So far I like it better than I thought I would, but I had pretty low expectations. I'm not sure that it will have lasting appeal though.
I didn't pre-order. I did buy the 5 euros bundle, but I won't buy the 20 euros bundle unless I'm still playing this mode regularly by the end of the month.
Difficulty in PvE seems to range from somewhat challenging to ridiculously easy. In a few battles tactics matter, but often it's just a matter of whether your pile of stats is bigger than the enemy's. I've only done the first page of the Barrens so far, maybe things get more spicy later on.
Heroic missions bumped the opponents up a few levels, but other than that there doesn't seem to be much of a difference. Maybe XP is higher because of the higher levels? The coin rewards looked pretty similar to normal mode.
I'm not sure yet if I want to do PvP. I'll probably watch a stream to get an idea of what it's like.
I'm not sure "loss of passion" is fixable though. The problem is that getting lots of practice is essential to playing Hearthstone well: even the best players perform worse when they don't play enough games. Few people are going to stay motivated to put in that many hours year after year.
That the early game is generous doesn't really say much: even the most manipulative pay-to-win games start generous and only require more and more payments to keep up with other players in the end game, when players have already invested their time and attention into the game.
Given how aggressively games with gacha mechanics are often monetized, I do understand why people are concerned about Mercenaries. With other Hearthstone modes increasingly moving to monetizing cosmetics instead of things that affect game play, I think Team 5 deserves the benefit of the doubt, but I don't think the doubt itself is unfounded.
In particular, I'm not a fan of expensive pre-orders. For physical games, pre-orders serve a purpose: it gives a company an indication of how many units they should produce in the first production run. For digital games, pre-orders are just a way to cash in on hype, which isn't in the players' best interest. Maybe it's asking a bit much for the games industry to unlearn all its bad habits at once, but I do hope pre-orders will go out of fashion some day.
Are you sure about Golden Wild packs? I only see Standard and Classic. I played a lot more Wild than Standard last month and no Classic yet at all, so I'd be surprised if I wasn't offered one if it exists.
I'm not going to buy these bundles though: I don't care much about golden cards and they're a bit expensive to buy just for the dust.
I'm not sure where I stand on hand disruption: it feels terrible when it's done to you, but at the same time it also feels terrible when you figured out your opponent's game plan and you're unable to do anything about it. I'm thinking of decks like Mozaki Mage in Wild.
By creating the original Illucia and also other cards like Mutanus the Devourer, Team 5 made the decision to have hand disruption as part of the game. The only thing that sets Illucia apart is that her effect isn't random, but I don't think it's a good rule to have high-impact plays always depend on a random roll.
It was indeed a card that can lose you the match when played at the wrong time: I remember watching a tournament where a player forgot about the automatically generated Deathwing in their hand that they swapped over to their opponent.
There would still be a risk in including a card in your deck that can sit in your hand for a long time. Priest doesn't have the card draw it used to and while it still has card generation, it's less than it used to be.
In any case, at 3 mana I don't think she's playable and I'm not sure the new version would be playable at 2 mana either. The cards your opponent hasn't played yet are likely either too expensive to play on curve so far or situational. In the swap version, getting rid of situational cards when they do nothing at the time could help you in the rest of the match, but in the copy version there is no gain from a situational card unless it's good right then and there. Evocation hasn't seen a lot of play at 2 mana and I think in most cases it would give you better options than your opponent's hand.
I liked Regis Killbin's idea for Illucia better: swap until the end of your turn, so if you play Illucia early in the turn you can disrupt your opponent's hand with your remaining mana, but you can't make them skip their turn by passing an (almost) empty hand.
I put a Metamorfin as the 30th card in a slightly different Brute DH deck and it's actually working out quite well so far. It's not even half a Brute in stats, but it is easier to play for free, or to dump if it's blocking an outcast card.
This is actually being played on ladder with lethal as soon as turn 6. I hope it gets fixed soon. Yes, I'm salty, not towards Mark (I love your videos) but towards the lack of QA at Blizzard.
