It’s funny how Druid really is the anti-Priest. Any time that Priest is good, it gets nerfed. Any time Druid isn’t good, it gets an insane package of cards that make it overtuned.
And doesn’t get nerfed. I have no clue how they thought 2 mana “cast a spell a second time” was a good idea when they constantly give druid good big spells.
@@solin21210 I hate druids. I actually dust all my druids cards all the time for other classes that are fun and not so noob to play against. Hunter and druid for me are the 'easy mode' for children playing hearthstone.
All I've ever wanted from Priest is for it to be decent. I don't care about being at the top of the pack (Fluctuating between OP and trash is Warlock's thing, the perfect roleplay!) I just want them to stop giving it meme shit that only annoys people. It's never even been good outside of Raza Priest and that's backed up by Blizzard's own data on the class. No other class gets this much hate despite being terrible.
Hey Rarran, there was actually one good priest deck that wasnt oppressive and actually good to play with in hearthstone history, and it was in the form of Dragon Priest in its both incarnations from The Grand Tournament with Twilight whelp, Twilight Guardian & Wyrmrest Agent and Un'Goro with Drakonid Operative. Sure it was simpler times, but it was a tier 2-ish deck with decent matchups against aggro and control and a not-as-priest-annoying gameplay as we're used to.
@@monkaWGiga Yea, more like option 2. In my memory Gadgetzan was pretty ruthless to any deck that wasnt a Reno/Kazakus deck, a Patches Pirate Package or Jade Druid/Shaman, but i can be misremembering. Personally i just played the second Dragon Priest iteration afterwards
@@argenis9518 yeah there was, it was even one of the few decks i've hit legend with, but i intentionally left it out because there were some interactions with Spiteful Summoner highrolls (like Tyrantus on turn 5 with coin) and Kobold+Cabal Shadow Priest that a lot of people werent much fond of hahahah
Being unfun to play against never seemed to stop Blizzard from buffing the bejeezus out of Warrior, Druid, Warlock, and Shaman, all of whom have had far, far longer reigns with the same types of decks that people complained about with Priest.
"Priest heals for a lot of dmg with samuro+apot + sometimes discovers a clear + gets maximum 48% wr"- average player that probably plays 80% aggro: "OMG DELETE PRIEST ITS SO UNFUN TO FACE" and blizzard deletes it into oblivion for 2 years. "Druid gains 69 armor for 2 mana while having 20 mana+ discovers consistently scale of onyxia or onyxia with guidance + has 60% wr"- average player : ye that is fine and less tilting.
As a priest player myself, it's really annoying to play a class where it seems like being annoying and unfun to fight against is part of the class identity. And no matter how crap your decks are, people will always say you're the worst and most annoying class in the game, all while Warrior and Druid are like right there. I'd love for blizzard to start bringing in more tempo mid-range priest options. Like their hero power seems like it should be ideal for keeping minions alive on the board, but it's always just control until there's that one aggro deck.
Yeah, aggro priest is aboslutely broken in wild. My win rate is legit about 70% so when I come back to play I just demolish everyone in the lower ranks bc it's easier to play than face hunter.
Good priest deck? Control Priest from Rastakhan. It had a win condition, good but not unbeatable control tools, and the DK Anduin hero power will keep you thinking on your feet so games are never boring
That's why I hate priest. While warrior and druid are still annoying as hell sometimes, at least they had much diversity in their kit (from value, to aggro, to midrange to control ecc.) and in very few occasions they became toxic (like with druidstone or pirate warrior). Priest for almost every year has always been "ok now we're are going to have a 45 min game where my only hope is to make you either die or boredom or make you literally use all your cards" or "yeah in gonna deal 300 damage with this combo and you can't do nothing about it" and the one time he became aggro was like "yeah its turn 3 and you are dead, deal with it". The only time that I decided to play priest was in saviors of uldum with that midrange deck, and that's it. Not to be mean, but I'm always happy to see priest get shit on.
To be fair my fellow priest brother, they did nerf pirate warrior a bit more for their quest which was desperately needed so they’re a lil more tolerable.
The problem is Preiest is a stall class but the hearthstone team has frequently shown that they do not want stall stratagies to do well with faster games. If your whole stratagy relies on on stalls but 90% percent of games are over on turn 8 their is nothing you can do
I like stall control. Classic control warrior is stall, as well, but it uses its stall to build armor and then leverages that armor into removal. Priest needs something similar that isn't just tons of mana cheat and stupid discover into discover crap.
@@Osric24 the two types of priest decks I love using. Stall priest where I make a deck to theoretical counter every deck.(Workes as well as you expect). And thief priest. Wish thief priest received at least half the love thief rouge got Edit:what the terrible stall priest deck taught me. Priest removal sucks
@@Osric24 I feel like if Priest just got more Lifesteal spells that can't easily be leveraged into a ridiculous amount of value it would probably help, especially if they're Shadow spells so that Shadow Priest has the option to run more actual spells.
@@amberlee4536 Full agree, warlock has gotten the best lifesteal support, but priest needs more of it to suit Spriest, and also to match that sustain/remove style control that warrior can do.
I mean, wasn't exactly priest as we knew it, but shadow priest last rotation was a fairly strong but not broken deck. Talking "classic" priest, through...
@@MiudmonDice it wasnt really that strong honestly.. It was a worse version of face hunter. Most of the deck was comprised of neutral cards and it was only viable because of 2 cards.. illucia and raise dead. It was introduced in Strormwind with bare bones support, has had nothing since then and is nowhere to be found in the meta. This short sided, half assed, underwhelming approach seems to be team 5s class vision.
It's paifully trash most of the Time. Wild format is the only place you can find some priests. And it's still like resurrect priest from Uldum, that was a long time ago.
Giving Priest reach might be a solution technically, but in terms of design and gameplay experience, we should NOT have to resort to this. The fact that a class is far worse just because it can't smorc face as well as other classes is moreso a problem with the game itself. Priest simply does not match the game philosophy of the developers at the moment. The devs want fast games that people can play while at the bus stop or while taking a shit. Strategy is irrelevant. Value is irrelevant. Game balance is irrelevant. Healing is nearly irrevelant. Controlling the board is irrelevant because once certain decks reach a turn they can just kill you from hand. I've been playing hearthstone since Grand Tournament and the things I loved about the game back then have disappeared.
I felt the same way for a while, then I started playing duels. Don’t get me wrong, duels is a flawed game mode but it’s the game mode where controlling the board seems the most powerful, and for me it makes me feel like I tend to have actual agency, even in aggro matchups
@@robinscompass5951 I'll take your word for that. I was mainly referring to the main game mode, but I do quite enjoy the additions of Battlegrounds and Duels. I haven't played Duels much but if anything will motivate me to grind arena again for packs it's that.
Control is doing pretty good right now, tempo decks as well only aggro deck running around is dh right now the only deck that just has to be changed not nerfed is quest hunter, it is thw most unfun and uninteravtive deck to play against
I remember highlander Priest from Uldum and Dragons, it was my favourite deck from that meta and one I still fondly remember as being really fun even though ive stopped playing the game
Yeah, as a mainly Priest player, it has always been a force pushing me away from Hearthstone that they could never be balanced, seemingly due to bias. Shadow Priest apparently went against the identity of Priest, despite it being a cool deck possibility, combo went against the card draw and spell damage weakness, but again was another iconic form of playable Priest. The class is balanced around Healing and Control, the former of which does nothing without extreme levels of synergy, and the later tends to be outclassed by Warrior whose weapons, taunt and armour access compliment the archetype much more. I still remember when people were crying about the first Highlander Priest, a deck completely screwed over by not drawing unsearchable combo peices early enough, to which I had to remind them that it was the first time Priest had ever been tier 1 and it was far from the worst meta Hearthstone had been through. What about when people threw hands at Blizzard because people had been complaining about how bad Priest was and Hearthstones response was to reveal "Purify" as an adventure exclusive card? Or back when Priest's most acknowledgable feat was a 30 card RNG Meme deck in Classic? That and Auchenai Circle. Priests early game line-up used to be Northshire, pass, pass, into one of Priests 5 or 6 four-drops they had for some reason. Priest just has no real goals and is mainly balanced around the do-nothing healing flavour of the class, It's naturally bad and by the time it gets the cards to have a comprehensive stratergy and goal, it's the last set before rotation comes around and sweeps at least 50% of the deck away. Double points if people complain and it gets nerfed or a vital card gets hall of famed before it happens. I swear the class is just hated by people. Even back in Classic when it had god-awful winrate with god-awful cards, people still complained about them, just because they played into a Mind Control, Cabal Shadow Priest or a Shadow Word Death, which they would have been more aware of if they played against it more often.
Coming back to this later as well, I also really hate that Priest has literally had it's possible archetypes stolen from them. Like, Priest has Mind Vision and other cards like it, people complain about Priest being more thief-y than Rogue, a class that literally was having no problems at the time, and what do you know, copy-Priest recieves minimal support and Rogue gets a whole thief archetype dedicated to them that they keep re-visiting. Priest's Mind Vision also used to let you straight up steal cards from your opponent as well. However it and OG Illidan both got changed due to the dev's opinion of hand and deck destruction being an unfun mechanic. Fast forward and we get Dirty Rat availible to everyone, and further than that, Warlock get's cards like Gnomeferatu, Demonic Project, Tickatus, Altar etc. Warlock gets to enjoy disruption and anti-meta options as a part of their identity, but for Priest's it doesn't fit apparently.
