Yingdi, a Chinese web portal for card games, had a chance to interview Hearthstone's Dean Ayala this past month and they spoke about card balance, rng, and Demon Hunters. Czhihong translated the interview and posted it on reddit. We've recapped it down below.
Card Balance
- Looking back, Dean thinks they would have made more balance changes to Demon Hunters right away.
- We're getting another balance patch before the expansion arrives.
- Expect the expansion to shake up the Demon Hunter win rates the most.
- Zephrys the Great and Dragonqueen Alexstrasza decks have been called out. If they are top tier next expansion, changes may happen to those decks.
- Dragoncaster may be addressed in an upcoming patch.
- Galakrond, the Nightmare may receive a change to make the cards drawn cost (1) instead of the current (0).
RNG
- We should expect less randomly generated resources next year and even in the expansions later this year.
- The tools we have right now to generate resources is likely the highest it will ever be.
- Part of the issue is that the cards that generate resources right now are just really good so we see them all the time.
Here are some select quotes from the interview.
Quote From Iksar via Yingdi (Translated by Czhihong) When all classes start generating resources outside their deck it makes the classes that specialize in resource generation like Priest or Mage feel less special.
Puzzlebox is probably the appropriate power level on its own but with Dragoncaster it's coming out a little earlier than we'd like in highly competitive decks. We'll likely look to address that in an upcoming patch.
Usually, when we make a card cost (0) it's a reward for building your deck in a particular fashion. We like to make those cards powerful so players are actually motivated to build their decks differently. In the case of Dragoncaster you end up including high mana spells that you might not have otherwise.
For Rogue's Galakrond, you get (0) mana cards but only because you put a large number of the other Galakrond cards in your deck. One issue that comes from having (0) mana cards is that they can result in really big unexpected swing turns. Rogue is probably the biggest offender of that right now when it plays a fully invoked Galakrond.
If the cards you drew off Galakrond cost (1), the card would obviously be less powerful but it would also result in a pause between the turn you play Galakrond and the turn you play all the cheap cards from your hand. This is a change we've been talking about making lately so that players have a turn to prepare rather than having to deal with so many resources all at once.
For Skull, I think those cards being reduced to (0) is less of a problem because Skull itself isn't also a tempo card. After your opponent plays a skull, they either play the cards that turn or hold them in hand to have a big swing turn later. In the case where they hold the cards, their opponent has some time to prepare which we think is healthy gameplay.
Comments
Good to hear.
The rogue's galakrond it's too good, i'm literally playing the same deck from after the galakrond adventure came out and it works so well that i didn't even include any new card. I still can't believe they thought it was fine drawing multiple cards and make them cost 0.
I don't see a problem with dragoncaller, the problem is the box, dragoncaller rewarding your deck to have dragons in it is very interesting and not broken by itself... Recently i wasn't watching heartstone for a while on twitch so i wanted to see a bit, went on Theo's stream and the first thing i saw is him playing dragoncaller on turn 5 and puzzle box, the puzzle box cleared opponent's board, give him a minion, 8 attack on his hero from the DH's spell, gained two extra mana from druid's spell and drew some cards; i instantly closed and will not watch hearthstone for a while.
EDIT: card generation is fine, but has to be done in a smart way, improving the interactivity, not as it is now.
About DQ Alex and Zephrys: they are way over the curve, so it's obvious they will still see play until they rotate out. Eliminating them from the standard (by early rotation or nerf) means pushing out all the highlander decks, unless they nerf them in such a way that they are worse but still enough good to be build around cards
A huge problem with Box in Standard is that there are like no bad spells right now. I'm 100% sure they'll add cards like Astral Communion or Cataclysm this year to weaken the card overall
Yes the spells in standard right now are good, there isn't a spell that can screw you.
Even if they add some bad spells it will just make the card bad sometimes, but it would still see play (it did see play whenmyra's unstable was legal). Playing a 10 mana card that lose you the game is not fun too. When played it's like the game until now didn't mean nothing, it's puzzle box time to choose who win and who lose.
I think the card is very bad designed, a card like this should exist (i think it's very funny) but not be constructed viable
Their logic makes no sense...
It's good they're addressing the amount of random generated crap. I am so tired of playing games where my opponent has an entire hand of cards that didn't start in their deck.
But one concern... card generation is Demon Hunter's main "weakness". So if you pull back all the other classes card generation, how does that help anyone catch up to DH?
DH needs an actual weakness instead of being good at everything that is important.
Zephrys and Alex are fine. The issue is the amount of deck cycling some decks are capable of. Non-Highlander decks shouldn't be running Highlander cards. I've been thinking of throwing Zephrys into my Discolock list because there are games that I am sitting at 10-15 cards left in my deck on T4.
Also, for DH it's fine to have cards reduced to 0, but for Rogue it's not? I agree Galakrond is an issue in Rogue. I like that they act surprised by the fact that cards that reduce mana cost are problematic. The community has been complaining about this for years.
"For Skull, I think those cards being reduced to (0) is less of a problem because Skull itself isn't also a tempo card."
What are you smoking? How many games have I won by playing a Skull for a ridiculous tempo swing that the opponent has no chance to recover from? How is it not a tempo card?
