It might not be, it seems to be following a pattern:
Rarity: Common > Rare > Epic
Mana: 2 > 5 > 8 (+3 for next "tier")
Attack: 3 > 5 > 9 (x2 -1 for next "tier")
Health: 2 > 4 > 8 (x2 for next "tier")
Battlecry dmg: 3 > 6 > 12 (x2 for next "tier")
So all the increments have (now) clear pattern, which looks intentional. One could argue that we could have guessed how would Maddest Bomber look like long ago, but without seeing it, it wasnt as apparent that this would be it.
So we are probably not getting a legendary, since 11 mana without any reduction is stupid :D And also we have ran out of superlatives for names :D
Copycat is a pretty strong tempo card, or even disruption later on.
You play it on curve, and your opponnent either plays suboptimally, or gives you free tempo play next turn as well. Extremelly strong Arena card.
And in late, it can buy you a turn by making your opponnent think twice about what they play, for example could delay them playing questline reward, or make them waste mana first to make the turn weaker etc. I think this might be sleeper of the mini-set.
That is the problem, isn't it? Game mode that was announced as PVE with added PVP for when you are all maxed out and want to measure your strength vs others has become a dull grind for coins so you can do only thing there is - PVP, which has extremelly high ceiling of entry in regards to mercs used (if we forget the ai battles). But the PVP itself is kinda pointless as well, since there isnt very many possible combinations or plays you can pull off.
So without any other things going on with the game mode, it basically failed to deliver on its intended purpose. As you said, the Dungeon Runs had better replayability than this.
Imho the bounties need a redo, make them longer, more meaningful and random with more stuff happenning in each run snd with a meaningful reward at the end. Not 5 min speedruns that noone really pays any attention to, because in this state, there is little reason to.
I mean they could just reduce its offering rate, but that will most likely come only after ppl start getting destroyed by it, if ever. So, the usual :)
Yeah, killing 3 enemies is A LOT. I can understand trying to recover when you lose one of your key units, or two, after you unleash your second part of tactic from the bench-replacement that comes in, but there will be a lot of times, where ppl concede before you can kill 3rd enemy.
I understand where are they coming from, but this looks like an absolute shit way to go about it. And yet another way ppl found how to farm coins and they r nipping it in the bud. Although this one is way more questionable than Mysterious Stranger farming, we can see the pattern here, right?
Wow, the economy of this game is even worse than I thought. I was already steamed about how hard it is to collect Mercs (see my comment on this article). I bought the Welcome Bundle to try to get at least a few good ones, and feel really ripped off.
I'm awfully frustrated, because I actually really like playing Mercenaries. So far, I've only played PvE since my woeful collection makes me feel like PvP would just stomp me. It would be SO much more fun if collecting Mercs was just a little bit easier. I don't need the full set, just ... not this.
I'm also aware that this is very whiny. I've been a regular spender in the main game, buying every preorder (though rarely anything more than that). That means I have a solid collection and can generally craft cards I want. Is this what it's like to be F2P? I would love to hear from some regular Hearthstone F2Players about how it compares to being F2P in Mercenaries.
Yeah, this is pretty much how it feels to be f2p in general, you have to invest your time to get where others are that bought packs with money. I mean it is a relatively "fair" system, if only the time spent was appropriate to what you get in return. I know that depends on a personal opinion of every one player, and ofc everyone wants more stuff in less time, but mercs are taking this to another level. Not to mention that the paying option isnt exactly great either to begin with.
I think the main issue is that you cannot do anything with coins for a mercenary you dont care about. With dust, you can at least craft a card you want and it is a general currency for any card, but in mercenaries, you have over 50 individual currencies basically and you have very limited options to narrow which ones you are getting at any given time.
Happy Oozefest everybody! I'm not completely convinced of the art pieces yet, but here's my idea. What do you think?
Bit of a throwback to Stalagg and Feugen with some Pogo-Hopper flavor mixed in. I considered making it a Rogue card, but there's too much potential for other Deathrattle classes like Priest and Hunter to make this a class card. Maybe add Rush so they have more impact the turn they're played?
Looks like a cool design, but hell no keywords on them. +4/+4 is already plenty and there are many ways to cheat the deathrattle trigger. It might already be pretty strong as is, tho i am too lazy to go and look for the broken combos :P
One thing you might want to do is say in the submission description, that they would be a part of a promo deal for the xpac, everyone would get them free at launch or something. Spending 3200 dust on this, or opening just one of them would feel horrible :D That fact alone might cost you some votes, possibly.
I like your suggestions a lot! The Mystery tile is definitely an underutilized mechanic in this whole thing, and having more than one, with many different outcomes, would make the bounties so much more interesting.
I also like the guaranteed Mysterious Stranger at the end of each bounty, even when you were able to farm Air Ele and others, it still took a LOT of time, without it, it will take an insurmountable amount of time. Having a guaranteed merc task at the end of a bounty would be so good, and having it gated by the task number for lower level bounties would correspond with their "policy" of "not forcing players to play low lvl bounties". Im hoping ideas like these will get to them and they consider implementing them, because without it, the game mode asks of you too much of your time for it to be worthwhile for most (adult) players, which is shame.
Yeah, apparently you first roll a mercenary and only after that the algo checks, if you already have it or not, if not, you get merc, if yes, you get portrait or coins, if you have all portraits.
Very shitty design, but thats how it is.
Pre-order guys have it even worse, since you practically own a skin for merc, not the merc itself, so you can still unpack Diablo/LK/Sylvanas, even if you can already play them thanks to owning their skin. Shitty design times two.
