So Mercenaries feels like a completely new game instead of a "new game mode", but actually its not, since you can use your Hearthstone resources in it. You have to spend gold to upgrade your town (we dont know the numbers), you can buy mercenaries packs with gold (I havent seen any confirmation about the gold price, but I think its safe to assume it will be 100 gold per pack) and we can gain gold by getting reward track xp from playing Mercenaries. It sounds cool right?
I have gathered some information and based on that it seems very hard to get a reasonable amount of xp while playing the mode. Most of the reward track xp comes from daily and weekly quests and the rest comes from gameplay.
1. None of the weekly quests can be completed in Mercenaries. You cant spend mana, play battlecry cards, use your hero power, deal damage to enemy heroes, etc.
2. Most of the daily quests cant be completed in Mercenaries. You cant play as x class, you cant play spells, Mercs dont have a cost, and Mercs are not heroes or minions, they are Mercs.
3. Getting xp from PVP in Mercenaries. We dont know anything about this. But I think its safe to assume that its gonna be something like duels or battlegrounds, so less than ranked but still somewhat reasonable compared to ranked gameplay. Thats the best-case scenario IMO.
4. Getting xp from doing PVE content in Mercenaries. Its more important than the previous point, since its a mainly PVE focused game mode. Do we have numbers about this? Actually, we have: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g8jSjG0Q-5M In this video, Warshack plays a bounty in Mercenaries. The first encounter gave him 7 xp the next one 8 xp and the boss fight gave him 14 xp. If you have ever played something like Book of Heroes, you might remember that you got the same abysmal xp numbers from doing solo content. These numbers might change, but I dont think they will, since they dont want to promote AFK xp farming and its easiest to do so in PVE modes, so they are just butchering the xp. There are 2 ways of fixing this. Either make the encounters to give static xp instead of butchered time-based ones (this will most likely not happen) or give us a static xp bonus when we defeat the final boss of a bounty (this will also not happen unless the community is vocal about the xp gain).
Conclusion: It seems like if you want optimal progression in Mercenaries and earn gold to upgrade your town and buy mercs packs, you need to play other game modes to complete your quests. Your reward track xp gain in Mercenaries will be close to nothing unless you play PVP only, and thats not really what the game mode is about.
Conclusion: It seems like if you want optimal progression in Mercenaries and earn gold to upgrade your town and buy mercs packs, you need to play other game modesto complete your quests. Your reward track xp gain in Mercenaries will be close to nothing unless you play PVP only, and thats not really what the game mode is about.
Doesn't this seem like bad design? I mean, I'm not trying to hate on Mercs like everyone else, I just mean, if the game was in fact designed as a separate game as opposed to a new mode, then it certainly should be able to be self contained. All rewards earned within itself.
Forcing players to split up their resources coming from one source into multiple places just pushes people to pay real money for stuff or get frustrated and not play it all. And if someone wants to play Mercs but doesn't like regular HS, then they are forced to play a mode they don't want to in order to get resources for the game they do want to play.
Conclusion: It seems like if you want optimal progression in Mercenaries and earn gold to upgrade your town and buy mercs packs, you need to play other game modesto complete your quests. Your reward track xp gain in Mercenaries will be close to nothing unless you play PVP only, and thats not really what the game mode is about.
Doesn't this seem like bad design? I mean, I'm not trying to hate on Mercs like everyone else, I just mean, if the game was in fact designed as a separate game as opposed to a new mode, then it certainly should be able to be self contained. All rewards earned within itself.
Forcing players to split up their resources coming from one source into multiple places just pushes people to pay real money for stuff or get frustrated and not play it all. And if someone wants to play Mercs but doesn't like regular HS, then they are forced to play a mode they don't want to in order to get resources for the game they do want to play.
Do I understand this right?
Yes, it is exactly bad design. Im also not hating the new game mode, even if I have mentioned my concerns about it in other topics. I dont mind the whole gacha-like system, since it seems like that you can do targeted farming with bounties, and I dont mind the pre-orders since they are optional. But when I see a serious design flaw, I want to point that out.
We will have mercs-only quests within the game mode and they will reward us with mercs-specific resources, like mercs packs. But when you are done with your mercs quests for the day, and you can still complete your normal daily/weekly quests in other game modes in lets say an hour, and you get several hundred gold that you can invest in mercs, then that hour will be more optimal to spend outside of mercs to get more mercs progression. Which is plainly just bad design.
1. None of the weekly quests can be completed in Mercenaries. You cant spend mana, play battlecry cards, use your hero power, deal damage to enemy heroes, etc.
None of the current weekly quests can be completed in Mercenaries. Quest roster changes after each major update. Win 5 games in Brawl\Duels\Arena may be updated. Brand new quest(s) may appear
2. Most of the daily quests cant be completed in Mercenaries. You cant play as x class, you cant play spells, Mercs dont have a cost, and Mercs are not heroes or minions, they are Mercs.
Again, changes in the daily quest roster are very possible.
3. Getting xp from PVP in Mercenaries. We dont know anything about this. But I think its safe to assume that its gonna be something like duels or battlegrounds, so less than ranked but still somewhat reasonable compared to ranked gameplay. Thats the best-case scenario IMO.
~300 xp per hour (like Battlegrounds) is the most likely scenario, lower than this will be very strange With 3000XP = 100gold we are looking at ~10 gold per hour. I am using post level 130 gold gain as a conservative estimate
4. Getting xp from doing PVE content in Mercenaries. Its more important than the previous point, since its a mainly PVE focused game mode. Do we have numbers about this? Actually, we have:
Most likely PVE is ~100XP per hour, just like regular PVE in Hearthstone. 7XP for a short fight seems consistent with this. This is ~3 gold per hour.
