Mike Donais: Yes, and pretty high play rates. Peter Whalen: But surprisingly high play rates, despite that! It’s getting very low win rates right now. Mike Donais: The Mage one is probably the one we would have expected to be better. IGN: Are there any Quests that you expected to be stronger than they are? There’s a decent number of healing cards in Shaman now too, with the 2/4 taunt and a couple of others. There was also Volcano in the set, which we thought was a pretty strong card, but didn’t really go with minion swarms because it cleared your own board as well, so we thought there might be people experimenting with some kind of more control-ish. One of the goals was to have multiple different build-arounds in most of the classes and then have people experiment with those build-arounds and see what they do. Mike Donais: I thought people would experiment with Elemental and Murloc Shaman both, obviously Murloc Shaman because of the Quest and Elemental Shaman because their other legendary was Elemental. IGN: Coming into the set were you expecting people to be playing Elemental Shaman or were you expecting Quest Shaman? And have things panned out differently to your expectations? Yeah, it was pretty sad when it didn’t work with the one Murloc Shaman card in the set. Peter Whalen: It was 15 at some point, then we changed it to be ‘play’ instead of ‘summoned’ and then it moved down to, like six or seven, then it moved back to being ‘summoned’ because we had Call in the Finishers in Mean Streets and we also wanted to make the 2/1 Murloc that makes a 1/1 Murloc – there’s a bunch of Murlocs that make more Murlocs – we wanted them all to work, rather than not work, so it moved back up to ten.
We tweaked Megafin at one point and then went back and we tried a couple of different things in that space, but it was basically this, except the number used to be way higher, and then final design played it and they moved it to the right number. And actually, it was Megafin the whole time, basically. And if you controlled them all at the same time you got some crazy reward.īut we moved away from that paradigm where Quests involved, like, just having a certain board state and so they were iterative things that you built up over the course of the game, and then, once we changed to that it was Murlocs the whole time. It was ‘control a minion’ then each of these different minion types, so, like, you needed a Totem and a Beast and a Murloc and an Elemental and a something else. Peter Whalen: There was one Quest super early, before the paradigm of the Quests was worked out. Was that quest always built around Murlocs or did you consider overload or any other mechanics? IGN: It has massive upside in Paladin – you can wind up with several Tirions, particularly with the right Secrets from Hydrologist. It had some extra benefits in Paladin and other places as well, but that was the main thrust for putting it in the set. It was a little bit boring beforehand, so Stonehill Defender helped out with that a lot. Stonehill Defender came out of trying to make the Warrior Quest more fun to play. IGN: Once you’d settled on the taunt theme for the Warrior Quest, did you have enough taunt cards to make that work, or did you have to design some more? This set as a whole is relatively heavy on taunt. Games actually end once you finish your Quest. It doesn’t make it so that games end in fatigue. There’s some interesting decision making on your part for – how do I want to clear so that I can hit the hero power? How do I play around whatever the hero power hit? And it does – it drives the game to a conclusion. There’s counterplay to it – you put a whole bunch of minions out. And when we played it it’s actually a lot of fun. And once you have Sulfuras what does it do? Well, giving you Rag hero power made a lot of sense.
Also, we were looking at iconic weapons from World of Warcraft – what were some of the things that would feel cool as Quest rewards? And Sulfuras being inside the volcano here really stuck out to us as something that would be awesome to find. This was one of the directions to do that. Once you finish your Quest the game’s going to finish pretty quickly.
Peter Whalen: In part, I mean, a lot of the Quest rewards are designed to push the game to a conclusion. Is attaching Rag’s ability to Warrior part of a thrust to ensure that games aren’t getting long and drawn out and going to fatigue? A way to speed up the end-game? IGN: It’s definitely Medivh’s time to shine.
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