Edwin as rogue legendary sure, but why would he want anything to do with the SI:7? More likely he'll usher in a return of pirate rogue, which has been weirdly absent for years.
We do need justice for Mathias Shaw though. As much as I like Maestra, there is no good excuse for leaving Shaw out of a Stormwind set with a strong SI:7 focus. Maybe he'll pop up in the 3rd expansion? If it is Alterac Valley like many people expect, it's not like there are any other rogue characters for it anyway.
Edit: I just remembered Garona Halforcen made a brief appearance in one of the Book of Mercs. stories, and she surely wouldn't be given such a minor role in the overall story. She was also one of the leaked mercenaries, which isn't proof of anything but adds evidence. So I expect she will appear in expansion 3 instead, which would be about damn time, but still, poor Shaw.
As much as I am on your side, I have to concede lots of people do like it. On the bright side, at least the Amulet cannot resurrect Archmage Vargoth. That's some good news.
Yeah, it always happens. Sadly it's not just confined to games either. Too often people, companies and countries chase profits and power at the expense of quality of life, which is surely the whole reason people would have wanted money and power in the first place?
I've seen F2P players slave away with meta decks for years in the belief that it will enable them build a large enough collection so they can start enjoying more casual decks, but never actually stop to play those decks. I worry a bit that people are doing the same thing with Mercs, and ruining their own enjoyment for a game they genuinely do like by chasing a dream that Blizz, like every company true to the spirit of capitalism, has placed conveniently just out of reach. You can bet new content releases for Mercs just often enough that it's not actually feasible to both enjoy the game and max out everything (without spending significant amounts of money, of course).
So yeah, having watched players and the world around me chase dreams to no avail, I've learned to aim low, but do so with a smile on my face.
I'll stick to rogue like I normally do (I wonder why I even bother with the other classes sometimes):
For SI:7, I don't think it actually needs many more cards since the questline is balanced on the assumption that there are the current numbers of SI:7 cards available, and it's not a bad card at all. Even so, we surely won't go through the entire Stormwind expansion without seeing Mathias Shaw, right Blizzard? So I'm going to set myself up for disappointment and predict he is one of the legendaries and he counts as an SI:7 card.
I'm not sure how much weight we should really put on mounts in the trailer, but assuming rouge does get one gizmos seem a bit too fancy for it. I am always surprised by how many straight attack buffs rogue actually gets, so I'd expect something whose buff is between that and stealth.
I agree Sketchy Information is lacking targets currently (although I do enjoy spamming Infiltrator Lilian's deathrattle), so I could see another 3 or 4 mana deathrattle for the class. In my ideal world they would bundle that up in Shaw's card, and free up a wildcard slot.
If there was a complete wildcard, maybe a pirate? Warrior has been hogging all the pirate focus for years now.
I'm also curious about whether they want secrets to be a long term thing in rogue. They are all set to rotate out next year at the moment, and if they plan on keeping them around, they're going to need to actually add a few more so next year's Core set doesn't have to carry the entire burden.
At least Snowclaw is a level 30 bounty, so there is a modicum of actual gameplay there. Against Air Elemental you can switch off your brain to the point where it isn't even a game anymore; it's just a chore.
The way the 'pick the optimal bounty and grind that for everything' method works is clearly running counter to the designers' intent. They did a sensible thing by telling us bounty X will give coins for mercs A, B and C, giving us a focus on where to grind when we want specific things while building in variety over time as we hunt coins for different mercs. That this isn't being used is an obvious 'conceptual bug' in my eyes. As you suggest, that could be resolved by making the coins given when you lose being for the same pool of mercs as in the final chest.
That influences the time scale a bit too. With completely random coins you're spreading resources thin, which slows things down compared to being able to focus on a sub-set of mercs. Not all of which are needed to be a high-level PvP player, of course.
