I've loved this game and put many hours in, but ever since price of power has been released the game continues to be going downhill.
Before POP the game was the most balanced we had seen it, and in a state where there was so much deck variety in higher ranks. The only problems we had at the time were SY, and the absolute refusal to nerf the tunnel drill crownsplitters combo, but other than that, all of the gwent youtubers were active and there were still so many different viable decks, and no true auto-include cards.
Only since POP we've been seeing auto-include cards all over – cards so good it becomes a detriment to play anything else in deck archetypes (fucusya, terranova, simlas, blightmakers, mamunas, fleders, zolatan combo, etc.) and ridiculous pointslams that you cannot even interact with, tech doesn't exist for some, and simply not playing them puts you at a major disadvantage.
Every patch since seems to be the same – release something broken then don't address the fixes that players want for months or at all. It makes playing (especially at higher ranks) such a pain because all you ever play againts are copy paste meta decks.
Newest exapansion is just that on steriods. It's either play Renfri, or some sort of cultist spam deck, or you lose. Of course you can beat them, but only if you play renfri or new cards in your deck, or only play decks that hard counter (Kelly is the only thing I see right now), but anything else has just become meme tier.
Deck creativity and interaction has been slaughtered in favour of just playing the definitive best faction cards or new broken cards for no drawback.
I think the balancing is the sole reason players have been declining and so many of the big gwent tubers have left (as they have also said) – that they don't find the game fun anymore because of the balancing.
I think the balancing team needs to at least trail changes with experienced players, or focus on hotfixing cards that play like this, rather than continue adding new cards.
Thoughts?
Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/gwent/comments/w3j5jb/something_needs_to_be_done_about_balancing/