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Hysteria originally cost 2 mana, but it was quickly bumped to 3 mana (and made it so it could target just enemy minions) due to a game-breaking interaction with Deathspeaker and Wretched Tiller.

I'm pretty sure that it always costed 3 mana, HS wiki also confirms that.

The Deck of Chaos buff is interesting. I experimented a lot with an big demons/Deck of Chaos deck ever since it came out and this buff might make it viable (as in tier 2-3)

Quote From HuntardHuntard

Nothing hinted at these actions.

That's not completely true. Some of the Mercenaries flavortexts hinted at the cards you have to play in order to get to the puzzle.

A chinese guy finished the last puzzle. I repeat, the puzzle is solved.

Because waaay more players than expected are playing against the Inkeeper and all you can do is to wait.

Quote From Alfi

Quote From kaladin

these puzzles are beyond making any sense.  so rather than 'solve' them, we basically just wait until other people find the solution and then copy that?  ill take the free xp but IMO i think this wasn't the community experience they were hoping for. 

I completely agree. What is the reason to do something like this? Play bunch of random cards in a game mode no one plays and then do a (sometimes excessively long) number of steps. 

Like the current tavern brawl - just random random.

It actually isn't. Every card is hinted at in the mercenaries flavortexts and each puzzle as a goal to solve. In the Rogue one you have to bring every box to 4 attack, in the warrior on you try to bring every minion to the other side of the board, the druid one is a maze where you control the character with the doors (turn left, go forward, turn right) and the hunter one is about trading at an bazar.

Seems like they fixed the Tavern Regular achievement bug already, I just claimed my Garosh skin.

Well, EtG is a bullet Hell game, but a really fair one. Every room is a pre-build and every attack pattern can be dodged without any Items. Aiming also isn't really a problem in this game. The challange mostly comes from dodging the enemies attacks. As for the difficulty I think that it's certainly challanging, but not too hard. I managed to beat the first floor after my 2th run or so and the second one roughly 6 runs later.

Ofcourse Item luck can help you, but in the end it's all about dodging. So I'd say give it a shot (pun intended). It's only 20 bucks and definetely worth the price.

No, they said that it's a BG only tribe when they announced it at blizzconline.

Part of me hopes that it's a live as a service game, mostly because that could mean more screen time for Ben Brode.

To be fair I havn't played or seen much of Dead Cells, because I prefear rogue-likes. But it seem to me that you can permanently upgrade Items which should make the game easier and as such classify it as a rogue-lite.

To follow up on Sevault

an opposite example to add here are the Binding of Isaac and Enter the Gungeon. Generally speaking the difference comes from the difficulty level. In Rogue-lites the difficulty starts extremly (sometimes even impossibly) high and gets lower the more you play and unlock perma progressions. Ensuring that everyone can beat the game if he sinks enough time into it.

Rogue-likes on the other hand don't have perma progression. The difficulty is still high, but never changes.This Means that not the character, but only the player gets better at the game. So an experienced player could start a new save-file and would not have more trouble beating it than with his 1000h file. Beating an Rogue-like for the first time also feels a lot better than beating an Rogue-lite because you know that YOU overcome the game challanges and not your character with the help of tons of upgrades.

However most Rogue-likes do have a permanent progression nowadays, mostly with unlockable Items or Characters. The difference to Rogue-lites here is that those Items and Characters are not designed to be stronger or weaker than the others. It's more meant as an alternative to increase the variaty and as such the replayable of the game while also giving the player a reason to continue playing it.

This Rogue-like rules can also be found in HS Dungeon runs, most notably Dalaran Heist Adventure. The difficulty never changes and the Decks and HP are not intentionally designed to be better than other ones. 

Tombs of Terror on the other hand is almost a hybrid of Rogue-lite and Rogue-like. The 7 fights before the final Boss could definetely be classified as an Rogue-like because the difficulty to get there is always the same. But once you reach the final Boss the game turns into a rogue-lite because he keeps his health and as such makes it easier to beat him the more often you face him.

This text became longer than expected, but as you may have noticed I'm really passionate about this genre (thx to Enter the Gungeon) and I just like to explain things to other people XD

Quote From angelkas

Mercenaries, at best, will start "closed beta" when the next expansion is launched

The Problem with that Theory is that Mercenaries will be released in the first phase while the next expansion is part of the second one. There is also no way that they are releasing an major new gamemode and a new Expansion at the same time, because they would distract the focus from each other. "Releasing" as in playable for the consumer even if behind a paywall (because that's where the hype peaks)

edit: Oh, you probably meant annocuned instead of launched. Then yeah, seems likely. Though I'm not completely sure because Mercenaries is a much bigger deal for them than Duels was. So that could be a reason to belive that it's launching before the next expansion gets announced.

But whatever, in the end all we can do is to wait and see.

1. Mercenaries is a rogue-lite (perma progression)

2. Mini-Expansion should launch somewhere around May 10. because that's when they Darkmoon Races bundle ends. Probably later than sooner considering that the Battlegrounds Update is coming next week

3. Mercenaries is almost definetly launching late into the expansion just as Battlegrounds and Duels did. Probably as part of the fire festival like the AoO PvE last year. If I had to guess i'd say the upcoming update order would be: Battlegrounds, Mini-Set, Duels, Mercenaries.

The pricing the depateable, but the decks themself look really good. Gj to the guy who designed them.

Wild, Standard and Classic are all different Formats of the same Mode (Constructed)

I don't expect mod support for the game. It's probably something like the Workshop in OW, which is like an own visual modding language, but in an more controlled way.

they have been working on the mode for over a year now and it was originally planned for the last expansion. Im fully confident that it's going to launch as part of the fire-festival, similar to the trials by felfire mode last year.

I don't consider Nozdurmo day an real event. Just as an regular suggestion to play that card. They also most likely could have started an legendary quest on that day, but I see 2 problems that come with that.

1. There is no automatic system for regular legendary quests. It's not such a big deal, but definetely something you want to implement at some point.

2. The quest would not be limited to Nozdurmo day. Right now every legendary quest stays in there until you complete or reroll it, but since Nozdurmo day is only...well, one day, they have to somehow remove that quest on the 16. . And that is a tech they definetely havn't implemented yet.

Serena Bloodfeather seem to work in the following way:

Card is played

Steal 1 Health and 1 Attack from the target (no matter what)

while target has more health than this minion

{

steal 1 health from target

}

while target has more attack than this minion

{

steal 1 attack from target

}

It's important to know that A: she always steals 1/1 and B: that she steals attack and health independently. This way the targets health and attack should always be halfed, while Serena Bloodfeather will always be +1/+1 bigger than the target.