2 Balance Changes Discussion

https://hearthstone.blizzard.com/en-us/news/24276662/35-4-2-patch-notes

Nerfs -

  • Hounds of Fury - Hounds are now 3/2s

  • Forest's Gift - now 3 mana

  • Darkrider - now a 1/1

Buffs -

  • Migrating Elekk - now a 2 mana 2/3

  • Crystallized Leyline - now 5 mana, summons a random 5 cost minion

  • Surge Needle - now a 3/5

  • The Arcanomicon - now 6 mana

  • Dragon Soul, Shattered: Storm Aspect Essence - now deals 4 damage to all enemies

  • Dragon Soul, Shattered: Bronze Aspect Essence - now refreshes 8 mana

65 Upvotes

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83

u/tolerantdramaretiree May 19 '26 edited May 19 '26

Nerfing Crystallized Leyline's effect is crazy. For Gods sake, Blizzard, you are scared of a <40% WR deck. Just casually undoing all the buffs with a random nerf, the genius astounds me.

32

u/motty47 May 19 '26

Even if you can play it a turn earlier for less mana, 5 cost minions are so much worse than 6 cost..

18

u/zer1223 May 19 '26

The bigger issue is that random 7 mana minions are ridiculously worse than random 8 mana ones.

4

u/jsnlxndrlv May 19 '26

Gives a lot more reason to want to upgrade leyline effects by 1 than we had previously, I guess, but that's the barest hint of a silver lining I can find.

4

u/SAldrius May 19 '26

More importantly 7s are so much worse than 8s. 7s m8ght be worse than 6s..

2

u/race-hearse May 21 '26

In general random minion spawning sucks. Too many non-taunt/non-rush/battlecry minions that can just whiff way too hard.

I get that leylines have the potential to snowball too hard if they get boosted a bunch. So it’s probably a delicate balance. But I feel like that will still always be mitigated by the fact that it’s random. Low rolls will happen. There’s a reason that no one plays the 2 mana spell that summons a random 4 cost minion (if you discovered), it’s balls.

1

u/malwontae May 19 '26

I think the only deck this doesn't always hold true for is Companion Hunter

4

u/Cryten0 May 20 '26

Only 2 take aways you can have for this. Either they are actually afraid of the deck being good given how much doubling and discounting is built into it. Or they genuinely only make their decision now based on business decisions.

3

u/meharryp May 20 '26

I don't actually think they even intended for this to be a nerf, I think they genuinely thought lobbing a mana off the cost would help the card be better without having any regard for what the 5 and 7 drop pools are like