Hearthstone Dev Tracker

The following is being posted on behalf of Aleco Pors, Final Design Lead.

Hey everyone!

We’ve got a really big balance patch planned for later this week, with changes to around 30 cards, including buffs and nerfs—and a few Wild changes. Since this patch has different goals from most other patches, I’d like to provide you all with some more context as to what we’re thinking and how we got here.

In this patch, we are attempting to address issues which have cropped up with the overall health of Standard, as opposed to correcting issues with the health of the specific meta like we normally do. Alarm bells started to go off within the design team when we noticed that the power level of Hearthstone didn’t seem to drop much (if at all) after the recent annual rotation. This sparked a lot of internal discussion about certain gameplay patterns in the current meta – particularly hyper-efficient AoE board clears, “OTK” style decks that la...

Hey everyone, we have another bot ban update to share with you.

Since our last post, we’ve continued our regular cadence of anti-bot detection and actions. In that time, we’ve actioned over 240,000 additional accounts.

In Patch 29.2, we also made an update to Arena matchmaking as a proactive step against extreme play patterns specific to that Mode, sometimes referred to as “barcode accounts.” Now, if you repeatedly retire runs early, you will be put into a separate matchmaking pool for your run. Being able to retire an Arena run early is an important feature for when you want to play a different deck. But, for a small percentage of players, it’s used to repeatedly draft new decks until they get one they consider extremely strong. This chan...

Patch 29.2.1 is a server-side hotfix rolling out now with the following game updates and bug fixes.

Weekly Quest Update

The Weekly Quest requirements are now as follows:

• Use your Hero Power 30 times (instead of 40)
• Play Battlecry cards 75 times (instead of 100)
• Play Miniaturize or Mini cards 32 times (instead of 60)
• Win games in Tavern Brawl, Arena, or Battlegrounds 10 times (instead of 15)
• Win ranked Hearthstone games 10 times (instead of 15)
• Damage enemy heroes 400 damage (not changed this patch)
• Spend 750 mana (not changed this patch)

XP granted by the Weekly Quests is not changing from the new higher amount.

Dev Comment: To get these changes out as fast as we could, we’ve put them into this server-only hotfix. That means there will be some weirdness where the numbers look unchanged in the client, but function as described above (so your rank...

That’s not a bug: paying health isn’t taking damage.

Thanks to everyone reporting the Death Knight weapon freezing thing. The team’s looking into it.

Patch 29.2 is here, bringing with it Battlegrounds Season 7, Battlegrounds Duos, and much more! This is a big patch, so there are a few known issues we’re tracking. Refer to this post for updates throughout this patch.

The known issues we’re tracking this patch include:

• [Shop] Mac desktop clients are unable to access the Shop in patch 29.2. This will be resolved in our next major patch. In the meantime, you can still make any purchases through the web shop or mobile devices.
• [Cosmetics] There is a bug where the default Coin is generated in-game instead of your Favorited Coin. This is scheduled to be fixed in the next major patch.
• [Added 4/16] [Collection] The team is investigating reports of players unable to open their last pack in a stack. This is believed to be a purely visual bug related to packs granted when retiring Duels.
• [Added 4/16] [Battlegrounds] Using Reno’s Hero Power on Persistent Poet results in a visual ...