Well, i dont know how many people will leave. I know for sure patch was enough to get me back at playing a little (just dont have time for more).
Havent figured out the meta yet, and thats the enjoyable part.
As for criticizing the patch - idk, constuctive criticizm is usefull, so lets try to keep it that way.
I have barely played the last patch. I believe i had a topic started where i tried to explain why, but its nowhere to be found.
On the current patch - lets take a look what mechanics were the most annoying ones:
1st - Cards getting buffed in deck, where you cant really do aynthing about it. That mechanic was drasticly reduced with rework on mulligan guys and spotters. Good ridance and a step in the right direction.
DBP is still here for some reason that is beyond me, but 1 awfull card is still alot better than 3. So, a + in this department.
2nd - Carryover. Resilience also recieved slapping. It exists, and it might give you that +1 card advantage, but highroll 2-0 "draw answer or lose" appears to be gone. Again, a big +.
3rd - removal of gold immunity. Change to gold cards makes any control decks that much more viable. I allways loved control, so i dont have trouble with it. Sure, some gold cards like Yen:Con and Triss:Butt took those changes hard. However with gold cards loosing their immunity, power of all gold cards went down, forcing them to more of utility role. Again, Tibor/Keyran finishers never were much of entertainment. Id say calculating what utility your opponent can get of his golds is more enjoyable than beating that 23 tibor. Overall, looks like a + to me.
Sure, several cards, like beforementioned sorceressess, need some love now. But i fail to see this change as a bad thing.
4th - powercreeps. For a long time gwent suffered from forced archtypes, and those were forced by adding ridiculously overstatted cards that would work with them. It appears that last update at least tried to level tha base value of bronze cards. We no longer have 2 cards for same slot, one having base value of 8, and another that has 10+. Sure, there is still a question of tweaking stat cost of some abilities, but at least 20+ % difference in base budget is gone.
Ofcourse, there is quite alot of cards that need tuning, new stamelfords is quite questionable (however, i still believe that DBP is the source of evil), Dun banner heavy cav appreats to be overstatted. Heavily. New Nithral with his 7 removal apprears to be bordering gold value. This list can get really long.
However, from personal perspective - ive seen quite alot of different decks on my quick tour of ranks 1-13. And in this time, ive seen Geralt:Igni once, and he didnt trigger. Its allready a good thing in my book. Moreover, i havent met "THE DECK". An utterely broken stuff you just wouldnt know what to do with. Like Axemen SK 2 patches before. Or swarm monsters. You know those.
While reading patchnotes, there wasnt really a moment when i thought to myself "allright, X deck is gonna be broken AF". So if we compare this update to the last 2 patches - its hell of a lot better. Honestly, after the previous patch i had serious doubt about games future, or at least, if ill be interested in playing it. This one however appears to get alot of things right.
Ill give you just one example: in this patch with gold immunity removal several cards recieved considerable buffs: Triss, Yenn, Succubus... numbers might not be right, but at consequences were considered. There was actuall thought process along the lines of "What will happen to the card A, to the archtype B if we implement this, even if the change doesnt directly impact it?" Thats something gwent patches desperately needed for long, long time.
So yeah, we pretty much got Gwent 3.0, but there is finnaly a sense that is considerably better than the previous one.