Nachdem Dean Ayala nicht mehr an Bord ist darf ‚sein‘ Thread
nun auch in den Ruhestand gehen.
Zeit für einen Neustart:
The Hearthstone Devs Answered Your Questions in Q&A #1 - Battlegrounds, Solo Content Returning, New Ways to Play, & More
Who Was Present During Q&A #1
Officially, the following developers were present for the Q&A. You can follow any of the links below to visit their Twitter accounts:
- Matt London, Modes Design Lead
- Cora „Songbird“ Georgiou, Senior Game Designer
- Chadd „Celestalon“ Nervig, Features Lead
- Aleco Gereco, Game Designer (Happy Birthday)
- Keaton „Chakki“ Gill, Senior Game Designer
- John McIntyre, Battlegrounds Lead Designer
It should be noted that the current plan is to do these regularly
Future Content
- They are working on new ways to play Hearthstone.
- We can expect the return of solo content.
- More Wild Diamond cards are coming but are several months away.
- The Colossal cards from Sunken City were well-liked and fun to design. Nothing is in the works for the moment but Cora says they are open to them again if they fit a specific theme.
- Keaton imagines there will be „at least one animal related Shaman archetype“ in future sets.
- Additional polish to the friends list has mockups but hasn’t been implemented yet.
- We could see improvements to the Mass Disenchant feature to discard your normal cards when you have golden copies.
- There might be some more in-game events in the cards.
- No permanent mode for Brawliseum is in the works, but they loved seeing the excitement from the community about doing them more frequently.
Maw and Disorder Mini-Set
Check out and follow our mini-set guide to see all the new cards!
- Sylvanas, the Accused was originally 10 mana but they kept bringing her down to the current 6 as the sweet spot.
- They are working on fixing Paladin and Warrior deficits. The Mini-Set might help a bit:
- Paladin has two cards that are „pretty fun“.
- Warrior has a card that is „spicy“.
- There will not be any Demon Hunter Relic cards.
- Cora was happy with the Relics though and is open to doing them again in the future.
Murder at Castle Nathria
- They considered all the Shadowlands covenants before landing on Revendreth for Castle Nathria. They may still use the others in the future.
- Cora is pleased at where they landed with Infuse, with a couple of exceptions.
- Sinfueled Golem is weak, which they knew going into release.
- Priest of the Deceased and Stoneborn Accuser are „simple foundational Infuse pieces, but don’t see much play.“
- Overall, Cora thinks that Infuse is more consistent than originally thought.
- Secret Rogue was a bit of a miss and Cora says if she could go back in time, she probably wouldn’t do Secret Rogue & Mage in the set.
- Rogue Secrets are hard to create when there are no other ones, since you need to make 3 auto-includes which limits uniqueness.
- Cora was concerned about having a narrative-heavy set when a lot of it isn’t directly in the game.
- They didn’t have the resources to do an adventure to explain the story around the set.
- This was good learning for next time around.
Rewards Track
- We are getting more constructed content on the rewards track next expansion.
- Battlegrounds content will no longer be on the rewards track next expansion.
Battlegrounds
- A version of buddies instead saw them as cards that would be added to the normal card pool, differing based on which heroes were present in the lobby.
- A problem they encountered was if the buddies were designed too much for a hero, they could be useless for other players.
- If the buddies were too generic, they may as well just be regular minions.
- They also used to give 3 quests/rewards during a game with increasing difficulty and „flashiness“ but was removed in favor of the 1 quest/reward as it was too much to keep track of.
- John feels that Quests have been the best balance they have had (with room to improve).
- He also mentioned that this let them create cool choices and plenty of knobs to turn for balance.
- If they were to redesign Quests, John would bring the power variance of the Rewards closer to each other and to bring down the power level of the highest.
- Current balance philosophy for Battlegrounds aims to redesign cards instead of removing them.
Development
- Mini-Sets usually have their balance locked in shortly after the main set goes live.
