Sure, we are on thanksgiving break so it's nice to have some extra time to dedicate to talking Hearthstone. Lots of people on the team are fairly active here on reddit and on twitter, feel free to ask any direction questions on either of those mediums.

Tracking type cards feel sort of rogue-y to me. I would say the chances are non-zero, but this isn't the thread where I talk about future cards ;). Thanks for the thought though!

Ugh I had thanksgiving yesterday and went to KBBQ today. I feel your pain.

Mill-Rogue yes. I mean I agree all decks aren't equal in power level, I was simply stating that there are many decks that comprise 1/200 to 6/100ths of the meta. I mean this in terms of how often that deck is played rather than how much that deck wins or loses.

Sure, we've all played thousands of games on the design team. The rogue I've played the most is probably aggro-oil, but C'Thun/N'Zoth are close seconds. I'm not sure if any of those fall into the category you think of. Not trying to downplay your concern, but it sounds like you are saying you really enjoy burgle rogue as an archetype, but sometimes you queue into decks where you are not favored... which seems pretty reasonable to me.

If you can do something great for a small portion of the audience that doesn't affect another portion at all I agree that is something worth doing. Realistically adding UI elements is always a cost. Most players are familiar with mobility/power creep and something we're very conscious of as developers is UI creep. Something we talk about a lot is 'death by 1000 cuts' in terms of UI design. We've all played that game where in the tutorial you are exposed to 15 different choices you don't understand yet, or go to the UI to try and change something and there are so many options available you can't find the relevant information you are looking for. I hesitate to use this argument because I don't want it to come off as a 'deck slots are too confusing meme' but something I think makes Hearthstone great is the cleanliness of the UI. So in short, I agree with the first part of your statement but not so much the part where a feature like this is 0-cost to everyone else.

I tried looking up UDE but I don't think you meant people that worked for the leading global manufacturer and worldwide supplier of products such as Magnetic RJ45 jacks. Or maybe you did and I never knew a bunch of my coworkers were former electrical engineers. Someone help.

I'm home for thanksgiving break without access to the data currently, but I understand the frustration with comments like that. A statement like that is pretty hard to define either way, what constitutes a janky deck vs a meta deck? There are at least 10 decks (probably way more) that are a 0.5% to 3% of the metagame. Things like Dragon Shaman, Gang Up Rogue, Divine Spirit Priest, etc.

The simple answer is that Auctioneer is super fun to a lot of people, and taking away something that is super fun in the name of variety it's always the right answer. We would much rather introduce strategies equally fun and powerful, but that is a difficult task. One that I hope we can hit, though.

Anytime, I like talking about Hearthstone. It's nice to have a place dedicated to talking to people equally passionate about the subject!

Oil was cool, I think it fit a lot of what people think Rogues should do as you say. Hopefully there are more cards like this in MSG and beyond. Ideally every card is 10/10 exciting to every player, but realistically that isn't possible. Hopefully there is a subset of cards that is mega-exciting to you and someone on earth finds the deck where they are bouncing every jade card every turn and that deck is a 10/10 to them.

Traditional styles of Rogue (keyword being traditional) are fairly weak as an archetype to damage from weapons/spells/heropower decks because their strength is controlling the damage output of minions. Decks with limited damage potential like pirate warrior and aggro hunter tend to get pushed out by decks with access to lifegain like Warrior. In a meta where rogue is the strongest you should be able to look at your collection and identify what Rogue is weak at and start playing things like Hunter/PirateWarrior. Once that happens Rogue should start replacing some of their strong tempo cards with things like double earthen ring (we've seen this in the past). Having that push/pull of strategies in the meta I think is a good thing.

I agree, the problem with Auctioneer is that all decks Rogue decks that have that card are about that card. If a rogue jade deck has jade cards but also has cheap spells and auctioneer is that still miracle? I think it still might be. We all agree we don't want Miracle to be the 'only' rogue deck in people's minds forever. I wish N'Zoth and C'Thun rogue would have caught on a bit more than they did, but the way the meta played out it didn't leave much room for decks in that space. The core of Rogue (cheap spells) works so well with auctioneer it's difficult to make Rogue decks built around something equally powerful or more powerful without it being busted, but we hope MSG and future sets make that happen.