In a much broader picture though, I see a split by 'healthy' gameplay and 'unhealthy' gameplay. Mercs is weird because it is actually really well designed to incentivise both. There is so much in there that lets super-casual players like me relax and enjoy it without feeling any need to maximise everything immediately, all while setting plausible mid-to-long term targets. But at the same time, I have to acknowledge how many people there are who are slaving away, grinding out coins as quickly as they can for... that's where I get stuck. I don't really see what they are doing it for. To me the game is very clear on not needing to max out mercs, let alone all of them, even for PvP. From what I've read I don't think the devs expected people to take the PvP quite as seriously as they do, although they would certainly have been aware of how obsessed people can get with this sort of game.
All of that is why I have largely kept out of discussions. I am really enjoying it as a casual game where the 'grinding' is really just me playing bounties because I want to, and openly admit I don't fully understand the mentality behind the more aggressive grinding performed by others.
Don't get me wrong, I love to see a stranger, but don't take away my potato :P
Well there is certainly some misalignment somewhere, as evidenced by you not understanding why some people like the potato. Wherever the split of the playerbase exists, there IS a downside to cutting out the non-stranger events to pander to those eager to farm asap. I don't want them removed because they make the bounties more interesting:
The potato forces you to factor its role into encounters. It isn't always useful, but sometimes juggling a downside is as enjoyable as getting stronger.
The portal speeds up getting the final reward chest, but you have to approach the boss with a weaker team than you otherwise would, ramping up the challenge a bit.
As demonstrated by the coin artwork, the sabotage is a bit of a coin flip. Sometimes it makes things easier, other times the opposite. Tbh I am yet to see it have enough impact to really warrant existing, especially as type-X encounters are rarely completely dominated by type-X opponents.
As for Blizz's change, I'm on the fence about it. I was never planning on grinding heroic air elemental anyway. However, I do respect that a monotonous grind of taking level 30s on a level 8 bounty is not the game Blizz wanted to make, and they have every right to modify systems to encourage players to properly interface with the game as they intended. The affected players will argue that they are within their rights to play the game however they choose, and that is true, but I do think the change happened early enough that it is better described as 'conceptual debugging' (I.e. a tweak to make the game better fit what the designers where conceptualising) than a plain scummy move.
Behind all of this is the time scale over which people want to reach some sort of end state. I think a lot of people are viewing it like everything needs to be achieved over a few weeks, while the game is actually designed for it to take months for F2P players, which makes perfectly good sense when HS has always had updates appear on those time scales.
As someone who is enjoying playing the Mercs PvE for what it is, I have to say I'm a little perplexed (though not entirely surprised) by people's need for an optimised grind for coins. I haven't touched PvP at all, but isn't it designed so you're not actually at a disadvantage if you don't have maxed out mercs? If so, why would people need to rush it?
I would happily stay out of the discussion as I play it at my own pace, but I'm conscious that what benefits PvP-focused grinders is a bit misaligned with what benefits PvE-focused players, who want the game to be tolerably fast to grind (which it already is) while retaining the game's longevity. Your comments about the potato, sabotage and portal acknowledge this disconnect, but disregard the opinions of the PvE players who like them rather too lightly for my liking.
Pretty sure this is not how it works, or if it is it'll certainly never be confirmed. Because its so knee deep in shit that its impenetrable as an explanation. How can anyone aside from blizz justify what a 'coin slot' would be? By opening multiple packs, anyone can see that the 'card slot' is not a constant in terms of position, so what we have here is if you have more than one 'card slot' then it stands to reason that one of them is guaranteed to be a skin, which means the pack quality of each pack is literally much worse than we can imagine.
For now Im running with the convenient logic that there is no protection anywhere, aside from the fact that you'll be receiving coins in 'card slots' only if you've gotten all the skins in that particular rarity. Since there's clearly more skins than there are mercs, you'll be screwed fairly often because of it, unless the logic is that you roll between a skin and a merc for each 'card slot' first rather than as a whole.
My description was perhaps more messy than it needed to be. All I was really trying to say is that there is clearly 1 item per pack that pulls from a different distribution than the others, and is much more likely to give a base merc. Hence I am distinguishing between 'card' and 'coin' slots by what they are most likely to roll into.
