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Summary of Balance Designer Iksar’s answers on The Angry Chicken #151

The Angry Chicken podcast invited Associate Game Designer Dean Ayala, “Iksar” (/u/Iksarhs), on their show to chat last Tuesday and I found parts of it pretty interesting so I made a summary of what he talked about.

I’ve divided the main points discussed into a few sections for easier digestion, and not everything is in chronological order or exact quotes. I’ve bolded out some parts that were more interesting to me, but overall I do think it’s worth listening to the whole thing as something you do maybe while commuting or multi-tasking. Youtube link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O3C4njg--7E. For the podcast just search on the Podcasts app and download the latest episode (or just subscribe! it's a fun podcast, and almost certainly the most popular).

I’m aware that the format of the write-up and language is inconsistent in parts, but I thought putting the content out was more important.

Sorry for the wall of text, but I thought it would be interesting for some people.

EDIT: Woke up to a lot of kind words, thanks guys. I actually started working on it right after listening to the podcast last Wednesday, but turns out transcribing interviews only takes something like 3 times longer than one would expect. Feel free to use it anywhere in whole or in parts, just give me a nod.

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Introduction and his role in Team 5

• Primarily working on “final design”, which is balance. “Initial design” is more about the flavour and thematic direction of cards, and once done they will be passed on to the balance team, who will think about questions like mechanics and health/attack numbers to promote people to use them in new decks.

• He did not play any card games before Hearthstone, but was already working at Blizzard prior.

• Hearthstone’s codename during development was “Pegasus”; when he found out the secret project under development was a card game, he was a little disappointed since he’s never played them.

• He took the game home and played 5-6 hours a day and was hooked. When first ranked season came out, he played and hit legend for the first time and was #1 Legend, but had no idea what it meant. He emailed his deck-list (aggro warlock) to a bunch of people in Blizzard.

• Mike Donais, who was the only balance designer on the team then, emailed him back. They have since expanded the balance team to 4 people. [They are /u/mdonais (Lead), Max McCall, @max_mccall on twitter, and Realz, /u/Realz-, @Realz_HS on twitter], but back when it was just Mike it was hard to do final design, since it’s hard to play games against yourself! After a few months of helping with play-testing and interviews, he joined the team.

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OG and set design in general

• Old Gods was a bit of a struggle, since Hearthstone has always been light and charming, while OG had a dark, mysterious, spine-tingling vibe going on, but they still tried to do it in the charming, Hearthstone way through cards such as Shifter Zerus. Still tentacles, but adorable and cute tentacles.

• They give cards power levels from 1 to 10 during play-testing.

• If they decide that a card is a 10, they look at whether it has the qualities they want of a “10” card: Ïs it fun to play? Is it a horrifying experience to lose against? Do you need to build a new deck to play it? If it hits a lot of these qualities, they may be ok with it staying a 10.

• In the early stages, say right after LoE released, everything is on the table; they play tested the craziest stuff to have a feel of what different things were like. In the later stages, almost everything is set and they maybe tweak one number here and there.

• They constantly discuss what they want to do for the next set, what was good about the last set, and reading feedback from the community.

Arcane Golem and OTK

• All 4 of them were responsible for the nerf to Arcane Golem.

• They do not want OTK decks to be too powerful.

• During playtesting, whenever they were trying to test OTK decks, they found that they always had 2 Arcane Golems in all of them.

• Arcane Golem was a power level: 10 card, but it was used mainly in OTK decks and that’s not something they’re excited about.

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The Four Old Gods

• For C’Thun and Yogg-Saron, they tried to approach them from a lore perspective, “what should XX do?”; it was difficult for N’Zoth and Y’Shaarj since there was almost nothing to go upon.

• They wanted them to be big, powerful and 10 mana.

N’Zoth

• Nothing to go on lore-wise, so they approached N’Zoth’s design from a gameplay perspective.

• Since they wanted it to be 10 mana, big and powerful, they wanted the card to inspire people to build decks around it and get more variety of decks in.

• They wanted to still encourage people to build deathrattle decks, even with so many deathrattles being rotated out. N’Zoth is so powerful that he accomplishes that. There are a number of decks out there that wouldn’t exist without N’Zoth.

• They struggled with N’Zoth’s power level a lot during the play testing phase; it’s really, really powerful and they had to thoroughly check its qualities in the internal power level: 10 checks. If it had been a little bit too powerful, every deck might have become a N’Zoth deck and they would have shot themselves in the foot in trying to create variety.

Y’Shaarj

• Similar to N’Zoth, approached from gameplay perspective: What does a big, powerful old god do? Wasn’t designed to be a “build-around him” card as much as N’Zoth.

