Can we talk about Mercenaries?

Tried it, found it extremely grindy and repetitive, never come back after the first few days to it.

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The economy is BAD. It is very hard to gain coins for any specific Merc.

I mean you can kinda target farm them with bounties, but it still takes quite a lot of time to farm a specific you don't have. Farming the Mysterious stranger event on the hand is a pretty reliable way of maxing out the important abilities.

Tough the amount of random merc coins you get from tasks and pvp chests is nothing to underestimate. Sure it's not the most efficient way, but it does progress the total merc collection.

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I just maxed out my first Merc (Cariel) and am still earning coins for her.

That's actually a common complain and the devs stated in their "What's next" Post that they are working on a way to spend excess coins. It's definetely a feature to expect in the first merc focused update.

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I had an empty spot, but it still said "the campfire is full" when I encountered the coveted "Mysterious Stranger."

That's actually working as intendet. The game just doesn't explain the mechanic well enough. When you look at your task board you notice that only 4 slots say "New Tasks in X hours", while the other 2 have nothing written on them. The reason for this is that the Task board has 4 dedicated merc Task Slots, 1 for the daily toki quest and 1 for the Story quests.

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Finally, whenever I get the "Use Boon: Caster" task, it takes forever to find a board with that Boon on it.

I usually do the boon tasks in the heroic air elemental bounty. There you are guaranteed to have a boon after only 1 or at max 2 battles.

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And last of all, I have quit entirely on the Fighting Pit. It used to be the best way to earn coins and level up Mercs quickly (bring a mismatched squad with one low level Merc and five level 30's, get matched with an AI and profit). It has been over a week since I faced an AI. Instead, I get matched with overpowered players and get creamed, and that's AFTER waiting 4-6 minutes for a game. It's clear that very few players are playing Mercenaries, or the matchmaking wouldn't take so long.

To be fair the fighting pit was never ment as a way to level your mercs against bots. The raeson why you aren't getting matched with bots probably has something to do with the changes to mm they did a while ago.

The reason for the long que times also do not neccesarely have something to do with the relatively small pvp playerbase. You have to consider that the mm also takes your overall merc power into account. So there could theoratically be a huge pvp playerbase and you would still have to wait 2-4 minutes because non of the players que with a low power team.

I personally play at around 7500mmr right now and can find a match in at max. 30 sec.

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And if so, what can we do about it?

I think one important thing is to remind yourself that the mode is all about grinding. If someone doesn't enjoy grinding then mercs is definitely not for them. As of right now we as the players can do nothing about gameplay issues other than waiting. The devs did hear the feedback and are saying that they are working on the problem. It's also good to know that the dedicated merc dev team is very pasionate about it and tries their best. One of them with the Usernames Kaizor is also relatively active on the merc discord channel (though has been quite for the last 2 weeks, maybe because of the holidays?) and also particpated in a few community Interviews. The devs also said that mercs has a similar update cycle to BG, so there should be 1 big merc update per Expansion which will hopefully fix the bigger issues of the mode.

Just a few comments of my own:

- The boons can be easily farmed in felwood against our dear friend Lord Banehollow, where there's a near guarantee of 2 of them stacked one match away from one another

- The excess coin issue is an outstanding thing that has yet to be resolved, and in my opinion, will likely end up as a means to get more portraits rather than exchange for other merc coins.

- It would appear that the design document has made out mercs to be some kind of money making mode, unlike both battlegrounds and duels. So many promos and sales, it almost makes regular hearthstone look tame by comparison. The latest is a 15 bucks promo for a portrait + 5 packs, I kid you not.

And then the latest change, which was to guarantee legendary coins from boss chest, only works when you've beaten a heroic boss at level 30. In effect this would change nothing: vets would rather grind it on barrens heroic 1, and newcomers (without better collections) would struggle to ever beat these at all.

All this leads me to believe that the grind is deliberate, and will likely stay on for the foreseeable future. As to whether mercs has a foreseeable future at all, that's a story for another time.

I've stopped grinding strangers ever since AV started because ranked standard was actually fun for the first time in 3 months and my attentions has largely been there. Haven't even played much duels at all, let alone mercs. In term of being a game, in my opinion, mercs would need to address the following;

- Retaliatory damage for physical attacks is dumb. Like seriously. The best team currently in PvE is either nature bros, or spam fire, mostly because they deal AoE or are simply more efficient: dealing more damage while taking less.

