Hearthpwn

Quote from Andrei2007 >>

If you have prime gaming, on your loot page. Your account needs to be linked though.

 Thanks :) I was looking on Twitch Drops - had no idea this whole other loot thing existed!

I still play a good bit, and don't have issues with the matchmaking queue anymore (maybe 1 min max) so I think a good number of people are playing still

I'm not here to say you should or shouldn't buy the rewards track pass, I'm just giving you the math to help you make a decision
NOTE: I'm only looking at the value of the extra Gold and I'm ignoring the value of the cosmetics and the free legendaries which you can value accordingly. Technically the breakeven point is 1500 gold (15 packs for $20)

1. Not Reaching Lv 100 without the Pass?
   • • With the premium pass - reaching Lv 100 is equivalent to reaching Lv 91 without the pass. This will net you about 2400 extra gold
     • Buying the pass is better than buying 15 packs if you're NOT reaching level 100 BUT are reaching about level 90 without the pass
2. Normally Reach Level 100 without the pass - this is where most of the value comes
   • • If you're consistently reaching Lv 100 without the pass then the value of the pass is only equal to the extra levels the XP gives
     • 10 Packs is Lv 130 with the Pass which is equal to 110 without the pass. At this point you've "gained" 20 levels which is 1000 Gold
     • The 15 Pack Breakeven Point is Lv 185 with the Pass which is equal to 155 without the pass. At this point you've "gained" 30 levels which is 1500 Gold... cool you get the drill
     • 20 Packs - Lv 245 With the Pass = Lv 205 Without (Conveniently this is also about the point you'd reach naturally from just the Weekly and Daily Quests in an 18 week period)
     • 25 Packs - Lv 305 With the Pass = Lv 255 Without
     • 30 Packs - Lv 365 With the Pass = Lv 305 Without
3. Max Value - Level 400
   • • If you're constantly reaching Level 400 without the pass... Impressive! This also means the pass has no value outside the cosmetics
     • There is actually a point where the pass has diminishing value and that's if you're reaching Lv 335 without the pass - at this point, buying the pass will put you to 400 which will net you 3250 gold - meaning the max value of the pass is 3250 gold
     • Not factoring in the extra XP from just playing - this roughly takes 32 weeks of quests (Weekly 2500 + 2x 1750 + Daily 7x 1000) all multiplied by the XP Boosts of course... You roughly need to get 12,500 extra XP per week for 18 weeks to reach this (not sure how much XP the expansion quests provide but they'd help)

Hope this helps you make your decision!

Quote from PetiteMouche >>

Quote from Pherosizm >>

Quote from Shipmen >>

I don't understand why you want to farm exp. The real issue is farm tasks. You can simply put the merc low in the team while you are farming tasks.

It seems very pointless to me your idea. 

 Free exp = free gold = more of whatever you want.

It's a low commitment, easy way to get exp without roping people out on ladder or tanking matches in BGs. I support this method.

I've done this a little bit at work, while my phone is sitting on my desk next to me. Just start a bounty, queue up your attacks, then set a timer for 30 minutes. Rinse and repeat for 202xp per battle.

 It's not free at all you still gotta do things, you just turned a fun game into a garbage clicking/semi idle game.

Checking back and repeat all the steps every 20 minutes sounds horrible and depressing and I don't see what else the op can do in his life that is so significant within these 20 minutes, so yeah it's pretty much strictly worse than playing the game whenever you want and getting xp from it, extremely alienating and unneffective farming method, makes zero sense to use it unless you actively want to sabotage your life.

 Do you play this game 24/7? Then yeah, this isn't a method that works for you... I've been playing Mercenaries semi-idle while I work and this is great... oh I have a 30 min call? cool, just load up a game before the call, talk for 30 min, come back and then I get 10x the exp than I would if I just played the battle

This is the dumbest argument I've heard in a bit...

Who cares if you don't like the game? The more "Hearthstone" they add the more there is for people to do and the more likely you will be to leave a mode alone...

