I really hope there is going to be a replacement for buddies. Maybe ultimates?

When the buddy system dropped it was an exciting new way to play battlegrounds. But I already knew the system was doomed when they revealed it. They simply tacked on too much power into these minions that essentially made them second heroes. Some buddies had very tempo-related scaling effects like greyborough, carieland the like. Others had absurd game-winning high roll potentials like tickatus, yogg, and such.

This was on top of the fact that the buddies were free minions. That means an extra 3 gold every single game. A free triple every single game provided you held onto them. And free stats that you could use to contest the board.

Not to mention that several of the buddies had battlecry interactions that could have been heavily abused to give an insane amount of resources. Faelin + brann, tickatus + brann, Finley + brann. With buddies leaving there is going to be such a power vacuum for heroes like onyxia who needed their buddies to barely survive in the meta.

Honestly, I would be ok with the idea of hero ultimates. Once per game effects, or effects you can charge up just like the buddy meter, where you could activate swingy effects like "improve your hero power to this" or "spin the wheel of yogg". No free gold or triples, which means less high roll, still adds another way to balance heroes.