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.
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.
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.
Correction - these clowns are going to pay and they are going to play only with each other canceling each other's ranking. Team strength matchmaking is there for a reason.
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.
Are you sure it's 1500 coins? That seems way to much generosity. (tbh I only expect 450 coins and all level 1 equipment) I mean getting those 1500 coins from quests/tasks is WAY easyer than just grinding. I mean the hardest part is just getting the 500 coins for the legendary but after that it's just focusing on completing the Tasks, wich probably hardly takes a day. UNLESS it requires the hardest zone on Heroic and you cant even get it done on normal. But I expect Guides to show up on youtube with ways to 'cheese' all those tasks. Trump will probably start a 'Broke in Mercenary' series. Though having seen him screw arround in early acces, I dont expect much wisdom from that.
On your second part: If doing all the tasks really award 1500 coins total then 'moderate spenders' will only need a few days of playtime to max out their favorite Team. And they will be able to do it with pve only. UNLESS blizzard made a restriction allowing you to complete only 1 Task for the same mercenary once a day, or a max amount of tasks a day. Since getting tasks seems RNG based, Blizzard can hide this restriction pretty easily.
On a side note: Like 90% of the Mercenaries seem to have breakpoints in their skill levels at skill level 3. So only 450 coins is needed to reach these breakpoints. Sylvanas is a big exception, she needs a massive coin sink but after that she becomes supreme. But for the rest of the Mercs, what is the point of these Breakpoints if their giving away 1500 coins from tasks? It just does not seem to match...
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.
Are you sure it's 1500 coins? That seems way to much generosity. (tbh I only expect 450 coins and all level 1 equipment) I mean getting those 1500 coins from quests/tasks is WAY easyer than just grinding. I mean the hardest part is just getting the 500 coins for the legendary but after that it's just focusing on completing the Tasks, wich probably hardly takes a day. UNLESS it requires the hardest zone on Heroic and you cant even get it done on normal. But I expect Guides to show up on youtube with ways to 'cheese' all those tasks. Trump will probably start a 'Broke in Mercenary' series. Though having seen him screw arround in early acces, I dont expect much wisdom from that.
On your second part: If doing all the tasks really award 1500 coins total then 'moderate spenders' will only need a few days of playtime to max out their favorite Team. And they will be able to do it with pve only. UNLESS blizzard made a restriction allowing you to complete only 1 Task for the same mercenary once a day, or a max amount of tasks a day. Since getting tasks seems RNG based, Blizzard can hide this restriction pretty easily.
On a side note: Like 90% of the Mercenaries seem to have breakpoints in their skill levels at skill level 3. So only 450 coins is needed to reach these breakpoints. Sylvanas is a big exception, she needs a massive coin sink but after that she becomes supreme. But for the rest of the Mercs, what is the point of these Breakpoints if their giving away 1500 coins from tasks? It just does not seem to match...
Blizzard’s FAQ says that you get 1500 coins for each mercenary’s campfire quests, but they won’t all be coins for that merc. And they won’t be all at once. I think the idea is to give you coins for Mercs you don’t have to get you to buy packs to find those Mercs. I don’t think you can just chain all the campfire tasks together and get tens of thousands of coins very quickly. It may be that you’re limited to only a couple per day. I think Kripp got one from a random bonus encounter on one of the maps.
As for the breakpoints, level 5 may not be as big an improvement over level 3 as level 3 is over level 1, but it’s still better enough that somebody with Rank 5 abilities will probably crush somebody with Rank 3 abilities almost every time.
Thanks for this indepth post! Very curious about the town upgrade costs. 200 gold could just be the start, I imagine more costly upgrades especially in expansion style content. I don't mind the gold cost to upgrade the town as long as it seems fair, you are able to earn gold in the mode, and you are rewarded for spending the gold.
I see the p2w aspect of this mode similar to Standard Hearthstone... If you play every day, and you're dedicated, you'll have no issue being f2p. You'll be able to earn the best cards/mercs, but don't expect *every single card/Merc* in your collection... That's an unrealistic goal.
You made a great point though, that this game mode is heavily reliant on pve. So it really doesn't matter what power level you are. I think part of the fun is starting from nothing and growing your team. That's what makes RPGs fun!
