A new game mode is coming to Hearthstone - a PVP Dungeon Run!
Quote From Blizzard Welcome to Duels, a new competitive Hearthstone game mode that changes every season! In Duels, you’ll choose a Hero, a Hero Power, a starting Treasure, and build a 15-card starter deck from your collection before facing off against a series of worthy human opponents—Dungeon Run-style! Devise your path to victory by enhancing your deck after each match with minions, spells, and powerful Treasures to aid in increasingly difficult encounters with other players!
How It Works:
Duels will be accessible through the Modes button from the Hearthstone main screen, where you’d go to play Battlegrounds or Arena. Here’s how it works:
- When you start a Duels run, you’ll choose a Hero, a Hero Power, and starting Treasure.
- Then, you’ll build a starter deck of 15 cards from your Collection and play your first match. In its debut season, Duels will include a curated assortment of cards from a number of sets, including:
- Scholomance Academy
- One Night in Kharazan
- Curse of Naxxramas
- Basic
- Classic
- After the match is over, you’ll gain additional health, and get to level up your deck by picking one of three sets of cards categorized by theme. Occasionally, you’ll also be able to pick from a selection of three incredibly powerful Treasures!
- Gain or lose rating based on your result! While separate, Duels uses the same Ratings system as Battlegrounds. Your run ends after you lose three times, or net 12 wins!
Play Duels: Early Access Today
In Duels: Early Access, each playable class will start with 1 Hero Power and 1 Treasure and will use cards from the Scholomance Academy, One Night in Kharazan, Curse of Naxxramas, Classic, and Basic sets. The card pool will be updated as new sets are released!
All Hero Powers and Treasures added after Duels: Early Access can be unlocked by meeting a variety of criteria associated with your Collection. For example, unlocking a new Hero Power may require owning a corresponding Legendary card. Or to unlock a specific Treasure, you might need to own 30 Epic cards from a given set.
How to Get Duels: Early Access
Pre-purchase the Madness at the Darkmoon Faire Mega Bundle to get Duels: Early Access* today, along with 80 Madness at the Darkmoon Faire card packs, 5 Golden Madness at the Darkmoon Faire packs, one random Madness at the Darkmoon Faire Golden Legendary card, the N’Zoth Warlock Hero, the N’Zoth card back, and Battlegrounds perks**!
You can also pre-purchase the Madness at the Darkmoon Faire Bundle to get Duels: Early Access* today along with 45 Madness as the Darkmoon Faire card packs, one random Madness at the Darkmoon Faire Legendary card, and the N’Zoth card back!
When you pre-purchase either bundle, you’ll get access to a special Legendary Quest chain that rewards 6 Scholomance Academy Packs for trying out Duels!
Pre-purchase will go live with the 18.6 patch at ~10:00 a.m. PT on 10/22.
Starting November 12, Duels: Early Access will be free and open to all players and Whispers of the Old Gods will be added to the pool of eligible sets!
*Early access obtained through pre-purchase is available between October 22, 2020 and November 11, 2020. Duels game mode is accessible after reaching level 10 with all Hero classes in-game.**Battlegrounds Perks are available upon purchase and expire at the end of the Madness at the Darkmoon Faire expansion cycle.
Duels: Early Access Twitch Drops
From October 28 at 10:00 a.m. PT to November 11 at 11:00 p.m. PT, we’ll also be giving away Duels: Early Access to 500 random viewers every hour, across the entire Hearthstone category on Twitch! Watch any Hearthstone stream to be eligible to receive a drop, so long as your Battle.net and Twitch accounts are linked.
Link Your Accounts
Before you can receive rewards, you'll need to link your Twitch.tv and Battle.net accounts. Here's how:
- Log in or create an account on Twitch.tv.
- Navigate to the Settings menu by clicking your account name in the top-right corner of the home screen.
- Navigate to the Connections tab of the Settings menu.
- Find the Battle.net section, then follow the instructions after selecting a region and clicking Connect.
- When connecting accounts, be sure that you're currently logged into the Battle.net account on which you'd like to receive your rewards.
The official rules for Twitch Drops can be found here.
