Blizzard has posted all the details for tomorrow's 19.0 game patch.
- The patch should arrive at the usual time, around 1 PM Eastern.
- Mobile users, your patch will, as usual, take some extra time to arrive.
- Duels will be receiving 1 new Hero Power and 2 Signature Treasures for each class.
- This patch activates new dailies, weekly quests, achievements, and more for progression.
- A battle pass, The Tavern Pass, will be available for $19.99 USD.
- Battlegrounds Perks will be available for $14.99 USD. It is also included in the mega bundle for Darkmoon Faire.
Read on for all the details. You don't want to miss out! Madness at the Darkmoon Faire launches on November 17.
Quote From Blizzard Tomorrow’s 19.0 patch includes an all-new progression system, several game improvements, and some updates to Battlegrounds. Its arrival means Hearthstone’s newest expansion, Madness at the Darkmoon Faire, is almost here! All Madness at the Darkmoon Faire cards have officially been revealed, and while you can’t use the new cards until they’ve unlocked on November 17, you can get a head start on building your launch day decks with our online deck builder!
Duels: Season One also begins on November 17, but tomorrow’s patch grants Duels: Early Access to everyone, introduces Whispers of the Old Gods to the pool of eligible sets, and adds Madness at the Darkmoon Faire cards to loot buckets! Once Duels: Season One begins, you’ll be able to add Madness at the Darkmoon Faire cards to your starter deck as well! You can learn more about Duels in our announcement blog here.
Tomorrow’s patch will also add a new unlockable Hero Power and two Signature Treasures for each class in Duels, which you can obtain by owning Scholomance Academy and Madness at the Darkmoon Faire cards. Check out our Pre-Release blog to learn how you can open Madness at the Darkmoon Faire packs early!
New Battlegrounds Hero
Silas Darkmoon
- Come One, Come All! [Passive]
- Darkmoon Tickets are in the Tavern! Get 3 to Discover a minion from your Tavern Tier.
- Random minions in Bob’s Tavern will have Darkmoon Tickets. Buy three of these minions to Discover a minion from your current Tavern Tier.
Players with Battlegrounds Perks will have early access to Silas Darkmoon before the hero is formally released on December 1.
Progression & Rewards Revamp
The 19.0 patch adds an entirely new progression system to the Tavern! In what is Hearthstone’s biggest systems update ever, the progression revamp includes four major parts:
- The addition of an Achievements System that tracks your in-game accomplishments.
- A central Rewards Track for all earnable rewards outside of Ranked play.
- A Quest Revamp that supports daily and weekly quests.
- An updated Profile Page with player info, ranks, and stats.
You’ll be able to access each of these pages by clicking on a new Journal icon that will replace the Quest Log on the main menu. You can read the full breakdown for each part of the progression revamp here. We’ve got a few additional details to share on the progression update today:
- Quests – Quests can be completed in Casual, Ranked, Arena, and Duels. Certain quests may also point you to Battlegrounds or Tavern Brawls. Quests can also be completed in the Friendly Challenge variants of any of these modes.
- Achievements – Achievements are broken up into categories and subcategories. As you’d expect, the Game Modes and Adventures categories can only be completed within their specified modes. The more general Progression and Gameplay categories can be completed in Ranked, Arena, and Duels modes.
- Dev comment: There is a known issue that sometimes causes Collection Achievements to appear to have incorrect progress—this will be fixed in an upcoming patch. When that happens, Collection Achievements will update to the correct progress, but no Achievements will be taken away.
- Reward XP – You can earn XP just for playing the game in most game modes. This includes Casual, Ranked, Arena, Duels, Battlegrounds, Tavern Brawls, and Adventures. Friendly Challenge variants of these modes do not give XP.
We’re investigating an issue which may impact minimum spec mobile devices (those with fewer than 2GB of memory) on this patch which may result in degraded performance. This behavior may be triggered by accessing the new in-game Journal. We’re advising players to exit and relaunch Hearthstone if they encounter these issues.
