Two new deals have arrived for Hearthstone Mercenaries. Check them out and whether or not we think they are worth it down below.
Do note that we aren't going to take simply grinding tasks into account. We're only going to talk about the monetary value.
Legendary Mercenary
The first shop deal today contains a Legendary Mercenary for $5 USD. This is how it works:
- If you are missing a Legendary Mercenary (no base or skins) you will receive one of those at random.
- If you own all the Mercenaries, a random Mercenary is rolled.
- If you own the base skin for that Mercenary, you will receive coins for that Mercenary.
- If you do not own the base skin for that Mercenary, you will receive that instead.
Is this a good deal? If you are missing a Legendary Mercenary, for sure. We're not too certain about it if you already own all the Legendary Mercenaries already though. Our own Linkblade91, who owns all the Legendary Mercenaries, purchased the bundle to see what would happen. We're happy, maybe, to report that you won't receive any Mercenary skins from the bundle but once you run out of Legendary Mercs, you end up getting 100 Mercenary Coins instead.
The question then becomes, is this $5 bundle for 100 Merc Coins worth it?
When you consider that it takes 500 Mercenary Coins to purchase a single Legendary, we're talking about an exchange rate worse than regular Hearthstone cards. Let me explain. In Hearthstone when you receive a duplicate Legendary card, you can obtain 400 Dust for it. To craft a new Legendary, it takes 1600 Dust. This gives us a ratio of 4:1. In the case of Legendary Mercenaries, "dusting" a Legendary Mercenary has a value that is 20% of its crafting cost, or a 5:1 ratio. That feels a little bad but its also not the full story.
Where this gets fun is you need to then look at the other paid way of obtaining Mercenary Coins, and that is through Mercenary Packs. Here's what Blizzard says about rates on coins in packs.
Quote From Blizzard Mercenary Coins Drop Rates
A pack can contain one or more drops of Mercenary Coins of any Mercenary, and each drop will be in between 35 and 45 coins.
- Rare Coins: Rare Coins can drop 12 times in 10 Mercenaries Packs on average
- Epic Coins: Epic Coins can drop 10 times in 10 Mercenaries Packs on average
- Legendary Coins: Legendary Coins can drop 8 times in 10 Mercenaries Packs on average
With that in mind:
- A single pack on average will contain 40 coins for a given Mercenary if coins are in that slot.
- Legendary coins appear in 8 out of 10 packs on average.
- A single pack's legendary coins value is 80% of the average, or 32 Legendary Merc Coins.
That means it would take opening 3 packs to acquire 100 Legendary Mercenary Coins, on average. Then we need to figure out how expensive a Mercenary Pack is. At their most expensive, you can purchase 2 packs for $3 USD. That gives us a baseline of $1.50 per pack at its most expensive. So 3 packs would cost $4.50 USD, or a whole $0.50 cheaper than buying your 100 coins in the shop.
Now, with that said, RNG is a huge factor in packs, especially when we're just talking averages, so this deal might be worth a bit more than 50 cents.
In conclusion:
- If you are missing a Legendary Mercenary, this is a great deal.
- If you are missing a base skin but own each mercenary, then this deal sucks mega trash.
- Though you may enjoy that it thins out your Merc pool more or that you have a chance at coins at least.
- If you own all the base skins, I still think its a good deal even if it doesn't feel so great - that 50 cents is the cost of convenience.
Quote From Nicholas 'DeckTech' Weiss Yeah, sorry that’s not what you wanted, Nate, but this is intended. If you are missing a base, you’ll get that base. After having all base Legendaries, you’d get it auto-converted to coins.
Legendary Coin Purse
The second shop deal gives us Legendary Coins. You'll get 250 Coins for each of three random Legendary Mercenaries. These can also be for Mercenaries you don't own, so depending on how you look at it, this could be your gateway into obtaining a new Mercenary whether you like it or not.
Is this a good deal? I think its safe to call it a good deal, only if you consider the value of the previous bundle. As noted above, if you already own all the Mercenaries and purchase the random Legendary Mercenary, you will receive 100 coins for that random Mercenary. That puts the value of the coin purse deal at $5 for each 100 Coins, of which there are 750. We did the math and it ends up being worth $37.50 USD.
Seeing as how it is an $8 bundle, that's an extra $29.50 worth of value. Worth it? Yeah!
Comments
The coins deal is terrible and let me explain why.
Imagine you own 3 legendaries: Gromash, Malfurion and Jaraxxus and you have 250 coins for Sylvannas, Diablo and Lich King. You buy this pack and you get 250 coins for each of those three => the value is HUGE because you get three new legendaries instantly.
Now imagine that you get the coins for the only 3 legendaries you already owned. That's like 3-4 tasks worth of coins for each? (which translates in slightly upgrading not even 2 skills) => absolutely TERRIBLE DEAL.
Adding to that, I've been playing the game for just 8 days and I'm only missing 8 legendaries (I only bought the 1 legendary + 5 packs deal and around 20 packs with gold), of those 8 legendaries, I'm missing more than 250 coins to craft on only 1 of them (Illidan // 284 coins).
If you spam tasks farming and some targeted bounty runs you don't need to buy anything at all in this game.