Well, it makes sense, since double damage is not say once 32dmg, but twice 16dmg. The visuals do show 32, but you can see how it changed during the animation, so damage reduction subtracts damage from both parts = it does reduce double the amount vs double dmg taken.
Frostwolf Grunt's time to shine!
Great read, didnt know about the red bandanas, but now i can see why they wear it in each of their respective art in HS! :)
Mr. Smite gives Charge to himself too. If it read "your other Pirates", then ok, maybe ... but like this? Just ROFL.
It might not be, it seems to be following a pattern:
So all the increments have (now) clear pattern, which looks intentional. One could argue that we could have guessed how would Maddest Bomber look like long ago, but without seeing it, it wasnt as apparent that this would be it.
So we are probably not getting a legendary, since 11 mana without any reduction is stupid :D And also we have ran out of superlatives for names :D
I mean the point of these is to have fun, not to cheat it to get it done easy, but to each his own :) Thanks for pointing this out tho :)
That has been a thing from the start. It is a non issue, you wont be able to cheese it by searching for edited words 😜
Copycat is a pretty strong tempo card, or even disruption later on.
You play it on curve, and your opponnent either plays suboptimally, or gives you free tempo play next turn as well. Extremelly strong Arena card.
And in late, it can buy you a turn by making your opponnent think twice about what they play, for example could delay them playing questline reward, or make them waste mana first to make the turn weaker etc. I think this might be sleeper of the mini-set.
That is the problem, isn't it? Game mode that was announced as PVE with added PVP for when you are all maxed out and want to measure your strength vs others has become a dull grind for coins so you can do only thing there is - PVP, which has extremelly high ceiling of entry in regards to mercs used (if we forget the ai battles). But the PVP itself is kinda pointless as well, since there isnt very many possible combinations or plays you can pull off.
So without any other things going on with the game mode, it basically failed to deliver on its intended purpose. As you said, the Dungeon Runs had better replayability than this.
Imho the bounties need a redo, make them longer, more meaningful and random with more stuff happenning in each run snd with a meaningful reward at the end. Not 5 min speedruns that noone really pays any attention to, because in this state, there is little reason to.
I mean they could just reduce its offering rate, but that will most likely come only after ppl start getting destroyed by it, if ever. So, the usual :)
The Parrot cards actually look playable, not like the last debacle with Caravans. Some seem little too good.
Edwin seems crazy ... +4 speed to adjacent Pirates? lul. Well, all the Pirates seem strong together, which i suppose, was the point.
I did this one in like 4 minutes. Good words i guess 😎
Yeah, killing 3 enemies is A LOT. I can understand trying to recover when you lose one of your key units, or two, after you unleash your second part of tactic from the bench-replacement that comes in, but there will be a lot of times, where ppl concede before you can kill 3rd enemy.
I understand where are they coming from, but this looks like an absolute shit way to go about it. And yet another way ppl found how to farm coins and they r nipping it in the bud. Although this one is way more questionable than Mysterious Stranger farming, we can see the pattern here, right?
Bug or marketing trick? They do get you to click on the shop every day, or most ppl. Annoying tho.
Very literal hint, visuals are your friend :)
Yeah, this is pretty much how it feels to be f2p in general, you have to invest your time to get where others are that bought packs with money. I mean it is a relatively "fair" system, if only the time spent was appropriate to what you get in return. I know that depends on a personal opinion of every one player, and ofc everyone wants more stuff in less time, but mercs are taking this to another level. Not to mention that the paying option isnt exactly great either to begin with.
I think the main issue is that you cannot do anything with coins for a mercenary you dont care about. With dust, you can at least craft a card you want and it is a general currency for any card, but in mercenaries, you have over 50 individual currencies basically and you have very limited options to narrow which ones you are getting at any given time.
Looks like a cool design, but hell no keywords on them. +4/+4 is already plenty and there are many ways to cheat the deathrattle trigger. It might already be pretty strong as is, tho i am too lazy to go and look for the broken combos :P
One thing you might want to do is say in the submission description, that they would be a part of a promo deal for the xpac, everyone would get them free at launch or something. Spending 3200 dust on this, or opening just one of them would feel horrible :D That fact alone might cost you some votes, possibly.
I like your suggestions a lot! The Mystery tile is definitely an underutilized mechanic in this whole thing, and having more than one, with many different outcomes, would make the bounties so much more interesting.
I also like the guaranteed Mysterious Stranger at the end of each bounty, even when you were able to farm Air Ele and others, it still took a LOT of time, without it, it will take an insurmountable amount of time. Having a guaranteed merc task at the end of a bounty would be so good, and having it gated by the task number for lower level bounties would correspond with their "policy" of "not forcing players to play low lvl bounties". Im hoping ideas like these will get to them and they consider implementing them, because without it, the game mode asks of you too much of your time for it to be worthwhile for most (adult) players, which is shame.
Yeah, apparently you first roll a mercenary and only after that the algo checks, if you already have it or not, if not, you get merc, if yes, you get portrait or coins, if you have all portraits.
Very shitty design, but thats how it is.
Pre-order guys have it even worse, since you practically own a skin for merc, not the merc itself, so you can still unpack Diablo/LK/Sylvanas, even if you can already play them thanks to owning their skin. Shitty design times two.
Well, it makes sense, since double damage is not say once 32dmg, but twice 16dmg. The visuals do show 32, but you can see how it changed during the animation, so damage reduction subtracts damage from both parts = it does reduce double the amount vs double dmg taken.