• Home
  • Shudderwock “fix” Announced

Shudderwock “fix” Announced

by - 6 years ago

The Witchwood has done a lot of amazing things for the meta in the 12 short days since launch. It spawned a flurry of innovation that brought a lot of life back into the game, it got basic cards into competitive decks, and it revived some previously dead classes.

However, as anyone who was around at the launch knows, it also brought boogeyman after boogeyman for the more outrage-inclined within the community to rage about. One of the earliest boogey…men(?) was the Shudderwock deck that we here at Blizzpro, and a lot of the rest of the community, had theorycrafted before launch (if you want to play the deck, play the better version in the latest Blizzpro ladder optimizer, not the theorycrafted version). Famous streamer, DisguisedToast, managed to take the deck to Legend with an incredibly high winrate and the deck was not particularly fun to lose to.

Although the metagame would quickly correct for the deck, and the community would soon learn that the decks winrate was not nearly as high as it initially appeared, the animations still remained an issue. Dean “Iksar” Ayala asked twitter for feedback, and the community gave plenty.

Then, today, Blizzard announced that a change was coming.

Originally Posted by Jesse Hill (Blue Tracker / Official Post)
Recently, our players have had feedback regarding the Shaman card, Shudderwock. We understand that the length of its Battlecry animation and other animations spawned from its Battlecry can be frustrating.

In a future update, we will be doubling the animation speed of Shudderwock’s Battlecry so it will lessen the impact on the overall pacing of your current Hearthstone match. In addition, the amount of Battlecries Shudderwock can reproduce will be capped at 20.

We will also be speeding up the animation of Lifedrinker for similar reasons.
Thank you for your feedback, and we’ll see you in the Tavern.

Cheers!

Personally, I like the change. I was always in the boat that the deck was not oppressive and the gameplay was actually interesting and good for the game. Although Shudderwock is now capped at 20, that effectively leaves the gameplay unchanged (because 20 is more than you ever put into the initial Shudderwock, so you still “go infinite” and because once you “go infinite” it doesn’t matter how much each Shudderwock does, since you can do it 10 times per turn and that’s almost guaranteed to be enough to win the next turn). The small loss of value you get from being capped at 20 may well be offset by the additional value of being able to play more ‘Wocks in one turn. Of course, it also works as intended to make playing with and against the deck much more manageable.

Let us know what you think about the change in the comments below.


Nicholas Weiss

Is a lawyer by day and a cardslinger by night. He's decent at both. He's been playing Hearthstone since open beta and writing about it for a few years now.


0 responses to “Shudderwock “fix” Announced”

  1. Lookitzjoe says:

    Good change. Surprised it happened so quickly though.

    • hsdecktech says:

      Yeah, definitely! I think they pretty much nailed this (after the initial flub that let it come out to such a poor reception as it initially did).