hearthstone January Update: Arena and Rumble Run Changes

[Starym 3,800]

 

Here comes another update, once again focusing on Arena balance as classes get the appearance rates of cards tweaked so everyone has a comparable win rate. We're seeing Hunters, Rogues and Warriors getting their rates nerfed, while Druids, Mages, Paladins, Shamans and Warlocks get theirs buffed. This is coming after the more comprehensive update last month that saw some bigger Arena changes, including the removal of Mind Control Tech.

We're also getting changes to Rumble Run in this update, featuring better synergy for your shrine with new cards picked, boss deck adjustments and the ability to re-pick the shrine you lost with. Check out the full details below:

January 10 (source)

This Hearthstone update mixes Rumble Run up for a refreshing new change, while also bringing in some updates to Arena buckets together with the cessation of December 2018’s dust refund. Read on for details!

Arena Updates

Following our Arena update last December, we have adjusted the appearance rate of each individual card available in Arena to ensure the overall win-rate of each class remains as close as possible to our ideal of 50%.

• Hunter, Rogue, and Warrior have had the average quality of their Arena picks lowered.
• Druid, Mage, Paladin, Priest, Shaman, and Warlock have had the average quality of their Arena picks raised.

December Update

The dust refunds that were available following our last update in December 2018 are no longer available as of this post.

Rumble Run Changes

Champions, rumblers, and trolls of all sizes! We’ve watched you spend a month punching faces in the Rumble Run, and we think there’s room for some changes based on how things have gone. Here’s what’s new with the Rumble Run.

Weighted Card Rewards

We’ve increased the possibility of synergistic cards for your shrine appearing more often. One of our primary goals with this mode was to showcase the nine troll champions and have you really get to know them. We wanted you to “live the dream” of fighting in the Gurubashi Arena, and to do so, we had to make sure that each Run had its own strong theme. Adjusting the card bucket offerings for decks and re-adding bonus buckets will help strengthen that experience.

Boss Deck Adjustments

One of our design goals with the Rumble Run was to provide huge, overpowered combat. Balancing at such a high power level is a challenge. When it works, it works great. You get epic, monumental combat against overwhelming odds. But when it doesn’t work, it feels random and swingy – like when the AI pulls an overwhelming combo. And since no one likes being repeatedly hit in the face with a club, we’ve pruned some of the power from the boss decks so that your Runs will play out more moderately. We have a lot of data about which bosses have the biggest body counts, and we’ve used that to target the worst offenders. Rumble Runs are now a little easier, but more importantly, they’ll feel a little more fair.

Shrine Selection Changes

In early builds of the Rumble Run, we allowed players to pick a class and shrine before playing. What we found was that playtesters immediately picked their favorite class, gravitated to a certain shrine, and played that shrine repeatedly.

We had wanted to encourage players to try different shrines, especially to experiment with stuff they normally wouldn’t, so we put the current random shrine drafting in place. While that helped achieve our initial goal, it removed that feeling of mastery – the ability to choose a shrine and play with it until you feel you’ve mastered it or exhausted its possibilities.

So we want to bring that back. With this update, whenever you lose, you can expect to always be offered the shrine you just lost with. The shrine that the boss used to beat you in your last run will also be offered, per the status quo.

Some Final Rumble Ruminations

We always prefer to experiment, try extreme ideas, and get feedback rather than play it safe. In true troll fashion, we went big with the Rumble Run and tried some different ideas to give this expansion a unique feel and to capture the thrill of stepping into an arena against known opponents for some superpowered brutality. It’s wallop or be walloped in there, for better or for worse.

One of the things we experimented with—and heard great feedback on—was about the earlier pack rewards for the Rumble Run. Previous Hearthstone missions awarded packs via quests for completing content. For The Boomsday Project, we gave packs out without a quest to celebrate the launch of the expansion’s missions. This time around, we front-loaded the rewards and gave players three extra packs on launch day instead of during the Rumble Run. We felt that packs might be more interesting to people during the initial weeks of the expansion.

As many of you have pointed out, this decision just made the missions feel especially un-rewarding. It’s always more gratifying to earn packs by competing a quest, rather than just being given them. To this end, we’re adding the new quest described above, and going forward, we’ll keep this feedback in mind for the launch of new single-player content.

We had a ton of fun making mode and really appreciate the time that many of you took to write out thoughtful feedback. Everything we learn helps make future content better.

And now, it’s back to the Rumble Run!

[Sach 1]

Finished Rumble Run with Gonk's Armament less than 4 days after it came out. I think it would be more interesting if you made it all 9 classes and another reward were available. Just my opinion seeing as its been done for me for over a month now ?

[SirSlapzAlot 28]

5 hours ago, Sach said:

Finished Rumble Run with Gonk's Armament less than 4 days after it came out. I think it would be more interesting if you made it all 9 classes and another reward were available. Just my opinion seeing as its been done for me for over a month now ?

I second this, I finished it with paladin shirvallah's grace shrine the week it came out. Was also pretty disappointed in the reward tbh but hey...

[Smorod 33]

On 1/9/2019 at 9:27 PM, Starym said:

 To this end, we’re adding the new quest described above, (...)

I can't see any such description in the announcement. I suppose this means they will add "Defeat 3 Rumble Run Bosses" to the pool of possible daily quests, as we already have for Dungeon Run and Monster Hunt solo content?

[Regdorito 0]

On 1/11/2019 at 5:27 AM, Smorod said:

I can't see any such description in the announcement. I suppose this means they will add "Defeat 3 Rumble Run Bosses" to the pool of possible daily quests, as we already have for Dungeon Run and Monster Hunt solo content?

I was wondering this too. You are probably right, they will add the typical solo run quest. It's just weird that they talk about describing a quest when clearly they didn't even mention one until that point.

[Smorod 33]

On 1/14/2019 at 7:41 PM, Regdorito said:

I was wondering this too. You are probably right, they will add the typical solo run quest. It's just weird that they talk about describing a quest when clearly they didn't even mention one until that point.

For what it's worth, I have still not seen this hypothetical new quest, nor did my spouse. I've been checking the Hearthstone wiki on a regular basis but nobody added it to the list either. So maybe it was planned, but not implemented yet in the latest update, and they left a stray reference to it in the news article by accident. The fact that the news article on the Blizzard site has been edited meanwhile to remove the mysterious reference to a new quest would be a confirmation of this.

I hope this is only a delay with the implementation and that the new quest will be added in a future update, hopefully as soon as in the next one.

[Smorod 33]

On 1/17/2019 at 9:17 AM, Smorod said:

I hope this is only a delay with the implementation and that the new quest will be added in a future update, hopefully as soon as in the next one.

The new quest was indeed added with the following update (13.2, February 5th, 2019), even though it was not mentioned in the announcement. The quest name is "Rise to Glory!", you have to kill 3 Rumble Run bosses, and the reward is 1 Classic card pack.