Tavern Pass
The Rewards Track includes a free track for all players, and a paid track that can be unlocked with the Tavern Pass, which will be available for purchase for $19.99. Purchasing the Tavern Pass at any point during the expansion will immediately grant the Golden Silas Darkmoon Legendary minion, a 10% XP Boost that lasts for the duration of the expansion, and all items up to your current level on the paid track. You’ll earn an additional XP Boost as you progress with the Tavern Pass during the Madness at the Darkmoon Faire expansion, in addition to the Annhylde Alternate Warrior Hero and Card Back, three Jaina Hero Skins, three Thrall Hero Skins, and one of Hearthstone’s first-ever collectible Cosmetic Coins!
Battlegrounds Perks
Battlegrounds Perks will be available as a standalone purchase on November 17, separate from the Tavern Pass, for $14.99 or 2000 gold. Battlegrounds Perks will allow you to pick from 4 Heroes at the start of a Battlegrounds match and grants advanced stats, visual emotes, and early access to new Heroes! Battlegrounds Perks are also included in the Madness at the Darkmoon Faire Mega Bundle.
Game Improvements & Miscellaneous Updates
- Hovering over the opponent’s Mana tooltip will now display a count of their Overloaded Mana Crystals. The friendly Mana tooltip has also been updated to display a count.
- Drustvar Horror will now randomly pick one option for Runic Carvings instead of casting both.
- Fixed a Duels bug where Golden cards would appear as normal cards.
- Fixed a Duels bug where the Best Runs counter was being unintentionally reset.
- Fixed a Duels bug where Heroes were not playing their voice line when selected for a run.
- Fixed a Duels bug where Book of the Dead was not counting enemy minions that had died.
- Fixed a bug where Dormant minions would not consume discounts provided from Studies.
- Fixed a bug where the arrow for targeted Hero Powers in Battlegrounds would begin offscreen.
- Fixed a bug where emotes would overlap with the post-game victory or defeat screen.
- Fixed a bug where portraits shown in history tiles were inconsistently sized between devices.
- Free decks for new and returning players have been updated (recipes can be found here).*
- Card text for Corrupting Mist and Chaos Gazer have been reworded to avoid confusion with the new Corrupt keyword. Functionality of both cards remain the same.
* Limit one per account. A returning player is defined as one who has not logged into Hearthstone for 120 consecutive days
November 17 - Arena Rotation
When Madness at the Darkmoon Faire launches on November 17, the Arena will include cards from the following sets:
Comments
I'm happy though, aside from the XP boost, the pass offers no in-game advantage, just mostly cosmetics.
I'm not FTP but I hate being "forced" to buy something to stay competitive.
Tavern pass should be part of mega bundle pre order
This.
Gonna buy it anyway. I'm too much of a sucker for this shit
In the previous system, you would earn an average of 50 gold per day from your quest (40/50/60 gold per quest), plus up to 100 gold from wins (10 per 3 wins, or 100 for 30 wins). That amounts to about 1.5 packs per day, give or take, depending on how much you play.
For the record: I do not play that much.
The old gold system would allow you to save up quite a bit of gold within an expansion, if you were really determined. 150 gold per day for four months (~120 days) would result in... a lot of gold. 18000? Wow. A lot.
In the new system, based on the preview screenshots (which are subject to change, definitely, but just using them as a base), you will earn 1000 XP from a daily quest, and between 1750 and 2500 XP from a weekly quest. Let's say about 2000 per weekly quest? Progression levels, assuming they remain flat, are 1200 XP apiece.
So 1000 XP per day = about 120,000 XP, and 6000 XP per week (~16 weeks) = about 96,000 XP. For a total of approximately 215,000 XP per expansion cycle. At 1200 XP a level, that's about... 179-180 levels per expansion. So lots of levels. And we've been told that levels past 50 result in 150 gold apiece.
But thing is, not all of those 50 levels reward gold. Some reward packs, others reward specific rarities of cards (rares, Legends, probably some epics mixed in there... maybe a Tavern Ticket?). Still, even if none of the first 50 levels reward actual gold, 129-130 levels would mean... well, about that same 18k gold figure...
