I think warlock in particular is destined to dominate an untouched Wild mode because the class is built on getting massive upsides alongside big downsides. Over time cards get added to turn those downsides into upsides, and Wild reaches a critical mass where decks are filled with cards that essentially have 2 major upsides with no downside. No other class really has that, and certainly not on the same scale. That's why warlock gets hit so much more often than anyone else in Wild.
Leaving it alone is fine if you like playing warlock, and indeed against warlock, but for everyone else it sucks. Your stance of wanting Wild to be completely untouched is perfectly valid, but until they decide to split Wild into curated and untouched versions, they need to at least try to ensure a reasonable class diversity. Unfortunately for warlock, that means it's probably going get hit over and over again until the end of time.
Ouch. This patch looks excessively unkind to poor Valeera. First she's the only one to not get a Halloween skin, and now this. They better at least have plans to release her merc. as part of some special event.
Later on, you’ll be able to stick new Mercenaries on the Bench and have them watch your more powerful Mercenaries take on tougher Bounties. Remember, all members of a Party get the same experience from fights, even if they don’t participate. Power-levelling like that could cut the leveling time drastically.
If they remove Valeera I am never going to believe they want to treat the classes equally. I know classes don't really matter in Mercenaries, but character flavour still does, and I always identify with rogues in fantasy games. Take Valeera away and there's only Scabbs left, and he's a chef in his default art! Then again, I guess that's completely in line with their philosophy of never giving rogue hero portraits. *sigh*
I assume they made her the de facto face of the game since she's one of the few good characters who's actually neutral between the Horde and Alliance, which is useful for flavour purposes. You could also believe she would be hiring mercenaries, whereas that would feel weird for some characters.
My interpretation is that every pack will contain exactly 1 mercenary card, but it chooses rarity first, so if you roll a 'rare' and already own all rare mercs. you'll get a cosmetic for a rare, not a new epic or legendary card. I.e. they only contain cosmetics instead of playable cards in packs where you wouldn't have got a new playable card anyway.
The only other way about it would be to replace those rares with cards from higher rarities, but then we'd only need 52-8 = 44 packs to get every character, which would be a brave move on Blizzard's part.
It actually does. He doesn't get through all the questions asked, so every minute spent answering anime questions is a minute not spent on HS questions. Since 'AMA' invites any question, that's fine, but there is an opportunity cost associated with it.
I'm not even a F2P HS player. I think I have had a pre-order (never both) every expansion since Blackrock, with the only exception being Boomsday Project because I happened to have lots of gold that time. I think I just have fond memories of cobbling decks together out of whatever I had in the early days of HS, and want to replicate that feeling in Mercs where I don't need to be competitive for the most part.
It's less that little red riding hood (LRRH) works with rogue, and more that Valeera herself has a red hood. Like, always, so it writes itself. Meanwhile I don't see any association between LRRH and Jaina at all beyond them both being female. Heck, they even used Jaina's BfA design, so she must be what, like 50 years old? Hardly the young girl in the story! At least Valeera is very young for an elf.
It just feels like a child Valeera (circa WC3) would have been such a perfect fit for LRRH in every way. You can even put a Warcraft spin on it by having Arthas be the big bad wolf who ate grandma (Silvermoon). As for post-BfA Jaina, I've got nothing. Don't get me wrong, the artwork is great, it just lacking even the slightest connection, which would be OK if Valeera wasn't an option.
I'm committed to treating Mercs. as F2P, even if I really enjoy it, because with (mostly-)single player games I find the journey more engaging than the destination. So most of what I'm getting out of this is confirmation that 100 gold gets me 1 pack.
However, I do want to point out that I've had ~6000 gold rolling over every expansion since DoD when I lucked out and won the OoC pre-order giveaway. So I can go into it with a healthy 60 packs courtesy of 2019 Flux & Co. :)
I guess if you play Maestra of the Masquerade rogue has literally every skin in the game. You can even use a rogue skin like SI:7 Anduin... wait, something's gone very wrong here.
Seriously though, we're still waiting on the first rogue skin since Maiev that is not part of a series that covers many, if not all classes :(
Making a red riding hood skin and not giving it to Valeera is alongside putting Omega Agent in warlock and Stormhammer in hunter for the strangest class choices Team 5 have ever made, but I'm not against it since she had her time as Diao Chan.
Elsewhere, I love the look Thrall and the frog are giving each other. That alone inspires me to go back to Rastakhan's Rumble to make a frog shaman deck.
It's similar enough to plenty of existing card backs that I'm not really bothered whether I will be able to get it or not. We've reached the point of diminishing returns for night elf themed card backs it seems.
