Announced probably this week. Revealed next tuesday and released wednesday. Why? Because its seemingly a marketing tactic to have the time between reveals and release as small as possible; maybe in a hopeless attempt to keep the hype high enough so more people will blindly buy in before reasoning kicks in.
I dont know, they did this the last time; and as we would recall we had that wonderful week long reveal scrummage in the last two expansions. Im not expecting this to change, though Im open to be pleasantly surprised.
Not bad really. Its sort of like Thing from Below, mostly because of the taunt, and that's likely what will push people to want to make it work. Because you can legit just use cards like Revolve, and put down a big taunt as early as turn 3-4.
I'd probably just reduce the health to 8. 0 mana costed cards, especially on minions, almost always break the game, and this one will likely be no different, assuming of course that there's support for it. Its too punishing for your opponent to play minions as a 4/12.
would increasing thr cost to 15-20 help? i ask in case i want to keep the stat
If you really want the stats to stay, it'll probably have to be at least 14. That's my opinion anyway
Just imagine if this blows up as well, the former McCree would then need to come out with another narrative as to why he's changing his name yet again.
Not bad really. Its sort of like Thing from Below, mostly because of the taunt, and that's likely what will push people to want to make it work. Because you can legit just use cards like Revolve, and put down a big taunt as early as turn 3-4.
I'd probably just reduce the health to 8. 0 mana costed cards, especially on minions, almost always break the game, and this one will likely be no different, assuming of course that there's support for it. Its too punishing for your opponent to play minions as a 4/12.
There's not going to be a rogue mount spell. I think Dean said something about buff spells not being what they want in rogue. And since all mounts are buffs, I dont think its happening.
Actually, from what we've seen in previous midsets, I think its likely we'll be seeing somewhere around 4 cards that buff existing archetypes and the rest are mostly cards that can find some niche inclusion somewhere. Which will be a shame if it turns out like this, because the current meta being what it is, Im actually contemplating just leaving it altogether until next month.
What are the odd chance of us getting some quest support cards like Questing Explorer?
There's no dupe protection in mercs. Basically you have a chance to get screwed with a skin each time you open one, despite having missing a few mercs of that rarity. Happened to me too many times. Rolled a legendary - which then turns out to be a skin. A very sad day indeed.
Ironically, all this really does is to switch air elemental with snowclaw. Is it really a change meeting their expectations? I'd argue if they make the coin drops a guaranteed thing then people might actually want to grind different bosses according to the coins given.
Ive been grinding air elemental before, and currently Im grinding snowclaw instead. My progress has been slowed down and so I play less hours as a result. Im sure for others the implications is similar if not worse, and I feel that the devs fully understand that the community is not happy with the change - hence why Dean was quick to suggest that they would be discussing this next week.
They designed a game that involved a lot of grinding and then decided that they didn't like how people were doing it efficiently. If they wanted us to enjoy the game while including the grind its fairly simple (outside of a game redesign); just make the playing the variety of bosses more rewarding. As for the time scale argument - Im willing to bet that a f2p player would never get beyond the mid tier of the MMR table even in the next 4 months assuming they didn't grind for strangers. And I base that on the fact that Ive been doing so for the last week and a half at over 4 hours per day, completing about 10-15 tasks - the best part is that Im not even close to being ready for high end pvp despite it all.
There seem to be a difference in coin drop rate according to rarity. Ive grinded for legendary coins with a fairly small team and often enough I'll be getting coins for the lowest rarity available more often than the ones I need: hence why there seem to be lower rarity mercs along with legendaries in later boss chests, perhaps as some sort of small bump to slow down the grind efficiency.
Also, I notice that there's seemingly also a difference in the amount of coins gained according to rarity in the boss chests. Legendary mercs coins often drop as 10 and 15 occasionally while lower rarities can reach 20 easily. Maybe its just me, but it has happened way too often to be a coincidence to me.
Ive stayed out of pvp and I cant say I can see myself ever going there. Talking strictly as a f2p (whom the lord may forgive but I cant let go of that 5 bucks deal), there is a good reason to grind the stranger and that's because that's the most efficient way of getting additional mercs so you can execute sweeter combos. Besides which, the upgrade requirements aren't exactly slouches themselves. You get 10-20 coins per boss chest and anything above the first upgrade comes in the hundreds. It is only with the bonuses granted by strangers that the grind feels even remotely tolerable - unless one is prepared to wait day by day for tasks to come in.
