(UPDATE, September 29, 2016: Yogg and Call of the Wild have been changed, along with several other cards. Details here.)
I caught up with senior game designer Mike Donais and associate designer Dean Ayala to chat about all of the above and more.IGN: How are you feeling about the meta? How healthy is it at the moment?
Mike Donais: It’s been pretty good in general, over the last three months. More recently it’s started focusing in a little more heavily on Shaman than I would like.
IGN: Yeah, I’ve been playing midrange Shaman over the last few days and it’s ridiculously strong. Mike Donais: So you’re part of the problem. (Laughs.) …The Shaman is obviously really strong, so that’s something we’re thinking about and talking about. Other than that there’s a lot of decks around the same level, a lot of different classes. Shaman even has a lot of deck types – people play a lot of different cards in the Shaman deck. Aggro, there’s a bunch of different midrange, Xixo’s Totemic Witchdoctor Shaman deck, a lot of different variants, so that’s kind of cool, but even though there’s a lot of different cards they still feel kind of similar when you’re playing against them.
Dean Ayala: There’s a lot of variance going round in terms of – there’s a lot of different classes that you can play. I think that the amount of Shamans right now that are showing up is because, I think part of it is there’s a lot of different variants of Shaman that you can play right now, and a lot of the top players have been toying around with whatever the best list is and they haven’t really figured it out yet. There’s a little bit more Shaman than I would like to see being played right now, but there’s a lot of different versions of Warrior, Tempo Mage is really popular again, Malygos Druid and Token Druid are pretty popular and also very successful, so I think when we have as many decks as we have right now that can be successful that’s a good thing, but just one class in general is having a pretty high play rate right now.
IGN: Yeah, we’ve gone from Warrior being by far the most-played class a few months ago to Shaman. Warrior had a bunch of different archetypes so you never knew quite what you were going up against.
Dean Ayala: And they still do. I think Shaman is just with them now, as opposed to Warrior going away. Warrior still has a lot of really strong archetypes.
IGN: Are there any Karazhan decks that you guys have been surprised by? Either by how successful they’ve been or just coming out of leftfield that you didn’t see coming? People have been experimenting with absolutely everything.
Mike Donais: I enjoyed watching Kripp’s Purify video, where he was not expecting Purify to do well and then he won a whole bunch of games in a row with his hilarious Purify Priest deck. He’s probably the one guy who’s done that, so that was great to watch.
Dean Ayala: I think for me the Malygos Druid was pretty surprising. A lot of players were thinking about the best ways to use Arcane Giant, and we’ve figured out a lot of interesting ways to use Arcane Giant ourselves. I think combining it with Malygos Druid - which has been around for a really long time; people have been trying to put Auctioneer and Malygos and Moonfire in their deck for a very long time now, years. It comes up every so often and I think this specific deck, now that Arcane Giant’s there, and now that you have Yogg at the end game, you sort of hit a critical mass where that deck is finally able to achieve some amount of consistency. That was really interesting to me as well. IGN: I like that deck being so strong at the moment because I feel that it’s a deck that doesn’t just pilot itself. I found the learning curve quite steep – you really need to understand how your various win conditions work to have success with it.
Dean Ayala: Yeah, like the Raging Worgen Warrior, Anyfin Paladin, Miracle Rogue, Freeze Mage is still being played, and this Malygos Druid, and all of those decks are very very complex, and all have some amount of success on ladder right now.
IGN: What are you guys personally playing right now? What are you enjoying the most?
Mike Donais: Well, I know that I’ve watched Dean play through all nine classes in a row until he gets three losses with each class, and that’s a cool concept, I might take that upon me. I’ve played a lot of Priest recently. We both had different versions of Resurrect Priest and we wanted to see which one was better. After I went 8-1 we decided mine was better. (Laughs.) IGN: Wow. Would you mind sharing that decklist with our audience?
Mike Donais: Yeah, sure!
IGN: How are you feeling about Priest in general? I played a bunch of Resurrect Priest during the release of Karazhan, and I found it could have really powerful turns but was ultimately inconsistent. I haven’t really gone back to it though.
