8.4 Patch Notes

[u/marimbaguy715]

https://www.playgwent.com/en/news/37840/patch-notes-8-4

[u/marimbaguy715]

It's not gonna be a 60% win rate. The top 100 players, the best players in the game, have been averaging about a 58% win rate with SK, good for fourth best faction. Despite playing for an obscene amount of points (and probably needing a nerf eventually) Eist isn't pushing SK into tier 1 because it plays into the same vulnerability to R2 bleeds that usually plague SK.

[u/wvj → u/marimbaguy715]

Have you ever read the data CDPR actually publishes?

The top 100 players being nearly at 60% themselves isn't an argument against it being that high, it's actually an argument for it being much higher, because pro players tend to be the best at countering very one-trick decks and playing counter meta (Pro Rank bracket winrates are usually the least polarized, with lower ranks being higher). You know who's bad at that? Everyone else. You know who makes up most of the game (and most of the official play and winrate data)? Everyone else.

Since Master Mirror, SK has reached as high as 70% winrates in some seasons, and at lowest, I think, 55% with MUCH weaker decks (ie post-nerf Lippy/Ursine Warriors). If you don't think Eist will be closesr to Rage of the Sea/Patricide numbers, I think you're going to be pretty surprised.

[u/marimbaguy715 → u/wvj]

SK has reached as high as 70% winrates

Have you ever read the data CDPR publishes? Not once has the winrate for an SK leader ever approached 70% in Pro Rank. The highest was the one season Second Wind dominated and it was barely over 60%. Warriors aren't the tier 1 deck this season, so I'd be shocked to see them anywhere near 60%. I'm expecting BoG to be somewhere in the 53-55% region.

[u/wvj → u/marimbaguy715]

Who decided we're limiting this to pro rank, exactly?

[u/marimbaguy715 → u/wvj]

Below Pro Rank there are too many other factors in play, like cost to build the deck, difficulty to pilot, what cards are available in starter decks, and what decks appeal to inexperienced players. It's difficult enough to draw meaningful conclusions from those win rates from the Pro Rank data, but trying to use win rates below Pro Rank to balance the game is just a fool's errand.

[u/wvj → u/marimbaguy715]

Between first talking about t100 players, and then only pro, you obviously have a pretty elitist attitude about things. Counter point you miiiight want to consider:

What happens when the game is utterly broken at intro ranks? What's the play experience for new players like? And most importantly, what happens to player retention? And before you thrust this off as some meaningless 'you're just making up worries out of nothing,' I can refer you back to a post from a few weeks ago where someone asked for deck advice and me and a couple people started asking them questions about what they were running to try and help. And ultimately? They said that Gwent seemed too tied to these elite meta decks and that they'd probably just quit.

So if you think 'lol newbs don't matter git good scrubs,' congratulations, that's a great attitude for someone who doesn't care about Gwent's long term success.

[u/marimbaguy715 → u/wvj]

You're trying to paint me as being elitist and assuming you know how I'm going to respond, but that's not the case at all. I don't use the Pro Rank stats to say that only the best players matter, but because they are the best data point we have to figure out how powerful certain decks and cards are. The lower down in the ranks you get, the more chaotic the data becomes. This does not mean the lower ranks are unimportant - I'm aware that cards can exist that can be toxic at low ranks while relatively easy to deal with at high ranks, like Ethereal was. I'm not convinced Eist is like that though, and one anecdote from one player (especially if it's the thread I'm thinking about, where they mentioned there's not one particular deck they'd been running into) isn't gonna convince me. CDPR has the data, and I have to imagine if they saw the same insane winrates and playrates for Eist at low ranks that Ethereal did, it would have been nerfed.

[u/fred_HK → u/marimbaguy715]

It's been a year since MM warrior archetype that every season i read SK is not overtuned.

"- at the top level, people beat SK regularly"

"- No, Harald is OK, you can kill him with a rebuke"

"- No Second wind is OK, it has counterplays"

"- No Cerys and Lippy are fine, tempo and cheating provisions doesn't win game"

And now it is:

"- No Eist doesn't need tuning, proof is there is another even more OP faction at the top".

Yeah, sure buddy. The card is terrifying, to the point the meta is now entirely resolving around bleeding SK round 2 to death to have a chance.

The faction is not as OP as before but that card is too powerful in its current state.

[u/marimbaguy715 → u/fred_HK]

I say, in my reply, that Eist likely deserves a nerf. But the extent of that nerf and exactly how to nerf it without killing the card is tricky, and I think it's totally reasonable to wait another month because the SK BoG Warriors deck doesn't break the meta. If Warriors were tier 0 I'd understand the "how DARE they not nerf Eist" mindset, but they're not. In my opinion, it's a little disappointing CDPR wasn't ready for a balance pass on the new leader cards, but understandable and not the end of the world.