Team 5 recently announced a number of nerfs designed to address the prominence of Druid in Hearthstone right now, and in a surprise move also took the opportunity to make a few other changes. To find out a little more about the thinking behind the adjustments, I caught up with senior designer Mike Donais and game designer Dean Ayala for a chat.
IGN: It’s great to see you guys address the Druid concern quite quickly. I think it’s much appreciated by the community. I was looking at the latest Vicious Syndicate report this morning and it was saying that 30% of the overall meta is Druid and that climbs to almost 40% at Legend ranks. Can you give me a look behind the scenes at how the team identifies something has to be done, then gets things in motion? How did you decide which cards to hit and what was the testing process like?
Mike Donais: We do a lot of stuff. One of the first things we do is – we’re playing on the ladder every day, and we’re seeing a lot of Druid, that’s step one. And of course, we read Reddit and our forums, and it’s like ‘okay, people are playing Druid, people are talking about Druid, but not everyone’s complaining about Druid. Some people are complaining about Mage or Warrior or Paladin.’ So there’s always a mix. Whenever you go to the internet you’ll get basically every possible answer and every possible opinion.
"One of the tools that we have tells us what the highest win rate draw/win cards are. So that means we can see that Innervate is one of the top three cards in Druid and has been over time." - Mike Donais.
We combine that, of course, with our data. We have a lot of really good data. We have very smart doctors working downstairs in the data department analysing our data. And they produce these really nice spreadsheets where we can look at it in every possible way. We look at Legend and we look at non-Legend. We look at one week, we look at three weeks. We look at the different types of Druid decks. Is it 40% one deck or is it 20% one deck and 20% of another deck? All those things combine. It’s really nice to have all those tools available to us.
And then we start talking. We put up on the whiteboard some ideas, like ‘here are some good cards in Druid’. One of the tools that we have tells us what the highest win rate draw/win cards are. So that means we can see that Innervate is one of the top three cards in Druid and has been over time. We can see that – the other card we nerfed…
Dean Ayala: Spreading Plague.
Mike Donais: Yeah, Spreading Plague.
Dean Ayala: There are so many names internally that it’s hard to remember what we actually shipped with a lot of the time.
Mike Donais: That card, at one point, was called Unleash the Taunts, even though it doesn’t do exactly that. So Spreading Plague was the top card in Druid, which was kind of a surprise, but it makes sense if they’re having challenges with aggressive decks. Having that card helps you beat those match-ups. We looked at other cards. We looked at Ultimate Infestation. It was around the middle for the cards that were being played in that deck – like, the tenth best card? And for a ten mana card like that, there’s more to it than just the numbers, so we have to think about – how does it feel to play against? Is there some reason the data might be skewed because of the fact that it’s a ten mana card? Things like that. So we think about that too and take that into consideration. But that’s sort of how we got to where we got with the Druid cards.
But at the same time we also cared about basic cards. This is something that was in my blog post. We wanted to make sure that the game overall didn’t contain something like 50% basic and classic cards. We wanted to get closer to 25-30%. If there’s basic, classic and six expansions, then basic and classic could be one seventh. I’m fine if it’s more than a seventh, but it shouldn’t be, like, three sevenths.
So in our efforts to reduce that slightly we looked at basic cards, and we saw Innervate’s grade one, the other basic cards in Druid weren’t nearly as good in that deck, things like Swipe and Wrath, Wild Growth. And that’s how we got to the basic cards in the other classes at the same time. We know that [Fiery] War Axe has been in basically every Warrior deck forever, and it’s been very very strong. If you compare it to a card like Frostbolt, then it’s two mana for two Frostbolts almost. So super strong card and it’s also basic and it’s been around forever, and we knew that even if it was a bit weaker it would still get played a lot. We’ve seen other weapons, that were not as good as Fiery War Axe get play in classes that didn’t have Fiery War Axe, like Paladin and Hunter and Shaman. So, in our effort to reduce the basic and classic, we looked for those cards and that’s how we hit Fiery War Axe, and so on down the line.
IGN: What did you think of the community reaction to the announcement? As per normal, everyone went a bit nuts.
