Mike Donais and Peter Whalen Talk About Designing Un'Goro Legendaries
IGN's Cam Shea had a chance to sit down with Mike Donais and Peter Whalen and they talked about how the designs came to be for some of Un'Goro's legendary cards.
Lyra the Sunshard
- Lyra the Sunshard came into being when they decided Priest needed to be "one of those trickier classes".
- Lyra was a 4 mana 3/5 initially, but proved to be too good in play-testing.
Sherazin, Corpse Flower
- Sherazin, Corpse Flower changed quite a bit during dev. Lower cost at one point, another time more stats, different numbers of cards required for the effect.
- At one point Sherazin required 3 cards and it was increased to 4 so you might have to build a deck around him.
- They're happy Sherazin ended up working out as playable and not just crazy.
- They didn't know how it would actually work from a UI perspective. One idea was to have the seed sit near your Hero Power.
Elise the Trailblazer
- Elise the Trailblazer had a lot of design iteration. One version of her saw "Discover a Quest".
- Once the Quest was discovered, you'd also get a package of helper cards in your deck to help complete it.
- The effect made Quests overall feel "less cool".
- Elise's Un'Goro Pack was originally destined for the Priest Quest Reward but it didn't feel good enough.
Hemet, Jungle Hunter
- Hemet, Jungle Hunter required a lot of play-testing in many different decks to see if he was reasonable.
- Hemet's effect surprisingly never changed, 3 was the perfect number.
Curious Glimmerroot
- Curious Glimmerroot was originally an idea for a Rogue legendary but ended up going to Priest as an epic. "It made more sense in Priest".
Shadow Visions
- Shadow Visions was originally 1 mana.
Priest Quests
- At one point, the Priest Quest was 'Start your turn with no cards in your hand. Reward: Un'Goro Pack'.
- Later on, they changed the reward to draw 5 cards instead, but that wasn't cool enough for quests.
Excited Lookout
- One of the removed cards from the expansion was Excited Lookout.
- It was a 2 mana card which shuffled the highest mana card in your hand back into your deck in order to draw a card.
- The card never made it to live because they were worried about the interaction between Hemet, Holy Wrath, and Molten Giant.
- It was removed around week 2 in the final design process.
It's not about meta or play, it's about being oppressive to play against.
worgen combo was barely a tier 2 deck barely represented in the meta and yet Chargegot the nerf bat.
Also patron warrior was the same case when he got nerfed had like a 45% win rate on lower tiers.
Team 5's statements on the issue don't bear this out. Patron Warrior was nerfed because it was EVERYWHERE all the time. It didn't have a great win-rate for lower-skill players, but because of its prevalence in the meta, it was nerfed.
Some have made the argument that the only thing keeping Quest Rogue in check is the fact that the rest of the meta right now has grown purely to answer Quest Rogue. It could very well be correct. But as long as the *players* are keeping the Quest Rogue population down, Blizzard will not intervene, because they hate nerfing cards. If things get a bit worse, you're more likely to see answers appear in the next card set. If they get MUCH worse, then the nerf hammer may show up.
so now someone tell me what they were smoking when they thought Lakkari Sacrifice would end up playable after any sort of testing?
I can only conclude that someone on the Hearthstone team thinks discard mechanic in general is fine and refuses to accept any criticism to the contrary.
And so we continue to get crap like that.
For all of you that been complaining about game balance ... just take a moment to picture what HS would be like without any play-test-phase ^^
Because the pro players know the same shit at the beginning? Just try to remember the Krip's, Trump's, Amaz's and others prediction of 5* and 1* cards even first week of release... The point is that the real meta direction can't be discovered by several people separated in their own matrix, the real meta is defined by a mass of people. Btw, is it quest rogue really the problem? I don't think so... It's barely in tier2.
Definitely the best crop of legendaries weve had in an expansion. Good stuff!
Yep. I haven't seen a quest that wasn't Rogue or Warrior in weeks. Great design!
Umbra will likely be useful next expansion. Im pretty sure some decent deathrattles will be introduced to fill the void left by sylvanas and to buff a little the quest for priest. Quests are interesting now, but they have potential to surprise all this standard cycle with the cards that will be introduced to support their archetypes