- Losing a merc in PvE is devastating, and the mechanics around reviving them are inconsistent at best. Meaning, there's no reason to take risks and fight more difficult fights. So what we have here is a game whereby best results are gained by strategically avoiding fights. Not good, when fighting is supposed to be fun.

- The gameplay is very one note. Pokemon avoided this by having EVs (meaning you can have the same pokemon with different stats and therefore different gameplans) and enabling switching, which means sniping is not a guaranteed option. In mercs however, whenever you see a beast build you know 100% how it plays out (King krush is always offensive, etc.) and sniping is near impossible to avoid. This makes the game very repetitive, and too efficient.

- And lastly, mercs feels a lot like a game that is designed not to be fun first, but as a cash generator. A similar souless triple AAA tripe that we see year to year, designed specifically to make money first and gameplay a secondary (if at all necessary) option. Except mercs lack the casual appeal and reach of your typical assassin's creed, madden, starwars etc.

Who is this game made for? A question yet unanswered.

Here's my two cents: we're being fed an alpha stage game and being sold a buttload of bundles on it. Now, I'm not saying this is solely T5's fault (although there is a small amount of blame to share to them, they did release the game in this state), this is mostly Activision doing Activision things.

And it's not like we only see Activision's grubby little fingers in Mercenaries, I feel a non insignificant percentage of the design process in Standard HS is revolved around selling the newest expansion above all things, which is why the newest expansions feel like the most broken ones (just look at a card like Soulciologist Malicia, an insanely powerful card that was a staple for a couple of expansion cycles before being rendered useless not because she was nerfed but because the environment around her just started chewing her for breakfast) [yes, this is a power creep rant, you can ignore it].

And this is why Mercenaries has a lot of issues. The game's focus is around money, not fun. That's why the game mode feels (and definitely is) unfinished. That's also why there were so many bugs around tasks, that's also why tasks (your main resource generator) are hidden behing a single RNG tile per run or that's why we don't have a use for excess coins yet, even if that one is a bit counter intuitive (if we could have a use for extra resources, we would feel less bad spending money). All these issues and more show that we're playing a rushed game mode whose main focus is making us spend more and more money rather than giving us a good experience. Hell, that's even why some of the initial design ideas we we're promised got scrapped, like "evolving" our mercs (which we can see it was a thing in the initial design through the baby King Krush skin or baby King Mukla skin or even the young Anduin Wrynn skin or how there's a clearly living Arthas Lich King skin or a clearly alive Elf Sylvanas Windrunner skin.

Just compare Mercenaries to Battlegrounds: the latter was made with the sole purpose of being almost like an one off thing for a while, but since the primary focus was on fun, it now rivals the main game in playrate and even viewership on Twitch, for example (just look at how a lot of HS content creators shifted their focus to BGs).

I will say this though, and this is my personal opinion: the reason why I haven't completely given up on Mercs (and HS in general) is that the devs still care about the game. I don't put my money on it because I don't like a lot of the current design decisions (or because I don't want to spend 20€ on 8 Jpegs and a couple of voicelines in BGs case [come on, T5, lower those prices, I bought Valheim for 17€ around 5 months ago and have almost 300 hours of play time already while juggling studies and work, that's just so much more value than what you're offering it's almost sad]), but I understand why people still put money on this game. Just look at how the devs still try to cater to the requests of the community while having to deal with Bobby Kotick's greedy little shadow everywhere. Iksar doesn't need to do weekly AMAs, he chooses to. Celestalon doesn't need to do weird puzzles for us, he chooses to (although dude, spend more time fixing bugs, Wildpaw Gnoll is a buggy mess, for example). Those are just some examples. But we also see a lot of community interaction through advertising content creators and other background stuff like that. That's why HS survived through 7 years of game life or the rise of other digital card games like LoR or MtG Arena or Artifact (LUL) or other "HS killers".