I've had some commentary about this in the past, I'm not sure what the right amount of statistics is and where is best to display it. Right now we track your class level, how many wins you have in arena and play mode, your highest arena key, how many wins/500 you have with an individual class, and your current chest reward for that constructed season. I don't think we would want to have some mass statistic tracker in client that shows stuff like how much damage you've done with 3-drops, other other niche stuff. Maybe we can display in depth statistics on the web, maybe we can send emails to your battle.net registered email with fun statistics? Where is the happy medium of stat tracking? I think for the great majority of people the amount of stats we currently track is enough, but for some portion of the audience it's not. If we were to add tracking for 3-5 more statistics what would they be and is that enough?

I suppose this is just a point for disagreement. I'm sure it's a non-interesting and boring thing for some amount of Hearthstone players but I'm positive it isn't for others. We would much rather release a bunch of strategies that are 10/10 enjoyment for some people and 0/10 enjoyment for others than release a bunch of 7/10 enjoyment decks for everyone.

"Tons of people" was probably a poor choice of wording. I'm not sure what the threshold is for play data that supports the statement 'there is interest in playing this deck'. To me that threshold is very low, ideally there are lots of decks that get played in the 1% range that when you are playing whatever strategy you decide on ladder that when you run into a 1% deck you are like 'wow, this is weird I very rarely see this thing' as opposed to having a pocket of 6-7 decks that rotate.

Jade is an example of an archetype that wants to work with Bounce mechanics, so you could argue we are doing that with the set we're releasing soon(tm). As with Purify, there is a small subset of players enjoying that deck, the goal isn't always to make every single deck 'meta' but to create a variety of options for people to play. If every deck was a 1% deck then that would be a pretty interesting environment to play in. That said, I don't think it's unreasonable to say Silence priest get a tool or two in the near or slightly less near future.

A small pocket of players that I hope are having an awesome time. If we can introduce 2 or less cards to help 1/2% or 1% of players enjoy a weird niche deck then I would consider that a great success. 1% a card adds up pretty quickly.

Shaman has had Hex since the beginning of (hearthstone) time without it being a huge problem. I think revisiting what Shaman is all about is a real concern though. It's easy as card designers to look at all the things a class doesn't have and shore up all of their weaknesses because that's 'new and fun!' but we have to be pretty careful about doing that. What should Shaman be good at? What should they be not so great at? I think single target removal should probably be a weakness, but it worries me to remove a high power level card from a relatively weak base set of cards when we just changed rockbiter. It isn't unreasonable to me to say Hex shouldn't be as powerful as it is, we just want to understand where that leaves Shaman a year from now first.

I agree with this, if it were the same power level but separated a bit more in terms of its stat distribution and effect that might have been a little better. The concept of how much you can do something vs how many different things you can do is a hard one to get across sometimes. Leper Gnome isn't that strong of a card but a deck with 30 Leper Gnomes might actually be pretty good.

Rogue has historically been pretty good vs Warlock and Warrior which are also highly represented. It's not a game of rock paper scissors, but I'm sure you can imagine if we made one class great against all classes what kinds of problems could come from it. Current Shaman comes to mind. If mid-range Shaman was to X class as Rogue is to Hunter, I think we would be in a better place currently.

No one thought Hemet was going to be the end-all counter to Beast decks. No one that works on card design would ever have said that. Sometimes it's nice to have cards like Hungry Crab and Hemet in the collection. If you've ever Hungry Crab'd a Murloc you can't deny it feels awesome even if Hungry Crab isn't actually a high power level card. In playtesting, Rogue was just fairly strong. All Jade decks struggle a bit vs very aggressive strategies because they are, at their core, slow ramp decks. So if Jade decks are slightly weak to hyper-aggro and strong vs control, what type of Jade deck is strongest vs control decks? Probably the one that can most consistently pump out 6-8 golems per game, and I think the answer to that is Rogue because of cards like Shadowstep. Time will tell though, hopefully they are all equally balanced :).

Glad you like it, can't wait to see all the new decks myself. I'll probably play C'Thun Druid with Aviana and Kun. Deck is hilariously slow, but has ludicrous damage potential.

Oh, sorry I misunderstood. In general I think Rogue is a class that will be more heavily based around combo-centric styles. Jade can sort of do either, but Rogue in particular should probably be taking advantage of things like shadowstep/shadowcaster. Gimmick is one way of saying it, but there have been a lot of statements from players saying that is the style they would rather be pushed for Rogue in particular.

I mean, miracle very clearly has none of those tools and does quite well (has for a long time). It's possible for sure if they just continue to do a better job at what they do now. Single target removal, drawing cards, utilizing things like prep, etc.

