by hsdecktech - 5 years ago     show comments

Senior Game Designer Dean “Iksar” Ayala has been in good spirits since his recent nuptials–as he should be!–and has been a lot chattier on twitter about the state of Hearthstone. Last Thursday, he announced that the Hearthstone team was considering reverting nerfs to approximately 10 cards, most of which were already in Wild or would be going to Wild in the next Standard rotation:

Planning on reverting a handful of card nerfs just before the upcoming set rotation. We’ll share details on exactly what those cards are in the next couple weeks but they currently include 5 Wild cards, 4 Year of the Raven cards (rotating to Wild), and 1 Year of the Dragon card.

— August Dean Ayala (@RiotIksar) March 5, 2020

Then, yesterday, he provided a rough Battlegrounds Ratings Distribution (see how you stack up, percentile-wise based on official, internal data!) and a cool thread about various Battlegrounds stats and design ideas. This is coming just a week after he provided a lot of insight about Wild balance and design notions, and even that came shortly after he started doing informal meta reports and gave us an updated Standard Ladder Rankings Distribution. Dean’s really been on fire in terms of communicating with the community, and we really appreciate all his work on that front!

This afternoon, the official Hearthstone Account joined in

and announced that the first of the nerf reversions would be going live in the next update (which, though not explicitly stated, is almost certainly before the next Standard rotation–in recent years, there has always been a Patch shortly before set release, to allow for pre-release events, and the Standard rotation does not happen until the actual set release date). Sludge Slurper will be un-nerfed, and returned to his prior glorious 2-attack self!

Will this small change be enough to help Shaman get out of the gutter? What other un-nerfs are you looking forward to?

Update: Hearthstone Esports Product Manager, Drew Higbee, has confirmed that the Sludge Slurper reversion will be going live before Masters Tour Los Angeles, but says that will be the only change to Standard ahead of that tournament.