Patch 16.0 - Removal of Doom in the Tomb Cards, BG changes and New Heroes
All the changes coming with this patch listed below, including changes to Battlegrounds and the removal of the Doom in the Tomb Cards from Standard.
- Notable changes were made to the way the Echo keyword works on minions like SN1P-SN4P, making them cost no less than (1), with Dust refunds as a result.
- There's also the return of Tyrande, for free and the arrival of Sylvanas as a Hero.
- Blizzard also announced the new Adventure that's coming with this expansion "Galakrond's Awakening" which comes in January and will introduce 35 new cards.
- Lastly with the expansion launch you will also start having the option to buy Wild expansion packs with Gold, instead of just with real money.
Much more in the official Patch Notes below:
Quote from BlizzardThe skies above Dragonblight stir with tension as the League of E.V.I.L. eagerly seeks to resurrect Galakrond, Progenitor of all Dragonkind, and use his great power as a tool of destruction in their sinister plans. To answer the impending threat, the League of Explorers are calling upon powerful allies, the same Dragon Aspects who defeated Galakrond once before. To turn the skies in their favor, both good and E.V.I.L. are unveiling some fresh tactics of their own…
Read on for the full details of what’s coming to the tavern with the Descent of Dragons expansion, including a major update to Battlegrounds, and how to claim the Tyrande Priest Hero and Card Back for free with the launch of the new in-game shop!
Descent of Dragons – Launching December 10
Galakrond
There are 5 new legendary Galakrond Hero Cards, one for each League of E.V.I.L. Class: Rogue, Warrior, Warlock, Shaman, and Priest. Over the course of a game, Galakrond can be powered up in three stages – each doubling the strength of his Battlecry, with his final form additionally equipping a 5/2 Claw weapon!
New Keyword: Invoke
When it comes to maximizing Galakrond’s potential, Invoke is an essential mechanic. Each time you play a card with the Invoke keyword, you will gain a class-specific bonus, wherever Galakrond is. Invoking Galakrond twice will upgrade his base form to “Galakrond, The Apocalypse”. From there, Invoking two more times will earn you his ultimate form, “Galakrond, Azeroth’s End”.
Sidequests
While the forces of E.V.I.L. are busy invoking the might of Galakrond, the heroes of good can take on new Sidequests to earn advantages of their own! Unlike the Legendary Quests you would typically build a deck around, Sidequests offer a more lightweight objective with moderate rewards that can fit into varying styles of play. Another key difference from Legendary Quests is that you can put 2 copies of a Sidequest in your deck.
Legendary Dragons
The Dragon Aspects are here in a way you’ve never seen before, along with powerful new Proto-Dragons and Togwaggle’s own candle creation, Waxadred! There’s a total of ten new Legendary Dragons joining the fight – one specific to each class, and the neutral Dragonqueen Alexstrasza. Each class-specific dragon will also have a corresponding Dragon Breath – these cards gain significant bonuses while holding a Dragon. So, remember to keep your friends close, but keep your Dragons closer!
Kronx Dragonhoof
Kronx Dragonhoof, The Herald of Galakrond, can earn you a sizeable advantage whether you have already become Galakrond, or if he is still in your deck. Use Kronx to pull a fully upgraded Galakrond, or if you’ve already become Galakrond, you’ll be able to choose one of four game-changing Devastations to unleash on the battlefield!
Login Bonuses:
Spread your wings and soar into battle as the ultimate dragon! Log into Hearthstone any time within the first 90 days of the launch of Descent of Dragons and receive 3 Descent of Dragons Card Packs, plus 2 copies of Shield of Galakrond to get Invoking straight away. Additionally, when you go to open your packs, you’ll receive all 5 Legendary Galakrond Hero Cards. Now that you’re well equipped for a draconic conquest, embark on a new Legendary Quest Chain to earn gold and even more packs!
Pre-Purchase:
Descend in style with these bonuses when you pre-purchase a Descent of Dragons bundle through December 9!
- Standard Bundle: Includes 60 Descent of Dragons Card Packs, the Shattering Card Back, and a random Descent of Dragons Golden Legendary.
- Mega Bundle: Includes 100 Descent of Dragons Card Packs, the new Deathwing Warrior Hero, The Shattering Card Back, and a random Descent of Dragons Golden Legendary.