"I talked to some pro players privately... and discussed what kind of changes they want exactly... and got some positive feedback." - Mike Donais.
Mike Donais: Well, when you put stuff out there you always expect every reaction on the internet. There’s some people who are like – hey, great, thanks, these are exactly the changes we wanted. In fact, Reynad made a video asking for Innervate to be nerfed a couple of weeks ago, so I’m sure he was super happy with that idea, and a lot of the players I talked to ahead of time – I talked to some pro players privately on Skype – and discussed what kind of changes they want exactly, and talked to them about very specific cards, and got some positive feedback, so I think once things calm down, people will be pretty happy, because these are things that people have been asking for. About a year ago Firebat did this awesome online tournament that he called the Firebat Invitational and it was really cool because he asked people what cards should they exclude, and the most voted-for card from today’s current Standard was Fiery War Axe.
IGN: Yeah, I remember. It is a ridiculously powerful card, and to your point, I think it’s always going to be a two-of in every deck unless you make a change like this. I guess in terms of the community response, there’s a sentiment that at the same time as hitting Jade Druid you also hit decks that are strong against Jade Druid, so I think there’s some confusion about – why now? for those other changes. Not necessarily that they’re bad changes, just the question of – why do it all in one go?
"The current top four decks all got hit, so that means – what’s open now?" - Mike Donais.
Mike Donais: When we do set rotation we make a lot of changes. We rotate three expansion sets, we rotate the five or six cards that move to Wild, and that all happens at once and it creates a lot of change, and a lot of experimentation happens after that. It’s a really fun time in Hearthstone. And I think that having that happen halfway through an expansion is an advantage, it makes everyone have a lot more fun, experimenting, finding out what’s good again. The current top four decks all got hit, so that means – what’s open now? If all those decks lose 2% win rate and everything else below it goes up by 2% then that’s a lot of decks that will be around the same win rate, and people will have to find out what the best versions of those are, and then as they explore that, they can modify their decks to be good against the best ones, instead of being good against Druid.
IGN: That makes complete sense. I’ll tell you what I’m hoping will be good – the deck I’ve been playing almost exclusively for the last two weeks – Razakus Priest. It’s just ridiculous how many tools and how much value can be packed into that list. Heaps of fun.
Mike Donais: Yeah, it’s a great deck, and something that people have wanted to play for a long time, and explore it, and played it even when it was at a low win rate because it was a fun concept, so it’s nice to give people a chance to win some more games with it.
Dean Ayala: I think some of the decks that are traditionally good against Kazakus Priest – or Razakus Priest – is the traditional control decks, like Control Warrior, and a lot of the decks that have been pushed out by Jade Druid, so we hopefully think we’ll strike a balance there where those decks will come back into the fold and be able to fight a little bit, because the Priest deck they’re playing right now is actually very strong, so I think if Jade Druid were to completely go away and the meta were to stay completely the same outside of that it might be just as powerful as Jade Druid is now. But the hope is that the meta shifts a bit, because maybe Jade Druid is played slightly less.
IGN: Let’s talk specifically about some of the cards that were hit. I’m curious whether – from a broad perspective - Innervate has been limiting the cards you can print up until this point, and whether the change will give you a little bit more scope to do things you couldn’t do before, particularly for Druid class cards.
Dean Ayala: A little bit, I mean, Innervate’s a good card with basically every card in Hearthstone. The things that it limits, more than anything, is that it means that Druid decks have two less cards that you can put in them. When a new expansion comes out, we’d like you to be able to play a lot of the old cards, and also a lot of the new cards, so I mean, when you have stuff like Swipe and we had Keeper of the Grove and Ancient of Lore, and if all those cards still existed, every Druid deck is 18 cards that you have to include because they’re so powerful, plus, maybe some stuff from the new set or maybe some stuff from the set before the latest set, and it basically feels like the same deck.
"Innervate, more than anything, just limited Druid feeling any different set to set, which I think is one of the more dangerous things for the meta game in general." - Dean Ayala.