While this is also a reasonable argument, I think you might be surprised how many people are playing 'janky decks' vs how many people are playing 'meta decks'. It varies at each skill range, but I wouldn't say the 'janky deck' population is small. Some people just like making weird decks and playing them for fun it turns out (yay). Sometimes I wonder what we can do to promote just having a good time in a stress free environment. The majority of people that play Hearthstone are playing in ranked mode, which I think limits just how hardcore of casual we can make it when we have to cater to such a wide range of player types. What should playing Hearthstone be about for casual players? What should Hearthstone be about for experienced players? Right now I think the focus for both is improving your deck and your deck performance, which could be incorrect. I could see a world where casual players are focused on building their collection and playing weird decks and hardcore players are focused on playing a single or multiple decks at the highest level and are totally separated from the casual group. There is always a cost to separating the population into a bunch of different groups, but maybe it is correct. Ideally there is a way to satisfy both types of players within a single system.

We have plenty of internal statistics to help with that. At any given time we can look at any skill range of players across any date and see what deck types are played the most/least along with the win rates of said deck types.

I think this is a reasonable argument. We have had multiple conversations about whether or not there should be more/less class cards. The upside is that we can make more powerful cards that are more exciting to the general populous of people that just want powerful cards (reddit I think falls into that category sometimes). The downside I think is that for people that like 1-2 classes, less cards they open in packs feel like they are for you. In a world where we have no neutral cards and only play 1-2 classes, the chances you open a pack and 0 cards are for you is pretty high. I think neutral cards help that ratio of 'cards that i can play' a lot. Anyway, it's a reasonable argument thanks for bringing it up.

The single biggest reason we made Purify was because in multiple playtests among non-designers on the Hearthstone team and in teams across Blizzard, premade silence-based Priest decks received positive feedback. A little anecdotal, but was still enough evidence to us that the general public might feel the same way.

It's mostly that you have access to this thing rather than how Ferryman compares to Brewmaster directly. I won't argue that in some or more than 50% of circumstances you would rather have one or the other because that wasn't the reason to make the card.

What part specifically?

I don't think a class needs top tier AoE, top tier healing, or top-tier taunt in order to be able to compete on ladder. Many players are successful with Rogue currently and have been for the past year (years?). If you absolutely need to have healing, taunt, or AoE to be competitive then that is a problem with Hearthstone and not Rogue specifically.

Yes and no. I imagine a meta in which hunter burn is popular is a meta where traditional rogue strategies will struggle. Hopefully there are enough strange neutral cards that allow rogues to modify a strategy to figure out those metas too, though. But as a general statement to answer that question... when Hunter is true to its identity, has a strong strategy for that identity, and is very popular in that current metatgame.... Rogue will probably struggle. We think that is okay.

I think strictly worse than brewmaster is a bit of an overstatement. Better and worse in a variety of situations is probably more accurate. I think Johnny in general is less concerned about a stat point here or there.

We don't have any plans to change Blade Flurry, I would be quite surprised if it ever changed. The future of Rogue is likely to include very weak AoE or life gain and very strong single target removal and card draw.

It sounds like a lot of the negativity here is centered around Ferryman, so I'll address that. Ferryman is meant to be an option for players that build a deck completely centered around bouncing multiple targets or a single target back to your hand as many times as possible. As some of you have pointed out, this will most likely not be a meta-defining 10/10 power level card, but it still exists for some portion of the audience.

There is some value in creating cards that give you a more realistic opportunity to do the core fun piece of your deck (bounce X minion to your hand to replay) regardless of whether or not that results in the next tournament worthy performer. There are some similarities to Purify here, but as a general purpose card ferryman isn't nearly as weak as that card. Purify was released in a set where Priest was the lowest win rate class and we only had a few class cards to work with. Outside of the timing though, the design is something we definitely stand behind. Building a deck around silencing your ancient watchers and eerie statues is a super fun concept to a ton of people. Giving you more ways to consistently pull that off I think is a good thing. Ferryman is an example of a card that more consistently gives players an opportunity to do the fun thing they built their deck to do.

So what is there to do for the mega-competitive focused Rogue group? Well, we think Miracle is as strong as ever and coin will make a meaningful impact there. Rogue Jade is also interesting and probably the Jade class that scares me the most as someone who works on balance. Cards like Prep and Shadowstep allow Rogues to start the Jade train earlier than most of the other classes and snowball it very quickly. The amount of times Aya Blackpaw was discovered off of Journey Below was pretty high in playtesting, I'm sure someone will do that math there. As you can imagine, playing two of that card in a control matchup swings pretty heavily in the Rogues favor.

I hope this gives some amount of insight to what is going on with Rogue currently, we're happy to continue the conversation.