Hearthpwn

Presumably you want to use it when you have a board of minions (like murlocs) that can attack, so you can trigger some of the deathrattles immediately, make some trades and end up with an couple of big minions and board advantage at the end of the turn.

Not to defend the big corporation, but there are a couple of reasons for these currencies that aren't related to "stealing" from players by leaving you with a couple of dollars worth of premium currency after you make a purchase.  They're about reducing transaction costs by reducing the number of interactions with financial services providers players make while purchasing small in-game products.

Credit card transaction fees eat up a lot of the revenue for small purchases like $1.50 BG skins.  A lot of small stores will not accept credit cards for transactions below a certain threshold, while bigger stores just jack up prices on smaller items to cover credit card costs.  Spending $100 on a bundle of currency once and then buying things with that currency a little at a time winds up being much more profitable for Blizzard just because they don't have to process a credit card transaction for every purchase of a couple of dollars worth of packs or skins or whatever.The second reason is to duck the commissions on various mobile app stores, which can reach 30%.  If Blizzard can convince mobile players to download HS PC and make their transactions through the PC game instead of mobile versions, it can make a LOT more money selling the same stuff to the same players for the same price.  

What is missing from this, and why the anger is justified, is that there is no incentive for the players.  If they gave us $10 or $15 in free currency for every $100 we spend on Runestones (without jacking up prices on us), that would go a long way toward calming the community down.  As it is, there is no incentive to buy big bundles rather than paying as we go, and there is no incentive to make purchases through HS PC rather than the mobile app, so there is no mechanism for Blizzard to capture many of the best efficiencies of premium currencies.

This game absolutely does not need a report feature.  People who are not on your friends list cannot communicate with you.  If someone friends you and then sends you a message you don't like, you can simply unfriend them and then they cannot talk to you anymore.  This is a perfectly self-policing system with a completely effective user remedy for any toxicity.  Some people seem to just want to have a teacher to tattle to.  

The only toxic behavior that is even arguably a problem that you can't easily solve yourself is roping, and that needs a change to the rules for the rope rather than punishment of players.

I'm of the opinion that Kazakusan is a win condition for a dragon deck, not for an all-spell deck or for any deck that draws itself into fatigue.  So I am fine with this and will keep the card.  

The big problem with Stormwind is that it introduced reliable game-ending win conditions that are faster than previous game-ending win conditions.  In Standard, the other pieces may not be in place for some of them to consistently complete on turn 5 or 6, but in Wild they definitely are.

Previously, OTK decks have been strong in both formats.  Notable ones are Mechathun, Togwaggle, Malygos Druid, Raza/Shadowreaper Anduin priest and Druid and Mage time-warp Exodia.  As decks like these rotate into Wild, it’s fun to get new decks with similar goals, but we shouldn’t get stronger, OTK decks that get their win conditions sooner.

All of these quests finish the game around 9-11 and are vulnerable to aggro and often midrange tempo decks while beating greedy control/value decks.  But Stormwind has replaced 4-5 card OTK combos that you have to draw into with win conditions that either start in your hand (quests) or can be tutored from your deck (ignite, boar).  These are going to be super-problematic in Wild because Wild has more card draw to find combo pieces, more pirates for warrior, and more spells to quickly trigger the hunter quest.

The best Stormwind OTK decks now achieve their win condition on turn 6-7 which means that only extremely aggressive decks can beat them, and not even super-consistently, midrange decks are too slow, and control value decks are way too slow.  In the past, there has occasionally been a broken wild interaction, but the game has never been like this.  Before the current expansion Warriors were playing stuff like Rattlegore!

The game needs a big nerf patch for anyone to be seriously excited about Alterac valley.  I don’t think anyone will be sad or disappointed to see the quests nerfed more or less out of existence, especially with dust refunds coming just in time for the new expansion.

The people who walked out are the same people who are putting nonbinary wizards in Warcraft and centering black and female characters in World War 2 military shooters even though there were very few black soldiers in WW2 combat roles and no women.   I hope Kotick cans the lot of them.  A lot of the people who are responsible for making the games good have been run out of these studios and if someone doesn't put their foot down, they'll wind up being EA when they're done hollowing themselves out with reckoning after reckoning.

Quote from Krishno_NL >>

how can you tell which characters are done with all their tasks?

