Mike Donais Talks Frozen Throne - Undead Tribe, Build-a-Beast Spell, Hero Powers
Mike Minotti of GamesBeat got a chance to speak with Mike Donais about the new expansion and Donais had quite a few interesting things to say. Here's everything that we learned!
Frozen Throne
- The idea for a Lich King expansion has been one the team has had before launch.
- They're not excited about trying to make brand new classes due to it clashing with their philosophy behind class identity.
- Warlocks are getting some cool cards but they have to be careful.
- Warlocks have been strong since the start of Hearthstone with the exception of Un'Goro so they may need to slowly give them more power over multiple sets.
- The only characters reappearing as new cards during the set are the hero cards. This won't be an Old Gods corrupted-minions-fest.
Undead Tribe
- Mike Donais could see an Undead tribe added in the future. "I don’t think there are too many disadvantages".
- One reason why we didn't see an Undead tribe for Frozen Throne was due to them just adding a new tribe in Un'Goro.
Hero Powers
- The Build-A-Beast Hero Power was originally a spell in the set.
- The new Death Knight Hero Powers were what they spent the most time on. Rexxar saw "maybe 10" iterations.
- An early Hero Power from DK Rexxar was 5/5 beasts summoned for each beast that died that turn.
- Another version of the Hero Power saw an N'Zoth-style effect where beasts which died that game were re-summoned.
Learn More About Knights of the Frozen Throne
Looking to learn more about Hearthstone's sixth expansion? Visit our adventure guide for Knights of the Frozen Throne!
dude, class identity is a thing, warrior wants to hit things with weapons and take hits, basically going tit for tat, pirate plays into that least of any deck for warrior but it also has the most reliance on neutral minions and a tribal synergy, so it uses less warrior identity.
Mage has always been a spell onslaught. Even Mech mage won off of big spell burst. mage also has clever ways of surviving, it tries to avoid taking damage by redirecting or stopping damage from various sources.
warlock sacrifices resources other than mana for advantages. It also has demons.
rogue is one of the hardest to define its identity but that is because it had op base cards and blizzard struggled for forever to balance the class and have never wanted to focus on one thing with rogue, rogue is generally tricksy though. Conditional power is a common theme and that is why it is so hit or miss. But rogue has always been at least viable competetively if not on ladder.
hunter's identity is aggression, board fill and face damage, and hunter has been on of the most powerful classes quite consistently, It has been a top class at some point in pretty much every expansion, seriously why are you angry about hunter being bad when for years everyone considered hunter to be THE problem.
Priest is heal and buffs and stealing stuff, basically just a class designed to win control matchups. if you wanted to list a class that is niche and struggles priest is it, priest sucked until gvg, and then sucked after whispers until gadget where it was almost not terrible but not good enough for the meta, and now it has 2 decks that are a little slow for the meta but can do well. Priest was only truly good in two expansions.
shaman is mostly board reliant stuff and burst damage, they also have powerful boardclears, which often rely upon your own board for various reasons.
druid is buffs and big stuff and flexibility. they are weak on boardclears because they are expected to survive by taking and keeping board.
paladin is buffs divine shield, heal and a few little spurts of a bunch of other stuff. Paladin is the best candidate for doing everything of any class and they are not even close.
In conclusion, classes have identities, some have been difficult to balance and so the class identity has been messed with a bunch others have stayed constant for a long time. But class identity is there and is a thing they care about, I feel like some of their decisions as to what makes a good class identity are wrong, but overall I agree with their philosophy on this matter.
Obviously classes have identity (or did you just rule out ALL class cards & hero powers?), the only thing we can discuss is, whether the identity aspect serves enough to actually give each class a unique feel and if Blizzard has done enough to ensure that. IMO ungoro has done quite a lot for that. Of course they need to keep working on that to ensure identity.
I think he means that some classes like warrior or warlock ,etc can be viable with all playstyles (aggro,mid,control) and others like hunter and rogue have only one playstyle from the begining of the game:)
19 biers too many.
Class Identity and deck archetypes are two completely different things. Control Mage and Control Warrior are the same archetype, but warrior utilizes weapons for value and armor for sustain while mage utilizes spells for value and Ice Block for sustain, which shows the difference in the class identities.
They could've added the undead tag but no interaction but that would be really pointless.
so let's wait till they come up with good undead synergy ideas before they add the tribe to the game
what's really good about it is that many MANY cards that might not see any play atm are undead and will get new synergies.
Well, for me it's weird they didn't add any Undead synergies in Naxxramas.
Feel free to offer a solution for Chillmaw.
Chillmaw doesn't even see play.
that is not the problem, also it would if dragons were a thing still.
the thing i really dont understand about giving warlock more good cards, or ~trying~ to make them more viable is that if they fuck it up... just nerf it straight away it's a fucking DIGITAL card game smh
Releasing something in an overpowered state just because they can nerf it is a horrible Business planespecailly for a collectable card game because even if you get refunds on the nerfed Cards you still had to get a lot of other cards which you can not refund. Things like that can be an exit point for more casual players.
Also nerfing can not be done as fast you think. First you Need to wait until the meta has somewhat settled because maybe it is not overpowered when the other decks are more fine tuned. Nerfing can also only be done wiith an update and in order to do an update for the mobile versions the update Needs to be approved by apple and Google Play which can take multiple weeks or a month. In addition to that they only have a few timeframes in which they can do the update without completly screwing over the competetive scene.
"Those who cannot remember the past..."
Warrior Dragon decks were a thing? You mean that Taunt Dragon Warrior during TGT? That deck only lasted a week or two in the meta. Then it got beaten by "WHO AM I?" and "EVERYONE! GET IN HERE!".
EDIT: Bleh, wrong deck.
Dragon Paladin was viable since BRM launch. Not overpowered (the thing you complained about in your first point) but perfectly viable.
Besides, you can talk about Blizzard like they're incompetent children, but look at The Caverns Below for example: Everyone thought it would be shit, yet it was the best card in the set. Maybe card balancing isn't that easy after all?
But hey, we all know that sarcastic complaining is the only thing here that brings in those sweet upvotes.
I'm not saying that Blizzard is particularly incompetent at balancing 2 tribes. I'm saying that it would be difficult for ANYONE to do so. I know its hard to support a Tribe without making it too OP, but I'm just making a point that it would worsen this problem if they tried to do 2 new Tribes consecutively.
I'm sorry if I chose my diction poorly.