• First design was: if this card is in your deck, you turn into Y’Shaarj, who had 15 health and a crazy hero power. It was not something they would actually do, but it gives them general ideas of which direction to go.

• His design was tested on a number of different cards previously, but they decided to do it now.

• (Dills: Would you agree with the community that Y’Shaarj is maybe struggling to find its place a bit? Did you guys have a plan for the card?)

• Iksar: Y’Shaarj is the only one that is not necessarily proactive. C’Thun is proactive, N’Zoth and Yogg-Saron can be. The place where Y’Shaarj can be more viable is a meta-game which is really, really slow. That might not happen.. (like) Arch-Thief Rafaam. If the meta-game is very, very slow, he’s very powerful because you get a ton of value and that’s similar with Y’Shaarj. You don’t build a deck around him and include cards that you wouldn’t otherwise. But it’s not happening right now, so there’s a perception that he’s not very strong. We were aware that he would be weaker in the environment now.

Yogg-Saron

• He thinks power level is about right for Yogg-Saron, and that it’s one of the most exciting cards they’ve ever made.

• They went through a lot of different things to get to where he is now.

• Yogg-Saron was very worrisome since it was high impact randomness; they love randomness since it makes everything different and a lot more fun, but they also understand that it can be quite frustrating at times. Yogg-Saron is one of the most random ones they’ve ever made, if not the most.

• If Yogg-Saron was at the power level of, say, a card like Sylvanas or Ragnaros that went into every control deck, it would be a detriment to the ladder since you never want people to feel like “I’m going to get to turn 10, someone is going to play Yogg-Saron and depending on how that goes I’m going to win or lose,” since that really cheapens the entire experience. If we get to a point that Yogg-Saron is impacting your games... not that often, say, every 25 games, sometimes it’s good and sometimes it’s bad and you get a laugh out of it, that’s a really good place that you want Yogg-Saron to be.

• On the flip-side, if they’re too scared of the high impact randomness and make him too weak, they’d get to the situation that no one plays him at all, and no one really gets to have that really fun experience.

• Cards like these are a huge struggle and it took a lot of playtesting and focus to get there.

• Yogg-Saron was such a cool and fun card that he gave up lethal on board for a turn so that he could play it during playtesting against Realz, and that shocked everyone since it’s super out of character for him as he’s so competitive.

C’Thun

• They wanted C’Thun to be big and powerful and thought the theme of little cultists buffing him was cool. “Wouldn’t it be cool to build your own monster in the game?”

• C’Thun was the one who was changed and played around the most

• (Dills: Some people were worried that the game would become a “whoever draws C’Thun first wins”)

• Iksar: Yea, I laughed a bit. Obviously we play-tested C’Thun a bit. I would say he’s the most core piece of the set, so he probably had the most design iterations and play-testing. So when people were saying “Yea we’re all going to lose to C’Thun decks”, and I thought, “We played about 500 games of C’Thun, I’m pretty sure it was not going to end up that way.

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Cards that are seeing less play than expected: Parts I and II

• (Garrett: Are there any cards that you rated high that you’re surprised is not seeing as much play?)

• Iksar: I would say we’re pretty on par with how things end up. I remember it was Mike and I a long time ago, we were playing a lot of undertaker. Specifically I, for sure, undershot the power level of undertaker quite a bit and we sort of paid the price for that I think. Since then, we’ve released 5 or 6 sets now, and there’s a lot of learning that goes into that. I think now we’re sort of in a place where we’re pretty close on what the power level ends up to be.

• If there’s a card that’s not seeing a lot of play, there’s usually a reason for that. It could be a tool for a different meta-game, or a card to have fun.

• You can play Servant of Yogg-Saron, but it wasn’t a card that we went “We want to see this card in… 8% of decks” and we undershot it. There’s a reason we undershot it, there’s a reason it’s a 5 mana 5/4 and not something different.

• Much later in the show - (Dills: Any cards from this set that you’re surprised haven’t made a big splash yet?)

• Iksar: I guess, Xaril is coming around. I was really surprised at the feedback on Xaril when people were saying “Oh he’s too slow, you can’t play him”. I was like “Hmm, ok.” It was the same thing with Huckster. People realised really quickly he was good but the feedback initially was that he was not really that great. Shifting Shade too, it’s very strong, and super fun to play as well and gave you a lot of options against late game decks.

• (Dills: I’m surprised about Cho’gall; what happened to Cho’gall?)

