The Hearthstone developers were out in full force to discuss Battlegrounds in yesterday's developer AMA. Here's all the important stuff you need to know!
- We're getting more info on Battlegrounds balance changes in "the coming weeks".
- Battlegrounds remains in beta so they can make larger changes to the mode if they want.
- Tide Razor and Nat Pagle in Battlegrounds are problematic and they are exploring options to fix it.
- Eudora will be the target of Battlegrounds balance changes. Info coming in the weeks ahead.
- They'll be discussing Battlegrounds rank resets when we're closer to the next major update for the mode.
- Murlocs in Battlegrounds are on the radar and they are testing ways to make them less consistently powerful. They do like the synergy they have though.
- Beasts in Battlegrounds could use some love to make it more exciting with Goldrinn now at Tier 6.
Quote From Developer AMA What's been the biggest eureka moment for you this year (as an individual or as a team)?
This is a very "engineer" answer, but when Battlegrounds first launched we had some issues where combat wouldn't play out the same way for both opponents. This took a lot of effort to track down and required a lot of more robust logging and reporting implementation. Finally figuring out the root cause and being able to confidently reproduce and fix the issue was a huge relief! (Source)
Hello, can you tell us anything about what upcoming changes are planned for Battlegrounds? I’m sure fellow BG enthusiasts would like to hear what is the plan to diversify the endgame (aka less massive poisonous divine shield murlocs)
Murlocs are on our radar, and internally we're testing a few different ways to tone them down. We like that they have a strong identity, but right now they're too consistently powerful. Ideally, not every game with Murlocs available would end with Murlocs in 1st place, and right now that does seem to often be the case. We also think there's room to make the Beast minion type a bit more exciting now that Goldrinn is at tier 6. They have a few gaps in their curve that we'd like to address. Other than that, there should be more information about balance changes heading your way in the coming weeks! (Source)
When is there going to be a Battlegrounds ranking reset?
We've been discussing this at large for sometime and have a plan in place to address this soon! Things we're planning to cover are seasonal resets and more. We will be sharing the full details as we get closer to our next major Battlegrounds update. (Source)
Is there plans to buff/nerf heroes in Battlegrounds? The hero power disparity in the early game means if you are given a "suboptimal" hero early you bascially start at half health unless you get ridiculous quality tier two minions. I wanna play characters like Reno and George without losing 8+ health from characters like Nozdormu, Eudora and Maiev.
We do have some balance changes heading your way pretty soon! Should have more to say on that in the coming weeks. Eudora in particular is one we want to address. (Source)
Has the team discussed making the randomly generated minions from Deathrattles only 1-star when it comes to how much damage they deal at the end of each Combat round?
As more tribes/minions get added, the random minions being generated from Deathrattles during Combat has gone up. It feels pretty bad when your opponents Tide Razor randomly spawns a Dread Admiral and two Amalgadons to hit you for a ton of extra damage because there was no way to play around it. I would argue that changing the random minions to 1-star (like Robosaur) would eliminate the bad experiences when on the receiving end and be a net positive change for the game mode.
Hey!
We've discussed this a fair bit internally. I think the problem does exist mostly with The Tide Razor and Nat Pagle right now, and being killed from 30 after your opponents Nat Pagle spawns a Golden Tide Razor can be a really bad experience.
That being said, we're exploring design options for those two cards in particular that will hopefully eliminate that from happening. Battlegrounds is still in Beta so we're willing to make larger changes with the game, but tokens as of now feel ok to us aside from those two instances. If that changes in the future, then we'll address it. (Source)
Comments
Battlegrounds is the most unnecessary thing that happened to HS. It should have been a separate game because it makes no sense compared to the original HS gameplay, it takes shit ton of space and it’s boring af.
ah, the typical "I don't like it so nobody else is allowed to like it" arguement
Same with you: ‘I don’t agree with your comment so it must be a lie’
He did not say anything like that. He just showed you how dumb your statement was.
To be fair, a hard aggro board kills Murlocs pretty quickly, the problem is that despite Murlocs being highly inconsistent, everyone wants to play them and it makes the game stagnant until someone hits Brann and skyrockets in power level.
Second, Cannon on tier 2 warps the game for a while into race of who gets it and gets the most amount of tokens… and ends up being an absolute RNG fiesta.
I actually think tokens from any source should not do any damage. They're saying tokens feel okay aside from Pagle and Tide Razor, but taking 7 damage because you killed the opponent's buffed up Rat Pack always feels bad and it always will until it is addressed. Changing token damage to 1 will certainly be a step in the right direction though, and I still think they should swap Rat Pack and Infested Wolf (in addition to adding or buffing some beast (synergy) cards).
Two other (imo obvious) things to change:
1. Nerf or preferably remove Arcane Cannon.
2. Reduce damage taken in some way. Ever since the pirates patch the damage you take even from small losses is absurd.
A possible solution I think they should experiment with is to change damage dealt to be equal to the current turn count. This way damage is still small in the early game and it ramps up more gradually, but lategame losses will always deal significant but not too large amounts of damage regardless of your build. A potential problem I could with this is that tavern 1 or 2 builds become more popular (probably mainly with Dancing Daryll or Pogos) because they don't have to worry about dealing too little damage and allowing their opponents to outscale them. However, I think it does at the same time solve another problem which is that losing too much hp because too many of your opponent's high tavern tier minions survived with small amounts of hp feels really bad.
I agree with the fist half. I too think that rat pack is a problem early, I've suggested before that any amount of tokens left in the winning board should only add 1-damage in total.
Pirates do a lot of damage but the mirror is a coin toss, I think it's just part of their tribe.
I was really expecting them to say something about that horrible Cannon but nothing, it seems. I wish that thing was nuked out of existence.
Beasts are fine besides the swings of Rat Pack
What needs attention is demon & mech tribes afterJunkbot & Floating Watcher became unviable
Not really seeing issues playing against Nat Pagle, more the early tempo of Goldgrubber & Pirate's Ship
Hell yeah, rat pack nerfed.
Glad to hear they are going to try and tone down murlocs, the best times I've had in BG's lately is when the murloc tribe is banned. It's fine until they hit that lucky transition into a board of poisonous divine shields. Also hope they redesign the cannon or outright remove it.