 When you get to a mysterious stranger with them in your party, you never get a task for them.  Otherwise, you just kind of have to remember.

I've farmed Rend probably 50 times over the last few days grinding Edwin coins.

As some others have posted, Diablo and Cairne are the optimal Rend finisher.  If Rend has a board full of Dragonkin, Fire Stomp will go off seven times, and none of their moves are faster than Cairne's Endurance Aura.

My strategy is to use Geddon, Rag, Tony to start off, with Cairne, Diablo, and either something I'm leveling or Edwin for a chance at extra coins behind them.

What you do first turn is fireball with Tony to start the combo, Use Geddon's AOE, and then use Die Insects on Rag, because it's his highest damage move and it doesn't matter what you hit, unless they have a potato, in which case you hit that with everything.  Usually,  enemies target your lowest health Merc which will probably be Rag.  He should survive turn 1.

Turn 2, Rend will put his instakill on Geddon.  This is fine.  Just hit them with the same combo, except you may want to use Rag's faster move, just to make sure it goes off before he dies.  Usually, Rag and Geddon will both die this turn, which fills the board, and gives you room to bring in Cairne and Diablo, and then you can just Aura+Stomp to win. 

If only one thing dies turn 2, you may want to bring in whatever your sixth thing is, and try to set up two slots on turn 3, just to be safe.   

The great thing about this lineup is that Rag+Geddon+Tony are also the best farming composition, and can clear most packs in the bounty in one turn, so this farms MUCH faster than nature or holy or shadow comps. I can run this in about 10 minutes.  I'm planning to max Edwin (and cookie and sneed) and level all my mercs to 30 doing this.

It's definitely a bug and will be fixed.

I’ve been paying close attention to news about Mercenaries, and here’s what I have pieced together about how the Mercenaries economy works.  I think this is pretty comprehensive.  I also posted this on Reddit.

Mercenaries drop from packs.  Every pack has a guaranteed mercenary, and the other four drops in the pack may be an additional mercenary, a portrait or 35-45 coins.  You will get an epic mercenary approximately every 5 packs and a legendary approximately every 20.  (https://us.battle.net/support/en/article/000032545)

Each mercenary has three portraits.  I believe but am uncertain that equipping a portrait gives a mercenary card cosmetic effects comparable to a golden Hearthstone card. In addition to their three golden portraits, the legendary mercenaries each have a rare (10%) diamond portrait with more elaborate animations.  These are likely to be expensive to collect, but Blizzard may add them to bundles.

There is duplicate protection on both Mercs and portraits.  Once you own all the Mercs of a particular rarity, merc drops of that rarity will provide portraits instead, and once you have all the portraits of a particular rarity, you get coins instead, which means that after you collect all the rare Mercs, which should happen within 15 packs, since you get 6 rare Mercs free from the tutorial, a common pack outcome is likely to be 4 stacks of coins and a portrait.  Once you have all the rare Mercs and all their portraits, you will get coins instead, so after around 60 packs, you can open packs that will contain nothing but coins.

The coins are exclusive to each merc rather than a universal currency.  Jaina upgrades with Jaina coins, Sylvanas upgrades with Sylvanas coins, Diablo upgrades with Diablo coins, etc.  

Each merc has 3 abilities to upgrade and 3 equipment items. The upgrade costs for each ability stage, according to datamines, are 50, 100, 120 and 120.  For equipment, the cost is 150, 180, 200.  This means it costs 390 to upgrade each ability fully and 1170 to fully upgrade all of a mercenary’s abilities, and 530 to fully upgrade an equipment.  A merc can only have one equipment in use at a time, so they’re effectively fully upgraded once they have one maxed, but you may want the others to run different comps or synergize with different teammates.  Total cost to fully upgrade a merc is 2760 coins based on current datamines.

You can also craft mercenaries at a cost of 100 coins for rare Mercs (which you should never have to do since you will collect all Mercs of this rarity quickly), 300 for epic Mercs and 500 for legendaries.