Its not a misalignment because clearly grinding is not mandatory for those who would rather take it slow. But for those who prefer a faster lane, blizz has just erected a metaphorical speed bump and that's just a downgrade worthy of being pointed out as slightly scummy, especially since there's really nothing wrong if a person would like to grind up air elemental for hours on end. Dean has pointed out that they didn't want "players...feeling like they have to farm the same low-level content over and over again to play optimally" but let's be honest here, there are plenty of alternatives other than this 'hotfix' that would achieve the same thing without pissing both sides of the divide off.
Lastly, Im not sure what's with the potato that apparently pve players like so much. I can only name one boss that it really genuinely helped but in all other times its either completely useless or usually end up blowing my face off.
Not sure if anyone heard of this yet, but there seem to be a new way to farm for xp. Start a game in mercs, then leave it hanging. No bots, no mods, no macros. Just leave it while the virtual pinwheel turns and the tumbleweed tumble. Apparently this works, but I have too much self respect to test it out.
On the subject of botting. Its still somewhat rife down in bronze wild, but I'd argue that in a way that's good for most people. Its certainly easy to farm out the achievements if nothing else. Somewhat annoying because you can take a 10 second move and then proceed to wait out a minute but that's just an easy way to grind out achievements without dying by turn 6.
And I hope that they do something about the tasks grinding in mercs. No one likes grinding up that poor air elemental for tasks but the requirements for a maxed out character - or indeed, to upgrade an ability at all - requires so many coins that we're really forced to do it to get anything progressed at all. Just make it easier to get the coins we need. Here's a suggestion: How about to guarantee the coins received from boss chest so when I beat a boss I get exactly what I want: instead of getting yet another marvelous 20 coins for Cariel because the random generators for coins are completely, and utterly whacked.
Its amazing how many characters I maxed out on even as I completely ignore them from day 1. Old Cornelius got so much for doing so little its almost like he has a mandated government pension cut from every boss chest I open.
Or just make strangers a guaranteed deal at higher difficulties. I know some players likes the potato, but its obvious that this along with sabotage and portal are mere fillers that frustrates rather than excite.
You can try snowclaw. Its three battles to one mystery wheel, minimum of 2 battles if you get lucky. Since regular snowclaw is earliest for the recommended level 30, the stranger still works there. Its just that winterspring's enemies aren't very conducive to completing the tasks, so you still have to waste some time at some lower level run to finish them up.
I think the hotfix is up Im afraid. Tried out air elemental heroic for 10 games, 0 strangers but lots of potatos. Then tried out snowclaw, 3 so far with 2 strangers
If anyone else have bigger sample sizes, please share. Because Im certain the percentages for higher difficulties have not been tweaked.
I dont get why blizz was so pissed that mercs got datamined off the client because what exactly did that do that adversely affected their business in any way? Mercs was being spoiled anyway, because as mentioned, as few lucky streamers got to access it early, and they subsequently shared the details with everyone else.
In any case, the bad publicity for mercs came from the mothership themselves: with that fairly poor 30 min stream, and the massive three preorders before launch that really soured the taste of the game before any details were even provided.
On the subject of streamers being scared to report data. Im sure this is only a small minority of cases. Many streamers in hearthstone aren't critical of the game, like at all. In most cases, they make small comments in their twitch streams and that's about it. I think the last and perhaps only time I see streamers actually came up on topics beyond simply playing the game was during that farce that was the first iteration of the new rewards track.
That's not to say that many aren't worried about their relationship with blizz. There's plenty of examples of streamers who simply didn't want to talk about 'sensitive' subjects, which is fair play to them, but I think that's weak. On top of my head, there's only botmathematician, Zeddy and Kibler that makes dedicated videos talking about the state of the game, etc. Better some than none, I guess.
We appreciate the hard work you put on the site. Dont let blizz's poor community management put you down; you're doing a public service to the hearthstone community. And whether blizz would like to admit it or not, they have much to gain from sites drumming up buzz for their game, because god knows they aren't very good at doing this themselves.
On one hand Im a little happy to know that I dont have to run the air elemental gauntlet anymore. But on the other, if this ends up making the grind even harder, I think it'll just be the last straw for most people.
