when is the solo adventure coming out ?
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Will we have the in game tournament mode this year ?
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Are there any plans to improve the structure of the Tavern Brawl game mode? Option to toggle between Standard or Wild? Removal of the two day cleanup time? Having multiple brawls available at once and rotating out old ones with new ones? Ability to freely revisit old brawls in friendly challenge mode?
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Thanks again for holding another Q&A, everyone appreciates it.
Does the team have a stance on 1) The lack of separate rank chests for standard and wild,
and 2) The very minor reward increase between rank 5 and Legend chests?
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Were the “new” 4 classic cards a replacement for the spells that rotated?
If that was the case, you’re only considering this for class cards, or do you have something thought for rotated neutral cards like the oracle?
If that is not the case, could any cards from other sets be reintroduced in standard, like rogue secrets from kobolds or whizbang, or the amount of cards in classic is just limited to the number it had originally?
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Tribes, or ‘minion types’, exist for a few reasons. Mechanically, they link a wide variety of disparate cards, so that they can be referred to and interacted with (“Whenever you summon a Beast…”, “If you played an Elemental last turn…”, etc.). They also help add flavor to a card. We have a variety of minion types right now, and are open to the idea of adding more in the future. However, each minion type we add does add a bit of complication, so we look at what the upside of each one is.
Take Treants for example: We’ve designed Treants to be consistently 2/2 tokens, with “Treant” in their name. So, if we add a Treant tribe, what do we gain? Treants are already quite recognizable, and searchable. It would allow us to print cards that are Treants, but not named “Treant”… but that would conflict with the goals of Treants to be 2/2 tokens, so we aren’t particularly inclined to do that right now.
Lackeys are similar; they keyword and consistent name already fill the role of the minion type, so an additional minion type there doesn’t really gain us much.
Undead is another minion type that we see brought up. What would a build-around theme for Undead look like? Is there a clear delineation between what counts as Undead or not? Since minions currently only have 1 type (apart from the special one-off amalgams), minion types tend to work best when they’re exclusive. Pirate is one where that gets complicated; in order to keep things clear, we tend to not make Murloc Pirates, or Beast Pirates, etc. Undead would be even more problematic in that regard; we’d basically have to go to a world of multiple types per minion, since dozens of cards look Undead along with an existing type already. It’s not out of the question, but we’d have to have a very good reason to cross that big bridge of complication.
Tri-class cards were pretty cool, yeah! I wonder if, in a world where the classes are divided between good and E.V.I.L., there would be a place for multi-class cards in the future? Hmmmmm… It’s definitely something we’d consider!
Mana ramp is indeed part of the core identity of Druids in Hearthstone, and we do intend to maintain that going forward. While they may not currently be as extreme at that as they once were, that leaves us room to add more/stronger mana ramp cards in the future. I think it’s safe to say that you’ll see mana ramp cards in Druid again.
A few reasons! First, we generally try to sprinkle some flavorful cards into each set. It helps set the tone of the set, helps it feel like you’re in Dalaran. Second, mechanically, it helps lay the groundwork for future build-arounds. As mentioned above, minion types are important for mechanical interactions, and we recognized that numerous Elementals were rotating out of Standard at this time, so we could use some replacements. Just as Dire Mole saw play merely for being a 1/3 Beast (heck, even sometimes just a 1/3), there’s potential for a 2/3 Elemental to see play, with the right supporting cards.
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So why do you guys keep locking hero portraits to preorders? Why can’t we buy them separately or earn them naturally as rewards like we used to? We didn’t even get a free hero with this new Hearthstone year.
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That’s a good question! I’m not sure… I’m not sure if even Rafaam is sure! Maybe “Elaborate Vision of Ideal Leaders”?
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Happy Birthday!
I wrote an article about a year ago about some philosophy on keywords when we changed Enrage (https://playhearthstone.com/en-us/blog/21614307) and that’s stayed pretty consistent. At a high level, keywords do some really good things. They condense card text, they make it easier to learn a new card once you know the keyword, they can tell a good story, and they can give us mechanical hooks to make other cards that care about them.