It's messier to describe in Mercs packs than normal ones because the notion of 'duplicates' is different, but in my mind it is doing fundamentally the same thing as when normal HS packs ensure there is at least 1 rare in them. And indeed, I expect they just re-used the old pack opening code for Mercs, with a few adjustments.
Here's what I imagine happens:
Randomly select the first 4 items from the 'coin' distribution.
These are most likely to be coins, but can become mercs. If they do become mercs, they have a good chance of being skins (probably about 75% of the time just by the ratio of skin to base versions, ignoring diamond complications). Skins sadly won't abide by duplicate protection of the base cards since they are treated as different entities.
If one of these 4 became a merc, generate the 5th item from the 'coin' distribution.
If all 4 were coins, generate the 5th item from the 'card' distribution.
This is MUCH more likely to be a base merc (at least before you own all of them in a given rarity), accounting for the fact we're likely to collect more base versions than skins at first.
I assume it can be a skin, but it is difficult to distinguish between that case and just rolling into a skin in the first 4.
It can also be more coins, but only once you own all the base rares (frustratingly to collectors like me).
The 5 items are then shuffled to make it more 'exciting' for players, hence why the card items move around from pack to pack.
This looks a bit of a fudge on my part, but it is very plausible from an 'interesting UI' standpoint.
I'm sure I am off by a few details, but it clarifies what I really meant by 'card' and 'coin' slots: they're different distributions of items more than fixed things. It is actually a very simple procedure, with all the complexity tucked away inside the distributions. Even they will be quite simple really; you just need 2 of them lying around.
I heard a lot of talk about there being some kind of protection so you'll only ever get skins once you have all the mercs of that particular rarity, but I guess today I can see that that is not the case.
I think - or rather thought - there was some distinction between 'card slots' and 'coin slots' in this regard. By 'card slot' I mean the part of the pack which is guaranteed to have a merc in it (at least until you own all the rares), and 'coin slots' are the other 4 parts. My understanding was that an epic in the card slot would be one you don't already own the base version of (and hence falls under some sort of duplicate protection), while an epic in a coin slot would most likely be a skin which doesn't care about duplicate protection at all. I certainly got the 2 cool Tyrande skins very quickly that way.
I'm not entirely convinced it is working that way anymore though.
I plan to use coins to craft some legendaries, especially those I'm not super interested in since that makes it more likely to get the others in packs, when I'll have the spare coins to upgrade them.
I'll probably wait to get epics in packs though, as the 8 I'm missing will likely turn up long before I'm done opening packs for legendaries. It's so easy to get all the rares that I assume they're not a problem anyway.
Maybe I'm remembering it wrong, but aren't there rewards based on how high the external rating is? If so, that's where the 'meaningful stakes' come in, and its comparable to ranked in traditional HS, where your rank and MMR can be very different.
I've been taking it pretty slow, having only got a couple of bounties into Felwood so far. I have been toying around with lots of different characters though, and not just focusing on 1 team, so I have been making the most of the Barrens while it is level-appropriate, including doing a few of the Heroic bounties.
Overall I'm enjoying it, and have seen myself bite off more than I can chew so I'm not labeling the PvE as too easy. As with Pokemon, it looks like you'll have an easy time if you stick with the same 6 characters throughout, but that's probably because it is balanced to accommodate players occasionally bringing in someone new and lowering their average level.
I know the board being empty is one of the go-to complains, but I don't even notice it when I'm playing so that doesn't bother me. Nor does the limited voice acting or the so-so animations. I guess I find the gameplay itself engaging enough to not need the aesthetics to pull any weight, which makes sense given how much time I have happily spent playing Pokemon over the years.
I'm glad I didn't buy any pre-orders though, and have only bought the welcome bundle because it's too efficient to pass up. While it would be nice in the short-term to have a few more epic and legendary characters to make use of some synergies, I also like that getting those characters over time gives me goals to work towards. Whether that ends up more of a grind than I am willing to take part in remains to be seen.
Finally, regarding the grind, I have little to no interest in PvP, and might end up ignoring it altogether. As such, I'm not daunted by the number of coins it takes to max out characters, since I don't see any need to do so. Heck, I never once cared to EV train Pokemon either; they just got whatever EVs they happened to get naturally and that was good enough for my purposes.
