The very significant balance patch became a reality just a few days ago, extending its influence over more than just the most traditional of Hearthstone game modes. On the Constructed side of things, the second course correction within a month (following the previous set of buffs & nerfs, as well as the addition of the Throne of the Tides Mini-Set) has been the main talk of the tavern ever since. But even the less impactful balance touches for both Battlegrounds and Mercenaries serve as an indication of the ongoing design philosophy, in a way signifying what's yet to come.
Back then in May, we also saw Associate Game Designer Edward "Gallon" Goodwin take to Twitter in order to share a lot of crucial developer insights regarding all Standard/Wild cards that received adjustments at the time, while hinting at the ones that were still on the team's radar. It was all very informative, more than making up for the lack of any commentary in the official blog post.
Now, while we did get some public takes this time around (published along with the latest batch of the patch notes), the other members from Team 5 have additionally stepped up to offer us even more thoughts on the present and possible future paths their respective game modes might take. It's the most comprehensive peek behind the scenes that one could hope for, so once again we'll go over all of them below:
Constructed Hearthstone
First things first - Gallon has since passed the torch to another person within the team, as a result of these occasional internal shifts:
Quote From Gallon Quick update: Starting today I joined the Initial Design team! Really thrilled to help tackle new design challenges in Hearthstone. I’ll still be actively involved in live balance, but I’ll be passing the role of Final Design team’s spokesperson over to @AlecoGereco.Aleco’s been an awesome addition to our team and I’m excited to see him take the reins. Be sure to follow him for great insight into future balance updates and general philosophy about final design!
One more relevant personal clarification while we are at it:
As it's turned out, the new Final Design spokesperson certainly took this appointment to heart, coming up with the amount of insights that seemed to have caught even 'Q&A Master' Iksar by surprise.
"Feels" Vs Data
We've heard of such a distinction before when balance considerations were being discussed - actually on more than one occasion - but perhaps not in as much detail:
These are all changes we would not have made if we were only thinking about balance. Though a few of these cards have high playrates, and these cards are powerful, none of their winrates are alarming enough to justify a nerf. That said, when discussing each of these cards we felt that they all represented too much of their deck’s respective power, and that the meta would be better if these cards were slowed down a bit.
School teacher is the most played card in the game right now by a decent margin. It has a powerful effect (especially when combined with Brann), and also has the most premium stats that we would generally ever give to a 4 drop with no downsides. These are probably the numbers we should have shipped School Teacher with, and it’s never too late to correct a small mistake like this.
It would seem that pulling any craftable School Teacher copies (from your Voyage to the Sunken City or Standard packs) even well before getting the chance to grab the Golden Uncraftables from the Rewards Track might've paid off in this particular case. All previous 'free' Epic offerings were nowhere near as ubiquitous.
This patch wasn’t all “feels”. Three classes stood out in the data in particular.
Shield Shatter
From the Depths
Nellie, the Great Thresher
Tidal Revenant
Caria Felsoul
Battleworn Vanguard
Wildpaw Gnoll
The Big Three
Warrior being the primary suspect here, gatekeeping a number of other class decks with all of its potent variants. Whereas Fel Demon Hunter and Rogues were mainly focused on abusing their occasional "scam" potential:
Control Warrior decks reliably generate large amounts of Armor, which they would often leverage to play Shield Shatter and clear away opposing boards. We wanted to find a place to shave away a bit of their incidental Armor generation (Tidal Revenant), and we wanted to make a change to Shield Shatter that didn’t disrupt the Frozen Buckler -> Shield Shatter synergy. The elegant change here was to reduce the damage on the spell instead of increasing its cost. From the Depths has been a standout card for Warrior, but it has felt particularly strong when used to reduce the cost of combo pieces for Charge Warrior decks. We wanted to take some power out of the card without completely killing it, so we opted to go from 3 to 4 mana. Nellie has been pulling a bit too much weight since her release and has been doing so in occasionally frustrating ways. We tested out having the Pirates cost (2) less instead of (1) less, but we found that there were so many Pirates that cost 2 or less that this was actually a buff to Nellie in a lot of situations. We hope that this version of Nellie will add a lot more texture to the Pirate discover decisions, now that it’s not as often correct to just pick the most expensive Pirate each time.