The only deck from priest I actually hate is Resurrect priest in wild, because it's incredibly stupid to know you are going to lose a game when they drop a barnes at turn 4. Dragon priest, however, was really great and played it myself. It really is a case that they set the identity of the class and their core set so much apart from other classes, that when they try to make a new archetype work it has to be not really priest, only priest-adjacent.
When watching people playing janky combo decks (like MarkMcKz), I noticed the games they'd upload where they'd finally pull off said janky combo were versus Priest a majority of the time. So, we need priest to allow people to play hilarious but inefficient combo decks, and get their clips for RUclips.
I don't understand the Priest hate, never will. Anyway, I don't care what anyone says, for me, the designers have no idea what they are doing with the class. They told us "We bring back cool cards like Draconid Operative and Murozond" in the coreset, everybody lost their sh!t about it... Then the expansion hits : 0 dragons and 0 support for it. Why isn't the Colossal for Priest a Dragon?!? Then every class has a cool hero card they can play as standalone, without any restriction except one... Xyrella needs good Deathrattles. How many did they bring back in the Core set? 0... How many did they print for the class in this expansion? 0... They support already powerful archetypes like Pirate decks, but can't even support 1 Dragon or DR archetype for Priest? What a bunch of clowns...
They’re scared to print something good for Priest because they know they’ll probably have to nerf it almost instantly. Switcharoo got nerfed *and* banned in Wild in the same patch for instance because people didn’t like facing it (very understandable in Wild though, that combo was BS)
@@TheOneWhoReportsForDuty Pretty sure their test team messed up (nothing new) and just missed the interaction. Had they caught it in their test phase, they would have made the change before releasing the card.
Priest is just a bizarre black sheep in my eyes, it's like a mistake they keep correcting to this day. It's like monowhite in MTG, even the cards are the same color. It's always worse than the other options unless it plays dirty.
I feel like they don't even get to be like White from MTG, because at least White can summon a fuck ton of dudes to do their work. Priest has 3 primary identities, Value Control, Combo Control, or Burn Aggro. If the Combo cards are too fast, it goes into Burn Aggro, and if they are slow they usually get wrapped in a control shell. Thus Priest is doomed to be a Control deck with the chance of going full Burn.
And then there's Blue, which is the definition of obnoxious and uninteractive. Seriously, why not a grindy midrange deck? As a control class priest doesn't work because of the hero power, which works the best at mantaining units alive.
Priest is bad the majority of time, but when they win, they probably humiliate the opponents, thus giving a feeling that the class is unfun to play against. But what you don't actually notice is that this priest you lost probably lost the other 5 games before you
As a priest player they should make the minions with good stats for cost will maybe more health and less attack and give priest health buffs, sprinkled with some decent deathrattle and some good removal so it can return to a board control deck to stomp out aggro and duel with other control decks. But its easier said that done.
Priest problems starts with its hero power. It needs a rebalance. And it's about time classes get a second hero power to choose when building a deck. Give classes more options to play and experiment with.
@@erikaz1590 I left much before Duels so I couldn't say. But I think standard priest hero power should be healing more targets (random friendly minion + hero?) for more health (3 or 4?) so the class could be somewhat balanced.
@@chaferraro okay. In duels, after you pick a hero, you can select 1 of 3 hero powers. So priests' powers were: 1. Heal a character for 3. If it's still damaged, draw a card. 2. Passive. When you cast a spell, deal 1 damage to the enemy hero. 3. Summon a 0/1 voidfiend that steals 1 health from the enemy hero at the end of your turn.
@@erikaz1590 I think Duels could be a good place to experiment those new ideas of hero powers and, with time and balance, eventually migrate them to standard play... Also, I like that 1st option a lot and I think it should be the priest standard hero power already. I would like to go even further on the heals and test another version without the card draw. I would try out something like: "heal every friendly character for 3 HP" and see how it does on the meta... 🤔
My favorite deck of all times was the Control priest after League of Explorers. You had Deathrattles, Lightbomb, Cabal, Sylvanas, Justicar, Auchenai Soulpriest + Circle of healing combo and the Golden Monkey as the win condition.
Priest is my favourite class. I would love for them to find a way to help the class. I agree that with some burst dmg Priest would be able to compete in this turn 8 win con meta.
I hope the game slows down a bit. Not like 20 minute long control vs control games but I want to be able to do a cool combo without being at 5 health on turn 6.
In the history of HS Druid and Rogue have been 100x more problematic and unfun than Priest. I say this is as someone who mainly Plays Druid, Priest and Rogue. I also enjoy kicking puppies and pissing in other people’s cereal.
Rogue is the most fun class in the game. I am only rogue mainer with 5100 rogue-wins. I played only rogue all game, and yes I tried other classes, but they all seemed to me boring and not fun at all. Rogue is the best class for me.
@@impkiller5932 All good decks are fun to play, it becomes unfun when you have to play against them. Priest in unfun because it feels like they just undo everything you do. Druid’s ramp and strong token synergies make them ramp ahead of you and build big boards efficiently and before you can reasonably deal with them, which is just worse and harder to play against. Rogue eschews most interaction so it’s good decks are usually very solitaire like which people don’t like because they aren’t really playing a game of hearthstone, they are watching one.
I'd love to see more value given to cards like Auchenai Soulpriest. Loved being able to switch between healing and damage. Keep priest's identity but make it possible to actually have some damage. Hell you could start designing some shadow cards that "drain life" instead of just healing. One suggestion
ive always thought it would be neat if they gave priest some "other class" minions. Like a stealth minion thats flavor-wise a rogue. Or a taunt with a ton of health that is supposed to be a "tank" and then its like priest is the leader of a wow party. That way they could actually balance the class while retaining anduin's role as a support/healer.
I really didn't mind facing rez priest, I'm thinking of when it was the reborn heal 3 minion and the 4/8 taunt with lifesteal. That is just a pretty normal control deck to me.
It’s frustrating when other classes can do about the some things pries do but no one really complains but the instant priest gets something decent people lose their minds. Feels a bit like band wagoning based on old decks but idk I feel meh after seeing my favorite class keep getting bad decks or getting good decks then seeing them immediately nerfed.
well if you talking about warrior, he can't cope the spells and use them every single turn ,,, and if you talking about druid he doesn't have removel other then the 7 mana dragon thingy , and even that isn't that good ,,,, priest has a lot of countrol spells and most of them cost 5 and less , and he can discover a lot of spells every turn , what makes him really annoying to play vs
any class get too aggro to deal with or too much countrol isn't fun to play vs ,,, that is why ppl hate quest warrior and any form of priest,,,,, i think they could solve that by given priest less discover and make them have a strong hero or winning coundeion late game
i ve been playing priest for the ealier hearthstone years, what i remember to be the most fun on this class was taking the right decision between switching from heal mode to dark mode with auchenai and setting up turns that way, planning to make big card draws with blademaster etc, i don t know about winning conditions in the past years but i agree that some kind of reach, maybe based on a combo would be the most fun to play (as priest)
I think there’s a few issues with priest. Firstly the priest hero card is directly affected by how many deathrattle are in the format. With standard rotation it lost a few while the other hero cards weren’t really affected. Secondly Priest used to be marketed as an ‘anti-aggro’ control class. Currently their board clears are situational (Dragon battlecry and the 1 mana silence deal atk) or are costed heavily (Lightbomb/whirlpool). This means that you are usually watching the aggro player smash you in the face while trying to stay alive or killing 1 minion at a time. Thirdly the lower amount of card generation/draw hurts priest especially if your spells/minions are trading 1 for 1. Compare this to DH/Warrior in which they have significant amounts of draw/generation. Finally the lack of a clear direction and ‘Power’ cards have people looking at priest thinking ‘Why wouldn’t I just play something else’ . When you look at other classes survivability tools (Cariel/Maki roll, Warrior gain 10 armour card etc.) and then look at priests you feel like you are wasting your time. Even shadow priest is just a bad version of other aggro decks. I’m hoping in the mini set priest gets something to help them find direction. Whether it’s a survivability tool, deathrattle support or shadow priest support I’d like to be able to think ‘ I could play (Insert decent archetype) Priest ‘ without feeling like I’m playing a bad deck.
I’m a priest main, and I haven’t enjoyed playing it for ages. Like you say, I like playing priest for the control aspect, so shadow priest was boring to me. Highlander priest was where it was at for me!
Play wild. It's tier 1 there. Standard is absolute garbage in Hearthstone. Card games need to stop trying to kill control out of this misguided theory that everyone hates playing against it and games need to be really fast.
Funny how it's always the aggro players who complain about the Priest when they have no idea how to play it, Priest might have low win rate but you see it more often on High Legend than gold
if we want to summarize priest has two fundamental problems, the difficulty is not balancing but how the developers worked. up to now there are a lot of archetypes but few really continued and when it comes to nerf over time many have not been done objectively and in comparison with other classes that often escaped priest (for community or for fear of repeating mistakes ) has often been punished.
