Upcoming Arena Changes, Cards Being Removed from Arena Drafts
Blizzard just posted a blog post about their thoughts on Arena and some big changes that are coming in an upcoming patch! 45 Class cards will no longer show up in your arena drafts.
You can read the entire blog post below:
Quote from BlizzardThere’s been a lot of internal and public discussion regarding the state of Arena recently. Today, I’d like to share what the Hearthstone team’s goals are for Arena and shed some additional light on where our overall focus is for the future.
Hearthstone has four major game modes right now: Constructed, Arena, Solo Adventures, and Tavern Brawl. One goal we have for Arena is that we want it to feel meaningfully different from any other way you might play Hearthstone. I think we’re hitting that goal now, but it’s important for us to keep that in mind when thinking about future changes. Variety among all game modes is important to us, but an equally important goal is to have a wide range of experiences within each game mode.
This is an area where we feel Arena has some room for improvement. When you first enter Arena and are offered the choice of three different classes, our goal is that you can look at those choices and choose any class without feeling disadvantaged because of their difference in power level.
Most of the feedback we’ve received on Arena is centered around class balance. For the last few content releases, Mage and Rogue have bounced back and forth as the top two most played and most powerful classes. Paladin has been in a tier by itself below Mage and Rogue, while the last five classes have done some shifting around in a tier below these three.
So what are some ways we can address Arena balance? Tools that we have available immediately involve removing cards from Arena completely—C'Thun-synergy cards and Purify are examples of this. We’d like to avoid removing strong spells and weapons from the Arena, because they add to a lot of the unpredictability and excitement surrounding the possibilities outside the current board state. We’d also like to avoid removing iconic cards, since they are generally versatile and familiar tools to veteran and new Arena players alike. Additionally, we can remove lower-performing cards in order to make room for a class’ more commonly utilized cards to show up more often in your Arena draft.
With those things in mind, we will be removing the following cards from the Arena draft in an upcoming patch:
Mage
Rogue
Paladin
- No changes
Shaman
Warlock
Druid
Warrior
Hunter
Priest
We're looking to develop additional solutions to balance Arena as well, such as the ability to adjust the rate that individual cards show up in your draft depending on a designer input value. If we pursue that route, there is still the matter of deciding on the best way to go about using that tool to achieve balance for each of the nine classes and still have Arena feel fun and different each run.
Drafting by card rarity is another discussion that we’ve been hearing a lot. If it’s a matter of balance, we’re fairly confident the ability to adjust the “weights” of cards available can solve that.
We think Arena is a fun environment that could use some overall balance tuning. We hope the above changes will help to address that, and we will be monitoring the Arena closely to see the impact of these changes. We also need your feedback to help us ensure that the Arena remains enjoyable for years to come, so let us know your thoughts!
Surprising they are removing rampage in order to improve warrior. I find it a decent arena pick.
What I can't understand is why people complain about flamestrike. Like many people would just fill the board to death and instawin when flamestrike would get out of the game. This is the card that actually makes mages strong sure but playing around cards shows some kind of skill. Otherwise you would just smorc the enemy without having any kind of fun there. We are complaining in competetive mode that the game is too fast and when arena gets even faster I guess I won't ever play arena again (I'm not even enjoying it now tough because of these curves and the fast game). Anyone ever thought about the arena runs without board clears?
Muster for Battle should be removed IMO. I know it's rare, but if you get one your deck is significantly better.
The same could be said about a lot of rares though, from highmane to blizzard to implosion to skulker.
Plus you'll notice that they said they don't want to remove iconic cards, and summon the dudes is a pretty iconic paladin card, and fits with their general playstyle, summoning lots of guys and having guys available for buffs.
How about changing card rarity to help fix the issues with the "OP" cards? Card rarity is only a factor in arena anyway. Make flame strike rare and lower higher rarity cards on lower ranking classes.
They want remove useless card like purify, starving, astral comunnion... to make space to better ones. Also remove another very annoying and powerful, so they can balance much better the game. Is a big first step for a better Arena. Is completely needed, in this moment arena is not only random, but is depend entirely in a "best" class and how player have more lucky with card showing, (not piking)
Seismic change to arena, I think the tier list needs a full revision in a few weeks
I think removing Goblin Auto-Barber will hurt Arena rogue a lot, which is good I guess.
they got the new fork to play with and it's good card and balanced.
I agree but a lot of people (including me) are too lazy for a sealed draft.
Blizzard take notes......This is how you fix Arena Mage....Remove Flamestrike and Fireballs can only deal 6 dmg to minions. Done.
Good finaly they baned Snow Chugger from arena and well be able to pick other new commons like flamestrike and Fireland Portal...WTF???!
My question is, why would remove those cards???
Succubus, Mark of Nature, Charge, Snipe. Those cards are not so bad, several cards are even worse than those.
For example: Demonfuse, Cursed Blade, Brave Archer
And the "nerf" of mage: The big problems are the removal cards, I rather wanna see less removals than Snowchuggers.
Yes it is maybe in heartharena, but still it isn`t such a bad card. Lots of people and even myself were succesful with this card, because it is a late game finisher. In my opinion it doesn`t weaken Warroir.....
i lost a game because of [card]Snowchugger[/card] the mage had 3 of them in the late game and he kept freezing my big minions and smorking with 2 Firelandsportal... glad they removed this card it's a perfect 2 drop at all game stages.
It seems #MakeArenaGreatAgain has just begun. However, there is still a ways to go. I think these changes will only marginally improve the 6 bad arena classes (only time will tell though so who knows).
If you go to the website you will see that they said ''SIX Classes"... So No, Priest is still a thing to Blizz!
Thank god Cursed Blade is still with us!!!
Not sure if removing Sense Demons is a benefit...If you have some drafted it's a better Arcane Intellect