The dev team would certainly want a lot more investment on their work (through more QA testers mostly, but also through card designers or a bigger balance team or probably through something more trivial like more artists for a more varied art style on their cards) but daddy Activision would probably just disregard their request. And yes, Iksar has stated multiple times he likes a smaller team, but I'm definitely sure he'd welcome an extra pair of working hands.

PS: Regarding the Deathblow Grom task you mentioned, the game didn't count game ending Deathblows, i.e., when you would activate Deathblow on the final enemy. I know this because I recently did that task on Cookie, the Cook's fishes and it counted all of them except for the last one I ended the fight with. It then happened again for like 3 fights (me triggering Deathblow on the final opponent) and I finally realized what was happened. Then I triggered the Deathblow on a non final opponent and it counted and now I assume it works that way for every single Deathblow related tasks, but I could be wrong and it could just be a Grom thing.

PPS: Sorry I got a little ranty at times, I tend to do that.

Quote From ElSabidon

I will say this though, and this is my personal opinion: the reason why I haven't completely given up on Mercs (and HS in general) is that the devs still care about the game. I don't put my money on it because I don't like a lot of the current design decisions (or because I don't want to spend 20€ on 8 Jpegs and a couple of voicelines in BGs case [come on, T5, lower those prices, I bought Valheim for 17€ around 5 months ago and have almost 300 hours of play time already while juggling studies and work, that's just so much more value than what you're offering it's almost sad]), but I understand why people still put money on this game. Just look at how the devs still try to cater to the requests of the community while having to deal with Bobby Kotick's greedy little shadow everywhere. Iksar doesn't need to do weekly AMAs, he chooses to. Celestalon doesn't need to do weird puzzles for us, he chooses to (although dude, spend more time fixing bugs, Wildpaw Gnoll is a buggy mess, for example). Those are just some examples. But we also see a lot of community interaction through advertising content creators and other background stuff like that. That's why HS survived through 7 years of game life or the rise of other digital card games like LoR or MtG Arena or Artifact (LUL) or other "HS killers".

I dont actually recall a Wildpaw Gnoll bug, far as I know its working as intended. Can you clarify on this?

Quote From ElSabidon

And it's not like we only see Activision's grubby little fingers in Mercenaries, I feel a non insignificant percentage of the design process in Standard HS is revolved around selling the newest expansion above all things, which is why the newest expansions feel like the most broken ones (just look at a card like Soulciologist Malicia, an insanely powerful card that was a staple for a couple of expansion cycles before being rendered useless not because she was nerfed but because the environment around her just started chewing her for breakfast) [yes, this is a power creep rant, you can ignore it].

I dont think there's anything particularly wrong if expansions are designed to overtake the previous meta. In fact, I'd argue that's particularly one thing it should be doing: freshen up the meta, something which the midset tends to fail doing.

There are cards that are still seeing play from earlier expansion. Librams, amusingly enough, sees more play after it was first introduced and are still seeing play now. Insane cards can be pushed away simply because of the meta is not conducive to it, not necessarily because of power creep.

The only time I have regretted spending money on Hearthstone was when I bought the mercs pre-order. Absolute shame because I enjoyed everything else that T5 has put out (to a degree). My biggest issue was that it lacked a certain depth that is present in wild. Maybe as the game mode gets older and more mechanics are introduced, I will come back and I might enjoy it more.

Merc is either grind or pay to get the best mercs, so like others have said it focuses on fustration in order to get people to spend. I mostly did Merc mode to get achievements and I am nearly done about 70% of those which is my goal. After reaching that, I don't have any goals left for that mode so will likely drop it until something new is added.

I do not mind the grind, but the excess Merc coins thing is just ridiculous. Especially since I have an overabundance of many and I still have not maxed out all of the Mercs at this moment (still 8 left).

This is my top 3 of Mercs with excess coins:

1. Rokara -> 11910
2. Bru'kan -> 11569
3. Xyrella -> 10891

Also, they should really tone down the flashiness of Mercs entering the battlefield. It got old quickly and hurts my eyes.

