Prepare for Mercenaries—Coming October 12!
This post contains information about the release date and small scale overview of the Mercenaries game mode as well as information about pre-orders.
Quote from BlizzardHearthstone Mercenaries is the new game mode where you collect iconic Mercenaries, assembling Parties to take down procedurally-generated Bounties. It is an entirely new way to play Hearthstone, combining RPG and roguelike elements with some of your favorite Hearthstone characters. There’s a lot to take in, so we created a series of blog posts to help you jump right into Mercenaries when it launches on October 12!
This post will give you an Overview of the new Mercenaries game mode, then you can check out the Gameplay blog for more specifics on how to fight, and the Collection/Village blog for details on the mode’s progression and collection systems.*
* Mercenaries is still in development and all stats and effects are subject to change. The Card Library will be updated when Mercenaries launches on October 12 to represent any updated versions.
The Mercenaries Village
The Village is your central hub for all things Mercenaries! In the Village, you can manage your collection, collect task rewards, head directly to the Mercenaries shop, set off on Bounties, and so much more! The Village is also itself a gameplay and progression system because you can build and upgrade buildings in your Village to unlock more content and make them more effective. You can learn more about the Village in our Village and Collection blog post, here.
Picking Fights
What is being a Mercenary if not collecting Bounties? From the Village, you can use the Travel Point to go to the Bounty Board. The Bounty Board is where you can choose which Bounty you want to go after—which can be thought of as choosing what “mission” or “level” to tackle. Seeking Bounties is a major part of the Mercenaries experience, and is critical for leveling up your Mercenaries, even if you plan to focus on PVP play.
Each Bounty has a suggested level, and a designated Bounty Boss at the end, so you have an idea of what you’re getting into. There are several Bounties to go after, and each one includes procedurally-generated encounters leading up to the Bounty Boss, to keep play interesting. As you play longer, additional difficulty levels can be unlocked, too, for even greater challenges!
Selecting a Bounty will bring up the Party selection menu. In Mercenaries, you control a Party of up to 6 Mercenaries, instead of a deck of cards. In combat, you will pick 3 of your 6 Mercenaries to fight at a time, with reinforcements coming off your Bench if one of your Mercenaries falls or uses a special Ability to swap out.
All experience you earn during your run sticks with you—even if that Mercenary rides the Bench or if they don’t make it out of the Bounty alive. After you claim a Bounty, you can move on to the next one, or keep coming back to ones you’ve already beaten to collect more loot and level up your team. Each Bounty has a different type of loot it can drop, so keep coming back to the same Bounty if you’re looking to focus on a specific reward!
After you’ve claimed a few Bounties, your Party might be ready to head to the Fighting Pit! In the Fighting Pit, you always be paired against a similarly-powerful opponent, even when trying out a new Mercenary. Compete in the Fighting Pit to complete achievements, earn rewards, and even push for a spot on the leaderboard!
Get This Party Started!
Try out Mercenaries when it launches on October 12 and get eight Mercenaries (pictured below) just for completing the prologue and introductory missions! That’s enough to put together a Party and immediately start chasing Bounties. Keep playing to continue growing your collection!
The More the Merrier
Start up a new Bounty after the introductory missions and you will also receive the adorable new Sarge mount for World of Warcraft! Learn more.
WoW and Hearthstone fans have even more to celebrate! Purchase a 6-month WoW Subscription between now and October 19, or have a current subscription set to renew at a later date, and you will receive the Tavern Pass and Battlegrounds Perks for this and the next expansion, 15 packs from United in Stormwind, 15 packs from Hearthstone’s next expansion, and 30 total Mercenaries Packs across your subscription period! Additional details and restrictions apply.
Diablo Comes to Mercenaries!
Last, but certainly not least, the Lord of Terror is coming to help celebrate the launch of Mercenaries! Diablo is available as part of one of three pre-purchase bundles, each including an iconic Blizzard character!
The Diablo Mercenaries Pre-Purchase Bundle includes a Diamond Legendary Diablo Mercenary Card and 50 Mercenaries Packs; the Lich King Mercenaries Pre-Purchase Bundle includes a Diamond Legendary Lich King Mercenary Card and 50 Mercenaries Packs; and the Sylvanas Mercenaries Bundle includes a Golden Legendary Sylvanas Mercenary Card and 30 Mercenaries Packs.