We considered that change as well. We also considered lowering the amount it discounted by. Ultimately, we felt like this change did a good job of slowing down the card without completely killing it, and prefer to make changes to cost before making changes to text box.
Xhilag didn’t stand out nearly as much in the data as Caria, so we decided to slow her down instead of ratcheting Xhilag back down. We wanted to hit at least one more piece from the Demon Hunter decks, and in looking at the data we had plenty of options to choose from. We settled on Battleworn Vanguard because it was one of the best performing cards in the class overall and had the ability to snowball early games in a way that Fossil Fanatic (another statistical standout) wasn’t quite capable of.
That's Wild
Ask and you shall receive?
The clear culprit here was Lightning Bloom, a card which was likely to continue to cause problems for the format in the future if we didn’t make a change.
Just big shaman
Lived To See Another Day
As always, it's highly interesting to learn what else might've been considered for balance/feels reasons, but was ultimately left alone - at least for the time being. It hints at all the other aspects of the current metagame that the Hearthstone team is clearly aware of.
We ultimately decided not to touch these decks at this time. These decks are clearly underperforming across most ranks, and there are currently not many other options available for players who enjoy this type of gameplay. We want there to be something available for these kinds of players. Additionally, we’re hitting one of Boar Priest’s best matchups in Control Warrior, so we feel like we can afford to wait and see how things shake out before making a change here. If you've made it this far, thanks for reading! As always, we'd love to hear your feedback, and hope you all enjoy the patch.
There were also a few more short answers provided to address various community questions:
That was actually the card we discussed changing for Hunter the most. We decided against it because we worried the class would be in too rough a spot afterwards.
Snowfall was on our shortlist for a feels-based change but didn't quite make the cut.
These decks were on our radar but we decided against making changes at this time. With such a big patch, it can be hard to predict if the new meta will be kind these decks or not.
That really depends on what kind of player you are. Some people are more frustrated by control decks than they are by OTK, other people are more frustrated by aggro, etc. We have to look at all the feedback and try to do what we think will make the most people happy.
Cariel stands out much more in the data. Her current winrate/playrate wasn't high enough for us to make a purely balance-motivated change here, but the combination of feels + balance put her over the edge for us.
Never a shortage of topics to talk about, so it's good to see this extensive developer communication continue.
Battlegrounds
While focused insights for Constructed modes always end up taking a lot of space, that's not all there is. The recent balance efforts also had a number of Battlegrounds adjustments in mind (a common trend nowadays), and designer Mitchell Loewen was on point once again to share a handful of relevant thoughts; including what we should be looking forward to:
Quote From Mitchell Loewen Well Met! Let's talk a bit about heroes in Battlegrounds.
Recently we've received a lot of feedback from players that some heroes feel less fun and exciting to play than others. We appreciate that feedback and agree that there are improvements that can be made.
It is our hope that when you look at your hero selection, there is always at least one (if not multiple!) heroes you are excited to play with.
In 23.4.3, we have included a few changes to some of our underperforming heroes (specifically Pyramad, Tamsin, and Onyxia). We have more changes like these planned over the next few months, and we're looking forward to sharing more on that soon. See you in the Battlegrounds!
P.S. Don't tell the others, but I'm rooting for you!
The improved Hero Power for Pyramad became the most discussed topic of the bunch, partially due to the initial version of the patch notes having the wrong description (it is not random, but targeted). Celestalon even went one step further, pondering various math implications and creating a whole spreadsheet for maximizing its usage.
