Maexxna's hero power...

“ We ended up making the normals even a bit easier because a lot of people – the very casual players – had a lot of difficulty with them.

Your compère for the evening...

The intros were definitely the icing on the cake.

Everything's coming up Millhouse.

First Majordomo and then Rag... with 30 armour and THAT hero power!

ALL the Molten Giants.

Not just a pretty face.

Thaurissan's hero power.

Such a clever challenge.

The class challenge gives you plenty of low cost spells but it can be hard to dump them.

I think they might be gang members.

I felt like, for Naxxramas, some of the coolest missions were the ones that made you really think differently about the game, about the decks you were going to build, about how you were going to approach the boss with a new strategy. One of my favourite fights from Naxxramas was heroic Maexxna, so I went into Blackrock just wanting to have a higher percentage of fights like that. Fights that make you say - I can’t just take a normal deck into this fight: it’s a pretty unique thing.Fights like Drakkisath were born out of that desire to make you think differently. Heroic Thaurissan I thought was also different in that way. You couldn’t just take a normal deck in there, you had to bring ways to keep Moira alive. So that was one of my big goals and I actually think the missions in Blackrock were even better than the missions in Naxxramas. I was more excited about them, and I think they worked out awesome. Mike, anything to add?Lessons from Naxx specifically. Hmm. It’s a lot of little lessons. Most of the things from Naxx worked out pretty well as far as the card balance and mission balance, but I guess we learned how easy we needed to make the normals and how hard we had to make the heroics. We ended up making the normals even a bit easier because a lot of people – the very casual players – had a lot of difficulty with them. Only a tiny bit easier. For the most part the difficulty was the same.It’s definitely really cool stuff to think about. It’s one of those things where I think we all wish the content that makes up these adventures is somewhat more replayable, because it’s really fun content. [As for] the right way to make those more replayable and whether or not achievements is the way to do it, and if it is, what kind of timeline are we talking about I don’t know, but we definitely have discussed the desire to make adventures more replayable, to get you a lot more content, because people really like going in there and playing these bosses. We’ll continue to talk about it and I do think that’s something we’ll be exploring someday.That sounds really cool! Again, it’s one of those things – we have a lot of really cool ideas we want to do, how do we do them all? And when do we do them if we decide that they’re awesome? That’s something that sounds pretty unique and different.When we were first starting to think about Blackrock Mountain, and what we were going to do for our next adventure, to me, the only way we were going to make that work was to do a greatest hits of Blackrock, because Molten Core didn’t have quite enough bosses, and I didn’t think any of the other instances and raids in the mountain could hold an adventure on their own, but together, there are so many highlights that are so awesome in the mountain, that this idea of a greatest hits thing had a lot of weight to it. From there we dug down into each wing and thought – what are the coolest fights in Blackrock Depths, what are the coolest fights in The Molten Core? And for Blackrock Depths, for me, one of the most exciting moments, one of the things that sold the dungeon for me was the Dark Iron Arena.We had a lot of crazy ideas for Dark Iron Arena, but once we hit on this idea of 30 legendaries, and then I had the idea to announce each one, that was the selling point of – oh yeah, that’s going to be unique and different, let’s do it. From there we started to brainstorm some really cool intro lines for all of these legendary minions from the other sets.[laughs] I haven’t seen that! Sounds awesome!Yeah, the Mage class challenge is interesting because it’s based on a card that’s not even in the set. Unstable Portal was actually in the previous set, but it’s just such a fun thing to do that we just decided to go with it anyway.We actually had Millhouse Manastorm in that challenge and then out, and then we finally put him back in, because even though it’s super powerful when your opponent plays Millhouse it’s super fun too, and that’s what it’s all about.In the World of Warcraft fight, Majordomo is the second to last boss in the encounter. You have to beat everybody else to get to Majordomo. He gives up when you fight him and walks over to Ragnaros’ fire pool. He summons Rag- ‘oh you guys are going to get it, I’m going to summon Ragnaros.’ Ragnaros comes out and is like ‘too soon! I’m not at full power!’ He kills Executus and sets the stage for this really exciting fight against Ragnaros.To me that’s one of the most memorable moments of The Molten Core – the interaction between Majordomo and Ragnaros – and so trying to figure out how to get that moment into Hearthstone was something that we tried a couple of different ways and this direction was something that – at first – we were not sure if it was going to work because we were worried that players would be really upset when they thought they won and we’re like ‘surprise! You lose!’ but we felt like that moment of excitement and craziness and feeling like we’re breaking the rules was potentially worth it.It was actually kind of a happy accident. We were bringing in waves to give fights a really different feeling where you have to build a unique deck for it, and Mike just said ‘hey, what if we made a deck full of Molten Giants?’ I was like ‘maybe that’ll work, let’s try it,’ so I threw a bunch in, and they happened to go into that fight, and it turns out that because of the mechanics that we chose for the relationship between Majordomo and Ragnaros it actually became a pretty interesting mechanic for a deck, so it worked out really great.