Patch 25.4 Preview - Mercenaries Stops Getting Content Updates & New End Game Mercs Mode
Huge news drop from Blizzard. Read everything below!
Quote from BlizzardPatch 25.4 will bring some awesome updates to Mercenaries, including new Mercs, Mercenary Faction designations, dual-type Mercenaries, and the all-new Mythic Boss Rush end-game system! It will also be the last major update to the Mercenaries mode as we align our goals and focus on continuing to make Hearthstone the best digital card game in the world. We’re excited to share more details about the next Hearthstone year, Core Set, and expansion, ahead of Patch 25.6. But first, we want to talk about the major Mercenaries updates coming in 25.4.
Six More Mercenaries Join the Village
Six new Mercenaries are coming in Patch 25.4. This is our final planned infusion of new collectible Mercs into the mode, and they’re some of our most interesting Mercs yet.
You can get all the details about the new Mercs in the 25.4 Patch Notes, coming soon. Once these Mercs join the fray, we’ll have over 120 total Mercenaries for players to collect, add to their Parties, level-up, and max out. That’s one bustling Village!
Dual-Types, Reworked Types, Factions, and more!
Starting in 25.4, Mercenaries will be able to have two different Types to better represent their identities. We’ll have Human-Undead, Celestial-Beasts, and more! Several Mercs will gain a second Type in this update, opening up a whole slew of new synergies across your collection.
Many Mercenaries will also be gaining Factions, like Horde and Alliance—signified by the flag in the upper-right corner of the card. These will make it easier to tell exactly how a particular Treasure or Ability might impact your Party. Some Abilities, Equipment, and Treasures have been updated or reworked to refer to Factions and/or to better work within the new Mythic Boss Rush system. On top of that, we’re adding five new Factions, for a total of seven.
You already know the Horde and Alliance well, but now they will have clear flags to show where their loyalties lie. Explorers represents the League of Explorers who are now, truly, in a League of their own. The Empire, Legion, and Scourge Factions represent different enemies of Azeroth. The Empire is comprised of the Old Gods and their followers; the Legion is the Demons and demigods who make up the Burning Legion; and the Scourge is made up of the Lich King and his shambling Undead servants. Finally, Pirate has been converted from a Type to a Faction, and represents those raiders and rapscallions who don’t fly any flag but their own.
Mythic Boss Rush End Game Content Coming Soon
The final big system update to Mercenaries is the new and challenging Mythic Boss Rush end-game system. At its core, Mythic Boss Rush is a gauntlet of bosses with randomized elements that you can face to earn more Renown and push your Mercs beyond their limits.
Mythic Boss Rush is weekly content, with a new Boss Rush unlocking every day throughout the week, until a reset at the end of the week. Each Boss Rush is like a Bounty with 3 Bounty Boss fights in a row, leading to a final Boss that is two Bounty Bosses at the same time!
Mythic Boss Rush has been streamlined to include only the most interesting PVE content: there are no Point of Interest nodes or mob fights, just bosses. Bosses will also have random anomalies that make them stronger—with power that scales based on a sliding difficulty setting you can choose for yourself. You earn Renown as a reward for each clear, with the bulk of your Rewards being granted after your first clear, based on the difficulty you were set to for that run.
How are you supposed to take on this bevy of big, bad bosses? In Mythic Boss Rush, you’ll be able to spend your Renown to upgrade your Mercs’ Abilities, Equipment, Treasures, and stats beyond Maxed! Those upgrades persist from Boss Rush to Boss Rush, letting you take on bigger and badder bosses each week.
In Mythic Boss Rush, you can spend Renown to upgrade your Mercs beyond their Max. These upgrades don't carry over to regular Bounties or the Fighting Pit.
You’ll be able to unlock Mythic Boss Rush via a free upgrade to the Travel Point. The upgrade becomes available once you’ve unlocked Heroic Bounties and have at least one Maxed Merc. Mythic Boss Rush adds tons of replayability to Mercenaries for players who love the PVE aspect of the mode and are hungry to push their Parties to the limits.
Continued Support and New Frontiers
After these updates, we will be focusing on making the Hearthstone and Battlegrounds modes the best they can be. At the same time, Mercenaries will continue to get support for bug fixes and periodic balance changes as needed, but no further regular content updates. With the new additions in this patch, we hope that Mercenaries will be a fun, fulfilling mode for players.
To everybody who has ever chased a Bounty or gathered around the Campfire, we thank you for making this chapter in Hearthstone’s history special, and we hope you’ll enjoy everything Mercenaries has to offer in 25.4. See you in the Tavern!
Thank You
If i remember correctly, they built a team specifically focusing on mercenary mode right?
