Cool Hearthstone Dad, Dean Ayala, is answering follower questions this evening on Twitter and had an interesting bit of lore on the Warlock Hero Power.
According to Dean, early on, Team 5 seriously considered changing the iconic self-damaging hero power that Warlocks know and love. Fortunately, or maybe unfortunately depending on your point of view, they were never able too come up with a good idea for the replacement so it stayed put.
Quote From Dean Ayala We discussed the idea of changing the Warlock hero power very seriously in the early days of Hearthstone but there was never a good idea for a replacement.
Comments
2 Mana | Summon a 2/1 Imp and take 1 damage.
A variant of "Reinforce" from the Paladin class in which you take 1 damage in advance, but have the ability to do 1 more damage than a Silver Hand Recruit every turn.
TBH, they should have spent a LOT more time on hero powers for several classes, and Warlock was far from being the one that needed it most.
But since that's the class we're talking about, sure, let's do this. Life Tap is based on an old Warlock ability from WoW that wasn't that great, certainly not iconic, and isn't even in the game anymore. I can see why they would have second thoughts about making it such a prominent part of the Hearthstone class.
Some better ways to reflect the WoW Warlock's play style in Hearthstone might be:
Just spit-balling here, and some of these would have affected other parts of the overall design, but there are plenty of ideas they could have tried. Again, I personally would have worked on other heroes before trying to change Warlock.
Discard a card to draw a card... Oh wait they did that in duels
It wouldn't make sense back then since Warlock had no Discard synergie when the game released. It would also force every deck into playing atleast some discard synergie cards because of the HP. That's why Warlock has, theoreticly, multiple HP in duels.
I mean to be fair, I'd be fine with warlocks having the hero power from duels (or maybe something a bit more toned down, 1 cost HP: discard 1 card at random in your hand and draw a card) It at least does keep with the theme of warlocks "sacrificing for power"...
It is fine thematically, but horrid in practice since basic hero powers are meant to be things you can just use when you have spare mana. If it discarded something it would be a liability to any slow archetype, essentially committing half of the class to having no hero power whatsoever.