TL;DR the value difference of owning the mercs you get coins for or not is way too huge for this deal to make any sense.
This is just the classic "pay to not play the game" logic that's so prevalent in the industry nowadays.
Thanks for the advice on the legendary coin purse. But now I've been hearing that you shouldn't craft legendary mercenaries from your coins, you should rather use the coins to upgrade abilities and equipment. I've got over 500 coins for Alex now but not sure if I should craft her
Initially I thought the same as you: get mercenaries in packs and save coins for upgrades.
Until you realize you barely get any coins for a merc until you own that merc.
And that legendary merc drop rates in packs are abysmal.
So to sum up, always craft a mercenary IMMEDIATELY once you get enough coins to do so.
Can't upgrade anything without the merc.
Here's the deal:
1. Coins drop at the end of a bounty, depending on your party (and the baseline coins associated with the bounty)
2. Tasks drop coins specific for the merc (and random ones; exception tasks for equipment)
Without the merc, you hardly ever get coins efficiently for them (some bounties require lots of time etc.)
In short: Go crafting, go leveling, have fun.
Thanks mate, you make a good point!
I had the coins in the shop, but missing the Legendary Mercenary for $5 USD..
Is this "personalized"? Sad.
Hello all, just bought the $8 bundle. I ended up with Sylvanis and 2 sets of Grommash coins. So it's entirely possible to get duplicates within the coins. Just making the fact known, whether it sways you in the direction of buying it or not.
It's worth noting for the second bundle that coins are far less valuable than dust once you own all legendaries, even if the two currencies appear similar. Dust will get you a whole new card to play with, while coins, if you have every merc, will get you a piddly few extra stat points. Conversely, if you DON'T own every merc, coins are more valuable than dust! 250 coins is halfway to a legendary merc - this deal offers 2400 dust in 'Hearthstone terms'. A much better deal for 8$ than traditional Hearthstone bundles.
I am see the 8 bucks deal on my store, it appears the 5 dollar offer for a legendary was removed.
Same here, with the added detail that the Legendary Coins bundle is only visible in the Mercenaries store (a.k.a. the merchant cart in your village) -- all I see in the regular Hearthstone store is the Mercenaries Launch Bundle and regular Mercenaries packs.
I can only assume that it'll make a reappearance after they better showcase how it works since their original description was bad.
News about Mercs is all over the place right now and it's normal. I am curious to see how successful that mode is. My impression: Blizzard thinks that, revenue wise, HS has capped so it was time to launch something new that could have a decent margin of progression (revenue wise). I think there is a potential serous risk here because it will give a certain number of players the feeling that Hearthstone is now diluted in a bunch of modes. First conclusion players will hastily draw (pertinent or not) is that Blizz will make HS take a back seat a bit like Wild. If I am right, this will translate, over a not so long time, into a gradual reduction of active HS players (concurrent and simultaneous). How bad will this reduction be? It depends on the success of the Mercs, if too many players switch from HS to Mercs, that's bad for HS. Whether Mercs is a flop or success, I think Blizz cannot ignore one factor: I don't see the majority of players spending money on Hs ranked AND Mercs. So maybe Blizz thinks HS is done hence the launch of Mercs. I really hope I am wrong and that's it just bad speculation.
Hey, I've made an update to the article since according to our research, we were wrong on how things worked.
This is the actual logic for the first deal, Random Legendary Mercenary:
I still think this is a good deal, but only in a couple of circumstances. If you are missing any base mercs though but have all the mercenaries as far as them all being playable, this "deal" really doesn't feel like a deal since now its only a chance of coins.
This is so poorly communicated in the deal. I really don't think this was the best the team could have done with how mercenaries are implemented. I love the idea of the game. I think its incredible fair for the most part and more than accessible to F2P folks. This sucks though.
I really cannot comprehend how Blizzard managed to make Mercenaries so complicated, and not for a gameplay reason. They really should have ditched the idea of a base skin when they saw how lengthy their communications on it were going to be. Maybe it was too late in the development process to do so, but that's hardly an excuse. Small indie this and that, this is something that really needed to be considered more. Kinda sad when you consider they worked on this mode for like 3 years.
As one of the Out of Cards staff put it on Discord - "dogshit".
Have they removed that legendary offer from the store? I only see the coins deal now.
Also can't see it...
It's pretty straightforward, really. If you need a merc, buy the merc. If you don't need a merc but want some coins, buy the coins.
Why would you even consider doing the opposite?
The gacha starts...
Mercenaries: $5 for a guaranteed Legendary
Genshin Impact (for example): $450 to guarantee a 5-star character.
Lumping these two games into the same category is kind of ridiculous.
Yeah I can't stand everyone that keeps bringing up Gacha with Mercenaries.
Maybe if card games are a Gacha too (they aren't anywhere near it). Gacha is predatory practices, not some RNG. I still laugh at the people who were trying to call Overwatch a Gacha game when it was purely cosmetics in loot boxes.
100% with you on the Overwatch situation. Its lootboxes are still used as the flagship picture on articles today about lootboxes in general. Overwatch has the best practice of lootboxes, and I can't help but roll my eyes at anyone that thinks it's the problem.