Incidentally, the final point regarding Master Nguyen caused a different follow-up:
The general rule is that upgradable hero powers cannot be obtained by Nguyen (e.g. New Pyramad, C'Thun, Saurfang, etc.) That makes sense. What if you made the upgrades roll over. Pick c'thun and use his hp, then if you get it again it has +1 upgrade and so forth? That's an interesting idea. I think the worry would be if you either never rolled it a 2nd (or 3rd+) time and feel bad, or that when you find the non-upgraded version for the first time on turn 10+ it's too weak to consider.
By the sound of that I assume hero pool rebalance will be a major focus of the team going forward for the next patches at least? It is definitely a focus
Agreed! Those are both priorities for the team.
It's only been a little while, so understandably not everyone has yet forgotten about these 'Buddy' individuals:
Hmm good question. They gave more knobs to adjust so that there were more way to change heroes, but they also added a lot of general power to the game and more interactions to consider. To me it wasn't really easier/harder to balance, it was just different if that makes sense.
Stay tuned for more to come soon (tm):
Mercenaries
It's been more than a couple of months since the last huge set of various adjustments for numerous characters took place within the Mercenaries game mode (the other patch that we got meanwhile was mainly focused on minor spell school changes and reworking Refresh), so even this smaller selection of buffs arriving just a moment ago was a welcome sight.
Alas, we are generally not used to receiving any regular developer insights for Mercs. So when this question was asked during the most recent Hearthstone Q&A from Dean 'Iksar' Ayala, the expectations weren't nearly as high:
Quote From Iksar In the recent update we saw some great mercs buffs. I'm curious what goes into the decision making when buffs are considered. Yulon felt like a clear better Valeera answer but for more subtle changes like HP buffs or smaller adjustments what makes a merc considered for buffs?I'm not quite close enough to mercs balance to have commentary on this @TinMan354leaves some great insights, he's your guy if you ever have questions like this
Following this prompt, Contract Game Designer Charles 'TinMan354' Dunn did indeed step up to talk about a range of subjects for Mercenaries (something we've actually seen him do before):
Quote From Charles Dunn For some Mercs, we look at whether or not they are fulfilling a niche. Yu'lon like you mentioned, same with Alexstrasza and Athissa in the last patch. Those Mercs were not being played much, even though the things they should have been countering were fairly popular.As for more subtle buffs, we often look for teams that are good but not quite top tier, and could use a slight bump. We will typically buff one of the weakest members of that team, Holy for instance with the Uther buff. This buff alone won't make Holy top tier, but it is a nice bonus to an older Merc who has not been able to shine recently. Players can now reevaluate all Holy characters in light of a single buff. (heh, get it, Holy light? I'll see myself out)
Appreciate the insight! Much like Onyxia would appreciate some more hp like our friend rexxar got
We were pretty scared of Onyxia in development. She could gain a ton of Fire damage with Deep Breath and that went crazy with Diablo's Flame Stomp. We positioned her as a glass cannon because of it. She hasn't proven that strong though, so maybe a slight buff would be ok
For a moment there it seemed that would be it, but then an unexpected challenger appeared - another Contract Game Designer we haven't really heard from before, Tess Leiman. As it quickly became evident, Tess had a lot of detailed insights to throw at us:
Quote From Charles Dunn Everyone curous about Merc balance changes, go read this thread by @DaBessTess. She has been the drriving force behind a lot of recent (and upcoming) changes.
It all starts with a more in-depth look into the whole balancing process:
Throughout the process, I received many changes completely denied for various reasons. There were also a lot of changes that were decided would need more time to effectively implement, so they were consider a "we can do this later potentially" option. We ended up with the current list after removing the ones that fell under either criteria. I can go through the ones that did make it live and give some insight.
The Newly Buffed Mercs
Specific commentary on all buffed Mercenaries along with a dash of general musings as follows:
Old: Cooldown 2 → New: Cooldown 1 Honestly this abilities should just be 0 Cooldown, but I decided to keep it at 1 because of the equipment that makes it 1 speed. Most of the time it's dealing less damage than Dragon's Breath.
