Mercenaries ftp farm results so far:

Community Discussion
1

The mode has been my main game since it came out and I thought I’d share my farming results before the new mercs come out. The only packs I’ve bought were from 300 gold(3 packs) near the start.

I have a day job, so my time spent per day would be 4-8 hours depending on what day it is.

I was one of the people abusing the water elemental bounty to farm tasks and since the MS change I switched to farming what I needed, since the rare ones were( from the first 3 bounties) were maxed.

First I’m going to share the current status of my roster.

Tasks maxed left task coins Left to farm
Red Mercs
Alexstrasza 18 y
Cairne Bloodhoof 18 y
Cariel Roame 16 y
Cornelius Roame 10 y
Garrosh Hellscream 7 1275 720 555
Grommash Hellscream 13 161 365
Gruul 18 y
King Mukla 18 y
Kurtrus Ashfallen 8 175 700
Lord Jaraxxus 16 172 155 17
Malfurion Stormrage 18 y
Mannoroth 18 y
Mr. Smite 5 774 780
Ragnaros 10 780 540 240
Sneed 6 822 720 102
The Lich King 0 733 980
Thrall 5 1103 780 323
Varian Wrynn 7 1300 720 580
Green Mercs
Blademaster Samuro 15 y
Diablo 18 y
Illidan Stormrage
Edwin, Defias Kingpin 7 1043 720 323
Eudora 18 y
King Krush 18 y
Lady Anacondra 18 y
Mutanus 7 440 700
Old Murk-Eye 12 y
Rathorian 9 y
Rexxar 18 y
Rokkara 14 y
Saurfang 18 y
Scabbs Cutterbutter 8 240 750
Sylvanas Windrunner 18 y
Tavisn Stormspike 18 y
Tirion Fordring 8 837 720 117
Tyrande 13 y
War Master Voone 9 y
Blue Mercs
Anduin Wrynn 18 y
Antonidas 13 y
Baron Geddon 7 y
Blink Fox 8 y
Brightwing 18 y
Bru’kan 18 y
Cookie, the Cook 18 y
Guff Runetotem 10 y
Gul’dan 13 y
Jaina Proudmoore 18 y
Millhouse 15 y
Morgl the Oracle 16 y
Natalie Seline 18 y
Prophet Velen 14 y
Tamsin Roame 8 y
Uther 8 719 720
Varden Dawngrasp 18 y
Vol’jin 11 y
Xyrella 18 y
284 2257

All in all I’ll likely max everyone with more than 33% of the tasks left to do and many many packs unearned.

Here are some of the runs I’ve tracked, in regards to legendary coins and MS.

merc map times leg coins strangers run on which it was encountered
Fallern guardians (normal) 10 150 3 1,3,10
Fallern guardians (heroic) 5 man 5 160 3 1,3,4
Fallern guardians (heroic) 76 1105 36 1,2,5,7,10,11,12,14,15,20,21,22,25,26,29,30,32,36,37,38,39,42,45,51,52,53,55,57,58,60,65,69,70,71,75,76 0 coins for task 11-15
Lord Banehollow (heroic) 40 660 13 1,2,10,13,14,19,20,23,30,32,36,38,39
Lord Banehollow (normal) 9 105 4 1,4,6,8
High justice Grimstone (normal) 73 785 32 1,3,4,6,7,9,10,12,18,20,22,24,25,29,34,36,37,42,43,48,49,51,52,53,55,56,58,59,60,63,65,68,70,72,73
Corrupted ancient (heroic) 59 880 30 1,2,6,7,8,11,13,16,19,20,21,22,23,24,26,27,28,31,34,35,39,42,43,44,45,48,49,53,55,58
Snowclaw (normal) 111 1370 50 1,3,5,8,10,13,14,15,16,17,24,26,27,30,33,35,36,37,38,39,42,43,44,45,46,47,48,49,50,51,55,69,72,74,75,76,77,82,83,88,89,90,91,94,100,101,103,106,107 0 tasks for runs 56-68
General Drakkisath (normal) 38 410 22 1,2,3,5,6,10,13,14,17,18,19,20,21,23,24,27,28,31,32,35,38
Emperor Thaurissan (normal) 46 585 27 1,2,3,4,5,7,10,11,14,15,18,19,21,22,23,25,27,30,32,33,36,37,40,41,44,45,46
Rend Blackhand (normal) 48 590 23 1,2,4,5,6,12,17,21,22,23,25,26,27,28,30,31,32,34,37,46,47,48

After rend I stopped recording since it seems like I get a lot less strangers when I’m spamming the same bounty on average and I didn’t have to do as many runs to max out a merc.

