From Mage to Warlock and beyond, we all have our favorite flavors of Hearthstone classes, and though their competitive viability ebbs and flows across the years, their design and gameplay styles couldn’t be more different. Some have aged well, some less so— here’s how they all stack up against one another. Where will Death Knight belong on this list? Only time will tell.
10) Shaman
What is Shaman in Hearthstone, exactly? 25 percent RNG rolls on the Hero Power, Evolve shenanigans, and Nature spells? At least Wrath of Air Totem is gone, along with all those game-deciding rolls (and the inexplicable cards like the original Lightning Storm and Crackle). But really, what else is there?
Overload is a boring mechanic and Elementals are the most vanilla tribe. And that’s before thinking of comedy archetypes like Frost Shaman, introduced and forgotten on a dime by the developers. If there’s a red-headed stepchild of Hearthstone, Shaman has to be the one.
9) Warrior
Pressing the Armor Up! Button is a miserable feeling. Again, Team 5 no longer wants to promote control decks that are based on resource exhaustion, and should anything close to that playstyle come up, the nerf hammer comes down hard, as we’ve seen in Voyage to the Sunken City. This doesn’t leave Warriors with many options. Combo decks have historically been limited for the class and the defensive Hero Power means that any aggro deck needs a significant amount of help and likely involves Pirate synergies and big weapons. It’s all a little bit too predictable.
8) Paladin
In many ways, Paladins’ plight is similar to Priests’, and it’s no wonder they were the other class whose evergreen set had to be completely reimagined over the course of the game’s lifespan. There is almost never a workable Paladin deck that relies on a mechanic other than buffing cards, making them extremely one-dimensional—so much so that sometimes people don’t even want to play its good decks even when the stats suggest it to be a good choice.
Unfortunately, the way Classic Hearthstone’s Control Paladin exhausted the opponent’s resources is no longer the sort of deck type the developers want to support, so you’ve got a massively overbuffed Charge minion to finish off the game instead.
7) Priest
Oh boy. There’s a reason why “The Light shall burn you!” and the mythical Unicorn Priest deck turned into a meme. No class likes to use its Hero Power on turn two, but Priest has by far the worst time with the effect. Heal synergies have nothing on Warrior’s Armor stuff, and it’s rare that you can leverage the effect through repeatedly healing minions on a sticky board.
Priests needed a complete rework when the Classic set went out, and it’s still tough to pinpoint what a fun iteration of the class would look like. Be it endless resource generation of the control decks, the stats-cheating Big Priest that continues to be a scourge in Wild, or the occasional Shadow Priest decks in Standard, Anduin just never had a healthy relationship with initiative, severely limiting his options.
6) Hunter
Supposedly, Hearthstone’s developers initially thought Hunter’s Steady Shot would make them a great control class because it meant they could exert pressure without using cards. Haha. Hahaha. SMOrc has been the name of the game so far for most of the time Rexxar’s been relevant in the metagame, and the small issue with this is that every time the devs want to take Rexxar in a different direction, they have to push the envelope quite hard from a power level perspective to make it happen. Also, Beast synergies are just not that interesting, as Druid players can also attest.
5) Mage
Starting as the class of fire and frost and secrets—and the introductory simple class for newcomers—Jaina has unfortunately fully embraced the nebulous “random BS go” archetype with randomly generated spells generating other random cards and causing random effects to go brrrrr and random their way to some sort of random random. A shame. Even Johnny players deserve better.
4) Druid
The original Force of Nature/Savage Roar package carried Druids for many years of play, and since then, Team 5 have been generous with aggressive ramping and mana-cheating tools that can easily get out of hand once they reach critical mass. From Spreading Plague to Ultimate Infestation and Wildheart Guff, there’s always some sort of way-too-efficient tool for the class to work with, and players are often frustrated by what Druids can dish out in the game, Standard and Wild alike.
3) Demon Hunter
It took Team 5 a while, but they found a nice formula. Though DH was busted on launch, it’s now in a nice place with an interesting identity. A cheap ping for just one mana always gives them a chance to impact the board in an efficient way and sets them up well for aggressive approaches, but the core nature of the Lifesteal keyword also guarantees a variety of survival options for decks that prefer to go late into the night. The class’ current balance bodes well for Death Knight, too.
2) Rogue
There’s just something special about the Rogue playstyle. Explosive and combo-centric with a huge helping of burst damage, Rogues have legendary combo decks and great aggressive archetypes to explore year after year, with a sort of fragility that is not present in any other class, creating a unique “glass cannon” play experience and the feeling of big brain moments whenever you can do something special with all those 0-cost cards.
1) Warlock
There is no class like Warlock when it comes to versatility. Life Tap is the best Hero Power in the game, a guaranteed source of card draw that can single-handedly enable archetypes. From cheap minions and Demon synergies to big idiots and huge hands, self-damage and healing synergies to double-sided AoE effects, Warlocks can do it all in a wide variety of ways. In most cases, you can immediately peg the deck your opponent’s playing just by looking at the class: with Warlocks, that is rarely the case.
