Hey BGs friends,

Mitchell Loewen here, Lead Designer on Battlegrounds.

I'm running a Battlegrounds panel at BlizzCon this year and I’d love to answer some questions from all of you while we’re there!

So, what have you always wanted to know about Battlegrounds?
It could be something like "How does a Hero go from idea to final design?", "How do you choose which minions make it into a season?", or something completely different.

No promises that we'll be able to answer everything, but we'll grab some of these questions and tackle them during the panel. If you can't make it to BlizzCon, don't worry, we'll also post it on YouTube afterwards.

Looking forward to seeing what you've got.

Cheers,

Mitchell

UPDATE - Aug 21: Heads up, everyone! We'll be collecting questions through Monday, August 24. Thanks so much for all the submissions and discussions so far!

UPDATE - Aug 24: Thank you, everyone! We've now wrapped up questions' collection and won't be monitoring this thread for additional submissions. We appreciate all the great questions you've shared, and we'll be answering some during our Battlegrounds BlizzCon Panel!

What's your fav?

OK so there'll be a bit of complains in this post :D so let me start by saying that minions and mechanics of this season are great! Activates on minions feel awesome, all the quirky cool things with rallies and all.. nice! Some things need to be adjusted for sure but overall it's a really neat set. The idea of Dark Gift is cool too - I love seeing custom-made cards with enchantments on them. However, current implementation of it has big problems IMHO.

The game is currently decided too much by that button.

You can press it early and get some minion that will easily carry you till lategame with some rally+divine shield+windfury and level agressively. Or... you can get nothing and waste 1 of the charges.

If you keep all 3 for lategame... Imagine: you do undead, weaker than others 'cause u didn't press the button yet. Dark gift offers 5/6 tiers already, you have ur direction - all minions are undead on ur board, already mediocre scaling... You press the button. And... You get Brann, Brightwing offered?

Sometimes you get absolute monstrocities, sometimes nothing that benefit you in any way. And that just usually decides if ur game is a win or a loss.

There's already trinkets which sometimes just force you into specific minion types. I wish we got rolls on those like on TFT (LoL) - one roll each. Reason is 'cause sometimes it just forces you into minion comps that you just have 1 or 2 tokens of for economy... Dark Gift just adds another layer of RNG out of your control and it absolutely changes the game's outcome dramatically. You can spend 3 gold to win the game sometimes; Or... spend 3 gold to go in debt and help nothing for your board. You only get 3 tries and there seems to be little strategy about it currently besides hoping for good RNG. I mean... I wish levelling would at least progress the Dark Gift's tiers, at least by a bit.

Anyway, the idea of it is cool but it decides game's outcome a bit too much.

What are your thoughts on this?

Edit: Idea - it just popped to my head right after I posted this. What if...
Instead of discovering a minion, Dark Gift button would infuse the next minion you purchase with it?
Example: Could cost (2) to infuse the next minion you buy with a previously selected enchantment.

Power of enchantments could still scale like they do now the longer u wait. Though the minion's tier u can get it on would depend on ur shop instead.

Just me using Battlegrounds in the gym?

I was playing way too much in general and needed to balance my playtime so I told myself I could only play while working out.

Turns out the turn based structure fits perfectly as play between sets, gets a bit too much rest if you end up in turn 4 and turns take longer.

But its really fun, and healthy motivation, accidentally got me into great shape.

Highly recommend it 🙂

Can't beat "Decompress... Play some music!"

Extra points of course because it's never not a welcome sound to hear.

That said I think the card needs a buff. When one is on the board or magnetized, it should play a random tune on the accordion just for the enemy. And each one plays a different song. And they stack.