I'm like 99% sure they're that color because of Pokemon: Fire (red) beats Grass (green), Grass beats Water (blue), and Water beats Fire. For anyone who has played those games this would seem perfectly natural, as it has been that way for about 25 years. I could say something like "tanks are red because Warriors are associated with red", but come on: it's Pokemon lol :D
The Pokemon colour cycle is fine, but the problem is none of the colours line up with how those types function. It would surely make red/fire the fighter, green/grass the caster (lots of status effects and healing), and then blue/water defaults to tank, which I suppose water type is fairly good for (it's no match for steel but it's pretty solid defensively). That would be the true Pokemon-inspired version.
(Sorry. I can't help being pedantic when it comes to Pokemon.)
Quote from Blizz page: When you first enter the Tavern, you’ll notice that your Mercenaries are organized into three sections, called Roles, each with a corresponding color. Red Mercenaries are called Protectors; green Mercenaries are called Fighters; and blue Mercenaries are called Casters.
This bugs me. Blue for Casters is OK, but why are Fighters not red (aggresive color, color of blood) and Protectors green (calm color)??
I view it by association with the roles of WoW/HS classes: blue is mage/shaman, so obviously casters; green is hunter, a DPS class; leaving red to adopt the tank side of warrior.
Abstracted from that context, I agree red and green seem misplaced, though I would personally separate fighters from being necessarily aggressive or even spilling lots of blood. I expect rogues will mostly end up in the fighter role, for example, but they are characterised by being calm and calculating, not messy and hot-headed. So there will be plenty of fighters for whom green is actually a better fit than red.
Similarly, I could argue that being a protector requires grabbing the opponent's attention (which is why HS uses the word 'taunt'), to let the fighters go by unnoticed. Valeera's blood elf heritage notwithstanding, there's a reason rogues and hunters don't tend to wear bright red, while a shieldbearer might consider that an advantage.
I agree they have a lot of clarifying to do after the reveal stream, but the mode is still nearly a month away with nowhere near a month's worth of communications (whatever that means) needed, so I understand the silence. Really I'm a bit surprised they did the full (if flawed) reveal stream so early. They could easily have done an announcement of an announcement instead, and left that reveal 'til about now.
All that being said, I would appreciate them revealing maybe 1 or 2 characters per day from now. We might not fully appreciate what all the abilities really mean yet, but it will keep everyone engaged for a while and there is so much to unpack with each character that seeing them all slowly would be beneficial.
I think you are misrepresenting the Barrens meta here. Yes, control priest existed and was horrid to play against, but that was more to do with how it played (generating the same handful of cards over and over again, removing any sense of progress for the opponent) than the length of the games. Ultimately it was 1 deck in an otherwise reasonably fast meta. Having 1 slow deck in the meta for the occasional long game isn't a problem if 80% of games are reasonably short.
The main complaints I saw about the Barrens meta were just that it was quite boring, and people struggled to put their fingers on why. I'm pretty sure it was that the Barrens set was mechanically simple and didn't do much to encourage creativity. For me at least, I felt like I could try to make anything work during the Barrens meta, but I couldn't find much that interested me enough to make the deck.
That's the complete opposite of Stormwind, which is a very interesting expansion and a meta that stifles the shit out of creativity. I can think of lots of decks I'd love to play, but they would nearly all win after turn 8, so what's the point? It's not the usual case of a meta being a bit kinder to one type of player than another, it's a case where one type of player has been completely and utterly shafted in both Standard and Wild. Of course those players are going to complain, because the game they love has suddenly become impossible to enjoy, and that is a massive failure of game design.
The issue with reducing the damage she does (or better put: the amount she reduces your health by) is that she is important for heal-focused decks to make sure they can be damaged to utilise their healing cards and synergies. You can only run 1 High Priest Thekal, so these decks still need Crystallizer for consistency. That collateral damage might not matter much to the meta, but since it is what she was actually designed for I would strongly oppose it.
Shaman: remove 1 round of overload and summon a 3/3 with taunt
Warlock: deal 6 damage to the enemy hero and restore 6 health to yours
Warrior: draw a weapon and deal 2 damage to a random enemy twice
All of them would be bonkers 1 mana cards on their own, even before the flashy final reward. Sure you have to jump through some hoops to get them, but it's usually easy enough that these rewards are plenty to compensate you for the trouble. Throw in the final stage and the total reward is just not in line with the effort required to 'earn' them.
Given players will be matched according to the power level of their teams, I don't think the Mercs' PvP is nearly as much of a pay to win mode as many people seem to think. By the sounds of it, you can chill and only collect and level your team slowly (i.e. F2P) without ever actually being at a disadvantage because you're not competing with anyone who has stronger teams. In that regard it looks a LOT more F2P friendly than normal HS is.