Just want to add that you can farm each merc in the specific dungeon. So with enough time (like any game) you can grind the heroes for coins. Its 100 for rares 300 for epics and 500 for legies. So a lot better than the HS rate. Also: PvP is not the main point of the mode. Its a PvE experience at first. So "p2w" is not really the thing especially because its power based MM and therefore its irrelevant. The only valid point for this mode looks bland but if you like pokemon games I think it it will be nice.
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"... but not less than (1)" is needed now more than ever!
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.
Correction - these clowns are going to pay and they are going to play only with each other canceling each other's ranking. Team strength matchmaking is there for a reason.
If you are trying to buy them all with gold only (no cash), you will have to buy more packs to make up for the 3 fixed legendaries, so it will cost you an average of 33K gold.
Heh, that means I can get a full collection on my American F2P server on day 1 should I wish to play PVP (doing this for PVE seems like a way to destroy your own fun)
I never called anyone a clown, I merely used the same term as the person I was responding to. If someone wants to play the game in this way - it is their right and it is their money. Also, "can" is not the same as "want" or "will do". Also also, my quote is about getting a full collection of mercs, not about leveling them up to the max by spending gold.
And I knew far less about how Merc economy works then than I do now. Buying that many packs seem like a huge waste of resources unless one wants portraits (I don't). I can see buying enough packs to get all rare Mercs but no more.
Thanks for this indepth post! Very curious about the town upgrade costs. 200 gold could just be the start, I imagine more costly upgrades especially in expansion style content. I don't mind the gold cost to upgrade the town as long as it seems fair, you are able to earn gold in the mode, and you are rewarded for spending the gold.
The 200 gold upgrade said it was to unlock Heroic Bounties. But even if the wording seems to imply all Heroic Bounties. I cant help to think it will be Heroic Barrens only. In wich case unlocking Heroic Felwood would cost like 400 or 500 gold. Heroic WInterspring 800 or 1000 gold and Heroic Black Rock Mountain would be like 1600 or 2000 gold. So a total of 3000 or 3700 gold...
Now obviously I could be wrong, but I dont believe in a generous Blizzard. So I m gonna keep atleast 3000 gold in bank until I know for certain I wont need that much. I probably will have the other 700 gold by the time I reach Heroic Black Rock Mountain so. I mean you can allways burn your gold on packs later on, there is no need to do it at the start. XD
The 200 gold upgrade said it was to unlock Heroic Bounties. But even if the wording seems to imply all Heroic Bounties. I cant help to think it will be Heroic Barrens only. In wich case unlocking Heroic Felwood would cost like 400 or 500 gold. Heroic WInterspring 800 or 1000 gold and Heroic Black Rock Mountain would be like 1600 or 2000 gold. So a total of 3000 or 3700 gold...
Oh, good classic presenting some absurd groundless claim that fits your agenda and saying "I could be wrong." to save yourself from being called out for spreading disinformation.
Game clearly states "unlock heroic bounties"
It is like "Politician X rapes 5 children per day. I could be wrong but I don't believe in the chastity of the Politician X"
Thanks for this indepth post! Very curious about the town upgrade costs. 200 gold could just be the start, I imagine more costly upgrades especially in expansion style content. I don't mind the gold cost to upgrade the town as long as it seems fair, you are able to earn gold in the mode, and you are rewarded for spending the gold.
The 200 gold upgrade said it was to unlock Heroic Bounties. But even if the wording seems to imply all Heroic Bounties. I cant help to think it will be Heroic Barrens only. In wich case unlocking Heroic Felwood would cost like 400 or 500 gold. Heroic WInterspring 800 or 1000 gold and Heroic Black Rock Mountain would be like 1600 or 2000 gold. So a total of 3000 or 3700 gold...
Now obviously I could be wrong, but I dont believe in a generous Blizzard. So I m gonna keep atleast 3000 gold in bank until I know for certain I wont need that much. I probably will have the other 700 gold by the time I reach Heroic Black Rock Mountain so. I mean you can allways burn your gold on packs later on, there is no need to do it at the start. XD
I think they were planning to charge a lot of gold for village upgrades and pulled those costs out in response to community backlash. They also cut the coin cost of crafting legendaries from 600 to 500. I definitely would not be surprised if the game is launching cheaper than they’d planned. We’ll probably never know for sure though.
The 200 gold upgrade said it was to unlock Heroic Bounties. But even if the wording seems to imply all Heroic Bounties. I cant help to think it will be Heroic Barrens only. In wich case unlocking Heroic Felwood would cost like 400 or 500 gold. Heroic WInterspring 800 or 1000 gold and Heroic Black Rock Mountain would be like 1600 or 2000 gold. So a total of 3000 or 3700 gold...
