Game Designers Mike Donais and Dean Ayala spoke to IGN about the health of Hearthstone.
Almost a month ago the last wing of Hearthstone's latest adventure, One Night in Karazhan, was released and with that 45 new cards had entered the game. Slowly but surely the meta is settling down again and this time it's the Shaman class reigning supreme. Severely underestimated cards such as [card]Maelstrom Portal[/card] and [card]Spirit Claws[/card] gave Thrall and Morgl an unnecessary boost, making multiple archetypes not only viable, but very strong too.
Another continuously discussed Hearthstone topic is the card [card]Yogg-Saron, Hope's End[/card]. Upon its release in the Whispers of the Old Gods expansion the 10-drop seemed nothing more than a fun - but bad - card. However, the opinions on the self-proclaimed God of Death shifted quickly. In games that appear to be lost, players can slam down Yogg and pray, since it might just save you the game. Casting a few Secrets, drawing cards and clearing the board are what one wants from the card, let alone gaining some life or playing a [card]Call of the Wild[/card] for a threatening board.
Two of Hearthstone's developers, Mike Donais and Dean "Iksar" Ayala were interviewed by gaming website IGN and talk about the meta, Yogg-Saron, Call of the Wild and the Arena. Below you'll find a summary of the most important points discussed.
The current meta
- Over the past 3 months the meta's been good in general, but it's now focussing a little too much around Shaman
- Almost 20% of the ladder consists of Shaman decks
- Apart from Shaman there are many different decks in many different classes that can be played
- Warrior, Mage and Druid have a lot of archetypes that see play
Priest
- Mike Donais sees Priest as a class that performs tricks, like Rogue
- The trickiness is why most Priest players love the class, as opposed to a 'curve strategy', which Dragon Priest revolved around
- They hope to have understood that concept and that they are able to give the class more of these 'tricks' in the future
Yogg-Saron
- "Yogg-Saron is definitely on our radar"
- It's high on their priority list
- Opinions on the card have changed since it was released, but some still love it
- They want to make everybody happy, so they're talking about a solution that does exactly that
- The three main options are changing the card, moving it to Wild, or do nothing
eSports
- Mike Donais loved Batstone, organized by James "Firebat" Kostesich, because of its explorative nature
- They don't implement card-bans themselves, since that way it might never be found out if there's a counter to a certain card
- An in-client tournament mode isn't being developed, but it's always on their radar since many people asked for it
Call of the Wild
- It's one of the cards that's brought up in-office on daily basis, because of its power
- People focus on the 'new strong cards', rather than on cards such as [card]Swipe[/card] and [card]Frostbolt[/card] which appear in every deck
- Despite the combined power of [card]Savannah Highmane[/card] and [card]Call of the Wild[/card], Hunters are statistically still on par with Warriors, Shamans, Druids and Mages
- Hunter itself is not too strong at the moment, but Call of the Wild is another topic
The Arena changes
- So far they're feeling good about the changes they've made, but it's a bit too early to tell
- They targeted class cards because every class suffers from bad Neutral cards
- Cards like [card]Flamestrike[/card] and [card]Fireball weren't removed because they are 'Mage-y', as opposed to [card]Faceless Summoner[/card]
- Despite [card]Snipe[/card] and [card]Dart Trap[/card] not being the most horrible cards, they were still removed because the team wanted to make a real impact
- [card]Windspeaker[/card] and [card]Windfury[/card] were statistically close, but the team felt a spell was easier to weave in a deck
- [card]Succubus[/card] turned out to be a really, really bad card in Arena because synergies with e.g. [card]Malchezaar's Imp[/card] occur very rarely