The Hearthstone Community has been in a bit of an uproar with the recent problems with Priest, and with the reveal of the card Purify it has become even more inflamed. Ben Brode took to creating this Designer Insight that talks about the decisions behind Purify, and what will be done in the future.
Brief Summary
- Purify wasn’t intended to be super powerful, not everything is supposed to be in a tier 1 deck. Used Emperor Thaurissan vs. Majordomo Executus as an example.
- He thinks they misread the community sentiment, and Purify was likely the wrong card to release in this Adventure. He thinks they messed that up.
- Brode thinks there’s some tools in Karazhan that could be good for Priest, and has hopes for Dragon Priest.
- They realize that Priest in Arena is bad and Purify will likely only make it worse. So, they’ve decided to make Purify not show up in Arena (like C’Thun cards).
Nothing wrong with Purify. If you don’t like it … don’t play it … simple!
Just like me with Standard. I hat it. Its boring playing against the same decks all the time. So now I play Wild. problem solved.
All card game releases, all expansions and all adventures are bound to have cards deemed to be terrible by the players. This is the way of the TCG/CCG world. Always has been and always will be.
Its impossible to design a set of cards in which every single card will find a home in some top tier deck. This would be ludicrous and a terrible design idea on its own.
My only comment on Purify has to be nothing to do with Purify, but rather the fact that on the whole the One Night in Kazakhstan expansion appears to be rather weak. Nothing earth shattering has yet come to the fore. And even worse nothing has come to the fore to save us players for the mind-numbingly boring Standard environment.
And yes … Kazakhstan was a joke.
I had a dream, and it was to get 12-0 in arena with purify but you stole this from me Damn you Ben Brode! I will never get 12-0 in arena with priest without purify because this card isn’t the garbage that we wanted , is the garbage that we need to turn hearthstone into fucking dark souls where all other classes are for casuals and priest is the ultra hard mode.
If they just make Purify a 0-cost, then it would be a lot better, and people might actually play it because it would just cycle cards at the very least. If Purify was actually 0-mana, I would at least try it out because it would be great for cycling cards, unfreezing minions, or removing other negative status effects/abilities.
Good he admitted that they messed up (they did) with Purify, and taking the card out of arena will make a (very) small positive difference.
I would like to hear more about how they will try to avoid making such mistakes again in the future. Re the arena balance point – as Adwcta, Kripp and others have said, this excuse about it taking time for them to implement a system of varying selection rates in arena (which I think is a good idea) doesn’t explain why they decided to make Babbling Book a rare and Firelands Portal a common.
Nevertheless a positive step I suppose that he came out and made this statement.
I’m going to be honest here. As a fan of priest: this was probably the worst. Purify was just poorly designed as a card. I could understand if it silenced only your opponent’s minions at 3 cost and drew a card, but you can’t justify poor card design by comparing a powerful card to an overall underwhelming card. Just give priest unconditional draw, or similar power level interactions like paladin. Stop making priest gimmicky and just make tools that aren’t over costed for simple effect.
That is awfull, the cleric its have a bad time!! and with cards like this…