- Much of what the features team has been shipping this year are small and medium-sized projects. Expect bigger things in the future.
- After they ship big projects, they’ll be working on polishing existing features and going towards new big ones.
- There will always be weak cards, if you buff the weak cards, other cards will then be weak.
- They made some effort this year to not support powerful strategies from last year (questlines come to Keaton’s mind).
Mechanics
- They have a six week period where they design new mechanics.
- First ideas rarely stick around. They get the mechanic in and test it with the team.
- If a mechanic doesn’t test well with the team, they ask if its time to refine or move on.
- Sometimes they find mechanics quickly and other times it takes longer.
- Galakrond and Location Cards weren’t finalized until months into their designs.
Classic
- The mode has dipped in popularity and they are considering their options for what is next for Classic.
Magical Girl Skins
- Cora thinks it would be a great idea to put pretty bows on Yogg’s tentacles.
Silver Hand Recruits
- Matt says they have started to talk about the question of adding female versions of Silver Hand Recruit.
- They have concerns about players being able to identify cards easily should they add it in. They are investigating.
Wild
- Matt thinks it would be a „wonderful idea“ to buff old wild cards and wonders if people would like that.
- He thinks it would give players an easier way to play competitively in the mode.
Unexpected Archetypes
- Turtle Mage
- Barrens Spell Mage was very popular, peaking at 40%. Deck of Lunacy went from meme to most-defining.
- Garrote Rogue - Keaton didn’t expect to see dealing damage via Garrote to be a viable deck.
- Quest Priest - Grew into becoming a reasonable deck. They had to convince some people that it was weak to ship a card that destroyed an enemy hero (Purified Shard).
- Boar Priest - More card draw and the rotation helped make it viable.
- Nathria Control Shaman - Keaton says its probably his favourite most recent deck and never came close to figuring it out during playtesting.
Random Questions
What set would you say has been your most enjoyable to work on over the last couple of years?
- John was proud of Scholomance Academy as dual-class was fun to work on.
- Cora thought Sunken City was a lot of fun - designing colossals was „cool“. She also enjoyed the narrative work for Castle Nathria which let her learn a lot of that process and felt it rewarding to see it come together.
- Chadd says the next set. What a tease!
- Keaton found Stormwind to be challenging and fun due to figuring out all the Questlines and to create designs around Tradeable.
Favourite Paladin legendary in the history of HS from each of you please!
- John has two of his all-time favourite decks represented with Shirvallah, the Tiger + Holy Wrath and Uther of the Ebon Blade + Auctionmaster Beardo.
- Cora is also in the Uther of the Ebon Blade camp.
- Chadd and Murgur Murgurgle are friends.
- Keaton agrees with John and nominates Shirvallah, the Tiger.
- Aleco is a fan of Val’anyr.
- Matt says there is a Paladin card in the next set that „has [his] favorite text box of all time“.
The idea they loved the most that got shot down the hardest.
-
John responded with „floppy physics cards“.
-
Chadd prototyped a mechanic in Darkmoon Fair that required too much custom UI and was „way too complex“.
- Various cards in the set gave you Prize Tickets and would appear in-hand as a spell.
- The spell has an incrementing counter as you gained more Prize Tickets.
- When played, a shop opened up with the Darkmoon Prizes you could buy, that each had their own cost.
- Each game saw the Darkmoon Prizes that were available vary.
- You could buy Prizes in the Shop just to prevent your opponent from getting them.
- This ultimately helped contribute to Darkmoon Prizes in Battlegrounds.
-
Keaton says that Warlock Curses were „pretty divisive“ among the final design team.
-
Aleco pitched a card that made spells temporarily unplayable for both players.
- Gallon used his „one veto per set“ on it.
-
Matt was excited to increase the difficulty of the „Book of“ solo content in response to players saying they were too easy.
- The completion rate of the content plummeted and people complained he ruined their „relaxation mode“.