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 BrodeWe 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)
this is just making the cards uglier. Ashbringer looks so good with that orange gem.
Nice!
when i started playing one of my 2 i guess legendaries from free packs was the black knight.
My friends kept joking on me because i was running it in every deck i had untill the black knight meta popped out.
Now actually they had to craft it for his insane value on some late game minions.
Now rend, i have a couple of decks in which i actually have it and it works pretty well.
Not everyone is playing retard aggro decks so stop complaining about that card,even some other underrated legendaries have their place somewhere in wild or standard.
Rend BlackDust?
Makes absolutely no sense, since caster weapons don't use durability upon the triggering of their effects.
Permanent, uncounterable, unremovable effects are not a great idea from a design perspective. I don't think Legendary weapons are meant to be anything like that.
Well, that's the thing, they can make Oozes only kill normal weapons, BUT have Harrison Jones counter any weapon, including legendaries.
That way they will make Harrison more viable and interesting and also keep the whole thing of people teching against weapon in their decks. Just not for like... a common card everywhere that can be played for just 2 mana to remove possible up to 10 mana value on a weapon depending on what crazy stuff they come up with.
If your idea of RNG is what tech cards your opponent has made the decision to run then you don't belong in card games. There's a lot of RNG in this game. Theres plenty of things to complain about if you want to complain. Having to read and react to the meta shouldn't be one of them. That's just Card Games 101.
His point was likely that you can't complain about being lucky in card games if the thing that you're complaining about is something completely normal in any card game that requires you to build your deck... It's not really legitimate to complain about topdecking the answer that you specificly put into your deck, yes it is luck, but you're still playing a card game. Card games are, at their core, heavily influenced by luck and it's perfectly fine, nobody would look at a deck that could win every single game they ever played and say that it's fine, even though that would essentially make the luck aspect virtually go away since you would win every game.
Just because you can't predict what they will bring does not mean that it is random. It means that you have imperfect information and have to take risks with your decisions. This is the point of card games. Including Pirates is risky because of Golakka Crawler. Including Golakka Crawler is risky because of decks that don't run Pirates. You have to make a decisions about what risks to take.