Mercenaries – What’s Next - 5 Free Packs!
Blizzard just provided an update on Mercenaries, which includes many things they intend to change now and in the future, as well as 5 free packs! Read all the details below!
Quote from BlizzardWelcome!
It’s been three weeks since we first released Mercenaries and we’re delighted to see our community hunt down bosses, make themselves cozy in the Village, and chase glory in the Fighting Pits. We’re excited to share some numbers with you, some insights into recent changes, some of our upcoming plans, and a few changes we’re making over the coming months to improve the player experience.
Mercenaries Launch Celebration
When we were building Mercenaries, we were looking to make a mode that delivered different gameplay experiences than Standard, Battlegrounds, and our other modes. Our goal was to figure out how to build a great collection RPG, with deep, strategic combat that you can pick up and play even for bite-sized play sessions. To us, the heart of Mercenaries is collecting Mercenaries, powering them up, and engaging in strategic combat with your foes – be they PvE or PvP.
We’re grateful for the millions of you who are playing Mercenaries. So far, you’ve totaled over one billion minutes of combat time and over 100 million combined Bounties (and that number’s excluding Heroic Air Elemental). As a big “thank you” to everyone for embracing this mode and making it so popular, we’re giving everyone 5 free Mercenaries packs! If you played Mercenaries in the 21.4 patch cycle, we’ll drop your appreciation gift into your collection on November 9. (If you’re a new player, it’s not too late to join in the fun! Complete the Mercenaries tutorial and introductory missions for a total of 8 free Mercenaries packs to start your journey now.)
Upcoming Content
This week, we’re adding our first new Mercenaries, with your favorite Deadmine-dwelling pirate, Edwin VanCleef! Along with VanCleef and his pirate band, we’re releasing new bounties in Blackrock Mountain to pursue. New Bounty Bosses Highlord Omokk, General Drakkisath, and Rend Blackhand await your challenge, and grant you rewards upon their defeat!
This is the first of many content drops we’ve planned for Mercenaries, and we’re excited to see how all of you hunt down these bounties and utilize these new Mercs in your Parties!
What We’ve Done & Changes to Come
Over the first few weeks, our team has been fixing bugs and tuning systems guided in part by your feedback. We’ve already made some immediate changes and have several larger challenges that the team is focused on tackling. We’re looking to improve the mode with content releases, balance patches, quality of life improvements (e.g., making it so that many daily and weekly Rewards Track quests will be completable in Mercenaries), system improvements in the Village, and more clarity in product descriptions and functionality. We’ll continue to look at both the data and your feedback as we improve and polish the Mercenaries experience.
The Village
We’ve loved the outpour of excitement around the Village artwork and the fantasy it evokes. That said, there are areas of the Village that we think have room for improvement:
- Task Board: Early on, we heard your desire for more Tasks, so we increased the Task Board daily refresh to refill all open daily slots, instead of only two. That said, we also know there are things we can improve on from here. For instance, we think Toki is doing her job well, but that her visits could be more interesting. We’re also exploring more ways to give players Tasks.
- Buildings: We launched the Village with future expansion in mind, but we want to make sure we add systems and upgrades that the community is excited about. Our first addition is something we’ve heard a lot of desire for: alternative ways to level up your Mercenaries. We’re excited to announce the Training Hall will be coming in a future patch, to let your Mercs passively gain XP throughout the day. We’ll have more details on the Training Hall closer to when it launches. In the meantime, we’d love to hear from you about other buildings or systems you want to see added into Mercenaries.
The Fighting Pit
We’ve been following along with the constantly evolving meta for PvP and have many people on our team playing along with you. It's been awesome to see the community enjoying PvP, and we want to continue to deliver on that skill-testing, mental game that it provides.
We saw your feedback on queue times and AI, and we made some adjustments to matchmaking parameters so that players, on average, would have shorter queue times and face fewer AI opponents. We saw players engaging in exploits that detracted from the Fighting Pit experience, and we made a couple changes to that system. After seeing your response, we adjusted our initial fix so that you now only need to defeat one enemy Mercenary for the game to count as a win. We’ll continue to monitor this and work to find that sweet spot that discourages behavior that ruins the mode for everyone, while also still ensuring that our core player base is properly rewarded.
Finally, we wanted to let you know that the first Mercenaries season will end at the same time as the November ranked ladder season. We wanted to give players more time in the first season to learn the ropes and make up for the mid-month launch. After this first season, Mercenaries seasons will reset every month, like the ranked ladder season.
The Travel Point
You’re all excellent Bounty hunters, and we see a lot of players having fun with PvE! We’ve noticed that most Bounties are the appropriate difficulty for Parties at the map’s suggested level. However, we also noticed that some bosses are a bit too tough—we're looking at you, Heroic Snowclaw—and we’re working to get these re-balanced in a future update.
