Hearthstone Dev Tracker

Thank you. Thank you, all. I love what I do, and am so glad that I can share this passion and fun with so many people. <3

Our current plan for card sets for Demon Hunters involves creating a Classic set for them in the future. That set may pull from some existing Initiate/Phoenix cards, possibly with changes, and some brand new cards. Exact plans are still very much up in the air; we have a lot of time before we have to decided what their evergreen cards are, and so want to take that time to get more experience with how Demon Hunters play out. Rest assured, we'll let you know what's going to happen when it's finalized.

I'll add on to this... Part of the way we're doing this is through having more cards in each Year of the Phoenix expansion for Demon Hunter, but some of those cards are core Demon Hunter fantasy, not tied to the expansion. Since they're brand new, we want to help instill the baseline of what Demon Hunter is, especially for those who are experiencing them for the first time here in Hearthstone.

Examples from Ashes of Outland: Spectral Sight, Immolation Aura, Warglaives of Azzinoth, Metamorphosis.

We intend to continue that strategy in the other two expansions this year.

Wheeeee!

https://www.reddit.com/r/hearthstone/comments/g0okne/hearthstone_team_ama_april_14/fneujfg/

The fun thing about Pure Paladin is that all Paladin cards are potential Pure Paladin cards! But really, we've got some balance changes coming soon, not specifically targeted at Paladin, but the meta overall, and the meta will look quite different after that. If any class is left in a bad state after that, we'll continue to adjust.

Maybe my reply came off a bit out of touch. I'm not at all saying that he's currently a strong card, merely that he's at a reasonable power level, similar to numerous other general-purpose legendaries.

I also wasn't sure if we were going to announce the Sacrificial Pact change yet, but we decided to announce that below as well, so great!

Hearthstone's clean and intuitive UI is a huge part of its charm and success, and so we're very careful when it comes to UI complexity. "Options" can just turn into "messy and confusing" quickly, if we're not careful.

1) We have some long-term goals of revisiting the Collection Manager, especially on mobile, and I think this sort of thing would likely fall under that. Nothing planned in the short-term though.

2) We hear the request for auto-squelch, but still think it would be a net negative for the game. Emotes are implicitly good-natured, and we want to support them as such. Manually squelching can be used for the extremely rare outlier of toxicity.

3) One of the great things about Demon Hunters is that they attack a LOT. It's super fun! However, that has the downside of sounding repetitive, hearing that voice line over and over. In the next major patch, we'll be adding some alternative exertion lines for Illidan attacking, to reduce the repetitio...

https://www.reddit.com/r/hearthstone/comments/g0okne/hearthstone_team_ama_april_14/fnebpg7/

1. "Restricting design space" is something we refer to as a downside of certain designs. However, I wouldn't take that to mean that all cards that restrict design space are bad. All cards restrict design space to some degree, but ones that do so more tend to also be the more interesting ones, and good for the game, especially in expansions.

In some cases, it's merely the presence of a class already having something for that role and not needing more (Polymorph), or adding more would give them a dangerous critical mass of it (Freeze and damage effects in general). In other cases, it's potential combo interactions that we have to be careful of (Tundra Rhino, Arcane Amplifier, Archmage Antonidas, Lightforged Blessing, Holy Wrath, Al'akir, etc).

There are a ton of cards that "restrict design space" in some regard, but that's not always a problem, and often goes hand-in-hand with doing good things for the game too. When it doesn't, especially when it's Basic/Cl...

Good question! "Titan's Script" actually refers to "Titan's Grip", a Warrior ability from World of Warcraft that lets you equip a two-handed weapon in each hand. Not at all related to Zephrys.

The Hearthstone design for Titan's Grip that they were talking about was a spell that read "Equip a minion." You'd pick a minion up and put it in your weapon slot, using its Attack as Attack, and Health as Durability. Fun idea, but there were a TON of technical issues with it. There were also a ton of gameplay issues with it as well, like, do you just use it as a way to protect an important minion from being killed? What do all these combat keywords like Taunt mean when they're on your weapon? Does 'Can't Attack' on a weapon mean that the Hero can't use it to attack? Do all of their triggered effects still happen? Imagine putting Armorsmith in your weapon slot and just never using it up!

We may find a way to do something like it, someday. We're brainstorming and prototyping si...

We love communicating with players. It's natural that we tend to talk more when there's new stuff to talk about, but we're still trying hard to communicate more at all times, not just around expansion launches. It's also easier to respond to things when we have great things to respond to, so I'd also throw a huge part of the credit for this AMA back at the community for all the great questions, feedback, comments, and yes, even constructive criticism, over the past couple months. Let's all try hard to keep this going!

As for how we've been following through with this on our side, whenever there has been an issue in the live game in the recent months, our community team has been quick to put out information. We also released a roadmap covering most of our development efforts and goals for the year during our Year of the Phoenix summit. And members of our development team have spent a great deal of their time both in work and outside of it communicating with players, whether ...

Some things are intended to be part of the core strength of Priest (hard removal, control), so those things got buffed (Shadow Word: Death, Smite).

Other things are not intended to be part of their core strengths (card draw), and nerfing them to the point that they fit would have resulted in just a useless card, so they were Hall of Famed (Northshire Cleric). Others could be changed to still fit and are useful, so that was done instead (Power Word: Shield).

Lord Jaraxxus is super sweet, and we love him. Any card's viability is always going to fluctuate with the meta, and this is no different. We may currently be at a low point in his meta-viability, but that's okay and natural for card games.

I'd also take issue with the idea that even now, he's unplayable. Yes, Zephrys is currently in standard, making Jaraxxus risky. But it's also quite an exaggeration to say that he can't be played because of that. He's still good against non-Highlander decks (which are the majority, currently), and I've heard multiple pro (GM) players state that they'll still run him, and just save him for after Zephrys is played.

Priest was the one where we felt the Basic/Classic set was the most in need of revision, by a considerable margin.

We're hoping to see how that goes (please, let us know what you think of it, whether you'd like to see more of that, etc.), and then evaluate the potential of making Basic/Classic design changes to other classes. I wouldn't expect the same level of change to other classes, but we're definitely talking about it.