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)
So you're telling me that Rend Blackhand makes a visual check on a card to see if it has the orange gem? There's no line of code in the backend that identifies rarity, so it has to be done manually? That's one of the most unique things I've ever heard.
uniquestupidYes... Nope...
Blizzard is just a small indie company bro Kappa
Usually they would call it a flag or a 'bit' in the card code that Rend or whatever would look for. For example there's probably a flag for "is a taunt" or "is a elemental". Sounds like they need to add a new one now but want to make sure they don't throw their QA cycle off course with a hot patch which can get very expensive.
Rend obviously does not do a visual check. My guess is Rend checks if a card is designated as a legendary and only if it is legendary, but going forward it needs to check for anything that is legendary OR a designation that contains legendary. The silver dragon and the gem are just the visuals that correspond to that designation. Something possibly like the below example:
Rarity=
Common:1
Rare:2
Epic:3
Legendary:4
Non-Collectible Legendary:5
All non-collectible legendaries are no longer 4's and have been changed to 5's. Rend is checking for 4, but needs to check for 4 or 5.
i lost a game once because i played a rend on a golden monkey, not knowing that he wouldn't kill the actual monkey lol
Always happy to see consistent things :D
Long awaited tournament mode....
...while Ben is thinking about gems consistency. So Blizzardish
Why Crazed Alchemist if I can use Rend Blackhand instead, right? ...Me wild, me smart
how about the horse riders from uther's hero power?
This means that more than somebody tried to break the Chest with Rend...
More than noone i would say :P
Who are these crazy people playing Marin the Fox and Rend Blackhand?
Joke would've hit better with just Rend. Everyone is playing Marin due to newness. In a few months, the full joke will work.
Joke works just fine due to 'and'. Even if everyone would be playing Marin they still are not playing Marin and Rend.
Good to know that they are changing meta drifting cards like Rend motherfucking Blackhand. Is that even a real card?
Well it's used in 0.05% decks... I do know that it's a wild card, but it's such a conditional legendary with underpar stats and not really a game changing battlecry. Yeah if you can use it on Tyrone or something op like that, but how often does that happen? Unless you are playing a super late game deck this card is not going to be played.
Yes, it is. Secret Mage players play Primordial Glyph, they might discover Unstable Portal with it and get Rend Blackhand from portal and they can have Azure Drake in hand for Rend Blackhand. Secret Paladin could end up in similar situation when they get against mage Undercity Huckster from Piloted Shredder, Cabalist's Tome from Undercity Huckster, 2 Unstable Portals from Cabalist's Tome and Rend Blackhand and any dragon from Unstable Portals. It is really important, when those situations occur, that interaction is clear and intuitive.
Also, Hearthcards needs to make this into a feature now: The ability to add the dragon to cards without the gem.