Next in line for our “Things You Would Change About…”article we’re looking at one of the newer but most popular trading card games/card collecting games around, Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft from Blizzard. In the game we get to play as a variety of Heroes, each representing one of nine classes from the World of Warcraft MMORPG, where you can build decks, earn cards and use strategy to defeat player opponents in exciting one on one PVP matches. The game has been released for a little over a year and in that time we’ve only seen a handful of changes to the core game, well here’s a list of things we think would go a long way to vastly improving the title:

• Add New Classes - There are currently two classes missing from the roster. Death Knight and Monk are the two newest classes to be added to World of Warcraft, but they were implemented before Hearthstone even released so we see no reason why it’s taken so long to at least incorporate at least one of these classes into the game so it has more synergy with the MMORPG. Whilst adding a new Class requires new cards unique to that deck, and so it quite a lot of work, it’s one of those things that everyone just seems to be waiting for; particularly older players who have played their other classes/decks to death. Adding a new class would really change up the meta and players would once again have to learn new strategies, really shaking up the competitive side to the game. With any luck if and when they do come they’ll be incorporated into the basic free to play game and hopefully won’t force a tragic “pay to play” situation with the recently announced “alternate hero” cosmetics.


• More Game Modes - The available game modes are quite limited. In the game players can either choose to play the Solo Adventure (PVE dungeon mode), Duels (friendly battles with their friends) or, for the main PVP the choice of Play mode and The Arena. Play is the random matchmaking pairing players of similar skill levels up together whereas The Arena is for more skilled players and costs gold or cash to enter; and that’s all there is. After more than a year since release and earlier considering the open beta and pretty full and extensive closed beta, we find it worrisome that no new game modes have yet been added. What we want is a 2v2 or 3v3 style PVP Co-op to make the game more social and team based, or an Auto Tournament mode where players can get into their own Tournaments with random players for a survival knockout game, a feature that even TCGs that have a tiny fraction of the development funds of Blizzard appear to have been able to put out. The game modes have become very tiresome and really need freshening up.


• New Ladder System - There are some core problems with the way the Ladder system works. Each season the ladder refreshes and players essentially start at the bottom and fight for their position, the experienced players have a pretty good idea on the meta now and which decks can help them breeze through early games against inexperienced players and so it seems to be the same players always reaching the top. More so with the refresh it means veterans do end up playing against newer players, which directly affects the new players early positioning. What we’d like to see is a way to stop those players who finished high having to play against previously low ranked players, some sort of tiered format or League based system where with a new season players only need to play against those players in the same league and a handful of positions from the league directly below, giving them a chance to rise, and similarly a handful of positions from the league directly above.


• More Deck Slots - The nine deck limitation is ridiculous. Blizzard have actually said that adding in the possibility for more than nine decks is too confusing for players, aside from the fact that no one believes that’s the reason and that it’s pretty insulting to the playerbase, it’s a pretty stupid deck cap anyway. With nine classes if players want to play all the Classes/Heroes then they can only ever have one deck each, or they can have multiple decks for a single class at the expense of not having any pre-made decks for the others. The fact is that adding more deck possibilities means that those who want to take advantage of the feature will, and those that don’t (or might be too confused…) wont, and means that players don’t have to destroy their made decks just to try something new, then rebuild them later. In all honesty we do expect more Deck options to be added when they get around to it, but no doubt they will be purchased micro-transaction items, this is Bli$$ard after all.


• Hero Gear - We want to be able to customize our Heroes. This isn’t the most original idea and there’s plenty of other TCG style games that have already done something similar, but for a game based off the MMORPG that focuses on acquiring gear and sets we’re surprised this wasn’t in as one of the core features. The option to earn equipment that you can add to your heroes gear slots to give them perks (start with an extra card, be able or have more cards to choose in your initial hand), stat boosts (extra mana/health points) or weapon attacks to change a Heroes basic class ability. Whilst it would, for a time, create some interesting balancing issues it would greatly add to the level of strategy of the game and really make people have to start rebuilding and injecting some freshness into the game.

So that’s what we’d change with Hearthstone, but more importantly what do you believe should be changed? What do you think could/should be added to improve the game? What would you add to your own personal wish list? Let us know what you think in the comments below!

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 16th, 2015 at 12:44 pm and is filed under Articles, MMO News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.