So I think that Innervate, more than anything, just limited Druid feeling any different set to set, which I think is one of the more dangerous things for the meta game in general, because, the last thing that you want is everyone to be playing the same decks from set to set. The thing that makes Hearthstone fun is when you’re seeing a bunch of different things from set to set and game to game. I think Innervate was just hurting a lot in that regard. It was making all Druid decks feel a little bit too similar, I think. If anything, it opens up that a little bit more. All Druid decks might feel a little bit different now. Those two slots will get filled by something else, not the same thing – one player will choose these two cards and one player will choose two greedy cards. It will just feel a bit different. That’s the hope, anyway.
IGN: It definitely seems like it will free up two slots to tech your deck a bit more now. Coming back to something that was touched on in the blog post – the other options you considered for changing Innervate. A lot of people really liked the idea of refreshing two mana crystals so I’d love to get your thoughts on the downside of that idea. To me it would mean that aggro Druid gets hit a little less hard. It means that they can’t Innervate out Vicious Fledgling on one or Bittertide Hydra super early, but they can potentially play a two drop then a two drop on two. But at the same time, if you’re refreshing your mana crystals that goes a little bit against the classic Druid class identity of playing big things, so the card would be less relevant for other Druid builds than the current change. What are your thoughts?
Mike Donais: I think ‘refresh two mana crystals’ is a reasonable card design to have in the game at some point. It’s something that we talked about, so obviously we don’t think it’s that far off. We think it has pros and cons. I think it’s easy to exaggerate and say ‘oh yeah, this thing is terrible’ or ‘this thing is great’, when, [actually,] it’s reasonable. There is the chance that, say we printed a really good two drop and somebody played that on turn two and then another copy of it on turn two, of course that would feel bad, and Innervate has that potential. But maybe one day we’ll put that in an expansion set and it’ll be a card that Druid has, and it’ll be around for two years, and people will use it if their deck supports playing multiple twos on two or something like that. And that’s an okay card to do. It wasn’t right for exactly what we wanted here, but it’s a reasonable design.
"Our objective with changing Innervate wasn’t to take it from an A+++ card to just an A+ card, because both of those... still sort of fit in every deck." - Dean Ayala.
Dean Ayala: Our objective a lot of the time when we make these changes, specifically with cards that aren’t really build-around at all, cards that just sort of go in any deck if they’re powerful enough, our objective with changing Innervate wasn’t to take it from an A+++ card to just an A+ card, because both of those, to my last point, still sort of fit in every deck, which is not what we want. Hopefully there is a space. Counterfeit Coin got used a lot in Rogue when Miracle was going on, and I think at some point there will be some meta where Innervate will be super useful for Druids when they need cheap spells for whatever the new Auctioneer is three years from now, or next year, when we decide to do something that makes having the new Innervate in your deck a really strong thing for you to do because it’s build-around.
And [it’s] the same thing with Fiery War Axe. Our objective isn’t to make them A cards, to nerf them a little bit, because they just go in sort of every deck. We want them to be somewhat build-around. We want you to put Fiery War Axe in your deck when having weapons in your deck is a good idea because there are synergies in your deck, not just because – oh, this is an obviously great card that I’m going to put in my Control Warrior and my aggro Warrior and my any Warrior. So I think that getting them to a point where they’re good in specific situations is our goal, rather than making them still almost as good as they already are but just maybe not as powerful.
IGN: Got it. So the Innervate change is less about Innervating out Ultimate Infestation on eight or Vicious Fledgling/Bittertide Hydra on one than it is a broader decision about freeing up deck slots, basically.
Dean Ayala: Sure. We generally don’t want to have a lot of cards that you just put in any Druid deck or any Warrior deck, just as a general statement. Those are not cards that we’re super excited about making.
IGN: Cool. Let’s touch on Spreading Plague now. I’d love to hear about the initial design phase for that card and what your expectations were for how the card was going to fit into the Frozen Throne meta. In hindsight, it’s a card that shores up a classic Druid weakness, which is dealing with wide boards, and I’m wondering whether you saw that coming or perhaps viewed it more as a piece of a separate Taunt-focused Druid?
