Some exciting news from Hearthstone's Battlegrounds today as we've learned of some huge changes coming via a blog post on the official website.
The patch will go live on February 26th and will not only include 7 brand new Heroes, but the addition of the mode's first new minion type: Dragons! We’ve highlighted the key attributes of the new minions below and included Blizzard’s official statement about the upcoming patch.
Dragons
- 18 new Dragon minions are being added.
- Some dragons become more powerful as you increase the size of your Dragonflight.
- Tactical positioning of Dragons can unleash powerful effects.
- Like many Battleground minions, Dragons can grow very large in size through synergies.
Non-Battleground Highlights
- Twitch Drops returns! Potential for 2 Descent of Dragons packs!
- Hearthstone is turning 6, which Blizzard celebrates with an Anniversary Event starting March 4th
- Events include special Tavern Brawl, Legendary questline and a heaping helping of log in rewards.
- There's also 2 special bundles on the store. A Mage specific one and the Khadgar Hero Set.
- With the patch also comes the usual bug fixes and new Arena Rotation.
Quote from BlizzardWith the 16.4 patch on February 26, we're adding Dragons as a new minion type to Battlegrounds! Galakrond and Reno Jackson, who recently spread his scaly wings for the first time as the mighty Renegos in Galakrond's Awakening, will join the five original Dragon Aspects as new Heroes!
18 new minions will be added alongside them, 12 of which will be the new Dragon minion type. All but two of these minions are new to Hearthstone altogether, exclusive to Battlegrounds! You can read more about the Dragons update below.
We're celebrating the first new minion-type in Battlegrounds with Twitch Drops! From February 26 at 11 a.m. PT - February 29 at 5:00 p.m. PT, watch 3 total hours of any Hearthstone stream on Twitch to get 1 Descent of Dragons card pack. Watch for 6 hours (consecutive or non-consecutive) to get another one! Watch time accumulates across the entire Hearthstone category, so long as your Battle.net and Twitch accounts are linked.
Link Your Accounts
Before you can receive awards, you'll need to link your Twitch.tv and Battle.net accounts. Here's how:
- Log in or create an account on Twitch.tv.
- Navigate to the Settings menu by clicking your account name in the top-right corner of the home screen.
- Navigate to the Connections tab of the Settings menu.
- Find the Battle.net section, then follow the instructions after selecting a region and clicking Connect.
- When connecting accounts, be sure that you're currently logged into the Battle.net account on which you'd like to receive your rewards.
The official rules for Twitch Drops can be found here.
That's the Spirit!
More celebrations are in order, as Hearthstone is turning six! To commemorate the occasion, we've planned a limited time anniversary event beginning March 4 that will bring special Tavern Brawls, a new legendary quest line, and a heaping helping of log-in rewards. Log in between March 4 at 10 a.m. PT - March 17 at 10 a.m. PT to receive 2 Rise of Shadows packs, 2 Saviors of Uldum packs, 2 Descent of Dragons packs, and the Year of the Dragon card back!
Mage Pack Bundle
For the first time ever, we’re offering a class-specific pack for a limited time! From February 26 – March 4 you can get 5 Mage Packs containing strictly Mage class cards from Standard (The Witchwood, The Boomsday Project, Rastakhan's Rumble, Rise of Shadows, Saviors of Uldum, and Descent of Dragons) for $9.99!
Khadgar Hero Set
Khadgar is back! For a limited time from February 26 – March 4, you can add the Archmage Khadgar to your collection for $9.99, complete with unique entrance and Hero Power animations, voiced emotes, and a thematic card back!
New Battlegrounds Heroes
Galakrond
- Galakrond's Greed [Cost 1]: Replace a minion in Bob's Tavern with a minion from a higher Tavern Tier.
Deathwing
- ALL Will Burn! [Passive]: ALL minions have +3 Attack.
Ysera
- Dream Portal [Cost 1]: Refresh and add a Dragon to Bob's Tavern.
Nozdormu
- Clairvoyance [Passive]: Your first Refresh each turn costs (0).
Malygos
- Arcane Alteration [Cost 0]: Replace a minion with a random one of the same Tavern Tier.
Alexstrasza
- Queen of Dragons [Passive]: After you upgrade Bob's Tavern to Tavern Tier 5, Discover two Dragons.
Reno Jackson
- Gonna Be Rich! [Cost 4]: Make a friendly minion Golden (Once per game).
New Battlegrounds Minions
Battlegrounds Balance Changes
George the Fallen
- Boon of Light Hero Power cost reduced from 4 to 3.
Sneed's Old Shredder
- Moved from Tier 6 to Tier 5.
