HearthCasual had a chance to speak with Mike Donais and Conor Kou about Battlegrounds on this week's podcast. Here's our recap of the important parts - you can listen to the full podcast if you wish down below.
Interview Highlights
- King Magurgle is a 6/3 Murloc (Tier 5). Battlecry & Deathrattle: Your Murlocs get +2/+2.
- Dragons will be added to Battlegrounds.
- Inviting 7 players into Battlegrounds is on the todo list.
- They are happy with Nightmare Amalgam since it makes the game more fun. They may make it weaker in January, possibly making it a 2/2.
Additional Details
- An autochess Tavern Brawl was being worked on starting in February 2019 by Conor Kou.
- In late March 2019, they decided to put together a team to make Battlegrounds.
- There was a lot of effort put into developing features that Hearthstone lacked - rearranging minions was a big one.
- They've been very happy with the community's reception with the mode.
- December 5 will be launch of the initial stats page. A month or two later will have more stats.
- They don't know what could happen with rewards or any other systems - only worried about gameplay right now.
- They were worried about adding a 5th tribe, but playtesting has been fun. More than that may require rotating an old one out.
- Bringing heroes closer to balance is a big goal of theirs and they will work towards it.
Listen to HearthCasual Episode 44
You can listen to this week's episode down below. Follow them on Twitter, @Hearthcasual, for updates.
Comments
Lots of people have pointed out that a lot of dragons can't be added because their battlecries, but here's a few that could be added :
1. Nightmare Amalgam. Already in the game, boom.
2. Faerie Dragon. an aggressively statted early game minion
3. Brightwing. It's battlecry will add a random legendary in a small pool, making it more valuable than in standard
4. Cobalt Scalebane. end of the turn effects are pretty good, and this guy works with anyone.
5. Sleepy Dragon. It's a big 'ol taunt
6.Hungry Dragon. Instead of a 1 cost minion on your opponents it swaps a random minion in the recruitment stage with a 1 cost minion
7. Hoarding Dragon. giving your opponent mana advantage is bad unless you can gaurantee this guy doesn't die easily.
Problem is that dragons also don't have the same synergies that the other tribes have - i.e., no area wide buffs, no minions that benefit from friendly deaths, etc.
but I'm sure Blizzard would add cards to make them competitive
When they announced it as didn't care about it, tried autochess didn't like, if HS wanted to jump on, to take back streamers I said fine I don't really watch them anyway. but on nov 12 when they make you played it, I took it like a chore, haven't stopped playing since.
Never tried it before and wasn't interested at first, but after playing it, it's surprisingly addictive.
Interested to see how Dragons are gonna work in Battlegrounds. Unless they can get some crazy custom units, I doubt they can really keep up with the other tribes outside of Lightfang Enforcer. Things like Promordial Explorere could make things interesting.
I have no idea what the point of the new Murloc is. Not really needed in the slightest. Murlocs are already really strong, did they need this? I guess it could work as an occasional Health and damage buff.
Murlocs as a tribe dont have any deathrattle effect like Beasts and Mechs where if something dies, do this. The new murloc is very similar to the beast tribe's Goldrinn, the Great Wolf and should help push a solo murloc tribe build further into late game....a bit more. Murlocs are still missing a card that deathrattles into spawning 1/1s though and that will still push beasts and mechs ahead but this new card helps close the gap a little IMO. Of course, even if they get a deathrattle that spawns 1/1s, they still need another card that punishes the deaths of those 1/1s. Beasts and mechs have something that grows and demons have a large knife juggler. I guess you could call the Murloc Tidecaller that card....it's just a slower version.
They're probably better off concentrating on Battlegrounds since they've all but abandoned constructed and just allowed it to be Shamanstone for the last two months. Hardly any streamers playing constructed anymore because it's dire. I know Battlegrounds is new so that factors in but most have said they're bored of the ladder.
The downvotes from the Shaman players are too obvious!
I really feel like this was all a calculated move on their part. It seems they were perfectly aware of the insane synergy between Desert Hare and Evolve and decided to let it run rampant because that would have a huge negative effect on ladder climbing. Thanks to that, people are tired and pissed about the shaman infestation (and the N'Zoth madness) and decided to try Battlegrounds as a form of escaping from the current meta.
