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.
If you want to read the full Q&A – all the questions and answers – here’s the Tweet you should go to:
Hearthstone AMA #32
5:00PM – 6:00PM PST
Ask me a question about Hearthstone!
Or Design! (or anime…) pic.twitter.com/G5JLha0Aou
— August Dean Ayala ???? (@IksarHS) October 8, 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 considering a round of “mass nerfs” with the rotation in order to reduce the power level / fight against power creep. But it’s a huge ask because they would need to redesign a lot of cards from 1st and 2nd expansions of 2022 which are already mostly done, as well as redo the 2022 Core Set which is also mostly complete. They aren’t sure if that time wouldn’t be better spent polishing 2022 expansions instead. That said, they will discuss it again next week.
- All the card nerfs and buffs will be re-considered when those cards rotate out of Standard in order to make them more playable in Wild. Reverting nerfs is obvious, but reverting buffs might also make some cards better – like Wildfire, which can no longer be played in Even Mage at 1 mana (but it was actually decent at 2 mana).
- The reason why The Demon Seed was banned in Wild instead of nerfing it further was because they couldn’t come up with a version that would no longer be broken in Wild but still be playable in Standard. And having a different balance for different formats is not an option at the time, it would require some new tech that isn’t in the game right now.
- Early in expansion development, cards are designed “fantasy-first”, so they find some characters/spells etc. that would fit into the expansion thematically and then come up with their effects. Then it shifts and they do “mechanics-first” design – come up with effects that would synergize nicely with whatever they already have and then design characters/artwork etc. that fits those effects. So in the end both approaches are close to 50/50.
- Dean didn’t do any development work on Mercenaries, he just did some playtesting, so for the most part he will be experiencing the format just like we all will and he’s excited for it.
- They’d like to have some way to showcase how long you’ve been playing the game since card backs no longer do that (even the old ones were purchasable with Gold).
- Priest class will definitely be back to Control variants, they just wanted to focus on the Shadow archetype in this particular expansion.
- The reason why they don’t reuse keywords on similar effects later down the road (e.g. Phase Stalker isn’t “Inspire” or Commencement isn’t”Recruit”) is because they don’t believe that it increases understandability of cards. It’s nice for players who were around when the initial keyword was released and they remember it, but many players don’t know it and they would have to learn a new keyword just for a couple of cards.
- Some people will always be unhappy with the meta and devs have to deal with it because at the same time there are also many happy players. Even going back as far as early expansions – Mech Mage in GvG was a very polarizing deck and it had a lot of love and a lot of hate. They try to learn from both positive and negative feedback.
- “Diamond Hero Powers” as rewards for ranked wins are unlikely, they would rather try out new frames or alternative card artwork as new cosmetics.
- Hearthstone already offers some personalized items in the shop (e.g. Wild bundles only appearing for players who play Wild a lot), but they would like to expand it the way it works in LoL or Valorant (e.g. offering deals based on what you’re playing recently). It’s a complex tech task, though.
- Dean’s favorite Battlegrounds Hero is Reno Jackson and his favorite build is Murlocs or anything involving Brann.
- He checked the database and a player with most Rogue wins on NA server is J_Alexander with 28.8k wins (damn, that’s a lot).