My speculation for encountering will come in the form of the following tips.
1.If you don’t encounter an MS on 3 consecutive runs on a bounty, change to doing bounties in another zone.
2.The number of maxed mercs in your team seem to affect the MS encounter rate negatively. (Whenever I was running a new comp with no (or almost no) maxed mercs I was encountering the MS a lot more.
3.MS encounter rate seems to sometimes be affected by the play session and time played. If you just can’t encounter any, in 7+ runs I suggest just turning off the game and taking a break (maybe 2-4 hours).

I can’t say those tips are definitive, but it’s what I currently abide by.

For pure coin farming I suggest doing the first heroic bounty with 6 mercs you want to get coins for, since you’re guaranteed to get 10 coin from the the last chest and it takes 4-10 min depending on how you do it. Time wise and considering the average amounts of legendary coins per run, it’s a good option when your collection is nearing completion and you have only 1 merc per boss to farm.

Hope someone found this helpful.

ps: pvp should be played for fun since the rewards aren’t duplicate protected in any way and as you collection gests nearer to getting maxed you’ll often effectively receive no reward).

4 Likes
2

The data for the Mysterious Stranger hunting is always welcome for Mercenaries. Can’t say I will use it all, but I’m sure someone will.

Furthermore, this is damn impressive.

3

Finally managed to max everyone, and I think I have about the same amount of coins in excess.

Tasks maxed Extra coins
Red Mercs
Alexstrasza 18 y 977
Cairne Bloodhoof 18 y 1299
Cariel Roame 17 y 5140
Cornelius Roame 11 y 2037
Garrosh Hellscream 9 y 121
Grommash Hellscream 14 y 29
Gruul 18 y 1149
King Mukla 18 y 1826
Kurtrus Ashfallen 11 y 1082
Lord Jaraxxus 18 y 408
Malfurion Stormrage 18 y 2496
Mannoroth 18 y 903
Mr. Smite 9 y 2711
Ragnaros 12 y 1705
Sneed 10 y 291
The Lich King 9 y 410
Thrall 12 y 582
Trigore the Lasher 15 y 159
Vanessa VanCleef 18 y 12
Varian Wrynn 9 y 150
Green Mercs
Blademaster Samuro 17 y 3308
Diablo 18 y 1082
Illidan Stormrage 9 y 227
Edwin, Defias Kingpin 7 y 475
Eudora 18 y 46
King Krush 18 y 1438
Lady Anacondra 18 y 2758
Mutanus 9 y 335
Old Murk-Eye 14 y 1395
Rathorian 11 y 2272
Rexxar 18 y 509
Rokkara 15 y 21217
Saurfang 18 y 607
Scabbs Cutterbutter 9 y 1241
Sylvanas Windrunner 18 y 1115
Tavisn Stormspike 18 y 1823
Tirion Fordring 15 y 533
Tyrande 16 y 919
Valeera Sanquinar 18 y 45
War Master Voone 10 y 3658
Blue Mercs
Anduin Wrynn 18 y 1129
Antonidas 14 y 705
Baron Geddon 7 y 570
Blink Fox 10 y 2089
Brightwing 18 y 632
Bru’kan 18 y 5999
Cookie, the Cook 18 y 1513
Guff Runetotem 10 y 4262
Gul’dan 13 y 644
Jaina Proudmoore 18 y 533
Millhouse 15 y 17930
Morgl the Oracle 16 y 3322
Natalie Seline 18 y 804
Prophet Velen 15 y 667
Sky Admiral Rogers 18 y 70
Tamsin Roame 11 y 3785
Uther 15 y 211
Varden Dawngrasp 18 y 2693
Vol’jin 14 y 920
Xyrella 18 y 19827
202 136795

Also have 15 packs to open xD.
Hope we can do stuff with the extra coins soon.

Time to exploit the Valeera before she get’s nerfed.

2 Likes
4

That’s truly impressive. Though I’m not a hardcore farmer I have 58-60 mercs, did spent 11k gold fm my saved gold and bought the cheap welcome pack and done almost all pve except the last 3(darn it, can’t figure it out yet but I will eventually). How’s you pvp exp? Is the next stop considering you have all it now…

5

I find the pvp enjoyable in general. Only downside is that currently if you want to win you should really play Valeera, or just concede the fact that you’ll loose every match you have against her. And mirrors are pretty much a coin flip on the first move. After that you can just concede. After the nerf her stealth speed gear. It will probably get back to being interesting.