In exchange, when we do focus tests with people that are more casual, just starting Hearthstone, or coming back to it, the single biggest thing that turns people off in card text is keywords. People have a much easier time with “Teach it 2 Shaman spells” or “Get a fantastic Treasure” than with “Lifesteal, Rush, Windfury.”
Part of our card text philosophy is that we want people to feel confident playing their cards and then understand the details once they play it. Keywords make you feel lost. If you don’t know a keyword, you just don’t get the card. In client, you can mouse over it but that creates an extra burden and a lot of people interact with cards outside of the client as well.
So there’s a tradeoff here. We want to get real value out of our keywords when we use them. We prefer not to use keywords on a one-off card. There might be exceptions in the future, but Witch’s Brew is a great example of this. “Repeatable this turn” is very understandable to experienced and new players and doesn’t take up too much text space. It does lose a bit of the story which is sad, but the clarity, especially for a card in a different year than Echo, was much more important to us.
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Can anyone comment on if we’re getting more deck slots in the near future? It would be a really nice QOL improvement.
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We are working towards a world where class strengths and weaknesses are better communicated and more easily defined. One option players have when their class may have difficulty with wide removal options is to tech in cards from Neutral, like Dragonmaw Scorcher and Mossy Horror, if they’re running to a lot of decks like Token Druid. Neutral options are generally weaker than class removal options, but they’re something you can reach for if that’s something you’re running into a lot on the ladder. We’ll continue to provide these types of options in Neutral for classes to look at to either bolster things their classes already do well, or help shore up some deficiencies they may have.
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Can we have bigger friend list in battle.net client and Hearthstone, please? 200 is maybe ideal for new users, but for those of us who play the game for several years, it feels really tight.
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Hearthstone is currently a lonely and sometimes outright antisocial affair (ever got friend requests from recent opponents?)
Any plans to implement some kind of group/ guild system or anything similar?
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I mean the biggest problem with token druid is the resilient boards that soul of the forest generates at such a low mana cost making it hard to clear.
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Oh really? I heard from Rafaam himself that it was “Every Villain Imbibes Lemonade”.
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Have you considered changing cards like Witch’s Brew or Unstable Evolution to have the Echo keyword after they rotate to wild? I understand why having a lot of keywords in standard can make the gameplay confusing for new players, however, in wild, where there are a bunch of similar cards, its absolutely necessary for them to know their keywords, and having these on-offs without the keywords IMO just makes it more confusing for players who are new to wild.
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Team 5 mentioned that the bulglar effect would change to “from another class” instead of your opponents class going forward.
Since Pilfer is in the classic set and will remain there forever will you change it’s effect?
In battle.net we have Social tab, where you can form a group. Isn’t it enough?
Legendary is easiest to decide. Mechanically, if we only want something to happen once a game (ignoring shenanigans), we’ll make it Legendary. Or if it needs to be the only copy of something. A good example is the no-duplicate cards like Reno and Kazakas. Or if there’s something that doesn’t make sense to happen twice in a game, like this scrapped card: “Battlecry: Detonate all Bombs in your opponent’s deck.” After that card, there’s no Bombs in their deck, so the second copy feels like a dud. We try and avoid that where we can. Also, if the design is top-down and can only fit one named character, we’ll make it Legendary. Ragnaros, Lightlord’s effect is directly linked to Ragnaros, so it’d be silly to make his flavor anything other than Ragnaros. 
As for the others, it’s mostly a complexity thing. The more the complex a card is, the more rare it is. Shadowcaster is a complex card that can do a lot of different things, but you need context of how to use it effectively. Dirty Rat is another good example; if you just play Dirty Rat, you may not know what you’re getting in to. Other times, if the card is a weird one-off card we put it at Epic, like Void Contract or Immortal Prelate.
At the common level, we try and put the most basic and easy to understand cards for a class. Rare is somewhere between Common and Epic.
In Initial Design (first 16 weeks), we try and get it as close as possible, but it’s mostly just from most complex to least complex.
Later on in Final Design, once designs are mostly locked in, we may shuffle them to make the class feel better. Like, if all the commons for a class are minions, or if an entire deck archetype is at rare.
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How do you feel about the lack of combo decks in the standard meta right now?
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