Quote From dapperdog

Quote From ElSabidon

I will say this though, and this is my personal opinion: the reason why I haven't completely given up on Mercs (and HS in general) is that the devs still care about the game. I don't put my money on it because I don't like a lot of the current design decisions (or because I don't want to spend 20€ on 8 Jpegs and a couple of voicelines in BGs case [come on, T5, lower those prices, I bought Valheim for 17€ around 5 months ago and have almost 300 hours of play time already while juggling studies and work, that's just so much more value than what you're offering it's almost sad]), but I understand why people still put money on this game. Just look at how the devs still try to cater to the requests of the community while having to deal with Bobby Kotick's greedy little shadow everywhere. Iksar doesn't need to do weekly AMAs, he chooses to. Celestalon doesn't need to do weird puzzles for us, he chooses to (although dude, spend more time fixing bugs, Wildpaw Gnoll is a buggy mess, for example). Those are just some examples. But we also see a lot of community interaction through advertising content creators and other background stuff like that. That's why HS survived through 7 years of game life or the rise of other digital card games like LoR or MtG Arena or Artifact (LUL) or other "HS killers".

I dont actually recall a Wildpaw Gnoll bug, far as I know its working as intended. Can you clarify on this?

Quote From ElSabidon

And it's not like we only see Activision's grubby little fingers in Mercenaries, I feel a non insignificant percentage of the design process in Standard HS is revolved around selling the newest expansion above all things, which is why the newest expansions feel like the most broken ones (just look at a card like Soulciologist Malicia, an insanely powerful card that was a staple for a couple of expansion cycles before being rendered useless not because she was nerfed but because the environment around her just started chewing her for breakfast) [yes, this is a power creep rant, you can ignore it].

I dont think there's anything particularly wrong if expansions are designed to overtake the previous meta. In fact, I'd argue that's particularly one thing it should be doing: freshen up the meta, something which the midset tends to fail doing.

There are cards that are still seeing play from earlier expansion. Librams, amusingly enough, sees more play after it was first introduced and are still seeing play now. Insane cards can be pushed away simply because of the meta is not conducive to it, not necessarily because of power creep.

Regarding the Gnoll: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I10Xy831K9Q Starts at 1:28. And something similar did happen to me. In my case, I was playing wild, added Grumble, Worldshaker to my hand (so far so good), played him and returned him to hand using Shadowstep (at which point Wildpaw Gnoll's cost did not decrease) and replayed him, with Wildpaw Gnoll increasing its cost. I don't have Maestra, so I was always a Rogue, so the card couldn't even get "confused" by that factor.

Regarding the Librams: they did get buffed. Aldor Attendant started as a 2 mana 2/3. Not saying that's the only reason the package became good, but it did become much more efficient from that point onward. But that wasn't my point regarding power creep. I believe the current design process has the flaw of shunning past expansions too hard. Yes, a card like The Demon Seed can exist, but if every other warlock archetype gets completely outclassed by it, then that card becomes a problem. And while it's impossible to have a meta where every card has similar power levels, it is possible to have metas where weaker archetypes can still fight with stronger ones, like the Un'Goro meta or even the OG Old Gods meta. It just feels the current metas revolve too much around the new instead of harmonizing the new with the old.

EDIT: Although I do have to say, the Libram package is still one of their best designs regarding balancing the new with the old. 

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I will say this though, and this is my personal opinion: the reason why I haven't completely given up on Mercs (and HS in general) is that the devs still care about the game. I don't put my money on it because I don't like a lot of the current design decisions (or because I don't want to spend 20€ on 8 Jpegs and a couple of voicelines in BGs case [come on, T5, lower those prices, I bought Valheim for 17€ around 5 months ago and have almost 300 hours of play time already while juggling studies and work, that's just so much more value than what you're offering it's almost sad]), but I understand why people still put money on this game. Just look at how the devs still try to cater to the requests of the community while having to deal with Bobby Kotick's greedy little shadow everywhere. Iksar doesn't need to do weekly AMAs, he chooses to. Celestalon doesn't need to do weird puzzles for us, he chooses to (although dude, spend more time fixing bugs, Wildpaw Gnoll is a buggy mess, for example). Those are just some examples. But we also see a lot of community interaction through advertising content creators and other background stuff like that. That's why HS survived through 7 years of game life or the rise of other digital card games like LoR or MtG Arena or Artifact (LUL) or other "HS killers".

I dont actually recall a Wildpaw Gnoll bug, far as I know its working as intended. Can you clarify on this?

