Is the Tavern Pass fixed now?

Hello

Some of you might remember me (good), some might not (probably better). About half a year ago I decided to quit the game for good for various reasons (the main one being the unchanging frustration about the meta always being worse than expected. Fuck Demon Hunter, all my homies hate Demon Hunter) and while it was one of the best decisions I had made in a long time, reading about the upcoming Core Set really caught my interest again. Basically I'm too curious to see how that will turn out to not make the smarter decision of just ignoring it.

However, since I quit before thee Tavern Pass was introduced I have literally no idea how the HS f2p economy is nowadays. I know that the Pass was pretty dogshit when it first came out and it resulted in a number of changes. Did these changes actually fix the problems? Or more specifically: Are you still able to accquire the same amount of gold (roughly) in between expansions for the same amount of playtime.

I remember my personal highscore being over 10k gold saved up. Is that possible in the current system without spending absurd amounts of time? Is there an overall gold average that casual players can report?

I really don#t care about catching up with the current expansion since I have at least 2k gold still lying around and more dust than I need, but I really want to know how long it would take to, say, farm 5k gold?

Thanks in advance

Quote From anchorm4n

It feels good to me. I usually play my dailys and then a bit more, finishing on Diamond 10 or 5 in Wild. I'm currently at around 5.200 gold, but I've bought the mid expansion for 2.000. I guess reaching 10k should be no problem if you play 30-60 minutes each day.

I must say that the grind to level 50 was quite a bad experience though. It feels way more rewarding to level up once you've passed that threshold. Remains to be seen if the changes they announced for this issue really help (if I remember correctly, the new goal is at 100 and the required XP per level got cut in half). 

that sounds decent actually. I guess depending on what the core set looks like I might actually check it out.

Thanks for your input.

Generally speaking, people are pretty happy with the rewards track these days. Some people find the approach to level 50 quite slow, but it is a lot faster after that and at the early levels.

In fact, if you have truly not been on HS since it was introduced, you will benefit quite a bit from doing a very small amount of stuff before the next set comes out. Just by doing the daily and weekly quests you'll be given when you first log back on you get ~9000XP, getting you to level 13 on the rewards track. That alone will net you 1 Legendary card, 1 Epic, 5 card packs, 1 card back and 500 gold.

Quote From AngryShuckie

Generally speaking, people are pretty happy with the rewards track these days. Some people find the approach to level 50 quite slow, but it is a lot faster after that and at the early levels.

In fact, if you have truly not been on HS since it was introduced, you will benefit quite a bit from doing a very small amount of stuff before the next set comes out. Just by doing the daily and weekly quests you'll be given when you first log back on you get ~9000XP, getting you to level 13 on the rewards track. That alone will net you 1 Legendary card, 1 Epic, 6 card packs and 500 gold.

Wow that does sound pretty rewarding.

Are achievements necessary for the grind or are they just a nice thing to do along the way?

Quote From YourPrivateNightmare

Quote From AngryShuckie

Generally speaking, people are pretty happy with the rewards track these days. Some people find the approach to level 50 quite slow, but it is a lot faster after that and at the early levels.

In fact, if you have truly not been on HS since it was introduced, you will benefit quite a bit from doing a very small amount of stuff before the next set comes out. Just by doing the daily and weekly quests you'll be given when you first log back on you get ~9000XP, getting you to level 13 on the rewards track. That alone will net you 1 Legendary card, 1 Epic, 6 card packs and 500 gold.

Wow that does sound pretty rewarding.

Are achievements necessary for the grind or are they just a nice thing to do along the way?

The XP-giving achievements are a nice bonus, but not necessary. Most of them are worth 200XP, which equates to about 30 minutes of normal gameplay in ranked. If you get the cards related to them then you might as well do them, and you'll find guides for most of the achievements in OoC threads, but there's no need to worry much about them.

I should also correct my previous post: one of those card packs was a card back... It's an easy mistake to make!

Quote From AngryShuckie

Quote From YourPrivateNightmare

Quote From AngryShuckie

Generally speaking, people are pretty happy with the rewards track these days. Some people find the approach to level 50 quite slow, but it is a lot faster after that and at the early levels.

