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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Are the plans on adding whizbang to the classic set? And are there other cards coming to the classic set either from other sets or just new ones like tome of intellect?
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Don’t listen to these guys it clearly stands for “Evil eVil evIl eviL”.
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Battlenet is on the same level as facebook, reddit, twitter etc. (not ingame)
A guild system ideally would entail additional incentives for interaction (issue challenges in the chat, share replays/ decklists, guild quests/ tournaments, co-op missions/puzzles etc.)
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A couple of things going on here. For Basic cards, we’ve always nerfed in the past. If we Hall of Fame a Basic card, we need to replace it at the same time since it’s in everyone’s collection. That’s something we might do in the future, but haven’t yet.
For Classic cards, it’s a question of whether the effect is something we want around long term in standard. There are a few of pieces to that - how well does it fit the class’ fantasy, is it a healthy effect for the game to have around always, and is it something cool and exciting that we want to preserve in Wild. For Cold Blood, it’s a healthy effect, something we want rogues to be able to do, and not so unique that we felt like Wild rogues badly needed it, so we nerfed it instead of Hall of Faming it.
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In Rise of Shadows we saw the return of 5 of Hearthstones iconic villains as they lay siege to Dalaran, can you tease where the League of E.V.I.L will strike afterward or if they’ll have any additional team members?
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Hi Hadidjah! As a member of the art team I have a question. Imp, Treant and Squirrel all got new token art for RoS. Why didn’t the Murloc from Soul of the Murloc get new token art? Jus curious. ![:slight_smile:](https://dacy5cilkxabf.cloudfront.net/en/hearthstone/images/emoji/twitter/slight_smile.png?v=6" ":slight_smile:")