Share. Discussing the Standard format, why changing the ladder system isn’t a priority and the challenges of making Priest viable in Arena. Discussing the Standard format, why changing the ladder system isn’t a priority and the challenges of making Priest viable in Arena.

It’s been a month and a half since the world of Hearthstone was turned upside down by the introduction of Standard mode, a number of nerfs to basic and classic cards, and the release of the new expansion, Whispers of the Old Gods. Today I caught up with senior game designer Mike Donais and game designer Peter Whalen to chat about how things are going with the game.

Stay tuned for the second part of this interview (publishing after E3), which deep dives into the creation of the Old Gods themselves.

Exit Theatre Mode

IGN: How are you feeling about the shift to Standard?

Mike Donais: I’ve been super happy with Standard. We didn’t know for sure how well it would be accepted or how much fun it would be or how much it would change the meta, so there were a lot of variables out there, but it turned out that everyone’s really enjoying it. The meta feels super fresh, tonnes of new decks are being played and lots of different decks are being played. People are still experimenting, with the Championships that are happening this weekend, all kinds of different decks are being played. And the same on ladder, a lot of people playing different decks and having a lot of fun with those decks too. People are saying Yogg-Saron is their favourite deck of all-time, or N’Zoth, or C’Thun.

Peter Whalen: I played a bunch of Renounce Darkness last weekend. It was pretty fun.

IGN: Renounce Darkness is one of my favourite cards in this set from a design perspective, but I just can’t win with it.

Peter Whalen: Yeah, me either, but I still enjoy it!

IGN: What are the next big changes you want to make now that Standard is out? Changes to ranked play? New formats? Changes to Arena?

Peter Whalen: We’re working on lots of different things, but one of the things we’re putting a lot of effort into is Fireside Gatherings, and making more ways for people to play socially with their friends, and find other people to play Hearthstone with. That’s a pretty cool area to explore.

IGN: Do you think that the ladder system needs an overhaul or are you happy with how it is?

Mike Donais: I think there’s a lot to learn about the ladder system still. The ladder system has been pretty good. A lot of people are having fun with it, and there are some things that I think are low hanging fruit that can be improved upon, and have more room for improvement than the ladder system.

IGN: So what’s some of that low hanging fruit?

“ If you go to the forums and you ask people ‘what [changes] do you think Hearthstone needs the most?’, none of them say the ladder system.

Mike Donais: Like Peter said, the Fireside Gatherings, but I also think our game has, like, if you go to the forums and you ask people ‘what do you think Hearthstone needs the most?’, none of them say the ladder system. They’re all like ‘it needs social features’ or maybe ‘Arena’ or ‘new, great sets’ or something like that. Very few will say the ladder system is their main problem.

IGN: How about Arena? Do you think new cards and giving them a find bonus is enough to keep Arena fresh, or do you need to address Arena in other ways?

Peter Whalen: I think that’s awesome. There are a lot of opportunities in Arena for maybe making it more friendly for newer players. Players that are less experienced have a very hard time right now in the current Arena system. I think there’s ways that we can go forward with Arena that maybe we can push in different directions. I know Ben [Brode]’s talked in the past about pushing a murloc deck in Arena so that you could go all-in on drafting a murloc strategy and have that work out really well. I think there’s a lot of things in that vein where there’s opportunities with Arena to do some really cool stuff, and it’s on the list of things that we’re exploring.

IGN: What can you tell me about the Arena rewards scheme in China and how that might pertain to territories outside China?

Mike Donais: China put in a system where individual players can be rewarded based on their Arena wins, if they go 12-0 ten times, they can get a prize. Seems like an interesting experiment, we like to experiment with different ideas and see if they’re good or not. This time China’s experimenting with an idea to see if it’s awesome or not, we’ll learn from that. They’ll probably keep iterating on it. If it’s awesome maybe we’ll do something with it. We don’t really have plans to do anything like that right now.

IGN: So this was something that was led out of China, as opposed to you guys testing the water in an external market?

Mike Donais: Yeah, that was led out of China. Our game director talked to them about it, so we’re aware of it, but it was a China initiative.

IGN: How about the card nerfs? How are you feeling about those in a post-Standard world? Did they achieve the results you were after?

Mike Donais: The post-rotation Old Gods meta has been super healthy. More deck types than we’ve ever seen, the win rates for the decks are closer together than we’ve ever seen, so it’s our best format. Another thing that we saw with Old Gods is, it has a lot of cards that are very good in specific decks, like, the cards that are great in the C’Thun decks are not good in a N’Zoth deck, or, all the different other decks, even Shaman has two distinct – maybe three – archetypes that are being played right now. A lot of the classes, like Warrior – there’s an aggro Warrior, there’s Control Warrior, there’s mid-range Warrior. All these different types of decks, there’s C’Thun Warrior, right? And I think that’s possible because of the card nerfs. Before there was just very strong, generally useful cards in classes that were overshadowing the situational cards that we wanted to make. This has been a much more healthy time for Hearthstone.

