#tavernbrawl

The Disagreement

Brawl: A Brawl of Fire and Ice

First Ran: July 25th, 2018

Rules: Constructed Deck. Solo PVE. Fight Ragnaros the Fire Lord and Ahune the Frost Lord, they are fighting over who gets to the be boss and keep shoving each other out of the way.

Player Footage: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dSEYgVLsCYM

Background: For Fire Festival that year I really wanted to have a big fight between Ragnaros and Ahune as they were antagonists the previous, each hosting their own Festival. I wanted to bring back that rivalry in a different way. Ahune had been pushed out and was trying to force his way back in by being way too friendly, all of his dialogue is like “oh we’re such good friends Ragnaros!” “WE ARE NOT FRIENDS!!!” Was a lot of fun to develop this dynamic. I think I learned more about balancing for single player from this brawl than any other. I wanted players to get through 2 60 health pools and have them feel like threats, it all started much harder than I intended but through iteration I brought them back down to a more reasonable difficulty.

Successes:

+ Players enjoyed the difficulty, lots of positive feedback about the challenge of it all

+ Players enjoyed the VO lines, brought a lot of flavor to the encounter

+ The theming of it came through very strong

Lessons Learned:

- Single player content is always pretty complicated to develop, with multiplayer it’s easier to just make things symmetrical. Here you have to really build out the enemies in a different way. Always account for more development time for balance with these.

Brawl: A Less Friendly Game of Chess

First Ran: June 27 th, 2018

Rules: Constructed Deck (6 cards). An update to the classic Chess Brawl and mission from the One Night in Karazhan adventure. Your 6 cards are effectively your “cheat” cards and can change the board dramatically.

Player Footage: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H09O0zfaVc0

Background: I work a lot with Pat Nagle, famous Blizzard designer and my boss. He created the original Chess event in World of Warcraft in the Karazhan dungeon, he also created the Hearthstone variant. In some random meeting he blurts out “We should make chess where you can build your deck!” and I went out and implemented it. Decided to keep it fairly limited so that it plays mostly like normal Chess and it makes those few cards more impactful. It really didn’t go through many iterations, one of those rare brawls that just works.

Successes:

+ Players enjoyed the strategy of choosing cards, it developed its own meta.

+ Players thought it was cool to revisit older brawls with new twists like this

+ Was very easy and straightforward to implement

Lessons Learned:

- Players always expect the minions to do damage equal to their atk and were disappointed when they realize buffing the minions did very little.