What's on Your Hearthstone Wishlist for 2018?
Last year, Iksar tweeted asking everyone what they wanted to see for 2017 and we posted about it to see what you wanted to see in 2017. so let's do it again!
HearthPwnians, what stuff do you want to see from the game next year?
Flux's Wishes for Hearthstone 2018
Having a two-line news post felt like a terrible way to get the discussion going, so here's what I want to see.
A New Druid Hero
It feels so wrong that we only saw three new heroes during 2017. After Prince Arthas came out with Knights of the Frozen Throne, and although the flavor was great for the expansion, we still were left with 2 classes that were still missing an alternate hero. Fast forward to October, just over two months later, Warlocks finally received a new hero in the form of the adorable gnome, Nemsy Necrofizzle.
Druid is now the odd one out and we've got no idea when we're going to see an additional face for the class. Hopefully, the method of acquiring the new Druid hero won't leave us kicked to the curb like Nemsy did with broken Fireside Gatherings and requiring us to be social / grab a GPS spoofer.
I'm not even going to bring up the topic of each class not having an easily accessible alternative hero, that's for another day.
More Cosmetics
Let players show off more! It would be great to see a mix of obtainable in-game cosmetic items and those that could come from a shop.
- There's definitely more room for new card backs coming out of various criteria.
- Let us obtain flair for our names. This could be displayed beside/under our name.
- Flair could provide a slot to showcase a statistic (like lifetime brawl wins, lifetime 12 arena win runs, highest legend rank).
- Flair could also just be a fancy badge that showcases something you achieved or purchased.
- More fancy board elements for heroes. Why stop at 500 wins, the counter doesn't!
Some ideas for cool things they could add:
- A card back to the shop that costs 10,000 gold. The entire point of it is to showcase your wealth. Level it up by spending another 10k gold.
- Something unique for getting all nine heroes to 500 wins. You're already tracking this, make up a card back!
- Reward players with a card back who have obtained Legend multiple times. The Golden Legend Cardback!
- Golden hero borders that could evolve to be hit with more sparkle. Adorn them with class-specific flair like a frost effect for Mages which gets better the more wins with the class you have.
- Name flair for all the basic stats available - total wins, total arena wins, and others that are certainly available internally.
- Name flair from the shop that could let you better represent your favourite <x>. A flashy Hunter trap, a cute little Murky face.
- Think of it as if they were a traditional avatar - they could even show up on your friends list!
- Overwatch, Heroes of the Storm, StarCraft II, and StarCraft Remastered all have avatars. Even Diablo III does if you consider Avatar Borders. EVEN DIABLO THREE!
- Interactables that could be on your side of the gameboard - extra stuff to play with! Buy 'em in the shop and have some rewarded for completing cool
achievementsquests.
This is just a small piece of the overall cosmetic puzzle; The important thing here is to help bring more uniqueness to the game. There are certainly better ideas out there that I am certain we'll see in the comments below.
Additional Unique Tavern Brawls
Back in September, I touched upon Tavern Brawls being too repetitive. I personally feel that over half the brawls being repeats is not a great way to truly figure out the mode and ultimately leads to more negative vocal reactions here and elsewhere in the community. That negativity has without a doubt resulted in more players becoming jaded when it comes to the game as a whole which without a doubt cannot be good.
By having more new brawls added to the game, we can consistently enjoy new experiences with Hearthstone and will hopefully see less negative discussion about the Hearthstone team being "lazy". That negative public perception that is picked up across the web and in the faces of potential new players certainly isn't a good thing and is hopefully taken into consideration when they decide what to toss up next.
While we're at it, seeing more stats on brawls overall would be wonderful. The last time we saw brawl play-rates was back at BlizzCon 2015.
A Friendlier Community
There's a lot of negativity within all the hot places for Hearthstone discussion and although a lot of is without a doubt justified, we should all try and be more constructive with our comments.
- Personal attacks against game developers, pros, and even your fellow players are not getting us anywhere and is the area with the largest room for improvement.
- Saying a card, deck, or play is terrible/shit/cancer doesn't actually help anyone. Explain your process to encourage discussion and teach others.
- Quit the political and regional attacks. Stuff can't always come out at the same time everywhere and discussion of subtropical fruit doesn't contribute to gaming discussions.
These things not only apply to Hearthstone but to other games you play and communities you are a part of.
- Packs need to only give you epics that you do not yet own: 2017 already brought us great changes to packs with you only being able to open legendaries that you don't already own, now we need this to happen for epics as well. Epics were already some of the most difficult cards to get because you often need two copies of them and especially in K&C the amount of epics that are essential for certain archetypes or even specific decks is higher than it has ever been as far as I know. Kibler already brought this up and while it being a small change it will certainly help players feel less apprehensive to craft epics that they might open in packs later.
