Hearthstone Battlegrounds
Hearthstone is introducing it's first new Game Mode, in a very long time: Battlegrounds. This post will attempt to bring you all the information you need to understand how they work.
When can you start playing this game mode?
Closed Beta starts 5th of November for people with a Virtual Ticket or who preordered Descent of Dragons. Open Beta starts November 12th. Open to everyone!
What is Hearthstone Battlegrounds in short?
- Combination between Hearthstone and the popular Auto-Battler genre.
- Free to play, no entry cost.
- No rewards, except prestige and fun.
- Player vs Player.
- 8 real life players queue in, no bots.
- Accessible from a new button on the main Hearthstone menu, simply labeled "Modes".
The basic idea is that you choose one of 24 Heroes, who start with 40 health, then pick minions to fight for you from the offered selection in a Recruit Phase and afterwards have those minions fight for you automatically in a Battle Phase. Battle lasts until one side has no minions left. At that point the power level of the remaining minions gets totaled and turned into points, added to a base number of 1 (which scales) and applied as face damage to the opposing Hero. When both sides end up with no minions left, it is a draw and no damage gets applied to either Hero. You go back and forth between the Recruit phase and the Battle phase on a fixed timer untill there is only 1 player remaining.
What is Battlegrounds in more detail?
So what does this look like in practice? You start the game off on a launch menu with your rating, the number of top 4 finishes and a launch button. Once queued and accepted you get a choice of 3 Heroes with different Hero Powers, all unique to this game mode. You can see all the available Heroes HERE.
After this you hit the Recruit Phase. Which looks like this:
Legend:
- A: This is the current standings, 1 through 8. Your portrait has a blue outline. The red portrait highlighted and sticking out is your next opponent. You can hover over these portraits for information about this opponent like you see HERE
- B: This is the button that lets you "Cheer" which upgrades Bob's awesome Tavern and allows you to Recruit a higher quality minion. As you get a higher level you also get a larger number of Minions to choose from growing from 3 at the start. Very importantly the Tavern level also increases the damage you do at the end of the Battle Phase when you have defeated your opponent. As indicated it currently costs 5 gold pieces to use this button, but that price does go down as the game goes on, 1 gold per turn.
- C: This is the button that let's you freeze the selection of minions that Bob has on offer till your next Recruit Phase. As indicated it costs 0 gold pieces to use. This is always the same price.
- D: This is the button that lets you swap your selection of available minions for a new selection. As indicated it costs 1 gold piece to use this. This is always the same price.
- E: This is the current timer on this round, indicated in seconds. It goes red when the timer is nearly run out. This timer is fixed for everyone and there is no way to get more or less time or give up your turn early.
- F: This is your amount of Gold available. It starts at 3 and goes up by 1 each round. You do not take gold with you to the next round if you have any unspent.
- G: This is your Hero Power which in this case costs no gold but is a passive. Otherwise a cost is indicated. When the Hero Power is active it can only be used in the Recruit Phase and only be used once per Recruit Phase.
During the Recruit Phase you can augment your board by:
- Buying a minion for 3 Gold. The selection will be random, with the maximum quality of the minions offered depending on your Tavern's Level. Even with a higher level Tavern you will still get lower tier minions offered. You can see all the available Minions HERE.
- You can easily see minion quality and corresponding tier by the number of stars it has as seen HERE.
- Getting 3 of the same minion will fully automatically combine them into 1 golden minion with increased stats and abilities. You then also get a special card that will let you Recruit 1 of 3 minions of a higher quality free of charge, to make up for the fact you just lost board presence.
- Selling a minion back to Bob for 1 Gold in return. This is the same for every minion, no matter how good or bad, no matter if you never used it or have used it since the start.
- Swapping the selection of minions for 1 Gold. You will do this frequently in later turns hunting for special minions that compliment your build.
- Use your Hero Power for it's associated cost.
- Cheer to upgrade your Tavern and get higher quality minions offered, get larger number of minions to choose from, and do more damage at end of Battle Phase. The Tavern can be upgraded to level 6 this way.
- Change the order of your minions to maximize their impact. In the Battle Phase minions will attack from Left to Right, and they will respect Taunt.
After the Recruit Phase timer runs out you immediately get moved to the fully automated Battle Phase:
In this phase there is not much to actively do, except watch and pray to Yogg for good RNG. You will need this because although the attack order is fixed from Left to Right, and the minions will have to respect Taunt, the target selection is otherwise random. This can lead to just the wrong (or right!) minion being attacked on your board and nuking (or enhancing!) your carefully laid out strategy. Play is quite fast, even though there is often quite a lot to resolve between deathrattles and buffs, so you will need to pay careful attention to spot where or why your planned tactic worked or didn't work and what your weak spots in your line up may be.
At the end of the Battle Phase, if one side ends up defeating the other side's minions, while still having minions remaining, there will be a hit calculated that will hit the loser in the face. This calculation starts with a base damage of 1 (scaling with Tavern level), and for every minion points get added. More minions, more points. Higher quality remaining minions give more points than lower quality remaining ones.
After the Battle Phase is over the ranking on the side board gets updated and players will get moved to the Recruit Phase, unless they died, in which case you see the end of game screen with your placement and your ranking change and you return to the main Battlegrounds screen. If you are the last one standing you will also get the placement screen and get returned to the main Battlegrounds screen.
