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!
there removing some op cards and there removing all the bad cards so they have a chance to get better cards
Agreed. Magni is still way higher tier than Garrosh, but there's not much they can do to fix that.
purify os already removed from arena. flamestrike is absolutly fine/
I totally understand how you feel, but when I consider my personal experience against Prince Malchezaar in arena he's not as OP as I had expected....it seems to often fill my opponents deck with like 4 extra shitty cards and 1 really good one.
I've actually won 5 out of the 6 games I've faced that card in arena, and I had mediocre/good decks with 0 legendaries in all those matches....none of the decks were like really good or insane....just mediocre or slightly above average.
They probably wouldn't wanna make changes to Firelands Portal right now since it's such a new card...yeah yeah they did with Purify, but that was Purify....it was removing a useless card which is way more fun-increasing than removing a strong card to even out the matches.
"Mage and Rogue have bounced back and forth as the top two most played [...] Paladin has been in a tier by itself below [...] while the last five classes have done some shifting around in a tier below these three "
Wait, 2 + 1 + 5 = 8... isn't there 9 classes ?
Ah ok my bad, that's priest...
That was a great catch. this just made my night xD
What is this "Priest" you guys keep talking about?
Blizzard updated the post already, alas HearthPwn is too lazy to do it I suppose.
Good changes. Better than nothing.
1. Warrior will lose 6 basic and common cards. And will have almost no bad common class cards remaining (except whirlwind, warbot and ironforge portal that aren't terrible). Will surely move to top considering fool's bane increased offering rates.
2. Hunter will lose 5 these cards (and two of them - cobra shot and snipe are ok).
3. Priest will lose only 3 of these with remaining CoH, Flash heal, Silence and Twilight whelp.
Blizzard hate priests.
Priest got much much better in arena with this change...?
The point of removing the weaker cards like Soul of the Forest is to create a more stable experience for those classes. How isn't all this self explanatory?
Some classes are weaker, oh no! Warriors, Druids, etc. etc. These cards have lost some weak cards so you're more likely to get their strong ones.
Some classes, well, Paladins, are juuuuuust right, and have been left alone.
They will probably implement these changes alongside the patch where they will add the Legion card back so it must be before 30th of Sept.
Problem is: Blizzard doesn't give rarity for the power of the card.
Rare = Powerful common
Epic = Not powerful with weird effect
Legendary = Powerful with weird effect
So basically a rare is better than an epic. If we begin to change rarity of some cards for their power, we will have to change all rare and epic rarity and it will be the mess.
"failing so hard"
Ok? On what basis? Continually massive revenue?
Call of the Wild : ye blizzard I'm not powerful at all
Sometimes there is exceptions but it's rare muahah
and what do you do about shitty commons? make them epic?
removing them is not a bad solution. Plus Ben Brode said this is temporary, while they're working on a better solution.
No, it's usually a case of, the more unusual and unique the effect is, the higher that card's rarity it. Just look at how in Whispers minions with vanilla statlines and no car text were common, whereas the Old Gods, which had new effects, were Legendary.
No changes paladin? Really?