…we struggled a little bit with what happens when Ragnaros is summoned… when I think of Ragnaros I think of the eight health minion who deals eight damage to a random target, but if the eight health version of Ragnaros comes out, it was like the less exciting phase [of the fight] was the Ragnaros phase, so we experimented with different amounts of armour associated with Ragnaros at that point…We also had different amounts of Molten Giants in the deck at different times. Sometimes there were a whole bunch and that got a little more crazy than it is now. We also had [a version where] in the heroic version Majordomo had a bit more health, so the Molten Giants would come out a lot sooner, and that made it much, much harder. So we had to tune that really carefully.This is actually a case of us trying to think of really fun mechanics that are going to make you play differently… how do we force you into going back to Collection Manager and thinking up a cool strategy? We came up with this mechanic. In Blackrock Spire Drakkisath didn’t do a lot of really unique stuff. He Cleaved, he Flamestriked, but mostly he was what in World of Warcraft we call a ‘tank and spank’ – where you just tank him and beat him up until he dies. So I felt like this is an opportunity, because he didn’t have a really strong identity - besides from a flavour perspective – in World of Warcraft, so we could build a mechanical identity for him in Hearthstone. So this is a cool mechanical idea that we found a fit for on the Hearthstone side.Yeah, it really mixes up the way you play. There’s no way you can bring a standard deck into this fight and win easily, but when you go back and add awesome stuff it’s really fun and you feel rewarded for deck building.Sure. In World of Warcraft, it’s such an interesting story - Thaurissan and Moira. The king of the dwarves, Magni Bronzebeard, sends you into Blackrock Mountain to rescue his daughter, who he believes has been Mind Controlled by Emperor Thaurissan. You get there with your party, and you kill Emperor Thaurissan and Moira says – ‘I wasn’t being Mind Controlled, I love him, we’re married and you just killed my husband.’ It’s this tragic moment in World of Warcraft and a really interesting story, and so I tried to bring that relationship and that element into the Hearthstone fight. She’s fighting for Thaurissan. She cares about Thaurissan, but you as the player are doing your part to keep her alive.And also I just love the idea of showing you – before you get into the match – that his hero power is ‘deal 30 damage’ and you’re just like ‘what?! How am I supposed to beat that?’ And then understanding as the fight goes on how it works and what the goal is. The goal’s totally different to a normal fight. Mike did you want to talk about the heroic version?Yeah, so one of the things we iterated a lot on for this fight was the text on Moira. At first, she would just attack into your taunts and die. And then eventually, we worked on it using A.I. and different programming techniques to make her not do that, and we came up with the idea that we’re just going to write exactly that she’s never allowed to attack any minions except minions with taunt. And we’ll just write that on the card. It actually took us many different iterations to get there because we were playtesting her where she didn’t mention it, but she sort of worked that way, and it was pretty confusing.On heroic, obviously she does more damage and has less health, which is pretty scary because we also put multiple minions that deathrattle deal damage to your own stuff into his deck. So right away you’re like ‘oh wait, she can do more damage to me,’ and then when the Abomination or Unstable Ghouls come down you’re like ‘oh my god this is unbeatable.’ For a lot of the heroics we try to blow your mind so the first thing that happens is ‘oh my god I can’t believe they did this there’s no way I’m going to beat this’ so if you do beat it you’re like ‘wow, I can’t believe I beat that!’ This is one of those… and she is really hard and it’s a tough fight in general, but once you either buff her or you swap her attack and health or you silence the other deathrattle minions, there’s a lot of different ways to victory, and it’s cool figuring that out.Crazed Alchemist ended up being pretty essential in the fight. And then once you figure that out and add him to your deck you feel smart and then when you actually play and it’s working you feel smart again.In the World of Warcraft version of this fight, Nefarian is corrupting this noble red dragon. Right before he turns him and takes over his will, he gives this huge buff to the players and they basically have infinite mana and infinite resources to just go nuts during this fight. It just felt really unique in World of Warcraft to feel unhampered by a resource that normally is basically everything to you. And so, for Hearthstone, I thought, what’s a way to [recreate this?] Maybe start with ten mana or something, but we were already doing the Drakkisath thing, so just giving you way more cards felt to me like, again, you’re going to want to take advantage of this. A new world of gameplay, where you go back to your collection and build a deck for it.The first time you build a deck for that – particularly on heroic – you’re like ‘I’ll put some really cheap stuff,’ so you put some ones, twos and threes, then you play and you’re like ‘my hand is still getting demolished’ so you go even lower. You put zeroes and ones. Maybe this is right?One of the things we want to do in class challenges is demonstrate some cool ideas that you could have used for that fight, like, ‘you could have gone with this strategy’ and then we provide an example strategy. And sometimes, when you get to the heroic, you’ll remember there were a couple of cards in the class challenge that were really effective, so let me add those to my deck. And this is sort of an example of that. Prep, Backstab, those zero cost cards, or less than zero for Prep. And Gang Up. They’re all ideas that you might want to use if you play the heroic. And it gets people who normally wouldn’t try the heroic an idea that they might not have had to use there.