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)
I can see why this change was so high priority. Clearly a staple meta card like Rend needs to be fixed asap in order to make it clear to new players that whether you're collectable or not, he will #$%£ you up. That's right. No mercy mother#$%£ers.
On a slightly less intense note, I wonder why Blizz felt the need to distinguish between collectible and non-collectible legendarys? I'm calling a related card or mechanic in K&C. Recruit a legendary maybe? Can't recruit non-collectible?
I guess they want that players can see clearly which cards can't be disenchanted (especially after a nerf; this would also explain why it's priority now, as the next expansion (after Kobolds of course) would come in march or April.
Marin the Fox and Rend Blackhand were together in one adequate deck?
This is very crucial. I remember playing Rend in Rafaam vs. Kel'Thuzad brawl. So Rend couldn't kill any of Kel minions, because they had no gem.
I had to reread this couple of times because I just woke up...
Rend's battlecry NOW kills cards with orange gem only. Rend LATER will kill any card with the silver/golden dragon on them.
Thanks, now these changes make sense. (tired too)
Who still has Rend Blackhand ?? @ _ @ also why would you start running him now??
The point is to make the game work properly, not whether or not you have a specific card in your collection
MY question had nothing to do with the patch ,it was about the card, simple and to the point
Oh okay, so completely unrelated to the comment you were replying to...
I don't even get why im still replying since my other comments have been downvoted by but hurt people, but ill repost my comment
(Triggered) is a very good annotation for this comment chain to be filed under.
Yeah. It is clear that there will be legendary tokens coming next expansion that they want to account for.
What a worthless change and a waste of time.
I generally don't like this kind of changes, but this one actually makes sense. It's a little thing, and it seems there would be bigger issues to tackle, but I can't say I disagree that it works better for tokens to have no rarity gem, it's a vert valid way to differentiate them from regular cards.
There are bigger issues to tackle, that's why they aren't fixing it until later than the expansion release. Also it is kind of an easy fix, but it needs quite a lot of QA since it goes so wide.