The plight of the Dwarves. My overall problems with Gwent.

[StrykerS77]

My rant on Dwarves sums up my general over arching problems with Gwent. Below is a response post I made on reddit not long ago. The basic point I am making is that in a short span of time Dwarves went from trash to viable to OP to viable to trash. Just think about that for a minute. Dwarves went through the entire spectrum of power in just a handful of months. The design in this game is just all over the place. I really wanted this game to be focused. Have a goal that it's trying to reach. Eventually I had to realize that there is no vision. It's just throwing cards and changes at the game and waiting to see what happens. Maybe the community likes something and maybe it doesn't. I can't get behind any game that is developed in this manner.

"I waited a long time after homecoming for dwarves to become viable. I kept trying to make them work but they were just too weak. Then when novigradian justice was put into the game all of the sudden dwarves had a power move that made them viable. Right then it was fun to play dwarves. They fit into the game without being meta. Then the big patch dropped that added a bunch of super strong dwarf cards. As soon as I saw them I didn't even have to play the patch to know what would happen because it was obvious. Dwarves were already competitive so adding those cards just made them ridiculous. So rightfully so people complained about Dwarves being way too oppressive and a huge part of the meta. I couldn't even bring myself to play them because they were so popular and so OP. So of course CDPR nerfs them multiple times. Ok that's cool at least I can still use the Novigradian Justice combo right? Oh....then this last patch changes NJ and the powerful move is gone. Dwarves are now dead (competitively speaking). None of this was the players fault. Making the dwarves too powerful was CDPR's fault because they clearly had no idea that would happen and then nerfing them into obscurity isn't the players fault either. CDPR has big issues with balancing and they have had those issues ever since this game was started."

 

[4RM3D]

And then there was Resilience Dwarfs. Also, we had Swim's Casino Dwarfs. That was in beta, though, but even then similar things have happened. CDPR has a tendency to over-nerf an archetype, when it over-performs.

It seems to me that CDPR doesn't have a grasp on all the (new) mechanics and (new) cards and the impact it has on the meta. The devs have a neat idea and just implement it without thinking too much about the consequences. Instead, they just look at the meta reports and axe whatever becomes too dominating. The Caretaker + Scenario interaction is but a recent example of this.

My personal gripe is with the death of the Bearmaster deck. It got chain nerfed, until Bearmasters themselves were changed altogether. That was one of my favorite decks.

 

[Barracuda88]

Funnily enough, I made a pretty sweet dwarf deck that took me from 4 to 3 last season, so AFAIMC they aren't "dead" dead.

 

[StrykerS77]

Funnily enough, I made a pretty sweet dwarf deck that took me from 4 to 3 last season, so AFAIMC they aren't "dead" dead.

They're bad. No reason not to use so many other decks that are objectively better.

 

[Barracuda88]

They're bad. No reason not to use so many other decks that are objectively better.

Eh, I mean, making my own deck rather than running cookie-cutter meta netdecks is reason enough for me. Making a dwarf deck that competes is reason enough.

 

[DRK3]

Funny, i actually made a dwarf deck yesterday, and i hadnt touched them since the first days of Iron Judgment when they became OP. Quite a coincidence.

But i didnt use Mystic Echo, used Deadeye Ambush to troll around, so players expect a full-on elf deck and end up with an all-dwarf deck.

Novigrad Justice is a tricky case. If Mystic Echo didnt exist, i would be ok with its previous effect, but that BS with the 4 mercenaries, usually protected with a defender, it was one of the most broken strategies in Gwent for this past year (and there's been a lot of those).

But regarding dwarves in general, i can safely say that even they're not terrible (i play lots of terrible decks often), they are far from the level that elves deck is on right now, seen especially in the golds:

-Yaevinn is just better and cheaper than Zoltan
- Dwarves dont have any card like Isengrim (who is too cheap), to boost all dwarves, only a bronze and a gold that basically do the same thing, boost on the number of dwarves on the row
-the Zoltan version from IJ and the other dwarf that transforms 2 rowdies into those pinging bastards are very expensive

Overall, dwarves are as easy to use as elves right now, but just dont offer the same point potential (maybe they also need a scenario of their own to even the odds?)

 

[Chuggy]

I think the community as a whole just isn't as good at this as we think we are.

Before the latest patch, Monsters were probably the weakest faction, but I think the bigger issue was that the community treated it as a meme. I saw several of the better streamers, that spend more time on the game than 95% of players and many players watch, put out videos of "how monsters are bad"/"lol I'm playing monsters" featuring decks that just weren't optimized at all. For example, whole decks centered around making a huge Glustyworp and then complaining that Monsters are weak to tall removal while not even really trying to make a deck that isn't.

Would they have been just as good as the top meta decks? Probably not quite, but it could be a lot closer than the perception of the community.
First proof of this is that we saw surprise decks do pretty well at the last tournament. How would that be the case if the community knows what the best decks are and by how much?
Second proof is that we see a lot more monsters now that it's been declared "not trash", including more use of monster decks that don't feature anything that was changed or even indirectly buffed. So the changed perception is responsible for a large part of the increase, along with the actual change in power. If community's perception was correct from the beginning, then only the actual changes in power would impact the amount of play.

The game is still relatively new, and the community isn't so large or so organized that it is able to "mathematically solve" for the ideal deck and correct rating of all possible decks. Very much flies under the radar, is overvalued or undervalued. There's a hundred people working on refining the top meta deck for every person working on making a competitive dwarf deck whenever dwarves are declared to be "dead", thus signal-boosting even the tiniest of difference in power. That makes it just harder to balance, and combined with the fact that only integers are allowed in this game (they can't print a 9.67-cost Geralt or a Glustyworp that gets 1.8 for every consumed token), and we have a game that is fundamentally unstable in terms of balance. Considering that difficulty, devs are doing a pretty good job.

 

[Allistre]

The game is still relatively new, and the community isn't so large or so organized that it is able to "mathematically solve" for the ideal deck and correct rating of all possible decks

I wouldn't consider 3.5 years a relatively new game... that's pretty old actually.

That makes it just harder to balance, and combined with the fact that only integers are allowed in this game (they can't print a 9.67-cost Geralt or a Glustyworp that gets 1.8 for every consumed token), and we have a game that is fundamentally unstable in terms of balance.

That's why the game was a lot easier to balance when the average card values were all like 14-20. I dont know why they made balancing harder by cutting all the power values in half.