A new game mode is coming to Hearthstone - a PVP Dungeon Run!
Quote From Blizzard Welcome to Duels, a new competitive Hearthstone game mode that changes every season! In Duels, you’ll choose a Hero, a Hero Power, a starting Treasure, and build a 15-card starter deck from your collection before facing off against a series of worthy human opponents—Dungeon Run-style! Devise your path to victory by enhancing your deck after each match with minions, spells, and powerful Treasures to aid in increasingly difficult encounters with other players!
How It Works:
Duels will be accessible through the Modes button from the Hearthstone main screen, where you’d go to play Battlegrounds or Arena. Here’s how it works:
- When you start a Duels run, you’ll choose a Hero, a Hero Power, and starting Treasure.
- Then, you’ll build a starter deck of 15 cards from your Collection and play your first match. In its debut season, Duels will include a curated assortment of cards from a number of sets, including:
- Scholomance Academy
- One Night in Kharazan
- Curse of Naxxramas
- Basic
- Classic
- After the match is over, you’ll gain additional health, and get to level up your deck by picking one of three sets of cards categorized by theme. Occasionally, you’ll also be able to pick from a selection of three incredibly powerful Treasures!
- Gain or lose rating based on your result! While separate, Duels uses the same Ratings system as Battlegrounds. Your run ends after you lose three times, or net 12 wins!
Play Duels: Early Access Today
In Duels: Early Access, each playable class will start with 1 Hero Power and 1 Treasure and will use cards from the Scholomance Academy, One Night in Kharazan, Curse of Naxxramas, Classic, and Basic sets. The card pool will be updated as new sets are released!
All Hero Powers and Treasures added after Duels: Early Access can be unlocked by meeting a variety of criteria associated with your Collection. For example, unlocking a new Hero Power may require owning a corresponding Legendary card. Or to unlock a specific Treasure, you might need to own 30 Epic cards from a given set.
How to Get Duels: Early Access
Pre-purchase the Madness at the Darkmoon Faire Mega Bundle to get Duels: Early Access* today, along with 80 Madness at the Darkmoon Faire card packs, 5 Golden Madness at the Darkmoon Faire packs, one random Madness at the Darkmoon Faire Golden Legendary card, the N’Zoth Warlock Hero, the N’Zoth card back, and Battlegrounds perks**!
You can also pre-purchase the Madness at the Darkmoon Faire Bundle to get Duels: Early Access* today along with 45 Madness as the Darkmoon Faire card packs, one random Madness at the Darkmoon Faire Legendary card, and the N’Zoth card back!
When you pre-purchase either bundle, you’ll get access to a special Legendary Quest chain that rewards 6 Scholomance Academy Packs for trying out Duels!
Pre-purchase will go live with the 18.6 patch at ~10:00 a.m. PT on 10/22.
Starting November 12, Duels: Early Access will be free and open to all players and Whispers of the Old Gods will be added to the pool of eligible sets!
*Early access obtained through pre-purchase is available between October 22, 2020 and November 11, 2020. Duels game mode is accessible after reaching level 10 with all Hero classes in-game.**Battlegrounds Perks are available upon purchase and expire at the end of the Madness at the Darkmoon Faire expansion cycle.
Duels: Early Access Twitch Drops
From October 28 at 10:00 a.m. PT to November 11 at 11:00 p.m. PT, we’ll also be giving away Duels: Early Access to 500 random viewers every hour, across the entire Hearthstone category on Twitch! Watch any Hearthstone stream to be eligible to receive a drop, so long as your Battle.net and Twitch accounts are linked.
Link Your Accounts
Before you can receive rewards, you'll need to link your Twitch.tv and Battle.net accounts. Here's how:
- Log in or create an account on Twitch.tv.
- Navigate to the Settings menu by clicking your account name in the top-right corner of the home screen.
- Navigate to the Connections tab of the Settings menu.
- Find the Battle.net section, then follow the instructions after selecting a region and clicking Connect.
- When connecting accounts, be sure that you're currently logged into the Battle.net account on which you'd like to receive your rewards.
The official rules for Twitch Drops can be found here.
