There’s been a lot going on in the world of Hearthstone addressing Arena balance issues . In terms of the community, there’s been a lot of chatter about RNG in the game, specifically in relation to Yogg-Saron, which has proven to be far stronger than anyone really expected, as well as a general sentiment that Call of the Wild needs to be changed.

(UPDATE, September 29, 2016: Yogg and Call of the Wild have been changed, along with several other cards. Details here.)

An option in Totem-focused builds.

Some of the key cards in Malygos Druid.

Mike's Priest list.

“ When we made Dragon Priest, we kind of gave them a curve deck rather than a trick deck. We’re hoping that in the future… we can give them some tricks instead and do some clever stuff…

A fiercely debated card.

“ Yogg-Saron is definitely on our radar… we’ll keep talking about it and try to find a solution that makes everybody happy. It’s pretty high on our priority list to make sure we do whatever’s right.

I caught up with senior game designer Mike Donais and associate designer Dean Ayala to chat about all of the above and more.It’s been pretty good in general, over the last three months. More recently it’s started focusing in a little more heavily on Shaman than I would like.So you’re part of the problem. (Laughs.) …The Shaman is obviously really strong, so that’s something we’re thinking about and talking about. Other than that there’s a lot of decks around the same level, a lot of different classes. Shaman even has a lot of deck types – people play a lot of different cards in the Shaman deck. Aggro, there’s a bunch of different midrange, Xixo’s Totemic Witchdoctor Shaman deck , a lot of different variants, so that’s kind of cool, but even though there’s a lot of different cards they still feel kind of similar when you’re playing against them.There’s a lot of variance going round in terms of – there’s a lot of different classes that you can play. I think that the amount of Shamans right now that are showing up is because, I think part of it is there’s a lot of different variants of Shaman that you can play right now, and a lot of the top players have been toying around with whatever the best list is and they haven’t really figured it out yet. There’s a little bit more Shaman than I would like to see being played right now, but there’s a lot of different versions of Warrior, Tempo Mage is really popular again, Malygos Druid and Token Druid are pretty popular and also very successful, so I think when we have as many decks as we have right now that can be successful that’s a good thing, but just one class in general is having a pretty high play rate right now.And they still do. I think Shaman is just with them now, as opposed to Warrior going away. Warrior still has a lot of really strong archetypes.I enjoyed watching Kripp’s Purify video , where he was not expecting Purify to do well and then he won a whole bunch of games in a row with his hilarious Purify Priest deck. He’s probably the one guy who’s done that, so that was great to watch.I think for me the Malygos Druid was pretty surprising. A lot of players were thinking about the best ways to use Arcane Giant, and we’ve figured out a lot of interesting ways to use Arcane Giant ourselves. I think combining it with Malygos Druid - which has been around for a really long time; people have been trying to put Auctioneer and Malygos and Moonfire in their deck for a very long time now, years. It comes up every so often and I think this specific deck, now that Arcane Giant’s there, and now that you have Yogg at the end game, you sort of hit a critical mass where that deck is finally able to achieve some amount of consistency. That was really interesting to me as well.Yeah, like the Raging Worgen Warrior, Anyfin Paladin, Miracle Rogue, Freeze Mage is still being played, and this Malygos Druid, and all of those decks are very very complex, and all have some amount of success on ladder right now.Well, I know that I’ve watched Dean play through all nine classes in a row until he gets three losses with each class, and that’s a cool concept, I might take that upon me. I’ve played a lot of Priest recently. We both had different versions of Resurrect Priest and we wanted to see which one was better. After I went 8-1 we decided mine was better. (Laughs.)Yeah, sure!You kind of have to get lucky. I felt like one of the reasons I did so well was because I got lucky. Like, if you don’t get your Injured Blademasters or your AOEs you can really just have a downturn. You also need to build it more and more to beat Shaman. Shaman’s almost 20% of ladder right now, so you really want to think about that match-up when you’re building it. And I certainly did that. You want to have a super low curve, such that maybe you’ll lose to the control decks, but that’s the trade-off you have to be willing to make to beat the other decks.It’s a really really greedy deck to play, so I think that when you’re playing the Resurrect deck you’re trying to get to a point where you’re not really playing a bunch of minions so you can all of a sudden start resurrecting these super giant minions that you already played. Either you do the Blademaster thing on turn three or you can wait a really long time against control decks and try and stall out and play a six drop and only resurrect that. So I think that a lot of the problem with that deck, at least for me and with players that I watch, is it’s already an inherently greedy deck and players try to be as greedy as possible. They’ll see – oh, I have two Resurrects and a Sylvanas in my hand. If I can just wait around until turn eight then I’ll be resurrecting Sylvanas and that’ll be great. Of