I know, I know, titles with a question mark suck but I am genuinely asking. This topic has been on my mind for a while now, and I'd like to know if y'all share some of my thoughts.
I've been playing Hearthstone on and off since a bit before Goblins vs. Gnomes. This means I have lived through most eras of Hearthstone, from the days of extremely rare nerfs to actually seeing cards being buffed. I have also felt the steady rhythm of power creep changing the experience of playing Hearthstone - initially for the better, but after a certain point (we all have one, mine was United in Stormwind) it can start feeling negative.
Thus, I'd like to talk about the one unchanging aspect of constructed Hearthstone. They printed more powerful cards, even increased maximum mana pool (Druids), gave everyone weapons, but they never touched Heroes' health.
No, not Anduin's health. If anything, he should have less health.
Power Creep
Power creep as a whole isn't a negative phenomenon, necessarily. Right about every game with content updates employs power creep - gear upgrades, passive unlocks, new cards must be at least equally strong, but preferably slightly better than the stuff the player previously interacted with. In fact, to combat power creep, Standard mode was born. You can see power creep at its worst in Wild right now. Twist was an attempt to give players a use for their older cards without Wild's power creep. To my surprise, the new cards in the Cavern of Time set feel like another set of power creep. I hope Twist will become a good, balanced game mode that harkens back to Hearthstone's older days, but I'm not holding my breath.
All of this to say power creep is inevitable, and developers must face it. How they handle it, however, is the important part. Old Hearthstone had a few OTKs and that sort of thing, but also three things you seldom find in modern Hearthstone:
- Less swings. No healing to full health 5 times a game. No 20 face damage a turn as a baseline for most decks.
- Stickier minions. When you placed a strong, expensive minion on the board, you didn't expect your opponent to have an answer for it 80% of the time.
- Games that would consistently last past round 10. This has become shorter over time.
I suppose you could say power creep inevitably made the game faster. Considering in Hearthstone, speed is equal to how quickly you can set your opponent's health to 0, perhaps there is where the key to a more enjoyable experience (at least for me!) lies: Messing with Hero health.
Absurd!
Battlegrounds Already Do It
The Battlegrounds team understands not all Heroes are born equal. Frequently, BG balance patches change the starting Armor value of Heroes depending on how well they're performing. While A.F. Kay needs a little more armor considering she's, well, AFK the first two turns, Onyxia is fine with less since her hero power keeps her better protected early on.
The same could be applied to Heroes in Constructed, at least in Standard. Say we're in an expansion cycle where all classes but Shaman and Warrior have good access to card draw. Shammies and Warriors are consistently disadvantaged the first five turns because everyone else is casually burning through their decks, slinging cards left and right. Perhaps a little armor would make them more competitive.
One could argue Prince Renathal exists, but the 'cost' of a diluted deck can be a disadvantage for a lot of deck concepts. For a class with a ridiculous amount of heals, Amara, Warden of Hope feels like it could better serve someone like Rogue. With the yearly power creep, Hearthstone's health pools have felt smaller - it's still $30, but $30 bought you more 10 years ago.
It exists, therefore it is possible.
More Complex Than It Seems
You can't just slap Armor on a bunch of classes and call it a day. There's plenty cards in the game whose effect changes depending on your starting Armor, such as Shield Slam. The same can be said for health with keywords like Overheal. There are lots of considerations as to what the appropriate health for each class would be if Hearthstone were to undertake this challenge:
- Some classes don't do much healing or damage mitigation but have amazing tools to handle threats, like Mage.
- Other classes have great healing tools to the point any health buff would be a huge advantage, but leaving their health at 30 keeps the game just as swingy (Demon Hunter, Priest etc.)
- How often would Heroes' health need to be balanced? How stable can a meta be if Heroes' health keeps changing?
- Is it all worth it just for some geezer's (I'm 26) enjoyment of a slower Hearthstone?
This is perhaps the biggest issue: There's many Hearthstone players who are enjoying the modern game, and just as many who wish there were less deck-defining cards, huge swings, stickier minions and more strategical encounters.
It just ain't the same, man!
