Your Questions for Hearthstone Game Designer Dean Ayala!
Blizzard has generously invited Hearthpwn to fly to the Bahamas this weekend for the upcoming Hearthstone Winter Championship! While at the event, we'll have a chance to sit down with Hearthstone Game Designer Dean "Iksar" Ayala to ask him some questions about Hearthstone's upcoming expansion, Journey to Un'Goro!
Do you have a great question on your mind? Write it down in the comments below and we might include it when we compile the best ones later this week!
Dean is a Game Designer on the final design team, focusing on testing and balancing new cards, making sure they're fun, trying to predict what decks they will go in and what the meta will look like. He also plays a lot of Arena! He's also very active on Twitter and Reddit, often responding to questions from the community.
Hello Dean
I was wondering the following:
when designing an expansion do you ever get inspiration from the community that has created fan cards or is the creation of cards for hearthstone only based on what the design team thinks would be best?;
MTG for example has You Make a card which is a event where the audience is given the opportunity to design a card through multiple votes and submissions of ideas, I know they are two different games but but rely on the same genre.
If you don't look at the community and see what they have done based on their creations is their a reason why?
yes, I know my name is edgy haHAA
Yeah I am more curious about why they choose a specific route with cards and how they come up with it.
Will you ever introduce a theme that goes beyond the "classic wow expansion" like Northrend, Shattered World or all the other places?
Also, is there any possibility that you will introduce hero characters as true legendary cards (I'm not counting Medivh because one medivh is corrupted by demons and the other one is the true guardian)?
Since quests will be adding a bunch of interesting token cards, can we have tokens as a separete tab in our card collection?
Hi Dean Ayala, would you consider a change to the power level limit of Jade Golems in a game? I also believe that Jade Idol is terribly undercosted and too synergistic with some of the existing cards i.e. Gadgetzan Auctioneer and Fandral Staghelm, resulting in a complete extinction of certain playstyles due to infinite value. I am really looking forward to your views on the aforementioned matters and how soon some of these tweaks can be made in Blizzard's infamous "Patch days"
Totally agree. I am very sceptic about all the new "cool control cards" because of control IS DEAD NOW. If your deck can't win on turn 10, you probably should auto-concede against Jade Druid to save your time.
Do you have any plans to buff bad cards? For example Priestess of Elune, whose heal effect is way too weak considering her cost and stats.
Replays. Do you plan them and if not, why? Same for the match history.
I'm gonna guess not soon.
Both have UI issues as a major concern (one of the appeals of hearthstone is a sleek, simple design focused on gameplay) and replays, more so than match history, represent some significant server usage (although this could be solved with the user's device storing the data)
I think the easiest way for blizz to introduce such "support" elements to the game would be tocreate a companion app, replete with decklists, import/export, stats etc.
Can you make Priest a tier 1 deck and stop giving Shaman OP cards? Thank you
why don't you rotate cards like loatheb into the classic set now that we're done 6 cards from classic? not a rage post or anything but i think there should be replacements for the cards we've lost to hall of fame.
Question: How did You come to idea of infinity value cards (Jade Idol, Malorne)? Do you consider this cards are healthy to game and meta?(There is a reason, that we have only 30 cards, and infinity value smashes this restriction) Why we have only 30 cards? What is a story about this number.
agree, at least malorne can be silenced or entombed, but jade idol is just insane
They stated before gadgetzan launched that the tri-class cards will be a one expansion only thing. Don't know Quest cards though.
are there any base set cards you're looking to change in the near future as in buffing king krush or nerfing/changing/adding cards to push desired archetypes in the base set.
Can you clearly define each classes archetype so I can stop trying to make control rogue work.
This question has been answered before. Cards are pulled at random from your deck.
I thought your deck is in fixed order and is re-shuffled every time a card goes into it (mulligan phase, or Malorne for example) and you always draw the topmost card.
https://twitter.com/bdbrode/status/557442435798671360
https://twitter.com/bdbrode/status/689923112792526848
https://twitter.com/bdbrode/status/691730819098869760
https://twitter.com/bdbrode/status/689197114329440256
What difference would it make anyway?