- Better dust values: Speaking of crafting, the dust needed to craft cards compared to the dust required from disenchanting cards is and has always been incredibly high and very free to play/only prepurchase unfriendly. I think that disenchanting should give you half of the dust required for crafting cards of the same rarity.
- (edit:)AND/OR improved epic/legendary rates from packs: Better disenchant/crafting values would be nice, but it might be more exciting to just increase the legendary and/or epic opening rates in packs. The downside to this is that players don't get to decide what they're getting, but who doesn't love seeing that orange glow when hovering over the cards they just opened? Right now even with the already implemented changes to opening legendaries in packs you are just never going to get every legendary you want unless you spend a huge amount of money on the game, and that's especially bad when you happen to open only legendaries that you don't like.
- (edit:)AND/OR more quests (or quest rewards): Another thing that would help solve this problem is giving more quests to players, which will give them more reasons to play the game (which in my point of view can only be good for the game) or increasing the quest rewards will give players more motivation to complete their quests and start up the game everyday. Another option is to give better rewards for just playing games. Right now the only real reward you get for playing is 10 gold for every three wins (so losses basically give you nothing) and this just doesn't feel rewarding at all, plus it further encourages people to play aggressive decks which are already encouraged by the current ladder system. Maybe giving players gold for the amount of turns the game took (regardless of win or lose) like 1 gold for every two turns would make playing the game feel more rewarding in general.
- Blizzard needs to make balance changes more often: I know the hearthstone balance/design team doesn't like to make changes to the game, but it's key to keeping hearthstone fresh and exciting. I also think they shouldn't be scared to buff cards every once in a while. Sometimes cards are made with an exciting idea in mind but it turns out they're just not good enough to ever see play even when they get a lot of support. Why not make slight changes to these kinds of cards to allow other cool archetypes to have their moment in the spotlight every now and then? (the changes don't have to be big, just change them little by little and revert the changes if they've made the card too strong) I know there are also arguments against this but I believe the upsides vastly outweigh the downsides.
(Edit) Give wild some love too: probably no one is going to read this anyway but I'd also like Blizzard to give more attention to wild, since the way things are going now wild is just going to consist of a few totally busted decks/cards that no other deck can compete with, and it's unfair for people who enjoy wild to always have to face the same broken cards just because Blizzard is too lazy to change them (*cough* Patches the Pirate and Raza the Chained/Shadowreaper Anduin).
I just want Old gods, karazhan and Grimestreet GONE. No more dumbass jades, no more babbling books and no more Nzoths
More Shiftcon brawls. More jades. More Dragon Priests. Cancer is what we need! Cancer is what we want!
Better dust rates. I think the price is packs would be a lot better if during wasnt so terrible.
I'm surprised this post wasn't deleted by a mod.
If someone is reading this, the only thing i want to see in 2k18 is jaraxxus being good and playable.
A Friendlier Community should have been first on the list. :)
I would love to see more stats somewhere. It doesn't even have to be in-game. It could be something like the WoW Armory.
I'm a nerd when it comes to numbers. I started a spreadsheet a year ago to keep track of my Ranked wins after each month which also gives way to different graphs (Golden Portrait Progress, Monthly Wins, Wins By Class).
More FREE packs
wtf
Just one thing ... please fix the windows client so it stops freezing frequently on 5y old windows 7 PCs like mine.
But I would also appreciate reasonable balance patches. Not such idiot-moves like Fiery Waraxe.
I can't help but feel that's a problem with your computer. My 7 year old computer runs the game fine.
16 more decks slots!
Too confusing for new players
Ability to eliminate one class from matchmaking in ranked mode would help to prevent the dominance of one class as in the case of quest rogue or jade Druid.Eh, in the end that wouldn't produce that much of an effect. Sure, you may eliminate Raza Priests but then you just face either Control Warlock or Jade Druid. You would always face the same 2-4 decks that are the most consistent at the top of the meta ladder.
"A card back to the shop that costs 10,000 gold. The entire point of it is to showcase your wealth. Level it up by spending another 10k gold."
I like it! If anyone has that cardback, it easily identifies them as a complete fucking dipshit shill. A dipshill!
I wish they delete ob64 #deleteob64
demon hunter, monk death knight, and craftiable card backs!!
Should have an option to squelch when spectating. Watching people spamming emote while you can’t do anything is very annoying.
I've thought about that too. Players still shouldn't have to deal with douchy player behavior even if they aren't the ones playing that game.