When the new mode was announced, it was immediatelly looked at with skepcism by a lot of people. If the ladder was perfectly healthy, most people wouldn't feel the need to try Battlegrounds and the launch would have been very weak. But since people were desperate for something fresh to play, it ended up being a huge success. And since they don't seem interested in doing anything about the current meta situation despite all the complaints, it feels like this is exactly what they wanted to happen. Huge conspiracy theory but that's the impression i have.
I don't like the ladder situation (haven't even bothered playing a single game yet), but i like Battlegrounds and i'm not unhappy with the new mode. But it's not okay that they haven't adressed the current meta situation at all given its clearly unhealthy status.
Honestly, I'm so tired of the constant complain about people playing Shaman.
Even before the reintroduction of those wild cards, quest Shaman was one of the most fun decks to play. It didn't have a great win rate (only marginally above 50%) but was the most popular of them all. Why? Simply because it's one of the least monotonous decks in the history of this game. A lot of different tokens get generated each game, making every game you play different to the last one. On top of that, people aren't playing the same cookie-cutter version of it either, but add their own flavor to the mix.
Yeah, adding in those wild cards made for some (unfortunate) OP early game combo's. I get that those aren't fun to play against. You still need to be pretty lucky to pull it off and comes with the downside of delaying your quest. You'll also have a hard time to keep up if your turn 4 eight mana minion is either a weak one or dies straight away.
Which brings me to the trend of people these days seeming to have raised 'bitching and moaning' to a form of art c.q. lifestyle. What the fuck happened to playing a game just for fun?
Don't know why you are getting downvoted, I totally agree with you and so does most of the pro players. I enjoy playing shaman a lot but even I can't stand it any more. This meta is just too shaman-y. Whenever I play ladder I immediately queue into 3 evolve shaman in a row and just stop playing after that. I don't think battlegrounds is polished enough to be super fun yet, but it is definitely way more fun than standard right now.
Battlegrounds is more fun than expected but i would rather see some HS Classic improvements
I wonder what kind of Dragons they'll be, since there are a lot that wouldn't make much sense like twilight or azure drake
That's nice but actual hs feels kind of.. Abandoned... I am quite sure most of the community is SICK of evolve shaman, but no lets keep the game as is instead of retiring evolve or nerfing mogu..
It's sad the same team needs to balance 2 different enough games, hs feels left out in favor of the new mode..
they can't make any money off Battlegrounds so no, they won't abandon normal HS. They'll just use Battlegrounds as a distraction
Lol, to me feels like it's all deliberate tactic, make meta as bad as possible so that more people will beta test battlegrounds
New expansion is right around the corner and their plan was from the beginning for this meta to last until new set is out
I can guarantee you 100% that main HS is not abandoned, if you look back to HS beta it was the same, you'd get updates and balance changes quite often
Having fun with Battlegrounds on my PC but will they improve its performance on phones and tablets?
I tried Battlegrounds on an Android tablet; it was sluggish. I saw my opponent getting triple cards while the battle was still underway, and trying to manage cards in 45 seconds or less was a chore, on both dragging and animations. Getting a triple was a nightmare situation.
I got disconnected once on mobile and when I got back in I found it interesting that the battle was over and I had an extra minute to do all my preparation for next combat phase.
So I tried closing the game and reloading it just as the timers about to end a few more times. It turns out that the outcome is already set as soon as battle starts.
You can use the tactic of closing the game and opening it again to reconnect and gain a lot of extra time as the timer ends to make your next move
battlegrounds has been the best surprise ive had in HS. just played 2 matches vs mage on ladder they got super lucky with their RNG spells when i had lethal i just said fuck it. not facing shamans and still get screwed by this rng moments. at least in BG things are fair with rng.
its my main mode atm and this dev updates shows how they are into it too
I really am happy with this mode. Super stoked they are focusing hard on it and have a separate team. I give them a lot of credit for trying to make this better almost weekly.
Really looking forward to Dragons being added. It's a bit weird that some of the mechs buff Dragons and they aren't (yet) in the game.
I love them since they'll hit the Amalgams :D
Dragons are going to be rad though. I wonder which ones they'll be adding and if we'll get a custom dragon. Would be cool if they added a new Deathwing - his current iterations don't exactly work for Battlegrounds.