Dean “Iksar” Ayala is an Interim Game Director on the Hearthstone team, and he’s been doing regular Q&A sessions on Twitter for quite some time now. 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 #43
7:30PM – 8:30PM PST
Ask me a question about Hearthstone!
Or Design! (or anime…or elden ring) pic.twitter.com/m22qt5g22x
— August Dean Ayala ???? (@IksarHS) May 14, 2022
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:
- They’re considering buffing many cards in the near future.
- Dean is surprised about Priest/Warlock’s win rate, they are lower than the usual “worst class of the meta”. On the other hand, Demon Hunter is a bit too strong. They plan to address that in the next balance update.
- While balance changes are often released shortly before a bigger competition, they never plan for it that way, but they want to release them as soon as possible for the general population. If the change is small they might delay it until after the tournament.
- User-generated content often comes up as an idea (like custom games mode), but there are no plans to implement it. It’s a really major development task and they would rather spend that time on other things like social features or in-game tournaments.
- Dual-Class cards were well received, and they will return at one point. They might do one-offs in mini-sets, but for it to return as a “main mechanic” of the expansion, they need to find the right theme for it.
- The team is working on an “ultimate cosmetic skin” (the actual name isn’t decided yet) which also changes how the Hero Power looks. Some prototypes are already done.
- The ability to pick a few favorite Hero skins and get a random one each game (like we can do with card backs now) is in the works, Celestalon says that it will probably be released in the next expansion cycle.
- They want to have more info (like patch notes, known issues) accessible in the client, it’s just not that high on their priority list.
- The patches are tested, and most of the new bugs they introduce get fixed so we never see them, but some bugs always slip through. They strive to release patches as bug-free as possible but some of them will always happen.
- There is always some bias when designing new cards – e.g. a person might not design cards they personally don’t like playing against or make them too weak. However, having two design teams (initial & final) help with that, as each cards gets a few different perspectives. There’s of course still some bias, especially in final design, as they are the last people who see the set before it ships.
- No plans to release Battlegrounds cosmetic skins as Constructed skins.
- Mini-sets always continue the story of the main expansion or at least they happen in a related location.
- Dean’s favorite Hearthstone character is Dr. Boom. He knows that he’s originally from WoW, but Hearthstone grew him into a full-fledged character with personality.
- He played the new Warcraft mobile game (Arclight Rumble) for somewhere between 50-100h, almost exclusively PvE, already and he loves it.
