“However, as we’ve shared before, too many competitive Quests in the long term can lead to a metagame that isn’t fun or healthy.” Man like why print quests at all if you don’t want them to be competitive, what’s the point of filling legendary slots with cards intentionally MEANT TO BE UNPLAYABLE. Starting the expansion with new decks with winrates in the 30’s and even after the miniset dropped doing absolutely nothing to fix it is laughable. LET CARDS BE PLAYABLE PLEASE WE ARE BEGGING YOU
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My point with all of this is the following:
- Blizzard needs us to spend money on the game.
- When people spend money on Hearthstone packs, they mostly do so on pre-orders.
- People buy pre-orders when they believe they are a good value proposition.
- This belief is built on Blizzard’s ability to ensure that new cards will have value in future metas.
But:
- When Blizzard makes it known that they will purposefully sell you low-value expansions, they break people’s trust.
- Meaning people won’t trust and subsequently buy pre-orders anymore.
- Meaning people spend less money on Hearthstone cards.
- Meaning Hearthstone loses income.
And that’s without mentioning how low-value expansions like The Lost City make the metagame more stale, leading to more player burnout, players leaving and thus again decreased income.
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I’m all for decreasing the cost of Hearthstone, but I’d like them to do this by making it cheaper to own the whole expansion, not by making 90% of any new expansion worthless
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Complaints about decks means it’s popular. People will complain no matter what, no new decks to complain about is WAAAAAY worse than people complaining about new decks
They wouldn’t even need to buff quests. All 11 classes got a legendary minion alongside their quest. Out of those only Herenn, Loh and Opu are seeing any play, but they aren’t even buffing those cards.
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Was anyone else incredibly excited about quests only to matchup against murloc paladin 17 times in a row being able to win only 1 of them without choosing something stupidly cancerous and not fun to play? Anyone else check every update notes hoping for a nerf to murloc paladin to actually try to enjoy the fun cards but then realize there are only 2 deck options with quests? Like stupidly strong and op decks draws the dumbest of the player base to it, so naturally the winrate won’t reflect the actual power of the deck if the playrate is 100000x that of the other decks… Balacing hearthstone is anything but rocket science. Balance team’s grade: FAT F. God I miss the old days where you could create an off-meta deck and smoke your way to legend because you don’t have a smooth brain.
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All constructed modes are suffering from a horribly stale meta and Arena drafting feels awful in multiple ways. Please explain to us how you decided on the balance changes for this patch? What problems will it solve and what decks will it enable to be competitive? I just can’t see the immediate impact of any of these changes, maybe they’ll be relevant when the next rotation happens but we need changes NOW.
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Definitely could have used some legit nerfs to the only competitive classes. I don’t know if I can say the devs are doing their best, but I can’t complain about a free-to-play game… But, I also can’t bring myself to spend money on it if all I have to look forward to is an infinite chain of murloc paladins and protoss priests… 
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Welcome back Savannah Highmane. You now have taunt and your summoned creatures immediately attack.
Hello everyone,
I want to talk about the widespread minion power creep and balance issues in Hearthstone’s constructed mode. This discussion will be based on recent years’ balance problems, and I will share my thoughts on the latest balance patch and its future implications. Thank you.
I’m not a fan of small talk, so let’s get straight to the first sub-topic: Are the recent balance patches and the future arrangements for limiting minion power in Hearthstone effective?
In my opinion, looking back at all of Hearthstone’s balance patches, their effect is very noticeable in the early game when minion power levels are lower. However, with the gradual power creep of minions over the past five years, players are facing more and more survival pressure. We can see that even though the team is releasing balance patches more frequently, they are still becoming less and less able to satisfy all players’ demands for the game’s meta.
The Root of the Core Issue
First, let’s clarify two facts:
- Players will not “actively purchase” new expansions that offer weaker mechanics, effects, and power levels than the previous one.
- The failure of the Classic format proves that players want novelty, not a truly “balanced but boring” design.
Therefore, I can assert that if the Hearthstone balance team hasn’t figured out what the problem with this game is, they will become increasingly exhausted from releasing patches, and there won’t be many new designs. Ultimately, the game will either die from the constant patching or, if left unchecked, turn into a “kill your opponent on turn one” style game like Yu-Gi-Oh!
So, are the players the problem? Is it because they are tired of the increasingly uninspired game mechanics offered by new expansions, or is it because the Hearthstone team is becoming more and more perfunctory in their approach to game balance? In my opinion, it’s neither.
The Overlooked Core: The 30 Health Hero
This leads to my most important topic today: the base hero health has been stuck at 30 for over a decade.
What I really care about is: why is this such a neglected issue?
The power numbers of minions in the game have been constantly creeping up, but the balance team has never adjusted the hero’s health. This leads to players dying more and more easily from early-game burst damage combos with powerful minions. It’s confusing to me how they add early-game armor to weaker heroes in Battlegrounds, yet never consider it for the main game. This kind of fragmented balance philosophy has always left me feeling confused about Hearthstone’s balancing decisions. Team 5, look into my eyes, and tell me, why? Baby, why?
I have a solution for this: based on all past game data in Hearthstone, we can find the average number of turns it takes for a hero to receive lethal damage, as well as the specific lethal damage value.
By doing so, we can identify the specific time point or expansion version that had the most positive discussion among players. Using this as a baseline, we can finally adjust the players’ long-standing 30 hero health, just as they are doing with balancing Battlegrounds. Their balancing needs innovation too.
Thank you.