Heroic Bounties are an integral part of Mercenaries–they give a breadth of Mercenaries an opportunity to shine, and are an exciting challenge, especially for players who prefer to focus on the PVE aspects of the mode. We’ll continue to invest in late-game content by adding additional challenging Bounties as part of our regular content updates.
Pacing and rewards are things we want to continue to address. Currently, we’re working on another adjustment to how the Mysterious Stranger works, which will be included in a future patch. We’re also considering holistically re-assessing Normal and Heroic Bounty rewards. On both fronts, we’re testing solutions with player interests in mind, and will have changes to share soon.
Building Your Collection
We’ve heard feedback about how the pack system and the experience of collecting could be improved. We’re making some short-term fixes here, but we’re also taking a look at the system as a whole to make sure it’s delivering the experience we want for you. Here are some of the things we’re considering:
- Getting you what you want: One of the biggest challenges in Mercenaries has been getting the players the things they really want, in an appropriate way. We like that Bounty Boss rewards provide direction to earning specific coins, and we think that system is working well.
- Duplicate mercs: We’ve heard feedback that some products aren’t working how players expect, or want, so we’re exploring options for changing how duplicate Mercenaries work in the shop.
- Pre-purchase Portraits: We saw confusion and disappointment with how the pre-purchase Diamond Portraits interact with other Mercenaries products. We thought that the super-rare Portraits were a strong value for the pre-purchase bundle, but we can do more. For each player who pre-purchased any Mercenaries bundles, we will be adding the base version of the pre-purchase bundle Legendary Mercenary to your collection. If you bought the Diablo pre-purchase, you’ll be given the base Diablo portrait. The same will be true for Lich King and Sylvanas. Anyone who already owns the base version of their pre-purchase Mercenary will have the extra copy automatically converted into 100 Coins for that Mercenary. We plan to add these to your account by November 16th.
- Pack logic: The philosophy behind Mercenaries Packs is to grant you both Mercenaries and their cosmetics along the way. We’ve gotten lots of feedback on both sides of the fence—from those who only care about the functional value of having all the Mercs, and those who love the Portraits. We don’t have anything to announce today, but we wanted to let you know that we’ve heard your feedback and are looking into this.
- More Portraits: We see that there are some players who are very interested in finding all the Portraits that Mercenaries has to offer. While the only current way to get Portraits is via Packs, we’ll be adding more direct ways to acquire Portraits and are considering other changes to how Portraits are obtained.
We’re excited to continue to grow and refine this game with you. We love how the community has passionately embraced Mercenaries as a new game mode. We also know that Mercenaries isn’t for everyone, and that’s okay too. There’s tons of new content coming across all of Hearthstone’s modes! We’ll continue to service all our players, in all our modes, so we can all keep playing our favorite game in the way we want. We’ll see you in the Tavern!
Didn't recieved any packs....
Me neither, did they say anything about the time or just the 9th?
Apathy is worse. With disappointment there is at least some investment to be betrayed
I believe that Mercenaries have huge potential but PvE has many flaws
1) Bounties just don't offer enough choices during your road to the boss, especially considering that you can't afford to skip mysteries, getting a chance for the mystery stranger is way more important than collecting ANY chest. I want to make decisions on the fly, to adapt.
2) There is no reason to go for a challenge. It is plain worse to make a new lvl 1 team and level them up naturally than taking 3 level 30 and using them to level up. All that taking 6 brand new level mercs and doing barrens 1 will give you is some already (soon to be) maxed coins + 5\10 coins for a merc from this party. Completing (retiring after a mystery) a high-level bounty with 3*30+3*1 is faster, easier and gives way better rewards.
3) Many, many rewards for defeating an encounter are no-brainer choices. And Team Five, if you want to call something "like a roguelike" GIVE randomly generated rewards not a small subset of rewards. Randomly generated enemies wouldn't hurt either.
Hey at least you do not feel disappointment. That counts, right?
xD
I tried to appeal in this post to some of the ridiculous statements but giving it a thought that is just a waste of time. I`ve seen neither any suitable improvements they could have made nor any reasonable plans for the future. They position this mode as some kind of tactical difference from the original RNG HS modes but it does not look like one yet. All we have for now is mumbling about the Packs&Portraits and SimCity building simulator. Oh yea and even if you do donate to this mode with real money you still need the gold for the SimCity part - newcomers, welcome!
I enjoyed Mercs for the last 3 weeks as a F2P user. I had almost all mercs except LK, Ragna and Thrall.
And after the patch I disappointed. They added some content but it's so irritating. I’m looking at Edwin and see 0 (zero) [legendary] coins and it’s so frustrating experience. I see how much effort it will take to just obtain him… and I want to quit.