In fact, if you have truly not been on HS since it was introduced, you will benefit quite a bit from doing a very small amount of stuff before the next set comes out. Just by doing the daily and weekly quests you'll be given when you first log back on you get ~9000XP, getting you to level 13 on the rewards track. That alone will net you 1 Legendary card, 1 Epic, 6 card packs and 500 gold.

Wow that does sound pretty rewarding.

Are achievements necessary for the grind or are they just a nice thing to do along the way?

The XP-giving achievements are a nice bonus, but not necessary. Most of them are worth 200XP, which equates to about 30 minutes of normal gameplay in ranked. If you get the cards related to them then you might as well do them, and you'll find guides for most of the achievements in OoC threads, but there's no need to worry much about them.

I should also correct my previous post: one of those card packs was a card back... It's an easy mistake to make!

That's good to know.

Also, your new profile pic is fantastic

Quote From YourPrivateNightmare

Also, your new profile pic is fantastic

Thanks :) The revelation that the main colours of shuckle and Valeera are essentially the same inspired me to give myself a little upgrade. The choice to turn my initial drawing into a bit of pixel art certainly paid off.

Oh shit, he's back! (maybe)

The Tavern Pass has been working out for me so far. Throughout an expansion cycle, I usually open somewhere between 50-60 packs (about 20-30 of them at the start), with about 2k saved up for the next one as my goal. Up to this point, I opened about 80 packs (starting with 25) and i already have 1k gold with almost 1 month till the next expansion.

I spent most of my time playing the new format, Duels. That mode still needs some work, but you can get a fairly high winrate very consistently.

Quote From Koetti

Oh shit, he's back! (maybe)

The Tavern Pass has been working out for me so far. Throughout an expansion cycle, I usually open somewhere between 50-60 packs (about 20-30 of them at the start), with about 2k saved up for the next one as my goal. Up to this point, I opened about 80 packs (starting with 25) and i already have 1k gold with almost 1 month till the next expansion.

I spent most of my time playing the new format, Duels. That mode still needs some work, but you can get a fairly high winrate very consistently.

I've taken a firsrt stab at Duels for a quest by now, and I kinda like it even though I just miss too many Wild card to really play it competitively and I can't afford to just waste my dust now that I have some catching up to do.

Either way, from what I've seen so far the pass seems relatively fair so that won't be an issue.

I guess I'm just gonna play casually for now and see how the core set turns out. After all, I can always just leave again (and then come back for the next gimmick because I can't be bothered to be consistent in my choices)

I did some quick maths after the last changes to the Tavern Pass and concluded that, in a 19 week time span (assuming each month was around 4,5 weeks and giving an extra week because the expansion released earlier than usual), I reached a total of 11300G for the expansion, which is a bit of an upgrade to your "personal highscore being over 10k gold saved up". 

However, the Tavern Pass is not perfect. As stated before, the first 50 levels are insanely grindy (even when considering suddenly having +300G does feel good, the grind doesn't [they did reduce the XP amount on later levels, though]). Achievements are a nice bonus, but they're not amazing. Sure, some of them are mostly a puzzle that can be solved in few games, but some others are brutally hard and boring to complete (looking at you, summon 200 Greyboughs and play 500 Corrupted cards). There's also the fact that you can't complete those achievements in casual (which Dean Ayala believes is the right approach, for some reason), which is very frustrating because some achievements involve bringing terrible decks to ranked and know you'll have an abysmal winrate for a while.

Also, there have been a couple of posts in which the devs made about events that include XP for catching up, but we've seen none so far (though those should just arrive closer to the end of the expansion cycle, as they're being treated as a catch-up mechanic rather than extra XP for us).

Quote From ElSabidon

I did some quick maths after the last changes to the Tavern Pass and concluded that, in a 19 week time span (assuming each month was around 4,5 weeks and giving an extra week because the expansion released earlier than usual), I reached a total of 11300G for the expansion, which is a bit of an upgrade to your "personal highscore being over 10k gold saved up". 

