I’ll concede that Blizzard was right. The Dalaran Heist is truly their most ambitious adventure. By combining the narrative linear levels of classic adventures with the newer deckbuilding mechanics, The Dalaran Heist is the biggest and best adventure yet. - Shawn @CD
The Hearthstone development team kicked off a new week with a bang, releasing details of the upcoming 18.0.2 patch coming in a few days. In Monday's blog post, more than a dozen changes to champions and units in the title's Battlegrounds game mode went along with two cards receiving nerfs in the traditional card game.
At this point in the six-year history of Blizzard Entertainment's collectible card game, Hearthstone, it's almost routine that long-time professional player and content creator David "Dog" Caero will, at one point or another, break the speed at which he plays. Back in 2018, Dog was known for mastering a one-turn-kill combo that required as much APM (action per minute) as it did brainpower to pull off. For a casual player tuning in to watch his stream on Twitch, it was mesmerizing and inconceivable to see so many moving pieces on a 2D board in a game that, by definition, aims to limit the number of actions a player can make in a single turn by having a mana cap.
Fresh off their holiday break, the Hearthstone development team was back to work this week and on Wednesday afternoon they revealed the upcoming balance changes coming to the traditional card game and Battlegrounds, the auto chess mode. Titled "16.0.8 Balance Update," the blog post was shared on Blizzard's official forum and outlined some changes scheduled to go live later this week. In total, seven cards from the traditional card game are being nerfed and one from Battlegrounds.
Well needed, very thoughtful balances, compared to expansions that seem like they weren't playtested for even one second. Design and pre-testing is horrendous over at Blizzard Team 5, but the nerfs and balance changes have been good for past year or so.