Mike Donais: You kind of have to get lucky. I felt like one of the reasons I did so well was because I got lucky. Like, if you don’t get your Injured Blademasters or your AOEs you can really just have a downturn. You also need to build it more and more to beat Shaman. Shaman’s almost 20% of ladder right now, so you really want to think about that match-up when you’re building it. And I certainly did that. You want to have a super low curve, such that maybe you’ll lose to the control decks, but that’s the trade-off you have to be willing to make to beat the other decks.
Dean Ayala: It’s a really really greedy deck to play, so I think that when you’re playing the Resurrect deck you’re trying to get to a point where you’re not really playing a bunch of minions so you can all of a sudden start resurrecting these super giant minions that you already played. Either you do the Blademaster thing on turn three or you can wait a really long time against control decks and try and stall out and play a six drop and only resurrect that. So I think that a lot of the problem with that deck, at least for me and with players that I watch, is it’s already an inherently greedy deck and players try to be as greedy as possible. They’ll see – oh, I have two Resurrects and a Sylvanas in my hand. If I can just wait around until turn eight then I’ll be resurrecting Sylvanas and that’ll be great. Of course, it doesn’t always end up working out that way.
IGN: Your Sylvanas gets Polymorphed and then pinged, and you’re stuffed.
Dean Ayala: Or you just die before then because you’re facing whatever aggressive strategy. So I think it’s just a pretty greedy deck. And there’s a lot of different versions of Priest actually. We were looking at some of the statistics today, and I was pretty happy to find out that [while] they’re not performing as well as a deck like, say, the Totem Shaman that Xixo’s running right now, or the Malygos Druid, they’re performing moderately well, and there’s Control Priest variants out there that are using a couple of Doomsayers… and of course Dragon Priest is still there, we saw a couple of Reno Priests running around, pretty high MMR in a couple of the regions. There’s a lot of different decks out there, so that was pretty interesting for us to see.
IGN: How high on the priority list is Priest for the next set then? What kind of goals do you have?
When we made Dragon Priest, we kind of gave them a curve deck rather than a trick deck. We’re hoping that in the future… we can give them some tricks instead and do some clever stuff…
Mike Donais: I’m kind of excited about the next set. When we were working on the future set that we haven’t talked about yet – and we won’t talk about in detail – that’s right around when all the Priest memes were starting, when people were starting to understand – oh, Priest is probably the weakest now, we should probably start worrying about Priest and making sure they get some good stuff. I’m happy with where they’re going. One of the things that we think about when we’re making Priest cards is – especially after making Dragon Priest – is, like, what people love about Priest is all the trickiness. I think Rogue and Priest are the two classes where if those are the classes you’re excited about it’s because you’re doing some tricks. And when we made Dragon Priest, we kind of gave them a curve deck rather than a trick deck. We’re hoping that in the future, now that we understand that concept for both Rogue and Priest, we can give them some tricks instead and do some clever stuff, and we’ll explore that space over the next, y’know, years, and the future of Hearthstone.“
IGN: That sounds really exiting. I’ve always loved Priest specifically for that reason. Trying to find these hard to see combos that can flip the game for you. In the end I just found it was too reactive – often you just sit there doing nothing turn after turn. Maybe there’s a middle ground where you can get going but then you’ve got a lot of tricks you can pull, but you have to know the deck inside out to actually make that work.
Mike Donais: Exactly, yeah.
IGN: Let’s talk about some other hot-button topics in the community. What’s your take on the Yogg-Saron sentiment at the moment? Mike Donais: Yogg-Saron is definitely on our radar. When Yogg-Saron first came out, it was super exciting for everybody. People couldn’t wait to play it, they watched the videos and there were more retweets and things like that every time a Yogg-Saron video came out. More people crafted it than any other legendary. It was just loved by everybody. And since then, some people – people who play a lot, follow a lot of videos, tournaments and so on – have had their [opinion shift]. After a few hundred games, maybe not so much. Some people still love it though. But we’re always trying to make everybody happy, so we’ll keep talking about it and try to find a solution that makes everybody happy. It’s pretty high on our priority list to make sure we do whatever’s right.
IGN: Is that a solution that may come alongside the next set? How long-term are you thinking?
Mike Donais: I think it’s too early to figure out. As soon as we’re sure, we’ll definitely tell people. It’s something we want people to, like, not worry about. As soon as we can tell them more, we’ll let you know.
