Hearthstone's Arena Team is Testing a 20% Increase in Spells During Drafting
Hearthstone's Dean Ayala was recently on reddit responding to a thread discussing arena win-rates being higher without the coin. Within this thread, he mentioned a few things we thought were worth bringing up.
- They are currently testing a 20% increase in the amount of spells you will see during drafts.
- Another test is changing the card pool over to Standard. It is "A good idea".
- We will hear more about the upcoming changes in the "nearish" future.
What sort of changes would you like to see to the Arena?
Quote from IksarHSMy Arena Experience (Source)
Winrate with Coin: 53.9%
Winrate without Coin: 71.21%My thinking (mostly a theory) is that this has to do with decks being so heavily minion based in arena. Traditionally, decks that are more reactionary tend to do better with the coin. Priest, Rogue, Etc. I imagine the reason for this is because they would rather wait and respond to what their opponent does instead of playing minions proactively. The coin does a good job helping those reactive decks respond at the right moment. So in a world where decks are more reactive and the minion to spell ratio is a bit closer together... maybe going 1st vs going 2nd win rate feels less imbalanced than it does now. There are a number of game-to-game quality changes coming for arena, this is one of them.
Have you ever thought about increasing spell occurences in arena picks? I think that would be more fun if the percentage of spells were a little higher.
Right now we're testing at about a 20% increase. We think having spells occur more often and the card pool being standard is a good idea, but the thing we fight a bit is that when you have a smaller card pool and increase the rate of any set of cards....those cards appear quite frequently. I'm fairly certain it's not a good idea for every Mage deck to have 4 Volcanic Potions or every Shaman deck to have 5 Jade Lightnings, but it might be a good idea to increase the rate at which you get spells or the most recent set. In any case, we have a number of changes in test now and hope to announce the final changes in the nearish future.
Just thinking out loud... why not get rid of basic cards in arena..
Why not get rid of arena? (Sarcasm sarcasm)
Protip: NEVER think out loud on the internet.
I'd be happier if they just made your 3 choices 1 spell, 1 class minion, and 1 neutral minion for each pick.
why not make arena a rotating set experience ? here is a suggestion
Give classic set 3
Adventures set 1
Full expansion 2
then we get a randomized (let's say 6 ) size arena pool each month ( 2 adventure set 2 expansion or instance , all adventures set classic next month for example )
I wonder who's going to draft the first 15 flamestrike deck
A 0-2 mage that Kripp goes second against.
Lul+1
STANDARD ARENA
Please dont touch arena, just leave it as it is...
Increase the chance of newer sets slightly, so you get a standard feel but there's still a chance for wild cards to appear.
A form of this is already implemented. For a limited time after a new set/expansion is released, new cards are more likely to appear in your draft choices.
Both terrible ideas...why do they feel the need to ruin arena? Propably they disslike the value amounth good players can get there so they just flaten ruin it.
They did it almost already with reward decrease but now this? Cant they just fix their shitty standard and basic set problems? leave arena alone!
A 20% increase in spells appearing means we would just see even more dominance by Mage in arena...definitely not needed in my opinion.
but its more of a 20% increase in control based decks in arena : )
an increase in spells would mean more comebacks and tempo would take a hit, I'm up for it.
Making arena Standard is not a good idea, that will just make it more stale and similar to ranked, we do not want that.
New expansions and adventure still have a massive impact on arena due to the new set appearance bonus, over time I understand the effectiveness of that will decrease, the easy solution to that would be to increase the appearance bonus.
I like the idea of increasing amount of spells that show up in your draft, but I am afraid it will make Mage the supreme ruler of arena again.
The logic behind increasing amount of spells in relation to the going first vs going second win rate issue is that since minions are statted and drafted to eat their lower mana counterparts for free, having a 1 mana advantage during the first 9-10 turns is a huge deal and having just 1 extra card in your opening hand and the opportunity to "go first" during 1 of the first 10 turns is not enough to make up for that.
The way you can make up for the mana disadvantage when going second is to get 2+ for 1s with reactive cards, which generally are spells (with a few exceptions like Abyssal Enforcer and Mind Control Tech), where the coin can help you also take back the board by coining out a minion after you've cleared ur opponents board with a spell.
That way your gameplan would be to run your opponent out of cards in order to increase the 1 card advantage you start with when going second, doing that without reactive cards like AoE or other spells that have an immediate impact on the board is near impossible.
Also here there are a few exceptions like Bog Creeper, Sunwalker and Ironbark Protector, but then again they are very vulnerable to certain spells like Hex, Polymorph and Sap so playing those minions might end up losing you the game so the safest and most effective way to get 2+ for 1s is by using reactive spells.
Of course when going first you also benefit from having more spells since some spells can be extremely strong in arena, but in order to use your 1 mana advantage to your benefit you need to have strong on curve minions to keep being the one asking the hard questions instead of being the one having to come up with the right answers.
Maybe with more spells in arena it wont always be so beneficial being the one asking the questions since the good answers will be more prevalent and having the right answers can often win you the game by getting a big card advantage over your opponent.
I just hope Blizzard wont keep printing busted aggro cards which don't just ruin ranked play, but also make arena faster thus winning by card advantage become less of a valid strategy and going first vs going second even more impactful.
One reason they said they wouldn't do it is because they would have to release the cards for every expansion and adventure one month earlier although i don't see that being the case because heroes of the storm has a PTR for a new hero release, on some occasions Hero reworks (hero reworks is when they do massive talent overhauls for a hero and/or change their playstyle for those not familiar with HoTS), And many other balance changes. All with one week, and most of the time they make changes to the live version of the game from data on PTR. I know they are 2 different game genres and teams but i think balancing HS on a PTR could take 2 weeks a max, To me i think changing a heros attack in hots by changing it from 258 to 255 would be a lot harder to do than reduce a minions attack by 1. Just give the players access to all cards/changes in the PTR and have 1 week to collect data on cards, then the final week to do balance changes before the sets/changes launch world wide
Standard was a necessary evil to keep Constructed fresh in the long run, to help players to keep changing their mindset with each rotation.
That's the reason why Standard Arena is pointless. Because we change our mindset at every card pick and our decks are never the same.
All Arena needs is an algorithm that changes card rarity based on its popularity, to avoid "no brain" choices or "play on curve" strategies.
So, cards like Firelands Portal and Piloted Shredder, for instance, could appear in an epic slot (to clarify for new players, a message could pop up when we hover over the card, telling us that the card got "promoted"). At the same time, underused legendaries could spot on rare slots, creating more opportunities to see cool cards in action, which otherwise would never see play.
The best part is that, after building this algorithm, they don't even need to worry about balance cards for Arena anymore, because the game would balance itself.
Won't this "confuse new or returning players?"