Coming Soon – Galakrond’s Awakening:
The final battle in the Year of the Dragon’s solo adventure story is Galakrond’s Awakening, coming this January! We won’t spoil too much, but we hope you’re ready to battle E.V.I.L. (or good) and collect 35 new cards! More details on Galakrond’s Awakening will be coming soon.
Hearthstone Battlegrounds Updates
New Heroes:
- Edwin Vancleef
- Sharpen Blades
- Costs 1. Give a minion +1/+1 for each minion you’ve bought this turn.
- Sylvanas Windrunner
- Banshee’s Blessing
- Costs 0. Remove a friendly minion to give adjacent minions +1/+1.
- Arch-Villain Rafaam
- I’ll Take That!
- Costs 1. Next combat, add a plain copy of the first minion you kill to your hand. (Note: this is an unbuffed, non-golden copy.)
Heroes leaving:
- Patches the Pirate
- Bartendotron
- Pyramad
- Professor Putricide
- Trade Prince Gallywix
Heroes returning:
- Millificent Manastorm
- Lich Baz’hial
New Minions:
- King Bagurgle
- Floating Watcher
Balance Changes:
- Minions
- Lightfang Enforcer
- At the end of your turn, give a friendly Mech, Beast, Murloc and Demon +2/+2. → At the end of your turn, give a friendly Mech, Beast, Murloc and Demon +2/+1.
- Heroes
- Millificent Manastorm
- Tinker
- All Mechs in Bob's Tavern get +1/+1. → All Mechs in Bob's Tavern get +1 Attack.
- Patchwerk
- All Patched Up
- Starts at 60 Health. → Starts at 50 Health.
- A. F. Kay
- Procrastinate
- Skip your first 2 turns. Start with a minion from Tavern Tier 3 and Tavern Tier 4. → Start with two minions from Tavern Tier 3.
- The Rat King
- King of Beasts
- Whenever you Hire a Beast give it +1/+2. Swaps type each turn. → Whenever you Hire a Beast give it +1/+1. Swaps type each turn.
- Lich Baz’hial
- Graveyard Shift
- Get a Coin and take 3 damage. → Get a Coin and take 2 damage.
- The Great Akazamzarak
- Prestidigitation
- Will now be harder to get Ice Block consecutively.
- Removed Hand of Salvation as a possible secret.
Advanced Stats v1:
Advanced Stats are now live for players who own 10 or more Descent of Dragons Card Packs, which will retroactively include data from matches played since November 5. From the Battlegrounds lobby screen, advanced stats can be accessed by clicking “More”. We’ll be continuing to add more features and stats with future updates!
A Note on Performance:
With this update, players on low-end devices may experience degraded performance. We’re continuing our efforts to address this issue and optimize Hearthstone Battlegrounds – and we’ll have more to share soon.
Features and Events
New In-game Shop
Hearthstone’s in-game shop is being redesigned to improve navigation and accessibility, with these changes rolling out globally December 9-10. In the new shop, you’ll find bundles, Card Packs, Alternate Heroes, and more together in a single location – additionally, Adventures and Wild Card Packs are being added, with the option to purchase Wild Card Packs using gold.
Claim the Tyrande Whisperwind Priest Hero and Card Back for free!
On December 10, we’re bringing back fan favorite Tyrande for everyone! Stop by the new in-game shop to claim the Tyrande Priest Hero and Card Back for free!
Sylvanas Windrunner Hunter Hero and Card Back
Also coming to the shop on December 10 for a limited time, the Sylvanas Windrunner Hunter Hero and Card Back will be available for $9.99!
Heroes rotating from the shop
On December 10, we’ll be rotating the current lineup of Heroes available in the shop – they may return at a later date, but for now, be sure to take advantage of the current Hero sale featuring Magni, Medivh, and Alleria!
Special event cards moving back to Wild
During the Doom in the Tomb event, 23 cards from Wild were released to be playable in Standard. On December 5, these cards will return to Wild, and any temporarily granted copies will be removed.
Winter Veil Celebration
Snowy cheer will be filling the tavern starting on December 11, with festive board dressings and the return of Winter Veil emotes! Grab your favorite ornament…al axe and wreak havoc in the Decorating Dalaran tavern brawl to earn the Winter Veil Treat Card Back!