A Bit of Fun: Parallel Universe Hearthstone
In a parallel universe, where everything is the same as here, except the game Harpstone. Harpstone is functionally identical to our Hearthstone in all but name and, well, Heroes' health. Harpstone changes Hero health/armor values about 2-3 times per expansion. This allows the developers to experiment a little more with archetypes every expansion. Harpstone's Rogue doesn't have access to much healing, and its cards are very techy and control-themed, but because of its increased health, it works. Here's what this totally-real Harpstone game's TITANS expansion looks like. For every class, the developers have focused on one 'main' type of deck: Aggro, Midrange, Control, Secret etc. I have used my powers of astral projection to get the information in the table below:
| CLASS | ARCHETYPE | HEALTH / ARMOR |
| Death Knight | Aggro (many ghouls) | 35 Health, 5 Armor |
| Demon Hunter | Aggro (many demons w/ Lifesteal) | 30 Health |
| Druid | Control (lots of big-cost cards that give Armor) | 30 Health, 15 Armor |
| Hunter | Midrange (lots of 'answer' cards, no big one-turn damage) | 40 Health |
| Mage | Secret (just a whole lotta' secrets) | 50 Health |
| Paladin | Control (lots of healing) | 30 Health |
| Priest | Aggro (full-on Shadow Priest) | 35 Health |
| Rogue | Control (lots of tech cards, specific removal) | 45 Health |
| Shaman | Control (keep basic Totems alive & buff them a lot) | 40 Health |
| Warlock | Aggro (lotta' imps, lotta self-damage) | 40 Health |
| Warrior | Control (army of Taunt minions) | 30 Health, 10 Armor |
I've played a couple of Harpstone games... uh, astrally, and I gotta' say it's pretty fun. No class has answers to the overwhelming majority of situations, but their health pools give them enough time to get their juices flowing, if you know what I mean (do I?). I hear Harpstone's next expansion is gonna' buff Shaman to 100 Health but only add spell cards to the class - sounds terrible but exciting!
Alright, fever dream aside, I'd like to know - what's your opinion on Health? Do you feel games generally ending too quickly, or being too swingy, is related to the relationship between power creep and a never-changing starting Health pool? Let me know in the comments below, because I must know if I'm the only one!
Comments
I understand your worry of power creep, but balance and fun is truly a difficult thing... there's a fun video on it I saw long ago, that even mentions your ice rager thing lol.
Can we lower the starting health instead?
In modern Hearthstone there are waaaay too many tools to gain health and armor.
In "good old HS" health was a resource you have to think about and manage it. There were only a few cards to push or refill your health.
But nowadays most classes can just spam removals and health gaining cards with very little or even no relevant board interaction at all.
All this overpowered control tools make modern HS in a lot of games very uninteractive.
Oh and yeah, I take all the downvotes from the control players out there. Throw them all over me! :)
It's not that you're wrong. You're not. The game simply lacks a clear design path. It's all over the place.
They removed the old control type because teenagers are too stupid to think for more than 3 seconds, thus leading to turn 4-6 kills.
Then they reintroduced an idea of control that is more keen to what you said. Other times, the ladder was 80% hyper aggro and early otks. Remember, face hunter will never be a bad deck :) never was, either.
So, you are right. Yet i'm also right with this being an arcade fiasco. Haven't even touched the lack of interaction between players.
It's like they stopped doing adventures and needed a way to compensate, thus making HS mostly single player. Funny...
Their design is really all over the place. Mostly rehashed ideas too. Assigning a keyword to already existing mechanics is not novelty, nor proper design.
They really need new designers there. Or simply to fire those that aren't letting the current ones do something right. No idea what's going on there, but it's being done for years.
That's exactly the reason i stopped playing years ago. I like long strategic games. Sure, i don't mind the odd quick ones here and there. But getting killed turn 4-6 is not what i call "a game". For me, the average number of turns per game should be 15, not 10.
Of course, health is the easiest to change. But considering how incompetent they are in managing power creeps (i.e. i'm definitely sure it can even be avoided, and have only slight power creep swings every few years, by adding different concepts into the game rather than something that makes the game faster or more luck-based than it already is), they'd probably botch it too.
I've said it previously - they need new designers and leads that want/are allowed to transform this into a real card game rather than an arcade fiasco.
There's always the posibility of updating older cards to match the new ones, yet, at this point, i think we're due for HS 2.0. A new game with proper new ideas. No more stupid filler cards either.
In the end, the game sucks for me, hero health increasing or not. I don't trust them anymore with anything. They clearly have a target audience of teenagers and kids, who apparently don't like to think strategically, thus they'll never do it, probably.
I liked the meta when Prince Renathal gave you 40 health, so experimentally I'd say that for me the game is better with more health.
Maybe you only included it for humorous purposes, but going from Magma Rager to Ice Rager is not power creep, as neither card ever played a role in any past meta. A real example of power creep is Azure Drake, which used to be considered a good card included in many decks and now barely sees play despite being buffed. Or going from Sen'jin Shieldmasta to Saronite Tol'vir.
What happened in Wild is a particular kind of power creep: the main factor driving up the power level is not that people select the best cards from all past sets, but that synergies work much better if you have a larger pool of synergistic cards to pick from.
