Yet how many ST/NR/SK players you know do not play one of those decks? None of them are barely touched this patch. Those decks are particularly popular playing pro rank. Reality right now is if you play NG, there's no real hope you can go far. And if you play ball, once on pro ranks, you barely stand a chance.I hope you do realise how bad a card that necessitates Heatwave is for the game. Being forced into obligatory 10-point inclusion is bad enough on its own, but also has a derivative problem of breaking devotion.
Also "few" is a severe understatement. Fangs reach 12 for 8 upon killing a 4 pt body which is in line with other 4p cards, but doing so they also probably prevents a decent amount of value...and that means everything above 4p gives them even bigger advantage, so the only contexts where they don't play for a lot of points is either control, swarm or unitless(or maybe, just maybe some kind of janky ultrahardcore hybrid pointslam) which amounts to not even 30% of all the viable decks. So... everything else either struggles or is outright unplayable. I've mentioned it before, but don't mind repeating - the only reason Ball hasn't been as successful recently is that symbiosis/SW/warriors stuff is more broken.
And you say the existence of ball forces many players to break devotion. But that's the point. There's no doubt SK and NR enjoy a lot greater an advantage playing devotion and right now one of the few reasons for them to not do so is ball. So now there's no stopping that. That's what many mean by saying nerfing the weakest and improving the strongest. I'm not saying ball is not powerful. But there are so many other cards way more powerful than it.
As far as I'm aware, most decks have at least one big play that involves 1-3 moves generating points way beyond the cards' provision costs. Ball is just one of those, and not even quite a successful one since it does not kill immediately (most of the time) unlike duel, does not so much generate points on own side unlike SK damage-boost combo and does not pose extreme control unlike triple nature's rebuke + symbiosis.