Duels: Season One Starts November 17
When the Duels officially launches on November 17, and we transition from Duels: Early Access to Duels: Season One, each class will have access to 2 Hero Powers and 3 Treasures. Additionally, Madness at the Darkmoon Faire cards will be added to the pool of eligible sets! We’ll be adding new Hero Powers and Treasures in a mid-season update early next year, and plan to reset Duels ratings at that time as well.
The theme for Duels: Early Access and Duels: Season One is Wizard Duels, which brings several familiar professors and luminaries from Scholomance Academy to the mode, each representing a different class and playstyle! The theme will change at the end of Duels: Season One, new Heroes will be added, and some Treasures will rotate out to make room for new ones.
When Duels: Season One begins, it’ll offer two methods of play with separate matchmaking pools: Casual and Heroic. Casual runs are free and are a perfect starting point for exploring the mode and experimenting. Heroic runs feature success-based rewards identical to Arena rewards, including gold, arcane dust, cards, golden cards, and card packs from the latest expansion. Heroic Duels runs cost 150 gold or a Tavern Ticket (US $1.99), which will be replacing Arena Tickets, and grant entry to Arena or Heroic Duels. If you’ve been sitting on Arena Tickets, they will be usable for Duels!
We announced a ton of stuff today! Be sure to check out the rest of what we’ve got going on:
Learn more about Madness at the Darkmoon Faire
Head on over to our dedicated guide for Madness at the Darkmoon Faire to learn more about the new expansion and to see all the revealed cards!
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Comments
Finally get to use those 7 Arena... urm I mean Tavern Tickets I've been stacking up, yay! :D
Being underwhelmed by a PvP Dungeon Run makes no sense to me. It's a great idea. The dungeon run format is still fun for me and I still do a run here and there. But we're all mostly over doing the same ones with the same bosses. But now every boss will be another player, and they'll get harder as you get more wins just like dungeon runs because you'll be playing against decks that are winning more, just like arena. They're using existing systems to give us a new game mode. Why not? It's not mind blowing maybe but it'll be different and it'll be fun. And they're introducing yet another new game mode next expansion so this isn't the lone great hope for new modes.
Having to pay for it like arena with rewards is slightly annoying. That at least has the slight upside of giving it stakes but the RNG swings from which treasures you were offered and which your opponents were offered are likely to be huge and feel quite unfair (when you get rekd) for something you have to spend gold on. But if the opponent rolls you with an OP treasure that only someone who has both copies of every Epic card in a certain set can get...that's going to feel really bad and make people not want to play this. That's the part that worries me.
(EDIT: There's a free Casual Mode. That's awesome. Something this inconsistent needs to have a casual mode. Sometimes you want to compete and go for 7+ wins but a lot of times with this I think I'll just want to get into a run to have some relaxed fun and see what kind of crazy stuff happens. There are times when I'm looking for that kind of experience and would like to play arena but can't be bothered to deal with gold stakes so...I just don't play arena much. I'm really glad we have the casual option. Unfortunately even casual mode will feel bad for people who are locked out from various hero powers and treasures, but not nearly as bad.)
I'm fine with the starter deck (15 singleton cards) coming from my own collection. I'm glad they're rotating what sets you can choose from. That keeps it fresh. I guess I'm glad some of the sets will be Wild. There would probably be too little variety otherwise. That does suck for people that don't have Wild collections but I don't see a way around it if we're using our own collections. Locking all Wild cards out seems like a waste.
So everything seems great about this except for what kind of amounts to discrimination based on what cards you have. Not to be too woke or anything but it feels bad when you can never get a hero power or treasure because you don't have a certain legendary or all epic cards in a set. But we'll have to see. Maybe they just shot themselves in the foot with those two examples and it's not as bad as that indicates.
I understand and accept the reasoning of people disappointed in the new game mode, but honestly I think many of the comments I saw before are blowing it out of proportion.
Yeah, I was also expecting something more exciting than "Multiplayer Dungeon Run" but its still somewhat fun. And having more cards doesnt make you a better player.
So i disagree with the extreme notion that having the HPs and stuff that are locked behind cards will be "p2w", but I certainly do agree that it will be detrimental to the gamemode
Granted, that does not mean I disagree with the criticism against it.