I agree with your first two observations, but old Hearthstone games did not consistently last past round 10. Maybe if you go back to before Naxxramas or played a very control-heavy deck, but most games I played with mid-range decks took between 8 and 12 turns (I remember because I logged my attempts to play decks like Beast Druid). Going past turn 10 wasn't rare, but it wasn't a majority of games either. Dr. Boom was such a good card because he came down on turn 7, which was often just before games were decided.
Less swings has both upsides and downsides. It feels more fair when your efforts aren't easily erased, but it also means that if a deck snowballs, there is no hope of recovering. While I think Modern Hearthstone has a bit too much swing potential, I wouldn't want to go back to the old days either.
I fully agree with stickier minions. Minions are now so easily removed that you summon them to force your opponent spend resources on removing them, not because you expect them to still be there the next round. Again, I wouldn't want to go all the way back to the old days (games being decided by a turn 1 Mana Wyrm was no fun), but having stickier minions would be nice.
Giving a hero more health has two main effects:
I think having more time to stabilize versus aggro is a good thing, because it makes games more interactive. It will force aggro decks to have a game plan that goes beyond just dumping the initial hand on the board and going face.
Raising the bar for OTKs is good up to a certain point: metas in which OTK decks are dominant aren't fun, as the first player to draw their combo wins. But metas in which control decks without win conditions are dominant become a slog. I think it's good that in modern Hearthstone control decks do have win conditions, although when a single card is a win condition, like Odyn, Prime Designate, it becomes too repetitive.
Tying health, archetypes and classes together sounds like a risky proposition:
In particular, if there is a viable aggro deck in a class that was predicted to not play aggro, that deck could beat all the aggro decks in the lower-health classes, because it wins damage races.
In Hearthstone a card has a significant intrinsic mana value. For example, we have 0-mana cards that do useful things. The Warlock hero power costs 2 mana and 2 health for a single card and still it's considered one of the better hero powers. Arcane Intellect gives you net +1 card for 3 mana, yet lots of decks include it. Faeria had a neutral card with the same cost and effect, but it saw almost no play, because in Faeria drawing cards just gives you more options, but the mana cost determines the power level of the card.
It is because of the intrinsic mana value of cards that we have aggro decks that dump their initial hand on the board and win or lose based on that momentum. It is the reason card draw and card generation are so good and that in turn is one of the main contributing factors to today's power creep: it is easier than ever to draw and generate cards and every card represents a mana discount.
I think *checks notes* I agree with everything you said. Indeed Magma/Ice Rager was just a bit of humour!
Perhaps the Harpstone example in the table I made was a bit extreme - it was meant more as a visual aid of how health could be balanced, but I reckon the subject matter was a bit too vast to fit neatly within a table.
Regarding your bullet points, let's consider Hearthstone's upcoming release of Showdown in the Badlands. The expansion, as usual, launches with every Hero being 30 Health, and not with 'custom' HP/armor amounts because of the points you've made in those bullets.
Let's consider that week 2, once the meta is fairly settled, three classes are underperforming - they've got, 42% winrate or whatever. This is usually the point when the devs release a balance patch and probably throw a few buffs in the way of those classes. Now, buffing specific cards means decks whose concepts/archetypes use those exact cards will be better, but other decks won't receive the same 'pick-me-up' and the buffed classes can feel pigeonholed into playing decks whose archetypes are supported by the buffed cards.
Now, instead of buffing these cards, would buffing these three underperforming classes' health generate a higher diversity of good decks, compared to just buffing a few cards? Would these classes having more time to set up their game / win condition result in more deck variety and more win rate, than buffing cards, which rarely results in more deck variety?
One thing that's made deckbuilding less fun for me is cards like your aforementioned Odin. Don't get me wrong, I like his effect, and he can still feel fun to play, but he's so much better that I'll never choose to make a deck around, say, Desert Obelisk instead of him. I actually tried to make a Desert Obelisk-viable deck back in the day (there's an article in here somewhere), and a little more health to give me time to pull it off could have helped hehe. I don't think buffing Desert Obelisk is appropriate, but it sucks that such a cool card barely found any space to be used.
I suppose I'm sort of hoping more health would be the solution to allowing more interesting, fun, gimmicky decks to perform well in the meta. Hearthstone is desperately missing a 'fun mode' format, and Twist (so far) doesn't seem to be it.
This is an important addendum in my books, because I initially wanted to reply that (kinda) frequent Health / armor changes would ruin the economy. The game is expensive as it is, I want to be able to judge what is powerful and what isn't without fearing for my money, gold and dust investments to blow up every other week.
Tweaking Health / armor instead of nerfs and buffs might work though. I would be an interesting thing to try out at least.