One of my favorite decks was Quest for Immortality. It was just fun to play and I never thought I'd have fun playing a priest deck but when it came out I played Priest for the whole season.
Before the nerfs I was playing Ramp Druid and fought against a Boar Priest. He managed to get the sword, hit me in the face for 45 damage and still lose the game. I had already played Guff, the Priest was fatiguing and couldn't do anymore damage to me. I had 6 hp left and it took me 4-5 turns to get some mana back and stabilize and then he conceded. I felt a little bad for him.
My favourite priest deck was the value priest from kobolds and Catacombs, using the quest awaken the makers, zola, benedictus and twilights call. While it may not have been a high winrate deck, it led to crazy games
I've been spriest main since I started, even as far as dusting all else just to get a decent start (not recommended). Now years later I can make any Priest deck in the game (overall)... My opinion over the last few seasons is that they give the class all this potential, But then when someone banks a combo the whole player base freaks out , and rather than let the dust settle and let players figure out how to change the meta or wait for new cards (already designed and ready to come out throughput the year) to fix things, They listen to the whining and Nerf Yank the new interesting card away into total uselessness... And have done so every year pretty much since the Snip-Snap debacle.
Long time Priest player here, Priest mainly lacks and needs wincons, since they usually don't have one. In standard, even without that, they are kinda lacking a decent control core to even just stall like Barrens Control Priest. It's missing a few pieces to make it work consistently imo; the dragon can be an inconsistent board clear but is nuts when works. I recently have been playing a modified Shellfish Priest to be more of a control deck, and the deck has potential since the mill is nuts, 67% wr at legend. It beats a lot of slower decks and DH. I want to see how far up I can get next month
Priest is bad because the developers are afraid of what priest do, heal and resurrect. If they develop strong cards that allow priest to that then opponents can kill they’re minions. That’s why the best heal cards in the game go to paladin, Druid, and warlock
I used to love playing spiteful dragon priest in standard back in the day, that was a fun deck. In wild I used to love playing weasel/albatross decks with awaken the makers, benedictus, and OG Elise.
Probably my favorite deck of all time was Dragon Pirest in League of Explorers. It was so much fun, it was good and the deck that I climbed the highest with, sadly I never hit Legend with it because I was too scared to lose my progress (which I didn't know at the time that I would still get the rewards at the end of the season) it was probably the most fun I had in the game and my life was very different back then and alot of my firends were playing HS. You just had too be there
Priest would be in a better spot if actual control decks were a thing. Priest excelles at outlasting their opponents similar to armor warrior back in Boomsday but every deck these days seems to be near infinite aggro or an otk from hand
The problem with being able to outlast is that unlike Warrior or Paladin, you don’t have a win condition in Priest. That might’ve changed with Kazakus, but at that point you’re kind of just a worse version of Warrior. Actual Control decks ARE a thing, Control Paladin with Mr. Smite and Control Warrior with Kazakusan are actually doing pretty alright on the ladder, it’s just that Control Priest isn’t very good.
@@JJroks543 Plus, Sunken and Dredge cards are awful for the control/attrition gameplan. Hyper Control Priest's theoretical win condition of fatigue is just shut down when every class has access to shuffling more endgame cards to the bottom of their deck.
During the last couple years I’ve played control priest a lot in top 100 legend (as many other players on top of the ladder) while according to hsreplay priest was tier 3 or so. Control priest was the best deck since scholomance to barrens, and illucia honestly was the main reason. Control decks usually lose to combo decks, but could be very effective against aggro, and illucia was the best wincon against any combo deck, while also kinda useful against aggro. Playing highlander priest during the scholomance was the most fun experience for me since control warrior in karazhan meta. It’s sad, but I don’t think we’ll see any other well rounded control/fatigue deck with no straight up wincon that could compare to barrens control priest any time soon.
yeah I don't get that widespread hate against priests either. Mecha'thun priest was very intersting - interesting unusual deck-building of preparing to mill your own deck for the sake of setting up a combo faster which you can only do in 2 turns, when you signal it, opponent can dirty rat you if you don't keep other cards in hands, and only if you managed to survive those 2 turns while on 10 mana. Resurrect priest became a problem only in wild in my opinion (just as pirate warrior etc. ... which is not a consequence of the archetype being toxic in in itself, but more because it was getting constant support across multiple different expansions and years - which caused initially unintended synergies. the same can't be said about all archetypes. Also, the current priest archetypes, I don't understand why they would be so bad... are those numbers really reliable in all ranks? Shelfish priest literally has reach contrary to what Rarran claimed in the video. and it's the interaction between shelfish and the hero card xyrella... which can mill anyone when they are closing into fatigue. (It's not something I fancy, it's kind of a stupid synergy between one card which should be generating value and board presence ... and it instead flat out kills the opponent if they don't have enough cards in their deck... that one win condition is toxic I admit... but it at least balances out the deck.. it's kind of a control killer as I see it). and quest priest seems to be a very nice archetype for new players.
I personally always thought priest was the health buff class, staying alive until the rest of your cards do the rest, like the smaller damage spells it used to have. My favorite deck was just to be able to play the old spell damage priest, a board based burn deck but with holy smite now only hitting minions, holy nova only hitting minions, mind blast being removed and most good spell damage cards being gone my go to deck is no longer existant I also vowed to collect every priest card and make them work one way or another but i gave up on that
I mean, the current Druid now is like the priest we have in the current patch, we had rez priest that revives endless 7/7 walls back in the day, now we have Druids throwing in 2x 23/23 Ivus + 8/8 walls in a single turn. Also we don't have much AOE removals and they are also high cost to play with, you can't really remove their lethal setup and take back control of the board in a single turn, not unless you play Druid with 20 mana cap...
Quest priest here. We desperately relied on discoveries for lack of card draws and silence neutralization….druids are the bane of our existence with their OTK, at least a quest hunter we had a smol chance. Switcharoo priest was cheap while it lasted, hell even i cheesed out a diamond from that. I admit it felt like a 60% win rate and was not fun, silence to clear board, duplicate 20/20 boar gg.
I've been playing dragon priest for a while since kazakusan change. Lightmaw netherdrake for boardclear, drakonid operative for taking opponent win condition, murozond, and horn of wrathion for card draw and board presence. It's probably bottom of tier 2 in my opinion but really fun to play
raza priest was the perfect priest deck, it had so many different wincons outside of the normal otk inevitable wincon, and the deck was so flexible and required so much thinking to pilot well. There's a reason firebat played that deck so well.
I dont know about now, but back when i played (old gods), i was a priest main and i only played deathrattle priest with n'zoth and sylvanas and i remember it being extremely fun. Dont know if it was annoying to play against
One of my best buddies is a priest main with over 3000 priest wins and he always said that most of the time, Priest does no face damage, they do psychological damage. He does not win by doing damage, he wins by his opponent conceding.
One problem with Priest is there is no healing. They have all these cards that gain effects when healed, but there’s no renew, no circle of healing, no more minions that heal. So many dead cards in standard
When I started playing Hearthstone years ago, priest was my first favorite class because it was kind of easy. Just have minions with good stats on curve and keep them alive with healing and healt buffs. The win condition for me usually was Inner Fire once I had a big minion. But stopped playing priest once I realized that it was not good against more experienced players.
I’ve been playing Deathrattle priest (big stuff with Vandar to discount) and it’s been extremely effective so far. Been extremely successful against control warrior and Druid too
It would be better as a cheaper single unit removal card for sure since it seems like you'd want to use it to target certain cards (like a copied Queen Ashzara or Defias Cannoneer)
For me, the two aspects they should focus on priest is the ability to tutor (search the deck for specific cards) and the ability to conditionaly discoint minions, so it can have a solid board.
I've played since the beginning but only played in earnest with Old Gods as a c'thun druid. Since, though, I'm a priest main, starting with silence priest even before purify. That statement might not won me any favors but I wrecked jade druid so give me some credit for that. Speaking of druid, priest is vilified but jade and ramp druid get a pass? I played Rez priest but like the first expansion and a half....I'm not a monster. Every expansion I play Blizz's attempt at health buff priest and it fails miserably. My last hope was a buff deck using irondeep trog, but of course paly uses it better and got nerfed.
The “class identity” post was SUPER unpopular when it came out. It said Mage’s weakness was minion generation at a time when Conjurer’s Calling mage was super strong and could pretty reliably fill up the board. The feeling I got from the community was that the post was very tone-deaf and sounded more like how the devs wished Hearthstone was played rather than how it was actually played.
I feel the problem of balancing fun and power of decks is real for many decks and classes, not only priest. Think for instance at thief rogue, as soon as it came out it looked one of the most interesting interactions ever, then it turned out to be broken and blizzard nerfed it to death; the idea of having duels' treasures in standard was cool as well but it became oppressive; demon hunter had the same issue when it first came out and then again with soul and lifesteal versions. It's probably really hard to introduce fresh and interesting mechanics to the game and to keep them balanced, so eventually we end up having always the same old boring things, like it happened with libram pala, like it's happening now with tribe based decks and for sure many more examples i cannot think of right now.