Peter Whalen: I look at Rogue as one of the success stories. Blade Flurry got hit pretty hard. It took a pretty harsh nerf, and there were new cards added to Rogue, and right now I think Rogue’s in an awesome place. It has a reasonably interactive, very unique playstyle that’s doing really cool things and it doesn’t go all-in on the super powerful ‘destroy all your minions and also kill you’ card. And I think that’s awesome. The nerf to Blade Flurry allowed us to push those strategies for Rogue.

IGN: I agree in some ways, but Miracle Rogue is back and pretty strong, and that’s a pretty non-interactive deck, which is something you guys are trying to avoid. The Leeroy + Cold Blood combo and the ability to conceal minions is pretty strong. So how are you feeling about Miracle Rogue right now? Is it really just a percentage thing, like, if only a percentage of players are using a deck like that it’s in check? Does it have to reach a certain threshold before it’s a problem?

Peter Whalen: It’s a combination of a bunch of things. So that’s one of them, definitely. If Miracle Rogue is everywhere, and it’s winning 58% of its games that’s suddenly dangerous, but it’s kind of nice that Hearthstone has decks that are different than each other. If every deck played the same I think that would be really sad. If Miracle plays in a way that’s different and cool – yes, it’s a little bit non-interactive, but I think the shells that it’s in right now are more interactive than it used to be. There are certain specific counter-plays you can go for if you just want to beat Miracle Rogue, which I think is nice. You have opportunities to flood the board with reasonable health minions. That does pretty well against Miracle Rogue right now. So I think in that sense it’s actually kind of interesting.

I don’t love the fact that it is still somewhat non-interactive and it just kills you on one turn with Leeroy Jenkins, that’s always been a thing that we’ve spoken out against. But it’s cool that there’s different decks. Freeze Mage is cool too, in moderation, and Miracle Rogue is cool in moderation. If every deck was the same Hearthstone would be a less rich game.

Mike Donais: [Look at] the Rogue deck that Orange posted yesterday. It was a minion-based Rogue deck, but it still has Auctioneers and Prep, so you still get to do awesome Rogue things, like drawing lots of cards and having Rogue-style action, but in addition to that you kill people with minions. They put minions on the board you kill them, which is a really healthy direction. If we can get closer to that I’d be very happy.

IGN: And I have to say – I really love those Gadgetzan turns. It’s definitely fun drawing through my deck if I can set it up. I don’t mind Miracle at all. But the real [joke] question is – does Leeroy need to be nerfed again, guys?!

Mike Donais: Well, last time we nerfed him, he was declared as unplayable. And obviously the same thing happened when we nerfed Gadgetzan Auctioneer. Now they’re both back and playable, of course, tier one probably, so we’ll keep watching it, but I’m really glad that different types of decks do exist and let’s just let people enjoy the cool cards for a while.

IGN: Do you guys have any kind of hard and fast rule about when you revisit card balance? Is it a once a year thing when we transition into the new Standard set? Or are you prepared to make changes mid-year if necessary?

Peter Whalen: We prefer to do them at the start of the year when things change. That’s a great time to sync things up. I’m not sure that, going forward, we’re going to be nearly as aggressive as we were this last time, but absolutely – if there’s an emergency and we need to change something for the good of the game that’s certainly on the table.

Mike Donais: [The] Hearthstone [team] has a philosophy of not having specific rules in general. We just want to be open-minded, see what happens, learn from feedback and our mistakes, and so on. So we’re going to keep deciding as we go, and listening to people.

IGN: How’s Wild going? I think it’s going to be a slow burn, as I know I’ve had so many decks to try out in Standard that I haven’t had a chance to play around in the format. And I feel that’s a common sentiment at the moment. How many people are using it? What percentage of the player base is participating in Wild?

Mike Donais: There’s still a good amount of people playing Wild. The thing is, I think – like you said – Standard is super healthy and fun, and there’s good variety, and I think Wild is more there for you, like Arena or Tavern Brawl, for when you want to take a break. You’ve had enough Standard, you’re tired of losing to X super popular deck, and you need to try something out, where you won’t run into that deck as much, and Wild is perfect for that. Right now Standard is super healthy and there’s a huge variety and Old Gods is only, like, a month old or something, so you’re not running into that, but it’ll be there for when you need it.

