On Thursday afternoon, the Hearthstone development team announced the contents of Patch 21.4.4 scheduled to go live later in the day. While the primary focus of the patch focuses on their auto chess game mode, Battlegrounds, some quality of life changes are being applied to their newly released dungeon crawler, Mercenaries, as well. 

The balance changes are straightforward and aim to reduce the power level of a trio of minions that the development team deems too strong. It's unlikely that the game mode's meta will change as a result but that's up to the players to decide.

The lone Elemental on the list, Recycling Wraith allows players to cycle through the shop a bit too easily in its base form. An optimal strategy for piloting Elementals involved not even necessarily tripling Recycling Wraith and just buying and selling Elementals with little financial risk. An early game Recycling Wraith plus lucking into a Nomi, Kitchen Nightmare on Tavern Tier 4 could cause a board to ramp up in power very quickly.

How the development team opted to nerf (or buff, depending on how you look at it) Omega Buster is interesting. On one hand, players can argue that because its' base stats were lowered, it's a weaker minion than before. On the other, perhaps lowering the threshold for it to die and trigger its' powerful deathrattle effect is actually a benefit to the minion. Sure, it cannot hit as hard but players aren't slotting Omega Buster into their team compositions for its Attack. Time will tell as to whether it is seen more or less as a result.

Unlike Omega Buster, the reduction of Attack on Holy Mecherel is a clear nerf to a powerful minion. Considering how often it can gain and lose Divine Shields based on attack order and team build, the development team felt it dished out a little too much damage for their liking.

The full list of bug fixes and overall game improvements can be found in the official post on Hearthstone's website here.