Crystallizer could convert 5 health to armor instead of dealing damage. That means it wouldn't help questline progression, but it would make the card more useful in other decks, for example when combined with Thekal.
Actually, you suggested exactly that in an earlier thread...
These puzzles were designed at a difficulty level where it would take the entire Hearthstone community a while to figure out, instead of a single person. If that's not something you enjoy, just play the modes you do enjoy instead. There is no need to call for anyone to be fired.
Most questline Priest decks run very few spells, to tutor the completion reward. That makes it far from certain that Mutanus will pull a key minion, so it may not be enough of a disruption.
The traditional win condition of mid-range versus control is to pace your threats in a way that exhausts the control deck's removal while the mid-range deck still has threats left, finding the sweet spot between under and over-committing. Questline Priest doesn't have to walk that tightrope: if it can stay alive for about 10 turns, it just wins.
While I agree that in many matchups the questline completion doesn't even matter for Priest, it does matter versus control, so if the deck starts seeing play after other decks are slowed down, it can still push control decks out of the meta. It would be like Mean Streets, where you couldn't play control because there was no way to beat Jade Druid in a long game.
By the way, for some of the questlines, like Demon Hunter and perhaps even Shaman, the intermediate rewards are probably more important than the completion reward. I've been playing a modified version of Dane's Frog Questline Shaman deck in Wild and realized that I was missing lethal opportunities because I was too fixated on playing the quest reward, while just slinging a lot of spells face without double cast is more efficient against most opponents. I wouldn't want to drop the quest though, since the overload unlock after the first stage is really useful.
One thing I noticed is that while the flanking minions on the bottom row (your side of the board) are random copies of minions on the top row (opponent's side of the board), two things are always true:
the order in which the minions appear on the bottom row is always the same as the order in the top row
the two minions on the bottom row are never neighbors on the top row: there is always at least one minion between them, although it can be as many as five
My guess is that the flanking minions represent some kind of operation or filter you have to apply to the top row.
It looks like each minion represents a 7-digit number: the 3 digits from attack, 3 from health and 1 from tribe, where tribe is the digit with the lowest significance, followed by health, followed by attack, since that is the casting order when you build your 7-digit answer on the question mark minion.
When at some point I entered the number formed by all the tribes from the top row (so basically just cast the spells matching the top row tribes from right to left), I got a board of different minions. I don't know whether this always works or whether I got lucky that the flanking minions happened to ask for that.
Edit: It seems I didn't make progress at all. Apparently after a certain time the server changes which minions you are given for phase 1.
I wrote down the top row as a 7x7 grid of digits and tried to input columns from that grid, but except for that one time I never saw any progression.
Over the years, the two opinions I've heard most often about Wild are:
Wild should be a place where you can play your old favorite decks
Wild should be a balanced meta
The first opinion seems to be more popular among people who don't actually play Wild, which makes me I attach less value to it. More importantly though, it is never going to work: the strongest Wild decks are made by combining the best cards and the synergies from all the sets. If people want to replay their old favorites, I think that will only work when players are restricted to the same card pool those decks were made from, in a time-shifted Classic mode.
When you look at the popular decks in Wild, I don't think any of them existed in Standard. Secret Mage still somewhat resembles the K&C Secret Burn Mage, but even there almost half the deck is cards from sets that weren't in Standard at the time. Other decks, like the current Odd Hunter and Pirate Warrior are very different decks compared to their old Standard counterparts.
While the current lack of balance in Wild is not healthy, the opposite is not great either: if Wild has a meta that is never disrupted, the same decks will be played year in and out. My appreciation of Wild would certainly improve if I didn't have to play another game versus Secret Mage any time soon.
As a deck builder, I would very much like a mode with a limited number of sets that rotates often, for example every month. Something like the Brawl Block, but with slightly more cards: 3 expansions and no core set was too limiting.
If I recall correctly, clicking the "drops enabled" link takes you to a page that shows progress. There is such a page in any case.
The drops haven't started yet though.
I got two packs earlier today. I watched GM last weekend and the packs for that were slower than usual, but I did get them eventually on Sunday.