Looking for the perfect gift for your favorite Hearthstone pal? Celebrate the season with the new Winter Veil Wonder Bundle, available from December 19 until January 7 for $24.99! Included in this bundle:
- The new Dame Hazelbark Druid Hero and Card Back
- 30 Card Packs – 6 packs each from Saviors of Uldum, Rise of Shadows, The Witchwood, The Boomsday Project, and Rastakhan’s Rumble
- The Arena draft pool has been updated:
- Basic
- Classic
- Blackrock Mountain
- The Grand Tournament
- One Night in Karazhan
- Knights of the Frozen Throne
- Rastakhan's Rumble
- Descent of Dragons
Game Improvements and Bug Fixes
- Echo
- Copies of cards with the Echo keyword can no longer cost less than (1). Full Arcane Dust refunds will be available for the following cards until December 19:
- SN1P-SN4P (Normal Only)
- Glinda Crowskin (Normal and Golden)
- Sound the Bells! (Normal and Golden)
- Dev Comment: This change is targeted at a very popular deck in Wild that utilizes SN1P-SN4P along with the Echo mechanic to generate extremely large minions or near infinite damage. This change should put a stop to that interaction while having very limited impact on the average use case for Echo cards. Glinda, SN1P-SN4P, and Sound the Bells were the three cards that took advantage of generating 0-cost copies through Echo, so we've opted to refund all three of those cards as a result.
- Zephrys improvements
- Fixed a bug where minions with both Stealth and Taunt (such as Wardruid Loti) weren’t properly accounted for.
- Fixed a bug where weapons would sometimes be offered as a removal option against Stealthed minions.
- Druid Choose One cards now account for having the ‘Choose Both’ effect
- Fixed a bug where Starfall could be offered as removal against a single minion.
- Fixed a bug where Earth Shock was incorrectly offered as removal against targets that were reduced to 1 health by Shrink Ray or Equality.
- Adjusted how Zephrys values enemy Deathrattles.
- Fixed a bug with lethal calculations including Rush minions not eligible to attack heroes.
- Fixed several bugs involving certain cards not being offered:
- Battlegrounds
- Fixed an issue where tripling Replicating Menace could add the incorrect stats to the target Mech when magnetized.
- Fixed an issue where tripling Replicating Menace did not double its card effects.
- Fixed an issue where Ice Block could trigger during the Recruit phase.
- Fixed an issue where players could sometimes not recruit a minion during their first Recruit phase.
- Fixed an issue where Poisoned Blade would get replaced by Ancient Blades instead of getting +1 Attack.
- Shirvallah is now discounted by spells that get countered, but will no longer be discounted by spells that are paid for with health.
- Fixed an issue where minions summoned from Deathrattle effects would sometimes not appear in the correct position.
- Fixed an issue where taking Fatigue damage would improperly extend the current turn.
- Shadow Reflections generated by Valeera the Hollow now function properly if discarded and then created by Soulwarden.
- Fixed an issue where shapeshifted Druid cards had a last known in-hand cost equal to 0, which triggered Darklight Torch when looking at even cost cards. Shapeshifted Druid cards now retain their pre-transformed cost.
- Buffs made to C'thun while it is still in the deck (and not from Ritual cards) now count towards all "If your C'thun as at least 10 attack..." effects.
- Fixed an issue with Curator, in the One Night in Karazhan Adventure, where Rush minions would forget to check if the opposing hero had Taunt when looking for valid targets.
- Fixed an issue where the client was not considering cards that read a value from a variable rather than the card text when determining spell damage. The damage itself was calculated correctly but the visual indication of spell damage was missing.
Good deal
Will there be any adventure with DoD? A tone heard something?
Seriously dude... Just read the post.
TLDR: it's a weak card in a vacuum, that can be good/great if you get the right enabler early enough and don't take too many hits otherwise (as life = buff potential in this case).
In general, all things considered, it *is* a weaker card. That's like saying Sky Golem isn't weak. You can win with it in a Baron line-up and the rare mech line up if you get it goldened, but generally you're not too happy to be keeping it on. Just because you got a win with it, doesn't mean it's suddenly not-weak-on-average (hell, I got a win with Pyramad early on in Battlegrounds, but that doesn't make it not a weak hero).