IGN: Can you give me an idea of some of the possibilities you’re exploring? I know there’s been talk of shifting Yogg into Wild and just leaving the card as is. And then there’s obviously changes to the functionality of the card itself.
Yogg-Saron is definitely on our radar… we’ll keep talking about it and try to find a solution that makes everybody happy. It’s pretty high on our priority list to make sure we do whatever’s right.
Mike Donais: Those seem like reasonable ideas. It’s also possible that, like, so many people love it that we don’t change it at all, so those three ideas are the leading candidates. Do something, do nothing and move it to Wild. So let’s just wait and see what happens. Lots of really good suggestions on Reddit too – we’re reading those suggestions and talking about the actual implications of those suggestions, because we want to make sure that people who love Yogg still have something to love, we want to make sure that the tournament scene is reasonable and we want to make sure that people who’ve had enough Yogg, they’re happy too. It’s kind of impossible to make all three of those goals succeed, so we need to figure out where we want to balance out.“
IGN: How about in-client tournaments with support for card bans? Loosening up how tournaments have to be run for points to be allocated for the World Championship? That kind of idea.
Mike Donais: In regards to eSports, right now if you’re running an event that gives you points towards the World Championship you cannot change the banning rules. And one of the goals of that is so that people have a chance to iterate and respond to really strong cards or really strong decks. And to make it more clear if something really is a problem. If people are too quick to say – oh yeah, Gadgetzan Auctioneer is a problem we’re just going to ban it, then you’ll never actually see if there’s an answer to Gadetzan Auctioneer, or y’know, it’s actually worse than we thought, right? That information is super important, especially at high levels of play. By letting those things happen, the community and Blizzard all get to see if it’s actually a problem or if players can innovate and respond and make new tech.
IGN: What did you guys think of the community bans from Firebat’s tournament? And the player bans? Did that tell you anything you didn’t know already?
Mike Donais: I love seeing other tournament formats, and other cool ideas like that. To me, having a tournament that isn’t linked to the World Championships that explores new space is always fun and awesome, and I think the way we discover new formats in the long run is by people experimenting. Like, the Archon Team League was really cool because we got to see a bit more about teams, and it got us talking about different ways to do team stuff. And I think people should just keep exploring that space and discussing with us what good compromises they can do. Firebat’s a great guy and he’s an awesome caster – one of my favourites – and obviously a great player too. So it was cool to see that happen.
IGN: I really enjoyed it. And now the obligatory question – how far off an in-game tournament mode do you think we are at this point?
Dean Ayala: We’re not really ready to talk about any of that stuff yet, there’s not really anything that is in development right now, but it’s something that’s always on our radar. In-game tournaments is something we’ve been talking about for, really, years. Everyone from the community has been asking for it, but there’s a tonne of features that are on the radar that we’re always thinking about – what’s the next thing that’s going to make the biggest impact to the largest amount of players? What’s going to be the most fun for everybody? So there’s nothing really to talk about right now on that subject, but it’s a really cool idea.
IGN: Another hot-button topic for the community is Call of the Wild. It’s a very very strong card. I find it quite frustrating to play against, but maybe that’s because I’m a middling player. How do you guys feel about Call of the Wild? Dean Ayala: Call of the Wild’s a really strong card. In some cases it’s okay to have really strong class cards. In other cases, there is a right cost and there’s a right attack and there’s a right health usually on some of these cards, and for Call of the Wild it’s very very strong, statistically and perception-wise, it can swing the game in a lot of cases and provides a lot of tools, like it deals direct damage, it protects you, so it’s something that’s on our radar, it’s something that we’ve talked a lot about.
I think in the last couple of weeks there’s at least 15 cards that we’ve talked about – like, hey, what’s the right thing for us to do with X, Y or Z card? Should we change it soon? Should we change it not at all? Should we change it during rotation or the next expansion or the next patch? These are conversations that we’re having daily, and Call of the Wild is definitely a card that gets brought up all the time. I would say that’s near the top of the list. I don’t really know if changing it is the right answer, but it is certainly strong, and we’re reading a lot of the feedback now…
I think in the last couple of weeks there’s at least 15 cards that we’ve talked about...