I guess Blizzard wasn't able to pinpoint exactly who missed out on packs and decided to send everyone who might not have gotten them new packs.
So far I like it better than I thought I would, but I had pretty low expectations. I'm not sure that it will have lasting appeal though.
I didn't pre-order. I did buy the 5 euros bundle, but I won't buy the 20 euros bundle unless I'm still playing this mode regularly by the end of the month.
Difficulty in PvE seems to range from somewhat challenging to ridiculously easy. In a few battles tactics matter, but often it's just a matter of whether your pile of stats is bigger than the enemy's. I've only done the first page of the Barrens so far, maybe things get more spicy later on.
Heroic missions bumped the opponents up a few levels, but other than that there doesn't seem to be much of a difference. Maybe XP is higher because of the higher levels? The coin rewards looked pretty similar to normal mode.
I'm not sure yet if I want to do PvP. I'll probably watch a stream to get an idea of what it's like.
I'm not sure "loss of passion" is fixable though. The problem is that getting lots of practice is essential to playing Hearthstone well: even the best players perform worse when they don't play enough games. Few people are going to stay motivated to put in that many hours year after year.
Why should the esports be teams when ladder is single player only?
Maybe that Warlock was just very eager to activate Jan'alai and Mordresh.
That the early game is generous doesn't really say much: even the most manipulative pay-to-win games start generous and only require more and more payments to keep up with other players in the end game, when players have already invested their time and attention into the game.
Given how aggressively games with gacha mechanics are often monetized, I do understand why people are concerned about Mercenaries. With other Hearthstone modes increasingly moving to monetizing cosmetics instead of things that affect game play, I think Team 5 deserves the benefit of the doubt, but I don't think the doubt itself is unfounded.
In particular, I'm not a fan of expensive pre-orders. For physical games, pre-orders serve a purpose: it gives a company an indication of how many units they should produce in the first production run. For digital games, pre-orders are just a way to cash in on hype, which isn't in the players' best interest. Maybe it's asking a bit much for the games industry to unlearn all its bad habits at once, but I do hope pre-orders will go out of fashion some day.
Are you sure about Golden Wild packs? I only see Standard and Classic. I played a lot more Wild than Standard last month and no Classic yet at all, so I'd be surprised if I wasn't offered one if it exists.
I'm not going to buy these bundles though: I don't care much about golden cards and they're a bit expensive to buy just for the dust.
I used the same dust approach, but it turned out I had a golden Brute in my collection, so I got a bit more dust out of it.
I'm not sure where I stand on hand disruption: it feels terrible when it's done to you, but at the same time it also feels terrible when you figured out your opponent's game plan and you're unable to do anything about it. I'm thinking of decks like Mozaki Mage in Wild.
By creating the original Illucia and also other cards like Mutanus the Devourer, Team 5 made the decision to have hand disruption as part of the game. The only thing that sets Illucia apart is that her effect isn't random, but I don't think it's a good rule to have high-impact plays always depend on a random roll.
It was indeed a card that can lose you the match when played at the wrong time: I remember watching a tournament where a player forgot about the automatically generated Deathwing in their hand that they swapped over to their opponent.
There would still be a risk in including a card in your deck that can sit in your hand for a long time. Priest doesn't have the card draw it used to and while it still has card generation, it's less than it used to be.
In any case, at 3 mana I don't think she's playable and I'm not sure the new version would be playable at 2 mana either. The cards your opponent hasn't played yet are likely either too expensive to play on curve so far or situational. In the swap version, getting rid of situational cards when they do nothing at the time could help you in the rest of the match, but in the copy version there is no gain from a situational card unless it's good right then and there. Evocation hasn't seen a lot of play at 2 mana and I think in most cases it would give you better options than your opponent's hand.
I know people like to shout power creep, but one mana for a 2/2 with the pirate tag and a useful discount on a future play is definitely a valid case.
I liked Regis Killbin's idea for Illucia better: swap until the end of your turn, so if you play Illucia early in the turn you can disrupt your opponent's hand with your remaining mana, but you can't make them skip their turn by passing an (almost) empty hand.
