Hearthstone has launched, bringing with it a wealth of changes, new features and sparkles!

Hearthstone is now officialy out of beta with the launch patch adding a ton of new features, animations and changes; this includes the achievement that rewards World of Warcraft players with the long-awaited Hearthsteed mount!

Blizzard has been telling us for the past week that beta testing was coming to a close and for people to get their Gelbin Metatorque card while they still could. Today – Blizzard's regular maintenance day – brought about a surprise launch along with a patch loaded with changes and additions. Here are some highlights:

• Golden Heroes have been added and now can be unlocked after winning 500 Ranked games with a Hero! Track your progress on the deck selection screen in Ranked Mode.
• New card backs have been added.  Collect these by doing awesome things such as participating in each Ranked Season!
• The Hearthsteed mount reward has been added and can now be obtained for your World of Warcraft account! Win 3 games in Play or Arena mode to acquire one of your own!
• You can now connect to other regions (Americas, Europe, Korea, Taiwan) of Hearthstone regardless of the region that is set on your Battle.net account. Account progress and card collections are saved separately per region. This feature will become available once the patch is live in all regions. 
• During each Ranked Season change, players may now start the new season at a rank higher than the default Angry Chicken rank, depending on the rank that was obtained at the end of the previous season. You’ll receive one bonus star for every rank you achieved in the previous season.
• Many new card effects have been added. +3 Sparkles/+5 Shinies.
• Minions who have Taunt and Stealth now have an effect that more clearly indicates that Taunt is temporarily disabled during Stealth.
• Mass disenchanting now has new and improved graphics. Now you can mass disenchant in style!
• If you disconnect from a game, you now have 60 seconds to try and reconnect and pick up from where you left off.
• The Expert AI has been sent to Hearthstone training camp and should now be more challenging.
• If a player’s deck contains all Golden cards, a Golden Coin will compliment your deck if you happen to go second.
• Unlocking a hero now plays that Hero’s emote. Well met!
• Secrets can now only activate on your opponent’s turn.

So as you can see, the patch has improved the ranking system when it comes to end-of-season resets, a change that will be celebrated by many. Players that reached legendary rank the previous season will not be pitted against newcomers or non-legendaries at the start of a new season.

Adding new card backs into the game gives extra incentive to play, along with the Golden Heroes that can be unlocked after a whopping 500 wins. Just two cards have been revised as they were appearing in almost every deck: Nat Pagle and Tinkmaster Overspark. Pagle now has a chance to draw a card at the START of your turn instead of at the end, while Tink is a 3/3 that turns a RANDOM minion into a 1/1 squirrel or 5/5 devilsaur.

For me, the best changes are the addition of the Hearthsteed reward, something you can obtain for your World of Warcraft account upon winning just 3 games in either arena or play mode; also, the fix for bugs that caused creatures already in-play to swap positions, bugging out the battlecry of cards like Defender of Argus.

Currently the patch is now live only in NA, but the official Hearthstone Twitter account has tweeted that they're working on getting the patch out for the other regions as well. So what are you waiting for? Go and play some Hearthstone, and remember to check out Hearthhead for all your Hearthstone needs!

Penny for your thoughts,

Qelric

Follow me on Twitter: @QelricDK