Upcoming Visual Change to Legendary Cards
Ben Brode shared some information on a consistency pass taking place in Hearthstone. You may have noticed that Marin the Fox's Master Chest lacks the rarity gem for a Legendary even though it contains the silver dragon portrait adornment. This is how non-collectible Legendary cards will be going forward.
Here's how things are going to work and look in the future:
- Rend Blackhand currently only targets Legendary cards which have the gem.
- Rend will be updated in the Kobolds and Catacombs patch to target based on the silver dragon.
- Orange Gem will only be present on collectible Legendary cards.
- Silver Dragon will be present on all Legendary cards.
- Update: Non-legendary cards are going to have these changes too - no rarity gem for non-collectible cards. Ben is not sure on the exact timing.
- Update: Legendary weapons like Ashbringer will also lose their rarity gem and have a silver dragon. (Source)
Here's Ben Brode's post on the matter.
Quote from Ben BrodeWe have a consistency pass on the Silver-Dragon being targetable by Rend Blackhand coming soon.
The new rule: The Orange Gem (what Rend currently looks for) will only be on Legendary collectible cards. The Silver Dragon will be on all Legendary cards, collectible or not. In a future patch, Rend will look for the Silver Dragon, not the Orange Gem.
Marin was built while we were in the new-rule mindset, so the chest uses the new rules, but we haven't actually changed Rend yet, and won't until the patch after K&C (at the earliest), so it's a bit funky right now.
Until we do, keep in mind that Legendary = Orange Gem, in gameplay. After the change - Legendary = Silver Dragon.
Sorry for the inconvenience!
Why can't you fix Rend with the K&C patch? Why the patch after (or even later)?
Usually when we identify a change we want to make we have to factor in a couple things when deciding which 'branch' to check the change into.
In this case, we were running up against the limits of what we could fit into 10.0, due to total number of hours of dev work, hours of bug fixing, and hours of Quality Assurance time, as they verify that things work as they should. Some tasks are easy for us to implement, but have far reaching effects, and so most of the work is QA verification. Correctly prioritizing which fixes/features make it into which patch means taking careful consideration of how much work each developer has on their plate, how much time it will take to fix bugs for each patch, how much time to reserve for additional polish work, and how much time will be required to QA it all. Often when we identify something new, it doesn't get slotted into the next patch, because we've already served ourselves a full plate of stuff to do in order to ship the patch in time, and so it gets assigned to the next patch that has room in it for devs and QA.
All that said, sometimes we "hotfix" things that are server-only (like this change). This has a somewhat higher cost on QA, because they have another milestone they need to test; it's not part of their test-cycle for the next patch. It's possible this particular change gets moved up in priority, and we bump something else to make room for it. (Source)
Does this change extend to other uncollectible cards with a rarity gems such as Spirit Wolf or Spellbender?
Yes, although i think we changed the Legendaries first - not sure on timing for the rest. Thanks for calling that out - I made sure they're on our list. (Source)
Well it is an easy fix, it's just one card. It not like it was a core mechanic that changed a bunch of other interactions and then you'd have to fix those as well... Also I was just paraphrasing everything that Ben Brode said, but I can just directly quote it so you'd get the same end result of it not being fixed until later than the expansion release because it needs more QA testing and there's already too much work to do with the expansion.
As for applying for Blizzard, I can't go work there, it's way too far away, also it's in a country full of insane people with guns everywhere, which kind of can't be made up for by any kind of compensation. I'm not specificly saying everyone with guns is insane, just that there's a lot of mental health issues not being addressed, there's way too many guns and mass shootings happen more often than daily.
It must have something to do with the Recruit keyword. Imagine "Recruit a legendary minion from your deck" with The Storm Guardian. Worse, with Malorne...
How is Malorne related? He literally shuffles himself into the deck and still will be a collectible legendary minion with orange gem. Not like The Storm Guardian, who is a generated token card.
edit: don't mind me, I'm just fucking dumb
I'm also fucking dumb. I can't see either how Malorne is related. Care to explain?
I guess ill use my golden Master Chest so Rend Blackhand can't target it haha
yea of course i'm just being stupid XDD
Did Brode just officially say that Blizzard is small indie company?
I am actually surprised Rend targetted the gem specifically instead of the card by itself.
I suppose this is mainly to let us use Rend on Marin the Fox's chest
"The Orange Gem (what Rend currently looks for)"
Just who coded that ? Why would you ever make something trigger on a gem in a card ?
Does "kill a pirate" looks if the card has a pirate hat ? ^^
ofcourse not you're insane? "kill a pirate" looks for a eye patch =D
I'm pretty sure Ben is just putting it into more understandable terms. Of course Rend doesn't physically "look" for a gem, its just some underlying code that will allow Rend to kill the minion with the gem.
Sure man, but we are not 5 year old kids... It's like the "After the change - Legendary = Silver Dragon." Will the dragon still be silver on a golden legendary ?
Technically, each card probably has a flag that indicates rarity and visual queues are based on that. If they are distinguishing between collectible and non-collectible then you are looking at (potentially) two flags. My guess is this is part of a larger, underlying issue they are trying to address, either for this set or (more likely) the future.
If you are wondering why Blizzard is worrying about visual queues while there are (in your mind) bigger issues to address: The game has a Product Owner whose job it is to prioritize work the development team is doing. This person has a vision of the past, present, and future of the game. It is their job to ensure future expansions can be successful by preparing the now. This may be one of those changes, and Ben isn't telling us because direction may change. For us, it is a cosmetic change. To the team, this may addresses underlying issues that will prevent them from meeting future requirements. Don't worry; the Product Owner knows their job and isn't making the team do busy work. There's more here than we need to understand, but if Ben doesn't tell us then people will observe (it is an obvious change and players will notice it) and say something, so he may as well be proactive. If it was a transparent change then he would keep it to himself.
Just my two cents, for what it is worth.
Well they clearly are distinguishing collectible or not because when you generate random cards or minions, it's always collectible ones. For the rarity, there's indeed a quite likely high chance that it exists, but I don't think that it is necessarily a part of the minion entity that exists on the board as it probably wasn't seen as being relevant for interactions on the board. Now Rend changed that and it is likely that the person that coded it just winged it with what was available at the time. It isn't necessarily a bad thing to code behaviour around a visual cue that is so closely related to that behaviour.
Another 1.6Gb download on the go...
rip my phone with only 16GB with only about 5 gigs left
So will they change Rend's text, or just how his effect works? If they'll change it to "destroy a legendary card" that would be awesome!