However, the Tavern Pass is not perfect. As stated before, the first 50 levels are insanely grindy (even when considering suddenly having +300G does feel good, the grind doesn't [they did reduce the XP amount on later levels, though]). Achievements are a nice bonus, but they're not amazing. Sure, some of them are mostly a puzzle that can be solved in few games, but some others are brutally hard and boring to complete (looking at you, summon 200 Greyboughs and play 500 Corrupted cards). There's also the fact that you can't complete those achievements in casual (which Dean Ayala believes is the right approach, for some reason), which is very frustrating because some achievements involve bringing terrible decks to ranked and know you'll have an abysmal winrate for a while.

Also, there have been a couple of posts in which the devs made about events that include XP for catching up, but we've seen none so far (though those should just arrive closer to the end of the expansion cycle, as they're being treated as a catch-up mechanic rather than extra XP for us).

Thanks for the info, this is much more encouraging now.

If you don't mind me asking, given that I started playing again today and managed to get to level 14 on the pass so far (mainly through quests and a few random achievements), do you think it is possible to still get to at least lvl 50 before the next expansion (without accounting for any potential events that would make it easier)?

Having bought Darkmoon packs with gold until I was down to 2K, as well as paid another 2000 gold for Darkmoon Races, I'm currently just shy of 10K. Playing normally, I'd usually spend down to 2K and earn to ~8K by the next expansion. And there's still a month and a half left to go this season. I'd say this is a major improvement.

And I haven't even played every week!

Quote From YourPrivateNightmare

 

If you don't mind me asking, given that I started playing again today and managed to get to level 14 on the pass so far (mainly through quests and a few random achievements), do you think it is possible to still get to at least lvl 50 before the next expansion (without accounting for any potential events that would make it easier)?

I think it's possible, but it'll be tight.

All the levels from 36 - 50 take 5000 XP a piece. That's the bottleneck. The average daily quest is 1000 XP, while every batch of weeklies is exactly 6000 XP. So, you can make about 11,000 XP a week on quests alone. You have maybe nine weeks until the next expansion if it's on the usual schedule. You need about 144,200 XP to make it. If you have the Tavern Pass, you get more XP, so it might be just barely obtainable.

If the expansion comes out a month early like Darkmoon did, there's literally no way.

Quote From MurlocAggroB

Quote From YourPrivateNightmare

 

If you don't mind me asking, given that I started playing again today and managed to get to level 14 on the pass so far (mainly through quests and a few random achievements), do you think it is possible to still get to at least lvl 50 before the next expansion (without accounting for any potential events that would make it easier)?

I think it's possible, but it'll be tight.

All the levels from 36 - 50 take 5000 XP a piece. That's the bottleneck. The average daily quest is 1000 XP, while every batch of weeklies is exactly 6000 XP. So, you can make about 11,000 XP a week on quests alone. You have maybe nine weeks until the next expansion if it's on the usual schedule. You need about 144,200 XP to make it. If you have the Tavern Pass, you get more XP, so it might be just barely obtainable.

If the expansion comes out a month early like Darkmoon did, there's literally no way.

that sucks I guess. Do we know if the lvl 50 free hero portraits will be the same for the next pass or are these a one time thing? Because that's the only thing I really thought about anyways.

Either way, if they haven't done an event yet then I might still have a chance anyways.

Quote From ElSabidon

However, the Tavern Pass is not perfect. As stated before, the first 50 levels are insanely grindy

Also, there have been a couple of posts in which the devs made about events that include XP for catching up, but we've seen none so far (though those should just arrive closer to the end of the expansion cycle, as they're being treated as a catch-up mechanic rather than extra XP for us).

They already announced that the next reward track will be twice as long while keeping the total required XP to give you the rewards more frequently. As for the event XP:

"We’ve heard your feedback: higher levels of the reward track just take too much XP to reach. We originally included event reward XP when calculating our intended cadence of rewards. We’ve rethought this and recognize that the rewards track should stand on its own and not require event XP bonuses, making rewards predictable and consistent across an expansion. We will still have in-game events, of course, but they will remain consistent with our existing approach to event rewards instead of rewarding bonus XP for the rewards track.