Your game is bad af. Just thake the suckers money and leave it to eos since its only the same rng clown fiesta like when you lose cause opponent gets all the best answers and you have your best cards bottom 5 and next game you draw them first hand. Its so bad stop talking about tournaments when its all rng and same decks snooze fest
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These guys really believe the current problems will resolve themselves by the card rotation… They really don’t want to fix their mistakes? Because not the players ruined the game… THEY did… now make the effort and fix it instead of try to sell more and more stupid expensive cosmetics! DO SOMETHING before it’s too late! Don’t wait for the card rotation… the player base won’t hold on until that long.
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The thing about low-value expansions is that they don’t necessarily have to be that due to low power level. The problem is that balance team is incompetent in their efforts to lower the power level equally through all expansions. Even the recent miniset could have been a good value purchase if the team had planned the previous expansions to be of similar power. Though even this vast difference can be solved by well thought balancing which they just gave up on.
Because they flopped the expansion and the miniset they are now doing damage control for their future income. That is they are refusing to do meaningful nerfs to some outliers because the refunded dust will contribute to less preorder sales.
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Why do any of you players respond to these threads? Nobody over there is reading your complaints despite them being gathered here in this blue thread.
If you have a complaint, quit. If they want silence, give them silence, and a playerless game.
This is not OK. You’re not OK.
Get some help.
How pathetics blizzard can be ?
Lesson n°1464
it’s like the new event of wow
Everyone is complaining, they don’t care
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balance team worst people on this planet, i doubt they are humans, must be underdeveloped aliens
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I was hoping they would remove cheating from the arena but no, the RNG based on bribes paid to Blizzard and accounts opened in bursts to find a good draft continues… I don’t know
Much has already been said… quite understandably so… Not sure if I’ve got what it takes to review all that right now, sorry, so I suppose I’ll just write down some of my initial thoughts about the actual patch notes and changes themselves.
no dominant power outliers or play patterns demanding nerfs
Yeah, turn 5 big Zilliax, followed by turn 6 Shaladrassil or something like that in every second game is fine. 
Got it.
We’ve also continued to hear suggestions to buff nearly every new Quest so they become competitive archetypes. However, as we’ve shared before, too many competitive Quests in the long term can lead to a metagame that isn’t fun or healthy.
Alright, come to think of it, I suppose I’ll comment on this bit, although it verges on expounding the obvious.
Are you saying that you wanna essentially print or maintain some cards, knowing well that they don’t work, that is, aren’t playable or competitive? What kind of… backward reasoning is this?
Card Changes
Mostly inconsequential (I think one ‘Old Guardian’ once elaborated quite well how minor adjustments to nonfunctional cards generally don’t make those cards or archetypes suddenly functional), however, the card already used sometimes in some variations of the biggest ‘power outlier’, namely Mirrex, the Crystalline, received a buff.
Are you people… normally adjusted?
We’ve seen a lot of feedback about the strong neutral package of Fyrakk, Elise, Naralex, and Ysera, and we’ll be keeping a close eye on them moving forward.
(Highlighted by me, the rest provided for the context, speaking of which: yeah, you ever considered actually addressing those instead?)
Not this thing again… What’s the point of yet another of such emtpy promises, though? Relying on short memory and attention spans of your particular target audience, so that they just forget it all eventually and move on until your next bit of hype, which’ll be the talk of the ‘town’ by then? Or is it yet another invitation to just keep waiting (in vain, of course) for the situation to improve in the next expansion, year, decade, millenium? Ugh, just stop feeding your players false hopes, wouldn’t you? Alas, seemingly, you wouldn’t (a realist speaking here).
More broadly, we believe future expansions are a better place to bring community feedback to life than trying to overhaul the current set through balance patches. We fell short of our goal of introducing enough new competitive options this expansion. As we look ahead to the next expansion and beyond, we’re keeping your response to this set in mind and are using it to help shape the future of Hearthstone.
In short, you failed, we got it. But what is it with those promises, as said above, again?
Dev Comment: We’ve seen players tapping into the potential of Possessed Animancer, and we’re making it more efficient to use. Alongside that, we’re also improving one of its favorite partners, Asphyxiodon. We wouldn’t be giga sore if you tried using it with another Beast, either.
Dev Comment: Upgrading Ankylodon gives Hunter a powerful Discover option through effects like Detailed Notes, while also making it a solid Beast for Quest Hunter and other Hunter decks.
Dev Comment: We’ve found that players already complete the Shaman Quest fairly quickly, but we still wanted to give Tortotem a small boost. Lowering its cost helps it contribute to Quest completion while also enabling earlier minion generation to fuel the payoff once the Quest is complete.
My reaction to more or less all of this, but the last-mentioned bit in particular, was like this: what? Are you talking about the same game that I (don’t wanna speak for ‘everyone’) have been playing? Someone seems completely… disconnected from the current reality of HS, and I seriously doubt it’s the players. 
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Blizzard:
“We’ve also continued to hear suggestions to buff nearly every new Quest so they become competitive archetypes. However, as we’ve shared before, too many competitive Quests in the long term can lead to a metagame that isn’t fun or healthy.”
Can you just say it properly: you want to focus on cosmetics rather than balancing because their sales bring more money. Furthermore, intentionally having the game unfair incentivizes players to pay real money until they collect the full overpowered deck so that they can reach legend, and they decided that this is better than creating a fun game. They want to milk this game for every cent possible in the short-term because they want to reallocate their personnel to other games and don’t care about its longevity. If you are intentionally printing cards that you know will never fit competitive archetypes, then you are literally admitting that you don’t care about balancing and wish to pigeon-hole the player base into paying money or quitting by intentionally diluting the pool with useless cards to increase the value on the useful ones to incentivize gambling with card packs.
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100%. They decided that limiting dust to F2P to incentivize a small increase in sales is more important than fixing their colossal mistakes in attempts to preserve the integrity and longevity of their game. Pennies in their pockets now > their game surviving. Corporate mentality.
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