I put a Metamorfin as the 30th card in a slightly different Brute DH deck and it's actually working out quite well so far. It's not even half a Brute in stats, but it is easier to play for free, or to dump if it's blocking an outcast card.
This is actually being played on ladder with lethal as soon as turn 6. I hope it gets fixed soon. Yes, I'm salty, not towards Mark (I love your videos) but towards the lack of QA at Blizzard.
Crystallizer could convert 5 health to armor instead of dealing damage. That means it wouldn't help questline progression, but it would make the card more useful in other decks, for example when combined with Thekal.
Actually, you suggested exactly that in an earlier thread...
These puzzles were designed at a difficulty level where it would take the entire Hearthstone community a while to figure out, instead of a single person. If that's not something you enjoy, just play the modes you do enjoy instead. There is no need to call for anyone to be fired.
Most questline Priest decks run very few spells, to tutor the completion reward. That makes it far from certain that Mutanus will pull a key minion, so it may not be enough of a disruption.
The traditional win condition of mid-range versus control is to pace your threats in a way that exhausts the control deck's removal while the mid-range deck still has threats left, finding the sweet spot between under and over-committing. Questline Priest doesn't have to walk that tightrope: if it can stay alive for about 10 turns, it just wins.
While I agree that in many matchups the questline completion doesn't even matter for Priest, it does matter versus control, so if the deck starts seeing play after other decks are slowed down, it can still push control decks out of the meta. It would be like Mean Streets, where you couldn't play control because there was no way to beat Jade Druid in a long game.
By the way, for some of the questlines, like Demon Hunter and perhaps even Shaman, the intermediate rewards are probably more important than the completion reward. I've been playing a modified version of Dane's Frog Questline Shaman deck in Wild and realized that I was missing lethal opportunities because I was too fixated on playing the quest reward, while just slinging a lot of spells face without double cast is more efficient against most opponents. I wouldn't want to drop the quest though, since the overload unlock after the first stage is really useful.
One thing I noticed is that while the flanking minions on the bottom row (your side of the board) are random copies of minions on the top row (opponent's side of the board), two things are always true:
My guess is that the flanking minions represent some kind of operation or filter you have to apply to the top row.
It looks like each minion represents a 7-digit number: the 3 digits from attack, 3 from health and 1 from tribe, where tribe is the digit with the lowest significance, followed by health, followed by attack, since that is the casting order when you build your 7-digit answer on the question mark minion.
When at some point I entered the number formed by all the tribes from the top row (so basically just cast the spells matching the top row tribes from right to left), I got a board of different minions. I don't know whether this always works or whether I got lucky that the flanking minions happened to ask for that.
Edit: It seems I didn't make progress at all. Apparently after a certain time the server changes which minions you are given for phase 1.
I wrote down the top row as a 7x7 grid of digits and tried to input columns from that grid, but except for that one time I never saw any progression.
Over the years, the two opinions I've heard most often about Wild are:
The first opinion seems to be more popular among people who don't actually play Wild, which makes me I attach less value to it. More importantly though, it is never going to work: the strongest Wild decks are made by combining the best cards and the synergies from all the sets. If people want to replay their old favorites, I think that will only work when players are restricted to the same card pool those decks were made from, in a time-shifted Classic mode.
When you look at the popular decks in Wild, I don't think any of them existed in Standard. Secret Mage still somewhat resembles the K&C Secret Burn Mage, but even there almost half the deck is cards from sets that weren't in Standard at the time. Other decks, like the current Odd Hunter and Pirate Warrior are very different decks compared to their old Standard counterparts.
While the current lack of balance in Wild is not healthy, the opposite is not great either: if Wild has a meta that is never disrupted, the same decks will be played year in and out. My appreciation of Wild would certainly improve if I didn't have to play another game versus Secret Mage any time soon.
As a deck builder, I would very much like a mode with a limited number of sets that rotates often, for example every month. Something like the Brawl Block, but with slightly more cards: 3 expansions and no core set was too limiting.