MTG have the sling mecanic. It destroys the minion and does it atk or hp as damage. Maybe it could be in priest, it make sense because they have buff spells. it could be a "combo deck" for fast game or a wincon as control for a slower game.
People Hate mindbreaker Ilucia for not reason at all. Being able to disable hands was one of the best stuff in the game. it was something that disable pretty much any stall+combo decks that were basically "priest but i am playing other class and have access to insta winconditions that are not slow"
I think it’s such a shame. I‘ve just returned to HS after 3/4 years with Priest being my favorite class. I‘m just getting overrun by Demon Hunters and Warriors while trying to play Shellfish or Boar Priest. I thinks it’s a bummer to see priest in such a bad state. Don’t get me wrong I don’t want it to be overpowered, playable would be absolutely fine.
Dropped Hearthstone a couple years ago for multiple reasons, but mostly because Blizzard kept hating on priest while leaving other (more annoying) classes alone. I never found Priest to be unfun to play against, though I was mostly a priest main so I'm somewhat biased there. Still, I can't remember a single priest deck that I hated facing, while even now (years later) I can recall my unending hatred for Druid (F*** jade tribal) and faceHunter. Thanks for reminding me exactly why I quit before I could convince myself to try the game again
I remember playing back when the old gods set wasnt wild, and I ran a cthun priest deck and saw ok success with it, I just had my cthun stacked so high from the card that buffed it everytime something got healed and had a draw engine from the cleric. I still lost a lot tho but that deck was fun to me because it just seemed like an anime card game antagonist slowly stacking up his most powerful card to win.
People Hate mindbreaker Ilucia for not reason at all. Being able to disable hands was one of the best stuff in the game. it was something that disable pretty much any stall+combo decks that were basically "priest but i am playing other class and have access to insta winconditions that are not slow" - That said i could use the last argument against other classes too: When Mage was broken has hell did people have fun to get perma frozen their minions and get OTK or out value? Did people find "fun" play against wocky shaman at his prime? or druid. When a deck is strong everyone hates that deck. Thats not really something that Priest decks do and no one else.
The problem with priest in classic is that cards in priest work well with each other or in specific situations with no flexibility (ie execute and shield slam serve the same purpose and can both be activated by you gaining armor or damaging a minion, but sw death and pain serve the same purpose but your opponent decides what you have to play since they choose which minion they play, and therefore, the attack of the minion they play), but they have very inconsistent card draw. They only run cleric as a real card draw engine, so if they don't draw it or if she dies turn 2, priest can't play the game and it's an auto loss since you aren't able to draw your small powerful combo win conditions together, and you can't pull the correct answer. Priest only can play the game when cleric pops off, and even then it only allows them to play the game, then they have to win it as well which isn't easy since the class itself just isn't good. Basically, if everyone started the game with all 30 cards from their deck in their hand, priest would be the strongest class, but that just isn't the case.
In my opinion Priest is not the problem, it's the state of the game. The core strength of Priest has always been value, it has never had the best survivability but if it managed to survive it would almost always win the long game. The problem is that value has become irrelevant because practically every deck is either an OTK deck or capable of at least 20+ damage in a single turn. That's why the only working control classes are Paladin and Warrior, because they can survive the burn. Unless Blizzard releases more burn, value will become important next year. The biggest burn offenders currently are some quests and some heroes, which will both rotate. Kazakusan is also a problem since he alone replaces the need for value, but he'll rotate as well. After that we might actually see cards like Faelin get some play, and Priest cards like Behemoth and Whirlpool will become the big bombs they were meant to be. Or Blizzard could make it happen faster by releasing more cards like Mutanus and Vol'jin that let control decks counter hero cards and disrupt combo pieces.
So in Wild, I just spent an hour playing as a reno priest vs. a Mage. I drew my entire deck, we were constantly countering each other. I wished for the perfect card, got Juraxas. All those hits and 6/6's helped. I think Reno was used between us 7 times. I copied his stuff. Once I had a choice between Reno, Reno the Recicoligist, and the Mage Hero thing, with the cast spells from different schools. Which would have been fun but I was doing a shadow only thing. So I went with Relic, which helped. I love bullshit decks like this. Just fill it with powerful cards that have little to no synergy. I just so happen to have a lot of cool priest legendries. Add only shadow spells, some cool neutrals, and a spin on the wheel of Yogg, and it's all cool. He must have been despondent when I finally got the win.
Every class did have hated decks. But priest sure has a lead in that category. You know the types of decks like : not exactly top tier, often quite fun to play but even more often absolutely obnoxious to play against. They basically decided to make 'obnoxious' part of the class identity after realizing they managed to let several other classes outheal priest.
I don't see how it's less fun to play against Priest than it is to face Druid or Rogue. And honestly, it's fine if Priest sucks 90% of the time because it actually gives me a reason to not play Hearthstone and enjoy other games. Also I have to give less money to Blizzard, which is always a positive.
Dude , please answer me... i love playing priest ,but it seems it is being screwed more in every expansion!!! Why its ok to won on turn 6 but it is bad to heal?
The most fun i had playing hearthstone was with cloning gallery priest deck , that deck was hard to play specially when you are against aggressive decks and killing your opponent with mindblast was really satisfying. Profet velen and Malygos were my favourite cards of all time , i remember i tried to make otk decks with Malygos in it with every class.
Amen brother, that deck is just too beautiful. If you survived till turn nine and didn’t draw any minion, BAM!! That sweet sweet 40 damage to the face is just too good to describe.
Priest has a 2 fold problem. 1) Its designed around a playstyle that is not very fun to play against but very fun to play if you like to play HARDCORE control decks. At this point its become part of the class's identity that Priest is all about creating big minions, healing a million damage, etc. Barring Shadow Priest, which is relatively new and doesn't have near enough support to make it even competitively possible to climb with, Raza Priest is basically a COntrol Deck + OTK. 2) It is "niche" class in the sense that many of its archetypes are designed around different things and the support is almost always different. Raza Priest Decks look nothing like Control Priest Decks, look nothing like Deathrattle Priest Dekcs, etc. If you look at Druid for example, you have different deck lists, but there are many similar packages which makes it easier to play the class the more cars you have, for Priest you need to invest a lot of Dust, TIme and Effort crafting and learning these decks because often support cards for one arhcetyp are near useless in another.
There is no early game minions for Priest that do anything. That there is the problem. hey are dead too early. They can beat Druid with a huge removal package but rip....
It’s funny how Druid really is the anti-Priest. Any time that Priest is good, it gets nerfed. Any time Druid isn’t good, it gets an insane package of cards that make it overtuned.
And doesn’t get nerfed. I have no clue how they thought 2 mana “cast a spell a second time” was a good idea when they constantly give druid good big spells.
Druid has literally never been anything kther than the best class
@@solin21210 It's important to not say such silly things.
@@solin21210 I hate druids. I actually dust all my druids cards all the time for other classes that are fun and not so noob to play against. Hunter and druid for me are the 'easy mode' for children playing hearthstone.
All I've ever wanted from Priest is for it to be decent. I don't care about being at the top of the pack (Fluctuating between OP and trash is Warlock's thing, the perfect roleplay!) I just want them to stop giving it meme shit that only annoys people. It's never even been good outside of Raza Priest and that's backed up by Blizzard's own data on the class. No other class gets this much hate despite being terrible.
Hey Rarran, there was actually one good priest deck that wasnt oppressive and actually good to play with in hearthstone history, and it was in the form of Dragon Priest in its both incarnations from The Grand Tournament with Twilight whelp, Twilight Guardian & Wyrmrest Agent and Un'Goro with Drakonid Operative. Sure it was simpler times, but it was a tier 2-ish deck with decent matchups against aggro and control and a not-as-priest-annoying gameplay as we're used to.
Do you mean Mean streets since that's where Drakonid came from or do you mean it just found a good home in Un'goro due to the surrounding meta?
@@monkaWGiga Yea, more like option 2. In my memory Gadgetzan was pretty ruthless to any deck that wasnt a Reno/Kazakus deck, a Patches Pirate Package or Jade Druid/Shaman, but i can be misremembering. Personally i just played the second Dragon Priest iteration afterwards
@@daniellmontblack2020 That's very true. I do remember dragon priest appearing a lot more in Un'goro than Gadgetzaan.
There was a really good dragon priest deck with the summoner without spells at the time of k&c if I remember
@@argenis9518 yeah there was, it was even one of the few decks i've hit legend with, but i intentionally left it out because there were some interactions with Spiteful Summoner highrolls (like Tyrantus on turn 5 with coin) and Kobold+Cabal Shadow Priest that a lot of people werent much fond of hahahah
Being unfun to play against never seemed to stop Blizzard from buffing the bejeezus out of Warrior, Druid, Warlock, and Shaman, all of whom have had far, far longer reigns with the same types of decks that people complained about with Priest.
It's because Priest when it's the best deck it means it is a control meta and Blizzard hates control decks.,
"Priest heals for a lot of dmg with samuro+apot + sometimes discovers a clear + gets maximum 48% wr"- average player that probably plays 80% aggro: "OMG DELETE PRIEST ITS SO UNFUN TO FACE" and blizzard deletes it into oblivion for 2 years.