• Iksar: Cho’gall initially was not this turn only, it was forever. We were playing some decks where we played Cho’gall and at some point you would DOOM!, and then Reno on the same turn. So fill your entire hand and heal to full. “WELLL, we should probably make it this turn only.” That changed the power level quite a bit. The way warlock plays right now, they usually float their mana quite a bit, playing reactive. Unlike rogues which need giant tempo swings, warlocks just tend to wait around forever. Warlocks currently don’t really need a giant tempo swing turn like Cho’gall-Siphon. 7/7/7 for that effect sounds very strong, he’s probably only 1 very good warlock spell away from being extremely powerful; Siphon is already almost there. We took a lot of healing out of the game so it makes it hard for warlock to stabilise.

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Cards that never really saw competitive play

• (Garrett: What’s your take on cards that never really saw competitive play, such as Feign Death, Bouncing Blade, Troggzor, Gallywix?)

• Iksar: That’s great, there’s going to be cards that see a lot of play, and some cards that we thought would be fun. We thought Piloted Shredder is a really fun card and it really communicated what GvG was, and it was 10 on the power level scale, but we looked at it and we were ok with that. It communicates the things that we want for this set.

• Other cards like Bouncing Blade, it’s essentially a single target removal spell and we didn’t want to go too crazy with it. If you want to put it in a frothing berserker deck to try and get a wombo combo, that’s great. I know for a fact that Zalae had a fatigue warrior that had it in the deck; having a card like that in 1% of the decks, that’s great since you need cards like that, cards that surprise people when deckbuilders put it in a deck. If every card is evenly played, that makes it a lot less exciting.

• When we’re making cards, we don’t go “Here’s 100 cards, let’s make sure they’re all played evenly.” The important thing about balance is to make sure that people are playing a wide variety of things. As long as that’s happening, we’re happy.

• Troggzor didn’t see much play, that’s ok. He did get played by some people and when you saw him, you were surprised since it was a novel thing that popped up.

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Inspire, Joust and TGT

• (Garrett: When is a mechanic or card considered unsuccessful vs being intentionally underpowered? Specifically Joust, which had spotlight shined on it, but it ended up that very few Joust cards saw any play).

• Iksar: I would say that the bigger one to talk about would be Inspire. We didn’t keyword Joust, it was just put on a few cards, it really was more of a flavour thing than anything else, two cards clashing into each other in the Grand Tournament. Having cards like that was really cool. Cards like Healing Wave will see more play over time.

• We wanted the Joust to be exciting, we wanted you to be super duper happy when you won a Joust, there has to be some drama there. It turns out that when we’re balancing these cards, the upside and downside are so different that if you play the card and don’t win, it’s real bad for you. So it’s just not consistent enough to put in people’s decks. Maybe having ties go to the winner may have been a reasonable solution, but I’m not super unhappy with it; it didn’t affect a ton of cards and still had its flavour.

• For Inspire, we ended up learning fairly late that Inspire was pretty snowbally. Like the Kodorider; you stick the guy on the board and you just hero power every turn and it’s pretty hard to come back from that, getting a 3/5 for essentially nothing every turn. When Inspire was really, really strong, we were making a bunch of Inspire decks that were really strong and it was not a fun experience to play against really. In a world that Inspire decks are really strong, it’s really the first person who gets an Inspire minion to stick and getting lots of power from it; it’s hard to come back from that. [a point he made here]

• We tried to make them a little narrower. Like Savage Combatant: it’s still a little bit snowbally but it’s less snowbally than creating new minions like Confessor Paletress. That was intentional to not make the cards very high power level since it wasn’t fun to play against.

• People were saying that no one was playing TGT cards. Statistically, they actually did but I think the problem with TGT cards was that they were not creating new decks, they just contributed to existing decks. Like Darnassus Aspirant in Druid, it was still the same druid which felt the same. I think that was what made TGT feel like it didn’t have as much of an impact.

• Whereas in LoE, we just kinda flipped that and all of our cards and legendaries basically said, “Does this card build a new deck or do something people haven’t seen before and make the game feel different?” So for cards like Reno, of course it did. People also realised they could just have 29 removal cards and Elise. With OG it was the same thing with N’Zoth and C’Thun. So really learning from the TGT experience was very important for me, to make cards that create new decks.

• For OG, it was easier since almost no matter what we did, things were going to be new. Every single deck outside Dragon Priest, Aggro Shaman, maybe Tempo Mage, that was seeing a wide amount of play lost a ton. Even if OG didn’t come out you would still see a lot of change, and OG impacted a lot so you saw double the amount of change. In terms of introducing variety, the switch from one format to two changed things on its own.

