Hearthstone's Book of Mercenaries makes a return with Cariel Roame getting her addition in the adventure today.
Completing all 8 chapters of the adventure will reward you with a free Paladin card pack which contains cards from Standard sets.
Quote From Blizzard The paladin Cariel Roame has returned home to find Stormwind in flames. Her sister Tamsin has summoned the dreadlord Anetheron and assaulted the city with an army of demons. Cariel and her companions are the city's last line of defense. At least one mercenary won't make it out alive. Find out who when Book of Mercenaries Cariel launches November 9. Defeating all 8 bosses in this linear adventure will reward 1 Paladin pack, containing only Paladin cards from Standard!
Comments
Well, that was an okay adventure. At least it had as much story as with Tamsin's, and unlike the others it actually had a tone other than the usual disney-eques family humor. That's one storyline resolved at least, and there seem to be 4 more;
- Scabbs and Varden's escape from prison, and probable confrontation with someone
- Tavish probably has a storyline, but so far its not exactly clear other than the one battle in dwarven district. The new expansion may give him an objective to focus on.
- Xyrella's storyline with the shard. I would be pleasantly surprised if blizz pulls a fast one and decides against an obvious happy ending in this one.
- Brukan and Rokara. Not sure what to do with this two. We know Rokara stole the juggernaunt, probably focused on that. While Brukan is really just there. Aside from his flashy naked half body showoff on the boat, what else is he supposed to be doing?
The last battle was a complete joke compared to the second last though.
Welp, that was kind of an underwhelming conclusion. Alright, who's gonna rez Tamsin for the next expansion? Is it Kel'thuzad? I bet it'll be Kel'thuzad.
Also what happened to Xyrella, what's she doing during all of this? Do we just have to wait for the Scabbs book to find out?
I liked it personally. It was very much a family matter rather than a big advancement of the plot, and that's a decent way to make use of the family they introduced. The first mission in particular did much more for Cariel's character than I expected.
There's no way K'T will res Tamsin. Quite aside from him being less than welcome in Stormwind by this point, he has no love for demons, the Burning Legion, and the forsaken, so why would he want to res a forsaken warlock? If she does get res'd in some capacity, I expect the Horde mercs to be involved.
As for Xyrella, she got the shit beaten into her by Tamsin shortly before Cornelius arrived, so she's probably just tending her wounds wherever she fled to, if she's not unconscious. I assume the events of her questline (purifying the void shard) happen in the aftermath of it all. Taking the questlines as guide to what everyone is doing around this time, I guess we'll find out next time that Scabbs has taken advantage of the commotion to do a bit of sleuthing.
Yeah, the first one was quite nice (and I want Young Cariel to use my face as a chair), but from there on it just kept going...downwards. The whole Anetheron thing felt more like a climax than the Tamsin fight. It doesn't help that Tamsin's deck is weak and super easy to beat. Didn't feel like a climactic battle but rather like putting down a dying animal.
I also expected more interesting dialogue. It really just went from "I'm gonna save my sister" to "nvm she's evil, gotta kill her". Maybe they wanted to tone it down after how intense the last one was, but it didn't really work for me.
I agree the final Tamsin fight was a bit too easy (though I did screw myself over at the final hurdle by playing the 9-mana card that is there for the story, only to find out her minions were way bigger than mine... whoops). That said, it does make sense that Anertheron felt like the bigger fight, because it was the bigger fight. Not just that it was 2 fights (I'm not sure why they didn't just make it 2 phases of a single fight, but oh well), but that as far as Stormwind was concerned that was the fight that mattered. Tamsin was just a family matter to mop up afterwards.
The change from saving to killing her sister may have come quickly in the dialogue, but she had been forced to kill the reanimated corpse of her father by that point, so her willingness to see good in Tamsin had taken an irrecoverable blow. It's pretty difficult to cling to the idea of protecting family when said family has just killed and defiled another family member. I'm not saying it was handled and paced perfectly, but it was about as good as we can hope a card game to do it given how atrocious it is as a medium for story-telling.
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[The stuff below is just me indulging in my love of the design of the forsaken]
I'm glad they didn't end with Cariel being able to help Tamsin, because she shouldn't have been able to. The forsaken are fundamentally broken characters whose emotional range is tragically 1-dimensional (they are generally left with only 1 emotion when they are brought back). It looks like poor character design but it's actually really clever as it lets them tell stories about characters who truly lack the emotional depth that the living people around them expect them to have.
Sylvanas, for instance, has been simmering in anger ever since Arthas turned her into a banshee, which is why she snaps with so little provocation, and why her worldview is so twisted. She gets no catharsis from doing, well, anything, and nor would Tamsin. It's just anger followed by more anger, and no amount of sisterly love will ever bring her out of that. Sylvanas looked like she came close when she reunited with Vereesa Windrunner during Garrosh's trial, but she wanted to kill her sister so they could 'live' together in the Undercity, which shows just how corrupted her idea of love had become. Of course the moment that plan fell apart, Sylvanas went on a bloody rampage and finally let go of the falsehood that she actually knew what love was anymore.
The forsaken aren't all edge-lords though. Some forsaken do get left with positive emotions, and the book Before the Storm does a good job of showing how the Undercity was populated by generally nice people getting by with a shit situation. I love the idea that these happy forsaken can't actually feel negative emotions anymore, and they press on with their 'lives' with a mangled smile on their face. They are just as emotionally broken as Tamsin and Sylvanas, but are rather more socially acceptable (ignoring the rotting zombie part).