Mama Bear
- Old: 4/4 Beast, Whenever you summon a Beast, give it +4/+4 - New: 5/5 Beast, Whenever you summon a Beast, give it +5/+5.
Tavern Tier 6
- Starting cost of Tavern Tier 6 has been reduced to 10 Gold (down from 11).
Dev Insight: Tavern Tier 6 has a lot of exciting minions and we'd like players to have more of an opportunity to reach it than they have. We're also trying to make Tavern Tier 6 more interesting by adding some of these powerful new minions.
Removed Heroes
- Professor Putricide
Dev Insight: We'd like to go back to the drawing board with Professor Putricide. We're going to disable him for now to make way for our new Heroes, but you'll likely see him return in the future with some changes.
Removed Minions
- Shielded Minibot
- Annoy-o-Tron
- Mounted Raptor
- Phalanx Commander
- Psych-o-Tron
- Tortollan Shellraiser
- Piloted Sky Golem
- Festeroot Hulk
- Boogeymonster
- Sated Threshadon
Dev Insight: We're removing some minions to help make room for the new minions. We also want to balance out the minion pool a bit. For example, there were way more Mechs in Battlegrounds than any other minion type. We're also removing some of the minions that aren't performing very well and ones that have generally been less exciting to play with.
Game Improvements and Bug Fixes
- Speeding up animations from 0.8s > 0.2s across all game modes for Overkill, Lifesteal, Poisonous, Inspire, and cards that reference "Whenever" and "After" in their text, outside of some special cases.
- "Recruit" will no longer be displayed on the turn timer when a player is about to lose in Battlegrounds.
- Rafaam's Hero Power will no longer trigger a Triple notification before you transition to the combat phase in Battlegrounds.
- Fixed a visual issue in which Golden Primalfin Lookout would sometimes display Golden Murloc cards.
- Fixed an issue where the scoreboard would not sort players correctly on the first turn if they conceded during the mulligan in Battlegrounds.
- Fixed an issue where the scoreboard could appear unsorted when reconnecting to a game in progress in Battlegrounds.
Arena Rotation
Starting March 4, the Arena will include cards from the following sets:
Does anyone elso also only receive the packs on only one of their servers? I got mine on my "america account", where I play just rarely, but no pack on my EU account which I play everyday and I'm kinda dissapointed...
Were the twitch drops supposed to only go to one server per account? Seems unfair :(
Initially they gave packs to all region accounts, but some time ago changed to just one per server.
By the way, Lightfang Enforcer now hits dragons as well, I wonder why it wasn't stated in the patch notes.
Yeah, Rat King rotates +1/+1 to dragon too. Weird, pretty important changes.
Lightfang has been hitting dragons since ever.. like when you had all other types and amalgam.
I'm pretty sure that if you had a minion of each type plus an Amalgam, she'd only hit four of them.
No, it buffed only 4 minion types. Just type Lightfang Enforcer in google and look up older images of this card. So technically it got buffed.
Battlegrounds are still a thing?
What do you mean "Are still a thing?" it's more popular than constructed and arena combined.
Isn't the stream supposed to be up right now? Where is it?
First try with Deathwing, easy win with a deathrattle token build. Won all rounds except 2 vs a Demon Yogg with huge minions and golden juggler. +3 atk on all minions is huge
5 hours later....
Mobile was late and now broken, can’t launch the app
Blizz tweeted that if you uninstall and re-download the app, it should correct the issue.
That worked, but it's a massive blunder on someones part
I've been criticizing Blizzard lately, but I have to admit: this update is a huge step. And Im not only talking about new BG minions, but more about android animation changing. In article mentioned speeding up animations, but wasn't mentioned that if your animations are still fall behind (which will happen if you playing on cheap android every time) animations cease totally until you catch up. You only see numbers pop ups. As result I have my 80sec turn instead of 20. So BG is finally playable on my Peasandroid. Probably even HS itself, didnt try it for year now tbh. I considering check it out now.
So Blizzard, despite all your failures, I taking off my hat: you did good this time. Very good
This isn't really the big announcement right? There's more right? Don't do this to me
First impressions (TLDR: dragons are ok but not the best strat in a vacuum IMO, the heroes range from pretty good to meh, a lot of the new cards are underwhelming, but the new tier 6 murloc is stupid strong in a couple of already-good builds)
Reno was quite good. No hero power for 95% of the game, but turning a key minion golden can turn things around and eventually let you steamroll. While my plans were to go murloc and get golden Brann, I ended up having 3 different tribes up when hitting tier 5 and getting a Lightfang very early, making it gold and going menagerie. Next turn filled out the 5 tribes and actually got a second Lightfang, and I basically didn't actually get to change my board after that point (tried to golden something to get a couple battlecries through, but given that most of my minions were tier 4+ nothing was happening). Still, +30/+15 over my board each turn saw me through.