Duels: Season One Starts November 17
When the Duels officially launches on November 17, and we transition from Duels: Early Access to Duels: Season One, each class will have access to 2 Hero Powers and 3 Treasures. Additionally, Madness at the Darkmoon Faire cards will be added to the pool of eligible sets! We’ll be adding new Hero Powers and Treasures in a mid-season update early next year, and plan to reset Duels ratings at that time as well.
The theme for Duels: Early Access and Duels: Season One is Wizard Duels, which brings several familiar professors and luminaries from Scholomance Academy to the mode, each representing a different class and playstyle! The theme will change at the end of Duels: Season One, new Heroes will be added, and some Treasures will rotate out to make room for new ones.
When Duels: Season One begins, it’ll offer two methods of play with separate matchmaking pools: Casual and Heroic. Casual runs are free and are a perfect starting point for exploring the mode and experimenting. Heroic runs feature success-based rewards identical to Arena rewards, including gold, arcane dust, cards, golden cards, and card packs from the latest expansion. Heroic Duels runs cost 150 gold or a Tavern Ticket (US $1.99), which will be replacing Arena Tickets, and grant entry to Arena or Heroic Duels. If you’ve been sitting on Arena Tickets, they will be usable for Duels!
We announced a ton of stuff today! Be sure to check out the rest of what we’ve got going on:
Learn more about Madness at the Darkmoon Faire
Head on over to our dedicated guide for Madness at the Darkmoon Faire to learn more about the new expansion and to see all the revealed cards!
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![All The Great Dark Beyond Card Reveals for October 12 - Day 2 [Finished]](dark-beyond-reveals-day-2-thumb.webp)
Comments
"that uses things that weren't balanced properly for PvP"
They've been working on this for at least a year - they've done TONS of balancing work on it. They didn't just throw everything in from Dungeon Runs and call it a day. You're misrepresenting the mode before even trying it.
The treasures shown in the screenshot in this article are exactly the same as the ones used in dungeon run games. Maybe my memory is betraying me and Small Pouches in the dungeon run adventures draws a card each turn instead of just one extra at the start of the game. But i'm pretty certain the other two are exactly the same. No changes whatsoever. Crystal Gem is pretty crazy as starting with three mana is such huge tempo. Sure, you go back to two mana on the next turn but you started with such a huge tempo advantage because of the extra mana on the first turn that your opponent is going to have a hard time catching up. I don't think you can call that "balanced". Again, i'm not saying that they didn't work on balancing or that they are lazy. But sometimes they miss their balance target by a long shot. And that creates a snowball of other issues.
Play it before you judge. They modified a ton of treasures. There a still some strong ones but as mentioned before, those will probably get nerfed when they become problematic
You yourself said in another comment that the mode is super inconsistent and not balanced at all. I'm not getting early access to it as i'm not buying any preorders. Also, this new mode isn't something that interests me. I'll play it once it becomes available to everyone but i'm not going to play it more than a few times. I already know how dungeon run works and it was never something very interesting to me.
To each their own.
I know it's part of the patchnotes, but I do wanna highlight this part before people start complaining that they are "forced" to pre-order:
"From October 28 at 10:00 a.m. PT to November 11 at 11:00 p.m. PT, we’ll also be giving away Duels: Early Access to 500 random viewers every hour, across the entire Hearthstone category on Twitch! Watch any Hearthstone stream to be eligible to receive a drop, so long as your Battle.net and Twitch accounts are linked."
*Pro-tip, increase your odds by "watching" the stream during the night when there aren't that many viewers.
Not every one of us have the luxury of time to log into twitch just for the sole purposes of a raffle, of which the rewards are not really that great.
Its nice of them to do this, don't get me wrong, but you would think that giving it out for free for everyone to play would be the best thing to do to get the ball rolling.
Well, this expansion marks the end of playing HS for me. I was hoping they introduced something new, but this is just a mutant Arena 2.0 with the oversaturated dungeon run flavour. Listen, dungeon run was fun alright, I loved it when it came out. It frustrated me but I was really on the edge when I played the Kobolds run. It was a challenging, well-rewarding experience which I will never forget. But... there are so many other dungeon runs now and I personally got bored of it. I never liked Arena so I don't like this new game mode too obviously. Most people are excited to play wild cards, but I've only been playing exclusively wild for 2 years now. I had my hopes up... Feelsbadman, I just started streaming and I don't want to stream a game I don't enjoy... This also means I'm not gonna post any theorycrafting decks this time.
