Rumble Run - New Details On Upcoming Solo Content + Looking Back At Adventures
Like with the past few expansions, Hearthstone is getting some new solo content to play through! Here's everything we've learned about the mode so far.
- Rumble Run releases on December 13th, 9 days after the expansion launch.
- Shrines - Passives! They sit on the board giving you a special effect. They can be destroyed, but they will respawn after 3 turns.
- Like other solo content recently added to Hearthstone, successful wins let you add more cards to your run's deck.
- They really want to celebrate each of the teams (classes). Overpowered fights had to be done.
- You will fight eight opponents - all the other teams. Each team has 3 different shrines, and 3 champions so your runs won't always be the same.
- Rikkar is your champion you play with. He evolves over the run. He doesn't have a team to start with, that's up to you.
- You earn "Prize Fighters" for successful clears. Pick your own teammates.
- We'll get to play as the champions in "a series of" Tavern Brawls.
Adventures of Old
- The old way of doing solo content, adventures, didn't work out for them due to not having enough cards for a meta.
- Adventures needed to be easy so everyone could unlock the cards.
- The low replayability of adventures was also a problem that needed to be solved.
Frozen Throne - "Linear Battles"
- Knights of the Frozen Throne was the first expansion with the missions team. They went with the old formula, "linear battles" because it was known to work.
- The Lich King fight originally had you getting trapped into Frostmourne with a janky animation that made your game look like it bugged out.
- During QA of the Lich King fight, it was reported that the "Shut Up, Priest" could be stolen. They used that as an opportunity for an easter egg.
- There were several easter eggs within the Frozen Throne adventure that not many people found.
- One easter egg that didn't have many mentions online was the one when fighting The Lich King as a Paladin, turning yourself into Uther of the Ebon Blade and using hero power allowed him to collect your cards. When at 3 out of 4 Horsemen collected, he would say that it would be embarrassing it would be if he collected them all.
- Making the adventure more challenging then usual due to no card rewards turned out to be a positive. They learned players enjoy the challenge and lots of people played.
Kobolds / Witchwood - "Build As You Go"
- One of the big focuses was to make the content replayable. It's sad when they create content that doesn't get to be seen again.
- Making deckbuilding less intimidating was another priority. Lots of players beat the Lich King thanks to the deck copy feature.
- Increasing the challenge even more than before was their final goal for the modes.
- The initial prototype for Dungeon Run saw you playing as Mage and the entire running being just one very long game.
- When the boss died, the board would be reset, you'd pick your bucket of cards in a discover selection, and the new boss would start.
- A fun bug in the prototype caused Arcane Giant to be playable for 0 mana on turn 1 - they didn't reset the spell count between bosses.
- Thanks to that bug, it lead to the special treasure cards which got stronger as your run continued.
- Originally there were 12 bosses to beat each run instead of the 8 we got. They found the decks were too big and the bosses had too much health though which made it less fun.
- You were able to pick your boss in addition to the loot you got. It felt like a negative experience though if you didn't know what each boss did and you lost to them.
- They experimented with Tower Defense a lot with Witchwood. It's a mechanic they are always trying to get into the game.
- Darius Crowley became Hearthstone's Tower Defense and the first hero added to Monster Hunt.
- The final boss in the Witchwood prototype was Jaraxxus.
- Tess Greymane originally had a hero power which was a bag of weapons. Each time it was used, you would get a weapon out of the bag.
- Handgonne - 1 Mana 4/2
- Stake Thrower - 1 Mana 1/8 with Windfury
- Blunderbuss - 1 Mana 2/2 "Also damages the minions next to whomever your hero attacks.
- The weapons in Tess' bag ran out (there were only 3) and then her hero power became the one we have today, Scavenge.
- Magic Mirror allowed players to "break the dungeon" which is fun. Let the players do it.
Boomsday - "Puzzles"
- They always wanted to add Puzzles to Hearthstone.
- It was important to mix up the solo content after doing "Build As You Go" twice in a row.
