Iksar’s Twitter Q&A #31 Summary – Next Focus After Mercenaries, Bigger Expansion Late in 2022, Balance Changes Philosophy, New Cosmetics

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. Right now they mostly happen on Fridays, 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.

Check out previous Q&A’s here!

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

Hearthstone AMA #31

5:00PM – 6:30PM PST

Ask me a question about Hearthstone!

Or Design! (or anime…) pic.twitter.com/a1kEGVbmlv

— August Dean Ayala ???? (@IksarHS) October 1, 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:

• With Alec Dawson leaving the team, the final balance decisions will now be done by Chakki, Gallon, and BoarControl (so they’re in very capable hands if you ask me). Iksar doesn’t expect any major changes in balance philosophy. Chakki will most likely be the one teasing nerfs etc. on social media.
• After Mercenaries is finally out and they have more time, the next main focus will be improving Battlegrounds with more systems like progression, cosmetics, and potentially some gameplay changes.
• A “bigger than normal” expansion is slated for late 2022. (I wonder if it just means more cards, or maybe something like a new class?)
• Between high-power sets and low-power sets, the design team likes doing high-power sets more. Players approach them more emotionally and they have more complaints, but if you make set too low on power then players get bored and quit. But obviously, they’d rather do something in the middle.
• Most of the balance changes are made on the perception instead of the actual statistics. The only time changes are made purely on balance for decks that players don’t complain about is when the deck is truly imbalanced with win rates exceeding 54-55%. (Many decks stay powerful but never get nerfed because players don’t feel like they’re too strong. And many decks that aren’t very strong still get nerfed because players don’t like them or feel like they’re oppressive.)
• The card that narrowly dodged nerfs/rotations so many times is Gadgetzan Auctioneer.
• Being able to draw too many cards quickly is a concern, but there are always upsides and downsides. Having more cards is fun because it means that both players have more options each turn. Limited draw leads to relying on hitting the right curve and playing a single card from the top of your deck each turn (and that’s boring). It can be alleviated by adding more draw or random card generation, and both have their downsides.
• Tons of new cosmetics are in the works. They would love to do more types of cosmetics like alternate Hero frames, card artwork or boards in the future. No plans on 2000 wins portraits specifically, though.
• There are plans to add Diamond cards for some cards from 2020 expansions and a special cosmetic coin for Ashes of Outland (since the first one we’ve got was from Scholomance).
• We’ll get even more portraits for Mercenaries (including the ones that already got their portraits like Rokara) next expansion. (He means Mercenaries characters, not game mode)
• There were plans to “celebrate” popular community figures by adding some hero portraits or alternate skins featuring them. If that happens, it will most likely happen in Battlegrounds since it’s a more “anything goes” place.
• The team tries to create more diverse characters of different ages, races and genders. That’s why original Hearthstone characters include Elise, Cariel, Rokara or Bob.
• Some new features might be easy to implement, but we need to take into account that everyone is doing something at the time, and something new moves to the back of the queue (often 4-6 months long).
• (Someone found out that most of the classes have roughly the same average card cost with an exception of Druid and Rogue) It’s intentional for Rogue to have cheaper cards on average and Druid to have more expensive cards on average to capitalize on their strengths – Combo in case of Rogue and Ramp in case of Druid.
• (Talking about Mercenaries) They are okay with having game modes with significantly different gameplay experiences in Hearthstone, but he’d still consider them broadly a similar genre – slow strategy games.
• Hearthstone playerbase is big enough and the games are fast enough that they don’t have problem with further fragmentation by releasing more modes – there are more than enough players playing each format to support it.
• (Answered by Matt London) Hero emotes are written in a way to stay true to a given character. For example, if a character is nice like Guff, then their emotes will be friendly. If a character is more sarcastic like Tamsin, then their emotes will be snarky.
• We won’t see a Hearthstone console release in the near future, but he can’t say “ever” because it’s a long time.
• Some more WoW cross-promotion should come in the future.