Vulgar Homunculus is largely irrelevant because if you're playing it just to trigger Floating Watcher, I would argue that's a misplay (if you want +2/+2 on Watcher there's a no-life option). Bazhial is an interesting thought, and that may make it a bit stronger in that case (namely because you're getting free buffs and you want to scale as quickly as possible with her so you can get ahead and stabilize).
I agree, it's better if you go the early Wrath Weaver and actually get that scaling enough to pull ahead and stabilize. But therein lies the problem - ideally on the way to T3, you'd reroll twice at most (first turn T2, if you don't have a way to get a 6th gold for 2 minions). How often are you going to see Wrath Weaver up to T3, and then actually want to take it based on your build and what you're going for? Less often than not, I imagine. The issues with Floating Watcher that make it weaker (in general) are two fold - it basically requires Wrath Weaver (again, if you're getting Homunculus just to buff it without also having a Wrath Weaver or 2 out I imagine that's usually a misplay), and it stops scaling at all after a certain point (because you have finite life, and Mal'ganis actually prevents the scaling unlike Wrath Weaver). The irony here is that, tribe aside, Wrath Weaver is the better card. It scales with any demon, it enables Floating Watcher to be decent, and it doesn't get turned off by Mal'ganis.
So, I'm stressing, the reason it's weak is because in order to be good, it requires either a specific hero or a specific minion that you really can't guarantee you'll see early enough, and may not want to lean into anyway due to how specific demon lineups need to be to win. I'm happy to eat my words though if someone can provide me stats on the winrate of Floating Watcher as being comparable to other good cards. Also, this is clearly just my opinion - if you disagree, go for it; keeping picking up Floating Watchers without Wrath Weavers and prove me wrong. :-)
I'd also be curious if there's any sort of viable pivot here if you're actually on a very high life total around the start to middle of T3 - where you pick up a Wrath Weaver and Floating Watcher at that point, being able to get maximum value out of them due to already having a strong board and having the life total to give Floating Watcher maximum buffage.
Turns out the card was OP and nerfed to 4*=)
Yeah, I ended up being grossly wrong about that - turns out that the synergistic scaling meant if you could get early Wrath Weaver/s and some demons to buff them, then an early Watcher or 2, you'd have huge minions.
It's not impossible to still do these days, but Watcher at 4 means that it comes out late enough that the scaling isn't nearly as strong, in most cases (plus with less chances to see it you're much less likely to get it).
Adventures are generally worth the money, or gold if you prefer that. Plus, it comes around the time meta gets stale, in month or so, it **MIGHT** be a change of pace. Or, they might all be useless. We shall see the cards first.
Ok so just to be clear: "when you go to open your packs".... does that mean they're guaranteeing Galakrond in our first 5 packs or will the pack opening screen grant us the 5 Galakronds?
I'm sure someone else asked this but I didn't see it and boy howdy does this matter (especially to F2P).
if you open the game the lauching day, 5 galakrons in your face before you see your quests, if you do it fter the 90 days, when you buy a pack of dod 5 galakrons in your face witouht opening the pack. Like C'thun
Oh thank God. Appreciate the clarification.
ok, here i must do a perhaps....People who is in the pre-release event, where you can open the packs, ttecnichaly, you don't recive anything but the packs tuo open earlier, no golden preoder legendaries or else, BUT, since a good amount of the cards interact with galakron, people got a pack with all 5 galakrons, card that would be imposible to get otherway cause the expansion isn't out yet, so this could be the way to get galakron (a legendary pack with all 5 galakrons) or just this is the way to let players in the pre release event use it before the expansion hits
https://twitter.com/Kripparrian/status/1203410309165264897
it is in reality, the holiday comes to us 🎄
Great job!
They forgot to fix brann in BG
They fixed him by releasing someone even stronger.
Sylvanas's bow is so cool !!! But we can't see it on avatar(((((
Oh hey, did anyone else notice that the Battlegrounds stats screen probably means that Giant Sand Worm is probably slated to be added?
Where do you see that ?
One of the stats says: "Damage by Giant Sand Worm".