That doesn't mean there aren't some competitive advantages to a bigger collection of mercs since the characters are never going to be perfectly balanced, but the biggest gain seems to be more for the impatient players who want all the characters to be present and leveled quickly, even if that doesn't actually benefit their PvP win rates much.
I think warlock in particular is destined to dominate an untouched Wild mode because the class is built on getting massive upsides alongside big downsides. Over time cards get added to turn those downsides into upsides, and Wild reaches a critical mass where decks are filled with cards that essentially have 2 major upsides with no downside. No other class really has that, and certainly not on the same scale. That's why warlock gets hit so much more often than anyone else in Wild.
Leaving it alone is fine if you like playing warlock, and indeed against warlock, but for everyone else it sucks. Your stance of wanting Wild to be completely untouched is perfectly valid, but until they decide to split Wild into curated and untouched versions, they need to at least try to ensure a reasonable class diversity. Unfortunately for warlock, that means it's probably going get hit over and over again until the end of time.
Ouch. This patch looks excessively unkind to poor Valeera. First she's the only one to not get a Halloween skin, and now this. They better at least have plans to release her merc. as part of some special event.
Good to see Exp Share exists!
If they remove Valeera I am never going to believe they want to treat the classes equally. I know classes don't really matter in Mercenaries, but character flavour still does, and I always identify with rogues in fantasy games. Take Valeera away and there's only Scabbs left, and he's a chef in his default art! Then again, I guess that's completely in line with their philosophy of never giving rogue hero portraits. *sigh*
I assume they made her the de facto face of the game since she's one of the few good characters who's actually neutral between the Horde and Alliance, which is useful for flavour purposes. You could also believe she would be hiring mercenaries, whereas that would feel weird for some characters.
My interpretation is that every pack will contain exactly 1 mercenary card, but it chooses rarity first, so if you roll a 'rare' and already own all rare mercs. you'll get a cosmetic for a rare, not a new epic or legendary card. I.e. they only contain cosmetics instead of playable cards in packs where you wouldn't have got a new playable card anyway.
The only other way about it would be to replace those rares with cards from higher rarities, but then we'd only need 52-8 = 44 packs to get every character, which would be a brave move on Blizzard's part.
It actually does. He doesn't get through all the questions asked, so every minute spent answering anime questions is a minute not spent on HS questions. Since 'AMA' invites any question, that's fine, but there is an opportunity cost associated with it.
I'm not even a F2P HS player. I think I have had a pre-order (never both) every expansion since Blackrock, with the only exception being Boomsday Project because I happened to have lots of gold that time. I think I just have fond memories of cobbling decks together out of whatever I had in the early days of HS, and want to replicate that feeling in Mercs where I don't need to be competitive for the most part.
It's less that little red riding hood (LRRH) works with rogue, and more that Valeera herself has a red hood. Like, always, so it writes itself. Meanwhile I don't see any association between LRRH and Jaina at all beyond them both being female. Heck, they even used Jaina's BfA design, so she must be what, like 50 years old? Hardly the young girl in the story! At least Valeera is very young for an elf.
It just feels like a child Valeera (circa WC3) would have been such a perfect fit for LRRH in every way. You can even put a Warcraft spin on it by having Arthas be the big bad wolf who ate grandma (Silvermoon). As for post-BfA Jaina, I've got nothing. Don't get me wrong, the artwork is great, it just lacking even the slightest connection, which would be OK if Valeera wasn't an option.
I'm committed to treating Mercs. as F2P, even if I really enjoy it, because with (mostly-)single player games I find the journey more engaging than the destination. So most of what I'm getting out of this is confirmation that 100 gold gets me 1 pack.
However, I do want to point out that I've had ~6000 gold rolling over every expansion since DoD when I lucked out and won the OoC pre-order giveaway. So I can go into it with a healthy 60 packs courtesy of 2019 Flux & Co. :)
I guess if you play Maestra of the Masquerade rogue has literally every skin in the game. You can even use a rogue skin like SI:7 Anduin... wait, something's gone very wrong here.
Seriously though, we're still waiting on the first rogue skin since Maiev that is not part of a series that covers many, if not all classes :(
Making a red riding hood skin and not giving it to Valeera is alongside putting Omega Agent in warlock and Stormhammer in hunter for the strangest class choices Team 5 have ever made, but I'm not against it since she had her time as Diao Chan.
Elsewhere, I love the look Thrall and the frog are giving each other. That alone inspires me to go back to Rastakhan's Rumble to make a frog shaman deck.