Hope this means I get a stranger task per game on higher difficulty instead of the same 50-50 chance. Or perhaps blizz can be persuaded to just make the fking coins for legendaries and epics drop more often at higher difficulties because Im sick of getting coins for my maxed out cariel after beating ragnaros for the umpteen time.
You'd probably get more out of the game if you try the heroic bosses, because those things aren't kidding about. I was about to quit the game myself, having beaten everything with ease, and then I tried heroics and got my arse handed to me in the most unfair way possible. Heroics require both skill and luck, as well as the correct composition to win. And that may make it more interesting to you as it has to me.
I agree that if you forget about heroic mode, the game is currently very much like a vanilla pokemon game. There's little to no challenge, the grind is very much there (as well as the slowness of the animations), and the game comes across as very shallow.
But unlike pokemon (of which gamefreak innovates as often as a vesuvius eruption), mercs is still a young game capable of improvement, by introducing more levels, diversifying the enemies, tweaking the grinding for tasks (because poor air elemental deserves a break), and perhaps considering putting stories into this game mode.
I feel that team5 have been banking on Mercs being a viable pvp game, because the end goal of mercs is obviously to sustain engagement and generate revenue, hence the shallowness of the pve element which is too close to being nothing more than a glorified dungeon run. Im still hopeful, but admitably once I finish off the heroics Im probably laying down the game for good. Its actually more about standard ranked being shit that Im still grinding out mercs in the first place.
It is precisely because of that maxing out bonus that I think the pvp grind is just veering close to being intolerable if you're not sinking real cash into the game. And the stat gain is not insignificant; its about 1/5 if Im not mistaken, which is a decent advantage and can easily turn the tables on an opponent without. Getting the equipment is nowhere near as maddening as trying to max out a character, because there are simply some abilities/equipment that no one bothers to get.
Its still very early though. I'd expect that within a couple of months most in pvp would have maxed out at least their core team.
I find it slightly amusing that Gruul is on top of the tier simply because the ones on top are all fire combo teams. Even crazier is the fact that Kurtrus is on tier C, because I was fairly certain that he's just trash. Eyebeam doing lots of work it would seem.
Probably random. I cant see why team5 would deliberately sell coins for legendaries we dont have yet, because it'll likely just provoke memes in reddit telling us how useless the coins were
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.
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.
Announced probably this week. Revealed next tuesday and released wednesday. Why? Because its seemingly a marketing tactic to have the time between reveals and release as small as possible; maybe in a hopeless attempt to keep the hype high enough so more people will blindly buy in before reasoning kicks in.
I dont know, they did this the last time; and as we would recall we had that wonderful week long reveal scrummage in the last two expansions. Im not expecting this to change, though Im open to be pleasantly surprised.
If you really want the stats to stay, it'll probably have to be at least 14. That's my opinion anyway
Just imagine if this blows up as well, the former McCree would then need to come out with another narrative as to why he's changing his name yet again.
Not bad really. Its sort of like Thing from Below, mostly because of the taunt, and that's likely what will push people to want to make it work. Because you can legit just use cards like Revolve, and put down a big taunt as early as turn 3-4.
I'd probably just reduce the health to 8. 0 mana costed cards, especially on minions, almost always break the game, and this one will likely be no different, assuming of course that there's support for it. Its too punishing for your opponent to play minions as a 4/12.
Let's hope that there isn't anyone named Cole Cassidy in blizz management anytime soon.
There's not going to be a rogue mount spell. I think Dean said something about buff spells not being what they want in rogue. And since all mounts are buffs, I dont think its happening.
Actually, from what we've seen in previous midsets, I think its likely we'll be seeing somewhere around 4 cards that buff existing archetypes and the rest are mostly cards that can find some niche inclusion somewhere. Which will be a shame if it turns out like this, because the current meta being what it is, Im actually contemplating just leaving it altogether until next month.
What are the odd chance of us getting some quest support cards like Questing Explorer?
There's no dupe protection in mercs. Basically you have a chance to get screwed with a skin each time you open one, despite having missing a few mercs of that rarity. Happened to me too many times. Rolled a legendary - which then turns out to be a skin. A very sad day indeed.
Ironically, all this really does is to switch air elemental with snowclaw. Is it really a change meeting their expectations? I'd argue if they make the coin drops a guaranteed thing then people might actually want to grind different bosses according to the coins given.
