Senior Game Designer Dean “Iksar” Ayala was tweeting pretty hard yesterday (or last night depending on your time zone). He started replying to a topic about Wild format and Wild balance changes, and there’s a lot to take from what he said. Here’s a quick summary:
- Currently, there are no balance changes planned for Wild.
- Wild balance changes are reserved only to the most unfun and swingy early/mid game strats (which simply block any other strategy) and decks that appear just so much stronger than the others.
- The decks they look closest look at are Darkest Hour Warlock, Quest Mage, Secret Mage and Mech Paladin. None of them “crosses the line” just yet, though. It’s something they need to “feel out” over time.
- They also want to focus on Standard now with the new expansion and rotation coming soon, and then think about balance changes to Wild.
- The goal of Wild is that players can play any card and any strategy they want. Because the card pool is so huge, the Wild is meant to have crazy strategies like that.
- They only want to address outliers like Naga Sea Witch or SN1P-SN4P which create some clearly broken combos. They don’t have a clear ruleset for identifying those outliers, though.
- He said that if players want to just play old cards without running into overpowered strategies, it’s not the right format. He asked whether we had some ideas for a rotating format we liked a lot. It might be hint that they’re thinking about another format – a rotating format, where we can play cards from older expansions, but not all of them at the same time + the available expansions rotate out periodically (something like we have right now in Arena). Would you like to see something similar?
And you can find this specific Twitter thread here:
No plans for balance changes in Wild. Wild is always going to be a place where very slow control decks have a hard time with extreme power combos that utilize all cards in Hearthstone history. Quest Mage is one example of this but there are many others.
— August Dean Ayala (@IksarHS) February 27, 2020
In a previous comment I had addressed how bad was the design of snip snap and Zephyr the Great. At least you did something about snip snap. Do something about Zephyr as well. The card was intended to be creative and gamebreaking but it turned out to be unskilled, unfun and generally speaking it has the reverse impact of the one you wanted to extract from it. Revise it please.
the only thing that zeph needs to remove is bloodlust and savage roar
at least you agree that it needs tuning
zephrys is one of the best cards in the game in my opinion. yes it is powerful but only in one condition; highlander deck. you “sacrifice” your duplicates in a deck to use zephyrs, which makes it an all-even condition with your opponent. using only one card in a deck is hard, and zephyrs is just the award for doing it; just as other highlander-only cards such as brann the tamer, alex etc.
I disagree. In a world where a highlander deck is only 30 cards and there are so many alternatives to put in such a deck, the downside of playing singletons is long mitigated, if not completely removed.
And Zephrys and Queen Alex even being played in non-highlander decks (albeit standard only) shows that you don’t even have to play singletons.
So yeah, I’m with Repellista – even if I crafted Zephrys golden on day 1. It’s an unfun card.
Stay salty because there is no way Team 5 is going to change their baby, Zephrys. And omitting cards from its pool is ridiculous. It was made to be powerful and powerful it will stay.