So yeah, it gets a thumbs up from me, though I acknowledge that is helped a lot by being the type of player I am.
Also a Pirate skin for warrior has honestly been LONG overdue, considering Pirate Warriors history in hearthstone.
In fairness, pirate warrior's reputation grossly overstates how much of a presence the archetype has had in HS's history. Unlike rogue, who has received pirate cards pretty consistently throughout the game's lifespan, warrior didn't actually start getting pirates regularly until Descent of Dragons. Before that they only ever got pirates in the Old Gods set.
If we count the Old Gods cards as an unrepresentative blip, then warrior has only actually waited about 2 years for a pirate skin. That's less than rogue waits for ANY skin... in fact, the absence of Valeera in Mercs speaks for itself :P
Right, and Duels is just PvP dungeon run with a tiny bit of constructed to it, so doesn't have any of the issues I said exist for doing it with Mercs.
I think you're way too bothered by it anyway. It really doesn't matter if Blizz is confident about the mode or not. What matters is whether you like the mode as it is, so just wait 'til it releases tomorrow and decide whether you like it or not then.
What about a PvP Event with fully developed Mercs? Or a kind of draft format: every player get's X Packs and has to form a team from it.
These can be done, but they're not without problems. Using fully leveled mercs won't actually be representative of what players experience when it goes live. Meanwhile, using mercs straight from packs leaves them at level 1, when they only have 1 ability, so PvP won't be very engaging.
On top of all of that, people just don't have the same understanding of the game that they do with normal HS. One of the things that makes HS so good to watch is that you're in some sense 'passively engaged', because you can see the hand and the current board state, so you can consider what you would do in that situation. Until we've all had a chance to actually play it and internalise what the different characters can do, there will be a much greater disconnect when watching Mercs gameplay, with a lot of stuff just happening in front of you.
When all this is considered together, I don't really see what such an event achieves right now. That said, I could picture doing one ahead of the next batch of mercs characters being added. Then people can combine them with characters we already know and understand.
The mode will be released tomorrow and there was no pre-release streamer event or similar. I'm used to be on the positive side for Mercenaries but for me that looks like Blizz is not very confident about the game (mode)...
Several streamers have been playing it for a while. That sounds like something similar to me.
I'm not sure the usual sort of streamer event would work very well with Mercs. because unlike normal HS you don't just get all the cards and everyone is on a level playing field. It takes time to level characters, and that process is a large part of the game. Hence why the drawn out stuff we've seen with a handful of streamers is more appropriate.
Certainly there will always be dominant decks, and they will always garner complaints. That's why my interest is in ensuring a variety of game lengths, rather than decks themselves. When both short and long games are supported, people are realistically able to play whatever they like to some degree of success. Or at the very least, they can give every card a fair trial.
Stormwind was the perfect example of how to ruin the game for a significant fraction of the playerbase, because it gave you the options of being fast or really fast, with enough draw or inevitability to completely lock out slow decks. Even with many players liking the Stormwind meta, it is an outright failure to not provide any outlet for the people who just want to reach turn 10.
As for the dust economy, I accept that is a major sticking point. There is a definite competition between making the game as good as it can be, and making as much profit as possible. It's conceivable that occasional mass nerfs will improve the game's longevity so as to increase profits in the long run, but that is a gamble.
Rumble gets a bad rap, but if you actually look back at it you'll see it did a lot more than nothing. Besides, I usually lean towards using 'worst' for expansions that were detrimental to my enjoyment rather than weakest. By that metric Stormwind is a serious contender, and way 'worse' than Rumble ever was.
As for Boomsday and Gadgetzan being forgettable sets? Really Iksar? I loved the SCIENCE!!!! and criminal underworld themes. They were much more engaging to me than Un'Goro's 'we've got dinosaurs and elementals'. OK Un'goro, but what are they doing? They're just sort of there.
