Hearthpwn

It's bugged. The only way to complete it is to have quest 5 before the merc hits 30, and then hit 30 while holding the quest.  Blizz confirms fixing it is a high priority, and hopefully they will hotfix by the weekend, because this is a significant barrier to progression.

Quest Hunter is weak-ish in Standard, and kind of oppressive in Wild.  I would be in favor of the first quest reward turning the hero power into something with a new name so that it no longer interacts with Odd.

However, since Hunter has no card draw it should lose to decks that can run it out of gas like Control-ish priests, warriors and warlocks.  If we get to a point where combo mages don't murder them all.

Quote from Xix19 >>

Quote from Jinkees >>

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.

Quote from Xix19 >>

Quote from Crawford881 >>

 

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.

/../

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.

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.

 

Quote from Strongpoint >>

2) And who said there will be no significant ways to earn gold in Mercs? Earn XP in Mercs, get gold, spend it in Mercs. It is that simple. Oh, you want to play Mercs, get enough gold for everything in there AND get more gold for regular Hearthstone while playing less Hearthstone... Nah, Blizzard won't do this.

3) Don't mix up "I want this product to be that or this" which is reasonable and "I want you to earn less and sell the same product cheaper for no reason but my wishes" which is not. And OP wasn't talking to Blizzard as a customer, he is teaching them how to sell games

 First of all, If Blizz wants people to buy 100+ Merc packs at the same cash/gold price as Hearthstone packs and the only source of gold for Mercs is that it awards pass XP at the same rate as Battlegrounds, that's going to be unacceptable to a large chunk of the community.  I don't even understand why you would defend that practice.

Second, Blizzard ought to know what the community expects from them, and maybe they do need some advice on how to sell their games.  They aren't exactly on a hot streak right now.  Mercenaries looks like fun to me, and I am excited about it, but Blizzard did an awful job announcing it, and people are really angry about how it might be monetized.  If Blizzard goes full gacha, they're not really Blizzard anymore.

Quote from Banur >>

Quote from Crawford881 >>

There is no balance concern about the amount of gold available through Mercs, because gold is cash, so it’s never unfair to give people more gold, because it just makes the game less expensive.

Making the game less expensive IS a concern because it affects Blizzard's bottom line.

The goal of Blizzard is to make X amount of dollars and the game is balanced around that.

Introducing another mode that increases gold income, will result in changes to keep it equal but it will also set the expectation that you need to complete these new gold resources or you are missing out. Thus creating pressure on players that don't want to play Mercs.

 If they burn the game down and piss off the community that hurts the bottom line.  Charging as much as possible doesn’t necessarily earn the most money because a lot of players will bounce if the game tries to soak them too much.  Hearthstone earns more than Raid: Shadow Legends even though Raid: Shadow Legends pretty much asks you to spend $10,000 on it.

1Quote from FortyDust >>

I don't think "salvage" is the right word for a game mode that hasn't even been released yet. There are plenty of people who are excited for it, and plenty of people who will cautiously give it a try and judge it for what it is, not what a bunch of naysayers claim it's going to be.

Now for the point-by-point:

1. We already know that the Campfire quests will include mercenaries coins and packs, so it doesn't make sense to expect gold on top of that. You don't need a separate currency when you get actual packs as a reward.

2. We don't know the XP reward per hour, but there's no reason to believe it will be out of line with other modes.

3. I agree that the bundles lack value, but that's no reason to hate the game, and it shouldn't keep anyone from buying packs if they want to. It's just a reason not to buy the bundles. (Or move to Korea, where you at least get a free Illidan with purchase of any bundle.)

4. The Reward Track is in a weird spot where other modes are concerned. At the moment, I hate getting quests for Battlegrounds, etc., but if I start playing more Mercenaries than traditional Hearthstone (a distinct possibility), I will welcome a few Mercenaries quests there. In a perfect world, there would be checkboxes so you can pick which modes you want quests for, but I don't see that happening.

I actually think it would be best if they took out all the Battlegrounds quests and made that section just about traditional Hearthstone. (Duels and Arena are included there because regular quests can be completed in those modes.) Battleground quests should happen in the Battlegrounds part of the client, just as Mercenaries quests are handled at the Campfire.