I think that having HPs and stuff locked behind certain cards, while flavourful, is really detrimental to the mode as a whole. I believe that such things would only work in decks built around it though, so perhaps the it wouldnt be that powerful?
Anyway, to sum it up, the game mode deserves some of the criticism it got, but I saw a lot of people blowing it out of proportion.
A fun bit of info, but Priest is retarded in this game mode (my opinion). I had an actual migraine crisis out of salt from the stuff they pulled out against me on my first game.
Does anyone if these games count towards your hero wins (like for the 1k portrait), like arena games do?
Alright so this is the mode i have wanted since Dungeon run came out. So i'm really happy it's finally here! I'm glad there is a casual mode, and that i can use my wild collection to actually have an advantage against the "i only play standard, and DE rotating cards" players, but still F for those players. Kinda feel bad for them. (And this is also a good marketing trick for blizzard, so people will buy old adventures to unlock the cards.)
Also i'm glad there is a heroic version that costs 150 gold and gives rewards. I'm guessing there will get some datamines around the time it releases, so we get to know how good the rewards will be. If they are similar, or as good as arena rewards, then i'm guessing it's truly RIP Arena. It won't be missed (by me at least, but there probably are some people that like arena more... i guess? At least most Arena streamers i know quickly became BG mostly/only streamers, so i dunno...)
the rewards will be exactly the same as in arena
After a first couple rounds I can safely say that you won’t grind this mode day in day out. It’s really cool but suuuuper inconsistent. Your initial deck choices quickly become irrelevant and the mode isn’t balanced at all. I am pretty sure that you make more consistent gold in the Arena as a good player. But who knows, I only played 3-4 rounds so far (12-1 once!
Yeah I think I would mainly want to play Duels casual and occasionally up the stakes with Heroic when I feel like it. It's nice that we have the option.
This looks so totally not for me. But so is Battlegrounds and people seem to like that well enough so I hope Duels works out the same.
My initial reaction was pretty tame because all I heard was the announcement trailer. I didn't read it in depth.
But this line in particular is a sucker punch:
Hero powers locked behind having specific Legendaries? Treasures locked behind having 30 Epic cards from a given set? That isn't even in the ballpark of 'could be free to play, if you want to make it work.' That is strictly pay-to-win. Just how many packs do you need to purchase to have 30 Epic cards from a given set? Those things don't drop like rares do!
I feel gross. This feels gross. This makes me not want to play any longer.
The 30 Epics one is really what gets ya. Like...what? That's insane. I think we should wait and see. They may have put their foot in their mouth with that example and it's not nearly as bad as that overall. But even one treasure locked behind something like that is horrible....unless it's a really memey treasure or something. Wait and see.
Thanks for calling that line out. I hadn't noticed it. What a hideous idea.
Given that and that this mode requires our card collections, I think we can assume that its entire purpose is to sell card packs, which is scummy.
Consumers should spend money on a game because they enjoy the content and want to support it, not because they need to do so to unlock new experiences. The second is already enough true without Blizzard forcing it, this being a card game and all.
I don’t see the contradiction here. I enjoy the content, support it and get to unlock cool perks in a super fun new game mode.
If you want to play it competitively, you gotta spend money on cards but you generally do that anyways when you are invested into standard. (Btw, I doubt that this mode will be very competitive. It can quickly end in an total RNG high roll fiesta)
Not to mention, large parts of the mode are free/easily acquirable. That allows you to test things out, try a little bit around and maybe grind for a new perk.
I think the real issue here is, unlike battlegrounds which unlocks perks using the pass that costs something universal like gold, this one requires card collecting, which is dependent on getting lucky in pack openings.
If someone were to only be interested in DR and not in standard ranked, I guess they would grind the supposed heroic mode which I would guess will grant packs as rewards. But how much grinding is one to make, and how successful they can get, if they're playing with a handicap from the start. Not to mention that said heroic mode is likely to also cost gold to play.
A simple illustration is to imagine having to have collected 30 epics (No small feat) in order to unlock Twin Tyrant in arena. That would simply be untenable.
