3 new heroes.
Balancing some old heroes.
2 new minions.
Amalgam change isn't until January.
Balance Lightfang to +2/+1.
Version 1 of stats page. Version 2 is January or February.
Patch notes will be out on Dec 5th most likely.
I haven't seen any updates from /u/mdonais or any other dev about the timer.
Making quick decisions and acting decisively is a key part of the game, but there just isn't enough time to do what you need on certain turns. It's especially bad on mobile and sometimes unplayable there. Even on PC, with certain heroes like Daryl, it's not possible to do what you want even when you plan ahead and act quickly.
Ideally, they would make everyone wait after battle until all battles are finished then everyone would get equal time in the shop. Barring that, they just need to add like 30 seconds to all timers after turn 6. I think that would at-least alleviate the worst of the time crunch. I would much rather wait an extra few seconds after I'm done shopping rather than not being able to finish my planned turns.
We are working on a lot of different fronts to improve this.
We are putting a lot of work into improving this experience. It is a lot more complicated than it sounds since timing is done on the server and animations are done on the client.
Do we know when is the next bg update?
Dec 5
Guess it makes sense that a "collectible" Battlegrounds card would need to be a thing so that it could appear in random generation pools. Would still be nice if they were visually distinct from actually collectible cards that appear in the mode.
Still not sure how I feel about cards that involve cost in this mode, when the gameplay isn't balanced around it and it isn't a visible attribute. It would have been safer in the long run if they made some new shredders that spawn minions by tier instead of cost.
We are going to remove the rarity gem from non collectible cards. It is just a bug or oversight.
Dont you think that would be too good for a 1 star?
Might be 2 star for the unnerfed version.
Seems reasonable to me.
Sure, that makes sense. With a lot of token deathrattles it can feel very hard to get good value when they're making multiple every death.
What's the deal with replicating menace, though? Surely that should make 2/2s?
Just a bug.
These can be looked up at playhearthstone.com/battlegrounds
When designing the golden versions we like Harvest Golem, we tried to choose the version that take less board space. So it makes a 4/2 instead of making two 2/1s. For cards like Mechanical Shredder it made more sense to summon two 2-cost minions though.
Yeah we will fix this.
Because in BWL, if you kill the bosses in reverse order, instead of using Shadowflame, he'll use "Barrel Toss." It's called Nefarious Fire, but he basically drops a huge barrel on the field.
It's a little know Easter egg nod to Donkey Kong.
Surprised anyone knew this, thanks for letting everyone in on it.
I mean you can’t play him without a cleaver. That’s the only strat. I’ve found him better than a lot of the other bottom tier heroes even though he’s rated nearly at the bottom of everyone’s list. I’m at 58xx or so right now.
He can also be ok with Divine Shield because you get the value twice, or even better a Cobalt Guardian with a bunch of ways to renew the divine shield.
Overall though, he will be happy to get a buff.
Great suggestion and we agree. We are working on it.
Dec 5th will be the first client patch where we can address balance. We will continue to adjust balance as we get more data too of course.
Everything on Dec 3rd, but mainly the first one.
We’ve made adjustments to the number of points given for first place. In the original system, you got 240 points for a first place on your first game, and 24 pts for a first place on your 150th (or later) game. Now, you will get 190 pts for a first place on your first game and 95 pts for a first place on your 150th (or later) game.
Wait wait wait wait.. Doesn't that imply that the points gained/lost are completely independent of your opponent's MMR? You just flat out get X amount of points per win and that's it? The one and only thing that matters is how many games you've played so far?
Am I missing something here?
Your opponent's MMR affects the point gain also, my examples are assuming all opponents are the same rank as you.
I do think that the multiplier for playing people far below you or far above you is a bit off right now, so we are gathering some data and adjusting it in the future.
That struck me too. I thought all this time that variations in MMR gain/loss at each place finish (in addition to, early on, how many games you've played) depended on the MMRs of the people you played against — as Donais himself seemed to confirm in this comment:
If the average MMR of the game is lower than yours (you got relatively easy opponents) then 4th place can cause an MMR loss. In these games you need top 3 to gain MMR.
/u/mdonais, could you please clarify?
Yes your opponent's MMR matters too, I just wanted the example in the patch notes to be simple. We are going to post a much more in depth blog written by Tian (data scientist) later this week with some more details.
Elise seems very busted. Very comparable to AFKay. The rest seem okay. Floating Watcher should scale very, very well for demons but that wasn't a huge problem for them to begin with. Really would've liked to see amalgam move to T3 or T4 =/.
Demons were a bit low on actual demons in the shop, so adding a mid range demon seemed like a good idea.
I wonder if Floating Watcher will still scale even if you have a Mal'Ganis on your board. If not, it definitely has a ceiling, since you can't really just keep hurting yourself.
I could see it snowballing quickly with Lich Bal'zial when she's eventually rotated back in, but they may just change her hero power outright anyway.
We are testing her at 2 damage internally and she is a bit better with Floating watcher, and of course stronger in general.
Aww, I loved Lich. Hope she’s back at some point! Though clearly she was hard for a lot of players to figure out
We are considering bringing Lich back at some point with 2 damage instead of 3.