I can't tell you the last time I played a Tavern Duel / Arena / Duels... Mostly been playing Battlegrounds until now. All that being said you don't really need to spend money. I did the $5 one and then with the packs there was plenty to get me started. From there I was able to grind a bit and get enough coins to craft a few more (I do think the crafting might be too expensive, but am also very happy / surprised with the ability upgrade cost) I think I maybe have 35 of the 50ish so plenty to build 9 synergistic builds... 

tldr; I'm having fun and you can keep playing regular HS

Quote from Jknight1372 >>

Great question

 Am I the only one who thinks there should be another upside (besides the intel upperhand) to Maestra? Something like "neutral cards have +1/+1 while you don't reveal yourself"? I love this style of cards, like I love Renounce Darkness but find that there is no real reason to play it.

Only for the achievements

 

 Wouldn't this also reveal yourself though? Perhaps "Battlecry: Upgrade your hero power"? I don't think having a delayed 2/2 weapon would break anything (certainly not in this meta)

Quote from DeathLord1313 >>

Another annoying thing is if you play cloak of shadows when you reveal yourself as a rouge, you lose stealth. That seems like it should trigger in reverse or the card has an anti synergy.

 Same with Yoink! it give you the HP then change to Rogue - I pretty much just try to make my first Rogue card be the Maestra herself or a 3 cost draw card

Quote from FortyDust >>

It shows the card you traded. You can also be found out by an opponent Rogue or Demon Hunter peeking at your deck or hand, or a Priest copying your cards.

 That's unfortunate - I can definitely get behind those other methods being fair game since it's the opponent discovering something, but I feel like when you trade the Extortion it should show that you traded your fake class' respective trade card if that makes sense

WOW! This actually worked! So bizarre

yeah! I just started a duels run instead - that works fine!

I just got 8800 and came to ask the same question

EDIT - I'm mainly done with this, and happy with the results of:

1) Top, top left, and bottom left boxen are always bounty reward when there are five reward boxes. Top right comes from the party. Bottom right is random.

2) When there's a legendary coin option for rewards: HC bounty reward boxes are approximately 27% legendary, 29% Epic, and 44% Rare. The legendary rate is approximately halved, to around 13.5%, when on normal.

3) HC data is across Felwood and BRM; normal data is from Coren and Emperor. No anomaly was found in my data for normal Emperor.

I'm looking at doing a few hundred runs of something like Fallen guardians HC and a few others for looking at bounty coin droprate breakdowns and testing my hypothesis regarding rates between the chars (specifically, my hypothesis is that there's 10 equal buckets, 6 for the mercs in your party, 3 for bounty rewards, and 1 random, and each of the five rewards picks randomly. No weighting based on rarity etc., and no difference between HC/normal). First, though, I'd like to check if there's any data on this already that people have gathered? Initially I need data with no overlap between party and bounty (how that interacts, or smaller parties if the game allows, would be a followup) - if someone's already gathered this, would be nice to know ahead of time!

Should be fine to mix and match bounties as long as I avoid overlaps in rewards/team. Overlap between random and others should be easily accounted for, I hope, but no way to prevent that.

Edit:

Interesting preliminary report - it doesn't quite seem to work like that. Low sample size, but looking like 1/5 rewards - specifically the one bottom right - is *always* a random merc - only exception is once when it's Tamsin which seems likely to be the random hitting one of the bounty rewards. Top right appears to be always a party merc. Top, top left, and bottom left are always a bounty reward. Far too early to look at rates between the mercs, though.

It's worth bearing in mind here that the top right and bottom right may actually be due to the order I'm opening rewards in - so it'd go first is bounty reward, second is party, third is random, 4th/5th are bounty rewards (which would scale down to the lower bounties with three rewards). Interesting idea here is that the first bounty would give you more random coins, though it'll take a lot of data to determine coin rarities etc..