IGN: The C’Thun cards didn’t go into Arena. Will there ever be a situation where you print a card for Standard that doesn’t go into Wild? Let’s say it’ll break the Wild meta but could be really exciting in Standard.

Peter Whalen: Pretty much anything can happen. I think that’s on the table. But I don’t think we have any plans for it right now, but sure, that’s definitely something we could do.

Mike Donais: Sometimes Peter comes up with really crazy designs, and if I have to make it ‘not Arena’ or ‘Arena only’ or something like that, we’ll do that. It just shows that we need to be open-minded to crazy ideas and surprise people with fun stuff, but we haven’t had that idea yet. We’ll work on it.

IGN: Talking a bit more about Arena, it’s been cool to see how viable Warrior and even Shaman has become in the format. I hate to be that guy, but how do you think you can bring Priest back in Arena? What can you do with the class to help make it more viable?

Peter Whalen: Priest has a bunch of challenges. One of them is that, looking at it through the Standard lens, which informs our design for Arena as well, Priest has a number of cards from the basic and classic set that are very powerful in ways that tend to feel bad for your opponent, that are highly reactive. They also don’t have easy build-around things. One of the things that we like to make strong is the cards that make new decks - that are a build-around. So some of the classes have tribes, like, murlocs are in some classes. Priests don’t have something that is as easy a hook as that.

It makes them a bit trickier to design for, so one of the things we’re exploring is – what are cool, build-around hooks that Priest can have that allow us to push them in constructed, and also allow us to push common cards of that type in Arena, that are interesting and powerful. There’s always the ‘Priest needs a good two drop’ [argument] and that’s one of the things that’s on the table, and that will help them in both Arena and constructed, but the question is finding out what the right thing is. And in that good place.

Mike Donais: When we did dragons we made some dragon Priest cards, when we did C’Thun we made C’Thun Priest cards, mechs we made a mech Priest card, so we obviously use whatever we can to help Priest, because it doesn’t have that kind of thing, but we need to figure that out.

IGN: It’s tricky, because if you give Priest too strong an early game, they’re never going to lose, because their hero power represents card advantage the further into the game you get. It’s such a strong late game class, so it must be a pretty tricky balancing act.

“ Priests have the worst hero power and the best hero power. If it has no minions on the board it has the worst hero power, but when it’s healing a friendly minion, it kind of has the best hero power

Mike Donais: Yeah, Priests have the worst hero power and the best hero power. If it has no minions on the board it has the worst hero power, but when it’s healing a friendly minion, it kind of has the best hero power, compared to, like, Mage, which only does one damage while it’s healing for two.

Peter Whalen: And one of the dangers there is that it feels repetitive. You keep trying to kill the same minion over and over again when you’re playing against Priest, so it’s tricky to figure out what the right direction is to go with them.

IGN: How about Hunter? Hunter feels pretty weak compared to other classes in Arena right now too.

Peter Whalen: Hunter doesn’t have that same problem, we have some healthy build-around things to push in Hunter – deathrattles and beasts and that kind of thing. It’s just that in this set, it didn’t work out that Hunter has a powerful Arena game. It’s not implausible that in the future we could just design some cards that will push Hunter a little bit stronger in the Arena. I think it’s a little bit healthy that classes ebb and flow, so sometimes Paladin’s weak in Arena, sometimes Paladin’s strong in Arena, and that makes the different Arena seasons or set releases feel different, which is kind of nice if you’re playing lots and lots of Arena.

IGN: Sure, and top players will adjust their play style to make the most of each class in the current Arena meta.

Peter Whalen: They do have one of the worst hero powers, as far as Arena goes, but Warrior has the same problem, and Warrior is pretty powerful right now. It’s in reasonable shape.

IGN: You guys did great work with Warrior for the Arena. The last couple of sets gave that class some very strong cards. Staying on Warrior but coming back to constructed. Warrior has, like, five viable archetypes right now. Is that the goal for all the classes? Can every class even support that many?

Mike Donais: I don’t think it’s possible to have 45 viable decks in the metagame, because there’s always some that are better than average, and honestly, having as many as ten seems like the most that I would expect. I feel like right now there’s maybe more than that, but that’s very unexpected. What we do is, during our design phase we aim them all around the same level, the ones that we think are healthy at least, and then we know that we’ll miss by a little bit in one direction or another, and we’ll see what happens. And right now there’s a lot of them that sort of hit the same numbers so there’s a bunch of different viable decks, and that’s wonderful. And hopefully we’ll continue to have a lot of viable decks. If it’s not five in Warrior, hopefully we’ll have at least two in Warrior. To be honest that seems like a lot.

Cam Shea is senior editor in IGN’s Australian office. He's a Hearthstone player and indie game enthusiast. You can tweet at him here.