The meta in the Year of the Raven was only boring because it was competing with the Year of the Mammoth (Un'Goro --> K&C). It would have had more significant effects if it was added to other sets of similar power. That's why a mass nerf is necessary if they want to lower the power level without a year of stale metas.
As for what a mass nerf gains us, I suppose my thread on card draw power creep has something to say, since I did suggest a mass nerf of card draw in that. I decided there that the efficiency of card draw, especially combined with the copious mana cheat available, is skewing things in favour of aggro and fast combo decks. Basically it is speeding up the game to the point where there are next to no slow games, which in turn makes a lot of cards utterly worthless because there is never any time to use them.
I'm not saying I want every card to be meta-worthy. Just that I would appreciate mass nerfs that enable a much greater variety in game length, which will provide some niche for every card by default. Maybe it doesn't need a mass nerf, but the alternative is more power creep, which is worth minimising wherever possible.
I concede many of them are exaggerations or fantasies, but that doesn't mean they don't exist in some capacity (even if it's intangible) or aren't relatable. Poppy's demonstrates it most clearly to me: kid gets bullied for being short - that absolutely happens. Kid also imagines a universe in which they could beat the sh*t out of the bullies. Anime makes up the world where they can actually do that, but not the idea itself.
Now I look at them, that does seem to be what happens when each of them levels up: they fulfill some fantasy associated with their first stage.
Ezreal is showing off some new toy, then imagining it doing something wholly unrealistic. Perhaps the real-world version would be a Megaman or Samus arm-cannon toy, which I presume exist.
Poppy, see above.
Caitlyn overhears a snub / someone bitching about her, and imagines acing a test and embarrassing the other person. In any case the two clearly don't get along and there is some rivalry there because of it.
Leona is a quiet kid forced to be in a noisy environment that she hates, and imagines screaming "shut the f*ck up!" in an intimidating enough way to actually make it happen.
By golly do I relate to that...
Kat is one of the class rebels, possibly with an unhealthy home environment and an obsession with knives, who imagines herself as the assassin(?) she is in LoL.
Lux... I honestly don't know what her deal is. Is she meant to be a hall monitor breaking up a fight? UK schools don't have hall monitors so that one is unfamiliar to me.
Sure, it's all covered with tropes (not just anime mind you) and set in a fantasy world where the line between childhood imagination and reality is blurred, but beneath all of that is a nugget of reality.
Edwin as rogue legendary sure, but why would he want anything to do with the SI:7? More likely he'll usher in a return of pirate rogue, which has been weirdly absent for years.
We do need justice for Mathias Shaw though. As much as I like Maestra, there is no good excuse for leaving Shaw out of a Stormwind set with a strong SI:7 focus. Maybe he'll pop up in the 3rd expansion? If it is Alterac Valley like many people expect, it's not like there are any other rogue characters for it anyway.
Edit: I just remembered Garona Halforcen made a brief appearance in one of the Book of Mercs. stories, and she surely wouldn't be given such a minor role in the overall story. She was also one of the leaked mercenaries, which isn't proof of anything but adds evidence. So I expect she will appear in expansion 3 instead, which would be about damn time, but still, poor Shaw.
As much as I am on your side, I have to concede lots of people do like it. On the bright side, at least the Amulet cannot resurrect Archmage Vargoth. That's some good news.
Yeah, it always happens. Sadly it's not just confined to games either. Too often people, companies and countries chase profits and power at the expense of quality of life, which is surely the whole reason people would have wanted money and power in the first place?
I've seen F2P players slave away with meta decks for years in the belief that it will enable them build a large enough collection so they can start enjoying more casual decks, but never actually stop to play those decks. I worry a bit that people are doing the same thing with Mercs, and ruining their own enjoyment for a game they genuinely do like by chasing a dream that Blizz, like every company true to the spirit of capitalism, has placed conveniently just out of reach. You can bet new content releases for Mercs just often enough that it's not actually feasible to both enjoy the game and max out everything (without spending significant amounts of money, of course).
So yeah, having watched players and the world around me chase dreams to no avail, I've learned to aim low, but do so with a smile on my face.
