Blizzard made a brief but important announcement for Hearthstone yesterday with the release of a hotfix that fixed a few bugs. Far more importantly, however, is the fact that developers have reined in the often ridiculous value that can be acquired from Discover cards. The patch was done server-side and does not require any additional downloads by users.

In their announcement, Blizzard states two important points:

  • Discover cards can no longer Discover themselves. Cards that ‘generate a random card’ can no longer generate themselves.

The developers added a comment for these points, stating that the overall change looks to help with keeping games feeling varied, “While generating the same card can be an exciting individual moment, these types of experiences tend to have diminishing returns after a while. These adjustments should make for healthier games against classes with a ton of resource generation.”

The change is sure to also prevent opponents from moments of intense frustration, because nothing feels worse than mastering a strategic deck only to see Archivist Elysiana discover Archivist Elysiana in the late game. Thankfully, this also means there is no more double Evocation, Sky Raider, Renew, and other ridiculous Discover plays. RNG has its place in Hearthstone, but such extreme cases are not healthy for any meta.

For clarification, Shadow Visions will still be able to Discover a second copy, but only if it is currently in a player’s deck. The same would go with Stitched Tracker or Lazul, since the extra conditions make for the pool of Discoverable cards pre-defined by a deck or player hand.

Overall, the changes are sure to make Hearthstone feel better – purely from the standpoint of an opponent generating an obscene amount of value from single cards – but the timing of the change is curious, as the mechanic has been around for years. Discover was first added to Hearthstone as a keyword at the end of 2015 with the launch of The League of Explorers. For nearly five years, players have been able to chain-Discover cards and Blizzard has hardly said a word about the mechanic.

Likely, the potential for problems with the keyword has always been on the development team radar, and now their internal stats may be showing that a deck or two is overperforming thanks to how the keyword worked before. We can only speculate for now, but in the end, it is still great to see this change live in the game.

Source: us.forums.blizzard.com

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