Everything Hearthstone Players Need to Know from BlizzCon 2017
BlizzCon is over, con-plague has begun spreading and lots of people have started heading home. It's time for us to go over everything that took place on this overwhelming weekend of everything Blizzard. Towards the end of this article you'll also be able to find news that came out of other Blizzard titles including links to coverage on some of our sister sites.
Now, shall we begin?
A special thank you goes out to everyone on the team who helped with this year's BlizzCon coverage.
New Expansion Announced - Kobolds and Catacombs
The Hearthstone team as usual announced an expansion at this year's BlizzCon. The expansion name is Kobolds and Catacombs, here's what it's going to contain.
- The expansion releases in December. No specific date yet.
- Card reveals start up again on November 20th.
- 135 new cards are being added.
- All classes are receiving a Legendary Weapon and a Legendary Minion.
- Recruit is a new keyword which summons minions from your deck based on criteria.
- Dungeon Runs are a new type of PvE content, replacing an adventure for this expansion.
- Learn more them it in our guide and our hands on with dungeon runs post.
Expansion Freebies
Free stuff is the best! There are a few free things available, pay careful attention.
- Starting this week, every player will receive a copy of Marin the Fox once the game patches.
- BlizzCon virtual ticket and live attendees will receive a Golden version of Marin the Fox as well.
- Dungeon Runs are entirely free. They also don't require you to have any cards in your collection.
- Logging in when the expansion hits in December will give you a free Legendary weapon.
- A card back is available to players who successfully complete dungeon runs with each class.
New Cards
So far, 14 new cards have been revealed from the set. Check them out in our dedicated visual guide to the set or below.
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Dungeon Runs
We got to play the Dungeon Run feature at BlizzCon and harvested information from it. Check out our Hands on with the Kobolds and Catacombs New Dungeon Run Feature post.
- A new type of PvE content which has the most replayability of any single player content they've added.
- There are 48 encounters in total, which a huge assortment of cards created just for the game mode.
- Each time you defeat a boss, you get to add new cards to your deck and sometimes special powerful cards or passives.
Panel Recap: Hearthstone Live Q&A
Members of the Hearthstone Team were on hand to answer questions from the audience and to showcase new arena cards that are going to be added to the game in an upcoming patch.
- We're getting 9 new arena-only cards added to the game. They won't be in forever, just a limited time.
- Picking a random card back each time you play is something they need to hook up the code for - the art is done!
- More player stats is something they want to do and recently they've been building infrastructure for it.
- They may rotate more cards to the Hall of Fame during the next Standard year. No announcements yet.
HearthPwn Exclusive: Developer Interview with Mike Donais and Jomaro Kindred
We had a chance to sit down with Mike Donais and Jomaro Kindred of the Hearthstone team to talk about the new expansion.
- If Dungeon Runs go over well they could see themselves doing something similar again or building upon it.
- The cool part about the Recruit mechanic is that it can create new rules for deckbuilding.
- Doing two class legendaries each expansion isn't set in stone. It's just worked out that way.
- Giving classes multiple legendaries is nicer because a lot of neutral legendaries waters down class identities.
- Mike Donais could see them doing Hero cards (like DKs) again in the future. They went over well with the community.
Community Interview: Ben Brode
We were invited to a community interview with other sites to speak with Ben Brode about the new expansion and Hearthstone in general.
- None of the encounters in Dungeon Runs are from any previously released content.
- Ben doesn't think Standard alone is enough for Arena and they're trying lots of things internally.
- There will be no balance changes with the launch of Kobolds and Catacombs.
- They are currently working on some things for Wild that may help increase the number of players playing it.
- More things will be added for Fireside Gatherings to make them more exciting to go to.
Panel Recap: Blizzard Social - What's Next?
We've got a recap of a non-Hearthstone panel from this year's BlizzCon which talked about social features on Battle.net.
- Battle.net: 1000+ servers, 4 data centers. 4.3 Petabytes of Data per day. 35 million messages per day.
- The team is looking at global regions, but are facing difficulties in doing so.
- Adding a streamer mode for in-game is something being looked into.
- They are considering allowing players to earn new avatars by achievements in-game. No plans for user-uploaded avatars.
More From Blizzard at BlizzCon
Our friends at MMO-Champion have an excellent recap of everything that took place at this year's con. Here's some highlights!
- A new World of Warcraft expansion was announced - Battle for Azeroth.
- World of Warcraft will be getting Classic servers at some point in the future.
- Overwatch is getting a new support hero, Moira, and a new map, Blizzard World.
- A new cinematic was revealed for Overwatch featuring Reinhardt.
- More skins are being added to the base loot boxes in Overwatch.
- Heroes of the Storm is seeing the addition of Alexstrasza and Hanzo.
Nice!
That Blizzcon was awesome!
Well if any of this weapons will be in Tier 1 decks that is...
Most likely. This is why I don't like the idea of giving every class a weapon, it punishes other weapons that were popular because now it is expected that many more of the match-ups in the new expansion might have a weapon (depending on the future meta).
This is also why I don't like the idea that some have proposed about giving every class a secret. It punishes secret-based gameplay because then it would become much more likely to be expected & thus teched against.
Why can't they just show us card per day or maybe 2?
They always make 2-3 weeks break between first announcement and reveals... Also some of them say that they still do some balance tweaks up until those reveals, so they actually don't have the finalized cards yet I suppose...
It would cost hype apparently according to them. The reason they do it is so they could maximize suckers hyped on the expansion by revealing all the cards when the expansion is about to come out.
2weeks of card-reveal-silence? :((
They both are rotating soon anyways. They are rotating in March,
Looks at first reply comment...looks at what they did with Wickerflame Burnbristle
(changes to Lifesteal)...looks back at first reply comment.
YEAH, and steer up a riot for players that actually payed/pre ordered packs for the decks that are in wild...
You could have just as easly stated hey Blizzard WOW is running LEGION why not make the old expensions free
that is way to greedy...but they could cut the price a bit :)
I don't wanna be that guy but in World of Warcraft all the expansions except Legion were rolled into the base game, so you only need to buy the base game (for the same price as it was before) and Legion is the only expansion you buy separately. They did this like a year ago? I don't remember.
Yep!
Which makes 1vka's comment a bit funny.
No card back from blizzcon? :(
No but theres a card back for K&C preorder
This single player content will be great. Still awaiting tournament mode though. Lots of good things Blizz. Thank you for the fun!!
Not sure they will do a tournament mode any time soon. If they do, I think it would be a good idea if they did it like Fireside Gatherings. Obviously they can't provide prizes because people can fake tournaments and get free rewards, but they can at least make the framework and structure for tournaments to take place.
I don’t know how long they will give us expansions and how long can we keep up buying luck packs (unlucky buy more and more.)
I hope they do Adventures with stories next year.
Really hard to keep up around 200$ paying per expansion every 3 months.
About the new players even harder, because of the old expansions. They can’t even try some decks :(
I hope they justify us from the prices.
In ESL you can pay 500 Gold and open a 50 cards (whole deck with variety of Legendary, epic, rare and common).
They took some ideas from ESL in the last two expansions. Even the dangeon similar a bit to solo arena.
Please explain me this thing:
How "summon" keyword is different from "recruit" ? (Apart from it having a summon criteria)
Update: NVM I got it as soon as i posted this. Stupid me