Assuming that some basic upgrade may cost 100 gold it is quite a grind (30 hours), that is a freaking month with 1 hour per day. But I don't share a pessimistic assumption that quests will stay the same. It would be extremely unprofessional to make a game mode you can't focus on.
So Mercenaries feels like a completely new game instead of a "new game mode", but actually its not, since you can use your Hearthstone resources in it. You have to spend gold to upgrade your town (we dont know the numbers), you can buy mercenaries packs with gold (I havent seen any confirmation about the gold price, but I think its safe to assume it will be 100 gold per pack) and we can gain gold by getting reward track xp from playing Mercenaries. It sounds cool right?
I have gathered some information and based on that it seems very hard to get a reasonable amount of xp while playing the mode. Most of the reward track xp comes from daily and weekly quests and the rest comes from gameplay.
1. None of the weekly quests can be completed in Mercenaries. You cant spend mana, play battlecry cards, use your hero power, deal damage to enemy heroes, etc.
2. Most of the daily quests cant be completed in Mercenaries. You cant play as x class, you cant play spells, Mercs dont have a cost, and Mercs are not heroes or minions, they are Mercs.
3. Getting xp from PVP in Mercenaries. We dont know anything about this. But I think its safe to assume that its gonna be something like duels or battlegrounds, so less than ranked but still somewhat reasonable compared to ranked gameplay. Thats the best-case scenario IMO.
4. Getting xp from doing PVE content in Mercenaries. Its more important than the previous point, since its a mainly PVE focused game mode. Do we have numbers about this? Actually, we have: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g8jSjG0Q-5M In this video, Warshack plays a bounty in Mercenaries. The first encounter gave him 7 xp the next one 8 xp and the boss fight gave him 14 xp. If you have ever played something like Book of Heroes, you might remember that you got the same abysmal xp numbers from doing solo content. These numbers might change, but I dont think they will, since they dont want to promote AFK xp farming and its easiest to do so in PVE modes, so they are just butchering the xp. There are 2 ways of fixing this. Either make the encounters to give static xp instead of butchered time-based ones (this will most likely not happen) or give us a static xp bonus when we defeat the final boss of a bounty (this will also not happen unless the community is vocal about the xp gain).
Conclusion: It seems like if you want optimal progression in Mercenaries and earn gold to upgrade your town and buy mercs packs, you need to play other game modes to complete your quests. Your reward track xp gain in Mercenaries will be close to nothing unless you play PVP only, and thats not really what the game mode is about.
Seems like a solid analysis to me. Hopefully we see scaling xp bonuses depending on the mode (normal, heroic, legendary) as well as the bounty levels.
Doesn't this seem like bad design? I mean, I'm not trying to hate on Mercs like everyone else, I just mean, if the game was in fact designed as a separate game as opposed to a new mode, then it certainly should be able to be self contained. All rewards earned within itself.
Forcing players to split up their resources coming from one source into multiple places just pushes people to pay real money for stuff or get frustrated and not play it all. And if someone wants to play Mercs but doesn't like regular HS, then they are forced to play a mode they don't want to in order to get resources for the game they do want to play.
Do I understand this right?
Yes, it is exactly bad design. Im also not hating the new game mode, even if I have mentioned my concerns about it in other topics. I dont mind the whole gacha-like system, since it seems like that you can do targeted farming with bounties, and I dont mind the pre-orders since they are optional. But when I see a serious design flaw, I want to point that out.
We will have mercs-only quests within the game mode and they will reward us with mercs-specific resources, like mercs packs. But when you are done with your mercs quests for the day, and you can still complete your normal daily/weekly quests in other game modes in lets say an hour, and you get several hundred gold that you can invest in mercs, then that hour will be more optimal to spend outside of mercs to get more mercs progression. Which is plainly just bad design.
1. None of the weekly quests can be completed in Mercenaries. You cant spend mana, play battlecry cards, use your hero power, deal damage to enemy heroes, etc.
None of the current weekly quests can be completed in Mercenaries. Quest roster changes after each major update. Win 5 games in Brawl\Duels\Arena may be updated. Brand new quest(s) may appear
2. Most of the daily quests cant be completed in Mercenaries. You cant play as x class, you cant play spells, Mercs dont have a cost, and Mercs are not heroes or minions, they are Mercs.
Again, changes in the daily quest roster are very possible.
3. Getting xp from PVP in Mercenaries. We dont know anything about this. But I think its safe to assume that its gonna be something like duels or battlegrounds, so less than ranked but still somewhat reasonable compared to ranked gameplay. Thats the best-case scenario IMO.
~300 xp per hour (like Battlegrounds) is the most likely scenario, lower than this will be very strange With 3000XP = 100gold we are looking at ~10 gold per hour. I am using post level 130 gold gain as a conservative estimate
4. Getting xp from doing PVE content in Mercenaries. Its more important than the previous point, since its a mainly PVE focused game mode. Do we have numbers about this? Actually, we have:
Most likely PVE is ~100XP per hour, just like regular PVE in Hearthstone. 7XP for a short fight seems consistent with this. This is ~3 gold per hour.
Assuming that some basic upgrade may cost 100 gold it is quite a grind (30 hours), that is a freaking month with 1 hour per day. But I don't share a pessimistic assumption that quests will stay the same. It would be extremely unprofessional to make a game mode you can't focus on.