Hearthstone Mercenaries: Mysterious Stranger Appearance Rate Changes
Blizzard just nerfed the most reliable way to get Tasks for your Mercenaries, which was the easiest way to gain their most powerful Equipment and the Coins needed to upgrade them. Progress on these things will no doubt slow down considerably. This change should already be live.
Quote from BlizzardWe are adjusting the appearance rate of Mysterious Stangers to be based on the relative level of the strongest Mercenary in your party compared to the suggested level of the Bounty. This move is to encourage people towards more engaging gameplay instead of repeatedly taking on low-level Heroic Bounties with highly over-leveled Parties.
I didn't know everybody is apparently playing Barrens runs with level 30 characters. Which a lvl30 character can even solo.
Blizzard bad PR strikes again. They REALLY should have thought about this before releasing it.
That said, I doubt half the people complaining here even play the game mode. And it is the right call.
Having grinding The Barrens over and over again shouldn't be the optimal strategy - but there should be better rewards for playing later content.
Stop playing mercs and wasting your time and potentially money… simple as that
The problem is that the higher level bounties dont bring more coins or rewards. It really sucks that they did this. I understand why but... it really just looks bad.
without tasks you cant farm coins for your mercs anymore. they have just destroyed game economy. if you want to farm a certain legendary merc coins you need to run a bounty with 7-8 fights more then 100 times. for example, i want to farm malfurion for my nature build.
so here is the calculation:
1 finished bounty gives you around 15 coins of that particular merc with 25% chance. 7 fights bounty takes lets says 1 hour to complete. 4 runs on average to gain 15 coins. for 500 coins you have to run that same bounty 130 times, which takes 130 hours. if you play 3-4 hours a day, it will take you a month to craft 1 legendary mercenary. just to craft it! now you need 3000 more coins (or 6 more months) to fully upgrade it.
good job small greedy company, good job. we all love you!
Can you give some info regarding your 25% chance? Because that doesn't agree with my data.
HC: ~25 coins average, 3 bundles giving the bounty rewards, each one approx 28% chance of the leg, 31%ish Epic, 41%ish rare. Assuming you want leg coins: 21 coins per run.
Normal: small sample size, but I'm pretty sure it's not the same rate as HC. Could be half the rate, and about 15 per bundle. Average of 6.3 coins per. Normal is not looking good for grinding.
Also, you're vastly overestimating farm time. 10-15 min, in my experience, if I don't get bogged down posting on here - maybe more like 20 for the harder HCs if you're reliably doing them (that trash is rough, particularly Winterspring).
If you run in Felwood there's basically no change in Stranger probability.
I also want to know where you got that math from. I was griding emperor for diablo and each run yielded 15 diablo coins on average. On the top of that 7 fights per hour is quite slow (your bot was lagging of what?).
With lucky 75 extra coins from Velen's 15th task I was able to craft diablo after just 1 weekend (while also sleeping, cooking, eating, going for a walk and even doing some cleaning).
Also I don't know how doing only tasks can help you max out your merc. Even without including crafting cost and with perfecly even distribution you you're still one equipment short from max (per merc if they have 3 upgradeable equipments).
And finally it takes 230 days (with no stranger) to get all the tasks so yea "6 months to max 1 legend", 8 months to max them all (or nearly, see paragraph above).
done 5x majordomo (normal) without a stranger. So I suppose with a lvl 30 party you need to do heroic felwood+ content atleast to get strangers to show up... :s stupid
Just done 5 normal majordomo runs in a row and got 0 mysterious strangers. So even with a full 30 party you can't reliably get it on non-heroic hardest encounters. So I suppose I gotta keep struggling in high difficulty heroics to get some legendary coins... pff busted game
I suppose tasks become dailies now. 4 tasks a day, and no way to farm more. Back to casual
"This move is to encourage people towards more engaging gameplay instead of repeatedly taking on low-level Heroic Bounties with highly over-leveled Parties" give better rewards at higher levels no???
i was finding the grind more annoying run after run and i still have only 8 mercs at 30 .... time to say good bye to the mode
Another dead mode with paywall like duels? Nice.
Why not create another great mode like BG with low barriers to entry and cosmetic shopping?
dont you have phones ?
Unbelievable, every time:
[new content drops]
[easily exploitable efficiency gain that early adopters abuse and get way ahead]
[blizzard nerfs it]
[anyone new is left light years behind]
Oh wait I guess activision wants to make sure people feel behind so they have to spend money. It honestly is on purpose by now, there is no excuse.
now everyones actually gonna quit this mode lmao
It took ages to get to task seven out of 20.... I'm really curious about how people will get their mercs strong now... And now I have an advantage since I already got two important mercs to 7 but all the new people will have to spend a week grinding before they can even play Malfurion
yea i cant imagine how slow the grind is going to be from now on
still havent seen a single stranger been trying a bunch of different levels
and im getting a new bug where i have to restart every time i get a treasure
Seems like Rarran already found a new bounty to farm :)
Hahaha greediest ass company, what a shitshow.