On the upside, the expansion looks fun and yes it will be fun but only for 3 weeks or so. Then people are gonna get annoyed by Yogg 15% lethal and all the crazy RNG they introduced. I was wrong about the Reward-Revamp they are doing. Seems good and very rewarding. I really like the achievements and I don't mind people buying the tavern pass or whatever. But these upsides are just not good enough for me and my stream. I'm sure new players are gonna have lots of fun!
P.S Im gonna be around and still following my favorite twitch hs streamers but I won't play much or comment much on HS. Maybe preorder an expansion here and there. I like the communtiy here, eventhough they easily slam the dislike button for most of things. Hope you guys remain active here because the mods are really active and nice. And no this is not a salty comment bud, I've joined this game since beta and loved it then. But time comes for everyone and everything eventually. Peace :)
Sounds like you're a victim of your own expectations. If you enjoyed playing Hearthstone yesterday, I really don't see how introducing a bunch of fresh content makes it suddenly suck today.
I think you encapsulated my thoughts exactly. I have been playing less and less lately and these announcements do nothing for me. This new mode is hardly something new as you pointed out. Will still be keeping an eye, but for sure this is the end of me spending cash on this game.
I'm excited to see how it'll turn out!
RIP the People who dusted their Wild Cards.
OK, so I rarely join a chorus of memes or complaints, but as a rogue main this is really starting to bug me: how is the pre-order hero still not for rogue? N'Zoth is cool and all, but surely Silas in rogue would have been a better representative of Darkmoon Faire?
Why bother with Akama when we can give shaman their 4th non-Thrall hero in Vashj? And sure, let's just skip Lilian Voss as a zombie for Hollows End and give pally their 4th extra hero in the form of Horseman Uther, without even having the good grace of just using the Headless Horseman who was a paladin anyway.
I didn't expect to get salty over this, especially as I really like both the existing Valeera skins (and that Valeera you can choose at level 50 in the battle pass looks awesome), but the needless inequality of it is getting really annoying.
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In other news, I like dungeon run and I like constructed, so duels should be good fun. I really hope they keep the number of sets you can choose from limited, so weaker cards remain viable options.
not as bad as rogue but for mage id like a elf mage(you knwo the mage races in warcraft) like say kaelthas for outland or just somethign that sint a human/another freaking jaina portait.
But for each expansion they should just have alot more portait options/bundles they got so many character and many portaits aready done they dont use/dont give to us.
Don't worry, with the new progression system, a new hero can be unlocked for every class for free. It is another Valeera skin, so I know some people aren't a fan of that, but atleast it's something, right?
I like Valeera as much as anyone, and will happily collect the fifteen thousand variants of her I'm sure will appear over the next year or so. But the devs are well aware the community has been waiting on another rogue character for ages because they told us near the start of the year. So to pass some of the few prominent rogue characters WoW has to offer, only to be handed throwaway skins like Horseman Uther or those only tangentially related like N'Zoth, makes you wonder what twisted process they go through when deciding which skins to make.
No disrespect to the N'Zoth skin - it's probably one of the better ones - but it's standing in someone else's shoes and I was so much more interested in the person he took them from.
Well, Blizzard seems confident that people will be able to enjoy the mode, so that speaks a lot about how generous they think the new progression system is, being able to afford all 170 cards.
I’d probably just play on the casual side for fun tho, I’m not willing to fork out so much cash on the adventures. Overall, an awesome addition to the game and Battlegrounds has finally left Beta!
Now we are constructing our initial 15 cards from our own collection of cards yea? Oof for those that went standard only and tossed all the wild cards we had at this point.
I think the sets will keep rotating from season to season, not sure how long those will be though
so this season is very wild, next might be purely standard
That'll be me. I dusted 98% of cards from Naxx to Kobolds. I saved half of my collection from Witchwood to Rumble. I have only dusted extra copies starting in RoS.
I love the premise of this game mode! Been turned off by Hearthstone this year but really like forward to this. Been craving more dungeon run since Uldum! A