There are Nine Tri-Class Cards in Mean Streets of Gadgetzan
We got a chance to sit down with Hearthstone Game Designer, Dean Ayala, at BlizzCon this year to talk about the new expansion and get answers to questions the community had about the game. Check out the recap of our interview below!
You can find Dean "Iksar" Ayala over on Twitter, @IksarHS.
Quote from Dean Ayala
- There are nine tri-class cards in the set. Each faction has three.
- The way they decided which class would belong to each faction was done by theme before balance.
- Mechanics were built on the tri-class cards to fit the three classes in each faction.
- A big goal of each new expansion is to play less off existing cards and build new things.
- The no duplicate cards synergy is something that hasn't been explored deeply which is why Kazakus has been added into the mix.
- No duplicates is super interesting, but it's dangerous to make too many of those kinds of cards. The cards that use this mechanic are very powerful and too many could be too strong.
- Kazakus isn't very easy to understand at face value, but is still a very exciting card and makes for interesting gameplay.
- They don't want to add too many cards like Kazakus.
- Dean wasn't sure if there would be any quests at the start of the expansion release that would give out free card packs like Old Gods.
- The freebies in Old Gods were more there to promote Standard, and C'Thun was given to players to make sure if you got C'Thun's worshippers, you could actually play them.
- There will be more pirates in the set.
- There was a Warrior pirate deck they were playtesting.
- They aren't jumping back into Mechs like they did with Goblins vs Gnomes. They're already had a Mech heavy expansion in the past.
- No pre-order card back this time around due to BlizzCon craziness (all the preparation they were doing to get things ready for it).
- Designers do look at community created cards and sometimes fetch inspiration from them.
- There will be some existing World of Warcraft characters appearing in the expansion, but it's mostly brand new characters. We will see Noggenfogger in the expansion.
- More existing lore characters from Warcraft will be done at some point, it's just also fun to create new characters.
- Part of LifeCoach's trip to Blizzard was to play test the new expansion and provide feedback on the current and future expansions. They like getting direct feedback like that from some of their most engaged players.
- Kazakus took a lot of iterations to get right. They had to figure out exactly how it would work and what all the different spells would be. Communicating to players how it worked was the most difficult; it had to be understandable.
- Patches was another card that took a lot of time to get right. Literal years of play testing to make sure it was right.
- They've discussed AI improvements. One of the gameplay engineers is interested in rebuilding the system but it's not something being works on right now.
- Improved AI could be a great teaching tool.
- Molten Giant was nerfed mainly because Handlock was using too many evergreen cards. They wanted to see that change up.
- It is hard to balance cards which could cost 0 mana, but sometimes you have to take the risk and it can make for some very exciting cards.
- Freeze mage is around 3% of the population.
- It's still important for players to feel like the card they open from a pack will continue to exist in that form.
- Waiting to see how things evolve when something powerful appears is important as it lets players figure out how to counter it on their own.
- Getting rid of things that are good just because they're good isn't a fun experience for players.
- It's painful sometimes to read threads where people think the team isn't listening to feedback; they are always looking at feedback.
Our BlizzCon 2016 Coverage
Looking for more coverage from BlizzCon 2016? You can find all our BlizzCon 2016 articles right here.
these triclass cards makes me feel like we wont be getting a new class to play, at least until they rotate out
They have said several times over the years that adding a new class to the game would be very hard, and they have no plans to do so. This isn't in the same league as things like, "We think that's a good idea, but no one is working on it right now" - it's as close to a "we'll never do that" as they'll ever say.
An additional class or two is a way down the line (if ever) kind of thing. It could easily break the game as classes and class identities have been in testing against each other for a good couple years now. Balancing it without it being a duplicate of another class would take a year or so of play testing. That's not even getting into the disadvantage it would have in wild (and or designing old set cards for the class, which would be a waste of resources).
In short, don't hold your breath.
So we're only getting nine multi-class cards even though that was a main selling point. God dammit Blizzard.
What's the point of introducing a brand new gameplay mechanic if you're not going to expand on it?
On the upside, YAY MORE PIRATES!
What would be the point in saturating a set in a new mechanic and potentially ruining the whole set? If the multi-class cards all end up being terrible, it doesn't affect the set as a whole this way. Common sense.
pirates mean more aggro and tempo decks - please no
You have to respond to every comment where they bash Blizzard, so you could protect your papa Blizzard, am i right?
Fucking fan boys.
We had expansion with inspire mechanic and shit loads of inspire card, on 9 tri class cards is stupid, there should be a lot more...
There's a difference between saturation and Expanding. Here's two examples of each:
Inspire: Inspire cards were a new mechanic that didn't work out in the end, yet the whole expansion was filled with them. Virtually every card in the set was an Inspire card, and therefore TGT was viewed as the worst expansion.
C'Thun: C'thun was a major selling point for Old Gods, one that was good and still used to this day. The premise was building your deck around one card. We only had a few dozen C'thun related cards, but we didn't need them, for they were designed to be used together with other cards to build your C'thun deck.
With the multi-class cards, only nine, when three of them have been revealed to be Discover cards is very limiting on the concept, and chances are most of them won't see play outside of Arena.
So, they don't plan on making a lot of mechs once again. I'm sad to hear that, because the same could be said about Dragons in the future.
Once BRM rotates out, a lot of cool minions are going away and the synergy is gonna be pretty weaker.
Much like what happened to the Mech Gorilla they released on LoE.
>Freeze mage is around 3% of the population.
Hahahaha. No.
Or it's just me too never lucky to win 97% chance to not get a freeze mage match up, uh, every single ranked match?
What in the holy fuck are you talking about? Freeze Mage is at the bottom of tier 2, and I'm 100% sure Blizzard has more data than you do.
Triclass suckkks man more less cards in the expansion
Well, good work then, destroying the complete archetype changed it up a lot.
Translated to English: "Balancing cards is hard, so we'll make a lot of ridiculous cards and decks and leave the players to figure out how to beat them"
i have no idea how team 5 can be so shortsighted that they think that new cards just get played bc they are fine and not broken at all. oh wait they did and we got standard. did it change anything? nope because 1 year of cards still remained in the pool and all the classic cards remained the same.
what we really need is a change in the basics of hearthstone. why not increase the hp by 10 or buff all the aoe? we got on average +1/+1 worth of stats on every minion compared to vanilla but we remained at 30 hp. but hey they are amercan and exponential growth without changeing your lifestyle works great... for 2 years... then it blows up
People triggered over a cardback lol
Fucking this.
Seriously, the dev team needs to be fired because it's quite clear the community can design better shit then they ever could.
Come off it. Read what you quoted again, emphasis on "just." If you want to complain about something, pick one of the many things it's legitimate to complain about, not the obvious statement of fact which is that removing something JUST because it's good isn't a great idea.