I'll stick to rogue like I normally do (I wonder why I even bother with the other classes sometimes):
I'm also curious about whether they want secrets to be a long term thing in rogue. They are all set to rotate out next year at the moment, and if they plan on keeping them around, they're going to need to actually add a few more so next year's Core set doesn't have to carry the entire burden.
At least Snowclaw is a level 30 bounty, so there is a modicum of actual gameplay there. Against Air Elemental you can switch off your brain to the point where it isn't even a game anymore; it's just a chore.
The way the 'pick the optimal bounty and grind that for everything' method works is clearly running counter to the designers' intent. They did a sensible thing by telling us bounty X will give coins for mercs A, B and C, giving us a focus on where to grind when we want specific things while building in variety over time as we hunt coins for different mercs. That this isn't being used is an obvious 'conceptual bug' in my eyes. As you suggest, that could be resolved by making the coins given when you lose being for the same pool of mercs as in the final chest.
That influences the time scale a bit too. With completely random coins you're spreading resources thin, which slows things down compared to being able to focus on a sub-set of mercs. Not all of which are needed to be a high-level PvP player, of course.
In a much broader picture though, I see a split by 'healthy' gameplay and 'unhealthy' gameplay. Mercs is weird because it is actually really well designed to incentivise both. There is so much in there that lets super-casual players like me relax and enjoy it without feeling any need to maximise everything immediately, all while setting plausible mid-to-long term targets. But at the same time, I have to acknowledge how many people there are who are slaving away, grinding out coins as quickly as they can for... that's where I get stuck. I don't really see what they are doing it for. To me the game is very clear on not needing to max out mercs, let alone all of them, even for PvP. From what I've read I don't think the devs expected people to take the PvP quite as seriously as they do, although they would certainly have been aware of how obsessed people can get with this sort of game.
All of that is why I have largely kept out of discussions. I am really enjoying it as a casual game where the 'grinding' is really just me playing bounties because I want to, and openly admit I don't fully understand the mentality behind the more aggressive grinding performed by others.
Don't get me wrong, I love to see a stranger, but don't take away my potato :P
Well there is certainly some misalignment somewhere, as evidenced by you not understanding why some people like the potato. Wherever the split of the playerbase exists, there IS a downside to cutting out the non-stranger events to pander to those eager to farm asap. I don't want them removed because they make the bounties more interesting:
As for Blizz's change, I'm on the fence about it. I was never planning on grinding heroic air elemental anyway. However, I do respect that a monotonous grind of taking level 30s on a level 8 bounty is not the game Blizz wanted to make, and they have every right to modify systems to encourage players to properly interface with the game as they intended. The affected players will argue that they are within their rights to play the game however they choose, and that is true, but I do think the change happened early enough that it is better described as 'conceptual debugging' (I.e. a tweak to make the game better fit what the designers where conceptualising) than a plain scummy move.
Behind all of this is the time scale over which people want to reach some sort of end state. I think a lot of people are viewing it like everything needs to be achieved over a few weeks, while the game is actually designed for it to take months for F2P players, which makes perfectly good sense when HS has always had updates appear on those time scales.
As someone who is enjoying playing the Mercs PvE for what it is, I have to say I'm a little perplexed (though not entirely surprised) by people's need for an optimised grind for coins. I haven't touched PvP at all, but isn't it designed so you're not actually at a disadvantage if you don't have maxed out mercs? If so, why would people need to rush it?
I would happily stay out of the discussion as I play it at my own pace, but I'm conscious that what benefits PvP-focused grinders is a bit misaligned with what benefits PvE-focused players, who want the game to be tolerably fast to grind (which it already is) while retaining the game's longevity. Your comments about the potato, sabotage and portal acknowledge this disconnect, but disregard the opinions of the PvE players who like them rather too lightly for my liking.
My description was perhaps more messy than it needed to be. All I was really trying to say is that there is clearly 1 item per pack that pulls from a different distribution than the others, and is much more likely to give a base merc. Hence I am distinguishing between 'card' and 'coin' slots by what they are most likely to roll into.