Now I’ll just do the daily tasks and some pvp for fun. No more grinding until more content is added.

Also time to grind the reward track again xD.

1 Like
6

Gosh, don’t tell me you farm the chests achievements of the current exp as well? I got to lvl 260 last exp, but I don’t progress on the achievements because you need to ladder and I’m down basically to monday ladder and the rest is just casuals fun…

7

Wow, just wow.
This is just incredible.

8

I usually max out the reward track by the first 3rd of the 4th month, thx to tons of afk-ing (just pressing the play button while doing other stuff) on the other screen. Mercs however doesn’t seem to give good exp unless you actually time every battle to 30 min and I think it’s currently bugged. + Getting D5 or legend gives free packs and an epic, so that’s good.

9

I’m nearly done maxing out all my Mercs. I only get an hour or two each day to play but was also a pre-nerf elemental farmer. I did buy the one bundle for $4.99USD and have bought a few packs for gold when new Mercs have come out. I play the mode a lot less now. Just became too grindy and the pvp is lackluster.

10

Pvp is fun 4 me, though hard as I don’t really farm and do not have max out mercs. This season I’ve been playing mostly people even in real low rankings(last season was mostly bots till 6.5k). I guess is because of mmr or something(don’t know if they changed how you are pair), because if I lose 2 in a row I usually get a bot for 1 fight at least. Waiting periods are still an issue, specially if it is my 1st pvp of the day and I have to wait 4 a person to pvp with, sometimes I need to cancel several games, until the game just gives me a fast waiting period no bot pvp.

11

I don’t want to sound like a downer here op, but wow. Most people don’t have that level of time commitment to invest in the game. If you have to put nearly a work day’s worth of time into it, that’s not fun, that’s a job. And people get paid to work, they don’t pay to work. Even with fake money, or their time.

On top of it, the boosting was done using a method that can’t be duplicated anymore, so most of the data isn’t valid.

TLDR: That a payoff in mercstone takes this much investment and required a shortcut they patched out…it’s not a game, it’s a job you are paying one way or another for.

1 Like
12

My current way of farming is about as effective if not more than what it was in the beginning. If I had to farm everything again it would probably take about half of the time. Conversely it would also be a lot less fun.

All the data was gathered after the stranger nerft, so it’s still quite valid.

The my idea in posting my data isn’t to say that the mode is easy or hard to grind. It’s to give everyone the needed information to decide for themselves if the mode is worth their time and how long it will take to max everything out.

Also, if they want to complain to the devs about it, so that it may be made easier.

Imo, the time commitment is quite extreme in general, though compared to the main card mode, it’s more like a joke.

13

The current Mercenaries mode lacks longevity, replayability and depth. There’s zero endgame.

The PVE is boring, repetitive and forgettable. The storyline, what little there is, was poorly conceived. How interesting is “Fetch my shard. Oh, there’s more. Fetch another shard.”? I can’t even recall any specific part of it. I don’t see the Mercs as anything more than colorful ovals that attack other colorful ovals. Red (Rock), Blue (Paper) and Green (Scissors).

The PVP is cringy. I can take any 6 maxed level 30 mercs and still see a lot of AI opponents. This is no different than when I would take 1-2 sub-30’s in the group. The majority of live opponents have their mercs at max, so there’s little variance in what is played, what gear is being used or how it will play out. I could live without the Pit.

They were too busy trying to cash-in with Diablo as a selling point for the mode/game. A character that has zero connection to any of the others you can acquire in mercs, or any other mode for that matter. They pushed the idea that pre-orders would give an advantage because the Mercs (Diablo, Sylvanas and Lich King) were allegedly the best in the game. The only thing all those pre-orders did was suck the money out of your wallet for things you could have had for free. There’s plenty of gold to be made in game if you really want to buy packs. Even the $4.99USD starter bundle I bought felt like a waste of money afterwards. Unless you really like skins, you don’t need any packs. The first few free packs are more than enough to get going. As more people realize this the profitability of the mode will be gone.

“Why buy the cow, when they give you the milk for free?”

The concept of Mercenaries itself is not bad. The design and execution are the reasons it is failing. They made the mode, added it to the game and seemingly forgot to come up with a long-term plan for it. “Add more Mercs and coins to farm” is not a strategy that is going to work for long.