I think I get what they mean by Skull not being a Tempo card. The majority of the time that you’re playing Galakrond, it’s fully invoked, meaning that it has the 5/2 weapon attached to it. So from that, you can gain tempo purely from Galakrond himself, by killing something. Then after you got the tempo from the weapon, you get to get more tempo from the cards you drew as well. For Skull, you’re only getting tempo for the cards you drew, not Skull itself.
That said though, it’s a kind of bad distinction to make, given that it doesn’t matter if you don’t get tempo purely from playing the card itself if the tempo you’ll gain afterwards will just win you the game anyways
Hopefully they shake it up completely so all the top decks are reduced in power and give some other ideas a chance to shine. As said before, when cards designed to be put in highlander decks are put in non highlander decks you know they are OP.
I'd argue the deck cycling is more OP. You wouldn't be seeing so many non-highlander decks using the highlander legendaries if they weren't able to go through their decks so easily.
In other card games such as Yu-Gi-Oh they restricted then banned many powerful card/deck cycling (Pot of Greed & Graceful Charity in the early days) because it made certain strategies particularly consistent. Perhaps HS could adapt their approach on deck cycling.
And in Yu-Gi-Oh decks are 40 cards, not the 30, with generally less powerful cycling than HS. Drawing even a couple cards from your 40 card deck with one card is pretty powerful. In HS it's easy to draw 3+ cards from a 30 card deck with little to no cost exchange.
Yugioh’s card draw is a bit different though, given that spells themselves don’t take any resources to play, so you could chain multiple Pot’s of Greed on turn 1 if you kept drawing into them
Got to nerf the reason to run highlander in the first place. I fear they'll nerf the dragons from alex to 1 mana, which imo makes the card pretty terrible to be honest. An Alex with 1 mana dragons played at turn 9 means you are dropping a vanilla 8/8 that does nothing and does not affect the board. An Alex with 1 mana dragons played at turn 10, assuming the best high-roll, means you are dropping 2 8/8's on the board, which for a turn 10 play is extremely lackluster.
Nobody is going to competitively play highlander in standard if the rewards for making your deck inconsistent get neutered.
EDIT: I also don't know how they would plan to nerf Zeph, or why. You know how to play around the card because you always know what he could offer the opponent at the various mana break points. A good player is never surprised by the result of Zeph.
Maybe nerf alex to discover one dragon that costs 0, that way it increases the quality of reward but lowers the quantity? according to their definitions to when a card should cost 0 they said it's ok if the deck made sacrifices for that so that's fair..
zephrys can become a 2/2 if they want to nerf his power level without hurting the mechanic, it would make him worse as a keep for tempo purposes, but won't change his general case.
That would be a good nerf tbh. It forces non dupe decks to also run Dragons (some Dragons have "if you're holding a Dragon"). Would suck to have a Legendary with condition at 9 mana though if all 3 choices suck. So if it was an 8 mana 8/8 with this effect I'd be happy.
Having randomly generated Nozari in a class that's not Paladin fe doesn't feel great to play against.
Oh right... discover can't discover other classes dragons.. dunno maybe it's better that way so you can't get some really highrolls like you said with nozari.
My direction was to "see" another dragon but get 1 less, sometimes you get really bad dragons you can't play anyway..
Another suggestion would be to make the dragons cost 0 only this turn that way you get one tempo swing turn and can't save them for later if you play around board clears, or if you got a determinal dragon you don't want to play now (for example either Deathwing)
In fact I was wandering why dragons created by Ysera or Alextraza were almost always VERY good ...
If the pool of dragons is what you're concerned about that is an easy fix. Release 3-4 lower to mid quality dragons and it makes the highrolls less consistent. No need to nerf the cards directly.
I don't understand the meaning of your post: yeah, Ysera, Unleashed and Dragonqueen Alexstrasza are indeed both good cards, but how does that relate to the news?
Their effect is not much RNG related, but rather it depends on Standard's Dragon pool, a tribe designed to contain units with a big body/strong effect. It's not that those cards are tweaked so that they'll give you minions that are bigger/more impactful than the average Dragon.
Edit: it appears that I may have poorly expressed my ideas. See Lyra's comment.
Yes, lets nerf mage. Solid idea.
were you expecting great ideas from the ppl that brought you Demon Hunter in such broken state?
Let me remind you this are the same guys that have declared their all time favorite decks are Secret Mage and Pirate Warrior and in fact Iksar himself is seen playing Secret Mage from time to time. How could you expect solid ideas from this ppl.
AT LEAST they say they want to reduce the random aspects of the game that is good.
This is why we receive less and less communication from the devs
Though I don't agree with OP, your post doesn't make any sense. If this is what the devs is holding back listening to the community, They're doing a bad job.
what do you mean? you think its fine that they push secret mage even after all these years? in fact its stronger than ever unless you dont count wild. sure it aint no tier 1 deck, but Big Priest wasnt one too or quest rogue caverns back in the day and they still saw merits in nerfing them which I agree.
Do you think flak mage is fine or a board wipe on a secret (flame ward) is fine? thats just pushing secret mage and you know it.
at the end of the day what im trying to say is that if you to run a community wihtout paying attention to what ppl say than you are running a dictatorship and its amazing how DH is getting nerfed all the time but they keep twaeking each nerf so that it has a small upside WHILE avoiding the n1 problem from the start which is the Warglaives weapon. that is ludicrous that is not being nerfed. its what carries DH hard