"Druid gains 69 armor for 2 mana while having 20 mana+ discovers consistently scale of onyxia or onyxia with guidance + has 60% wr"- average player : ye that is fine and less tilting.
It is
Makes zero sense to me 🤷🏾♂️.
It is still unfun to play against even if it has 20%wr and same goes for FUCKING QUEST HUNTER
@@argenis9518 de las diez creoiooi ocon pollo o puede o
@@nickolayvlachkov7781 people like you just like to bitch about everything that isn't aggro. Why should we listen to you? Stay bronze 10.
As a priest player myself, it's really annoying to play a class where it seems like being annoying and unfun to fight against is part of the class identity. And no matter how crap your decks are, people will always say you're the worst and most annoying class in the game, all while Warrior and Druid are like right there.
I'd love for blizzard to start bringing in more tempo mid-range priest options. Like their hero power seems like it should be ideal for keeping minions alive on the board, but it's always just control until there's that one aggro deck.
Yeah, aggro priest is aboslutely broken in wild. My win rate is legit about 70% so when I come back to play I just demolish everyone in the lower ranks bc it's easier to play than face hunter.
Good priest deck? Control Priest from Rastakhan. It had a win condition, good but not unbeatable control tools, and the DK Anduin hero power will keep you thinking on your feet so games are never boring
That's why I hate priest. While warrior and druid are still annoying as hell sometimes, at least they had much diversity in their kit (from value, to aggro, to midrange to control ecc.) and in very few occasions they became toxic (like with druidstone or pirate warrior).
Priest for almost every year has always been "ok now we're are going to have a 45 min game where my only hope is to make you either die or boredom or make you literally use all your cards" or "yeah in gonna deal 300 damage with this combo and you can't do nothing about it" and the one time he became aggro was like "yeah its turn 3 and you are dead, deal with it".
The only time that I decided to play priest was in saviors of uldum with that midrange deck, and that's it.
Not to be mean, but I'm always happy to see priest get shit on.
To be fair my fellow priest brother, they did nerf pirate warrior a bit more for their quest which was desperately needed so they’re a lil more tolerable.
@@khaluu2000 this nerf was very laughable since to they didn't adress real elephants in room like Cannoneer or Smite
The problem is Preiest is a stall class but the hearthstone team has frequently shown that they do not want stall stratagies to do well with faster games.
If your whole stratagy relies on on stalls but 90% percent of games are over on turn 8 their is nothing you can do
This
I like stall control. Classic control warrior is stall, as well, but it uses its stall to build armor and then leverages that armor into removal. Priest needs something similar that isn't just tons of mana cheat and stupid discover into discover crap.
@@Osric24 the two types of priest decks I love using. Stall priest where I make a deck to theoretical counter every deck.(Workes as well as you expect). And thief priest. Wish thief priest received at least half the love thief rouge got
Edit:what the terrible stall priest deck taught me. Priest removal sucks
@@Osric24 I feel like if Priest just got more Lifesteal spells that can't easily be leveraged into a ridiculous amount of value it would probably help, especially if they're Shadow spells so that Shadow Priest has the option to run more actual spells.
@@amberlee4536 Full agree, warlock has gotten the best lifesteal support, but priest needs more of it to suit Spriest, and also to match that sustain/remove style control that warrior can do.
Priest is either broken or it’s trash hasn’t been a middle ground priest deck in awhile
Same as shaman, either its tier 1 broken or not played at all, no middle ground
The last one I remember was legit dragon priest back in gadgetzan
I mean, wasn't exactly priest as we knew it, but shadow priest last rotation was a fairly strong but not broken deck.
Talking "classic" priest, through...
@@MiudmonDice it wasnt really that strong honestly.. It was a worse version of face hunter. Most of the deck was comprised of neutral cards and it was only viable because of 2 cards.. illucia and raise dead. It was introduced in Strormwind with bare bones support, has had nothing since then and is nowhere to be found in the meta.
This short sided, half assed, underwhelming approach seems to be team 5s class vision.
It's paifully trash most of the Time. Wild format is the only place you can find some priests. And it's still like resurrect priest from Uldum, that was a long time ago.
Giving Priest reach might be a solution technically, but in terms of design and gameplay experience, we should NOT have to resort to this.
The fact that a class is far worse just because it can't smorc face as well as other classes is moreso a problem with the game itself. Priest simply does not match the game philosophy of the developers at the moment.
The devs want fast games that people can play while at the bus stop or while taking a shit. Strategy is irrelevant. Value is irrelevant. Game balance is irrelevant. Healing is nearly irrevelant. Controlling the board is irrelevant because once certain decks reach a turn they can just kill you from hand.
I've been playing hearthstone since Grand Tournament and the things I loved about the game back then have disappeared.
I felt the same way for a while, then I started playing duels. Don’t get me wrong, duels is a flawed game mode but it’s the game mode where controlling the board seems the most powerful, and for me it makes me feel like I tend to have actual agency, even in aggro matchups
@@robinscompass5951 I'll take your word for that. I was mainly referring to the main game mode, but I do quite enjoy the additions of Battlegrounds and Duels. I haven't played Duels much but if anything will motivate me to grind arena again for packs it's that.
I couldn't agree more. Priest was fun when the 3 general deck archetypes were aggro, midrange, and control, rather than just aggro and combo
Well said.
Control is doing pretty good right now, tempo decks as well only aggro deck running around is dh right now the only deck that just has to be changed not nerfed is quest hunter, it is thw most unfun and uninteravtive deck to play against
I remember highlander Priest from Uldum and Dragons, it was my favourite deck from that meta and one I still fondly remember as being really fun even though ive stopped playing the game
Basically: Either priest player has fun or everyone else around him has fun
Goes to show that Blizz is not capable of balancing him
Yeah, as a mainly Priest player, it has always been a force pushing me away from Hearthstone that they could never be balanced, seemingly due to bias. Shadow Priest apparently went against the identity of Priest, despite it being a cool deck possibility, combo went against the card draw and spell damage weakness, but again was another iconic form of playable Priest.
The class is balanced around Healing and Control, the former of which does nothing without extreme levels of synergy, and the later tends to be outclassed by Warrior whose weapons, taunt and armour access compliment the archetype much more.
I still remember when people were crying about the first Highlander Priest, a deck completely screwed over by not drawing unsearchable combo peices early enough, to which I had to remind them that it was the first time Priest had ever been tier 1 and it was far from the worst meta Hearthstone had been through.
What about when people threw hands at Blizzard because people had been complaining about how bad Priest was and Hearthstones response was to reveal "Purify" as an adventure exclusive card? Or back when Priest's most acknowledgable feat was a 30 card RNG Meme deck in Classic? That and Auchenai Circle. Priests early game line-up used to be Northshire, pass, pass, into one of Priests 5 or 6 four-drops they had for some reason.
Priest just has no real goals and is mainly balanced around the do-nothing healing flavour of the class, It's naturally bad and by the time it gets the cards to have a comprehensive stratergy and goal, it's the last set before rotation comes around and sweeps at least 50% of the deck away. Double points if people complain and it gets nerfed or a vital card gets hall of famed before it happens.
I swear the class is just hated by people. Even back in Classic when it had god-awful winrate with god-awful cards, people still complained about them, just because they played into a Mind Control, Cabal Shadow Priest or a Shadow Word Death, which they would have been more aware of if they played against it more often.
Very very well said.
Coming back to this later as well, I also really hate that Priest has literally had it's possible archetypes stolen from them. Like, Priest has Mind Vision and other cards like it, people complain about Priest being more thief-y than Rogue, a class that literally was having no problems at the time, and what do you know, copy-Priest recieves minimal support and Rogue gets a whole thief archetype dedicated to them that they keep re-visiting.
Priest's Mind Vision also used to let you straight up steal cards from your opponent as well. However it and OG Illidan both got changed due to the dev's opinion of hand and deck destruction being an unfun mechanic. Fast forward and we get Dirty Rat availible to everyone, and further than that, Warlock get's cards like Gnomeferatu, Demonic Project, Tickatus, Altar etc. Warlock gets to enjoy disruption and anti-meta options as a part of their identity, but for Priest's it doesn't fit apparently.
The only deck from priest I actually hate is Resurrect priest in wild, because it's incredibly stupid to know you are going to lose a game when they drop a barnes at turn 4.
Dragon priest, however, was really great and played it myself.
It really is a case that they set the identity of the class and their core set so much apart from other classes, that when they try to make a new archetype work it has to be not really priest, only priest-adjacent.
When watching people playing janky combo decks (like MarkMcKz), I noticed the games they'd upload where they'd finally pull off said janky combo were versus Priest a majority of the time. So, we need priest to allow people to play hilarious but inefficient combo decks, and get their clips for RUclips.
This is so true its funny. Always against some priest just playing random crap.
I don't understand the Priest hate, never will. Anyway, I don't care what anyone says, for me, the designers have no idea what they are doing with the class. They told us "We bring back cool cards like Draconid Operative and Murozond" in the coreset, everybody lost their sh!t about it... Then the expansion hits : 0 dragons and 0 support for it. Why isn't the Colossal for Priest a Dragon?!? Then every class has a cool hero card they can play as standalone, without any restriction except one... Xyrella needs good Deathrattles. How many did they bring back in the Core set? 0... How many did they print for the class in this expansion? 0...