Oh, good classic presenting some absurd groundless claim that fits your agenda and saying "I could be wrong." to save yourself from being called out for spreading disinformation.
Game clearly states "unlock heroic bounties"
It is like "Politician X rapes 5 children per day. I could be wrong but I don't believe in the chastity of the Politician X"
Well that escalated quickly. Why not bring Hitler in your comparison while your at it.
My "claim" comes from experience as things generaly go this way, so it aint absurd. But atm there is currently no ground for it. Meaning I was not "claiming" anything just posting a warning to watch out with burning all your gold and then getting stuck later on cause you cant upgrade your stuff! Not to mention I even say at the beginning that the game mentions: 'Unlock Heroic Bounties'. And what agenda am I even pushing here??? Are you just going to bash me with your own groundless claims?
SERIOUSLY WTF IS YOUR PROBLEM? Is Diablo stuck in your ass or something?
It is EXTREMELY obvious that you play the 200 gold ONCE to upgrade the Travel Point to unlock ALL Heroic modes. Given the way it was presented in the reveal video, it makes no sense to think it could work differently. Later, you will be able to pay more gold to upgrade it again for Legendary modes.
To be fair, I found the reveal video totally easy to understand, and it seems I'm all alone atop some big-brain mountain because of this.
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.
Now that the game mode is out, have you found out how it works?
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.
Now that the game mode is out, have you found out how it works?
Yeah, it is confirmed that you will continue to get coins for mercs that are fully maxxed out, which kind of sucks. A guy on Discord who spent $1000 on packs had like 6000 coins for each of the rare mercs. It would be nice if you could buy skins with them or convert them to gold or if you just stopped getting them.
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.
Each pack is NOT a guaranteed mercenary drop. You can get packs that are JUST coins.
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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.
Correction - these clowns are going to pay and they are going to play only with each other canceling each other's ranking. Team strength matchmaking is there for a reason.
Thanks for this. I've been a whale until now, but I'll try to not spend a dime on this mode, and use its automatic features to grind at work.
Take a walk on the wild side...
Are you sure it's 1500 coins? That seems way to much generosity. (tbh I only expect 450 coins and all level 1 equipment) I mean getting those 1500 coins from quests/tasks is WAY easyer than just grinding. I mean the hardest part is just getting the 500 coins for the legendary but after that it's just focusing on completing the Tasks, wich probably hardly takes a day. UNLESS it requires the hardest zone on Heroic and you cant even get it done on normal. But I expect Guides to show up on youtube with ways to 'cheese' all those tasks. Trump will probably start a 'Broke in Mercenary' series. Though having seen him screw arround in early acces, I dont expect much wisdom from that.
On your second part: If doing all the tasks really award 1500 coins total then 'moderate spenders' will only need a few days of playtime to max out their favorite Team. And they will be able to do it with pve only. UNLESS blizzard made a restriction allowing you to complete only 1 Task for the same mercenary once a day, or a max amount of tasks a day. Since getting tasks seems RNG based, Blizzard can hide this restriction pretty easily.
On a side note: Like 90% of the Mercenaries seem to have breakpoints in their skill levels at skill level 3. So only 450 coins is needed to reach these breakpoints. Sylvanas is a big exception, she needs a massive coin sink but after that she becomes supreme. But for the rest of the Mercs, what is the point of these Breakpoints if their giving away 1500 coins from tasks? It just does not seem to match...
Blizzard’s FAQ says that you get 1500 coins for each mercenary’s campfire quests, but they won’t all be coins for that merc. And they won’t be all at once. I think the idea is to give you coins for Mercs you don’t have to get you to buy packs to find those Mercs. I don’t think you can just chain all the campfire tasks together and get tens of thousands of coins very quickly. It may be that you’re limited to only a couple per day. I think Kripp got one from a random bonus encounter on one of the maps.
As for the breakpoints, level 5 may not be as big an improvement over level 3 as level 3 is over level 1, but it’s still better enough that somebody with Rank 5 abilities will probably crush somebody with Rank 3 abilities almost every time.
Thanks for this indepth post! Very curious about the town upgrade costs. 200 gold could just be the start, I imagine more costly upgrades especially in expansion style content. I don't mind the gold cost to upgrade the town as long as it seems fair, you are able to earn gold in the mode, and you are rewarded for spending the gold.