“
[UPDATE, September 29, 2016: The team has announced a raft of card nerfs, including Call of the Wild, which now costs nine mana.]
Mike Donais: On that note, something that comes up in our conversations is there are some really strong cards in the expansions, and those are very noticeable to people because they haven’t been around forever. If you look at the base set there’s also a lot of really strong cards, and those are just kind of accepted, because they’ve always been around. They don’t feel like they’re breaking the mould. Even simple cards like Frostbolt or Fireball that are in every deck, or Swipe, right? People don’t think about those. Savannah Highmane is probably better than Call of the Wild, but people call out Call of the Wild because it’s the new thing. And in the long term we really want our expansion sets to be more what the game is about, so that it feels fresh and new and fun, and less about base set cards, so that it’s more changing, so it’s one of the things that we struggle with as we try to figure out which cards to adjust.IGN: I think that people do call out Highmane. The problem with Hunter right now is that – particularly with the latest set – it has sticky early game minions and then it moves into this incredibly strong mid-late game. Highmane on six, coin Call of the Wild, Call of the Wild. I think it’s the combination of strong cards. Call of the Wild was a great design from you guys initially because it gave players a reason to push the midrange Hunter archetype again, and introduced a late game finisher, but then in Karazhan, you introduced a couple more sticky early game minions, so it’s a very rounded deck now. To me it’s a cumulative thing.
Mike Donais: Yes. It’s a very strong deck. Very strong early game and Call of the Wild and Savannah Highmane shore up their late game, so it’s like you never get a chance to relax when you’re playing against them. Even despite all that, though, Hunter’s just kind of on par with the other good Warrior, Shaman, Druid and Mage decks, so it’s tough to say that it’s actually a problem. If all those decks are around the same win rate, then maybe it’s actually really good. Dean Ayala: I’d say the perception right now is… that Shaman might be a little too strong, but for Hunter specifically, I haven’t heard that basically at all, and statistically there’s nothing to back up that claim either. I think that you never want to make it so that the entirety of a class’s power level is on the back of one tool, because whether you draw it or don’t draw it, whether you play it or don’t play it, I think feels like the swing is too big. We’d rather mete it out and have a bunch of different cards and all the synergies are really what makes the class very powerful, so I think specifically with Call of the Wild that’s the case, more so than it is, like – does Call of the Wild make Hunter too strong? It’s more – is Call of the Wild providing the entire kit for Hunter? Is that the only card that players are concerned about? Anyway, it’s interesting, I don’t think Hunter itself is too strong right now, but Call of the Wild is another topic.
IGN: It’s been great to see you guys addressing Arena, and attempting to make the classes a little closer to each other in terms of power level. How are you feeling about the changes you’ve made so far?
Dean Ayala: Pretty good. I’ve been looking at some of the stats internally, and it’s condensed a little bit, but it’s really too early to tell what the actual impact is going to be, because a lot of players hold onto an Arena deck for a very long time. And even though some time has passed, there’s still a lot of players that are playing games that had these decks in place before the changeover happened, where all the cards got removed, so I think that when we’re looking at the data, of all the games, I think maybe another week or two is going to have to pass before we can really look at it and say - okay, this peeling off of ten days and hundreds of thousands of games, we’ll look at all the win rates of these and then after that we can see the impact on win rate that it made.
In terms of the [Arena] data we’ve been able to acquire since the actual changes, I don’t think it’s quite enough to make a real judgement call on how to move forward just yet.
I know, like, HearthArena and some of the other sites have already been posting their perception of what’s going on, so we can look at the community feedback and then look at the actual stats and make a judgement call on if there’s more cards to remove or if there, like, needs to be a drastic measure in place, because nothing changed, or maybe too much changed, or things changed in ways we didn’t expect. These are all meetings we have set in place to really talk about – okay, exactly what happened here? And what are ways for us to move forward.“
But in terms of the data we’ve been able to acquire since the actual changes, I don’t think it’s quite enough to make a real judgement call on how to move forward just yet.
Mike Donais: Also, there’s two things that you measure. One thing is how the win rates have changed, the other thing is how much people are playing each class, and how much people are playing each class takes even longer to migrate over, because they’re so used to picking the same classes. It’s not until they have a bit more faith in the other classes and understanding of their strengths, that they’ll start playing the classes more evenly.
