BlizzCon 2017 Hearthstone: What’s Next Panel Transcript

Written by medievaldragon on November 18, 2017. Posted in BlizzCon 2017, Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft

SPELLSTONES

Peter: Unidentified items hit on that: as you draw them, you get that moment where you get to hope: “Oh, this is going to be the perfect one.” For progression, we wanted to capture that sense that as you found treasure, your character would get better, and then you find better treasure, and your character would get even better. That’s really cool, and so we captured that in the Spellstones.

This is the Lesser Jasper Spellstone, the druid’s spellstone, for 1-Mana it does 2-Damage to a minion, and while it is sitting in your hand, and if you gain 3-Armor, it will upgrade. Let us see what that looks like.

Now it deals 4-Damage to a minion. If you gain 3 more Armor, you get to deal 6-damage to a minion. So, 1-Mana deals 6-Damage to a minion. It is a pretty good deal. You might be willing to put some extra cards in your deck to gain armor to take advantage of something like that.

Jasper Spellstone is cool, but some of the other spellstones are the kinds of things you could build your entire deck around. Let’s take a look at Shaman’s Lesser Sapphire Spellstone.

Alright, for 7-Mana you summon a copy of a friendly minion. If you overload a few mana crystals, you get two copies.

Overload a few more, and now for 7-Mana you get three copies of a friendly minion.

If you combine that with something like Snowfury Giant, or Al’Akir, here you get an instant army. Let’s see that in action. So, we’ve a got a Flamewreathed Faceless on the board, we’ve got Sapphire Spellstones on hand, we will upgrade our spellstone to greater; and now, we’ve got the army of Flamewreathed Faceless.

Dave: Brutal. Brutal.

Peter: That is pretty awesome.

Ben: Seems pretty good. So, looking at spellstones, these ended up being a real challenge in communication. Not just communication for the player, but also communication for the opponent oftentimes too. So that they know exactly what just happened to them, such as we just saw.

Now, it’s important of course that this feel very class-specific. When you see a spellstone, then you should know immediately what class it’s ascribed to. Additionally to that, though, what Peter mentioned before is very important — which is you want these to feel as though they’re leveling up. You want to feel that progression as you go. So they really need to have three very clearly defined states. This ends up being a practice in looking at different silhouettes, or colors, and changing the palette of the spellstones slightly, all of which help towards getting that sense of progression.

Ultimately, the bonus of this is you get the golden version of this, and you’ve got three goldens that are distinctly different from one another; and really cashing in on that fantasy of been leveling up, and progression; and ultimately, to some of our favorite effects in the game.

NEXT: ADVENTURERS

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Tomas Hernandez is owner of Blizzplanet.com since 2003. I post news about World of Warcraft, StarCraft II, Diablo III, Hearthstone, Overwatch, Heroes of the Storm, Blizzard Careers, and the Warcraft film.

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I was previously an employee of the OGaming Network (2003), and IncGamers (2008-2010). I was a guest newsposter for GosuGamers (World of Warcraft) a few years ago and for Diablofans.com (formerly Diablo3.com)

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