Edit 2 - Early data on rarities shows that the rare and epic coins from bounties are at roughly the same rate. Legendaries are notably rarer - might be a 2:2:1 ratio, but early. No pattern yet in the significantly smaller datasets for party/random mercs. Variance on rarity breakdowns is hilaiously high. Looked like 1:2:2 for a good while, but now at 17/22/31, so we'll see what more data does. With only one leg in the group and the rest being rares, no visible signal there, but small dataset. Random shows no skew so far, but again needs a LOT more data. Lots.

Since I know how party overlap will be treated now, I can go for any bounty/group composition to gather more data - pretty much done on Malf, so will switch.

Hi guys, has the Mercenaries gameplay by Slysssa, Trump and Kripp changed your mind about Mercenaries? Did you even now preorder a bundle?

I have to say, that it hyped up the mode a bit for me and I am thinking about a preorder. Simply to have more fun when the game mode launches.

What do you think?

So what, he got a nut draw T1, something that almost never happens and it's not even that strong to begin with. Cast lightning storm on his board and he basically lost because he has no cards left to your full hand... It's not even a T1 deck lol, people really do complain about everything. 

It basically forces everyone to put it in their in decks

no.

the first who draws it wins.

no.

This thing should be a 2/3 MAX

no.

Play removals.

Our orbs are back from the Outlands, a world once called Draenor. This timeline drops promising data. It presents a peculiar developing, I detect the  presence of  organisms augmented with a fusion of metal and fel magic. This is unusual. The information mentions an individual named Doctor Boom, this.... goblin, has performed a sustantial twist to the events in this  dimension, as a result the Legion of this reality is known as the "Rusted Legion". It also looks like those called "Demon Hunters" are in a process of  mass dispelling to purge the fel magic around the zone. The way to proced is clear, sending operatives to stablish a base and take control of the remaining  artifacts, drain the energy of those  which are not  salvageable. Any information about the desing behind the augmentations   or  heavy machinery must be immediatly  informed in order to start the researching for future applications.  I expect resistance from the natives and the foreingners. You have permision to use the warping mechanisms against them when someone tries to stop our agents.

With this post  i present to you  The Warper custom class. Travellers between time and space that  yearn with twisting the reality to their will. 

They research in order to find new ways to perfect it's own technology, sometimes in a not very ethic  way. Thing that has gotten them some enemies, and for that reason they are always prepared to answer the anemy presence.

The 3 main ways to work with.

 The first way is reducing the cost of card. The class has some big minions awaiting to jump into the board and this class tries to reach "the future" early in the game by making them cheaper. This does not discard the option of just reduce the mana of a lower cost card, helping to fit better some curves. 

 The second way is by generating tokens,  more agresive decks may use  the cards that summon multiple boddies to buff their attack whether with Warper's hero power or buff spells and minions. Some of  this ways to buff your mech are susceptible to the enemy's presense on the board, which  guide us to the last main characteristic of this class.

 Warper are always alert.  The enemies they've made and all the past confrontation forced them to be more competent if they oppose to minions in the other side of the board. As a result of this some cards will gain benefits when your opponent controls 1 or more minions during a match.

Remaining Cards

Flavor Text: "FOOOOOORE"

Flavor Text: "Measure once, shoot twice!"

Flavor Text:  "I told you to read better the prospects when you buy automatons from a century ago in another dimention"

Flavor Text: "Ohh! Interesting!, The ice cream vendor was here yesterdey!"

Flavor Text: "People used to confuse it with the  FORCEhead Strike, but after a few tries everyone of them noticed that the only thing reduced by smacking  objects with their heads was their wallets because of the medic interventions",

Flavor Text: "He is just a janitor with a cooler lantern"

Flavor Text:"We are having huge improvements on this version! Now the Prototype recognizes more things to protect other than it's cigarette!"

 

Tokens

A while back the HS team specifically stated that when you re-roll a quest you get an "easier" one, where it was assumed that those that gave less gold (now XP) are considered easier to complete than the ones that give more.
It was also made that you could re-roll quests that you couldn't in the past.