I absolutely think talking about "salvaging" Mercenaries is reasonable right now.  I have been watching YouTubers talk about Mercs and Regis Killbin said that he felt like he was wasting time putting effort into Mercs videos because nobody was watching them.  Maybe the pre-orders are rolling in and Blizzard is happy -- Iksar did say something about the response to Diablo in Mercs being successful.  But online communites would have to be incredibly nonrepresentative for that to be true, because the sentiment has been incredibly negative, and I do think the people on Hearthpwn and Reddit probably represent the people who spend several hundred bucks a year on Hearthstone, and they were massively annoyed with Blizz asking them to drop $130 on Mercs.  If Blizz were getting the response they expected, I don't think they would have gone totally silent about it after the announcement.  It really seems like they're on a back foot and regrouping in response to the negative community reaction to the announcement.

Now, on a couple of your points:

1. Merc packs and coins aren't as good as gold, which is the same as cash.  Gold can be used on future releases, and current-set packs and currencies cannot.  If the packs cost gold and the camp upgrades cost gold, then the mode needs to pay out gold.  Playing this mode shouldn't leave you with fewer free resources to allocate to regular Hearthstone.  

4.  We currently get one daily quest and three weekly quests for Hearthstone.  A couple of the weeklies are Battlegrounds exclusive, and one of the Weeklies is can be completed in any mode except main Hearthstone.  Adding Mercs quests to this pool means that people who don't play Mercs will have to spend more rerolls, a scarce resource, rerolling their Mercs quests to get quests for other modes.  I will say again that if Blizzard is asking us to significantly increase our spend on the Hearthstone platform for Mercenaries, then it needs to come with a similarly significant increase in the free cash-equivalent gold rewards for participating in this expensive new mode. 

Quote from Strongpoint >>

Quote from Pherosizm >>

 If people had some extra gold to spend on packs I really doubt that they would consider that "losses". People can buy both preorder bundles and have 3 months worth of legend rank free cards and packs from ladder and still not collect the whole set each expansion. They'll be fine.

 You don't understand what I am talking about....

Imagine there is an additional 4th weekly quest that grants 2000XP for playing Mercs. You can't reroll this quest into a Hearthstone\Battlegrounds one, you must play mercs to get this 2000XP. To complete this quest you need.... let's say 3 hours of Merc gameplay. Now imagine that you find Mercs BORING. Now your choice is two 1) Feel bad by playing the mode you actively dislike or 2)feel bad because you aren't getting this 'free' XP for your Hearthstone collection. It is a lose-lose for a huge number of players. It will be like the current brawl situation but WAY worse. Some brawls are just boring. For me it means 1 less pack in a week (feel bad), for other it means grinding till the win (feel bad). But not all brawls are boring and victories don't take that long.

Playing 100 hours of constructed Hearthstone should give you more resources for constructed Hearthstone than playing 80 hours of constructed Hearthstone and 20 hours of another game masquerading as a game mode.

Do you want more gold in Hearthstone? There are better ways to do it. (But keep in mind that Blizzard isn't a charity)
Do you want more gold in Mercs? Well, make them do something like in game merc tasks that give -1% to the cost of some town upgrade (up to zero) or something like this but don't make people play a game they don't want to get Hearthstone cards. I don't mind occasional special Merc events or rare 1500 XP daily quests but making it mandatory for every week if not every day? No thanks.

 

There is no balance concern about the amount of gold available through Mercs, because gold is cash, so it’s never unfair to give people more gold, because it just makes the game less expensive.  If Mercs is going to cost $130 for the base set preorders and get expansions that Blizz hopes people buy big bundles of, then it should generate free currency that is equivalent to a game of that cost, which means we should double the total gold/pass exp available with mercenaries or at least come close.  If HS players don’t want to play Mercs, they’ll still get as much HS gold, and they won’t be pouring any of their resources (cash, gold, time) into an alternate mode.  

Quote from x0chipilli >>

Lastly as much as I agree with the argument about price point, I think that will only happen if the whole thing flops. 
I mean they stealth-nerfed arena rewards and haven’t even made an attempt at making the mode better (arena specific cards, in-game menu to explain what cards or sets are in, etc.) Instead they are thinking of adding ranks to arena, likely causing arena to be even less profitable. 

I know businesses need to be profitable, but sometimes it really seems like straight greed :/

 It is amazing to me how many people went all-in on Genshin, considering how harsh its monetization is.  If the market rewards monetization practices like that, we get more of them.  I am absolutely floored at how much people are paying into Raid Shadow Legends.

