Iksar, Lead Hearthstone Balance Designer, was on Reddit answering some questions about Odd Paladin, Druid, and will Baku be nerfed? Check out the responses and questions below, I’ll be paraphrasing the questions.
Why does Odd Paladin not have any new cards?
Generally the idea is that when there is a very powerful archetype in one expansion, we try not to give that archetype additional powerful cards so other archetypes can catch up. I think the fact you state here has more to do with intentionally not making more powerful cards for Odd Paladin than it has to do with all the cards in Odd Paladin being so powerful they could never be reasonably replaced.
Have you considered nerfing certain Baku hero powers? Summon a 2/2 minion instead of two 1/1s, or for warrior, 3 armor instead of 4.
Considered both actually. Odd Warrior is a deck that I think is cool if it shows up in a very specific meta then goes away. If Odd Warrior were to find a long-term place in the 5-10% play rate range I think it would be time to seriously think about a change to the deck. For Odd Paladin, it’s the best deck in the game on most days. As ‘best decks in the game’ go, I’d say it’s not so bad. There are some clear counter strategies and most games have a good amount of interesting minion combat. The downside of course is that it’s been around for 8 months or so and that’s a long time for any deck to see a very high play rate. For now, we’re still in the set evaluation phase, the meta from a data perspective is still changing every day.
Is the plan to not print any usable minions for Paladin for an entire year?
Both odd and even are fairly aggressive or tempo decks. It’ll be difficult to make powerful aggro/tempo cards in paladin next year, but there is a lot of space outside those archetypes. Paladin also loses a ton to rotation.
Response to a comment about being happy Odd Paladin didn’t get nerfed
Yeah. Something we have to consider when thinking about card changes is what the fallout might be. It’s a little scary to consider that a change to Odd Paladin might result in something like Kingsbane Rogue being the most played deck. While I love Kingsbane as a card and deck, I don’t think it’s the kind of strategy that is very fun if it’s the highest population deck for an extended time period.
Why were Flobbidinous Floop and Dreampetal Florist added to Maly Druid when it was already strong?
The thought was essentially that Dreampetal might improve Maly and Togwaggle a small amount, but not enough to be more powerful than decks they already had like Token Druid and Taunt Druid. I think without Dreampetal and Floop, there would probably be less variants of Druid. You can argue that is good or bad :).
If you generally don’t support already strong archetypes, why did Druid get more cards?
Ideally every class has something in the tier 2+ range every set. For Druid, I think it’s just that cards like Wild Growth, Nourish, Swipe, Naturalize, Branching Paths, UI, Plague, Spellstone, Malfurion, etc make up a core that is very good and has been around for a long time. There is some player fatigue with anything that is powerful and high population for a year+. Mike has mentioned this before, I think it’s likely we’ll do something to address Druid decks feeling similar in a way that is more long-term.
Are expansions designed 2 or 3 in advance? If so, do you make adjustments closer to the release?
We come back for two weeks of balance focused playtesting pretty close to set release. We also do a lot of playtesting, so even if we’re 2-3 sets ahead, we’ve been playtesting each of those individual metas for a couple months each (in addition to other tasks). For example, most all card design is complete for the first set of next year, but we’ll wait until Rastakhan meta has settled to make all final balance decisions for that set.
Who asks this questions? We dont have many opportunities like this one and instead of asking about real problems like the new rogue quest (wild kingsbane), the homogenization and polarization of games that baku produces, and how they failed to make an impactful set (yet again), they ask hollow questions about balance without anything else to say appart from “x deck is op” or other obvious questions regarding desing topics they already touched before.
people on r/hearthstone
I have a distinct suspicion that these question were written by a fellow blizzard employee or they just read the top comments on reddit lol
Iksar occasionally writes things on Reddit. In this particular case, he wrote a few answers to various popular threads on r/hearthstone and tweeted about them to give them more visibility, mentioning that when he writes about something on Reddit, it is still asked about a lot as individual Reddit comments are quickly forgotten.
This was not an organized interview, just ad hoc interaction from a developer on a popular community platform.
I think the questions actually asked what you’re mentioning? Nerf two of Baku’s Hero Powers -> make it less polarizing. Fail to make an impactful set? We’re just suffering the power level of Year of the Mammoth. Once that rotates out, the game will be completely new. They didn’t say anything about Wild Kingsbane, but Wild is a mess anyway. If it’s not Naga Giants, then it’s Star Aligner Druid, and now it’s Kingsbane, and another OP deck will climb up again if that gets nerfed.