We’re reducing the requirements of the current rewards track by a total of 37,000 XP (nearly 20%), which will make mid-to-late levels easier to reach and adjust for the absence of XP events"

Quote From YourPrivateNightmare

Quote From ElSabidon

I did some quick maths after the last changes to the Tavern Pass and concluded that, in a 19 week time span (assuming each month was around 4,5 weeks and giving an extra week because the expansion released earlier than usual), I reached a total of 11300G for the expansion, which is a bit of an upgrade to your "personal highscore being over 10k gold saved up". 

However, the Tavern Pass is not perfect. As stated before, the first 50 levels are insanely grindy (even when considering suddenly having +300G does feel good, the grind doesn't [they did reduce the XP amount on later levels, though]). Achievements are a nice bonus, but they're not amazing. Sure, some of them are mostly a puzzle that can be solved in few games, but some others are brutally hard and boring to complete (looking at you, summon 200 Greyboughs and play 500 Corrupted cards). There's also the fact that you can't complete those achievements in casual (which Dean Ayala believes is the right approach, for some reason), which is very frustrating because some achievements involve bringing terrible decks to ranked and know you'll have an abysmal winrate for a while.

Also, there have been a couple of posts in which the devs made about events that include XP for catching up, but we've seen none so far (though those should just arrive closer to the end of the expansion cycle, as they're being treated as a catch-up mechanic rather than extra XP for us).

Thanks for the info, this is much more encouraging now.

If you don't mind me asking, given that I started playing again today and managed to get to level 14 on the pass so far (mainly through quests and a few random achievements), do you think it is possible to still get to at least lvl 50 before the next expansion (without accounting for any potential events that would make it easier)?

Highly unlikely. Assuming the next expansion is released by the end of March, that's in around 6 weeks. 6 weeks worth of XP (assuming 1 hour of play every day and no achievements whatsoever) should be around 96k XP. Since you're at level 14, you should have a total of at least 13,2k XP. Adding those two numbers, you'll end up at around level 39, just shy of level 40 (by around 1k XP). If you get to level 40 (by adding just a couple of achievements and excluding rewards from levels 1 through 14), you'll get 2750 G, 5 packs, 1 legendary and 1 ticket to arena/duels. It's not a lot of resources, but it's something.

EDIT: Oh wow, I really misinterpreted that text when the Battle Pass changes were announced, @Suchti0352. Yeah, I guess catch up XP is likely off the table, then.

Quote From YourPrivateNightmare

Do we know if the lvl 50 free hero portraits will be the same for the next pass or are these a one time thing?

We haven't been told anything about this, but the expectation is that the lvl 50 portraits will stick around for a while, with the most logical guess being for 10 expansions so that a single player could obtain all of them if they were around the whole time. It's all speculation though.

Right now it feels really good, even after spending 2k gold in the miniset I am at about 7k right now not playing that much every day. Also I am quite happy with my Darkmoon Faire collection so I will not spend any more gold in it. I think i will open about 85-90 packs when next expansion launches without spending a penny. Up until this last week (when I decided I wanted demon hunter to reach lvl 60 before the core set comes out, so i started doing a lvl a day) I have played mostly the dailys and then only with friends (I am not that much into ranked, but been playing it more now as I think I get more Hero XP that way)

Now the rewards are fine. 

Before I earned ~7 500 gold per expansion cycle. Now I am at 11 500 gold with one more month to collect gold. 

For me personaly the Reward Track feels pretty good. And if i hadn't bought the Mini Expansion with Gold i would also stand on around 10K. So i guess it is not that big of a deal to reach 10k.

Also the leveling up after lvl 50 is pretty fast. 

The new system feels great to me AFTER they made their tweaks.

I bought the Tavern Pass on Day 1 of the new system, so I've always had that boost, and I play a lot - but I am at 14,600 gold saved so far in this expansion which is by far a new record for me (even when you factor in the XP boost from the paid pass). Given that the next expansion won't hit for another month, possibly more (Iksar wasn't sure on the timing given the challenges of continued WFH during one of his Twitter AMAs), I will have a good deal more gold.

With the daily quests, I am leveling 1.5-2 levels a day (probably averaging 75 gold a day), sometimes more if I get in a groove and play a bunch in the evening. The weekly quests with the 20% XP boost helped me charge through 6 or 7 levels yesterday.