Blizzard has acted quickly to quell the latest Hearthstone community outrage, reverting some changes made earlier in the week.
On Tuesday, a new Hearthstone patch changed the way some cards interacted in the name of consistency. That included changing Tess Greymane to behave like Yogg-Saron does currently, instead of how it did before the nerf.
The problem was, that went against what principal game designer Mike Donais had explicitly said before the card’s release. The community wasn’t happy at this nerf, accusing Blizzard of trying to sneak it under the radar. Reddit and some community figures got pretty hot under the collar about it.
Well, Blizzard has listened to the backlash, and is reverting the change. The 30-card limit on the Battlecry is staying, but Tess will now behave like pre-nerf Yogg and keep casting cards even if taken out of play.
“After hearing your feedback to that change,” community manager Jesse Hill said on the game’s forums. “we initially considered offering a full Arcane Dust refund for Tess. We also read feedback from players who use Tess in their decks asking for her to be reverted to her old functionality. In this case, we agree that it’s worthwhile to sacrifice some consistency so Tess is more fun to play, especially since our priority wasn’t to decrease Tess’ power level. With that in mind, instead of offering an Arcane Dust refund and encouraging players to disenchant the card, we’re reverting one of the changes to Tess Greymane so that her Battlecry will continue even if she’s destroyed, silenced, or otherwise removed from the board.”
Hill was keen however to stress that when cards are changed to be more consistent with the rules of Hearthstone, Blizzard doesn’t consider that a nerf—so don’t expect movement on this the next time.
The changes also affected triggers for the Druid Quest card, Jungle Giants. For example, using Faceless Manipulator on a minion with five attack or more would previously trigger the quest. That wasn’t correct, so Blizzard changed it.
Those changes to Quest Druid had a big esports impact, though. The changes were made after the submission deadline for this week’s HCT Tour Stop in Korea. Players who had brought Quest Druid were initially denied the opportunity to change their decklists, but this decision was reversed at the last minute.
The reverted version of Tess will go live today.
