Update: Liv has confirmed on reddit that the legendary questline will be available throughout the entire expansion. (Source)
So, that's still a ton of games that need to be played, but at least we have almost 4x the amount of time to work towards it. Original post is down below.
More information is available now on the upcoming faction war event that is coming to Hearthstone in the Fractured in Alterac Valley expansion including details on the Legendary Questline.
- Logging in to the game makes you choose your faction - Alliance or Horde.
- If you've logged in since the previous patch, you've already chosen your faction for the event.
- The war runs from December 7 until January 11.
- When the war ends, a tally will occur and the winning faction decides which card will get Diamond art - Drek'Thar or Vanndar Stormpike.
- A Legendary questline is available that is progressed by earning honor.
- This questline rewards several Rare Golden cards.
- There is also a Golden Legendary reward at the end - the card from the faction you didn't pick.
During the event, everyone will earn Honor points by playing games in Standard, Wild, Classic, Arena, and Duels. Wins providing more honor.
- 10 Honor for every game played
- 10 more Honor for every game won (20 total)
- 20 more Honor for every game won versus an opponent of the enemy faction (40 total)
Your Honor is how you progress through your faction's Legendary quest. Everyone will be able to unlock the same rewards, they just get rewarded in a different order. This order is the same order that you'd follow in progression inside of World of Warcraft's Alterac Valley Battleground. Such great flavor!
How Hard is it to Finish the Alterac Valley Legendary Questline?
With 7200 Honor being required to unlock all the rewards, that's a cool 720 games played if you don't win any. Incoming bot storm! We know you're the best though and will win all your games and they will always be against the enemy faction, which brings it down to180 games - the fewest number of games possible to play for all the rewards.
Realistically though, let's make a few assumptions here:
- Players should win half their games on average.
- The player base is equally split between Alliance and Horde, you should see half your games against the opposing faction.
- More likely, Horde is biased here so Alliance players may have an easier time earning the rewards.
Knowing that we're likely to encounter an even number of Alliance and Horde opponents, we can assume the average honor that will be earned for a win is 30 ((40 + 20) / 2). With our next assumption of a 50/50 winrate, we can further assume that the value of playing a single game of Hearthstone is going to be 20 Honor ((10+30) / 2). I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but 7200 / 20 is 360 - that's a ton of games that we need to play to get all the rewards.
With the Alterac Valley faction war lasting 36 days, that means you're going to need to play, on average, 10 games per day. That isn't a crazy amount of Hearthstone to play each day, but with the holiday season coming into full swing, its a bit unfortunate to have the looming dread of grinding Hearthstone games at your side.
Now, there could be some alternate forms of grinding out Honor which would speed up the process, but none of Blizzard's official communications have confirmed that - we'll have to wait and see.
Fractured in Alterac Valley Legendary Questline Rewards
Here are all the rewards for the Legendary Questline and how much honor each step requires.
| Alliance Quest | Alliance Reward | Horde Quest | Horde Reward | Quest Honor Quota | Achieve Honor Quota |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Corporal | x1 Golden Stormpike Aid Station | Grunt | x1 Golden Frostwolf Kennels | 40 | 40 |
| Sergeant | x1 Golden Stormpike Aid Station | Sergeant | x1 Golden Frostwolf Kennels | 80 | 120 |
| Master Sergeant | x1 Golden Dun Baldar Bunker | Senior Sergeant | x1 Golden Iceblood Tower | 180 | 300 |
| Sergeant Major | x1 Golden Dun Baldar Bunker | First Sergeant | x1 Golden Iceblood Tower | 260 | 560 |
| Knight | x1 Golden Dun Baldar Bridge | Stone Guard | x1 Golden Iceblood Garrison | 400 | 960 |
| Knight-Lieutenant | x1 Golden Dun Baldar Bridge | Blood Guard | x1 Golden Iceblood Garrison | 500 | 1460 |
| Knight-Captain | x1 Golden Iceblood Garrison | Legionnaire | x1 Golden Dun Baldar Bridge | 540 | 2000 |
| Knight-Champion | x1 Golden Iceblood Garrison | Centurion | x1 Golden Dun Baldar Bridge | 620 | 2620 |
| Lieutenant Commander | x1 Golden Iceblood Tower | Champion | x1 Golden Dun Baldar Bunker | 660 | 3280 |
| Commander | x1 Golden Iceblood Tower | Lieutenant General | x1 Golden Dun Baldar Bunker | 780 | 4060 |
| Marshal | x1 Golden Frostwolf Kennels | General | x1 Golden Stormpike Aid Station | 840 | 4900 |
| Field Marshal | x1 Golden Frostwolf Kennels | Warlord | x1 Golden Stormpike Aid Station | 900 | 5800 |
| Grand Marshal | x1 Golden Drek'Thar | High Warlord | x1 Golden Vanndar Stormpike | 1400 | 7200 |
Comments
So I chose the Horde and got Drek'thar. Today in a Fireside Gathering I opened a normal copy of Vanndar. I feel like this shouldn't happen since we will get both Legendaries anyway, as long as we complete the Questline. So, was i scammed or will I get a full dust refund? Feels like a wasted Legendary
Anyone else unable to see opponent's faction while playing on mobile? Also haven't been able to see rank in quite some time (several patches ago) on mobile.
