Reward Track & Tavern Pass
For the first time in Hearthstone's history, Hearthstone's progression system is being changed!
Here is everything revealed that you need to know so far.
Table of Contents
Progression System Summary
- Launches on November 12, alongside Achievements!
- The Reward Track is the name of the new progression system.
- In addition to awarding gold, you will be able to earn other rewards such as card packs from Standard, tavern tickets, legendary cards and more!
- Quests no longer offer gold, but award experience points (XP) that will be used in the Reward Track.
- In addition to Daily Quests, Weekly Quests are being added!
- Every expansion will feature a brand new Rewards Track, so you have about 4 months to complete all 50 levels.
- After completing all 50 levels, every level earned afterwards will award 150 gold instead.
- A paid version of the Rewards Track, called the Tavern Pass, will be present. While sharing the same leveling system, it will feature its own rewards on top of the Rewards Track and provide a permanent +10% XP boost for future experience points.
- Rewards from the Tavern Pass will only award cosmetic items. All gold and card packs earned will be from the Rewards Track.
Progression - Earning EXP
Every new expansion will bring with it a new Reward Track that consists of 50 levels of rewards.
Currently, there are 3 main ways of earning XP points on the Reward Pass:
- Playing the game in any mode.
This include Battlegrounds, Arena and the new Duels mode! - Completing select achievements in the new Achievements System.
New achievements will be added with every expansion, future game modes and every major update. - Completing Daily and Weekly Quests.
Every week, you'll be given 3 weekly quests. While these quests take more time than daily quests, in turn, they award more XP as well. Like daily quests, one weekly quest can be rotated for another weekly quest daily.
Do note that XP values in the above image are not final!
Rewards
When designing the Reward Track, Blizzard has designed it in such a way where there is more flexibility in earning rewards. This in turn allows them to offer a wider variety of rewards to offer to the player-base.
Here are the rewards that we currently know so far from the Madness at the Darkmoon Faire Reward Track! Once the full Reward Track is released, this list will be updated accordingly.
Reward Track
- Gold, gold and more gold!
- Card Packs from sets in Standard.
- Tavern Tickets that grant access to either Arena or Duels.
- 1 Epic Card, awarded at level 5.
- 2 Legendary Cards, awarded at levels 1 and 25.
- "Madness at the Darkmoon Faire" Card Back, awarded at level 10.
- A choice of Hero Skin from every class, awarded at level 50.
- After level 50, every level gained will reward the player with 150 gold.
Tavern Pass
So far, the Tavern Pass seems to offer only cosmetic items. Thus, other than the +10% XP boost helping the player to level up, all card packs and gold rewards are relegated to the Reward Track.
- +10% EXP Boost for the duration of the expansion.
- Golden Silas Darkmoon, awarded at level 1.
- Three Jaina Hero Skins, of which two are awarded at levels 5 and 20.
- Annhylde Alternate Warrior Hero and Card Back, awarded at level 25.
- Three Thrall Hero Skins, of which two are are awarded at levels 30 and 45.
- Darkmoon Coin, a Cosmetic Coin awarded at Level 50.
Comments
That is not how it works. You get xp from playing the game. You don't need to be able to level up heroes. Hero xp is something completely different
Things certainly look better than what we have right now. It's also nice that they aren't going to cap the amount of gold we can receive after grinding all those levels. There are still quite a lot of questions though. How fast can we grind those levels? How much exp will be required for further gold rewards after level 50? How much time this new system is going to ask of the average player? We will only have the answers after we experience it so let's wait and see. In a few months we will know if things got better or if the game is doomed.
Now, with the rewards currently revealed, i can say that this is still a big joke compared to Legends of Runeterra. I played LoR for three hours today to complete a few quests, receive the weekly chest (which i barely grinded for, totally forgot) and some pending tutorial missions and i was rewarded with 5 champions (the equivalent to legendary cards in HS), several epics, rares and commons, a decent amount of shards (equivalent to dust) and a bunch of wildcards (something that HS doesn't have). And i barely did anything. Just a bunch of tutorials for 150 exp, a few games against the A.I. to test a deck i made and 1 game against a real player.
The reward track in HS gives 1 epic and 2 legendary cards. ONE EPIC? For the whole track? And two legendaries (which i imagine are completely RANDOM)? There are more than 100 legendary and epic cards in standard. Most are unplayable. The disenchant cost for cards isn't receiving any adjustments. If you get garbage then too bad. You just spent a bunch of time grinding for gold that you will only spend in 4 months, several packs that might contain something you want or just dust, a few cosmetic items and three garbage unplayable cards that won't even be worth enough dust to craft a single legendary. Totally worth your time right? Now, imagine that once you spend your hard earned gold on packs from the next expansion... you hit the pity timer every single time. You get two to three legendaries that might not even be playable. And you have no choice but to go back to grinding.
The game might become more affordable. But it's still too expensive if you want to be competitive. They are not addressing that issue in the slightest. If Runeterra wasn't a thing or if i didn't start playing it (which i only did because HS was pushing me away from it) then i wouldn't be able to raise an argument about this. But i did. And this is inexcusable. I'm not joking. The difference is that outrageous. ActiBlizz isn't going to change its greedy ways.
Any CCG that's not Hearthstone or MTG HAS to give better rewards to entice players to try it. You're never going to see parity between them unless someone comes in and takes a huge percentage of their marketshare.