But all in all, I have to say that I'm pretty happy with the current state of the game. I can play hyper aggro that kills turn 4, I can play OTK that requires some thinking and closes out games around turn 7 and I can go for giga control - all of that is possible in Wild with Shadow Priest, Ilgynoth DH, Renolock / Even Warrior. I don't know what level you're playing at, but from what I've heard from friends and judging by my own experiences, you can enjoy almost whatever archetype you wish on ladder as long as you don't step into 11x spheres.
Even now, the game could use a way of showing your opponent's max health.
Sure, it says 28 now, but is that 28/30, 28/35, or more?
A simple tooltip simply makes the game too complicated!
Do you want a tooltip, or deck slots? There's only so much space in the files to go around!
Honestly I'm starting to wonder if we don't have too many deck slots lmao. Hearthstone's interface is not exactly great when you've got 18 decks lying around, spread across a bajillion different modes.
Playing 3 modes with less than 18 deck slots would not be fun either. I think the solution would be to filter decks by mode, not less deck slots.
Boost the health and then team5 has to now design cards around it and inevitably the same result will come off.
Renathal was the first true exception whereby additional health are granted on an optional basis and we already seen the effects of renathal in the game. Suddenly aggro decks can sustain entire matches without ever running out of stuff, burn damage got increasingly more insane and in some cases near infinite, and certain classes go far into greeding their entire deck. Burn mage can virtually destroy any 30 health deck without a whimper, but struggle against a 40 health control deck.
To me, there's just no reason to ever buff the starting health of any class because inevitably team5 would design around it. If they needed a class to last longer in the game, all they got to do is to print better sustain cards for them. We've seen it with priest already. The class went from being a laughing stock for having less than healing than paladin, to the point that you sometimes genuinely needed 60 damage in total to kill them.
Also, the additional health means certain classes pretty much gets pigeonholed into one archetype or another. How is it fair for shaman to play aggro with 40 health against the same archetype in hunter who has 10 less health? If we print more powerful aggro tools for hunter to compensate, then what happens when they face a more controlling or greedy dhunter? Its just not ideal whichever way we do it.
In my opinion, the hero health in hearthstone hearthstone is perfect. No need to tweak what isnt broken.
I agree messing with health isn't a perfect solution, but it seems Team 5 is already designing around the - for these times - small-ish health pool heroes have. The stronger cards' effects and stats get, the stronger healing & armor effects you get. If Grace of the Highfather restores 8 health today, I worry the future's 3-cost healing card will have to restore 10 to be competitive, and so on. Card numbers keep going up, health stays the same, and the game gets swingier and faster.
What could be a solution that isn't a bandaid which results in the team still designing around it?
If heroes start getting more health then aggro and midrange decks will need more powercreep to stay relevant. It's either that or this game becomes combostone or a slugfest. None of those options seem healthy.
"Renathal is an experiment, to see if they should raise everyone to 40!" - Some people when Nathria dropped. Then it was nerfed, and we never heard from them again lol.
For what it's worth, my absolute favorite Hearthstone games are slugfests. I want to play the ultimate duel, where both players are going back-and-forth on the board and their life totals are rubber-banding as they give everything they got. Fatigue, value wars, lethals out of nowhere; whatever it takes to get the win.
If I have the time to play one, obviously...which is the crux of the issue. People need to be able to get through a match on the bus or whatever, and thus Blizzard tends to cater to the "I won before we ever got close to 10 Mana" crowd. I get it (though if you truly want fast games, go play Marvel Snap lol).
I, too, am a slugfest enjoyer. I'm not looking for all games to last at least 15 minutes, but just enough to feel like I've used most of the cards in my deck and they all had a bit of weight to them (so, not drawing half my deck by turn 7). It's the same jarring feeling you get in Warcraft III when you move from the campaign to some 1v1 multiplayer: Instead of having a bit of time to get your base set up, 2 minutes in you've already got some damn enemy Ghoul hounding on your peasants!
If you want a slugfest, I find a bunch of Duels decks do an amazing job of this. I just had a 12-2 Mage run where I had a 70% deck of discover cards with the passive powers "cards that don't start in your hand are -1" and "your first discover does -1 to all spells". Each game was absolutely intense of me on the defensive searching for answers getting down to a few hp and usually pulling out the win with a flustered enemy roping: exactly the reaction of something trying but failing to beat a "Control". This is the most enjoyment I've had in HS where games are basically drawing 40 cards in a match and playing double that and needing to read the situation to win until you finally have more value and excess to finish them out.
So I'd suggest playing some Duels with the slower archetypes and see what you think: it does have some learning curves as there's some whacky swings out there, but it's enjoyable for sure.