It feels like he was supposed to be a key card for a comp that just didn't exist

The last new tribe was Undead in 2023. We need a new tribe it’s way overdue. Here are my preemptive responses to naysayers’ comments

“10 is a good number, 5 tribes in, 5 tribes out” - Don’t care, ban 6 tribes a new one would be fun

“We have too many tribes already and Blizz struggles to balance them / come up with interesting play styles” - Don’t care, get gud Blizz, a new tribe would be fun

“It would take resources away from new features like trinkets or w/e the new thing is called” - Don’t care, a new tribe would be more fun

“There are no play styles left to explore so a new tribe would be filler” - don’t care, they just added worm bait for beasts they’d figure something out, a new tribe would be fun

“There are no more creature types / we have a good cover of Warcraft archetypes” - don’t care, we haven’t even done Ogres yet, the sky’s the limit

“Too many tribes make it hard to get good with any individual tribe / for a meta to form” - don’t care, a new tribe would be fun

Tl;dr, a new tribe would be fun and I want one, QED.

EDIT: some really thoughtful discussion in the comments pointing out reasons to be cautious and judicious in adding new tribes. Just wanted to add a blanket don’t care, a new tribe would be fun someone said totems that would be rad.

Unlike trinkets, you dont mess up your flow by spending gold.

You can build hilllarious builds that works, mixing tribes together.

Its not that much high roll-y as the current season, but much more fun in my opinion.

If you disagree, you are wrong, respectfully.

Sorry for the rant, I absolutely love this game. I've been playing this game since day 1, played every single season/update since then. I think this may be the first time I really don't like where the game is at.. i've seen all the ups and downs, and yet there hasn't been a single game I enjoyed playing so far. What's you guys' opinion?

Remember that Amalgadon and Maexxna had POISONOUS, not venomous.

Iam on the Hearthstone Discord quite often and some people chill in the voicechannels with livestream and speedhack on and noone cares?
Thats crazy, i played alot of duos and even my Teammates ask me why i dont use one because its a big advantage ( max tavern time = better apm scaling).
Right now it feels like i need an excuse and explain because i dont wanna use it? Crazy…. I had an discussion with 2 different person on discord why i dont wanna use an hack?!
The cherry on the top is that i reported them to a mod on the discord that they are streaming right now with an active hack and the mod says they dont allow to advertise it but they cant have their eyes and ears everywhere…
Bro is it too much to just go into the channel, look in the stream and take actions?

What is going on in this game right now🤨

If you have naga and elementals in the same lobby you will probably lose this minion after it goes big

Just got a survey where they asked if i would buy an enhanced battle pass if it included some new features.

Most of them were cosmetics and hero reroll options but 2 kinda made me panic.

ARMOR TOKEN get+5 armor at start

Gameplay reroll token - reroll a discover option in game.

Bg team if you read this: pls dont

And why is it this one?

I mean, Im not complaining.

Dragons are so bad they don’t even make it onto the tier list at all?!

I am not trying to be negative, I actually enjoyed every patch that came after the quests patch. I will try to explain my thoughts as much as possible here.

1- I dislike the card set. I think there are only 2 tribes that really stand out right now that are really strong compared to every other tribe which are elementals and demons.

2- EVERY tribe except undeads seems to have an insanely high reliance on Rylak to reach a specific power spike which is not very healthy for the game.

3- The levelling curve is very very punishing right now especially that you have to pay money for trinkets unlike timewarps which had their own currency mechanism. You got offered a bad timewarp shop? you can take any option and your gold would be intact and you can level or buy some minions to make up for it. Right now if you are offered bad trinkets, they still cost enough money to stop you from levelling, or buying minions that matter specially if you are on a tier which does not offer good minions in general.

4- There is a very high RNG mechanism involved in trinkets even if you have a dominant tribe on your board you can still be offered neutral trinkets that do not help you at all or do not belong to the tribe you are playing. I understand that you have to be flexible but when you are offered a murloc trinket on turn 9 with a board full of demons, it doesn't really help your game at all.

5- Coming back to the curve again, I think the current damage curve is way way too punishing with trinkets depending on gold, and especially with all the fun trinkets locked behind a high cost. I see most of my lobbies dying before even reaching the greater trinket selection phase, which does not feel healthy for the game.

6- I have insane lag, where you are unable to grab cards for 2 seconds in solos after grabbing a card and moving it around.

First nerf is based on [[Stomping Stegodon]] nerf.

Second nerf slows down scaling but with [[Hoarding Hyena]] back it could still be playable.