It wouldn't be a proper Hearthstone season without some sort of a leak preceding any of the official announcements - although we are unsure whether we can even call it that here, seeing as the following information comes courtesy of the existing Twitch Drops campaign credited to Hearthstone/Blizzard. Eagle-eyed streamer Zeddy was the first to notice and call everyone's attention to this peculiar fact.
If you've been eagerly awaiting the news about the final Hearthstone expansion of the year - already confirmed by the former game director Dean "Iksar" Ayala to be "bigger than normal" - it would seem that all the answers and more will be given to us during a special Twitch stream taking place on Tuesday, November 1. Conspicuously dubbed as 'Hearthstone Theorycrafting':
Quote From Blizzard Join us on a very special stream for Hearthstone’s next expansion reveal and more!
If you wish to find out for yourself (as long as this doesn't get removed), you can simply navigate to your Twitch account and access Creator Dashboard from the dropdown menu. All open campaigns are being listed under the Viewer Rewards/Drops.
As you might've already noticed, there is one Castle Nathria pack that's going to be available for watching the stream for 15 minutes (a very short window of time, which had caused a lot of complaints the last time such a promotion happened).
Attempting to click on the 'About This Drop' link takes us to the following Hearthstone blog article - but you won't find anything there currently other than an Error 404 i.e. page not found. What's most interesting about this is the URL/web address itself, with a designated number 23852693. For reference, the latest published blog post (that of 24.4.3 balance patch notes) is currently listed as 23852692. And we're still expecting at least one other Blizzard article about the upcoming Masters Fall Championship to appear before the said esports event kicks off on October 28. Given this line of reasoning, some sort of expansion-related announcement might be imminent.
Disclaimer: Now, while this being scheduled on Twitch could pretty much act as a full confirmation, with the set reveal time and date unlikely to be moved around - do NOT take it all for granted until we see an official Blizzard social media post, a blog article, or hear from one of the developers. Events like this are likely to be pre-recorded well in advance, and so it wouldn't be impossible for these plans to change.
But in the event this is more than a simple placeholder, we might start seeing vague expansion teasers in the days leading up to the big reveal. Perhaps even something more detailed. There's been a lot of hopeful rumors circulating about the arrival of Death Knight as a new playable class. And one way or another, a supersized expansion is a novelty we aren't exactly used to in Hearthstone. That alone promises something special to come.
Death Knights, Spooky Creatures, & Mercenaries
We are also still awaiting the annual Hallow's End celebration to arrive in-game, and it wouldn't be particularly surprising if that was one of the main topics of the upcoming blog post. There is also this tease the Hearthstone team thought to share with the latest round of card nerfs:
Quote From Blizzard The one notable outlier that is not getting changed, but which we are keeping a close eye on, is Prince Renathal. He is powerful and popular, but we don’t want this patch to completely shake up the meta, because we have something fun coming in Patch 24.6 and we want to see how Renathal performs in the next expansion before making changes to him.
It's been almost four months since we've received Prince Renathal as the free Legendary paving the way for Murder at Castle Nathria, so the expectation here would be something similar. Typical cycle of .6 Patches is when Hearthstone usually shares the next set announcement along with all the other patch notes. The proposed excess coins solution for Mercenaries features on this extended list as well. Before we know it, there might be a ton of news dropping all at once.
Excited to find out what's in store for Hearthstone's final expansion of the Year of the Hydra? Do you have any predictions or wishes that you would love to come true?
Comments
There technically was. But it was a strange one. I just tend to measure these by the Dual-Class Arena, really. In any case, your comments have now inspired me to add a relevant paragraph. Or a few.
Nice! Now, I personally expect an Undead Tribe coming with DK if they are indeed being added to the game. This could be great for battlegrounds and normal hs too :D. Hyped up but not too much just so my expectations don't surpass the actual content.
Two points I'm a little worried about are class identity and pricing.
I'm not a WoW player so please correct me if I'm wrong but I'd expect Death Knights to center around death-related stuff like Deathrattles or Reborn, maybe some twisted form of Paladin flavor as well. The thing is we already have solid Deathrattle packages in Hunter, Rogue, Priest and Demon Hunter so that wouldn't really make for a good core identity trait (not to mention the Skeleton archetype that Mage received with Nathria). Reborn might work better for this but I feel like it would be harder to balance. On the plus side Reborn fits the color scheme which is something they did very well in Demon Hunter (green cards, most Fel related cards have green art, Hero Power with a green touch, ...). No idea for a DK Hero Power that hits the flavor and balances well with the other classes so far (like, you can't make it a 2 Mana summon a 1/1 minion with Reborn because of Paladin for example).
Maybe Demon or Shadows could do a summorizing article about all the Death Knight fan creations this site has seen so far?
Regarding pricing I'm hoping for an adjustment that mirrors the growing number of cards. With more cards being released we obviously need to open more packs to collect them all so the cool thing for Blizzard to do would be to give us more packs for the same price as in the past, but I'm not holding my breath on that one.
They didn't increase the number of cards per expansion when they introduced the DH class and instead just started to print less neutral ones. I see no reason why it would be any different with a 2. post-launch class.
Or DK's could get something entirely new like how DH's got outcast.
I always feel like the point in the undead is that they are denied death, so it is actually out of flavour for DKs to want their minions to fully die, hence reborn makes way more sense than deathrattle does as a class mechanic. So while I'm not sure whether they'd bring back the reborn keyword for the class, it would certainly fit well and alleviate the issue of having too many deathrattle classes.
Alternatively they could have cards akin to Infiltrator Lilian, which moves between the living and undead states via her deathrattle. She's like a middle ground between deathrattle and reborn, allowing for the 2 parts to have different effects. I expect that would lead to fairly normal deathrattle synergies though.
LET'S GOOOOOO