I don’t need it. Blizzard at one time pointed out, that it is similar to Slay the Spire. I own that game (also the somewhat similar Monster Train) and thought “If the investment is like battlegrounds, I will look at it.” Then I found out, how much gold you could invest and decided “not for me.” Maybe I will have a look at it, when it comes out, but meanwhile I play the games I already own.
I mean… the fact that no one knows how it’s going to work and they’re asking you to drop $50 per pre-pack should be indication enough… right? That’s not crazy…
Yeah it’s lousy they’re asking for pre-orders without explaining what’s actually in the packs. Or what the merc cards you’re getting actually do. That’s just a terrible business practice.
The way the monetization in Mercenaries works is thus, tho if anyone’s curious:
You get at least one merc per pack. There is duplicate protection, so if you pull a rare/epic/legendary merc you’ll get one you don’t have. Once you get them all, you’ll pull a new skin you don’t have. Once you have all of those, the duplicate merc you get will be converted into coins for that merc. The odds of pulling rares/epics/legendaries is the same as pulling rare/epics/legendaries in a hearthstone pack.
You get coins too. More rare coins than epics, more epics than legendaries, but epic/legendary coins are much more common than epic/legendary mercs.
Mercenaries level up just from using Mercenaries in PvE content. Coins let you rank up your mercenaries skills and buy them loot/treasures. You get some coins from using the mercenaries in PvE content. (So if I use the Lich King in a raid, there’s a chance for there to be some Lich King coins at the end of the raid.)
And then you get more mercs from doing PvE content, and you get coins from completing specific PvE encounters.
It’s definitely not a cash grab. The price is very comparable to what the price of standard Hearthstone is. With more ways of earning stuff through PvE content and less RNG, so you can work more towards getting what you actually want. Instead of opening 40 packs and getting a legendary for a class you don’t play or something.
God bless the easily led is all i can say … I have zero interest as it looks boring, but it is most definitely a cash grab
As much as any product released by a for-profit company is a cash grab.
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Apparently no one here knows how to use Youtube.
But why bother when you can b*tch and cry about a preorder in a forum?
Welcome to capitalism, n00bs
Apparently entertainment products shouldn’t be worth ever paying any money for.
“But they’re just making it to make money”.
And? Either reward them with the money, or if the quality isn’t worth it then ignore the product.
That’s the cool part. You can ignore Mercs entirelt if you don’t give a crap about it amd it has no bearing on your Hearthstone experience.
Are you a living, breathing human in 2021 if you aren’t using at least a reasonable percentage of your energy to express your misery over trivial things?
funny i was thinking the same exact thing
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I mean I think they did mishandle the pre-orders. It’s not really worth complaining about, because you can just not pre-order, but I think it was pretty bad.
A lot of they stuff they’ve been posting on social media the past few days should’ve been day 1 info. Would’ve gone a long way towards helping folks (especially those unfamiliar with the general genre they’re going for) understand how it works.
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Ehh, i’ll give it a fair shot, but i’m not entitled to like or dislike anything.
I’ll give it a play through and give it my own opinion. From a glance it looks like a discount pokemon or pet battling in hearthstone form a little better than i thought but i mean. That’s like saying. “Wow, This building isn’t already pre lit on fire, that’s amazing”. Activision blizz is a company that at this point, just having the most basic level of features working or even a Released product not having “IMAGE NOT YET FINISHED” is considered a high bar. It’s been several years and it’s this giant company with a amazing art team, i can’t say the cinematics are ever bad.
But it feels so weird. Like nearly every single blizzard game is “Wow, the cinematic team is next level. But the gameplay is… just okay. i guess. I’ve seen even indie and fan games do it a lot better just out of passion, and they’re free. With less devs complaining on twitter they’re expected to do a job we paid them for” 
Maybe if we’re lucky, some day Blizzard employees can get into congress and the us poltical system and see the battle of a lifetime. Next to Comcast employees, to have a Free for all contest to see who can give the most mediocre and/or dissapointing products to millions of people. But somehow i feel like that might be a high bar Blizzard might pass… Who knows… maybe if Congress just sat on their bums all day and watched Anime and twitter… Their productivity would skyrocket over hearthstone devs… XD
i dont understand the pre-order freakout.
no one is forcing you to buy it. it’s just there for those who want it.
I hope this does well but this looks really aggressively monetised which I think will turn people off who don’t want to drop a lot of money on this.
They released info on how much each type of hero will cost. Legendary heroes, which obviously, are where a lot of the heroes that are projected to do well in sims are, take 500 coins to get them. You can get coins from bounties (the pve), pvp (unclear how much), campfire tasks, and packs. The coins for almost all the legendary heroes other than grommash, the free legendary, drop from bounties with a recommended level of 30 (one legendary has coins obtainable in a level 23 bounty and another in a level 28 bounty). So you’re gonna have to grind a team up to level 30 or close to it before you could even start the grind to get any of the legendary heroes for free. Maybe you get lucky and the merc you want shows up at your campfire and you get a task that lets you get them as a playable merc. Alternatively you can buy lots of packs because legendary mercs drop in 1 on 20 packs in average with that same lovely 40 pack pity timer.
I’m gonna try to find a way to have fun with this for free but it sounds even more miserable and difficult than trying to compete in standard for free as a new player
Kripp leveled up his heroes to 26ish in 6 hours of play…
Trump was also able to level up his mercs quite high in just 1 day of playing.
depending on how much you play… you could be grinding legendary coins in a day or two.
you dont need Legendarys. there’s plenty of epics that are just as powerful if not more so.
All that progress was on an already fully unlocked account so they already had high end teams from the get go which makes the whole process a lot easier.
Sims, for what that’s worth, project many of the best mercs to be legendary ones which are only unlocked by grinding level 30 areas. Even once you get a solid team of level 30 mercs you’ll need to run the same bounties over and over again to hopefully get enough coins to get started with one of the legendary mercs whose coins you then need to grind up all over again for equipment and abilities. Also worth noting that some of the epics also require level 30 teams to earn coins for
I take offense to this attitude because that’s like saying Dad of Boy was as much a cash grab as Raid: Shadow Legends or Fate GO. There are definitely tiers of greed in game design, mechanics that don’t have to be in the game except for the purpose of monetization.
Randomized packs available for cash is one of those, certainly. If things have to be for sale you could always just make heros/cosmetics purchasable directly, but companies will make demonstrably more money by adding the random element so that’s what they do. When, really, all of this stuff could just be unlockable through gameplay at a reasonable progression speed and not have to charge for it at all.
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I should have been more specific. I meant Mercenaries specifically is no more a cash grab than any micro-transaction-based online game is (including Hearthstone, which is specifically what I was thinking of). And is probably a lot more reasonably priced at this point than A LOT of them are.
There’s no cap on how many coins you can get, which might mean you need to grind a lot is all. But hopefully the PvE content will be updated and new PvE content will be added regularly to keep it from getting repetitive.
It’s a great idea. Standard is a solitaire snoozecfest. I have 6k gold saved for a f2p run.
It’s true, collectible card games were one of the original lootboxes.
If they can’t even get Standard right, what makes you think they’ll be competent enough to run Mercenaries?