Iksar’s Twitter Q&A #24 Summary – Balance Meeting Next Tuesday, Possible Mass Nerf, Emote Wheel, Hearthstone Original Class, More Minion Types

Dean “Iksar” Ayala is a Lead Designer on the Hearthstone team, and he’s been doing weekly Q&A sessions on Twitter for a while now. They usually happen on Wednesdays, afternoon-evening Pacific Time (but he moves them to a different time slot or day occasionally, such as around big releases). 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 during the previous weeks, I went through all of his replies and decided to make a summary of his most important talking points.

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

Hearthstone AMA #24

2:00PM – 3:00PM PST

Ask me a question about Hearthstone!

Or Design! (or anime…)

I’ll go through each question and answer all I can in a few hours. See you then! pic.twitter.com/PR1GibJLQf

— August Dean Ayala ???? (@IksarHS) August 6, 2021

Below, you will find my summary. It’s still pretty long, but Iksar tends to answer the questions thoroughly and includes a lot of details. I try to ignore “fluff” answers and not repeat points that have been already discussed in his recent Q&A’s, so if you want to learn more, go back to them. And if you want to read his full replies on all topics, check out the Tweet above. Things in parentheses are my own notes/comments and not Dean’s words. Let’s start:

• The team is still reviewing the expansion data. They will meet next Tuesday to talk about balance and finalize their decisions.
• The current meta is less interactive than they would like. Some of that will fix itself when people stop playing pretty bad decks (because many of those uninteractive decks have low win rates) and some of that might be addressed in a balance patch.
• They’re never striving for a perfect balance between different archetypes or even classes. Some metas being faster, some being slower and some combo-focused is okay. The same goes for classes – they don’t need to have an equal representation all the time, they can flow in and out of the meta. They want metas to feel different from each other.
• In another answer, he explained that each expansion, they try to give every class at least one deck that’s able to compete, but it doesn’t mean T1. 47-48% win rate is good enough, because players who master the deck will be able to push them above 50% WR mark.
• Dean expects most of the Standard nerfs to be undone after the cards rotate out to Wild, unless there’s specifically a deck in Wild that might be too strong with the unnerfed version.
• When Hearthstone gets a new class, the options are Death Knight, Monk, or a new, Hearthstone-specific class (maybe Innkeeper? Bard?)
• We’ll definitely see more minion types in the future.
• Power creep is inevitable if they want to release cards that see play, because those cards have to be at least on a level of those that we already have (or slightly better). They could ship an entire expansion with no playable cards, but that would be pointless. If it gets out of hand, they will consider doing a massive nerf with a Standard rotation. Ship a lower power expansion, rotate the strongest cards out of Core Set and nerf the best cards from three previous year’s expansions.
• Mercenaries game mode is currently Team 5’s “main focus”.
• Dean definitely sees Hearthstone getting more constructed formats in the future. He thinks about either something between Wild and Standard and maybe something with custom rules.
• Original version of Raid the Docks had final reward literally blowing up your hand and turning it into a pirate ship. It had buttons you could press to fire cannons etc. instead of drawing and playing cards. But the UI cost was too high for as single card.
• They want to make all Hero skins purchasable with Gold eventually – they will just leave a long period of exclusivity for e.g. pre-order skins. He isn’t sure about Battlegrounds yet, because the mode has very light monetization anyway.
• Mini-sets were a nice changing in pace. Dean was thinking about even smaller, more frequent releases, but the problem is with patching – it takes a lot of time to release a new patch and they would need a new patch every time new cards are out.
• When designing cards for mini-set, it’s hard to know which archetypes from main expansion they should boost, because they never know how balance will turn out. They still make some changes to the cards before shipping them out, but they can’t redesign them completely (because it’s too late for new artwork, effects, sound etc.)
• 8-10 mana cards are hard to balance (especially for non-healing/Armor classes) because they basically need to win you the game or otherwise they’re too slow to include. On the other hand, 0-2 mana cards are hard to balance, because the numbers on them are so small that you can’t fine-tune them too much (e.g. 1 health difference on a low cost minion can turn it from broken to unplayable).
• They didn’t predict Stealer of Souls to break Wild in the way it did, so they only thought about a ban after its release. Dean was surprised, but he ended up thinking that it’s a reasonable solution.
• Control decks not being viable in Wild is the nature of the format with an ever-increasing card pool. Decks only get faster and more synergistic. (And honestly, they can’t do much to change it unless they stop adding new cards to Wild)
• In Wild, they only want to nerf decks with extremely high win rate or no counterplay. They won’t nerf a deck just because it’s on the top of the meta for a long time (in this case – Darkglare Warlock).
• N'Zoth, God of the Deep was buffed to 9 mana despite “Old Gods are 10 mana” flavor, because the gameplay is more important than fantasy.
• When designing new cards, one of the hardest things is staying within class restrictions. They might want to give e.g. Hunter or Rogue healing, but it’s not in their class identity. The downside is that there will be e.g. no viable Control Hunter or Heal Rogue, but if they start breaking those identities, every class will feel the same.
• They would like to find the right time to do some cross-promo with other franchises, they have some ideas for Diablo, but he can’t promise anything. In another reply, Dean mentioned that Battlegrounds Heroes might be a good way to introduce some characters from different Blizzard franchises.
• They record a lot of extra voice lines when making new Hero skins for future flexibility. It’s not on a schedule right now, but they would like to make the emote wheel customizable in the future.
• When writing card text, they don’t want it to sound like it was taken out of the rulebook – they strive for the right balance of clarity (explaining what the card does) and using normal language.
• Shrines from Rastakhan’s Rumble were very promising during testing, but most of them turned out to be bad after the set was out. That’s partially because they used to many “fun” decks during playtesting and didn’t focus enough on competitive ones (to be honest, the entire set’s power level seemed pretty low, that might be the reason why).
• They plan to add “things we might have never seen before” to the future rewards tracks.
• Dean’s favorite card from United in Stormwind is Druid’s Questline.