Quote From ElSabidon

And it's not like we only see Activision's grubby little fingers in Mercenaries, I feel a non insignificant percentage of the design process in Standard HS is revolved around selling the newest expansion above all things, which is why the newest expansions feel like the most broken ones (just look at a card like Soulciologist Malicia, an insanely powerful card that was a staple for a couple of expansion cycles before being rendered useless not because she was nerfed but because the environment around her just started chewing her for breakfast) [yes, this is a power creep rant, you can ignore it].

I dont think there's anything particularly wrong if expansions are designed to overtake the previous meta. In fact, I'd argue that's particularly one thing it should be doing: freshen up the meta, something which the midset tends to fail doing.

There are cards that are still seeing play from earlier expansion. Librams, amusingly enough, sees more play after it was first introduced and are still seeing play now. Insane cards can be pushed away simply because of the meta is not conducive to it, not necessarily because of power creep.

Regarding the Gnoll: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I10Xy831K9Q Starts at 1:28. And something similar did happen to me. In my case, I was playing wild, added Grumble, Worldshaker to my hand (so far so good), played him and returned him to hand using Shadowstep (at which point Wildpaw Gnoll's cost did not decrease) and replayed him, with Wildpaw Gnoll increasing its cost. I don't have Maestra, so I was always a Rogue, so the card couldn't even get "confused" by that factor.

Regarding the Librams: they did get buffed. Aldor Attendant started as a 2 mana 2/3. Not saying that's the only reason the package became good, but it did become much more efficient from that point onward. But that wasn't my point regarding power creep. I believe the current design process has the flaw of shunning past expansions too hard. Yes, a card like The Demon Seed can exist, but if every other warlock archetype gets completely outclassed by it, then that card becomes a problem. And while it's impossible to have a meta where every card has similar power levels, it is possible to have metas where weaker archetypes can still fight with stronger ones, like the Un'Goro meta or even the OG Old Gods meta. It just feels the current metas revolve too much around the new instead of harmonizing the new with the old.

EDIT: Although I do have to say, the Libram package is still one of their best designs regarding balancing the new with the old. 

Thanks for the Wildpaw Gnoll note. Interesting bug. Gonna test a little of this myself later.

Regarding the impact of current expansions versus the old, I still think team5 got it mostly right, or at least the intention is correct: new expansions should introduce new decks, and the goal is to have as many new cards see play as possible. Often enough this means power creeping, or deliberate design decisions to disadvantage old cards in favor of newer ones. A good example would be the introduction of new frost spells in shaman, so usage of Primal Dungeoneer is theoretically disadvantaged, as inclusion of frost spells affects its consistency.

Harmonizing with the old is hard when you're trying to get people to play new cards. To do this, they would need to dedicate some cards to support old existing decks, but this would run counter to their design decision to have the new expansion stand out. Witchwood was deliberately designed to be weaker than the preceeding expansions, and as a result many of its cards never saw light of day.

Besides, there's no reason to believe the old decks can't function in the new ecosystem. Rush warrior can still play, and control priest arguably just evolved into the current existing quest priest. Face hunter from barrens is still here, as is the many iterations of libram paladin. One of the ways I enjoy hearthstone is to engineer old decks to new expansions and while I dont always meet success, that doesn't mean they're completely unplayable.

Also, I think we can all agree that stormwind's meta is an anomaly: a once in a lifetime situation where cards are so disgustingly polarizing that it strangled the game for weeks. Using that as examples should be done sparingly, because I think its unanimous, that this is the extreme end of examples of unhealthy new expansion cards (pre-nerfed).

I only bought the welcome bundle ($5) as a sign of support for this new game mode. For the rest I treat Mercenaries as a F2P (and farm XP) game mode.

All initially introduced mercs (except Grommash Hellscream and Gul'dan) are fully upgraded with their abilities plus equipment. Currently, I am only missing a few tiers of upgrades for these two and six other of the later added mercs. I also opened most if not all portraits for the rare and epic mercs from the packs received from completing all their tasks (which are of course also all done). I just receive 1 single daily task at the campfire each midnight now.

As my situation shows, the economy of mercs is truly bad and needs some serious overhaul.