It's messier to describe in Mercs packs than normal ones because the notion of 'duplicates' is different, but in my mind it is doing fundamentally the same thing as when normal HS packs ensure there is at least 1 rare in them. And indeed, I expect they just re-used the old pack opening code for Mercs, with a few adjustments.
Here's what I imagine happens:
I'm sure I am off by a few details, but it clarifies what I really meant by 'card' and 'coin' slots: they're different distributions of items more than fixed things. It is actually a very simple procedure, with all the complexity tucked away inside the distributions. Even they will be quite simple really; you just need 2 of them lying around.
I think - or rather thought - there was some distinction between 'card slots' and 'coin slots' in this regard. By 'card slot' I mean the part of the pack which is guaranteed to have a merc in it (at least until you own all the rares), and 'coin slots' are the other 4 parts. My understanding was that an epic in the card slot would be one you don't already own the base version of (and hence falls under some sort of duplicate protection), while an epic in a coin slot would most likely be a skin which doesn't care about duplicate protection at all. I certainly got the 2 cool Tyrande skins very quickly that way.
I'm not entirely convinced it is working that way anymore though.
I plan to use coins to craft some legendaries, especially those I'm not super interested in since that makes it more likely to get the others in packs, when I'll have the spare coins to upgrade them.
I'll probably wait to get epics in packs though, as the 8 I'm missing will likely turn up long before I'm done opening packs for legendaries. It's so easy to get all the rares that I assume they're not a problem anyway.
Maybe I'm remembering it wrong, but aren't there rewards based on how high the external rating is? If so, that's where the 'meaningful stakes' come in, and its comparable to ranked in traditional HS, where your rank and MMR can be very different.
I've been taking it pretty slow, having only got a couple of bounties into Felwood so far. I have been toying around with lots of different characters though, and not just focusing on 1 team, so I have been making the most of the Barrens while it is level-appropriate, including doing a few of the Heroic bounties.
Overall I'm enjoying it, and have seen myself bite off more than I can chew so I'm not labeling the PvE as too easy. As with Pokemon, it looks like you'll have an easy time if you stick with the same 6 characters throughout, but that's probably because it is balanced to accommodate players occasionally bringing in someone new and lowering their average level.
I know the board being empty is one of the go-to complains, but I don't even notice it when I'm playing so that doesn't bother me. Nor does the limited voice acting or the so-so animations. I guess I find the gameplay itself engaging enough to not need the aesthetics to pull any weight, which makes sense given how much time I have happily spent playing Pokemon over the years.
I'm glad I didn't buy any pre-orders though, and have only bought the welcome bundle because it's too efficient to pass up. While it would be nice in the short-term to have a few more epic and legendary characters to make use of some synergies, I also like that getting those characters over time gives me goals to work towards. Whether that ends up more of a grind than I am willing to take part in remains to be seen.
Finally, regarding the grind, I have little to no interest in PvP, and might end up ignoring it altogether. As such, I'm not daunted by the number of coins it takes to max out characters, since I don't see any need to do so. Heck, I never once cared to EV train Pokemon either; they just got whatever EVs they happened to get naturally and that was good enough for my purposes.
So yeah, it gets a thumbs up from me, though I acknowledge that is helped a lot by being the type of player I am.
In fairness, pirate warrior's reputation grossly overstates how much of a presence the archetype has had in HS's history. Unlike rogue, who has received pirate cards pretty consistently throughout the game's lifespan, warrior didn't actually start getting pirates regularly until Descent of Dragons. Before that they only ever got pirates in the Old Gods set.
If we count the Old Gods cards as an unrepresentative blip, then warrior has only actually waited about 2 years for a pirate skin. That's less than rogue waits for ANY skin... in fact, the absence of Valeera in Mercs speaks for itself :P
Right, and Duels is just PvP dungeon run with a tiny bit of constructed to it, so doesn't have any of the issues I said exist for doing it with Mercs.
I think you're way too bothered by it anyway. It really doesn't matter if Blizz is confident about the mode or not. What matters is whether you like the mode as it is, so just wait 'til it releases tomorrow and decide whether you like it or not then.
