Dean “Iksar” Ayala’s Twitter Q&A – January 27, 2021 – Roundup of All Answers – New Classes, Mechanics That Might Make It Into The Game, Achievements and More!

And so, weekly Dean “Iksar” Ayala’s Q&A session on Twitter became a thing. He started them on January 13 and promised to do them every Wednesday (6:30 – 7:30 PM PT). People have been asking lots of questions about the game’s balance, design, specific cards, mechanics and so on. Sadly, Twitter is kind of a mess when it comes to such things. Messages are short, you have to create long threads if you want to talk about something in detail, lots of comments get hidden, and it just doesn’t flow right. To make it a bit easier for all of you, just like last week, I went through all of his replies and decided to make a quick summary of the most important talking points.

Check out his last Q&A from January 20 here.

That said, if you want to read the full Q&A – all the questions and answers – here’s the Tweet you should go to:

Ask me a question about Hearthstone and I will try my best to answer. More likely I can answer your question if it relates to game design in some way, but can give other questions a shot.

7:00PM – 8:00PST pic.twitter.com/5KgcslxtYP

— August Dean Ayala (@IksarHS) January 28, 2021

And here’s the summary. I mean, it’s pretty long for a summary, but he answered A LOT of questions. Of course, I didn’t cover everything. Instead, I tried to focus on the more interesting / important stuff. Again, if you want to read his full replies on all topics, check out the Tweet above.

• They’re still exploring solutions when it comes to Khadgar in Battlegrounds. More details in the next couple of weeks.
• Overall, the release of Demon Hunter was successful (either the new class itself or marketing around it brought more players into the game).
• There is no new class in development right now, but we probably will have another one in the future. They’ve talked about Death Knight, Monk or maybe something entirely new. However, it’s not something they want to do every year.
• Initially, Death Knights weren’t Hero cards. Instead, they shuffled corrupted cards into your decks, which then turned you into Death Knight, but each class felt too similar. That’s when they turned them into Heroes.
• They’ve been trying to answer some questions regarding deck slots (what % of playerbase wants more, how many slots players would be happy with), they have some initial information, but they will share it later in official communication.
• Hearthstone is big enough that they don’t mind fragmenting playerbase with new game modes. What they do is releasing major content updates for different modes at different times, so people can jump around and play what’s new.
• It’s easy to say that QA does a bad job when some broken cards get released because we don’t see all of the cards they caught before going to live. One example Dean gives is Livewire Lance, which used to cost 2 mana until shortly after release (and it would be really broken at 2).
• Devs usually test 3-10 new mechanics every expansion, and only 1-2 of them make into the game. One interesting mechanic they had tested were Champion cards. They were minions with no Attack and an ability that triggered every turn. They wouldn’t be affected by AoEs like Flamestrike. Something like a mini-hero. Their abilities and visuals didn’t feel good enough, but they might revisit this concept in the future.
• Another mechanic that might come into the game in the future is having spells of different types – e.g. Fire, Frost, Arcane etc.
• People responsible for Tavern Brawls are also working on Duels, Book of Heroes, as well as an unannounced game mode they haven’t talked about yet – that’s why we’ve been getting so many repeats this year. We should get more new Brawls once they’re closer to finishing their projects.
• “Pack vouchers” instead of pack rewards from X or Y expansion is a complicated issue. Most of the rewards are already Gold, but they don’t want to add another layer of decision making to getting packs. Most of the players don’t know what packs are good for them and which they want to buy, so making them get specific packs or even card rewards makes it easier to just jump into the game instead of wondering what will work best.
• Devs knew about Wretched Tiller + Hysteria combo pretty late into the release cycle, but they didn’t change it, because it didn’t look that powerful. There are a lot of combos they let slip through simply because they make the game more interesting. In this case it just didn’t work out.
• They plan to add achievements for older PvE content, but have no plans to create achievements for older expansions (like GvG etc.) – they aren’t sure if it would be very enjoyable (but they’ll talk about it).
• They won’t allow achievements to be completed in casual or friendly games, because it would make them too easy, which isn’t the point of achievement hunting and it’s not fun.
• Achievements from the current expansion will no longer grant XP after new expansion is out (but that new expansion will have its own achievements with XP).
• Reprints can be good for the game and they will probably do some of them in the future. E.g. they planned to reprint Webspinner in Un’Goro, but landed on a slightly different design (most likely Jeweled Macaw). So far they felt that they can accomplish something similar to reprints by just making some tweaks and releasing new cards.
• Dean isn’t worried about “running out of ideas” for new cards.
• It’s pretty rare that an undiscovered powerful deck flies under a radar nowadays – good decks are usually popular. The exception might be decks that players find boring (e.g. Highlander Hunter, Even Paladin) – players know that they’re strong, but their play rate is lower than it should, because not many people enjoy them.
• Dean recommended Peter Whalen for the Hearthstone team after playing his card game Dream Quest.