Maybe someone can add a link to that article on this site?

Anyway, when we still had gold as reward I didn't mind that, but now with XP it is irritating (XP has more value because you need more of it the higher you get up the reward track - for gold you never realised it because I just spent what I had when a new expansion came around). For example, I have the daily "Play 3 games as Rogue/Shaman/Warrior" ... three of my least played classes (cuz they don't interest me much) ... if I re-roll I'll get a lesser-XP quest, where all I want really is to not play those three classes, so won't mind an equal value quest ... so off to casual I go ...

The biggest question about the new reward system: is it better or worse than old one? There are many misconceptions about it, some people love it because its front-loaded (meaning: its very easy to get a lot of rewards in the beginning but later it will be harder) and some people just hate it because they cant get that sweet 10g per 3 wins anymore.

Now we have the numbers and I dont wanna wait for the Hearthstone Mathematics channel, because I love to do the number-crunching myself. So the answer to the question mainly depends on what kind of player you are. Lets see the first one:

UPDATE: Before that, lets talk about the "apology blue post". We will have 6 less packs and 1350 more gold on the reward track from level 1 to 50. I didnt update the original number crunching, only the conclusions at each category, because it was easier to do. I have also renamed the 4th category to "competitive player". BTW I should mention here that I have used these numbers for the required xp for levels: https://outof.cards/hearthstone/2200-the-rewards-track-how-long-to-get-to-level-50-644000-experience-required-to-get-to-level-150 and by their calculations you can achieve level 50 in 12 and a half weeks with 1 hour play per day. You can still achieve it within the expansion cycle with less gameplay, since most of the xp comes from quests.

The Questing adventurer:

In this category I will assume that you are just logging in to do your daily quests (and weekly quests) and play less than an hour per day. In the old system you could get an average 55 gold per quest and I will assume 3 wins for the 10 gold. So 65 gold * 120 day = 7800 gold per expansion cycle. Now lets see the new reward track. Up to level 50 you will get 4200 gold, 16 packs, 2 arena/duel tickets, 2 legendaries and 1 epic card. 1 pack is worth 100 gold, the ticket is the same because the questing adventurer doesnt have time for this, but instant conceding is still worth a pack. Cards are a bit more tricky, but we can measure them in dust, and a packs average worth is around 100 dust. Lets say we are pessimistic and you just want to disenchant your rewards. (BTW I dont know if the reward cards could be golden but lets assume they are always non-golden) So a random legendary is equal to 400 gold and a random epic is 100 gold for this calculation. If we add this up we get a value thats worth 6900 gold. From there, you gain 150 gold for every level up.

So lets see the new quest system. Every week we get 3 weekly quests, 1 has 2500 exp reward and the other 2 has 1750, so its 6k exp per week. We also have 66 new daily quests, 50 of those worth 1000 exp the rest are 800 or 1500, so I think its reasonable to count 1k as an average. Easy math, 7k + 6k means 13k exp per week just from quests. You can also gain xp just from playing the game. Winning means more xp but the main factor is the time and its capped at 400 xp / hour in ranked. Lets assume that the questing adventurer doesnt have time to play a whole hour per day, so I will count with 200 xp per day which should be attainable in less than 30 minutes. Thats another 1400 xp per week.

So we are at 14400 xp per week, and an expansion cycle is 120 days or 17 weeks, so the Q.A. will get 244800 xp which is equal to level 61 on the reward track. So its 1650 gold bonus above level 50, which means 8550 gold in total. So for the Q.A. its 7800 gold vs. 8550 gold or 5850 gold + packs and cards.

There is also another source of xp, namely achievments. There are some that gives you xp, overall they can give 3-4 more levels so 450-600 bonus gold but we know that the questing adventurer dont have time for this. I would say for this category the new system is better, but some people dont think that a pack is actually worth 100 gold, so its maybe less good for them.

UPDATE: Old system: 7800 gold vs New system 9300 gold value OR 7200 gold + packs and cards.