They support already powerful archetypes like Pirate decks, but can't even support 1 Dragon or DR archetype for Priest? What a bunch of clowns...
They’re scared to print something good for Priest because they know they’ll probably have to nerf it almost instantly. Switcharoo got nerfed *and* banned in Wild in the same patch for instance because people didn’t like facing it (very understandable in Wild though, that combo was BS)
@@TheOneWhoReportsForDuty Pretty sure their test team messed up (nothing new) and just missed the interaction. Had they caught it in their test phase, they would have made the change before releasing the card.
Well said
Hopefully you’ll understand this ratio
@@JimBobe L
Priest is just a bizarre black sheep in my eyes, it's like a mistake they keep correcting to this day.
It's like monowhite in MTG, even the cards are the same color. It's always worse than the other options unless it plays dirty.
Literally, the only way Priest can be playable in any given meta is by being the most obnoxious class.
I feel like they don't even get to be like White from MTG, because at least White can summon a fuck ton of dudes to do their work. Priest has 3 primary identities, Value Control, Combo Control, or Burn Aggro. If the Combo cards are too fast, it goes into Burn Aggro, and if they are slow they usually get wrapped in a control shell. Thus Priest is doomed to be a Control deck with the chance of going full Burn.
And then there's Blue, which is the definition of obnoxious and uninteractive. Seriously, why not a grindy midrange deck? As a control class priest doesn't work because of the hero power, which works the best at mantaining units alive.
Priest is bad the majority of time, but when they win, they probably humiliate the opponents, thus giving a feeling that the class is unfun to play against. But what you don't actually notice is that this priest you lost probably lost the other 5 games before you
Truth, right here.
I really liked priest when they had the vellen mindblast combo deck and the my master will return controll guy was fun too
I really enjoyed Cloning gallery priest when that was a deck.
As a priest player they should make the minions with good stats for cost will maybe more health and less attack and give priest health buffs, sprinkled with some decent deathrattle and some good removal so it can return to a board control deck to stomp out aggro and duel with other control decks. But its easier said that done.
Priest problems starts with its hero power.
It needs a rebalance.
And it's about time classes get a second hero power to choose when building a deck. Give classes more options to play and experiment with.
So basically duels, but in the normal format.
@@erikaz1590 I left much before Duels so I couldn't say.
But I think standard priest hero power should be healing more targets (random friendly minion + hero?) for more health (3 or 4?) so the class could be somewhat balanced.
@@chaferraro okay. In duels, after you pick a hero, you can select 1 of 3 hero powers. So priests' powers were:
1. Heal a character for 3. If it's still damaged, draw a card.
2. Passive. When you cast a spell, deal 1 damage to the enemy hero.
3. Summon a 0/1 voidfiend that steals 1 health from the enemy hero at the end of your turn.
@@erikaz1590 I think Duels could be a good place to experiment those new ideas of hero powers and, with time and balance, eventually migrate them to standard play...
Also, I like that 1st option a lot and I think it should be the priest standard hero power already.
I would like to go even further on the heals and test another version without the card draw.
I would try out something like:
"heal every friendly character for 3 HP" and see how it does on the meta... 🤔
My favorite deck of all times was the Control priest after League of Explorers. You had Deathrattles, Lightbomb, Cabal, Sylvanas, Justicar, Auchenai Soulpriest + Circle of healing combo and the Golden Monkey as the win condition.
Priest is my favourite class. I would love for them to find a way to help the class. I agree that with some burst dmg Priest would be able to compete in this turn 8 win con meta.
Turn 8 Win Con Meta is "uncannily" accurate.
I hope the game slows down a bit. Not like 20 minute long control vs control games but I want to be able to do a cool combo without being at 5 health on turn 6.
@@TheOneWhoReportsForDuty Thats the great part about a control meta. If you dont want a control vs control 20 minute game...JUST DONT PLAY CONTROL
In the history of HS Druid and Rogue have been 100x more problematic and unfun than Priest. I say this is as someone who mainly Plays Druid, Priest and Rogue. I also enjoy kicking puppies and pissing in other people’s cereal.
Rogue is the most fun class in the game. I am only rogue mainer with 5100 rogue-wins. I played only rogue all game, and yes I tried other classes, but they all seemed to me boring and not fun at all. Rogue is the best class for me.
@@impkiller5932 All good decks are fun to play, it becomes unfun when you have to play against them. Priest in unfun because it feels like they just undo everything you do. Druid’s ramp and strong token synergies make them ramp ahead of you and build big boards efficiently and before you can reasonably deal with them, which is just worse and harder to play against. Rogue eschews most interaction so it’s good decks are usually very solitaire like which people don’t like because they aren’t really playing a game of hearthstone, they are watching one.
As a priest player, you’re invited to the prayer session 🙏
I'd love to see more value given to cards like Auchenai Soulpriest. Loved being able to switch between healing and damage. Keep priest's identity but make it possible to actually have some damage.
Hell you could start designing some shadow cards that "drain life" instead of just healing. One suggestion
ive always thought it would be neat if they gave priest some "other class" minions. Like a stealth minion thats flavor-wise a rogue. Or a taunt with a ton of health that is supposed to be a "tank" and then its like priest is the leader of a wow party. That way they could actually balance the class while retaining anduin's role as a support/healer.
I really didn't mind facing rez priest, I'm thinking of when it was the reborn heal 3 minion and the 4/8 taunt with lifesteal. That is just a pretty normal control deck to me.
It’s frustrating when other classes can do about the some things pries do but no one really complains but the instant priest gets something decent people lose their minds. Feels a bit like band wagoning based on old decks but idk I feel meh after seeing my favorite class keep getting bad decks or getting good decks then seeing them immediately nerfed.
well if you talking about warrior, he can't cope the spells and use them every single turn ,,, and if you talking about druid he doesn't have removel other then the 7 mana dragon thingy , and even that isn't that good ,,,, priest has a lot of countrol spells and most of them cost 5 and less , and he can discover a lot of spells every turn , what makes him really annoying to play vs
any class get too aggro to deal with or too much countrol isn't fun to play vs ,,, that is why ppl hate quest warrior and any form of priest,,,,, i think they could solve that by given priest less discover and make them have a strong hero or winning coundeion late game
i ve been playing priest for the ealier hearthstone years, what i remember to be the most fun on this class was taking the right decision between switching from heal mode to dark mode with auchenai and setting up turns that way, planning to make big card draws with blademaster etc, i don t know about winning conditions in the past years but i agree that some kind of reach, maybe based on a combo would be the most fun to play (as priest)
I think there’s a few issues with priest.
Firstly the priest hero card is directly affected by how many deathrattle are in the format. With standard rotation it lost a few while the other hero cards weren’t really affected.
Secondly Priest used to be marketed as an ‘anti-aggro’ control class. Currently their board clears are situational (Dragon battlecry and the 1 mana silence deal atk) or are costed heavily (Lightbomb/whirlpool). This means that you are usually watching the aggro player smash you in the face while trying to stay alive or killing 1 minion at a time.
Thirdly the lower amount of card generation/draw hurts priest especially if your spells/minions are trading 1 for 1. Compare this to DH/Warrior in which they have significant amounts of draw/generation.
Finally the lack of a clear direction and ‘Power’ cards have people looking at priest thinking ‘Why wouldn’t I just play something else’ . When you look at other classes survivability tools (Cariel/Maki roll, Warrior gain 10 armour card etc.) and then look at priests you feel like you are wasting your time. Even shadow priest is just a bad version of other aggro decks.
I’m hoping in the mini set priest gets something to help them find direction. Whether it’s a survivability tool, deathrattle support or shadow priest support I’d like to be able to think ‘ I could play (Insert decent archetype) Priest ‘ without feeling like I’m playing a bad deck.
I’m a priest main, and I haven’t enjoyed playing it for ages.
Like you say, I like playing priest for the control aspect, so shadow priest was boring to me.
Highlander priest was where it was at for me!
Play wild. It's tier 1 there. Standard is absolute garbage in Hearthstone. Card games need to stop trying to kill control out of this misguided theory that everyone hates playing against it and games need to be really fast.
Funny how it's always the aggro players who complain about the Priest when they have no idea how to play it, Priest might have low win rate but you see it more often on High Legend than gold
True
In top legend boar priest is crazy
I see the cam video better, less cloudy than the last one, I think that the lightning was the problem.
Nice video!
if we want to summarize priest has two fundamental problems, the difficulty is not balancing but how the developers worked. up to now there are a lot of archetypes but few really continued and when it comes to nerf over time many have not been done objectively and in comparison with other classes that often escaped priest (for community or for fear of repeating mistakes ) has often been punished.
One of my favorite decks was Quest for Immortality. It was just fun to play and I never thought I'd have fun playing a priest deck but when it came out I played Priest for the whole season.
My fave was Awaken the Makers Priest, still playing to this day in wild as a Highlander deck with Reno, Raza, all that jazz.
