Put down your Wrenchcaliburs, Wagglepicks, and Headhunter’s Hatchets and set fingers to keyboard - we’ve assembled a league of talented D.E.V.E.L.O.P.E.R.S. to answer your Rise of Shadows questions here on the Hearthstone forums at the start of next week!
You can go ahead and start listing your questions in the thread now - starting at 10:00 AM PDT on Monday, April 22, we’ll have designers and artists on hand for a couple of hours to check in on how your evil schemes are coming along and to talk to you about your favorite decks, awesome plays, answer your burning questions, or discuss anything else you’d like to know about Rise of Shadows!
Remember to favorite/like any questions you’d like to see answered and we’ll see you Monday!
Thank you for hosting this Q&A session! Furthermore, it is much appreciated that you deigned to host this on the official forums; hopefully this will become a regular trend.
I do have a meta question regarding this interview: Must our queries pertain to Rise of Shadows specifically, or can they be more general with respect to the game? There is a lot to discuss about RoS, so I am sure we will have much to ask about either way.
To the community, please remember to be respectful and open-minded; positivity and constructive communication build trust with the faith that, ultimately, we all want what is best for Hearthstone!
Vereesa Windrunner has a special voice line when facing Garrosh (“You’ll pay for Rhonin!”). This is a great addition, but it left me wondering:
Why was there no voiceline for Vereesa being played against Alleria? I was very excited to see the final Windrunner sister put into the game, but it makes me sad that neither Sylvanas nor Vereesa recognize Alleria.
Hero cards like Dr. Boom are clearly very strong, but only a couple classes have them. Peter Whalen said there wouldn’t be a new hero card this expansion because the Deathknights just rotated out and you thought it would be nice to take a break from them. But here we are, Dr. Boom is pretty broken and we aren’t getting that break. Any plans to address the remaining hero cards now and/or as they become overpowered over the next year?
Don´t you think the epics should have the same rule as legendary cards? (Can´t open duplicates.) - It´s sooo painful to get for the 5th time Crystal Stag when there are so many cool epics you want to open but they are not worthy to craft just because a few funny games you can play with them.
Are you pleeeeeeease going to do something about wild soon? It has been my favorite mode but there are cards, which are so unfun to play against - New Dark Hour Warlock, Big Priest, Thekal + Molten Giants, Voidcaller, Kingsbane, Spreading Plague + Poison Seeds, Kabal Crystal Runner, Divine Favor, Even Warlock Heropower… Everything else seems kinda “balanced” for wild purposes now, but these cards are just the reason why I don´t enjoy the game at all and I just keep doing quests every day and sometimes play… These cards are also limiting the new expansion cards being added to the metagame in wild.
There are few problems in standard right now too and these are: Hero Cards, Scavenging Hyena, Elysiana, Magic Carpet, Waggle Pick (Raiding Party). These cards are insanely high in powerlevel and this causes the warrior and the rogue being almost every game against you + as I mentioned a few more broken cards for zoo and for hunter.
That´s probably all for me today, I would love to get response as what are your thoughts about these problems, thank you.
With RoS now available to players after some time. It seems as though Rogue has taken a different direction from its class identity. Can you comment on how the new spells from RoS and previous expansions combined with Preparation has affected Rogues’ style of playing? Furthermore, what is the dev teams’ plans with preparation moving forward?
They said that they are focusing on a new expansions rather than even thinking about new game modes. Sorry man, everyone wanted that, but expansions are on the first place. But I can understand that.
Like other people have said Dr. Boom, Mad Genius is kind of becoming Rexxar 2.0 in the current meta. For me, the main problem with him is that his hero power can discover really powerful Warrior Mechs like Omega Devastator, Dynomatic and Beryllium nullifier multiple times in a single game. This creates a very frustrating experience against Control Warrior where they can remove anything you play against them.
I would like to see an arena type bucket system for his hero power where powerful mechs, mediocre mechs and weak mechs are in different buckets and offer rates of these buckets are dependent on the power of the mechs in it, like powerful mech bucket has 25% chance of appearance, mediocre mechs with 60% and weak mechs with 15%.
Maybe this is too complicated or straight up a bad idea, in any case I would like to see that card reworked in some form or another because opponent getting like 5 Omega Devastators in one match isn’t very fun.
During last few months, Wild Growth, Nourish, Equality, Flametongue Totem and Cold Blood got nerfed due to being auto include in their respective classes. Currently, majority of Tempo Rogue decks run the same package of Backstab, Edwin, Prep, Eviscerate and Sap. Are these cards being considered for nerfs due to being auto include cards ?
Would you kindly keep an eye on Wild format, which is plagued by Big Priest and Darkest Hour Warlock decks? I can’t understand why Blizzard supports cheating 10-mana minions on turn 4 and resurrect endlessly. To be fair, these spells -and Barnes- should be increased by two:
Resurrect
Eternal Servitude - Also, remove “friendly” tag.
And, these spells by one:
Shadow Essence
Lesser Diamond Spellstone
So, the power-level of Big Priest should be equal to, say, Big Shaman or Recruit/Big Warrior, which is pushed in RoS.
As for Darkest Hour Warlock deck, it has already plagued Wild format by cheating out whole big minions at turn 6. Full board at turn 6, cheating out like 50-mana worthy minions. It should summon up to three minions at best at 8-mana. Also, this card shows that Bloodbloom can activate its effect early thanks to its cheap cost, 4-mana would be better to stop this madness.
Make old Hero skins available again. It was asked like million times, yet no response about it? That’s a shame, really. RoS is about Dalaran, so let us purchase Khadgar again. If not, make Tyrande available again to anyone.
In short, make cheating mechanics at 6-mana or above, and let us get Khadgar/Tyrande again. Don’t let us lose faith in you, I beg of you. (My English is bad btw, sorry if I wasn’t clear enough.)
Since we haven’t been told which devs are present, I will just assume that there is some technical staff as well.
Deck sharing has been exquisite additions for the overall scene in general. Still though, Hearthstone is lacking on more basic features, mainly game replays. Why must we still rely on third-party tools or constant recording if we want to relive epic Hearthstone moments? And so is there a chance that we might soon see replays introduced?
Beyond what we’ve already heard about in the Year of the Dragon announcement blog post, what other differences can we expect in the upcoming solo content to make it stand out from the past few ‘run’ style solo contents?
Rarity of cards is an interesting characteristic of cards. As we all know legendaries can only have a single copy in a deck, while common cards cost very little dust to craft.
Can you tell us more about how the team determines card rarity?
Why are some cards epic when others are rare?
When in the design process are those choices locked in?
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