Dean Ayala: For me personally, looking back on Spreading Plague, we have stuff in the game, like Eater of Secrets and Golakka Crawler, which I think are answers to – hey, I’m losing to Pirates, or I’m losing to Secrets, so I want an answer to go to in my collection that is good against those decks, but they’re not necessarily great to just put in all of your decks. I think Spreading Plague for me was – during playtesting – was really that. ‘I’m losing to swarm decks so I’m going to go out of my way to put in this card that’s not really good in most situations, and put it in my deck.’
"As a team, we underestimated how good that card might be." - Dean Ayala.
I think that, obviously - we’re nerfing it, right? – as a team, we underestimated how good that card might be, because Druid’s weakness is so much that they lose to swarm, having a card in their deck that doesn’t do a lot, in a lot of games, because really, it doesn’t – a lot of times when you’re playing Druid you’re summoning one 1/5 or two 1/5s, because you’re ahead on board, but because it shores up that weakness so well, and that was one of the only types of decks that Druid lost to, it was worth putting in almost every Druid deck. Maybe not in Aggro Druids right now, but any Control-ish Druid deck, you just put it in because it’s very very very powerful. So, personally, that wasn’t something that I thought was going to happen. I think that I thought it was going to be a bit more niche than it was, so we ended up having to nerf it.
IGN: The blogpost mentioned that there was discussion in the team about changing it to seven mana instead of to six. Did you ultimately decide that the difference between five and six mana is the breaking point? Like, giving fast decks that one extra turn to set up for the kill?
Mike Donais: I think it’s more complicated than that. I think the total of Innervate plus this changes Druid’s win rate and it changes their tempo and how fast they can get set up, so I think it’s a combination of the two. It’s hard to tell how much the combination of these two cards will change it and if Druid just goes down a little bit and the other decks go up a little bit - so there’s a lot of classes very close together - hopefully that’s a good thing. Hopefully that means there’s a diverse meta. We didn’t want to make Druid too weak. We thought changes to two cards would probably be enough, but it was very close to [us] adding two mana to the card instead of one. We weren’t sure, it’s tough.
IGN: Take me through some of the other options that were considered – like changing the stats on the taunts – and why you thought a mana increase was a better solution.
Mike Donais: We actually have other Druid cards that make 1/5 taunts – the two mana Druid of the Swarm and Malfurion [the Pestilent]. Both summon 1/5 taunts and they’re supposed to be the same minion – the Scarab, so lining those all up at 1/5 taunt makes sense to us.
"Increasing the mana cost doesn’t really take away from the cool aspect of the card, but still accomplishes the same goal." - Dean Ayala.
Dean Ayala: Also, I think that often when we’re designing cards, crazy things happening in Hearthstone is awesome. We love it when crazy things happen, but the craziest things we like to keep for the later turns of the game, and I think that summoning 30 health of taunts or 25 health of taunts is a crazy thing for you to do. I think later in the game for that kind of thing to be happening, in general, is a bit better. And it is a huge swing. You have these big 1/5 taunts – it’s hard for your opponent to get through. It’s a big wall. So I think that’s actually a pretty cool aspect of the card. Making them a lot smaller takes away from the cool aspect of the card, to make it more balanced, whereas increasing the mana cost doesn’t really take away from the cool aspect of the card, but still accomplishes the same goal.
IGN: Last question on the nerfs for now – can you confirm that Ice Block will be going into the Hall of Fame with the next rotation next year?
Mike Donais: It’s so far away, I’m sure that what we want to change at that point will change in our heads twenty times, and what the fans ask for will change in their heads twenty times. But it’s certainly on our shortlist.
Dean Ayala: Yeah, it’s something we talk about quite a bit, but I mean, we talk about it so frequently that it would be pretty crazy to confirm anything at this point, because I’m sure that list will change over time.
IGN: Yeah I didn’t actually expect you to confirm it. Just asking.
Dean Ayala: (Laughs) Yeah, nothing should really be set in stone that far away. Things in Hearthstone change so frequently. The issues we have today aren’t going to be the same issues we have seven or eight months from now. Having anything confirmed that far ahead I think would be a bad idea.
Stay tuned for the second half of this interview, in which we discuss Arena and dig into the Death Knight hero cards.
Cam Shea is senior editor in IGN's Sydney office, plays a lot of CCGs and tries to spend as much time as possible in Japan. He's on Twitter.
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