Conclusion
Hearthstone Battlegrounds is a tactical game, much like the normal Hearthstone card game. There is a lot of interesting game play to learn and master that is very different from the normal Hearthstone game play. At the same time players who have been around the card game for a bit will easily recognize and understand parts of this new game mode because the familiarity with the cards and keywords will be useful throughout. Synergies between cards and card tribes matter a great deal. Using and abusing buff cards of various sorts is key to getting a line up that will carry you to the end. Placement of minions matters, probably even more so than in the normal card game. And all of these things will come as no surprise to people who have played the normal card game.
Blizzard seems to have created a fun game mode that can easily change with new expansions of cards coming in and easily be changed up and augmented with new unique cards and Heroes as time goes on. We cannot wait to get our hands on this game mode ourselves!
he have to be some king of ultra top tier player how only profit from gaming in standar ladder and world championship
A win in play mode is worth about about 3 cents compared to buying the packs with real $. If you're playing solely for that "reward" then that's pretty sad.
Hell, you know what, if you make a video of you winning 30 battlegrounds games, I'll paypal you the equivalent of 100 gold ($1).
What he means by that, my mentally handicapped friend, is there are so many other different things you can do "for fun" in HS, like K&C dungeon, that RoS pve content thingie, a tomb run or try to do heroics if you havent done it already or try out a new deck in ladder etc. Im playing the ladder because it gives me something in return each month. If you wish to spend your time to have fun, there are better, and i mean WAAAAAYYY BETTER things to do than this garbage mode, especially with the current rewards, which is 0.
Will be forgotten in 3 months, maybe 2. A complete waste of time for all parties involved.
So it would not be a waste of time if they gave you like 1 card pack per win?
Dumbass logic. Playing a video game is always "wasting time" unless its your job.
I would actually prefer if this was like an arena. By that I mean cost and reward wise.
Actually now that I think about it, why not have both free versions with no reward and paid version with rewards like arena?
Tho I have a feeling it will be for free while Paid version will come every now and then in tavern brawl like heroic tavern brawl does.
It has to have some stakes pride is pure garbage this WILL NOT LAST LONG GARUNTEEDS WITH NO ECONOMY
even if u go first u get like 15 gold 10 gold and 5 gold for the 1st 2nd 3rd .... it's not that unreasonable because u'd atleast go through a long gauntlet but they don't sell packs so hmmm LUL
THIS SEEMS LIKE A COMPLAINT THREAD
#1 CARD BACKS for WINNING
#2 PERKS like COSMETIC HEROES
#3 SUPER SLIM SUMS OF GOLD 15 for 1st 10 for 2nd and 5 for 3rd
OR we can CONTRIBUTE TO A POOL 10 GOLD ENTRY total POOL 80 GOLD first 40 gold 25 gold 15 gold SO THIS MEANS A FREE MODE AND A 10 GOLD ENTRY MODE OR dust same Distribution?
#4 EXTRA PINS AND WHEELS like u have a golden TAB or a cursor OR on the ICONS ON THE LEFT you have a star saying u're a pro? or a GOLDEN BORDER? there's just so much SMALL PERKS you can DO i think I DON"T NEED a SMALL STUPID MAN LIKE MYSELF to give you IDEAS when U"RE A MULTI BILLION DOLLAR COMPANY!? GOLDEN ICON PORTRAITS!?
#5 EVERY WEEK there's an Event
#6 QUEST TAB? SHOWS your RANK MMR? SPECIFIC QUEST LOG REWARDS!? DUDE there's so many ffs Blizzard you figure out now leave me alone....
I'm not bothered by the lack of rewards. I just think this looks like a dumbing down of the autobattler genre. I play TFT and underlords, but this doesn't appeal to me at all. That said, it's free, so whatever.
I actually don't care that much about additional rewards, but I am a bit confused. The wording implies that there are no rewards at all, but I don't think that is the case. Bilzzard's previous philosophy was that you don't get punished no matter what format or gamemode you play, be it standard, wild, ranked, casual, Tavern Brawl or Arena. So I think this new gamemode will include the 10 Gold every 3 Wins and it will most likely also work with certain dailies.
Mike Donais told a streamer that the only reward for winning is "pride," indicating that there's no intent to hand out any prizes. Your reward is your Battleground ranking, period.
its just beta, i believe they will make any improvement after open beta,
reward, cost, hero, gameplay
why would people waste their time playing video games
this new mode is interesting , but I was hoping for a monthly reward at least based on your rating.
Why not make a Casual and a "Pro" version where Casual is free and Pro is 50-100G entry fee with the top 4 getting rewards like arena? Will definitely drive a lot more hype that way, and people who just want to play for fun won't be forced into paying gold
Because they are stingy with rewards.
calling them stingy during the same expansion where they give out 5 legendaries might not be the smartest thing.
Because 8 people is needed to play a sh*** mode?
The game is fun, and it’s free, the best part is you don’t have to play it!!!! They dumped thousands of work hours, probably hundred of thousand dollars internally to make a fun game mode that costs the consumer nothing and youre mad you don’t get more free stuff... I’d really appreciate if everyone complaining would go to work tell their boss that for a month “im good you don’t have to pay me” then see how it feels when they ask you to stay for free overtime. Every time a free to play game waste the resources to add new game modes or cards or w/e they take a gamble that that work will pay off cause PEOPLE CAN PLAY THIS ENTIRE GAME FOR FREE! Go play another game and stay off the forums.
Thats the problem, they made something no one wanted and they were late with it, again. People wanted tournament mode, but no Blizzard knows best.
And people downvoted me massively after announcement. I knew it will be different than people's expectations and I wrote about it but no they needed to defend Blizzard...
To be fair though I'm looking forward to this and I don't really care about a tournament mode, but as for the average player I have no idea