Of course, we can give blizz the benefit of the doubt since the DR is currently so OP that you probably dont need anything new to get past to say, 7 wins. But then again, when arena was first introduced and no one developed any cheat sheets, arena was pretty simple for those who had figured it out. It didn't take long before the meta was broken and those 10-12 wins became as rare as desert rain.
Its an underwhelming announcement, honestly. Speculations was rife, and I really thought its either limited wild, or some kind of new mode with new rules, but the reveal being this? Dungeon runs were frustrating enough, and now I get to pit myself against a human opponent with it. Is that really the kind of A-game we were anticipating early this year when the hearthstone development map was shown to us?
And on top of that unwanted cake, is the cherry of it all. If this article is correct, the assorted hero powers and treasures will eventually require actual cards to unlock, guaranteeing that not everyone would have access to the whole thing without having first paid something somewhere, whether its gold, dust, or ehem real money.
Sorry blizz, but this is one thing that I would probably never get to really enjoy.
The "cherry" is concerning but keep in mind this isn't the only new game mode coming. Another one will come out next expansion.
Nothing against the idea behind this new mode. It makes sense as dungeon runs were a huge success when they were introduced. What worries me is the balance between hero powers and treasures. The effects of the treasures are deliberately busted to improve the fun factor when playing against the A.I.. But in a PvP scenario, this could create a lot of balance issues as some treasures are always better than others. So, they could easily become the deciding factor in many games. Same for hero powers. Look at what's happening in Battlegrounds right now. Power creep has settled in extremely quickly. Some heroes are insanely broken while others are an absolute joke. Some minions or minion types just rule the entire format for prolonged periods of time (Nightmare Amalgam, Holy Mackerel, Amalgadon, Gentle Djinni). We could see the same situation happening again. Certain hero powers or treasures could dictate the format and those who are lucky enough to get them are going to be more successful than others. Also, this mode can't be played by everyone. People who dusted their wild cards and people who are new to the game won't be able to enjoy it and that already removes a ton of potential players. Battlegrounds is completely free, at least. Unfortunately, the new mode doesn't look very promising in my opinion.
All true but remember they will iterate on it, adding, removing and balancing treasures and hero powers. And there is a casual mode, so it's not like you have to pay gold to get rekt by someone's crazy OP deck. The way you get access to the hero powers and treasures is alarming though and seems unwise on their part. Maybe they thought it would feel great for players that are able to get more stuff, but it will feel really bad for the ones that are locked out and have to craft a legendary or several epics to get the thing they want. A lot of those people might just not get into Duels as a result which could greatly hamper its success. They should rethink this...unless we're missing something and the two examples they gave are outliers.
So, same as Battlegrounds, they'll be nerfing and buffing hero powers and treasures on a regular basis to keep things interesting. Given the massive number of permutations this mode introduces, I'm not worried about the Duels meta growing stale. If it does get bad, they'll just change things. Give the devs some credit! They've been very proactive with Battlegrounds, and they have every incentive to be equally involved with Duels.
I'm not saying they don't deserve any credit or that they aren't working hard to improve each game mode. What i'm saying is that they are usually overshooting too hard on their new designs and that generates a lot of dissatisfaction very quickly. They try to balance things but when they miss the target (or don't really fix anything as that's the case of Djinni), it only creates even more problems that they need to solve quickly. They are being proactive but the pressure over them is at its highest in a very long time. There's a lot of things to look out for and i doubt Activision will expand the team to make things easier for the devs. They might already be under work overload and it could lead to a snowball of other problems.
Adding a mode that uses things that weren't balanced properly for PvP could be a major source of problems and i don't think it was the right call. People have been asking for a Tournament mode for a long time and there were other suggestions as well. I believe the reason they went for this is the ability to re-utilize assets. It wouldn't need a ton of work to implement and their only worry would be the overall balance of the mode. But it could backfire pretty hard if things become too messy. I also don't believe they chose this because they are lazy. It's exactly because they have to meet certain deadlines and are constantly under pressure from their superiors. It was easier and healthier to go for this route and bank everything on the previous success of Dungeon Runs.