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HS_Celestalon

HS_Celestalon



11 Aug

Hearthstone Team Reddit AMA – August 11

Comment

Originally posted by EvilDave219

I don't play much arena, but I'd like to hear the HS team's thoughts on the state arena has been in over the past several months. There have been quite a few valid criticisms of the format, including -

  1. Dropping set rotations, which were previously well received by the community.
  2. Dropping the bucket system for drafting, which was also well received by the community.
  3. Certain cards like Twin Tyrant and Dragonqueen Alexstrasa providing too much of a one turn tempo swing that typically can't be overcome in the arena format. Is there a reason why these cards have either not had their offering rates decreased or removed from the format entirely?
  4. The lack of communication from the dev team on any sort of arena updates (I think the last time we heard from them was when they mentioned they were tweaking Demon Hunter's class card offerings at the beginning of Ashes of Outland).

Are you planning any sort of updates around Arena, or sh...

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We love Arena. It has a passionate and dedicated following, and one of the things that we think is most important to Hearthstone is that there are many different ways to play. Our main focus right now has been on developing new game modes, while keeping Arena in a stable place. I can definitely understand wishing for 'something new' (beyond new expansions); are there little changes that you think would help Arena out?

To some of your specific points:

  • Set rotations had some downsides as well (a more complex format, old sets out of place at times balance-wise, etc.). Since they were removed, we’ve seen a large amount of vocal support for them, and are considering bringing them back in some form for the next expansion.
  • Buckets were a mixed bag; we could spend all day tweaking buckets, but we didn’t really see positive results from them. Even just a few poorly-bucketed cards would cause significantly negative community reaction/experience, until we could ...
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Hearthstone Team Reddit AMA – August 11

Comment

Originally posted by stonekeep

As a content creator who commonly used your official assets from press site, I have a question about that. Why have you stopped adding full card artwork from new sets? In the past, virtually every single card art was available. A few sets ago the number got lower, but you could still get a lot cool art from there. And now, starting in Ashes of Outland, there are no card artworks available whatsoever.

So is there a specific reason why you don't publish them anymore? I know that individual artists are still sharing their art quite commonly (not every one of them, but by the end of expansion you can get art for 80-90 cards from different sources), so I assume it's not them not wanting you to do it? And is there a chance that you will keep adding them again in the future? Not only they make my (and not only mine) work easier, but they're frankly just amazing to look at.

Update: ...

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Yeah, we love that there's interest in this. As your update says, we just added a bunch of Scholomance Academy card art up on the press site, and we will try to post card art there whenever possible!


23 Jul

Reveal video of the new Priest card: the Gamemode is a Friendly Standard Battle, but the Rogue has a Cogmaster’s Wrench equipped? Perhaps indicating that Rogue will get a card allowing them to equip Wild weapons in Standard?

Comment

Originally posted by mrgoodbytes8891

The side bar that tracks the actions taken in the game is also empty, but they’re clearly far into the game. I think it’s more likely that this is just a situation that the devs who are playing manually set up and they just didn’t care what weapon the rogue had. They probably just set up a specific situation where the card they’re trying to show off does something crazy rather than actually playing full games until they get the footage they want organically.

This is correct. The Wrench is not intended to be a hint of anything.


14 Jul

List of Transfer Student's effects! (Updated over time)

Comment

Originally posted by [deleted]

I wouldn't be surprised if they keep it updated with the next 4-5 boards before just putting one final effect on it for any boards it doesn't recognise.

This is basically correct. We plan to update Transfer Student with custom effects for new boards, while he is in Standard. After he rotates to Wild, new boards will get a consistent "Battlecry: Discover a card." for each board.

Plans may change in the future, but that's what we're thinking right now, at least.


18 Jun

Bug: Quest is uncompletable since it only popped up after relaunching HS and I already did the solo adventure.

Comment

We're working on a fix for this, sorry about that. Stay tuned!


17 Apr

Am i crazy or should a Pack Tactics copy of overconfident orc at full health have a 5/3 statline?

Comment

Yep, Overconfident Orc's buff was too low priority. Should be fixed in the next major patch!


15 Apr

Some Positivity for Dean and the Dev Team

Comment

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


14 Apr

Hearthstone Team AMA - April 14

Comment

Originally posted by FancyLad_SnackCakes

Concerning Demon Hunter:

-Will Warglaives of Azzinoth be moved to classic for the class? (even the hero portrait is him using them) Its a staple of Illidan and we have Doomhammer and Gorehowl for use in classic for Warrior/Shaman.

-Alot of Demon Hunter Initiate cards are pretty much the class identity from lore (Immolation, Eye Beam, Spectral Sight, etc), I guess this goes with my first question, will some demon hunter initiate cards be moved and chosen for the classic set or will there be all new classic DH cards? Seems like you guys used all of Demon Hunters abilities for a set that will get rotated out.

-Why doesnt metamorphosis change the hero portrait while its in use? Its a legendary card and we already seen that Hearthstone can change hero portraits with card abilities (Shadow Form Priest anyone?)

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.