Old: Cooldown 1 → New: Cooldown 0 Pre-launch this ability was 4 speed and had no cooldown. It seemed pretty fine in PvP that way, but it was nerfed because it was particularly strong when enemies used it in PvE. Since then, we've almost doubled the amount of Mercenaries released, so the chance of encountering any singular Mercenary is PvE is much lower. The frequency of fights against collectible Mercenaries in PvE were also reduce pre-launch, but post Death Coil nerf.
Old: Cooldown 1 → New: Cooldown 0 This was made mostly to help reduce the impact of Valeera. I didn't actually think it was going to be as impactful as it seemingly has been, but it's cool seeing Mercs that were previously underplayed finally showing up.
Wave Crush: Old: Speed 7 → New: Speed 6 Riptide: Old: Cooldown 1 → New: Cooldown: 0 Wave Crush was increased in speed to activate the Frost Combo on Tidal Strike. Previously, there were multiple abilities that activated this Frost Combo across the Naga, but as their designs change those abilities were scrapped. This left the Naga with only 1 ability to activate this combo, so I wanted to rectify that. Riptide just felt underpowered compared to similar options, specifically Jade Gust. Jade Gust deals 40 damage when one character Attacks, while Riptide deals 20. Riptide has pros and cons compared to Jade Gust, but not enough pros where the cooldown seemed justified.
Rexxar has always been pretty frail, but nothing in his moveset really required him to be. If he's trying to get value off of Mama Bear Claws, he needs to be alive long enough to see more beasts summoned.
Old: Speed 7 → New: Speed 5 Because Pounce is Speed 4 and generally provides +15 Attack, Equalizing strike is almost never going to be used. It'd require making the ability something like 2 speed for it to be close to parity, but that seems extremely dangerous on its own. I wanted to increase the speed to 5 regardless to make the niche situations where you do want to use it over Pounce a little bit more common.
Old: Speed 7 → New: Speed 2 Hooktusk is just super slow and that's hurting her overall playability. There was a lot of fear around her when she was initially implemented because of role changing, but the many characters implemented since her also can change roles. The ability needs to be fast to both gain any utility from it, and for it to provide skill testing mind games.
Old: Speed 3 → New: Speed 1 There were bigger plans for Uther, but this is the only change that made it in this patch. This one was mainly a change to just tighten up the usability of the Taunt.
Now this is a fine mission statement to stand by:
I knew I couldn't create the perfect meta with this changelist, but I pushed for doing something to make our players happier. If someone playing with Rexxar loves having 10 more Health, then it was worth just giving Rexxar 10 more Health.
I don't wanna say because I don't want to disappoint anyone who would've liked those changes. Especially ones that might be more discussed by the community. Hopefully some of the buffs will see the light of day sometime soon.
Sounds like there is a lot more in store as far as the balancing act is concerned. We'll always take some bonus Mercenaries communication; perhaps this won't even be the only time.
That should about cover everything of significance for our (arguably) most expansive chapter of developer communication to date. If you've managed to internalize most or all of these particular insights, well done! But perhaps you only really care about one or two of the game modes in question, while skimming throughout the rest. Where do you stand regarding all these changes, thoughts, and potential future adjustments being hinted at?
Comments
Thank you for writing this up :)
I am concerned by a lot of the developers comments though. For example, the comment about Harpoon Gun. They know it is a high-roll card and feels awful to play against but won't do anything about it because they fear hunter will become too weak. Having all classes be competitive is more important than how enjoyable the game is to play.
Maybe they are worried that peope who mainly play hunter will quit.
Wow that was a long read but definitely more user friendly than reading 1/25 twitter posts!
I do think some warrior lovers are voicing their displeasure considering how hard the class got nerfed. Honestly think that Tidal Revenant nerf was unwarranted