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Bowler needs that rework more than executioner does IMO. It needs a rock speed increase/damage increase.
Bowler may have a rework this year too :) Hard to predict any timeline, but there are many Epics that could use some love to make them feel truly Epic and big bowlie boi is certainly not as cool as he could be.
I agree. I fundamentally disagree with the premise that cards should have "healthy" use rates, which they have previously defined as "in the same general magnitude as the use rates of other cards." If all cards cost the same elixir and there were substitutes then this would make sense but the whole point is that most cards are relatively unique and don't have perfect substitutes. Then use rates should always vary as various metas gel around the state of the cards. Then use rates would not be even. But as a meta gels, an anti-meta forms and use rates naturally shift again. It seems very unlikely to me that in a stable game we would have both uniform use rates and a stable meta.
If anything, frequent changes cause a subset of players to focus on one or two decks that seem safe even if not optimal in several kinds of metas, which makes use rate statistics an artifact of balance changes rather than a meaningful statistic. Then trying to balance around this artifact leads to wildly OP cards.
I don't think our goal is to get every card in the 4-13% use rate range. Some cards like Spells or Mega Minion will ALWAYS be above that range regardless of how bad they are - Wizard is proof of that. But we do care about win rates. Even if the use rate is low, the win rate needs to be competitive so players of niche strategies still feel like they can keep up.
Cards like Skeleton Barrel and Three Musketeers are not a high priority because they maintain a decent win rate despite low usage. Cards like Bowler (mentioned above) are perfect candidates for buffs because their win rate is bad even with only Bowler fans playing him.
They do test them. They wrote a whole post about it. Go search the post history. The specifically cite the problems with play testing and how they brought in a new company to do it cause pros wouldn’t. Problem is no amount of play testing will account for all the possibilities millions of player can find with a card.
Your last line is really the crux of it and its something that has been echoed by every balance team of every live game of every genre - when you have enough players, its impossible to playtest perfectly. We can playtest things into the ground and players will have more battles with it in 5 minutes than we could in months, even with a big team. Ultimately there is always going to be room for error and that's part of the job. PEKKA fell into that margin of error (we did have discussions above Medium vs Long range during testing) and when that happens it's incumbent upon us to fix it quickly. Overall I think we get more right than wrong and if we can keep up a positive %, the game will march towards a better state each month.