The farmer:

The farmer plays a very fast aggro deck, he always does the quests and always farms the daily 100 gold for 30 wins then immediately shuts down HS. 155 * 120 = 18600 gold per expansion cycle (thats the cap). Assuming a 50% winrate and 5 minute matches, the farmer plays 5 hours every day. In the new system that means 5*400=2000 xp per day, so 14k xp per week + 13k from the quests so 27k per week, so 459000 xp in the expansion cycle. We will be generous this time and give him 500 achievment xp to earn level 109. This means 8550 gold above level 50, for a total of 15750 gold. The farmer doesnt like the new system.

UPDATE: Old system: 18600 gold VS New system 16500 gold value OR 14400 gold + packs and cards.

The hardcore player/streamer:

The farmer capped out the old system with 5 hours per day. But I was curious if someone can max out the current reward system. The math shows that you will need an average 9 hours per day to do that (which is really high, I know), but the new cap is actually higher than the old one. On max level you have 21900 gold, or 19200 + the goodies. So the hardcore player likes the new system.

UPDATE: Old system 18600 gold VS New system 22650 gold value OR 20550 gold + packs and cards.

The competitive player:

This is my category, a player who doesnt have much time on the weekdays but plays a bit more on the weekends. My assumption is that the average player plays 1 hour per day from monday to friday and somewhere between 2-5 hours per day on the weekend. For this calculation I will use 10 hours per week. In 10 hours a farmer would get 200 gold, but the competitive player also plays other decks than hyper-aggro, so lets calculate with 80% effectiveness, that would mean 160 gold per week from the 3 wins deal plus 7*55=385 from quests for a total of 545 gold per week on average. This is 9265 gold per expansion cycle. In the new system we have the 13k/week from quests and the 4k/week from gameplay, which means 289000 xp per expansion cycle. It means level 71 on the reward track, but the competitive player is interested in doing some achievments for xp, so we will give him +2 levels. The summary is 10350 gold or 7650 gold + goodies.

UPDATE: Old system 9265 gold VS New system 11100 gold value OR 9000 gold + packs and cards.

The conclusion:

If you agree with my conversion rate of the goodies, you can see that the new system is better for most players. The pure gold will be lower, but it is compensated by cards/packs. Since the new system is front-loaded, you will get more stuff in the beginning of a new cycle, which is good IMO. Later you get mostly gold, which you want anyways for the next expansion. Needless to say that the xp bonus from the premium track helps a lot, but as far as I know it doesnt change the hourly cap from gameplay. Personally I like the new system better, but I can see why someone would like the old one better. One thing is for sure: its NOT more grindy than the old one, you get rewards based on how much you play the game.

I did these calculations mainly for myself, but I hope it will help you too to understand what you should expect from the new system on the long run.

Conclusion UPDATE:

At first I didnt consider that the loss of pure gold would upset most of the playerbase, but that was my mistake, since Blizzard specifically stated that we will make more gold in the new system, and its obviously not the case, by my math not even after the update (-6 packs and + 1350 gold). I am a mostly wild player and I also like to collect cards, so for me any pack that can give me a card I dont have has a 100 gold value. If you are not like me, you can use the updated numbers with pure gold + packs and cards. So I still like the new system better BUT we will have a mini-expansion with 35 new cards and the slightly better rewards wont help us to get them. All we can do is hope that the promised events will get us enough xp to help with that.

Thanks for the feedback, if Blizzard will update the rewards track again, I plan to do the same with my post.

I got free stuff, but not the free stuff I wanted :(

I would have expected it to work this way, honestly. Fate Weaver (and cards with similar requirements) activate once you've done something (invoke). IE. it doesn't really matter which Galakrond is being Invoked (you or your opponent's), as long as you are the one doing the invoking.

Whereas Galakrond itself is going to upgrade when Invokes are played by the deck (/hand) it belongs to. Makes sense when you look at the wording of the cards, no?