Before the nerfs I was playing Ramp Druid and fought against a Boar Priest. He managed to get the sword, hit me in the face for 45 damage and still lose the game. I had already played Guff, the Priest was fatiguing and couldn't do anymore damage to me. I had 6 hp left and it took me 4-5 turns to get some mana back and stabilize and then he conceded. I felt a little bad for him.
Power creep completely negates class identity. Everyone heals more than priest these days
My favourite priest deck was the value priest from kobolds and Catacombs, using the quest awaken the makers, zola, benedictus and twilights call. While it may not have been a high winrate deck, it led to crazy games
I've been spriest main since I started, even as far as dusting all else just to get a decent start (not recommended).
Now years later I can make any Priest deck in the game (overall)...
My opinion over the last few seasons is that they give the class all this potential,
But then when someone banks a combo the whole player base freaks out , and rather than let the dust settle and let players figure out how to change the meta or wait for new cards (already designed and ready to come out throughput the year) to fix things,
They listen to the whining and Nerf Yank the new interesting card away into total uselessness...
And have done so every year pretty much since the Snip-Snap debacle.
Long time Priest player here, Priest mainly lacks and needs wincons, since they usually don't have one. In standard, even without that, they are kinda lacking a decent control core to even just stall like Barrens Control Priest. It's missing a few pieces to make it work consistently imo; the dragon can be an inconsistent board clear but is nuts when works. I recently have been playing a modified Shellfish Priest to be more of a control deck, and the deck has potential since the mill is nuts, 67% wr at legend. It beats a lot of slower decks and DH. I want to see how far up I can get next month
Priest is bad because the developers are afraid of what priest do, heal and resurrect. If they develop strong cards that allow priest to that then opponents can kill they’re minions.
That’s why the best heal cards in the game go to paladin, Druid, and warlock
I used to love playing spiteful dragon priest in standard back in the day, that was a fun deck. In wild I used to love playing weasel/albatross decks with awaken the makers, benedictus, and OG Elise.
Priest dominated for so long that I will never identify this as a problem.
Probably my favorite deck of all time was Dragon Pirest in League of Explorers. It was so much fun, it was good and the deck that I climbed the highest with, sadly I never hit Legend with it because I was too scared to lose my progress (which I didn't know at the time that I would still get the rewards at the end of the season) it was probably the most fun I had in the game and my life was very different back then and alot of my firends were playing HS. You just had too be there
Priest would be in a better spot if actual control decks were a thing. Priest excelles at outlasting their opponents similar to armor warrior back in Boomsday but every deck these days seems to be near infinite aggro or an otk from hand
The problem with being able to outlast is that unlike Warrior or Paladin, you don’t have a win condition in Priest. That might’ve changed with Kazakus, but at that point you’re kind of just a worse version of Warrior. Actual Control decks ARE a thing, Control Paladin with Mr. Smite and Control Warrior with Kazakusan are actually doing pretty alright on the ladder, it’s just that Control Priest isn’t very good.
@@JJroks543 Plus, Sunken and Dredge cards are awful for the control/attrition gameplan. Hyper Control Priest's theoretical win condition of fatigue is just shut down when every class has access to shuffling more endgame cards to the bottom of their deck.
During the last couple years I’ve played control priest a lot in top 100 legend (as many other players on top of the ladder) while according to hsreplay priest was tier 3 or so. Control priest was the best deck since scholomance to barrens, and illucia honestly was the main reason. Control decks usually lose to combo decks, but could be very effective against aggro, and illucia was the best wincon against any combo deck, while also kinda useful against aggro. Playing highlander priest during the scholomance was the most fun experience for me since control warrior in karazhan meta. It’s sad, but I don’t think we’ll see any other well rounded control/fatigue deck with no straight up wincon that could compare to barrens control priest any time soon.
Do we want priest to be unplayable or toxic? I miss the contol priest mirrors against players that didn’t understand the matchup
yeah I don't get that widespread hate against priests either.
Mecha'thun priest was very intersting - interesting unusual deck-building of preparing to mill your own deck for the sake of setting up a combo faster which you can only do in 2 turns, when you signal it, opponent can dirty rat you if you don't keep other cards in hands, and only if you managed to survive those 2 turns while on 10 mana.
Resurrect priest became a problem only in wild in my opinion (just as pirate warrior etc. ... which is not a consequence of the archetype being toxic in in itself, but more because it was getting constant support across multiple different expansions and years - which caused initially unintended synergies.
the same can't be said about all archetypes.
Also, the current priest archetypes, I don't understand why they would be so bad... are those numbers really reliable in all ranks?
Shelfish priest literally has reach contrary to what Rarran claimed in the video.
and it's the interaction between shelfish and the hero card xyrella... which can mill anyone when they are closing into fatigue.
(It's not something I fancy, it's kind of a stupid synergy between one card which should be generating value and board presence ... and it instead flat out kills the opponent if they don't have enough cards in their deck... that one win condition is toxic I admit... but it at least balances out the deck.. it's kind of a control killer as I see it).
and quest priest seems to be a very nice archetype for new players.
I personally always thought priest was the health buff class, staying alive until the rest of your cards do the rest, like the smaller damage spells it used to have.
My favorite deck was just to be able to play the old spell damage priest, a board based burn deck but with holy smite now only hitting minions, holy nova only hitting minions, mind blast being removed and most good spell damage cards being gone my go to deck is no longer existant
I also vowed to collect every priest card and make them work one way or another but i gave up on that
Oh my, it's the magical hoodie, the one that disappears and reappears depending on whether the camera zooms in or out !
I mean, the current Druid now is like the priest we have in the current patch, we had rez priest that revives endless 7/7 walls back in the day, now we have Druids throwing in 2x 23/23 Ivus + 8/8 walls in a single turn. Also we don't have much AOE removals and they are also high cost to play with, you can't really remove their lethal setup and take back control of the board in a single turn, not unless you play Druid with 20 mana cap...
Quest priest here. We desperately relied on discoveries for lack of card draws and silence neutralization….druids are the bane of our existence with their OTK, at least a quest hunter we had a smol chance.
Switcharoo priest was cheap while it lasted, hell even i cheesed out a diamond from that. I admit it felt like a 60% win rate and was not fun, silence to clear board, duplicate 20/20 boar gg.
Grand tournament priest was my favorite time to play the class. Highlander hero power spam with Confessor Paletress.
I've been playing dragon priest for a while since kazakusan change. Lightmaw netherdrake for boardclear, drakonid operative for taking opponent win condition, murozond, and horn of wrathion for card draw and board presence. It's probably bottom of tier 2 in my opinion but really fun to play
raza priest was the perfect priest deck, it had so many different wincons outside of the normal otk inevitable wincon, and the deck was so flexible and required so much thinking to pilot well. There's a reason firebat played that deck so well.
I dont know about now, but back when i played (old gods), i was a priest main and i only played deathrattle priest with n'zoth and sylvanas and i remember it being extremely fun. Dont know if it was annoying to play against
One of my best buddies is a priest main with over 3000 priest wins and he always said that most of the time, Priest does no face damage, they do psychological damage. He does not win by doing damage, he wins by his opponent conceding.
I thought my C'thun deck for Priest in Whispers of the Old Gods was fairly decent, but I could be remembering wrong (seems like almost a decade ago).
Priest and Mage are my favouite classes and whenever they are good they are the most complained decks because of mainly the randomness.
One problem with Priest is there is no healing. They have all these cards that gain effects when healed, but there’s no renew, no circle of healing, no more minions that heal. So many dead cards in standard
When I started playing Hearthstone years ago, priest was my first favorite class because it was kind of easy. Just have minions with good stats on curve and keep them alive with healing and healt buffs. The win condition for me usually was Inner Fire once I had a big minion. But stopped playing priest once I realized that it was not good against more experienced players.
I’ve been playing Deathrattle priest (big stuff with Vandar to discount) and it’s been extremely effective so far. Been extremely successful against control warrior and Druid too
Paladin and warrior are doing control better than it now and maybe even shaman, they gave priest a 9 mana board clear that should be at most 7
It would be better as a cheaper single unit removal card for sure since it seems like you'd want to use it to target certain cards (like a copied Queen Ashzara or Defias Cannoneer)
For me, the two aspects they should focus on priest is the ability to tutor (search the deck for specific cards) and the ability to conditionaly discoint minions, so it can have a solid board.
I've played since the beginning but only played in earnest with Old Gods as a c'thun druid. Since, though, I'm a priest main, starting with silence priest even before purify. That statement might not won me any favors but I wrecked jade druid so give me some credit for that. Speaking of druid, priest is vilified but jade and ramp druid get a pass? I played Rez priest but like the first expansion and a half....I'm not a monster. Every expansion I play Blizz's attempt at health buff priest and it fails miserably. My last hope was a buff deck using irondeep trog, but of course paly uses it better and got nerfed.
The “class identity” post was SUPER unpopular when it came out. It said Mage’s weakness was minion generation at a time when Conjurer’s Calling mage was super strong and could pretty reliably fill up the board. The feeling I got from the community was that the post was very tone-deaf and sounded more like how the devs wished Hearthstone was played rather than how it was actually played.
