Designer Insights: Upcoming Arena Changes - New Cards and Pick Rules
Prepare yourselves, Arena changes are coming! In a Designer Insights video today, Kris Zierhut, Lead System Designer, talks about new changes coming to Arena.
- The cards from BlizzCon are finally being added! They will be available for a limited time.
- Cards will be offered based on their relatively equal power level and not just by rarity. Commons could be paired with a Rare for example.
- Legendary cards will still be offered in sets of 3.
- Picks 1, 10, 20, and 30 will still contain cards that are of Rare quality or better.
- They are temporarily disabling the increased chance to see cards from the most recent expansion.
- Existing rules that affect appearance rates are unchanged.
- The new cards will leave the arena pool when the expansion hits.
The New Cards
A couple of things have changed since the original BlizzCon cards.
- The Priest card has decreased in cost from 3 to 2 mana.
- Wording on several cards has been adjusted but retain the same effects.
Video
Mike Donais on Card Power
Quote from Mike DonaisWe had to take educated guesses on which power level buckets these go into when we added them.
Like most arena events they will be around for a while, and then they will leave. In this case they will leave with the release of the next expansion. I think they are pretty interesting cards in general.
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Posted Mar 7, 2018 (Patches Nerf)Some overpowered effects for arena I guess
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Posted Mar 7, 2018 (Patches Nerf)that sounds a bit like gwent arena
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Posted Mar 7, 2018 (Patches Nerf)How so?
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Posted Mar 7, 2018 (Patches Nerf)"Cards will be offered based on their relatively equal power level and not just by rarity. Commons could be paired with a Rare for example."
That sounds like a good change.
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Posted Mar 7, 2018 (Patches Nerf)I don't get it what is the purpose of this update? When we choose card from same rarity it actually give you abbility to choose the best card from the pick. Often we receive 1-2 trash cards. Often we receive even 3 trash cards and that is bad picks, but if at least 1 card is good, at least you can choose something playable. If now we have picks based on their "calculated" power level, thats mean that we can receive 3 garbage/3goods/3 very good cards in 1 pick. Actually yes, skill in arena is in choosing the best card from the options, but if we all the time receive a garbage pick, we will have no chance in this 3 cards to pick to have something better, because they should be same level? At least this is what was described. I hope that they really "lowered" low power cards, otherwise we will have choices like: Wisp, Penguin, Tinyfin Murlock (ye I know it is from wild). There is some good ideas in this, but before seeing it, I am a bit reserved to this changes. Hopefuly they will really remove useless picks from unplayable cards than.
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Posted Mar 7, 2018 (Patches Nerf)They also said that bad picks have got their spawn-chance lowered
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Posted Mar 7, 2018 (Patches Nerf)Amazing change! Only thing I'm still hoping for is:
Option A) Remove dust from the reward pool.
Option B) Give the option to pay 100 / 50 gold instead, with smaller rewards.
In other words, I love arena but don't have the patience to not buy a pack when I have 100 gold :)
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Posted Mar 7, 2018 (Patches Nerf)Doomsayer + Generous Spirit
Draw 3 cards and boardclear for only 4 mana
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Posted Mar 7, 2018 (Patches Nerf)Lets just hope that the power level they think is correct will not be complete different from community made stats but we all know how blizzard tends to handle things if you know what I mean.
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Posted Mar 7, 2018 (Patches Nerf)-
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Posted Mar 7, 2018 (Patches Nerf)Winrates mean nothing. The highest winrate cards are cards like Pyro and Bloodlust because they are finishers, but they are nowhere near the most powerful cards in the game. Similarly, reactive cards like Corrupted Seer often have low winrates(43,8% in Seer's instance, on par with cards like Simulacrum and Pantry Spider), but I don't think anyone that is a good Arena player would say that Seer is a bad card and it's miles better than e.g. Pantry Spider. That's why it's hard to say how the cards' power level should be evaluated, even when you have all of those exact statistics.
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Posted Mar 6, 2018 (Patches Nerf)While the new cards look great, tampering with arena hasn't really gone down well in the past.
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Posted Mar 6, 2018 (Patches Nerf)Crackling Doom + double Earth Elemental who cares about overload if you are already overoaded for 10...
Not to mention even more busted Crackling Doom + Eternal Sentinel where you clear the board for 2 mana and get a 3/2 on top of that (and for 7 mana you can also have a 7/8 taunt too)...
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Posted Mar 6, 2018 (Patches Nerf)Yeah, getting specific epic combo cards is SUPER common and easy in arena.
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Posted Mar 7, 2018 (Patches Nerf)I'm guessing the changes will be implemented concurrently with the release of the new expansion, so Sentinel should at least rotate out (unless they continue Wild Arena).
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Posted Mar 7, 2018 (Patches Nerf)-
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Posted Mar 7, 2018 (Patches Nerf)