I am kind of playing Mercenaries F2P, so some people might say I have absolutely no valid reason for any complaints. To those I will just say if the game mode improves for me it probably also will improve for them as well.

I have played off and on since release and don't have a maxed fully maxed out merc yet, I do have several approaching there.

My 2 cents is that while it's semi fun, the idea of grinding that much to have a merc be viable in PVP and the linear progression of new mercs ( meaning ranks 4-5 are more important) is not worth it.

It reminds me a lot of vanilla HS where we all know the gold and dust economy were horrendous but it was the best digital card game so we just grinned and played along. Alot has changed since 2013.

While I understand grinding is part of the mechanism of the game, it's too much, the idea of grinding even 3 mercs per expansion seems daunting if it's not your "main" game mode

It's a nice body without a soul. If it had RPG elements it could be 1000 times better. But it's 100% grindy repetitive gameplay. Wasted chance. 

I drastically cut my time spent on Mercenaries after the update to lvl 30 heroic bounty rewards* because it made me realise just how unrewarding the whole process was and still is. I am hopeful that Blizzard will improve the game but I don't know which direction they will take so for now I'm avoiding any form of grind - no lvl 30 heroic bounty runs, no task farming. Furthermore, on the off chance they introduce some form of maxed coin protection, I've also decided not to complete any more tasks (except for Toki's daily) or open any more packs.

* Side note: Old Guardian has done some analysis on the post-update drop rates of legendary coins on lvl 30 heroic bounty runs, and his initial findings are disappointing to say the least. See his Reddit post and YouTube video. The average number of coins you can get from the guaranteed legendary coin pile was reduced along with the probability of legendary coins appearing in the other two bounty coin piles. More data is needed but it appears this change is at best a side-grade ie. same legendary coin drop rate on average. For those intent on farming for legendary coins, heroic quilboars still present the best value for your time.

I played a lot of Mercenaries the first week it was released, but then I suddenly stopped because of many reasons:

• Even if you sink money into the mode, you are required to grind a remarkable amount of PvE.
• PvE, after a few runs, becomes repetitive and boring.
• Even if you start upgrading a Merc, you'll never want to bring it to PvP if it's not maxed (or at least has the most important moves at level 5).
  • This means that the hours you spend grinding your Mercs in PvE are absolutely useless unless you complete your goal.
• While there are "F2P" builds, PvE is completely dominated by Legendary Mercenaries, with the preorder ones being very prevalent.

Long story short, I am not saying that the mode is pay to win, but rather that you never started on a equal foot and you need an absurd amount of time to get on par with those with a larger collection - way more time than you need to actually enjoy Constructed.

See, this last point is particularly enlightening for me: if you need more grind than Constructed (which is the emblem of "grind" in Hearthstone), then there's definitely something wrong going on. And if I ever had to choose between a game move I've been playing for 4+ years (and that gets massively shaken up with a regular frequency) and a new and even more time-consuming one, there's no way in hell I would pick the latter. Sure, I would try it, but nothing more.

Just my two cents, so please don't take me as the most informed/influential person ever.

Quote From Pezman

 Threw together 5 level 30s and a level 13, hoping for an easy match vs AI. Nope: got creamed by 6 maxxed out level 30 Mercs.

This is exactly what discourages me from even trying PvP: I know I cannot just avoid strong opponents by self-harming my own comp, but there has to be some form of compromise in the middle!

I used to spend time doing the daily tasks in Mercenaries, and tried to get into the grind for various comps, but just got super bored of it. For the PvP to be fun, you need to have tons of fully buffed Mercs, but getting there requires way too much boring PvE. How many times can you battle the same line-up of Furbolgs or Dragons or what have you over and over before you die of boredom? There's just not enough variety in each run, and I think that stems largely from the fact that the perks you get along the way are just not all that impactful. "Here's a stat buff for your Horde characters." "Here's a little more Arcane damage." Okay, great, but that doesn't really meaningfully impact the choices I make in game.

Tonight I had enough coins to craft Galvangar, cool cool. 

Then I took him on a couple bounty runs to unlock some abilities, cool cool. 

Then the collection manager showed -268 Galvangar coins. Math, y'all, it is just so hard.