These can be done, but they're not without problems. Using fully leveled mercs won't actually be representative of what players experience when it goes live. Meanwhile, using mercs straight from packs leaves them at level 1, when they only have 1 ability, so PvP won't be very engaging.
On top of all of that, people just don't have the same understanding of the game that they do with normal HS. One of the things that makes HS so good to watch is that you're in some sense 'passively engaged', because you can see the hand and the current board state, so you can consider what you would do in that situation. Until we've all had a chance to actually play it and internalise what the different characters can do, there will be a much greater disconnect when watching Mercs gameplay, with a lot of stuff just happening in front of you.
When all this is considered together, I don't really see what such an event achieves right now. That said, I could picture doing one ahead of the next batch of mercs characters being added. Then people can combine them with characters we already know and understand.
Several streamers have been playing it for a while. That sounds like something similar to me.
I'm not sure the usual sort of streamer event would work very well with Mercs. because unlike normal HS you don't just get all the cards and everyone is on a level playing field. It takes time to level characters, and that process is a large part of the game. Hence why the drawn out stuff we've seen with a handful of streamers is more appropriate.
Certainly there will always be dominant decks, and they will always garner complaints. That's why my interest is in ensuring a variety of game lengths, rather than decks themselves. When both short and long games are supported, people are realistically able to play whatever they like to some degree of success. Or at the very least, they can give every card a fair trial.
Stormwind was the perfect example of how to ruin the game for a significant fraction of the playerbase, because it gave you the options of being fast or really fast, with enough draw or inevitability to completely lock out slow decks. Even with many players liking the Stormwind meta, it is an outright failure to not provide any outlet for the people who just want to reach turn 10.
As for the dust economy, I accept that is a major sticking point. There is a definite competition between making the game as good as it can be, and making as much profit as possible. It's conceivable that occasional mass nerfs will improve the game's longevity so as to increase profits in the long run, but that is a gamble.
Rumble gets a bad rap, but if you actually look back at it you'll see it did a lot more than nothing. Besides, I usually lean towards using 'worst' for expansions that were detrimental to my enjoyment rather than weakest. By that metric Stormwind is a serious contender, and way 'worse' than Rumble ever was.
As for Boomsday and Gadgetzan being forgettable sets? Really Iksar? I loved the SCIENCE!!!! and criminal underworld themes. They were much more engaging to me than Un'Goro's 'we've got dinosaurs and elementals'. OK Un'goro, but what are they doing? They're just sort of there.
The meta in the Year of the Raven was only boring because it was competing with the Year of the Mammoth (Un'Goro --> K&C). It would have had more significant effects if it was added to other sets of similar power. That's why a mass nerf is necessary if they want to lower the power level without a year of stale metas.
As for what a mass nerf gains us, I suppose my thread on card draw power creep has something to say, since I did suggest a mass nerf of card draw in that. I decided there that the efficiency of card draw, especially combined with the copious mana cheat available, is skewing things in favour of aggro and fast combo decks. Basically it is speeding up the game to the point where there are next to no slow games, which in turn makes a lot of cards utterly worthless because there is never any time to use them.
I'm not saying I want every card to be meta-worthy. Just that I would appreciate mass nerfs that enable a much greater variety in game length, which will provide some niche for every card by default. Maybe it doesn't need a mass nerf, but the alternative is more power creep, which is worth minimising wherever possible.
I concede many of them are exaggerations or fantasies, but that doesn't mean they don't exist in some capacity (even if it's intangible) or aren't relatable. Poppy's demonstrates it most clearly to me: kid gets bullied for being short - that absolutely happens. Kid also imagines a universe in which they could beat the sh*t out of the bullies. Anime makes up the world where they can actually do that, but not the idea itself.
Now I look at them, that does seem to be what happens when each of them levels up: they fulfill some fantasy associated with their first stage.
Sure, it's all covered with tropes (not just anime mind you) and set in a fantasy world where the line between childhood imagination and reality is blurred, but beneath all of that is a nugget of reality.