At first glance, it would seem that Blizzard is being generous with us and giving us a lot more for free. So, cool. The flipside of this is that they are getting the most out of their investment in you: if you are playing this game up into the vicinity of 150-180 levels, you are solidly in their pocket. You are much more likely to spend actual money on them.
But if you're playing that much, that's probably not much of a deterrent for you. Huh. Maybe this is a good move after all.
I'd be more curious about the time investment. Under your numbers and assuming a 100% win rate with an aggro deck (6 minute average game) you would still have to spend 3 hours a day to grind out that 150 gold per day.
That's some awesome work there.
So what's the situation if you're more of a casual player that only does enough to complete the dailies (in the old system) and saves maybe enough gold for 20-30 packs for the new expansion?
Are people like me on average better or worse off with the new system?
If you do dailies and dont waste your gold on arena, battlepass etc. you should be way beyond 60packs, which is enough to get every common and rare from new expansion. If you would only get 60g a day it would total to 7200g per expansion.
Its just a few hours away until the full track will be known to us.
My guess is that it wouldn't be too far off the current reward system. If blizz were smart then they'd load it up well so people don't start complaining day 1. But then again, its still activision-blizz we're talking about.
You are in a drastically better situation.
Assuming you complete your dailies and weeklies--consistently--you will earn as much as the people who would grind out with aggro decks the full 100 gold a day.
From what I can gather, there is no grinding incentive in the new system. You earn XP from playing in any mode, but you ONLY earn XP. You do not earn gold every 3 wins, or an XP boost every 3 wins. You do not have to worry about pushing your participation to the absolute max in order to benefit. You could skirt by, doing the absolute minimum of completing daily quests every three days and your weekly quests every seven days, and get the same benefits as the most hardcore players.
Basically playing casual Hearthstone will net you the same rewards as hardcore grinding used to get you. Playing Hearthstone when you feel like it becomes an option, not a handicap.
Of course, all of this is from what I can gather from what has been revealed. Maybe the leveling cap is way different from what they've shown. Obviously numbers will be very different if each level takes, say, 1500 or 2000 XP, or if daily/weekly quests offer much lower amounts of XP.
But based on the preview images in Blizzard's official post, it's looking pretty generous. Check back in a day or two? We'll have more solid figures at that point.
I don't think this is quite true. I think we could still grind XP, we just won't need to be so try-hard about doing it since we will be given it for playing in all game modes and (I assume) when we lose too. In which case hardcore players should still be getting more XP than people just doing their daily quests.
I appreciate this analysis.
I was thinking the Tavern Pass would include the BG perks. Not sure why I thought that, but obviously I was wrong!
I thought the same for the pre-order (that it included the Tavern Pass), because the mega bundles in the recent pass had included something Blizzard called the "Tavern Pass (previously Arena tickets + BG Perks)". I was disappointed when I read the fine print more closely (the Darkmoon Faire bundle includes Battlegrounds Perks only).
They had said during the big announcement day with the expansion reveal and everything, they made mention of the Tavern Pass changing to be this paid Rewards Track. But still, maybe because of the same thought, I believed BG perks would remain part of the Tavern Pass.
so as it's not mentioned in the patch notes, I'm guessing they still haven't updated to new Unity version and the S-pen bug on Samsung devices is still present :(
Does any other game charge this much for its Battle Pass? Leave it to Blizzard to drastically overcharge for something like this as the sun begins to set on its game
Clash of Clans is this much as well. It is, after all, only $5 / month
MTG Arena have the same
in mtg arena you could had bought your first pass with the welcome bundle, $20 worth of gems at $5.
3400 gems
then you could have earn enough gems to buy the next one or in the worst case almost one i think 2500 gems.
but you could
$20 just seems too much for the battle pass.
Would happily pay $10 as that seems fair, or they could throw it in with the expansion pre-order.
I do genuinely want to spend money on this game, but they keep making it harder to justify with how little you get in return.