Do you have the per-nerf data by chance? I think a lot of the imbalance in the mode comes from everything that occurred in that first week. I can tell the difference between my main server that started day 1 and my alt server that started after the hotfix. The task grind was a major advantage that first week. I’m not sure people really understand how bad that made it for attracting and keeping new players.

I think they took the info the wrong way. I’m voting for this to get :pushpin:. If read and taken like it’s obviously intended, this is very useful information for players. I appreciate the time and effort you put in to provide this.

14

The problem with the task farming is that you’ll still need about 66%(for the specific mercs. probably more like 50% for everyone since you get other coins from tasks) of the coins from actually farming after all the tasks are done. And since you don’t actually get any of those by farming the elemental in the end it’s hard to say if the time spend would be much less.

Their general idea was probably for people to need a lot more time to farm coins, while they make other things to monetize (boards extra skins, emotes, etc).
It just didn’t occur to them at the start just how much time people may shave off from spamming tasks. And when the tasks run out everyone would complain again for lack of content. Only farming coins with no tasks left would make it very boring.
During my whole farming I was only focused on tasks, and the results show that spending too much time in the mode will lead to having many tasks left undone. In that regard, spending less time in the mode and waiting for daily tasks would prove more time efficient. So more casual playing of the mode is probably a better idea.
You don’t need to max everything, I just set a challenge to myself to objectively see how long it would take w/o hardcoring it.
If you want to play the mode you probably need only about 10-20 of them to be able to do everything. In many matchups whether a merc is maxed makes no difference at all(in some they do xD)

I think they should add an extra reward to the rank chests so that people actually care for them. I think portraits may do the job, since they’re the only thing in the game that’s not available currently. For example one random rare for 7500 rating (upgrades to epic if you have all rares. One random epic for 10000 rating (upgrades to legendary if you have all) and one legendary for 120000 rating. Getting 3 portraits per month I think won’t do anything to the economy since there are way too many portraits and it’d give people more of a reason to go to the pit.

As far as bots go. I haven’t seen one since they nerfed their encounter rate. It does seem that you can match against maxed comps even if you’re not maxed. Recently I fought one that have a lv 17 and 19 in the roster (though that was only one out of many)

15

This 100%. The entire presentation is abysmal throughout.

2 Likes
16

Yeah the thing i felt too was i was skeptical of the mode but tasks seemed f2p friendly. They took air elemental away. People pointed out the varden task and 180 beasts extremely time wasting 2-8 hr grinds even with the workarounds for a rares basic coins.

I grinded up to epics would be complete by tasks but you only get 900/2700 coins + 700 random for a merc. With 500 for crafting, the mode felt like a time sink but at least the xp was good.

When they stealth nerfed “accidentally” changing the xp in half and then i realized how slow the xpless loading menus were, I realized that even if i was getting 340 xp a minute of mercs I was in loading screens for 30-40s for every 10-30 second encounter. On paper it looked great, but in practical terms I was only getting like 200 irl exp a hr with rapid clicking 20-40 sec loading screens to 10-40s long fire comp stomps.

With the xp halved it was even worse and those two days without playing mercs with the xp half, no targeted coins, and no treatment of not profit harming ‘bugs’ made me really wonder if i was wasting my time in a mode that could take anything away at any notice and not even leave a patchnote. I left the mode after 500 hrs of grind since I wasn’t even enjoying PvP, it was either one sided stomps for either player, coinflips, players conceding before credit, and only the first 1-2 wins mattered and packs and random coins were worthless.

I was playing a mode I didn’t enjoy, for rewards I didn’t enjoy, to play pvp I didn’t enjoy, against people who all wanted bots and not people to reward structure. I just barely got Cairne maxed and 5/5/5 1/4/1 gear on diablo and a new merc I couldn’t target came out with halved xp. I was only justifying it with the xp but when I realized I was making less with loading times than other formats even with higher xp I quit the format.

It felt like I was spending days in a project that barely felt like it was coded over hours. Mercs feels like it was made in 8 hrs and the grind 1000 and the format seemed concerning. Everyone wants positivity but If the app reviews are asking why we still pretend mercs is still the Emperor’s new clothes. The mode isn’t wearing any real wrapper. It’s a excel spreadsheet simulator to make money where player loved bgs failed to extort money and aggressively monetize 15$ bundles to own 1/20th a hero power and a portrait for only 299$.

I really don’t have anything else to say when the child points out there’s nothing there to mercs OTHER than the grind for grinds sakes, and devs that aren’t hired to fix game affecting bugs, but profit concern “bugs” on a dime.

2 Likes