There was a faction that was always going to be pissed if Mercenaries was a monetized game with collectible characters rather than a free or inexpensive mode like Battlegrounds.  But a lot of the takes on it are hyperbolic.  The total spend to get all the mercenaries available day 1 at release is a couple hundred bucks, and a moderate spend looks like it will put players in position to earn the rest.  The rarest, most expensive items look to be the diamond cosmetics for legendary minions, rather than having a super-rare tier of super-powered characters.  By contrast, gacha games like Raid Shadow Legends and Genshin Impact are designed to suck thousands of dollars out of their whale players.  However, Blizzard is launching this with $130 worth of preorders and many players will potentially spend an additional $100 on top of that, and that ain’t nothing.  

There are several things Blizzard can do to make this mode more appealing:  

1. First of all, if upgrades and packs are going to cost gold, then Mercenaries needs to generate gold above and on top of what players earn from other modes.  That doesn’t mean adding Mercenaries quests to the regular daily Hearthstone quest pool, it means separate quests with distinct rewards for playing mercenaries.  If Mercenaries runs on Mercenaries-exclusive currency, then Mercenaries quests can award those currencies, but if Mercs is going to run on gold, and its pack-system looks like it will, then it needs to pay out gold.  If Blizzard is hoping players will substantially increase their spending into what it now apparently views as a card-game platform, then it needs to substantially increase free rewards.

2.  The per-hour pass experience needs to be brought in line at least with Battlegrounds.  It’s understandable if Ranked Hearthstone has reward incentives to get casuals to play ranked, but this mode can’t trail others in value for time spent if it is going to be successful. 

3.  Frankly, if Blizzard wants to extend goodwill, it should straight up cut the price for the preorders and give extra rewards to anyone who preordered before the price cut.  Legends of Runeterra is coming from Blizzard’s most direct competitor, and it’s a lot less expensive to play, with regular players getting access to effectively all cards for free.  Hearthstone doesn’t necessarily need to be as cheap as Runeterra, but it’s a bad look to come in with new ways to spend a lot of money when the base product is being undercut by a competitor.  Hearthstone is not Raid Shadow Legends, but it would still be nice if it was more like Runeterra in its monetization strategies.  This is a very expensive game to keep up with, and prohibitive to return to after a break, and Blizzard should be thinking about how to relieve that, rather than trying to get hundreds more dollars per year from players.

4.  Mercenaries rewards should be added to the Tavern Pass, but they should be in addition to, rather than replacing, all the stuff we’re getting for standard Hearthstone and other modes.  Players of other modes should not feel that they’re losing any value because of Mercenaries.  Taking this up should mean more stuff rather than draining your resources from other modes.

Blizzard has been silent on Mercs since the poorly-received announcement, and they’ve got a lot of work to do to salvage this with the players. Hopefully their silence over the last couple of weeks means they’ve heard community dissatisfaction and are going to come back on Tuesday and say something we’ll like.

Battletag: Crawford#1677

Region: NA

Trade only? : Yes, you go first.

Quote from Banur >>

Quote from Crawford881 >>

Also, I think animated Broomstick is too strong in decks that can produce a big board in a single turn.  Being able to give a bunch of giants rush is  too powerful for a 1 cost card.

But that's hardly an issue of broomstick that a deck can drop multiple big minions on one turn.

I mean Flesh Giant, Broomstick, Darkglare and Stealer of Souls existed before and weren't an issue, but the quest enables a better synergy between these cards.

You can easily activate the discount on the giant and Stealer of Souls and Darkglare let you mana cheat minions with the quest to keep you alive and Tamsin as the finisher.

Before the quest you could already play all these cards, but you would run the risk of having little to no life left and the opponent just pushing you over the line.

 

 Dropping multiple big minions on the same turn is a lot more balanced if doing so prevents you from otherwise affecting the board state.

I think it would be good if the card required you to take all the damage for each step in a single turn, like the Demon Hunter questline does.  That would help slow it down on turns 2 and 3.  

And Darkglare needs to just be changed so that it’s not the same card anymore.  Being able to draw and play half your deck on turn 4 isn’t much better than being able to draw and play half your deck on turn 3.  The ability is just too powerful.  

Also, I think animated Broomstick is too strong in decks that can produce a big board in a single turn.  Being able to give a bunch of giants rush is  too powerful for a 1 cost card.