I played a lot of Mercenaries when it first came out. However, there were two things that made me stop playing.
The exhausting boring grind.
The coin system.
There was a point when I had all the mercenaries, however, there have been many more that have been added since that time. However, that being said, the grind is still intense so if you really want to be able to play pvp in mercenaries you have to buy mercenary packs, but the issue is the coin system is so restrictive that you have to spend a fair amount of gold or actual money in order to obtain an amount of coin for a particular mercenary in order to upgrade.
If you don’t have a mercenary, crafting is not something I would recommend anyone to ever due in the current state because then you can’t even play the mercenary as it’s useless if you can upgrade the skills.
How I feel the coin system should be is…
Rare coins to be used on any rare mercenary
Epic coins to be used on any epic mercenary
Legendary coin to be used on any Legendary mercenary
I have a couple mercenary that have 1k coin that I can’t use because they are maxed out. While at the same time I have some of the newer mercenaries that have less than 100 coin at level 30.
I mean in regular hearthstone you don’t have DUST that can only be used to craft specific cards, the dust is free to use on any card providing you have the right amount of dust to craft the card based on rarity.
I feel that if Blizzard fixes the coin system Mercenary would have the ability to shine. It just doesn’t feel good when you buy 20 packs and get maybe enough coin to upgrade 1 skill on a mercenary you need while still getting coin towards mercenaries you have maxed out.
I saw a post by someone that Blizzard plans on making changes to the coin system, however, that seems to be taking a really long time considering how long mercenaries has been around for now.
There are already better games with a similar “rank up” system that are obviously p2w (level 6 against level 8, guess who is at an advantage?), which are older than mercenaries but have a better progression system.
I don’t really understand what people are looking for in mercenaries: if it’s bad now, it can only get worse.
A new game should give you TONS of free stuff, to involve you playing it (see master duels), while in mercenaries we saw the opposite (nerf of whatever the grinding system was).
Months after release there are still many basic problematics unsolved (see excess coins).
I honestly have no idea what keeps you from leaving this mode
Is it fun even without having everything maxed? From what people posted on the forum it seems like they have to max out every mercenary they use before playing against real enemies, but they also hate grinding, so what’s the deal?
I do believe that mercenary has potential, but not in its current state. I actually enjoyed playing it, however, but stopped for reasons I mentioned above. But only time will tell, what is clear though, mercenaries did not take off the way blizzard anticipated it would, it’s been a disappointment.
You could take out the word “coin” in the title and you’d still be correct about the mode.
The best choice I’ve ever made in my entire gaming life was not purchasing this mode. And that’s saying a lot because I also never purchased Warcraft 3: Reforged.
Now I’ve never bought coins - did throw down cash at release and farm like a sad person for two weeks to max out six different parties.
So don’t buy coins - just farm the given single player for the hero you want leveled ad nauseam. Include that hero for added chance for coins. Do this till you question your life choices and blam, you’ll have enough or realize mercs simply isn’t fun.
The fact that Battlegrounds is getting more content (buddies, boards, hero skins galore) than their fancy-pants new game mode indicates to me that they know mercenaries came across to most players as a wet fart.
I think they can salvage the mode, but, boy does it need a LOT of work. Training grounds was a step in the right direction, but the coin system as mentioned is just abominable.
It gets so much worse the more you play. I have 109,486 excess coins not counting the thousands in mercs that I have enough coins to max out but haven’t unlocked their task 7 equipment yet because they’re basically useless and I am nowhere close to the most coins. I know someone with 5 times as many excess coins as me (probably more than that by now). If I open packs when there’s no new mercs available getting packs with literally nothing I can use in them is a fairly regular occurrence. In a mode where money is made from selling packs having packs with literally nothing usable in them is a complete failure of monetization. It’s not even greed on their part just horrendous monetization. I just maxed out Garrosh last week and I have already over 200 useless coins for him and he’s a legendary.
If you somehow get through the massive grind there’s an actually fun game underneath all that.
It’s extremely fixable. I say that because it mostly just needs things other hearthstone packs already have like pity timers and some sort of generic currency.
That’s more a case of perception rather than reality. Nobody has every merc maxed out. Their plan is to release new mercs roughly every month and thus far they have (so no to whoever said BGs gets more regular content added to it that’s not the case). Maxing out 4 or 5 mercs in a month is almost impossible without a crazy amount of free time and high boredom threshold. There’s also very few cases where the extra +1/+5 makes a difference. Numbers in mercenaries are quite high and getting the +1/+5 isn’t super important. If you have your important abilities and the equipment you’ll be using maxed out that’s enough usually. It does seem like the bonus matters though and they’d be better served baking that into the max level stats rather than a maxing all abilities and equipment bonus or taking it out entirely to be replaced with a cosmetic reward.
man you hit it right on the head its a shame blizzard don’t listen… they wanted to make it worst when the took the stranger out of the barrens alone./…
That’s wishful thinking 1x1 rarity conversion into another merc. Have you seen the selling price 4 coins these days?. There’s ppl that have over 100kcoins overall.
Anyhow why it has taken this long to address this issue; only reason is $$. The longer it takes the more problematic it remains unsolved.
There’s actually more complicated reasons than this. I don’t really think money is the reason though because this drives down the value of buying anything since packs have huge diminishing returns and coins run the high likelihood of becoming worthless.
The real problem are the numbers they set it at and what kind of conversion they allow. They go too generous and the entire mode becomes free forever for a large part of the player base and it encourages grinding trivial content. They go too stingy and the change might as well not exist. There’s also questions of do you lock coins to a specific rarity? If you do and it’s hard locked then you quickly run into the problem of useless rare coins. If you let people convert coins between rarities what ratio do you do it at again?
If they simply went with a single generic currency the conversion rate would need to be at least 30:1 to make grinding heroic 1-1 not the most efficient way to get coins you want and funnel people towards more challenging and engaging content. At the stingiest I don’t think it should be any worse than 100:1 for it to still be relevant.
There’s also a question of the UI in which you get and spend the more generic coins which isn’t insignificant as it needs to fit on a bunch of different mobile screens and desktop.
It’s a big job but is really something they should’ve had ready at launch and it’s gonna be hard to make this system both worthwhile for players that want to try out or return to the mode and not make the game free forever for established players.