The Diablo, Lich King, and Sylvanas are all also obtainable in-game, without purchasing these bundles, from Mercenaries Packs or the crafting system. To learn more details about Mercenaries, make sure to check out our Gameplay and Collection blogs. We’ll see you in the Village!
That's kind of an odd connection to make here. They release a new mode to attract players, completely separate from regular Hearthstone, and it makes you want to quit the game?
The game is not changing, they're just adding to it. You can still play with all your card collection.
What's the problem?
Wow, good job Blizz on making your players leave your game. This is basically Hearthstone Shadow Legends. Pure gacha and exploits horrible rates from games like WWE champions, exploitative and incredibly predatory. Hearthstone is already having a massive lull as Stormwind made the game worse. Wild is effing unplayable and what is worse the game is more expensive than freaking Yu gi oh at a local level.
I remember playing for hours and probably since frozen throne post, its nothing. I begrudge playing because its the same over and over. Now they are putting arbitrary stats in hearthstone making it stat.game when really people want stable gameplay modes that are FUN.
Seems pretty cool and well designed, but it's true that it may be hard to spend gold both on this and regular modes. Shame, because I realy like how this looks.
All many of us ever wanted was a simple tournament mode..... This just looks like another cash grab to sell us something that I don't think anybody asked for.
Yeah, I thought it was going to be another free mode, like Battlegrounds. Considering how expensive Standard is, I won't be paying more! LUL
I'm getting a headache looking at this. This mode is super confusing just glancing through it, and they expect us to drop expansion bucks for something no one has played yet.
Get outta here with this crap Blizz.
When I heard a new game mode that would be related to a Roguelike RPG I expected something better structured and fun not a Battlegrounds 2.0 with fewer functions.
I already own slay the spire
What are the XP/gold rewards for this game mode?
Let's face it: HS has turned from Ben's vision of a fun, charming card game, set in the Warcraft universe, into a super-company's Acti-Vi$ion of a soulless money printing machine. It used to be about the players. Now it's about the shareholders.
I'll play it just to try. Hope I'll like it but in any case it will be F2P for me. The game is already too expensive.
Consider using another server (or even account) for this. For me, if it is any good, It will be easy to start playing without wasting any resources from my main server. I buy almost nothing on my American account and have 50K gold and 8 tavern tickets there. If I'll like the mode I'll pour all of this into it.
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Nice, I'm going to use the Rarity information in the forum thread I made about this. Thanks!
Edited: Nevermind, found how mercenary packs work
Not a big deal since you can reroll every day.
I really dislike that this has no connection to our hearthstone collections. I hoped that owning, for example, both Ragnaroses will give something. And vice versa - getting something in this mode would give stuff for proper Hearthstone
That's the point. Makes our collections worthless and makes us have to spend more $. They break wild then release this crap
Its like a new game. Same with Battle Grounds. Expect some quest but in the end its a new game with no connection. You even see it in the game menu.
Uhm, maybe I'm stupid, but the only things I was able to clearly understand from this "announcement" or "explanation" were Purchase, Pre-Purchase, Subscribe. The rest seems quite confusing and non-intuitive.
I'll give it a chance, but I would have preferred they focus on making the existing modes more fun, less RNG-based, and more polished overall. I'm not an expert and only Blizzard knows what's best for them, but there are really A LOT of modes now, which are played very rarely and player base/player engagement continues to shrink.
Instead of adding more and more modes, why not just make the existing ones playable? Cause right now it feels non of them is really fine-tuned. We have Arena and Tavern Brawl, which are totally forgotten. Single player content is getting worse and worse with every release. Duels is still in beta version. Wild is... wild. They just released Classic, which (judging by my humble limited community) no one ever plays. And there is Standard, which also feels rushed all the time.
I think they went too far with the number of new "mandatory" expansions and content, in order to try and monetize more, which ultimately led to a much lower quality overall, less player satisfaction, and I guess less players overall as well.
Maybe I'm wrong, but that's my feeling and experience in the last 2-3 years in Hearthstone (I have been playing since beta).