It's similar enough to plenty of existing card backs that I'm not really bothered whether I will be able to get it or not. We've reached the point of diminishing returns for night elf themed card backs it seems.
The Pokemon colour cycle is fine, but the problem is none of the colours line up with how those types function. It would surely make red/fire the fighter, green/grass the caster (lots of status effects and healing), and then blue/water defaults to tank, which I suppose water type is fairly good for (it's no match for steel but it's pretty solid defensively). That would be the true Pokemon-inspired version.
(Sorry. I can't help being pedantic when it comes to Pokemon.)
I view it by association with the roles of WoW/HS classes: blue is mage/shaman, so obviously casters; green is hunter, a DPS class; leaving red to adopt the tank side of warrior.
Abstracted from that context, I agree red and green seem misplaced, though I would personally separate fighters from being necessarily aggressive or even spilling lots of blood. I expect rogues will mostly end up in the fighter role, for example, but they are characterised by being calm and calculating, not messy and hot-headed. So there will be plenty of fighters for whom green is actually a better fit than red.
Similarly, I could argue that being a protector requires grabbing the opponent's attention (which is why HS uses the word 'taunt'), to let the fighters go by unnoticed. Valeera's blood elf heritage notwithstanding, there's a reason rogues and hunters don't tend to wear bright red, while a shieldbearer might consider that an advantage.
I agree they have a lot of clarifying to do after the reveal stream, but the mode is still nearly a month away with nowhere near a month's worth of communications (whatever that means) needed, so I understand the silence. Really I'm a bit surprised they did the full (if flawed) reveal stream so early. They could easily have done an announcement of an announcement instead, and left that reveal 'til about now.
All that being said, I would appreciate them revealing maybe 1 or 2 characters per day from now. We might not fully appreciate what all the abilities really mean yet, but it will keep everyone engaged for a while and there is so much to unpack with each character that seeing them all slowly would be beneficial.
I think you are misrepresenting the Barrens meta here. Yes, control priest existed and was horrid to play against, but that was more to do with how it played (generating the same handful of cards over and over again, removing any sense of progress for the opponent) than the length of the games. Ultimately it was 1 deck in an otherwise reasonably fast meta. Having 1 slow deck in the meta for the occasional long game isn't a problem if 80% of games are reasonably short.
The main complaints I saw about the Barrens meta were just that it was quite boring, and people struggled to put their fingers on why. I'm pretty sure it was that the Barrens set was mechanically simple and didn't do much to encourage creativity. For me at least, I felt like I could try to make anything work during the Barrens meta, but I couldn't find much that interested me enough to make the deck.
That's the complete opposite of Stormwind, which is a very interesting expansion and a meta that stifles the shit out of creativity. I can think of lots of decks I'd love to play, but they would nearly all win after turn 8, so what's the point? It's not the usual case of a meta being a bit kinder to one type of player than another, it's a case where one type of player has been completely and utterly shafted in both Standard and Wild. Of course those players are going to complain, because the game they love has suddenly become impossible to enjoy, and that is a massive failure of game design.
She's a forsaken warlock, so there wasn't much chance for anything else.
Rokara's 'dick-move' was more surprising: ain't nobody got a right to claim the're the captain when Hooktusk is right there helping you out!
The issue with reducing the damage she does (or better put: the amount she reduces your health by) is that she is important for heal-focused decks to make sure they can be damaged to utilise their healing cards and synergies. You can only run 1 High Priest Thekal, so these decks still need Crystallizer for consistency. That collateral damage might not matter much to the meta, but since it is what she was actually designed for I would strongly oppose it.
Well, that saved me the trouble of writing a similar post, which would have been broadly in agreement.
I would have put some focus on the rewards for the first 2 stages of the questlines though. Just look at them:
All of them would be bonkers 1 mana cards on their own, even before the flashy final reward. Sure you have to jump through some hoops to get them, but it's usually easy enough that these rewards are plenty to compensate you for the trouble. Throw in the final stage and the total reward is just not in line with the effort required to 'earn' them.
Given players will be matched according to the power level of their teams, I don't think the Mercs' PvP is nearly as much of a pay to win mode as many people seem to think. By the sounds of it, you can chill and only collect and level your team slowly (i.e. F2P) without ever actually being at a disadvantage because you're not competing with anyone who has stronger teams. In that regard it looks a LOT more F2P friendly than normal HS is.
That doesn't mean there aren't some competitive advantages to a bigger collection of mercs since the characters are never going to be perfectly balanced, but the biggest gain seems to be more for the impatient players who want all the characters to be present and leveled quickly, even if that doesn't actually benefit their PvP win rates much.