- Boomsday thematically lead itself well to Puzzles. This was the set to do it.
- Puzzles originally got their start as a Tavern Brawl 2 years ago. They were Lethal-only puzzles. (We actually datamined this)
- The brawl created new tech that allowed them to save your state - absolutely needed for the real deal.
- Toki's replay turn tech helped out in the Puzzle Lab.
- First thing they tried to make was a Tower Defense puzzle.
- Netherspite laser beams tech was used to try and make a puzzle which required bouncing the beams off minions and into portals.
- Since they couldn't let you take extra turns, they instead gave you mana back to cheat in a multi-turn mechanic.
- Mirror was originally supposed to be seeing the solved board state and then having to replicate it. It was hard to remember in more difficult puzzles, even being able to see the solved state whenever you wanted.
- Sometimes there would be multiple developers behind one computer trying to get through a new puzzle they were given.
- One of the puzzles was accidentally unsolvable thanks to a number change and was given to Chakki shortly after he joined the team. Oops!
- They weren't really replayable, but there was very high engagement. They'll probably return to Puzzles again in the future.
I don't disagree with you buddy.
But it's the same. GVG and Narx was overpowred, everything else was underpowered before old gods and the first rotation.
But it's not because there were LESS cards. It was because the cards we got were always worse.
Sure, the guy above says that we can get more archetypes for each class. WELL, That too is a fallacy.
You can make MANY different cards for MANY different archetypes. As long as the cards are underpowered and there is bullshit decks that basically don't allow your deck to exist it won't matter!
My god they tried to make Discard warlock work for SO LONG. And it mostly was only the couple of CLASSIC discard cards that were used in ZOO together with the 3/3 from Karazhan because it made your deck better if you high-rolled but wasn't so bad if you didn't.
They have been trying to make control and buff paladin work forever and it's still not there yet (Maybe with the new LOA on the next expansion?).
I like getting more card btw. I think it's good for the game. I'd also love a proper core set. That doesn't mean that the argument they are giving makes sense or is true whatsoever.
I like most decisions Blizzard made for hearth the last couple of years. I don't agree with the balance aspect of it.
But what I can criticize is that the REASONING they give to every change they make, good or bad, has always been flawed.
"Let's rotate stuff to wild, so standard can be fresh and people play different things in wild than standard" -> Prints a bunch of overpowered cards for standard to the point that everything in Wild is weaker and Wild meta becomes Standard Meta.
i don't think UN'goro was so far above the power curve tho, despite Un'goro having the problems of never getting to see turn 10 and the 17 viable decks meta was pretty much 14 different aggro decks that did the same thing with Taunt Warrior, Quest rogue and Discover Mage to round the rest of the archetypes it didn't feel as powerful as KFT and K&C i think with witchwood they found a happy medium for control decks to be powerful and not Oppressive and depending on how in line with WW and Boomsday Rastashkan is we might see some previously unseen witchwood and Boomsday cards during next april (rotation)
once again
tournament mode died for this
Tournament mode died because they want to release social features, I doubt the solo adventure content team was ever going to be working on tournament mode. I still want tournament mode, but there's no point in blaming this for its delay.
you are like one of the only two people that wants it anyways, you can just use any third party site to organize a tournament or just go to a gaming cafe that hosts them, i live in a city where HS and gaming in general isn't popular like at all and i still can go to a tournament like every two weeks.
Totally crazy. Yeah, better fitting rewards would be nice, but no incentive to play more of these runs. I still return to the newer PvE content from time to time.
I much preferred the Adventures to be honest. The new runs have the Ghosts n' Goblins (or most any game of the time) problem: if I fall at the last hurdle I have to start over from the beginning. Ugh. When I was a kid I had the time and motivation for that, I don't anymore.
I wholly agree with you. It's one of the most frustrating things to get sent right back to the beginning and is why I still have yet to bet Kobolds or Witchwood.