Ive been grinding air elemental before, and currently Im grinding snowclaw instead. My progress has been slowed down and so I play less hours as a result. Im sure for others the implications is similar if not worse, and I feel that the devs fully understand that the community is not happy with the change - hence why Dean was quick to suggest that they would be discussing this next week.
They designed a game that involved a lot of grinding and then decided that they didn't like how people were doing it efficiently. If they wanted us to enjoy the game while including the grind its fairly simple (outside of a game redesign); just make the playing the variety of bosses more rewarding. As for the time scale argument - Im willing to bet that a f2p player would never get beyond the mid tier of the MMR table even in the next 4 months assuming they didn't grind for strangers. And I base that on the fact that Ive been doing so for the last week and a half at over 4 hours per day, completing about 10-15 tasks - the best part is that Im not even close to being ready for high end pvp despite it all.
There seem to be a difference in coin drop rate according to rarity. Ive grinded for legendary coins with a fairly small team and often enough I'll be getting coins for the lowest rarity available more often than the ones I need: hence why there seem to be lower rarity mercs along with legendaries in later boss chests, perhaps as some sort of small bump to slow down the grind efficiency.
Also, I notice that there's seemingly also a difference in the amount of coins gained according to rarity in the boss chests. Legendary mercs coins often drop as 10 and 15 occasionally while lower rarities can reach 20 easily. Maybe its just me, but it has happened way too often to be a coincidence to me.
Ive stayed out of pvp and I cant say I can see myself ever going there. Talking strictly as a f2p (whom the lord may forgive but I cant let go of that 5 bucks deal), there is a good reason to grind the stranger and that's because that's the most efficient way of getting additional mercs so you can execute sweeter combos. Besides which, the upgrade requirements aren't exactly slouches themselves. You get 10-20 coins per boss chest and anything above the first upgrade comes in the hundreds. It is only with the bonuses granted by strangers that the grind feels even remotely tolerable - unless one is prepared to wait day by day for tasks to come in.
Its not a misalignment because clearly grinding is not mandatory for those who would rather take it slow. But for those who prefer a faster lane, blizz has just erected a metaphorical speed bump and that's just a downgrade worthy of being pointed out as slightly scummy, especially since there's really nothing wrong if a person would like to grind up air elemental for hours on end. Dean has pointed out that they didn't want "players...feeling like they have to farm the same low-level content over and over again to play optimally" but let's be honest here, there are plenty of alternatives other than this 'hotfix' that would achieve the same thing without pissing both sides of the divide off.
Lastly, Im not sure what's with the potato that apparently pve players like so much. I can only name one boss that it really genuinely helped but in all other times its either completely useless or usually end up blowing my face off.
Not sure if anyone heard of this yet, but there seem to be a new way to farm for xp. Start a game in mercs, then leave it hanging. No bots, no mods, no macros. Just leave it while the virtual pinwheel turns and the tumbleweed tumble. Apparently this works, but I have too much self respect to test it out.
On the subject of botting. Its still somewhat rife down in bronze wild, but I'd argue that in a way that's good for most people. Its certainly easy to farm out the achievements if nothing else. Somewhat annoying because you can take a 10 second move and then proceed to wait out a minute but that's just an easy way to grind out achievements without dying by turn 6.
And I hope that they do something about the tasks grinding in mercs. No one likes grinding up that poor air elemental for tasks but the requirements for a maxed out character - or indeed, to upgrade an ability at all - requires so many coins that we're really forced to do it to get anything progressed at all. Just make it easier to get the coins we need. Here's a suggestion: How about to guarantee the coins received from boss chest so when I beat a boss I get exactly what I want: instead of getting yet another marvelous 20 coins for Cariel because the random generators for coins are completely, and utterly whacked.
Its amazing how many characters I maxed out on even as I completely ignore them from day 1. Old Cornelius got so much for doing so little its almost like he has a mandated government pension cut from every boss chest I open.
Or just make strangers a guaranteed deal at higher difficulties. I know some players likes the potato, but its obvious that this along with sabotage and portal are mere fillers that frustrates rather than excite.
You can try snowclaw. Its three battles to one mystery wheel, minimum of 2 battles if you get lucky. Since regular snowclaw is earliest for the recommended level 30, the stranger still works there. Its just that winterspring's enemies aren't very conducive to completing the tasks, so you still have to waste some time at some lower level run to finish them up.
