The recent reddit AMA gave us a lot of great insight into upcoming card changes for both Standard and Wild, but it also let Hadidjah Chamberlin, one of the FX artists for the game, gush about the great work they and the rest of the FX team have been doing recently.

You might remember them for their deadpan reaction to growing horns in the 'Collection Managers' video when Demon Hunter was first revealed. Turns out they're a lot more verbose when not faced with Dean's overwhelming enthusiasm!

I'm not sure what's changed, but it feels like the animations have really stepped up in terms of complexity and visual flair over the course of the last year - for example, the plagues in Saviors, the breaths in DoD, and standout cards like Soul Mirror, Kael'Thas, and Teron Gorefiend in AoO. Was there a behind-the-scenes change in process that led to these flashier effects? Thank you!

Quote From Hadidjah

Oh no you asked one of the magic questions, LET’S GOOO:

1. The simplest answer is just - team size. Rastakhan’s Rumble was the first expansion where we really had two dedicated VFX artists, over the course of Year of the Dragon we went from three to four, this year we’ve had one departure but brought on two new artists who are now ramping up. A lot of improvements from team size simply come down to how much time we can spend on a given card, but the cooler part, I think, is that it’s meant people come in with totally different perspectives and techniques, and we keep the bits that make things better. Nick doesn’t come from a VFX background at all but has been in Hearthstone art style and whimsy for almost as long as I have, and he comes up with the most off-the-wall shit that never would’ve even entered my mind, figures out nutsy technical workarounds to get the visuals he wants, and just has a great mind for charming little stories (things like Teron Gorefiend and Kael’thas, The Lurker Below’s persistent water jet, and Highkeeper Ra are all his). Dominic brought a beautifully clean style and really pushed a lot of our color usage and mesh animations beyond what they were before (things like Soul Mirror, Plague of Murlocs and Flames, and all of the Dragon Breaths are his:)). I’m super excited to see what the newbies add as they get their boots under them. We all make each other better.

2. Better tools! Unity has made some pretty nice changes over the last year or two, which are mostly pretty subtle (things like noise, particle offsets, really nice little quality of life changes), but also some major ones like their Timeline editor, which is the first time we’ve been able to preview more-or-less a complete CustomSummon without having to load up the whole damn game. The combination of all those various features has meant we can spend way more time actually making the effect in our heads instead of fighting with the engine. Just as significantly, I think, one of our (now former, may he rest in peace on Diablo) VFX artists, Sasha, wrote us a sick new ubershader during Uldum that’s let us create a ton of different materials/ribbons/etc. that are more vibrant and juicy, easier to animate, all sorts of rad stuff like that (compare Uldum animations to even just RoS animations and they’re so much cleaner-feeling it’s crazy). It’s something we’d been wanting for years and it’s so flexible and powerful it’s almost completely replaced the two dozen-ish hyperspecific shaders we relied on before. The number of technical limitations we're dealing with has dropped considerably - we have a bigger backlog of weird mechanic/visual support we can lean on, one of our engineers wrote an insanely flexible way for us to call our FX in script rather than having to try and patch and sequence stuff through a system with a lot of hard limits (because I did such a hacky implementation for Cannon Barrage he wrote an entire system to make sure I'd never do it again:)). Back in Ye Olden Days there would usually be several weeks to months of engineering support dedicated to just getting visual goals hit - these days we barely have to bug them outside weird discovered bugs and major mechanical (heh) FX like Twin Spell, Reborn or Galakrond's invocation rituals.

3. We’ve evolved the rules around VFX a lot. This is kind of a two-parter - a big part of is just the new approaches that people bring to the team when they join that I mentioned in #1. The other factor there is that as time's gone on and we make more FX and develop a stronger sense of exactly what we want FX in Hearthstone to look like, we’ve just changed a lot of the old rules that our VFX had been adhering to. Probably the single biggest example of this is that there used to be a (fairly, unless you were Patches’ cannon) strict no-physical-objects rule for VFX in Hearthstone - the logic being that VFX were the magic contained in the physical cards being unleashed, and therefore shouldn’t contain physical assets (pretty big part of why many of the older animations are very magical and particle-based, with fewer big clean focal shapes). You can’t really maintain that when you’re creating at least 23 new big FX every four months (you can all do the math on how many that is per year, it’s pretty nice), plus however many smaller ones - everything eventually just becomes a slightly different ball of sparkles or lightning. So we’ve start doing a lot more with big, easy-to-read objects like wings, books, weapons, etc. that , and we keep the “unleashed magic” aspect by having these appear and vanish via magic sources, giving them fresnels and outer glows to keep them feeling ephemeral, etc. At their core these sorts of evolutions are very practical - our principle of a Simple and Clean art style is more important than “no physical objects in VFX” - but I think the results are better than either of those alone.:)

4. Regarding cards like the Plagues and Breaths in particular - one of the things that’s become really important to me is getting more cool custom VFX out of the legendary-only space. It’s a really fun opportunity to push the visual flavor of the sets better and get cards that feel a little more special to more people, and on the VFX team it’s a nice creative break from the legendaries where we spend most of our time, so I like to think it’s a win for everyone.:) We still pick-and-choose where we put those unique FX, because we have like, 137 cards that use the gold buff and 30-something that use the lil’ Fireblast fireball, and trying to do 137 different versions of the gold buff is just asking for a lot of FX that either visually power-creep each other or just don’t feel that different but take up disc space, but we try to find those opportunities to add more flavor and variety throughout a wider range of cards in the sets now.:)

They also teased us with a description of an upcoming effect to be applied to Metamorphosis when played - the effect sadly didn't get finished in time to ship with the expansion launch, but will feature in a future patch!

Quote From Hadidjah

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?)

Because I suck and I ran out of time to to finish implementing the overlay (I even mentioned the intent to do it in an interview so you can imagine what a tit I feel like). It’s still something we want to add, I just haven’t been able to finish it yet (because I didn’t want to just do Shadowform-but-green). It is actively in progress, though it unfortunately won't make it into the next patch, sorry.:(

Edit: Someone asked the particulars of the effect in another thread, the goal is for the tattoo overlays from the effect to persist for the duration of the metamorphosis. I wanted to make sure it was something of similar visual loudness and equally flexible - since other classes could steal it, we'll inevitably release alternate heroes for DH, etc. I just didn't want to tint Shadowform green and call it a day.