Ysera I wasn't too impressed with. The hero power strongly encourages dragons, but like we've seen with other heroes whose hero power is greatly benefited by one strategy (and weaker with others), if the cards just aren't coming then forcing a tribe is going to hurt you rather than help. Sure, unlike some of the other tribe-forcers her her power actually helps you get that tribe - but dragons seem to need a pretty good roll to survive the early game.
Dragons as a tribe - there are some definite power minions in there, and if you get a few of them you're capable of getting through the early game, but their scaling starts taking place too late - and as we all know, stats matter in Battlegrounds. I mean, the only cards that buff dragon tribal don't come in until tier 5, which is way too late to get started.
Malygos' hero power ended up being very average overall. Early on, I tried using it on minions I was either about to sell (just in case they high rolled), or minions that were easily in the bottom levels of their tier (ie. a 1/1 token). I think at best I got a +1/+2 buff from that - nice for free, but not if it's inconsistent. Later on I ended up trying to high roll with it after getting Zapp as a 6 - not a bad card, but as I had started going into demons Imp Mama would've closed out the game for me. Turns out random 6's aren't necessarily any good; I went Zapp > Kalecgos > Zapp > Kalecgos > Zapp, for effectively a negative hero power (3 turns of a useless 2/8). Essentially, because you're getting to reroll a minion, you can potentially high roll huge with it (ie. getting a chance at one of the strong tier 5 each turn), but odds are you aren't going to hit it very often.
I actually passed over playing Alex - not too confident in her hero power given the Ysera issues I outlined above. From what else I've seen:
* Nozdormu is basically a free gold each turn in many cases, so not bad at all; will probably end up being middle of the road.
* Galakrond has a pretty interesting strategy, given that you can force a 6 drop on turn 6 or 7 (depends if you start with a turn 1 token minion or not). The power level of Galakrond I feel largely comes down to if you can reroll that 6 drop with his ability; something like a Mama Bear or Foe Reaper could easily dictate your direction for the rest of the game; something like Megasaur is absolutely useless.
* Deathwing seems good without being too good - don't know if he'd make the top 10, but because you're building around the hero power to a degree (and your opponents aren't) it's an asymmetrical effect. In particular, that reborn/divine shield dragon is super good, as are token cards in general.
* In terms of minions: Red Whelp starts off quite good but drops off in the mid/late game where even 7 damage twice may not be too impactful against huge boards (also consider you're giving up a minion for it), Togwaggle is pretty decent in heavy dragon builds, punching way above what a 2 star should, Bronze Warden is quite good particularly if you can buff its attack, Hangry Dragon is amazing *if* you've managed to get an early lead, and can help you maintain and solidify that lead, but unfortunately it's awful from behind, Cobalt Scalebane is good but health matters more than attack in most cases, Murozond is pretty cool with Brann, especially if you can save it for when someone is playing cards you might actually want, Twilight Emissary is great but it's really bad that the first dragon-buff card (that isn't a menagerie buff card) doesn't come out until tier 5, Razorgore can grow huge but same deal, doesn't come out until tier 5, Kalecgos is great for dragon tribal but comes out even later, Imp Mama is just a really solid demon tribal card, Nadina is good but it can be tough to find a spare slot for her in the dragon tribal setup, and Holy Mackerel is just stupidly powerful and thank god it's at tier 6 (it's a murloc - so easy poisonous - that can get divine shield without Megasaur - and has amazing synergy in either a murloc build where you can give all your murlocs divine shields, or in some other divine shield build - so likely Tirion or a Cobalt mech build). In fact, if you can somehow get 2 of them, if the enemy AI is deplorable they can kill everything on their own, which is more than you can say about Cobalt.
The thing which strikes me about Malygos is that he does two different things. Early game, rerolling a token into a not-token is pretty big. Replace a 1/1 with... well... anything else... and it's kinda almost like getting a minion with a Yogg Saron buff. Not as reliable, but something like it. In the late game, with each fill of the tavern, you only expect to see a single unit from any of tiers 4/5/6, so if you're looking for a specific minion on a tier, or two on that tier, using Malygos on a bad minion in the tavern is "almost" like getting a free reroll like Nozdormu.
If Malygos could be seen as half a Yogg early game, and half a Nozdormu late game, that's not too bad. Being both free and flexible seems pretty handy. Maybe that only amounts to mid-grade as far as heroes go, but still.
Wait a minute... Malygos can't target minions in the tavern, can he?
If so, that's a much better hero power than I gave it credit for. I was assuming it can just target your own stuff, like 95% of hero powers.