Mike Donais and Dean Ayala on the Arena Changes, Priest, Yogg-Saron, Tournaments
IGN's Cam Shea had a chance to chat with Hearthstone's Dean Ayala and Mike Donais. We've recapped the interview below!
Quote from Dean Ayala & Mike DonaisShaman
- Mike believes the meta is in a good spot but it's a little more Shaman heavy than he would like.
- Shamans are currently around 20% of the ladder.
Druid
- Dean was surprised to see Malygos Druid pop up again thanks to the consistency brought by Arcane Giant.
Priest
- They've both been playing different Resurrect Priest lists, with Mike having the better one. (Check bottom of post)
- Mike admits he was lucky winning with his Priest list.
- Reno Priest has been spotted at high MMR in a couple of the regions.
- They should make sure to get good Priest cards into the next set.
- It is understood that people love Priest trickiness. They hope to incorporate more tricky cards in the future.
Hunter / Call of the Wild
- Not certain if Call of the Wild needs to be changed. Community feedback is being read.
- In some cases, it is okay to have strong class cards.
- It's tough to agree that Call of the Wild is an issue when those decks are on par with the good decks of other classes.
Yogg-Saron
- Yogg is on the developer radar.
- They want to find a solution that makes everyone happy.
- It's too early to talk about when they'll have a solution to the problem.
Tournaments
- BatStone was great to see because it explored a new format in how you could play Hearthstone. More events like this can lead to the discovery of new long-term formats.
- They don't have any tournament client stuff in development right now, but they've been talking about it for years.
Arena Balance
- It's too early to tell what impact the arena balance changes have made.
- There's two things they want to measure:
- How the winrates have changed.
- How often each class is being picked.
- Short term goal is to get all the classes closer together in pick rate.
- Long term goal is to be able to have players pick the class they love the most because they're all so even.
- They wanted to target class specific cards in the arena changes because removing neutrals doesn't really change anything for specific classes.
- They didn't want to remove weaker cards that gave players awesome moments such as Eye for an Eye.
- Bouncing Blades was questioned and ultimately, they think it's more consistently awesome in constructed.
- They didn't want to remove cards which felt core to what each class was. Example cited being Fireball and Flamestrike on Mages.
- Windspeaker was removed over Windfury because there are less spells in Arena as time goes by. The two cards were statistically very close.
- Succubus was statistically a very, very poor card.
- It is believed that the best method of long term arena balance is through changing the drop percentage of cards. They'll talk more about it when they figure it out.
Mike Donais' Resurrect Priest
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just 20% shamans? that cant be true.
Yeah, if their goal is for classes to be played equally, that's nearly twice as high as it should be.
Agreed, over this season and last season I've had 10% Shaman opponents, I can't believe it could be as high as 20% played.
I've faced more Druids, Hunters, Warriors and especially Mages. Mages have been 20% of my opponents over that time (27 out of 134 games).
So your sample size of 134 games matches all of the data compiled by the developers? Jesus christ, you're dense.
For some perspective, undertaker hunter, the most infamously broken aggro deck in the history of hearthstone, after 6 months of being tier 1 and pretty much beating everything with above 50% winrates except mirror, was 25% of the meta.
So with shaman not nearly being that broken (Trust me, find some game play.) being at 20% of the meta is an incredibly high number, and the only explanation i can give for it not being higher than undertaker hunter is that undertaker hunter was very cheap to craft and an obvious pick for new players.
Mike Donais is clueless. This is the man who when asked about the sorry state of the Priest class responded, "Is there a problem?"
Can anyone please explain this "They've both been playing different Resurrect Priest lists, with Mike having the better one." What does it mean? They just played a couple of times and it deserves to be mentioned. Or they played vs each other? Or how they realized one's list is better?
How is their Resurrect Priest vs AggroMidSham / DragWar / any Huntard? How it proves good spot of meta?
"We played against each other a few times. Both of us used Resurrection Priest, and one of us won every time, so... is there a problem?" (Kappa)
And just as a side note from the last blizzard post in comparison to this one:
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Shaman
Yes it's true, you are right on that. However my argument is that is there different type of shaman archetypes, and does is matter? They all play the exact same way and only differ in a few cards from one another. 90% of the cards in a shaman list is the exact same and they all play out the exact same way. If you see rarely maybe a few fire elementals here and there tha is like a heavily committed "midrange" deck these days, there i say; a lategame tech. There is basicly no difference in their "archetypes" which is one of the core problems. It almost dosen't matter what shaman cards you use it stil ldoes the same thing effectively.
I have to disagree, I have 3 shaman decks (all wild),
1:Midrange-Control featuring Unbound Elemental, Tunnel Trogg, 6 4 cost minions (Dunemaul Shaman, Fireguard Destroyer, Flamewreathed Faceless), Earth Elemental and Fire Elemental and many removal/burst spells.
2: Zoo Evolve Shaman with the guy thats costs 1 less every turn in hand, Thing from Below, Bilefin Tidehunter and evolve related cards.
3: Spell-Damage shaman with spell-damage minions (Bloodmage Thalnos, Azure Drake, Malygos and a few more, and lots of burst.
All of them play very different.
Translation from Blizzard to english:
"WE will tell YOU how this game is fun and not the other way around. After all you ar all the ones playing it, enjoying it (yeah, right...) and paying for it. You dont know what fun is and how you want it!"
It makes me remember that infamous Blizzard quote:
I think if at the end of a turn u used Call of the Wild Huffer would automaticlly die, it will balance the card in a good enough way, just so you do have the burst but not farther
oh really? who could guess that more decent cards would push domanating deck even further?
powercreep is fine if the card is a class card, thats why we didnt nerf dr 7 for wild and yogg is still playable. also we think its fine to end the game turn 4 and stronger cards without an increased healthpool is good gamedesign.
we wont nerf the new set because you need some cards atm to win and that is how we make money and the playerbase is still big enough. we try to nerf old cards or if we release a new expention so we wont loose money. sometimes we will forget to do so but wild isnt our problem atm, normal mode and arena are worse so we dont have time to nerf boom or nzoth+old cards anytime soon.
they did something we should have done years ago and the games were more enjoyabel that the current meta. we fucked up
so we get a broken "tricky" cards next expantion? as tricky as the current meta? so many get random cards effects so that you cant predict what the enemy is playing? cooooooool....not
edit: [half serious sacasmn off]
Why did his post got downvoted so badly? it's quite humoristic.. oh wait internet 2016 people get offended by everything.
thanks dude, true words :D so do i have to downvote your comment too? :S