Hello everyone, the following is being posted on behalf of Aleco Pors, Lead Designer on the Final Design team:
TITANS is about to go live and you’ve now seen some of the new design space that we’re exploring for Paladin in this expansion and beyond. This is the second class we’ve given a tune-up to this year, after Priest. We wanted to take this time to talk about why those changes were made and what we consider (or don’t consider) when adjusting a class like this.
There are two main considerations when we make these types of changes: 1) player enjoyment of the class (the most important consideration); and 2) how much design space the class has for us to work with.
You’ll note that “power” is not a consideration for these types of changes. We’ve seen some questions and comments about why we adjusted Paladin when the class already seems strong. The short answer is just that power isn’t relevant for class tune-ups: this is about adjusting fundamental issues with a class, not its power level. From a design perspective, power is easier to adjust—we can, and frequently do, shift power by just adjusting numbers on cards. We make those power adjustments in our regular balance updates, not in class tune-ups. If Paladin ends up too strong, too weak, or too unfun in TITANS, we have lots of ways to adjust that after the fact.
Earlier this year, we changed Priest because it was the biggest outlier on the first and most important consideration: player enjoyment of the class. There was a good amount of design space in Priest, but much of it was in space that players don’t want to see.
Paladin also had a bit of this problem: while some players love Paladin, there is a perception that Paladin tends to be too basic to keep player engagement. We see that sentiment reflected in years of Paladin being underplayed for how powerful it is in the meta.
However, Paladin’s bigger problem was actually in the second consideration: the design space within the class. Paladin has consistently been one of the most challenging classes for us to design for. We often found ourselves falling back on the same few class themes: buffs, dudes, pure, then buffs, then dudes again, and then pure… On top of that, we were constrained by the “Paladin has to be fair” restriction. There are only so many ways to do that directly (Equality, Divine Favor), and it basically meant we couldn’t do cool stuff for the class unless their opponent got to do it, too. We’ve been phasing out this type of “has to be fair” restriction for a while now, while looking for other ways make Paladin still feel righteous.
Auras are a great example of this: the heads-up nature of Auras makes them feel more righteous and fairer than the sneaky Secrets they replaced. Auras are also truer to World of Warcraft, where Paladins have Auras as part of their kits.
Auras give us another angle that we can design Paladin towards. We plan to regularly print Auras—maybe about one per expansion—and at some point we might even explore a dedicated “Aura Paladin” deck of some sort.
Resurrect is another mechanic we’re exploring in Paladin this expansion, something they’ve never done before (wink, wink). This is another effect that is very on-brand from World of Warcraft, and leaves room to explore going forward. Will Auras and Resurrect be enough new space for Paladin? Maybe! If not, we’ll keep looking for other space to explore.
That leads me to a third reason why we might do a class tune-up, which is just “we had a sweet idea!” It doesn’t necessarily mean the class was fundamentally struggling; it might just mean that we had an idea we wanted to try and we found the right time to do it. Currently, this is our last scheduled class/Core Set tune-up of the year, but it’s our goal to be more flexible about these things going forward.
For now, we hope you enjoy Paladin and all of TITANS. We’re looking forward to a great launch and we’ll see you in the Tavern!
If you want to join in the fun, this is your last chance to get your TITANS pre-purchase bundle before the expansion goes live tomorrow, August 1!
I would rather use Uther avatar again if Blizzard would be so kind and restore it here on this forum too… but I think they won’t…