Upcoming Visual Change to Legendary Cards

Upcoming Visual Change to Legendary Cards

Ben Brode shared some information on a consistency pass taking place in Hearthstone. You may have noticed that Marin the Fox's Master Chest lacks the rarity gem for a Legendary even though it contains the silver dragon portrait adornment. This is how non-collectible Legendary cards will be going forward.

Here's how things are going to work and look in the future:

  • Rend Blackhand currently only targets Legendary cards which have the gem.
  • Rend will be updated in the Kobolds and Catacombs patch to target based on the silver dragon.
  • Orange Gem will only be present on collectible Legendary cards.
  • Silver Dragon will be present on all Legendary cards.
  • Update: Non-legendary cards are going to have these changes too - no rarity gem for non-collectible cards. Ben is not sure on the exact timing.
  • Update: Legendary weapons like Ashbringer will also lose their rarity gem and have a silver dragon. (Source)

Here's Ben Brode's post on the matter.

Quote from Ben Brode

We have a consistency pass on the Silver-Dragon being targetable by Rend Blackhand coming soon.

The new rule: The Orange Gem (what Rend currently looks for) will only be on Legendary collectible cards. The Silver Dragon will be on all Legendary cards, collectible or not. In a future patch, Rend will look for the Silver Dragon, not the Orange Gem.

Marin was built while we were in the new-rule mindset, so the chest uses the new rules, but we haven't actually changed Rend yet, and won't until the patch after K&C (at the earliest), so it's a bit funky right now.

Until we do, keep in mind that Legendary = Orange Gem, in gameplay. After the change - Legendary = Silver Dragon.

Sorry for the inconvenience!

Why can't you fix Rend with the K&C patch? Why the patch after (or even later)?

Usually when we identify a change we want to make we have to factor in a couple things when deciding which 'branch' to check the change into.

In this case, we were running up against the limits of what we could fit into 10.0, due to total number of hours of dev work, hours of bug fixing, and hours of Quality Assurance time, as they verify that things work as they should. Some tasks are easy for us to implement, but have far reaching effects, and so most of the work is QA verification. Correctly prioritizing which fixes/features make it into which patch means taking careful consideration of how much work each developer has on their plate, how much time it will take to fix bugs for each patch, how much time to reserve for additional polish work, and how much time will be required to QA it all. Often when we identify something new, it doesn't get slotted into the next patch, because we've already served ourselves a full plate of stuff to do in order to ship the patch in time, and so it gets assigned to the next patch that has room in it for devs and QA.

All that said, sometimes we "hotfix" things that are server-only (like this change). This has a somewhat higher cost on QA, because they have another milestone they need to test; it's not part of their test-cycle for the next patch. It's possible this particular change gets moved up in priority, and we bump something else to make room for it. (Source)

Does this change extend to other uncollectible cards with a rarity gems such as Spirit Wolf or Spellbender?

Yes, although i think we changed the Legendaries first - not sure on timing for the rest. Thanks for calling that out - I made sure they're on our list. (Source)

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