Hearthstone Team AMA - April 14

Comment

Originally posted by HearthstoneTeamAMA

The team has had a lot of practice at this over the past six years with Hearthstone's nine other Heroes 🙂. Characters like Uther and Thrall are very grounded in Warcraft lore and history, but they and their cards manage to have their own flavors in Hearthstone while remaining true to the source material. - Ben

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.

Hearthstone Team AMA - April 14

Comment

Originally posted by EndangeredBigCats

What’s the least-descriptive way you can describe your favorite upcoming archetypes we should be on the lookout for throughout the year?

Wheeeee!

Not a single word in the AMA about the state of Paladin, despite dozens of questions refering specifically to that class...

Comment

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

Hearthstone Team AMA - April 14

Comment

Originally posted by gdw0

Will there be any more pure paladin cards? Also this arch gets pretty destroyed by antihighlander tech, is this intended?

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.

Hearthstone Team AMA - April 14

Comment

Originally posted by LordTekron

With all do respect, even if Zephrys didn’t exist he’d still be too big of a risk to play. A 3/8 weapon that has nothing else to it is just meh, the 15 max health is a huge risk, and the 9 mana is too clunky. The Galakrond cards get a 5/2 which is fine and the two death knight hero cards (Garrosh and Uther) that get weapons at least have something special about them. And I know it’s not fair to compare Jaraxxus to any Hero Card but he kinda is in a bizarre way. Like a beta hero card.

I don’t know, I feel like while he doesn’t need such a drastic change he could get some quality of life touches so when I am making a warlock deck I can look at him and at least consider him as an option. Cause right now there are two different hero cards I’d rather make a deck with and they don’t die to a random 0 mana spell. And if I want to hear Jaraxxus ham I just have the Mecha-Jaraxxus skin to do that for me.

Hope this doesn’t sound too rude.

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 Team AMA - April 14

Comment

Originally posted by stonehearthed

Are there any plans for more customized settings/game options? Let me mention few examples to illustrate what I mean:

1-) Collection: Don't show regular cards if I have golden copies. / Don't show goldens if I have regular copies. This is to show most cards in one page instead of 2 regular plus 2 golden taking up 2 card space. So every card would take one space. Alternatively the counter shown below the cards can be made two counters, respectively regular and golden:

CARD IMAGE

[x2] - [x2]

2-) Squelch every opponent.

3-) When squelched, enemy hero's other voice lines are also disabled. Sylvanas talks too much to my taste, and Illidan's "Vengeance is mine!" repeatedly is a horror show for me.

4-) Show quest progress at any moment. Even when you are already playing a game.

Have a 4/7/7 day! Cheers!

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...

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Hearthstone Team AMA - April 14

Comment

Originally posted by zemubocu

Will there be any classic and basic class cards revamp this year like Priest got ? I'm thinking about Paladin and Shaman in particular.

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

Hearthstone Team AMA - April 14

Comment

Originally posted by Jannimaus

Hello! Thank you for this great opportunity!

1) How much effort is it to design a new game "board"? I would love to see grass, lava, water, ice or wooden planks like on a pirate ship...or something spooky. Is this even possible? It could be a great achievement reward for getting a class to 60!

2) Which cards currently restrict the design space in hearthstone, in your opinion?

3) Are you looking into adding pirates, totems or elementals to the battlegrounds? How far are you in the development/Implementation of new tribes here?

  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...

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Hearthstone Team AMA - April 14

Comment

Originally posted by [deleted]

During the blizzcon 2017 QA, four of your colleagues (I actually think none of them are still part of team 5) were asked about their favorite card that never made it into the game and Peter and Mike mentioned a card called Titan Script that is insanely complicated to build.

Has that card made it into the game since then? Is it perhaps Zephrys? If not, do you have any more teases or pet peeve designs that you are still trying to get into the game?

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...

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Hearthstone Team AMA - April 14

Comment

Originally posted by apathyontheeast

The Hearthstone team has repeatedly claimed an intention to be more communicative, yet this is one of the extremely few times we have heard any communication (that wasn't focused on a new expansion). What has prevented follow-through with communication with the playerbase and how will you be remedying it in the future?

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 ...

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Hearthstone Team AMA - April 14

Comment

Originally posted by Cynthielle69

I love the priest classic/core set change and ive wouldve only done it sligtly different persoanly in buffing shadowform to 2mana and replacing mindgames .

And id really love to see it happen to other classes(palladin,shaman the most then warrior imo) as i think its needed and would be really good for the future.

Also whats the design decisions for the core set change for priest in buffing some,nerfing others and others juet being hof'd ? like northsire is hof'd but powershield is nerfed/changed.

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).

Hearthstone Team AMA - April 14

Comment

Originally posted by LordTekron

Lord Jaraxxus, we need to talk about him. Right now he is a class legendary that has no logical reason to be played, even if Zephrys wasn’t in standard so everyone could just top deck a sacrificial pact (an interaction that while was cute at the start has become an annoyance), a 9 mana set your max health to 15 and equip a meh weapon at best is terrible in an environment in which 15 face damage is not impossible to do from hand alone. He has one of the best hero powers in the game but that shouldn’t come at such a heavy cost. Has the team at all considered looking into possible changes to either the card or how things interact with him? Cause an evergreen class legendary shouldn’t be so mediocre at best IMO.

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.