IGN: Do you think the order for the top three classes needs to change, or are you more concerned with making the weaker classes more competitive? Mike Donais: There’s a short term and a long term answer to that. I think in the short term I’d be fine if everything just got closer together, but in the long term it’d be nice if you could just pick based on what class you loved, or what class you were most comfortable with playing.
IGN: Can you tell me a little bit about the process that you used to decide on the changes? How did you settle on the cards to remove? How important was statistical analysis? How did you determine how many cards it should be per class?
Dean Ayala: We have a multitude of dashboards and statistics that essentially get us to a point where we can see what are the weakest and strongest cards in a particular class. We’re obviously looking at class cards because removing neutral cards kind of removes it from everybody and makes, not the exact same impact, but a similar impact across all classes. So we wanted to target class cards for that reason. We have the win rate and the play rates for all of the nine classes as well, so we sort of went in there and we said - what is the least amount of change that we can make in terms of, we don’t want to change the entire Arena experience, we don’t want to make it so Fiery War Axe or Death’s Bite is showing up eight times as much. We want to make it so it feels pretty similar, but at least it feels like the classes are more balanced out towards each other, so you don’t feel like you have to pick Mage when it shows up.So we targeted, at first, what were the cards that we could remove. When we looked at a class like Paladin, we didn’t end up removing anything from Paladin, but we looked at a card like Eye for an Eye, and all the stories that surround that card – when you can utilise that card it’s really really awesome, and people post videos of it and they talk about it. When you play Eye for an Eye in Arena and it actually matters that’s a really really awesome moment, and we didn’t really want to remove a lot of cards like that, so it was about going into the weak classes and determining – what cards can we remove that don’t have all these awesome stories attached to them as often, but still remove enough to where we thought it would make an impact. And that ended up being five to seven of the least performing cards in some of the weaker classes.
And in some of the better classes - part of this was in the blog – but we didn’t want to remove stuff like Flamestrike and Fireball, because that feels really core to what Mages are, but removing some of the slightly older stuff, or the stuff that feels not quite as Mage-y, like Faceless Summoner, I don’t think feels super Mage-y to a lot of people. That could have been a card for a lot of different classes, but it was a very high performing card, and it was a common, and it showed up quite a bit in Arena, so removing a card like that made a lot of sense to us. So that was basically the process we went through.
We had sort of a general idea of the impact that it might make, but there’s so much synergy and correlation between all the cards and how many people pick each class and how the cards all work to each other, it’s really hard to accurately determine what’s going to happen post making all these changes, but we have a general idea and we have a bunch of meetings and stats set up to really review it after the fact. IGN: There are a few story cards and high skill cap cards that did go. Was that just a matter of saying, well, overall it’s going to be a positive change?
Dean Ayala: Which cards are you referring to exactly?
IGN: Something like Bouncing Blade is a pretty fun card. It can be used effectively in the right situation. I think it’s an epic though, so probably a bad example. Dean Ayala: It’s an epic, but I’ll address that one specifically. When I think of Bouncing Blade being used interestingly and effectively, it’s mostly in a constructed environment, where you can build a deck that can utilise it. You can remove a bunch of stuff and then use it on a big creature. In Arena the circumstances generally don’t happen very often. A lot of the stronger classes in Arena and the stronger archetypes will just play a minion on two and a minion on three, and then your Bouncing Blade ends up being, well, I hope it removes something with two health as opposed to something with one health, versus a situation like when you’re playing Control Warrior and you have a bunch of cards in your hand and you can Shield Slam one thing and Slam another thing and use your Bouncing Blade on his big giant minion.Those situations are fun to think about, but they don’t actually happen very often in Arena.
I think a lot of the really cool story moments that happen surrounding a card like Bouncing Blade just aren’t really a reality in Arena. That’s sort of the case, as well, for a card like Snipe. You just play it and you hope that it hits something, but I don’t think there’s a crazy amount of stories surrounding that.