I see the p2w aspect of this mode similar to Standard Hearthstone... If you play every day, and you're dedicated, you'll have no issue being f2p. You'll be able to earn the best cards/mercs, but don't expect *every single card/Merc* in your collection... That's an unrealistic goal.
You made a great point though, that this game mode is heavily reliant on pve. So it really doesn't matter what power level you are. I think part of the fun is starting from nothing and growing your team. That's what makes RPGs fun!
Just want to add that you can farm each merc in the specific dungeon. So with enough time (like any game) you can grind the heroes for coins. Its 100 for rares 300 for epics and 500 for legies. So a lot better than the HS rate. Also: PvP is not the main point of the mode. Its a PvE experience at first. So "p2w" is not really the thing especially because its power based MM and therefore its irrelevant. The only valid point for this mode looks bland but if you like pokemon games I think it it will be nice.
"... but not less than (1)" is needed now more than ever!
I never called anyone a clown, I merely used the same term as the person I was responding to. If someone wants to play the game in this way - it is their right and it is their money. Also, "can" is not the same as "want" or "will do". Also also, my quote is about getting a full collection of mercs, not about leveling them up to the max by spending gold.
And I knew far less about how Merc economy works then than I do now. Buying that many packs seem like a huge waste of resources unless one wants portraits (I don't). I can see buying enough packs to get all rare Mercs but no more.
The 200 gold upgrade said it was to unlock Heroic Bounties. But even if the wording seems to imply all Heroic Bounties. I cant help to think it will be Heroic Barrens only. In wich case unlocking Heroic Felwood would cost like 400 or 500 gold. Heroic WInterspring 800 or 1000 gold and Heroic Black Rock Mountain would be like 1600 or 2000 gold. So a total of 3000 or 3700 gold...
Now obviously I could be wrong, but I dont believe in a generous Blizzard. So I m gonna keep atleast 3000 gold in bank until I know for certain I wont need that much. I probably will have the other 700 gold by the time I reach Heroic Black Rock Mountain so. I mean you can allways burn your gold on packs later on, there is no need to do it at the start. XD
Oh, good classic presenting some absurd groundless claim that fits your agenda and saying "I could be wrong." to save yourself from being called out for spreading disinformation.
Game clearly states "unlock heroic bounties"
It is like "Politician X rapes 5 children per day. I could be wrong but I don't believe in the chastity of the Politician X"
I think they were planning to charge a lot of gold for village upgrades and pulled those costs out in response to community backlash. They also cut the coin cost of crafting legendaries from 600 to 500. I definitely would not be surprised if the game is launching cheaper than they’d planned. We’ll probably never know for sure though.
Well that escalated quickly. Why not bring Hitler in your comparison while your at it.
My "claim" comes from experience as things generaly go this way, so it aint absurd. But atm there is currently no ground for it. Meaning I was not "claiming" anything just posting a warning to watch out with burning all your gold and then getting stuck later on cause you cant upgrade your stuff! Not to mention I even say at the beginning that the game mentions: 'Unlock Heroic Bounties'. And what agenda am I even pushing here??? Are you just going to bash me with your own groundless claims?
SERIOUSLY WTF IS YOUR PROBLEM? Is Diablo stuck in your ass or something?
Tone it down with the insults.
Further language like this will not be tolerated.
If you see a bad post on the forum use the report function under it, so I or someone else of the moderation team can take care of it!
It is EXTREMELY obvious that you play the 200 gold ONCE to upgrade the Travel Point to unlock ALL Heroic modes. Given the way it was presented in the reveal video, it makes no sense to think it could work differently. Later, you will be able to pay more gold to upgrade it again for Legendary modes.
To be fair, I found the reveal video totally easy to understand, and it seems I'm all alone atop some big-brain mountain because of this.
"Why, you never expected justice from a company, did you? They have neither a soul to lose nor a body to kick." -- Lady Saba Holland
Now that the game mode is out, have you found out how it works?
Yeah, it is confirmed that you will continue to get coins for mercs that are fully maxxed out, which kind of sucks. A guy on Discord who spent $1000 on packs had like 6000 coins for each of the rare mercs. It would be nice if you could buy skins with them or convert them to gold or if you just stopped getting them.
Each pack is NOT a guaranteed mercenary drop. You can get packs that are JUST coins.