The legendary coins are so rare so you can farm them like 10 per hour (once in several runs). And I need 500 :-( I don’t have LK but I have like 450 coins of him that I randomly got in the last 3 weeks. The last 50 coins is pain as the LK run is very long and you get almost nothing from it. Edwin run is the same length but LK is the best legendary in this mode but Edwin… meh, only for the pirate squads.
I can farm Tasks but random coins from Tasks are not consistent. I can get more Rokara coins that I don’t know how to spend and there’s probability that I never will get even a single Edwin coin. And what next? The devs will print one more legendary and everything starts again?!
It was fun for the last 3 weeks but it looks like a time to quit.
1. Mercenaries will never become as successful as what it was modeled after, there is no excitement in its gameplay loops, just grindbox.
2. I'd like for Duels to be easier to jump into and play on mobile, via deck recipes/ auto-build/recommendations, like there are in standard.
3. multi-class arena and the diablo duels event are good steps towards reimagining those formats, I hope it's expanded in duels next year, maybe something similar to Commander in MtG. More avenues for creative deckbuilding will surely be appreciated.
If they acknowledged this mode was an unmitigating disaster I might see hope. But the pre-face that this has been a resounding success that people "love" pretty much ensures this mode has no hope. Though honestly, there is no fix they can do really, just wait for their next mode.
I've just opened 20 packs and received 0 legendaries. Thank you for that much, activi$$ion.
Mercenaries is a complete trash mode. We want tournament mode not this crap.
Read: "we copied what other cash grab mobile games do"
You’d think that, but let’s not forget that blizzard gave vague details about the game and cranked up the FOMO. There are plenty of players who bought one or all preorders because this was going to be the new premier game mode and you can get characters we didn’t know would be available in game later with diamond profiles and tons of packs on discount. I don’t blame anyone for buying preorders, regardless of your opinion on the game, the launch and preorders were predatory and poorly executed.
agree, they did their best to UPSELL this gamemode. nobody knew that inside the packs we were going to find some random useless coins.. I feel NOTHING when opening these mercenary packs.
also the Mercenary gamemode itself feels like an offline grind type of game.
poo-poo content inside the mercenary packs..
5 free packs... could they spare it.
100 coins for a dupe on our pre order bundles? How about you give me the 2 legendary minions I'm missing instead of the 200 coins? I honestly can't even believe dupes made it in to this mode years after they striped them away from HS. I was completely dumbfounded when I opened a normal Diablo instead of a missing merc. In 2021 how is it possible this was something that seemed OK to this company? On top of that the people that did get dupes are the ones spending huge chunks of money on the bundles.
What a joke.
Those that spent money early on it to support blizzard are the ones that will suffer the most. Its nice for them to add dupe protection no going forward on bundles and to try and right that wrong but most of us already looted the same merc we paid for. 100 coins to just not a great apology. We are missing the merc we would have looted had we held those packs till after nov 16th. Lesson learned I suppose. Last time I will support blizzard blindly. Its my own fault. I trusted that the rules they set in place for this 7 year old game would apply to packs in a new mode. Silly me. No dupe protection or maxed coin protection is a slap in the face and the biggest issue for the economy of this mode and it isn't even addressed here. I wont be playing it much going forward and the sad part is even if I wanted to I would still have to hold all packs for weeks to open because the fix for me happening to loot normal Arthas isn't in yet. BTW the patch notes dont even say they are adding in the Sylvanas normal card for those golden bundle purchasers. Just that they are doing it for the other 2 bundles (Arthas and Diablo).... /SMH at this company.
I wanted to like this mode but its still being baked. They say its bland looking because Its made for cell phones but without a mod like deck tracker the pvp is next to impossible to play. There is no info on abilities your opponents mercs even have or what's at what speed after all the casts. Or the quality of life things like tracking missions. How is it possible blizz can work on this for years and deck tracker fixes the worst parts of it in a week.
They talk about improving this in the post, but the reason you got a Diablo skin in place of a new merc was because you got it instead of coins.
And you get golden Sylvanas from the bundle, not Diamond Sylvanas.
I understand she was golden not diamond but she was still a pre order merc and you can still loot her as a dupe. Im not sure why you would defend that.... This is the real issue. Dupes shouldnt be a thing.
No I didnt loot a diablo card instead of coins. Thats the compensation they are providing now. I looted that instead of a merc. I know this because when I looted it was closing in on pity and didnt loot another for long after as well.
The main reason you'd want the non-diamond mercs is because they talk. That's the only reason.
There's unfortunately no pity timer for legendaries from merc packs but there there is dupe protection. Every pack guarantees a mercenary of rare or better quality, and that mercenary will not be a duplicate. However, in place of *coins* you can get portraits you already have. (You can also get mercenaries)
The main reason you want the non-diamond mercs is so they don't show up in your packs after you pay a premium for a preorder bundle that includes the character.