IGN: The Lightforge guys had a really interesting conversation about that on their podcast, actually, where they were saying it’s not about whether Snipe is a good or a bad card in Arena, it’s about the fact that it exists in Arena, so it’s another secret that has to be tested for. They felt that removing secrets has a negative effect overall on the class. What’s your take on that? Dean Ayala: I think there’s two questions surrounding that, and I’ve actually talked to those guys about this specific question. If the first question is – is Arena less fun because when a trap gets played you’re no longer playing around Snipe any more, you know it’s either Explosive or it’s Freezing - I think that’s a valid point. I think that playing around more traps and really wondering what those things are, is very interesting, but I think at the end of the day when you’re shooting to make an impact, and that was one of the major goals, removing Snipe and Dart Trap was just something that we felt we had to do to really make an impact.
The other side of that argument being that removing Snipe actually makes Hunter worse, because it makes Explosive Trap and Freezing Trap worse, I get that theory, but it just doesn’t really add up. The amount of value that you add to your deck by every single time one of the worst performing cards no longer shows up in your draft, and instead you get something else? The amount that helps your deck versus the amount Explosive Trap or Freezing Trap become worse because you can predict them it’s just not really comparable. I can definitely see the argument, but it just doesn’t really add up.
IGN: Another one they were discussing was taking out Windspeaker instead of Windfury. Why did you decide to get rid of the minion as opposed to the spell? Dean Ayala: I think that they’re actually pretty close statistically, and we chose to remove the minion versus the spell because I think the spell you can kind of weave in in trickier scenarios I guess. There’s just less spells in Arena as time goes by so we sort of choose to remove the minions over the spells, especially when it’s really really close. With Windspeaker and Windfury statistically it was very very close, so we just opted to move the minion rather than the spell.
IGN: Sure. Last specific one to chat about – a lot of people weren’t sure why Succubus was taken out when you could have perhaps chosen a different Warlock class card.
Succubus, as it turns out, is very very bad in Arena - discarding a card and losing that card advantage, and then it gets removed.
Dean Ayala: Well, I think this goes back to – statistically, when we were talking about it, when we were looking at Succubus, Succubus, as it turns out, is very very bad in Arena - discarding a card and losing that card advantage, and then it gets removed. Because I think in Arena a lot of the time players are playing one drops and two drops at a much higher rate than they are in constructed, so it’s actually worse, I think, in the Arena environment than it even is in constructed, because you’re not getting a lot of the value out of it. You’re playing it and you’re losing a card and it’s dying to most classes, because most classes are playing ones and two drops. So I mean, it was just statistically a very very poor card, and I don’t think really contributed to a lot of stories.A lot of the cool stuff around discard nowadays is you can get some benefit with, like, Malchezaar’s Imp and Silverware Golem and stuff like that, and in Arena those synergies are a little less frequent, so I think discarding a card is a little bit of a feel bad moment in itself, especially in Arena where you might have one or two really awesome cards that you drafted that you’re excited for, and Succubus discards them. So I think that was one of the easier choices. It was very very weak statistically, and didn’t contribute to a lot of story, and also contributed to some feel bad moments. It’s kind of an easy one I think.“
IGN: Makes sense. You mentioned before that this is a work in progress and you’ll be monitoring how things are going and deciding how to proceed from here, but then you’ve also got your longer term plans for Arena balance that you can’t technically implement now. What do you think is going to be the ultimate solution? Is it going to be a card by card probability system? What’s the ideal solution do you think?
Mike Donais: We’ve had some really cool solutions, either from fans or from us over the last three years, and one of the most obvious ways to do it is just to change the percentages on each card, so we accomplish a bunch of different goals, and also figure out what those goals are. Like, do we want more build-arounds, do we want less build-arounds because it’s awkward when you get a build-around? Do we want more recent sets, do we want more old sets? All those things, but it’s also possible that we do something else that’s more clever, it’s really just a matter of us going through it all and figuring out what the best things are. We’re still pretty far away from that. Once we figure it out we’ll probably start talking about it more.
IGN: Do you think the player base is big enough to support formats in Arena?
Dean Ayala: The player base is certainly big enough, yes, I’m not sure if that’s the right answer, but it’s certainly big enough.
That's the end of the first part of the interview. Stay tuned for a discussion of some specific Karazhan cards. Cam Shea is senior editor in IGN's Sydney office and recently wrote a guide to Hearthstone for beginner/intermediate players. Tweet at him here.