Max number of turns in Mercenaries is 40

Singleplayer Discussion
#1

While doing my orc team tasks, I reached the annoying wall of doing 900 dmg with Rain of Destruction, 900 dmg to casters, and 900 dmg to fighters…

While some of those you get naturally, 900 dmg with Rain of Destruction is really hard to do in a non-fel team. So, I was trying to have Gul’dan in every single match.

Eventually, I crossed the odd opportunity to go against an Elite Protector team + Brightwing. I killed all 3 protectors fast, but BW survived.

I found that to be a rare opportunity to farm the quest… and simply casted RoD on her, skipping my other merc’s attacks, as she healed into eternity. By the time I reached BW, I still needed 850 dmg with RoD, so I calculated 850 / 14(dmg) = 60 turns minimum to get the task done.

Welp, I straight up just did that like a bot, using the Hearthfire addon to track my turns. At exactly turn 40, however, all my mercs exploded… and I lost the match.

I was fully prepared to do it again for the remaining 300 dmg on RoD, but to my surprise, the task completed.

:sweat_smile:

So, maybe a bug, or maybe Blizzard realizing their task is stupid… but their ainti-bot mechanic actually worked in my favor. I saved a good 10 mins of spamming the same ability.

/shrugs

#2

Yes, there is an undocumented turn limit in PvE… I think it used to be (or maybe still is) even fewer in PvP, and for a good reason, especially before the Fatigue mechanic (yes, in the days of those Sinestra vs Sinestra endgames it was especially prominent, probably prompting the introduction of fatigue).

PS Nowadays such tasks are often done with Cookie’s fishes, if nothing else — no need to wait for a perfect matchup. And before Cookie, Felwood was my method for many of them — looking for a Mad Summoner or a Blood Imp, eliminating the opposition quickly with Kurtrus and doing those tasks… often losing count in the process. :rofl:

For real old-timers:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iNp0PuzrGwU

And that was not even the worst, by the way… Voone’s task [1] was probably the dumbest, and Gruul used to have some tricky ones, especially about destroying dragons with the second ability, but I think it was either bugged or did not exactly require a kiling blow by that ability… By the way, that was in the days when BRM was the final zone (Executus being the final boss) and dragons in general were hard to come by…

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ektfMnybbzc

[UPD] Speaking of an ‘orc team’: (Mercs) Recipes for a 'perfect' Orc party .

#3

I do a lot of them with Cookie and Slitherspear, but this time the stars aligned so I went for it. I also don’t like to just have Cookie in every single comp. It gets boring after a while. I just wanted to play orcs through the story as I got all their quests done “naturally.” Now that all of them are done, I dropped them. There are 10+ other comps I like more.

Jesus!!! They really made some tasks annoying AF.