Honestly, that may be frustrating for you, but for a lot of us it is a core gameplay feature. These 'build-as-you-go' modes are very much based on roguelikes. The fun is that you are constantly trying new things, it wouldn't be fun to feel like you have to keep grinding out a run with a deck that just isn't working.
I get what you say but I think it's more a matter of taste: this is a genre problem. The mode is built as a rogue-like experience, in rogue-likes the key feature is permadeath which in this case is represented by the loss of your deck once you "die".
Adventures locked out very casual f2p players as when they would come back to explore the expansion they couldn't afford any of the wings. And the fact that it was impossible to craft those cards with dust.Personally modes like Dungeon run are far more fun and replayable than an adventure as I'm using new cards (not just my own decks that I sometimes had to tech against a specific boss) and experiencing overpowered decks that you couldn't make in standard. Deck builders are power fantasies
However, I will admit that beating the dungeon runs and only getting a card back hurts. If they actually gave a decent reward for beating them (that doesn't take up a quest spot) like the class specific legendary for the first class you beat it with then that would be good.
Also, 2800 gold really isn’t that much.
Yeah, probably shouldn't have commented on the pricing of the wings, its just that the dungeon runs are some of the most enjoyable things to come out of Hearthstone for a long while - The pricing of the adventure + dungeon run gameplay would be bliss
"The old way of doing solo content, adventures, didn't work out for them due to not having enough cards for a meta"
This is a blatant lie, while the number of card you got from adventures was indeed smaller than from expansions, the number of cards that saw play was pretty much the same. How is that possible you ask? Simple, expansions have way more filler cards so whenever you open a pack you are less likely to pull a usable card, thus forcing you to buy more packs. When you buy an adventure you are guaranteed to get all the cards including the playable ones. When you buy packs you have to keep gambling for a chance to get the good cards, even buying 200 packs does not guarantee that you will get all the playable cards.
It is obvious to anyone with a brain that the real reason they killed adventures is to make more money, and it is truly insulting that they make up these excuses that make zero sense. But really what to expect from Activision when after they decided to have Netease resking one of their games into Diablo Immortal...
Eh, adventures sucked though in that we only got a couple of cards for each class, there wasn't enough room to add in diversity. It was even worse when you had 2 adventures and 1 expansion in a year due to the alternating releases so that year just got severely shafted.
I would like to see them revisit the adventure model as an accessory to the regular 3 expansions. Drop smaller adventures, with a class card in each plus a handful of neutral cards. Do this midway between every expansion and use that as an opportunity for some balancing while sticking to their never nerf anything goal.
LoE had about less than 20 cards played while being the biggest adventure in terms of card pool and having a high power level (for the days of that time). It also has had many filler cards. Boomsday has about 25 - 30 played cards (even more if you consider the first experimentation), not counting meme-ish, niche ones.
Glorifying adventures doesn't get us anywhere. Adventures served the purpose to be PvE content right from the beginning. The cards were sweet extras. In the end, the PvE content was played once by most people, which is why they introduced replayable adventures ADDITIONALLY to your full expansions. I do enjoy dungeon runs and monster hunt much more than the old adventures.
Of course money is a factor, but you seem to forget that people cried for the first 2 years of HS, that the meta was always getting too stale too soon, which is also why they introduced 3 full expansions every year.
Your last paragraph proves, you are just frustrated with the game(s). How about taking a break and reconsidering your game of choice?
If adventures gave more than 50 cards, of which about 5 were playable (at best), they would be competely fine, but they need more money and less effort
I agree, adventures could have never printed cards like bomb mech hunter, bone drake, dead ringer... or they would be insanely OP and hated
I play it for fun, crazy I know.
I do think they should add better rewards, but other than a few BS bosses (*cough* face collector *cough*) the fun of building a cool deck is worth the time spent.
There is many ways to get fun by playing hearthstone and most of them bring rewards. Dungeon run doesn't. I play for fun, too. And I get some gold. Crazy, I know.