course, it doesn’t always end up working out that way.Or you just die before then because you’re facing whatever aggressive strategy. So I think it’s just a pretty greedy deck. And there’s a lot of different versions of Priest actually. We were looking at some of the statistics today, and I was pretty happy to find out that [while] they’re not performing as well as a deck like, say, the Totem Shaman that Xixo’s running right now, or the Malygos Druid, they’re performing moderately well, and there’s Control Priest variants out there that are using a couple of Doomsayers… and of course Dragon Priest is still there, we saw a couple of Reno Priests running around, pretty high MMR in a couple of the regions. There’s a lot of different decks out there, so that was pretty interesting for us to see.I’m kind of excited about the next set. When we were working on the future set that we haven’t talked about yet – and we won’t talk about in detail – that’s right around when all the Priest memes were starting, when people were starting to understand – oh, Priest is probably the weakest now, we should probably start worrying about Priest and making sure they get some good stuff. I’m happy with where they’re going. One of the things that we think about when we’re making Priest cards is – especially after making Dragon Priest – is, like, what people love about Priest is all the trickiness. I think Rogue and Priest are the two classes where if those are the classes you’re excited about it’s because you’re doing some tricks. And when we made Dragon Priest, we kind of gave them a curve deck rather than a trick deck. We’re hoping that in the future, now that we understand that concept for both Rogue and Priest, we can give them some tricks instead and do some clever stuff, and we’ll explore that space over the next, y’know, years, and the future of Hearthstone.Exactly, yeah.Yogg-Saron is definitely on our radar. When Yogg-Saron first came out, it was super exciting for everybody. People couldn’t wait to play it, they watched the videos and there were more retweets and things like that every time a Yogg-Saron video came out. More people crafted it than any other legendary. It was just loved by everybody. And since then, some people – people who play a lot, follow a lot of videos, tournaments and so on – have had their [opinion shift]. After a few hundred games, maybe not so much. Some people still love it though. But we’re always trying to make everybody happy, so we’ll keep talking about it and try to find a solution that makes everybody happy. It’s pretty high on our priority list to make sure we do whatever’s right.I think it’s too early to figure out. As soon as we’re sure, we’ll definitely tell people. It’s something we want people to, like, not worry about. As soon as we can tell them more, we’ll let you know.Those seem like reasonable ideas. It’s also possible that, like, so many people love it that we don’t change it at all, so those three ideas are the leading candidates. Do something, do nothing and move it to Wild. So let’s just wait and see what happens. Lots of really good suggestions on Reddit too – we’re reading those suggestions and talking about the actual implications of those suggestions, because we want to make sure that people who love Yogg still have something to love, we want to make sure that the tournament scene is reasonable and we want to make sure that people who’ve had enough Yogg, they’re happy too. It’s kind of impossible to make all three of those goals succeed, so we need to figure out where we want to balance out.In regards to eSports, right now if you’re running an event that gives you points towards the World Championship you cannot change the banning rules. And one of the goals of that is so that people have a chance to iterate and respond to really strong cards or really strong decks. And to make it more clear if something really is a problem. If people are too quick to say – oh yeah, Gadgetzan Auctioneer is a problem we’re just going to ban it, then you’ll never actually see if there’s an answer to Gadetzan Auctioneer, or y’know, it’s actually worse than we thought, right? That information is super important, especially at high levels of play. By letting those things happen, the community and Blizzard all get to see if it’s actually a problem or if players can innovate and respond and make new tech.I love seeing other tournament formats, and other cool ideas like that. To me, having a tournament that isn’t linked to the World Championships that explores new space is always fun and awesome, and I think the way we discover new formats in the long run is by people experimenting. Like, the Archon Team League was really cool because we got to see a bit more about teams, and it got us talking about different ways to do team stuff. And I think people should just keep exploring that space and discussing with us what good compromises they can do. Firebat’s a great guy and he’s an awesome caster – one of my favourites – and obviously a great player too. So it was cool to see that happen.We’re not really ready to talk about any of that stuff yet, there’s not really anything that is in development right now, but it’s something that’s always on our radar. In-game tournaments is something we’ve been talking about for, really, years. Everyone from the community has been asking for it, but there’s a tonne of features that are on the radar that we’re always thinking about – what’s the next thing that’s going to make the biggest impact to the largest amount of players? What’s going to be the most fun for everybody? So there’s nothing really to talk about right now on that subject, but it’s a really cool idea.