Blizzard confirms that Hearthstone will "probably" get new classes in future

Since the launch of Hearthstone beta, back in 2013, Hearthstone fans have been wondering if the game will eventually get new classes, beyond the starting 9 that were there from the beginning.

And in the era of Ben Brode and his leadership of Blizzard's Team 5 (department in charge of Hearthstone), new classes were something which was categorically dismissed, as something which would be hard to balance.

Nonetheless, it seems that Blizzard realised that fan's favourite characters and classes are their trump cards for when things aren't looking good for the game, and so they added Demon Hunter with Illidan Stormrage as the hero back in March last year.

During one of his recent Q&A sessions on Twitter, Hearthstone's lead designer Dean Ayala was asked what are his thoughts on Demon Hunter's implementation and are there any plans to add another new class to Hearthstone.

Purely from a player-metrics perspective, it seems like DH was successful. I say *seems* because there are a lot of variables. Hard to understand if success was because players love having a new class, because there was a higher marketing spend during that time window, etc.

— August Dean Ayala (@IksarHS) January 28, 2021

 "Purely from a player-metrics perspective, it seems like DH was successful," Ayala wrote. "I say *seems* because there are a lot of variables. Hard to understand if success was because players love having a new class because there was higher marketing spend during that time window, etc"

While fans were indeed quite happy with the addition of a new class, Demon Hunter brought a lot of problems in terms of game balance, as it seemed that the class had everything at its disposal. There were 13 waves of balance changes in 2020 and most of them were in some way related to Demon Hunter and many of Illidan's problematic cards.

Demon Hunter's overtuned cards were a huge problem, but the addition of a new class was seen as a welcome change (Picture: Blizzard)

Still, the reception was overall positive and the addition of Hearthstone's 10th class has been seen as a great change, so fans are now naturally expecting that we might see more new classes, particular those which were added to World of Warcraft via expansions, like Death Knights and Monks.

"But overall, our team is positive on it and will probably do it again," Ayala added and practically confirmed that Hearthstone will get new classes at some point. "It's just not something you want to be doing every year. We've talked about Death Knight, Monk, or even the idea of inventing something new."

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Furthermore, Ayala said that "there is no new-class in development today", but a lot of coding and infrastructure has been done when they added Demon Hunter, so adding another class should be easier next time, in terms of pure implementation.

Based on this, there are currently no new classes in development, but we can probably expect to see the next new class in around two years from now, maybe with the standard rotation in 2023, which usually occurs in late March or early April.

The omission of a Pandaria-based expansion might mean that the region is kept for the release of the Monk class (Picture: Blizzard)

It's interesting to see that they are even considering a completely new class, not just Monks and Death Knights. Still, our guess is that the next new class will be the Monk class.

Firstly, because we technically already had Death Knights with the Knights of the Frozen Throne expansion Hero cards, and secondly, because it is quite conspicuous that Hearthstone still doesn't have any expansion based on the Pandaren race and Pandaria, the home of Warcraft monks.

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No matter what the new class will be, it is nice to see it confirmed that we will be getting a new one, even if it is two years from now.