The first iteration of dragon priest was a great midrange deck, that was how many years ago?
I feel the problem of balancing fun and power of decks is real for many decks and classes, not only priest. Think for instance at thief rogue, as soon as it came out it looked one of the most interesting interactions ever, then it turned out to be broken and blizzard nerfed it to death; the idea of having duels' treasures in standard was cool as well but it became oppressive; demon hunter had the same issue when it first came out and then again with soul and lifesteal versions. It's probably really hard to introduce fresh and interesting mechanics to the game and to keep them balanced, so eventually we end up having always the same old boring things, like it happened with libram pala, like it's happening now with tribe based decks and for sure many more examples i cannot think of right now.
MTG have the sling mecanic. It destroys the minion and does it atk or hp as damage. Maybe it could be in priest, it make sense because they have buff spells. it could be a "combo deck" for fast game or a wincon as control for a slower game.
This man changing clothes as fast as Padme
People Hate mindbreaker Ilucia for not reason at all. Being able to disable hands was one of the best stuff in the game. it was something that disable pretty much any stall+combo decks that were basically "priest but i am playing other class and have access to insta winconditions that are not slow"
people be like: priest at 52% winrate: bad
priest at 0% winrate: bad
people on warrior: pirate warrior yeah let's get fricking ranks
Pirate warrior is not as cancer as quest hunter (best deck in the game imo) and demon hunter
I think it’s such a shame. I‘ve just returned to HS after 3/4 years with Priest being my favorite class. I‘m just getting overrun by Demon Hunters and Warriors while trying to play Shellfish or Boar Priest.
I thinks it’s a bummer to see priest in such a bad state.
Don’t get me wrong I don’t want it to be overpowered, playable would be absolutely fine.
As long as we don’t have Shadowreaper Anduin or Res Priest I’m all for them being decent.
@@TheOneWhoReportsForDuty So what's your opinion about shadow reaper rexxar who costs 5 mana and always start in hand?
@@BernieDSniper Hate it as much as I did Shadowreaper Anduin
fun fact: priest winrate will soon drop below the
human body temperature
Dropped Hearthstone a couple years ago for multiple reasons, but mostly because Blizzard kept hating on priest while leaving other (more annoying) classes alone. I never found Priest to be unfun to play against, though I was mostly a priest main so I'm somewhat biased there. Still, I can't remember a single priest deck that I hated facing, while even now (years later) I can recall my unending hatred for Druid (F*** jade tribal) and faceHunter. Thanks for reminding me exactly why I quit before I could convince myself to try the game again
Me thinking about good priests: "Surrender your will to the kabal!"
that ending tho, and up next is the druid problem
With this new expansion, I've been playing Silence Priest. It has very good early damage, but can struggle with board control/mechs
Also Priest is probably the most loved class. Anytime it was playable it got huge play rates, sometimes more than tier 1 decks.
I remember playing back when the old gods set wasnt wild, and I ran a cthun priest deck and saw ok success with it, I just had my cthun stacked so high from the card that buffed it everytime something got healed and had a draw engine from the cleric. I still lost a lot tho but that deck was fun to me because it just seemed like an anime card game antagonist slowly stacking up his most powerful card to win.
Priest is probably my favorite class to play, but hearthstone is usually too fast of a game for priest decks to actually be successful.
People Hate mindbreaker Ilucia for not reason at all. Being able to disable hands was one of the best stuff in the game. it was something that disable pretty much any stall+combo decks that were basically "priest but i am playing other class and have access to insta winconditions that are not slow" - That said i could use the last argument against other classes too: When Mage was broken has hell did people have fun to get perma frozen their minions and get OTK or out value? Did people find "fun" play against wocky shaman at his prime? or druid. When a deck is strong everyone hates that deck. Thats not really something that Priest decks do and no one else.
5:49 nice quick change
The problem with priest in classic is that cards in priest work well with each other or in specific situations with no flexibility (ie execute and shield slam serve the same purpose and can both be activated by you gaining armor or damaging a minion, but sw death and pain serve the same purpose but your opponent decides what you have to play since they choose which minion they play, and therefore, the attack of the minion they play), but they have very inconsistent card draw. They only run cleric as a real card draw engine, so if they don't draw it or if she dies turn 2, priest can't play the game and it's an auto loss since you aren't able to draw your small powerful combo win conditions together, and you can't pull the correct answer. Priest only can play the game when cleric pops off, and even then it only allows them to play the game, then they have to win it as well which isn't easy since the class itself just isn't good. Basically, if everyone started the game with all 30 cards from their deck in their hand, priest would be the strongest class, but that just isn't the case.
Old school dragon priest was fun and so was raza shadow priest.
In my opinion Priest is not the problem, it's the state of the game. The core strength of Priest has always been value, it has never had the best survivability but if it managed to survive it would almost always win the long game. The problem is that value has become irrelevant because practically every deck is either an OTK deck or capable of at least 20+ damage in a single turn. That's why the only working control classes are Paladin and Warrior, because they can survive the burn.
Unless Blizzard releases more burn, value will become important next year. The biggest burn offenders currently are some quests and some heroes, which will both rotate. Kazakusan is also a problem since he alone replaces the need for value, but he'll rotate as well.
After that we might actually see cards like Faelin get some play, and Priest cards like Behemoth and Whirlpool will become the big bombs they were meant to be.
Or Blizzard could make it happen faster by releasing more cards like Mutanus and Vol'jin that let control decks counter hero cards and disrupt combo pieces.
What’s even more ridiculous is that the team shows that they know how to make win conditions for slow or control decks, it just always goes to Warrior
So in Wild, I just spent an hour playing as a reno priest vs. a Mage. I drew my entire deck, we were constantly countering each other. I wished for the perfect card, got Juraxas. All those hits and 6/6's helped. I think Reno was used between us 7 times. I copied his stuff. Once I had a choice between Reno, Reno the Recicoligist, and the Mage Hero thing, with the cast spells from different schools. Which would have been fun but I was doing a shadow only thing. So I went with Relic, which helped.
I love bullshit decks like this. Just fill it with powerful cards that have little to no synergy.
I just so happen to have a lot of cool priest legendries. Add only shadow spells, some cool neutrals, and a spin on the wheel of Yogg, and it's all cool.
He must have been despondent when I finally got the win.
I loved priest back in the Raza highlander day. I just think priest should get more standalone great legendaries to make powerful swing turns
Every class did have hated decks. But priest sure has a lead in that category.
You know the types of decks like : not exactly top tier, often quite fun to play but even more often absolutely obnoxious to play against.
They basically decided to make 'obnoxious' part of the class identity after realizing they managed to let several other classes outheal priest.
I don't see how it's less fun to play against Priest than it is to face Druid or Rogue.
And honestly, it's fine if Priest sucks 90% of the time because it actually gives me a reason to not play Hearthstone and enjoy other games.
Also I have to give less money to Blizzard, which is always a positive.
Res priest is still a absolute nightmare to deal with in wild, especially now that some can run prince ren.
You could replace "priest" with any class here
Is it fun to play against any class if you're outmatched?
After the serpent wig buffs, it puts this video in an interesting perspective.
As a priest player, i agree with every second of the video and i miss have a fun deck that can win games
Dude , please answer me... i love playing priest ,but it seems it is being screwed more in every expansion!!! Why its ok to won on turn 6 but it is bad to heal?
It’s not that it’s bad, just a current design of the game. Value is not as important as killing your opponent
I just saw your mini.pack video and notice how they buffed pirates and nothing much for priest. Maybe shadow quest priest? Lol
The most fun i had playing hearthstone was with cloning gallery priest deck , that deck was hard to play specially when you are against aggressive decks and killing your opponent with mindblast was really satisfying.
Profet velen and Malygos were my favourite cards of all time , i remember i tried to make otk decks with Malygos in it with every class.
Amen brother, that deck is just too beautiful. If you survived till turn nine and didn’t draw any minion, BAM!! That sweet sweet 40 damage to the face is just too good to describe.
@@KenWu-pl3or yeah I hope they bring back that deck one day.
I play basically explusively Rogue, Warlock and Priest... Yeah today is a great time to play Hearthstone...
Priest has a 2 fold problem. 1) Its designed around a playstyle that is not very fun to play against but very fun to play if you like to play HARDCORE control decks. At this point its become part of the class's identity that Priest is all about creating big minions, healing a million damage, etc. Barring Shadow Priest, which is relatively new and doesn't have near enough support to make it even competitively possible to climb with, Raza Priest is basically a COntrol Deck + OTK. 2) It is "niche" class in the sense that many of its archetypes are designed around different things and the support is almost always different. Raza Priest Decks look nothing like Control Priest Decks, look nothing like Deathrattle Priest Dekcs, etc. If you look at Druid for example, you have different deck lists, but there are many similar packages which makes it easier to play the class the more cars you have, for Priest you need to invest a lot of Dust, TIme and Effort crafting and learning these decks because often support cards for one arhcetyp are near useless in another.
Dragon priest from Mean streets was my favourite priest deck of all time. I miss it
There is no early game minions for Priest that do anything. That there is the problem. hey are dead too early. They can beat Druid with a huge removal package but rip....