Rise of Shadows Q&A - April 22, 2019

Dr Boom’s Scheme seems massively overcosted, and doesn’t seem to fit the artwork or the general theme of Dr Boom blowing things up, since it’s a defensive effect. What is the history and intention behind this card that lead to its final design?

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Um but Dopple Gangster exists and does the same thing? So that infinite shudderwock “uninteractive” combo still exists.

*please don’t nerf Dopple Gangster, infinite Shudderwock should exist in the Wild West of Hearthstone

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Any chance of the option to download hi-res art on mobile devices?

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Greetings,
Any chance for a Hearthstone API anytime soon?
Or an option to quickly export collection? (to include it on fansites)

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I have really enjoyed how Hearthstone has implemented hand discard/manipulation of your opponent’s hand. Cards like Demon Project and Undead Saboteur have an inherent amount of risk and RNG that make them worthwhile and also rewarding for hand tracking. I feel similarly about Hecklebot and Deathlord.

Broadly speaking, are you satisfied with these cards implementation? Is there a deliberate intent to make sure a single class does not get access to more than 2-4 of these cards? Is “stealing” a card from your opponent’s hand you would never cross?

Greetings,
Any chance for a budget play bracket (standard or wild) where decks are capped at a certain dust cost?

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Designs go through a lot of iterations, and this one happened to be a little later than others. We try to get the flavor, mechanics, and art to all line up but getting the right design is the most important part. We tried Boombots, shuffling in bombs, dealing damage, but this is the one we landed on. We wanted to give them some more defensive tools to help out that archetype more than the damage and bomb version.

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Oh, and forgot my main question: will there be an opportunity to get Khadgar and Tyrande hero portraits for those, who missed it? Or at least purchase it with $…? Somehow :disappointed_relieved:

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We’ve learned a lot about hero cards since we launched the Death Knights. In general, we like them to either have a fair amount of variance in their gameplay or to have their hero powers be at a power level more in line with Justicar Trueheart than, say, Bloodreaver Gul’dan. Zul’jin is a good example of this. There’s some wiggle room here, but the core idea is that we don’t want the hero power to drown out the rest of the cards that you’re playing.

With each expansion, we’re going to continue to make powerful cards – a card being powerful isn’t necessarily a reason for us to change something. The most important thing here is that the game doesn’t feel hopeless or inevitable. I think the variance in Dr. Boom’s and Hagatha’s hero powers helps a lot there. You could get lucky, your opponent might get unlucky, and there’s still a lot of gameplay back and forth between you after those are played. It’s meaningfully different from some of the very powerful and more repetitive hero powers we’ve seen in the past.

For the other question, will we change them, that’s more a question of how things shake out in the metagame. Things have been changing rapidly over the last couple weeks. Just looking at hsreplay, Warrior is around the fourth best class right now (and Shaman is fifth), so let’s see how things evolve. We don’t think that Dr. Boom feels inherently bad to play against and it doesn’t seem like a huge balance outlier right now, so we’re going to let things develop before we make a call on card changes.

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Are there any plans for player rewards for hitting 1000 wins with a certain class? I know it only applies to a small portion of the player base but even something like alternate character art or a special class specific card back would be easy to implement.

Also, what are your thoughts on being able to obtain previous month end card backs either through some kind of reward system or simply buying them with coins?

It would be nice for those of us who have been playing for a long time to have another goal to work towards besides grinding the ladder.

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Achivment system will ever be added to the game?

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copy the whole text and then reply to it, that’s better for the reader.

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When will alternate heroes such as Khadgar and Tyrande be made available again?

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For the sake of the community, can you please make a comment in regards to an auto-squelch feature?

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Achivment system will ever be added to the game?

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  • Don´t you think the epics should have the same rule as legendary cards? (Can´t open duplicates.)

We’re happy with the no duplicates rules for Legendary cards, but have no plans to extend it to epic cards.

  • Are you pleeeeeeease going to do something about wild soon?

When we release a new expansion, we’re always excited to see players try out new cards and discover synergies and decks that will shape the meta. We’ve seen this with Rise of Shadows and have been monitoring the ebbs and flows as decks rise in prominence and get countered by other decks. With the Wild meta in particular, we tend to see crazier interactions and stronger decks and this is something we’re generally happy with. In certain cases when decks seem out of line with what we’re comfortable with, we have stepped in, like in the case for Naga Sea Witch and Aviana. We’ve discussed the possibility of nerfing cards, such as Barnes and Bloodbloom, but the meta is still settling down and we’d like to continue to gather more data before making any decisions. We’ll continue to monitor the meta closely to make sure nothing gets too out of hand.

  • There are few problems in standard right now too

We’ve been watching closely as the meta has adjusted day to day and week to week since Rise of Shadows has been released. We’ve seen a variety of different decks be “the best deck” so far and are happy with how players are adjusting and countering what they’re seeing as the most prevalent decks on the ladder.

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You said long time ago that “missed season cardbacks” will come back at any time to allow people that miss them be able to obtain them again. What about that?

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Will you consider giving wild more tournaments? As a wild player I would love to participate and play in official tournaments. Not to mention, people have been complaining about voidcaller, Myras Unstable Element, and Barnes in wild. Have you guys considered nerfs?

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Will we ever see a legend theme cardback for wild or something that will encourage people to play wild more

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Seriously, can we please, pleaseeeee get wild packs in the shop? Or at least in the blizzard shop, for IN-GAME currency and not real money?

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