On Tuesday afternoon, the Hearthstone development team shared a blog post about what's coming in their auto-chess mode called Battlegrounds. Within the post, four new heroes (which were recently revealed via data miners) were confirmed and the four heroes they would be replacing were made public. Additional design decisions were brought to light as well.

According to the blog post:

Bob the Bartender has been hard at work keeping the tavern tidy for Hearthstone’s heroes, and it appears that the news has started to spread. Hearthstone Battlegrounds is about to add some extra chaos—and a few Explorers—with a new update coming to the mode today.

Sindragosa, Elise Starseeker, Brann Bronzebeard, and Sir Finley Mrrgglton are the latest heroes to enter the Battlegrounds. Each one comes with a new hero power to give you more options to push toward a first-place finish. Read on for details on these new heroes, as well as some additional updates coming to Hearthstone Battlegrounds.

For details on the hero powers of the three League of Explorers and Sindragosa coming to Battlegrounds, click here.

In order to keep the hero pool at 24 playable characters, the Hearthstone team removed King Mukla, Giantfin, Millificient Manastorm, and Lich Baz'hial from the game for the time being.

Balance Changes

As the meta has begun to settle since the last round of balance changes took place, the Battlegrounds team is looking to keep things fresh by tweaking the Tavern Tier numbers of four existing units. The patch, which is live at the time of this post, requires no additional downloading time so players can begin playing right away.

Primalfin Lookout, a valuable tool to buffing existing murlocs (or Amalgams) is being moved from tier 5 to tier 4.

Voidlord, a big-bodied taunt machine, is becoming more accessible as it moved from tier 6 to tier 5.

Junkbot, a win-condition in many powerful mech decks, is being bumped up from Tavern Tier 4 to 5.

Coldlight Seer, a murloc that buffs the health of others is dropped from Tavern Tier 3 to 2.

According to the development team, these changes are going into place to provide a more diverse meta going forward:

We wanted to buff both Demons and Murlocs, so we moved those minions down a Tavern Tier. Junkbot was a bit too strong for Tavern Tier 4 and often made it so mech players never had a good reason to upgrade to Tavern Tier 5. With these changes, we think the minion types are closer together in power level.

December's update

The holiday season is a busy one at Blizzard Entertainment and the Hearthstone team isn't exempt from that. In early December, the card game's next expansion, Descent of Dragons, is going live on the 10th and will introduce more than 130 new playable cards. Around that time, the Battlegrounds team will be planning their next patch as well.

While the preview is subject to change, the development team shared a bit of insight into what they're looking to do:

-We’d like to continue balancing minions and Heroes based on how they’re performing. We don’t have the changes solidified yet, but we’ll be watching things closely and will have more to say soon.

- We’d like to continue rotating new Heroes into the game while rotating some existing Heroes out. We have some recognizable faces we’re working to include in December.
- We have two new minions in the works that we’re currently planning to include in the December update: King Bagurgle, a brand-new card, and Floating Watcher, which you may recognize from the Goblins vs. Gnomes set.
- We have been working on the first iteration of the Stats feature, to give you more insight into your performance. We’d like to surface some fun stats, like how many Triples you’ve created, your top five Heroes by wins, and more. An updated version of Stats will be available next year.