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Arena

• (Dills: We haven’t had any official word on whether there’s a extra chance to draft OG cards. Is there an increased %, and if so, will you guys tell us or do we have to figure it out ourselves? *chuckle)*

• Iksar: I believe that there’s a 50% increase, I’m not exactly clear. You’re probably right, we should communicate and publish this. I know people ask Brode on twitter, but I also know not everyone follows Brode on twitter and look out for such comments. I will send that feedback to the guys.

• (Dills: How much do you guys talk about arena these days? There’s still a feeling from arena players about “hmm, when are we getting something new?”)

• Iksar: I play a bunch of arena and we’re constantly talking about arena. Arena is one of the buttons on the main screen, it’s not going away! It’s really important to us. I don’t have anything to announce unfortunately. We have meetings where we talk about what’s a cool feature we can do for arena, new crazy wild features but also minor improvements. And how we can celebrate arena players that are playing all the time right now. How we can get more players to play arena. It’s hard to get synergies in arena over time since card pool is really, really big, we think about how we can make deck building more enticing for arena.

• We're also balancing around rarity: something like mage and paladin are not getting any big, common AoEs anytime soon, we’re aware of the arena power levels. A lot of rarity has to do with complexity of a card.

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Social Features

• (Joce: Any plans to incorporate social features that are present in other titles, like chat channels, guilds, clans into Hearthstone?)

• Iksar: That’s really tricky, it’s about finding what the best way to do that is. Maybe guilds are cool in WoW, Starcraft has a chat channel, maybe that’s the right thing, but maybe it’s also too much to handle from a UI perspective in HS. Having more friends in a community is important, you’re more likely to go back and play a game if you have a bunch of friends.

• Even the small stuff like the spectate a friend quest, or co-op brawls pushes you a little bit towards that, you’ll have some interaction there. Right now we’re doing smaller pushes while we figure out what the overarching plan is to make the HS community better. We’ve certainly talked about clans etc, but finding the right thing for HS is really the struggle there. We’ll continue to make smaller pushes.

• Fireside Gatherings is something we’re super developing and one of my favourite people Pat Nagle is in charge of designing the Fireside Gathering stuff and making that a better experience.

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Decks he’s been playing in Standard and Wild: C’Thun Rogue, Yogg-and-Load, N’Zoth Paladin, Pirate Warrior

• (Dills: What decks have you been playing?)

• Iksar: I’ve been playing Yogg and Load Hunter. The last game I played I jousted a Yogg and lost against C’Thun, that was sad. (Dills: That's when you thought "hey, maybe ties should go to the jouster!")

• The deck that I played the most out of all in playtesting was C’Thun rogue, I thought it was super strong to the point that I was worried about it.. and then NO ONE’S PLAYING IT. I still play a lot of C’Thun rogue on ladder and it’s extremely good; maybe it’ll catch on at some point.

• (Dills: 1 or 2 Blades of C’Thun?) Iksar: Definitely 2. The thing about C’Thun decks is you have to put in the C’Thun cards that are not so good on their own, but Rogue you can just throw 2 Blades of C’Thun, and that’s it. And my C’Thun is still a 30 attack minion, since I’m shadowstepping Blades. I think the deck is super strong. I threw Yogg in as well. [this is his current deck. he has mentioned on multiple occasions before the expansion dropped that he was playing yogg-cthun rogue a bunch]

• In Wild I play N’Zoth paladin, it’s totally absurd. Having Sludge Belchers with it doesn’t seem fair.

• Eventually decks in Wild are going to be extremely synergistic since the card pool is so large. Decks like Miracle Rogue or Freeze Mage; there won’t be room for individually strong cards like Shredder or Belcher. We’ll mostly be in a combo environment, so there's generally no need to nerf individually strong Wild cards. [a point he made here]

• Pirate Warrior is his aggro deck of choice currently. He has 3 pirate warrior decks and one of them has Sky Captain Kragg.

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tl;dr:

• Their main design goal is to encourage a wide variety of decks to be played.

• They're getting better at predicting the eventual power levels of cards and for this set, cards generally fall in line with their predictions. If a card is underpowered, there are usually reasons behind it.

• From TGT's experience, they've learned that it's important to design cards that potentially create new decks.

• Joust was never a core mechanic and was more for flavour; Inspire was too snowbally and they reeled its power level in a little since it was not fun to play in a world where Inspire was very strong.

• Yogg-Saron and N'Zoth's power level are about right currently, and it took a lot of playtesting to get there. They're aware that Y'Shaarj is a little weak in the current meta and were never worried that C'Thun would be too strong.

• Cho'gall's effect was intitally forever (!).

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