Blizzard tweaks Heathstone cards, ranked mode ahead of full release

Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft, Blizzard's furiously addictive collectible card game, will see another round of tweaks before its final release.

This time just two cards have been altered - Tinkmaster Overspark and Nat Pagle.

Tinkmaster has been buffed to a 3/3 (up from 2/2) and has an updated character text for its Battlecry power of transforming another random minion into either a 5/5 Devilsaur or 1/1 Squirrel.

Nat Pagle now has a 50 per cent chance of drawing a card at the start of your turn, rather than at the end - in an attempt to make it easier to counter.

Lastly, Blizzard will implement a change to Ranked Play where extremely high level players will no longer be fully reset at the end of each season.

Every month, all players have seen their Ranked Play levels returned to zero, leaving inexperienced players suddenly facing a huge pool of the best. Not fun.

From now on, Legend, Innkeeper (Rank 1), or Black Knight (Rank 2) players will start at Questing Adventurer (Rank 16) rather than Angry Chicken (Rank 25).

There's no word on when Hearthstone will finally lose its 'beta' tag - but Blizzard has hinted that it'll be fairly soon.

"The release of Hearthstone is on the horizon, and we have a couple of additional changes to certain cards we feel it is necessary to implement before the game goes live," Blizzard wrote.

"As we've stated, we plan to make very few card changes when the game goes live, and we will only make changes to cards if they are absolutely necessary. Making these changes now will ensure a more balanced state of the overall game into release."