Wasn't expecting this, but also not massively surprised. I mean they couldn't even be bothered to put out a working fix so the mode is even playable on mobile. It's been bugged on many Android devices for months now. If i try and open mercs on my phone it just hangs and gives a menu error.
Good. The people trying to convince me the game mode wasn't a failure have evaporated one by one. The game mode could have been interesting, but it's a ripoff of pokemon battles, and just worse in every aspect. they failed from day one when they couldn't come up with original, interesting mechanics.
They're clearly giving up on the mode, but I don't see how it's a rip off of Pokemon other than being.... a turn based RPG? And even if it were a rip off of Pokemon... who cares?
It's a worse ripoff because:
-you have a team of 6, but instead of 2v2 battling at a time, you have 3v3 (more chaotic).
-turns happen at the same time (speed ties usually decide games, this can be a problem in pokemon too although you have more agency on speed control)
-you can customise your team (items only in this case, while in pokemon you have loads more space for creativity)
-you have a huge selection of Mercenaries to build a team with
-type advantage (only 3 types is too little, and one of them is flawed because it takes damage while attacking)
As for who cares, a lot of people I have seen do. We were promised something interesting, but they didn't have the creativity to come up with it, and created a mobile grindfest instead.
The gameplay was not chaotic at all, I don't get that, I think most criticisms are that it was too simple. Speed ties are an issue because it means the game comes down to coin flips/RNG, but if you think RNG is an issue in Mercenaries. Um... Pokemon is the *king* of RNG. The emperor of RNG.
There's a degree of more team customization, but it's really just because the roster is so much bigger because it's a 20 year old franchise. Who cares about types. Honestly. It adds very little to the gameplay to have a complex rock-paper-scissors type system. 3 types is enough. You don't need more than that. Also what is your point about things taking damage while attacking?
I dunno why anyone would care that a game they're playing is similar to another game. Especially when it's only similar in the most superficial way possible.
Like this is all very knee jerk criticism based on pretty faulty logic. I think the biggest issue with the mode was the speed and accessability of it. And that's an issue with current hearthstone too, I dunno what's going on with the client and why they can't speed things up.
well if they are giving up on the mercs mode, at least make the portraits available to people via renown using crafting.
they've put all that effort to make those great animations, and yet to get the portrait you want, you need to spend some amount like buying a car ffs
at least leave the gamemode in such a way that people could fully experience it afterwards.
Even releasing Mercs for Hearthstone just shows the bad decision making some of these guys over at Blizzard make. It was a complete failure when they did this in Warlords of Draenor. In fact, it was a catastrophic failure. Maybe the biggest flop in the history of the game. Anything that had to do with merc missions and player housing fell straight on it's face. No surprise it did the exact same thing in Hearthstone. Honestly, what are they thinking?
Now balance wild and nerf Quest mage and Pillager Rogue instead of taking care of this mode, thanks
so no more new mercs :(
So as expected, Mercenaries completely failed. Good. It was clearly damaging their development focus on the actual game. Also, if you guys are truly focused on making Hearthstone the best digital card game in the world - get Battlegrounds out of its application and into its own engine so that can stop cannibalizing your UI and your development efforts as well.
Still don't really understand what they were thinking with this mode when they have Arclight Rumble in development.
Why force a half-baked gacha game that plays nothing like Hearthstone into the game when they have an actual fully featured Warcraft gacha game in development? As far as I'm concerned it's little more than bloatware.
Maybe they were checking ideas and Mercenaries was just testing grounds for them?
I'm way more into in Mercenaries, but I think you're right that Arclight Rumble played into this decision heavily. "Why are we funding 2 mobile games in this franchise?"
They have “new” mercs content on “sale” for me right now. It’s ok if they want to stop support for mercs, but selling content while discontinuing support is a really bad look.
Too little, too late. Sorry.
This was not a shock at all. Who plays mercs?
They should just focus on standard and BG. And maybe a tournament mode for the future.
Wait… mercs is going to stop getting major updates after this? What the fuck is the point of releasing even this update then? Why invest any time into what is now officially deemed by Blizzard to be a dead mode?
This keeps the game mode playable long term for those interested in it. A reason to play it, as opposed to just fully dead.
I'll probably dabble in it myself every now and then, just for something to do, but from this announcement it is clear Blizz sees no future in financially putting a lot of time and effort into Mercs. Disappointing, but it's better than continuing to put budget of game development towards it when you can put that towards Battlegrounds or Constructed.
Who knows they might replace the Mercs content development with Constructed PvE Content development now. Silver linings etc.
because this most probably have been in development in the past 6 months to 1 year... so no point to waste all the effort and release this final batch of enhancements