By the way, I'm already at legend so it shouldn't be hiding because of MMR matching.
"Knowing that we're likely to encounter an even number of Alliance and Horde opponents"
Nope! I played about 10 games today and 9 of them was against Horde. The Horde Legys was just waaaay better it seems like.
Hm. Are you Horde or Alliance? I’m Horde and it feels like I’m fighting way more Alliance than Horde.
If the game is biasing in favor of picking cross-faction opponents, that will speed up the progression a lot
I played some more games yesterday and I got a few more Alliance enemies - but still at the end I got about 75-80% Horde enemies overall.
I am Horde for myself.
it seems HONOR gathering is already started. How do we know how much HONOR we / our faction has?
So it seems like you won't get any Honor from Casual games, right? That's a shame.
So play ranked? Its not a big bad wolf, its literally the same thing as casual gameplay wise
I’m the one that made the Reddit thread with the math. Do I get a brownie or something, flux
I never saw a reddit thread prior to Liv's post, but grats!
Got 3 questions here.
1. I assume the Legendary Quest is personal honor points, not mixed with others, right?
2. Do we still need to include either Vanndar or Drek'thar in our deck to gain honor points?
3. Are those rewards from Legendary quest counts towards duplicate protections? It's only rares though, so you ended up getting all of them eventually when you open 80+ packs. But the rewards track Lv.65 and 75 is epic. Sucks to open them early.
4. Can we get non-golden variant of either Vannder or Drek-thar from opening packs? If so, I think it's more profitable to rush the quest then.
I don't have the slightest interest about cosmetics or golden cards, so this whole thing will be pointless to me because, for sure, none of those golden cards will be craftable, right?
They probably won't be uncraftable, so if you don't care at all about cosmetics and golden cards then this is a free 2800 dust.
We earn 10 honor for every game played, not only for those we win, so I think it's 25 honor on average per game (30/2 + 10).
Then we need to win 7200 / 25 = 288 games to get all the rewards. It's still a huge amount of games, but not that much compared to 360 😅
No, I think Flux's math is right. Here we're assuming that (a) You win half your games and (b) Half your wins are against the other faction.
So, suppose you play 100 games. That works out to:
...which adds up to 2,000 honor for 100 games, or 20 honor/game.
Update from the bluetracker:
Liv has confirmed on reddit that the legendary questline will be available throughout the entire expansion. (Source)
So yes, it is indeed going to take 360 games but that's okay because you have 4 months to do them. So thats 2.5ish games of Hearthstone per day instead.
Maybe I'm missing something. What do the Quest - Honor Quota and Achievement - Honor Quota columns mean? Ordinarily I'd assume it means something like either "You need X honor, and no more than Y can come from quests/achievements", or else "You need X honor, and at least Y must come from quests/achievements." But there isn't an X listed.
That said, it does seem to imply you can get honor from quests and from achievements, besides the honor you get from just playing and winning games, so maybe that reduces the number of games we have to grind through...
Ooooh I get it. There's a "become a Grunt" quest and also a "Grunt" achievement (and same for all the other ranks). The honor totals for the quests are standalone -- "Okay, you're a Grunt, now you have to earn 80 more honor to be a Sergeant". The honor totals for the achievements are all-inclusive -- to be a Sergeant you have to have earned a total of 120 honor all told. And so on all the way up. (A newly minted Stone Guard needs to earn 500 more honor to become a Blood Guard, at which point they'll have 1460 honor in total, which is the amount needed for the Blood Guard achievement.)
Which is super confusing because if there really are achievements... that means this will be the first round of achievements that are only completable during a specific time frame.
I don't have an issue with that because several online games have achievements that are "Legacy" or "Feats of Strength" which showcase someone's progress over many years (hell, we do that here on Out of Cards), but I'm curious if they're going to list them separately. It would be super annoying to display them as unearned achievements after the event is over. We'll find out in like 14 hours though so \o/