Battlegrounds Balance Update - Official Patch Notes
Blizzard just posted the official Patchnotes for the Battlegrounds Balance Patch that went live tonight. It includes changes to Mama Bear and Kangor's Apprentice as well as Hero Changes to the cost of the Hero Power for Jaraxxus and Toki.
In addition to that, Battlegrounds Dev Mike Donais has publically said that "It takes 2 weeks to make a proper client patch with localization and QA, these changes predate Blizzcon and were made before we had live data. We have a small server side patch next week that introduces new heroes. After that we will patch balance again at the start of December."
Quote from BlizzardHi all,
We’re in the process of releasing a new update, which is live on PC and rolling out over the next few hours on mobile operating systems. This update contains a variety of optimizations to improve performance when playing Battlegrounds, especially on devices with fewer than 2GB of RAM. Please note that players on devices with lower memory may still experience degraded performance. Also, p that if you do not download the client update before going into a match, you will see some visual differences on the cards / heroes due to the discrepancy in server and client versions.
iOS players, please ensure you have updated to the latest version of iOS to receive the greatest performance increase from these optimizations. There were some balance changes that we identified based on our initial testing that didn’t quite make it in for release, so we’re making those live with today’s update.
Balance Changes
Minions
Mama Bear: Changed from 5/5 giving +5/+5 to 4/4 giving +4/+4
Kangor’s Apprentice: Changed from 4/8 to 3/6
Hero Powers
Infinite Toki: Temporal Tavern - Changed from 1 cost to 2 and now reads “Refresh Bob's Tavern. Add a minion from a higher Tavern Tier".
King Mukla: Bananarama - Changed to “Passive Hero Power: Whenever you buy a beast, add a Banana to your hand.”
Jaraxxus: Bloodfury - Hero power changed from 3 cost to 2.
Game Fixes & Improvements
Squelch now works as intended + no longer causes crashes under certain circumstances
Daily Quests can now be rerolled
Hallow’s End Arena Daily Quest can now be completed
A variety of Android crashes have been fixed
Memory optimization for Battlegrounds for devices with less than 2GB of RAM
We’re aiming to make updates fairly regularly – every month or so, or perhaps a little faster. We’ll have more information on future updates over the next few weeks. While I’m here, I wanted to talk a bit about Battlegrounds and what we’re seeing and feeling since we launched in beta last week.
Overall, we’ve been thrilled by the response players have had to Battlegrounds, and we’ve been closely watching the feedback coming in. We’re continuing to work on a variety of things coming in the future, but I’d like to call out to a few of them. Please note all of this is future-looking – none of this is getting added quite yet.
New Heroes and Minions!
We’ve been cooking up some new heroes and minions, and we’ll be making them live within the game with our next update. We don’t want to say too much right now, but a couple of very familiar faces will be included.
Stats!
We know the amount of gameplay information that informs how players are performing is limited right now, and we are already hard at work on an advanced stats screen that will be available in the next update. We’ll have much more detail soon, but expect things like your top 5 heroes by wins, most played heroes, how many first place finishes you’ve completed, and more.
Leaderboard Updates
We want to give players more useful information about their opponents so they can make more informed gameplay decisions and build more complex strategies. On the left-hand leaderboard we’re going to be adding some addition information on the minion types that your opponents have. For example, you’ll be able to see that one of your opponents currently holds three murlocs and two demons.
The Selling Experience
We want to make some improvements to how minions are sold, allowing minions to be sold from your hand. We think this will make it into the game some time early next year, and we’ll have more updates on how that is progressing, especially if we think it will come later than January.
Open Beta begins tomorrow, Tuesday, Nov. 12th @ 10am PT! We hope to see you all in the Tavern!
Descent of Dragons Card List & Guide
Learn more and see all the cards in our dedicated expansion guide.
Endgame is always dominated by Mech and Beasts. I think Mech is the bigger problem. They both thrive off a synergy between spawning minions and then benefiting from those spawned minions dying. Beast uses Wolf, Rat, and Savanah Lion to spawn, while mech uses Security Rover and the 3/1 magnetic. They then scale off those spawns with the Worgen, Hyena, and Mamma bear for beasts, and Cobalt Sentry and Junk Bot for Mech. I almost never see other builds succeed in the late game but those two strats, which just oppressively dominates.
If Junk Bot was moved to tier 5 it would solve the problem.
pretty much, im surprised it wasnt pushed up with this patch
You havent seen what an early Lightfang can do to a board of all tribes - my favorite strat
Yeah! Early 1 or even 2 Lightfangs do insane stats, my fav too. Pretty often it is enough for 1st place.
It suits me better than going full mech or full beast - especially beast is my worst for some reason, mama bear with rat pack and hyena just doesn't work for me.
An early Bran can also be really nice if you can get Defender of Argus on most of your minions and the one at tier 5 that buffs taunts minions - gg.
Demons need a buff, for sure. I'm hoping they add a strong new Demon unit to help even things out.
Seeing "daily quests can now be rerolled" makes me laugh because it's like a new feature they just added.
I think that's even funnier.
They should add that they changed this for mobile users. We couldn't re-roll quests since the patch prior to this one. It was a temporary bug.
it was the same for each1
I think there's the reward system sub-category missing.. Oh well
Why would you get reward when it is free?
Why would I want to have to pay 30 packs to get everything in this "free" gamemode when there's nothing I get in return.. Competitive is fun because of the thrill of climbing ranks thinking in the end you're going to have a chest full of golden cards and card backs, arena the same thing but you only get to have 3 losses and with solo adventures, you do it for fun of course but a part is the rewards; of course you can tell me you still play dungeon run but that's not how I prefer to play. It seems fun, it really does but at some point I ask myself; What's the point?
Also, Hearthstone is free. So by your logic; there shouldn't be rewards in the game? After all, it's free; they shouldn't have to give rewards because you paid nothing. I guess the only way to get rewards now is to pay..
If you pay 30 packs you get 30 packs... You were going to spend money on pack anyway. So this mode is free.
In this sense, of course it is free. The point is that it feels bad having NO rewards while having to "get" 30 packs to get everything while you might not want to buy these packs or don't play often enough to get all this gold; it's even more expensive than dalaran heist!
Eh, that's your perspective, but I strongly disagree. Ladder didn't have any rewards for a long time, and I still don't really care about the rewards chest, enjoying the game is the point.
Think of battlegrounds this way. They put time and money into developing a game mode for your enjoyment. If you don't enjoy it, don't play it. If you do enjoy it, the question you should be asking is; why aren't you paying them for their hard work? It's pretty cool that this fun new mode is available for free with minor improvements that can be easily unlocked with or without spending money.
The thrill of the consequences is what I enjoy and simply gaining "prestige" and fun" seems a little lazy in my opinion don't you think? Also, play mode is the main attraction of the game while battlegrounds might be it for you, the majority of the player base play in "Play" mode.
the purpose of a game is to have fun, not to get rewards for free, numb nut.