In addition to being found in packs, coins are the loot rewards for bounties.  Bounties are Slay The Spire-style roguelite dungeons with random encounters culminating in a fight with a preset boss. Completing a bounty awards coins for some of the mercenaries you are using in your party, as well as coins from a pool of other Mercs. You can see which other Mercs have coins available from a certain bounty on before you start, and you can grind the same bounty over and over again to target coins for a specific merc until you can craft them.  Bounties appear to drop 4-5 stacks of coins ranging from 5-25 at the completion of a bounty.  Kripparian, Trump and other content creators got some time with a pre-release version of the game, and Kripparian believes it will be possible to collect every mercenary by targeting the bounties that drop their coins and just grinding it over and over, since there doesn’t seem to be an energy system or other restrictions on how many PvE missions you can do. However, it looks like legendary coins may drop in smaller quantities than other rarities’ coins from bounties, and if this is the case, it will take a lot of grinding to get all the legends.

There is no information about whether there is duplicate protection on coins; i.e. whether you will stop getting coins for a particular merc once you have bought all available upgrades for it.  

Each Mercenary has a chain of associated quests they will give you when they visit your campfire, and completing these quests will award coins and packs — three packs and 1500 coins for the campfire quests associated with each mercenary. (https://playhearthstone.com/en-us/news/23707669?utm_source=desktopweb-news&utm_campaign=web-us-desktopwebnews&utm_medium=internal&utm_content=23699737). This mechanism alone, which is worth 153 packs, should be sufficient to get most of the Mercs for a completely free player, though grinding through all the campfire quests will likely take a lot of time.

It does NOT appear that there is a heavy gold cost to upgrading the town.  In the build the content creators played, the only gold cost they saw was a 200 gold fee to unlock Heroic Mode bounties.

So is it pay-to-win?  Well, it’s certainly nowhere near as abusive as games like Raid: Shadow Legends, where legendary characters have less than 1% drop rates and level ups require convoluted processes of destroying lots of excess, paid characters.  Whales in those games have spent thousands of dollars and still have only limited selections of legendary characters.  In Mercenaries, you can obtain every mercenary on day 1 if you open 300 packs, so some heavy Hearthstone players could buy everything with gold. 

Kripparian thinks a free to play player can get all the Mercs in a month.  That seems really fast to me, based on these economies.  Maybe if you’re a full time streamer playing 10 hours per day this is feasible, but for normal players, 500 coins per legendary merc is a big lift, especially since you’re not guaranteed to get any coins for that particular merc in a run through a bounty, and the coin stacks when the right coin drops can be as few as 5-10.

Depending on how fast players can get the campfire missions, the packs available from those will help players fill out their ranks, but it is likely those resources will flow in at a relative trickle.

It seems plausible that dedicated free-to-play players will be able to target and grind out the specific Mercs they need to build a meta PvP team over the course of a few weeks, but people who buy the preorders will still be in it much faster, because they’ll have many powerful characters right from the start while F2P players will have to start out using the default, rare-quality mercenaries, and will have to grind their coins build them up so they can attempt the harder missions to grind for the stronger Mercs.  Remember that the bounties award coins for the Mercs you have in your party, so if you have Diablo from the start, you can get Diablo coins from every bounty, while F2P players have to find a bounty that can award Diablo coins and grind it repeatedly with other Mercs.

Players who buy packs at the beginning will also have access to crazy combos that clear the bounties much faster.  The strategy that early access streamers using default, free Mercs employed was using Cariel Roame to stall and protect Milhouse Manastorm while he ramped up.  Legendary Mercs have access to some much stronger combos, like using Cairne Bloodhoof’s speed manipulation in conjunction with Diablo’s Fire Stomp to deal massive AOE damage. This can get the job done much faster, which means more bounties and more coins for players who began with a head start.

A very small percentage of players will buy 1000 packs on day one which will give them every merc and thousands of coins to fully upgrade all of them instantly, effectively allowing these players to mostly skip the PvE and they will do nothing but PvP.  These players will dominate the leaderboard at launch, and it’s going to be a bad look.  There will be a lot of complaints about the mode being pay to win, because these clowns are going to pay, and they’re going to win.  If Blizzard is smart, they will delay the launch of PvP rankings to somewhat obscure that this is happening.

However, once their Mercs are fully upgraded, they’ll hit a power cap, and everyone else will start to catch up to them.  Moderate spenders who bought one or more of the pre-order bundles will be able to max out their their most PvP relevant Mercs in probably a couple of weeks if they focus on them and play a lot.  Fairly dedicated F2P players — I am talking about 80+ hours spent with this mode — should be able to field at least one fully-upgraded PvP meta team by the second month.