The roguelike dungeons are what kept me hooked on playing Hearthstone, after playing the witchwood I mistakenly believed that all the singleplayer campaigns were the same kind of thing and agree with most players that Dalaran Heist was by far Blizzard’s best work both in balance, and the bosses being likeable with their clever emotes, and even the final four bosses due to their extreme difficulty. Crazy I’ve put in hundreds of hours and always enjoy returning to it after a new expansion as it adds the cards to the reward buckets.
To my knowledge, none of the other card game’s competing with Hearthstone have any roguelike modes. Blizzard should put effort into advertising this as it probably flies under most fans of the genre’s radar.
For future improvements maybe they could add a item system with currency, you can buy 1 time use power ups such as gain 2 energy on use, heal, give divine shield, whatever. Or pay to remove cards from your deck by turning them into a consumable item, since getting rid of not useful cards is still rather difficult.
It would be neat if they allowed for more niche but risky decks like the Warlocks “Rin The First Disciple” who lets you destroy the enemies deck, Rogue forcing them to overdraw and die from exhaustion, Bomb Warrior, Gifting the enemy cursed units such as Fel Reaver who discards 3 cards with each play, and many others. As currently its almost impossible to pull these off without extreme luck because you just won’t get everything that’s needed and instead the most reliable strategy by far is to pick treasures that allow you to spam 8-10 cost minions from early on, especially as late game bosses cheat by starting with more mana.
Rapid fire spell mages or tempo rogue is inferior, as it works well against earlier bosses but just won’t be reliable enough come late game. Spells need to be chosen/discarded/upgraded as reliably as you can with minions at the tavern as bosses with 110 health already skews the game inherently in favor of big minions making it like arena mode on steroids.
- Add optional challenges. At the beginning of the fight allow the player to pick a challenge that increases the difficulty with an extra reward given at the end, such as a unit or spell upgrade if they succeed. They will have to consider if the challenge exploits a weakness in their deck, such as player spells cost 1 more, skip your first 2 turns, take 2 damage when summoning a minion, etc.
In Dalaran Heist there are 5 chapters who have their own unique bosses, but only one that lets you go against the final bosses. This seems kind of a wasted opportunity that you never see many of them in the other chapters.
- A map where the player can choose their path with multiple branches, that way they have to plan ahead to balance certain challenges with gaining upgrades or resources, or fighting a exceptionally strong boss like what you see in Slay The Spire in many others. It forces you to take calculated risks in favor of rewards, often times just barely surviving a series of fights or ending a run because they were too greedy.
One of the most interesting treasures is the one that starts the player with 100 health but doesn’t regain to full at the end of a fight so that health actually because a resource that needs to be managed, and you can win a fight and still feel like you lost because of the amount of damage lost. This is unbalanced for certain classes as some heal and lifesteal much better than others, and they can go from 10 hp back to 100 hp very easily, which is why I think a currency system with 1 time consumable cards or artifacts would be a better way of resource management.
Further refinement could push dungeon runs to become more popular than battlegrounds. The majority of development time is in having to create A LOT of content to make each run feel unique to the player, and this is something that Heartstone already has done! All they need to do is improve the overall mechanics better and it could compete with popular stand alone titles.
Considering how much negativity there is around the main game right now and even Battlegrounds, it seems like the developers are struggling to release new content that is balanced, while being unique enough to get players to spend money on it, and so they have resorted to making new stuff be blatantly over powered just to get nerfed repeatedly shortly after, which appears to be hurting the popular of the game in the long run. Even the demon hunter campaign was poorly received, one of the most negative responses I’ve seen so far.
Battlegrounds is good for giving players a break from the main game or bringing old players back but it wasn’t the right format to try and monetize with a subscription as is evident with the incredibly limited reward of having two extra heroes to choose from, and a stats screen. There just isn’t enough that can be done with it.
Auto-battlers are a great way to reuse content but are one of the least flexible in terms of putting features behind a paywall without making it feel unfair as a pay to win.
Dungeon runs on the other hand have a FAR MORE flexible format where the fans of the genre love receiving (and paying for) new content and features, and is one of the very few instances in gaming where blatantly broken challenges and overpowered abilities actually add to the fun instead of taking away from it.