Patch 36.4.2 releases today with balance updates for Hearthstone, Arena, and Battlegrounds.
Dev Comment: Well met! Since the launch of the new Class Sets, we’ve been happy to see a diverse meta and continued experimentation across a wide range of decks. As a result, this patch is fairly small and focused on addressing a few gameplay patterns that have stood out as problematic.
We’ll continue monitoring how the meta develops, and we’ll make additional adjustments if needed. Thanks for playing, experimenting, and sharing your feedback with us.
The Food Chain
Agamaggan
Dread Leviathan
Seismopod
Spiderling
The Forbidden Sequence
Dev Comment: While our standard dust refund policy only applies to cards that receive direct balance nerfs, this update includes changes intended to reduce the effectiveness of The Food Chain. As an exception, we’ll be offering a full dust refund for The Food Chain for a limited time. This exception should not be considered a change to our standard refund policy.
Accordingly, The Food Chain, Spiderling, and The Forbidden Sequence will be eligible for a full dust refund for two weeks following Patch 36.4.2.
Dev Comment: We’ve been closely monitoring Arena performance and have found that several classes are struggling to keep pace with the field, while Warrior and Death Knight have emerged as clear performance outliers. In addition, a bug has prevented cards from the Escape from Violet Hold set from appearing in drafts as intended. That issue is being fixed with this update, and we’re also making targeted appearance rate adjustments to improve overall class balance.
With these adjustments, we’re increasing the appearance rates of cards that support underperforming archetypes. Our goal is to create a healthier drafting environment where a wider variety of strategies can thrive. We’ll continue monitoring Arena performance and make additional adjustments as needed.
The following cards have been removed from Arena’s random generation pools.
The following cards will appear less often in Arena drafts.
The following cards will appear more often in Arena drafts.
Dev Comment: In our last balance patch, we made broad changes across every minion type. This time, we’re focusing on the types at the top and bottom of the meta.
For Beasts, our nerf to Tasty Lobster landed a bit too hard, so we’re increasing its base buff to +2/+1 and moving Hoarding Hyena to Tavern Tier 4 to help the archetype compete.
Self-damage Demons have also been underperforming, so we’re making several buffs across the board, alongside a more experimental redesign to Eredar Escapist (which we’ll be keeping a close eye on).
Quilboars have been among the weakest minion types this season, so we’re increasing Blood Gem scaling to help them keep pace.
Finally, we’re giving Dragons a couple of modest buffs through Fire-forged Evoker and Mighty Dragonbreath to strengthen their late-game potential.
On the nerf side, our focus is primarily on Elementals and Naga. While both tribes have been highly popular, their overall power level hasn’t been dramatically out of line. Unleashed Mana Surge stood out as one of the strongest Tier 6 minions in the game and the clearest Elemental outlier, making it our target for this round of adjustments.
For Naga, Cagey Conjurer and Fauna Whisperer were the main offenders. Conjurer’s change is fairly straightforward, but Fauna presented a trickier challenge. Based on previous metas, changing it to affect only one minion would likely have been too severe, so instead we’re toning down Natural Blessing to reduce Fauna’s early tempo spikes.
While these nerfs are relatively light, our goal is that, combined with the buffs to Beasts, Demons, Quilboars, and Dragons, more minion types will feel both competitive and viable.
We don’t expect to make any major balance changes before the mid-season update, which we’ll be sharing more about soon.
We’ll see you in the Tavern!
Tasty Lobster
Hoarding Hyena
Goldrinn, the Great Wolf
Lurking Leviathan
Eredar Escapist
Soul Rewinder
Ashen Corruptor
Tichondrius
Malchezaar, Prince of Dance
Devout Hellcaller
Bronze Timewalker
Fire-forged Evoker
Unleashed Mana Surge
Utility Drone
Sanguine Champion
Sanguine Refiner
Prodigious Tusker
Fearless Foodie
Jailbird Juggernaut
Private Investigator
Cagey Conjurer
Forsaken Weaver
Drustfallen Butcher
Tyrael
Sanctify has been removed from the Tavern Spell Pool.
Mighty Dragonbreath
Natural Blessing
The following have been removed from the Lesser Trinket pool:
Coral Spear has been removed from the Greater Trinket pool.
Archaic Scroll
Bubble Crown
Gold Mallet
Rune of Transmutation
Stormcoil Sticker
Lionfish Portrait
Nomi Sticker
Lava Lamp
Nazjatar Postcard
Baller Portrait
All-Purpose Kibble
Inductive Gyroblade
Miniature Ship
Trusty Crowbar
Thaumaturgist Portrait