I think the hotfix is up Im afraid. Tried out air elemental heroic for 10 games, 0 strangers but lots of potatos. Then tried out snowclaw, 3 so far with 2 strangers
If anyone else have bigger sample sizes, please share. Because Im certain the percentages for higher difficulties have not been tweaked.
I dont get why blizz was so pissed that mercs got datamined off the client because what exactly did that do that adversely affected their business in any way? Mercs was being spoiled anyway, because as mentioned, as few lucky streamers got to access it early, and they subsequently shared the details with everyone else.
In any case, the bad publicity for mercs came from the mothership themselves: with that fairly poor 30 min stream, and the massive three preorders before launch that really soured the taste of the game before any details were even provided.
On the subject of streamers being scared to report data. Im sure this is only a small minority of cases. Many streamers in hearthstone aren't critical of the game, like at all. In most cases, they make small comments in their twitch streams and that's about it. I think the last and perhaps only time I see streamers actually came up on topics beyond simply playing the game was during that farce that was the first iteration of the new rewards track.
That's not to say that many aren't worried about their relationship with blizz. There's plenty of examples of streamers who simply didn't want to talk about 'sensitive' subjects, which is fair play to them, but I think that's weak. On top of my head, there's only botmathematician, Zeddy and Kibler that makes dedicated videos talking about the state of the game, etc. Better some than none, I guess.
We appreciate the hard work you put on the site. Dont let blizz's poor community management put you down; you're doing a public service to the hearthstone community. And whether blizz would like to admit it or not, they have much to gain from sites drumming up buzz for their game, because god knows they aren't very good at doing this themselves.
On one hand Im a little happy to know that I dont have to run the air elemental gauntlet anymore. But on the other, if this ends up making the grind even harder, I think it'll just be the last straw for most people.
Hope this means I get a stranger task per game on higher difficulty instead of the same 50-50 chance. Or perhaps blizz can be persuaded to just make the fking coins for legendaries and epics drop more often at higher difficulties because Im sick of getting coins for my maxed out cariel after beating ragnaros for the umpteen time.
The reduction happens before the double damage is applied. Seen it happen too many times, with Mutanus scales, and the treasure that reduces damage.
You'd probably get more out of the game if you try the heroic bosses, because those things aren't kidding about. I was about to quit the game myself, having beaten everything with ease, and then I tried heroics and got my arse handed to me in the most unfair way possible. Heroics require both skill and luck, as well as the correct composition to win. And that may make it more interesting to you as it has to me.
I agree that if you forget about heroic mode, the game is currently very much like a vanilla pokemon game. There's little to no challenge, the grind is very much there (as well as the slowness of the animations), and the game comes across as very shallow.
But unlike pokemon (of which gamefreak innovates as often as a vesuvius eruption), mercs is still a young game capable of improvement, by introducing more levels, diversifying the enemies, tweaking the grinding for tasks (because poor air elemental deserves a break), and perhaps considering putting stories into this game mode.
I feel that team5 have been banking on Mercs being a viable pvp game, because the end goal of mercs is obviously to sustain engagement and generate revenue, hence the shallowness of the pve element which is too close to being nothing more than a glorified dungeon run. Im still hopeful, but admitably once I finish off the heroics Im probably laying down the game for good. Its actually more about standard ranked being shit that Im still grinding out mercs in the first place.
It is precisely because of that maxing out bonus that I think the pvp grind is just veering close to being intolerable if you're not sinking real cash into the game. And the stat gain is not insignificant; its about 1/5 if Im not mistaken, which is a decent advantage and can easily turn the tables on an opponent without. Getting the equipment is nowhere near as maddening as trying to max out a character, because there are simply some abilities/equipment that no one bothers to get.
Its still very early though. I'd expect that within a couple of months most in pvp would have maxed out at least their core team.
I find it slightly amusing that Gruul is on top of the tier simply because the ones on top are all fire combo teams. Even crazier is the fact that Kurtrus is on tier C, because I was fairly certain that he's just trash. Eyebeam doing lots of work it would seem.
Probably random. I cant see why team5 would deliberately sell coins for legendaries we dont have yet, because it'll likely just provoke memes in reddit telling us how useless the coins were
Edit: Okay, its random. Explicitly stated
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.