I’m not a Hearthstone player, but you don’t have to be super-knowledgable about a game to know when the internet is angry about it. Of course, when is the internet not mad about a game? Hearthstone fans will know that the Priest class has been faring poorly against the others of late, and the most recent expansion cards don’t seem to address the issue.
One new Priest card in particular has drawn quite a bit of ire. Purify requires you to spend 2 mana and silence the abilities of a friendly creature in order to draw a card. That’s not great, especially considering the variety of other cards with similar effects but lower penalties, and players are seeing the addition of such a weak card to the Priest’s repertoire as a lack of concern about the class’s balance.
Naturally, there’s more to it than just that, and the act of designing and balancing a–pardon the pun–house of cards like the myriad abilities and creatures in Hearthstone always has unintended consequences, which designer Ben Brode addresses in the video above. Despite that, Brode also says that in regards t reading the community’s feeling toward the class and their ability to address those issues with these new cards, well, ”we messed that up.”
Blizzard’s in an incredibly weird position with most of their games. They’re all among the most popular titles in the world, and they’re all online, competitive to some degree or another, and intensely reliant on constant balancing based on the direction the community is going and the way the metagame is shaping up. It’s incredible that their whole lineup doesn’t implode, honestly.
