Rise of Shadows Q&A – April 22 – Summary!

Devs will be hosting a Rise of Shadows Q&A session on the official forums. They will start answering the questions on April 22 at 10 AM PDT (19:00 CEST), but you can already start asking your questions in this thread. So head over and do your thing! We’ll summarize the most interesting and/or important answers after Q&A is over.

The Q&A is over – we’ve rounded up and summarized all of the most interesting answers below!

General

• Better defining and refining class strengths/weaknesses/identity is one of their main goals for this Standard year.
• New tribes (like Undead) are not out of question, but they might be difficult to introduce (since they want to keep 1 tribe per card) and in order for a tribe to make sense, there needs to be some sort of gain from it (not doing it just for the sake of doing it) – e.g. Treants or Lackeys don’t need a separate tribe, because they are already clear as they are and adding their respective tribes would be simply unnecessary.
• Keywords discussion – people ask why they didn’t make Witch's Brew an Echo card. Peter Whalen explained by linking his blog post from when they’ve decided to get rid of Enrage (https://playhearthstone.com/en-us/blog/21614307) and explained that learning key words is most difficult thing for new players and it turns them off – especially when seeing the cards outside of the game’s client (when you can’t hover over them for an explanation). They don’t want to use keywords on a single card with a rare mechanic, especially since they are from different Standard years (so when Witchood rotates out, Witch’s Brew might be the only “Echo” card left in Standard and it would feel out of place).
• On card rarity: Picking which card is Legendary is simple, because those are cards that they want to be limited to 1 per deck. If they design a card top-down (start with a name/character etc. and then fit an effect), if they design a card for a specific character (e.g. someone from WoW lore) it only makes sense to make it Legendary. When it comes to others, it’s mostly about complexity (not only when it comes to the text, but also on how to build a deck around that card, where to fit it etc.) and “weirdness” – e.g. cards like Dirty Rat and Void Contract fit that category. Commons are most basic and easy to understand cards without any complicated effects. Rare is somewhere between Common and Epic. It doesn’t end up like that 100% of time, since they often shuffle card rarity later into the design for different reasons.
• There are no secret interaction on the Rise of Shadows board. They do add one if it really fits the board – like the Volcano one (it would be a shame to not be able to make it explode).

Cards

• There was a common theory that a Dr. Boom's Scheme card was changed last minute, because its art and effects don’t match + it seems like it was heavily nerfed and they didn’t have time to re-balance it. It sort of true – they’ve tried many different mechanics for it, like shuffling Bombs, summoning Boom Bots or dealing damage, but they decided to go with a defensive version in the end.
• They’ve learned a lot since the launch of Death Knight Heroes, and will try to no longer print ones with broken Hero Power. They feel like Zul'jin is in the right spot. There are no plans to nerf Hagatha the Witch or Dr. Boom, Mad Genius right now, but it depends on how the meta shakes up. They don’t think that those cards are as problematic, because there is still a lot of variance to them because of RNG (so they aren’t as oppressive as some of the DKs).
• They hinted that tri-class cards might make a comeback THIS YEAR (but it might just be a tease, nothing is confirmed).
• They didn’t abandon mana ramp mechanic from Druid class and it’s still the class’ core. We should see more ramp cards going forward.
• New Legendary weapons/spells is something they might do in the future, although they don’t want to get into a formula of “Mage gets Legendary spells, Warrior weapons” or something similar.
• Going forward, they plan new “Thief” cards to add a card from a random other class instead of the opponent’s class (because that made Thief Rogue mirrors quite miserable). They don’t mind the current Thief cards to stay the way they are and just rotate out, but Pilfer is a Classic card now, so they do consider changing it to the way e.g. Hench-Clan Burglar works.
• When talking about a card that looked really fun/interesting on paper but turned out to be impossible to balance or fundamentally flawed, Liv Breeden mentioned a card she thought about for KFT – “Mass Teleport: Fill both sides of the board with random minions.” In reality, since your opponent had the initiative, he just killed you on the backswing nearly every single time. Chadd Nervig said that he tried to find a way to fullfil the “Beast Mastery Hunter” fantasy of just Rexxar + one life-time partner pet. They tried to make a fun way of making that work, but failed so far. Another idea was the “Balance Druid” fantasy with Crystalsong Portal, which initially checked the ENTIRE DECK (like To My Side! for example), but it turned out that the archetype was weak and they would need to make the card insanely powerful to compensate.
• Swampqueen Hagatha‘s “teach” mechanic was mostly done for the flavor and they have no plans to add more cards like that, but they also don’t see why not.
• They already have some card replacements ready for the Classic cards that got HoF’d and they are hoping to bring them into the game before next expansion (but they won’t come in the upcoming single player content patch).

Balance Changes/Meta

• They are happy with the Standard meta’s balance so far, because things have been changing a lot since the expansion’s release (players adapting to the best decks etc.) But they are ready to step in with some nerfs if that changes.
• They are thinking about nerfing Barnes and Bloodbloom + Darkest Hour combo for the sake of the Wild format, but no decisions were made yet – they are still monitoring the meta and waiting for it to settle down. In general, they are comfortable with a less balanced and higher power level meta in Wild than in Standard, because that’s the idea behind the format, but if they turn out to be too oppressive after meta settles down, then they will step in like they did with Naga Sea Witch and Aviana.
• They want to add more Neutral tech card options that can help classes fill their weaknesses vs specific strategies. E.g. Dragonmaw Scorcher and Mossy Horror against Token Druid – they are not as powerful as class options, but give a way to either make your existing class option more potent or fill some of the gaps.
• They do know that Archivist Elysiana is a commonly qutoed problem card, especially among the competitive community, and they will look into the card at the upcoming HCT World Championship (and continue to monitor her overall use after). They will make a change if it turns out to be necessary.
• They nerfed Cold Blood instead of Hall of Faming it, because the effect itself is not oppressive in any way, and it’s something they want Rogues to be able to do in Standard (and not only in Wild), but it was just too powerful so they decided to nerf it.
• No plans to change Zilliax, they like how the card plays. It’s present in so many decks mostly because it’s so flexible, not because it’s overpowered – it feels good to play and doesn’t feel awful to play against.
• They don’t want to un-nerf Yogg-Saron, Hope's End in Wild, because it’s just a too powerful/dangerous effect to have around forever as Neutral. If anything, they might print a similar card in the future as a class card.

New Features/Cosmetics

• There are no plans to extend the duplicate protection rule to Epics.
• They are “interested” in new game modes, and know that they are important for the player base (so basically no new info about that matter).
• They are thinking about some medium and long-term cosmetic rewards, something that would reward long time players (e.g. extra cosmetics for 1000/2500/etc. wins with a certain class).
• They are looking into some ways to bring back Tyrande portrait (before the end of this year) as well as some of the old card backs for people who missed them.
• There are no plans to implement auto-squelch feature, because Emotes are the only way to communicate with your opponents right now (and as far as those go, they are among the least harmful in video games).
• They want to implement more stuff as potential small rewards for players, because most are already bored of the constant card backs / card packs as the only possible rewards.