What is the XP for? Just determining where you are on the rewards track?
yes pretty much
Still a bit unsure about the pass, but it seems like it isn't p2w that much so that's good. If they told the truth, and were not losing gold. Then i'm not complaining. Also i might get the pass honestly, as long as it's not too expensive. I play the game a lot, so getting cosmetics finally for mage (one of my favorite classes) and finally another skin than morgl for shaman might be really interesting to me. But then again, those skins are probably like Tin Can Uther and Scholar jaina. (Probably no new voicelines, but if they do have new voicelines, it would be amazing!) Guess i'll wait with that pass until we know more about that.
It's unfortunate that BG and normal pass seem to be seperate. Kinda wish you could get both in 1, or unlock BG perks at pass lvl 50 or something, considering that's probably where you get later into the expansion. (Would allow you to "earn" BG perks later into the expansion, but still makes buying BG perks a good option at the start of a expansion.)
Thank god it's 150 gold after level 50 and not 50 or something like they initially wanted to do. I think it's a good change since we will only get more rewards and free skins
The lvl 50 hero skins are all the Tier 1 raid sets from classic WoW.
Nice touch for WoW fans.
maybe over time they will go into different tiers of sets . Like after 10motnhs of these so people could get all of showcased 10 we get new ones to pick from but they have tier 2(most famously boodfang)
They actually confirmed 3 tiers of portraits...
the jaina and thrall which upgrade. But thats not what im talking about.
those are for the paid pass.
Ones im talking about with tier 2armor from wow(judgement,blodofang) would be from FREE for 10months after current goes live and evry could gotten all the skins.
Okay, so we're finally going to get this whether we like it or not, so let's just have a go with it.
Positives are obvious. The better interface, the new hero portraits (which really surprises me how nice it looks), and there's only a slight pay to win element here (pay for the pass so you get 10% faster exp gain, which is the only objectively better perk compared to normal). There's no real cap to the amount of gold you can get (though its not obvious how much we need to play to max out), which is a nice idea too.
The negatives are less obvious, since we aren't really briefed on anything specific. Questions to ask;
- How fast the exp gain is for the average player. We don't actually know what the xp is required to max out, but its fair to assume that you can get there by just completing the quests every day (if this is not the case then that's a real bummer right here). Since there's actual reasons to get xp past the level cap (you get 150 gold for every level past) we can also assume that you would likely need to play as much as a legend player does to get anywhere near there.
- Whether the rewards will give out unwanted rewards like packs from previous expansions in lieu of gold. If blizz thinks a previous expansion pack is worth 100 gold, then they seriously need a stern clip across the ear. Also, I don't need arena passes, tavern passes, or the new duel passes. I need gold, and that's always preferable to others.
- How much gold we can theoretically gather up in time for the next expansion is not clear. But with the reward structure as we see it its likely that we wont exactly get that 8k gold per expansion as is customary.
- How obnoxious is the quests. Let's be clear here. I don't play battlegrounds to any regular amount of level. Just don't have the time. So if there is such a quest, I will obviously want to flip it. But it wouldn't help if I have to constantly flip only to see another annoying quest (play and win duels mode would probably be the worst of the lot) taunting me to complete or lose value. Let's hope there's as little as possible of such things.
It's going to be very difficult to say anything here. If a pack is a reward at a level, has it replaced gold or does it just meant there's more levels squeezed into the same amount of XP, at which point it's just a purely good bonus pack?
Personally I'd throw away this question completely since it is only ever answered implicitly by another of your questions: If we get as much (or more) gold than before then those 'unwanted rewards' can be counted as bonuses, but if we get less gold then they have replaced gold.
Another question to answer later once this is all released is when it will make sense to re-roll daily or weekly quests to maximize value. We don't have a list of all quests yet, do we?
Judging by there being a 'Win 2 place and above in battlegrounds' quest, I'm sure rerolling will still be thing
But you're right, we dont have a list yet so there's no way to tell whether rerolling daily will get us better rewards.
As long as i can get my 9k gold worth of stuff by the end of 4 months, i'll be happy about it, since this system seems to be a lot more interesting to play than those daily quests. Let's just hope it's not just a shiny new thing to distract us from the fact that it'll reduce our resource gathering between expansions...
Ever since the battle pass stuff was first talked about I've been concerned that it will reduce the amount of packs a reasonably dedicated F2P player can bank per expansion. Still feeling nervous about that after reading about this progression system announcement until they put out some real details about the level rewards.
so once you hit 50 do you have to choose a skin to unlock? can you unlock the other ones in the same season/next season or do they go away?
I don't think we know that yet, but a good question to ask really. I'm still just trying to find out, do we get gold with each level 1-50 as well? It says "Gold, gold, and more gold" in the article, but I don't see anything to say how much per level other than the 150/lvl after lvl 50.
EDIT: But to answer the first half your question, it sounds like we get to choose the hero we want, yes. Which is smart since they probably know some people only play certain classes. No use awarding a Shaman portrait to someone who only plays Mage and Warlock.
Hey there!
While gold denominations are shown on the levels, I didn't commit to counting then because there's a lot that we don't know yet, such as EXP values. Gold values may change as well.
This guide will be updated when we know more details. I'm disappointed we didn't get a full picture yet, because then we will be able to do more calculations.