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!
After months of feedback for Arena what does Hearthstone team got to show for it? Absolutely nothing... They did literally nothing.....There going to remove cards.....That's the worst duct tape zero effort job I've ever seen. There better be some very impressive showing or something at Blizzcon because honestly this shit is plain embarrassing and bad, there is so many things in need of improvement i hope the guy that got over +300 rating for his idea on the main forum becomes a reality that the card reward structure needs a completely new system that makes sure the new card is one the player doesn't have yet. I know this sting all to well, 19/20 gold cards i get are duplicates the current arena rewards is pure trash.
Definetely a step in the right direction. #makearenabalancedagain
Pretty cool.
Draftin 35-40 cards wouldn't change much in your decision making while picking 1 out of 3 cards...so that change would have a minimal effect.
I like the idea of letting every deck start out with a legendary pick though...not just random that would be too...random :P
Prince Malchezaar should be removed too... it feels so bad on receiving end.
But its a neutral card, it does not affect class balance.
Be interesting 2 see how these changes will affect Arena and what else will be changed...
I am glad they are seeing this problem in arena, however the fact that they cut some cards that could see play, or were seen as too powerful is stupid. Mage just got 3 picks off his chart, druid got 1 off which could change game and nothing at paladin? You must be bonkers if you think there no underperforming cards there
That was meant to be a bad joke, right? Everyone who plays Arena a lot know that Paladin and Mage are the best classes in Arena, with a higher win rate unequaled by the other seven classes. This sways the scales more towards Paladin, which has all of their stat changing effects, minion generating, and strong board presences untouched.
Want to get 12 wins in Arena? Pray you get Paladin.
You don't play a lot of arena if you think Paladin is better than Rogue.
OSfrog
It is a good decision, i can see that this makes arena more balanced overall.
Horrible idea to remove cards from Arena. I thought it was against the whole premise of Arena not to have the C'Thun cards be draftable but I could at least understand that to a degree due to just how heavy the synergy was designed into the cards. Removing cards from the Arena damages the "soul" of what Arena is supposed to be. This should be fixed with card rarity. I hope this is a temporary fix to deal with the current state of Arena and that the can figure out another way to bring the entire card pool back into the Arena game.
TBH, this is even worse game decision than introduction of standart. It show how awfull game design was and will be in hearthstone. And laziness of not fixing cards will prevail. Basically this change should be name - "we are too lazy to fix stuff, it takes time and thinking. from now on any problem will be just removed from the game".
While I don't agree with some choices (axe flinger and bouncing blades come to mind), I'm quite happy with the decision. I do however think that some rarities also need to be reworked (like making fireball or flamestrike atleast rare). Still, nice to see that blizz are trying to improve the experience for the playerbase. I'm pretty sure that balancing a card game is one of the hardest things to do, so we just need to give them some more time.