I dived into Mercenaries a day after its release and I have spent most of the last week playing this new game mode.
I used a secondary account to evaluate the mode because I was unwilling to commit to it by doing any pre-orders and I did not want to waste any gold on my main account.
I spent almost 8k gold buying packs and making upgrades to my village.
My progress so far includes:
I obtained all but 9 of the 51(?) heroes. Eight of the missing Heroes are Legendaries.
I have leveled 20 heroes to level 30.
Only six heroes have all their skills maxed out to Rank 5.
I am not able to field any complete synergy comps (such as Orcs, Beasts, Fire, Nature, Etc.) in PVP, but I have reached a rating of 6664 and I feel like hitting 7k or higher is easily achievable right now, since I seem to be mostly fighting bots.
Pros:
Mercenaries is something new to explore.
The mode is easily playable on a mobile device.
The PvP has decent mechanics.
The Village aesthetics are nice and the building functions readily accessible.
PvE is very straight forward.
Cons:
It takes so many coins (500) to craft a Legendary hero that it’s nearly pointless to do so early on, since there would be few coins left over to improve skills. It’s probably better to wait for a hero to be obtained from a pack, unless a ton of extra coins have already been farmed for a particular hero. It takes 2,250 coins to level all three hero abilities to Rank 5.
I am really not a fan of the coins being “hero specific,” especially, since I already have heroes with maxed out skills that have nearly 1k of extra coin. Large, pointless, leftover amounts of coin feels bad.
I would have preferred a neutral type of coin that could be used to craft or train any hero, This would have incentivized the devs to better balance heroes and the team synergies to increase a PVP team’s diversity and to maintain a desire for players to unlock and train a large number of the heroes, but in an order that better balanced fun and grinding while exploring different PvP comps.
With only 9 missing hero’s I am still unable to field any theme-based comps. It would take a ridiculous amount of grinding to unlock and properly train a single Legendary hero before it would be of use in PVP. Feels bad.
PvE is simple and boring, and the most efficient ways to grind coins or to gain and complete tasks involves farming the level 8 and 10 Barrens dungeons over and over.
The devs did an extremely poor job of measuring out increased rewards for pursuing more difficult and time consuming PVE content. Imagine in WoW, if the best way to gear up your high level toons came from farming the Deadmines or Wailing Caverns over and over again.
So much more could have been done to improve the PvE experience to make it fun. Overall, I see a lot of missed opportunities for for more fun in this new mode.
If your goal is to PVP, Mercenaries requires huge amount of boring PvE grinding to get a good team to PVP with, and then many players will probably get bored quickly from facing the same top five comps in PvP given the limited number of heroes that are actually viable for PvP.
I do not understand the odd number of heroes, with Protectors representing the smallest group. Twenty heroes of each type would have made more sense.
Some heroes are gimped with useless or super slow abilities that do not make sense for PvP, which is so dependent on who has the initiative to go first. For example, Velen’s Blessing (Gain three Holy damage. Your next spell casts twice) does not work in PVP where heroes tend to be focused down fairly quickly. Pairing spells that build up the power of a slow ability that is to be played on the next turn involves two actions that may never result in harming an enemy before the hero is bursted down. Tyrande’s “Elune’s Grace” is almost as bad for the same reason.
A number of things are annoying like being unable to rearrange the party slots like you can deck slots. Same goes for copying party party lists. I wish the order of my heroes in my hand was determined by their placement order in the party list. I wish I could reorganize the order of skills on combat tabs— or that they were ALL ordered by placing the the ability that you are most likely to open with always to left. Jaina’s Ice Flows should have been placed to the left, since she is more likely to open with-or to spam- that ability.
What are your impressions or your pros and cons lists for Mercenaries?
For me it has run its course. Blizz makes a fair number of grind games, but mercenaries is tediously repetitive for too small a chance of getting what you are actually grinding for, equally tediously repetitive to level a merc to 30. Wait times for PvP, which at least offers a chance of something new, are increasingly longer, and most times end up with a quick win or a quick loss.
I am going to set it aside for a bit and see if the interest returns…
It takes so many coins (500) to craft a Legendary hero that it’s nearly pointless to do so early on, since there would be few coins left over to improve skills. It’s probably better to wait for a hero to be obtained from a pack
is wrong. It is much easier to get hero specific coins once you have them, since they not only drop from bounties, but their questlines offer hundreds of them. If you want to max out a hero, do their quests. On the other hand the chance to get a legendary from a pack is ridiculously low. Waiting for that seems like a fool’s game.
Is it? The harder Heroic Bounties are a challenge, and I have been perfecting ways to complete these for a chance to get the legendary coins.
Less focusing on completing as many tasks as possible with the boring “easy” Heroic grind of Level 8 and 10 dungeons, though I have done my fair share of this.
That is why I qualified my opinion with “early on.”
I have Heroes that are earning packs now from some of the upper-teen task rewards. With 8 legendaries to get, I wanted to open some of the easier to earn packs first before crafting legendaries, since there is no duplicate protection for Mercenaries packs. I do wonder if there is a pack pity timer for legendaries.
I did decide to experiment by crafting one Legendary (Malfurion) today to try out a coin farming strategy idea, and I did manage to farm about 100 coins for him in less than a hour without doing any of his tasks.
You sound like you are just further along than I am. My Velen just got task #17, which will require doing higher level dungeons to complete it. I figure the increasing task difficulties will steer me to harder PvE content in time.
I’m just approaching it from a different angle where I only spent 900 gold on the buildings and 500 on packs and seeing how viable it is F2P to find strategies to farm Heroic Bounties for legendary coins. So for tasks while I have Cariel completed Task 18 all the others are at 13 or less.
I do not own many of the Mercenaries but I figure in another week I’ll have enough coins to craft most of the Legendaries outright.
That’s in spite of me “inefficiently” spending time losing to Heroic Emperor Thaurissan and getting only consolation coins for hours before I started getting more successes (maybe I bit off more than I could chew).
Reward when you do get Diablo coins (because it’s not guaranteed): https://imgur.com/a/Zvt5nfC
The other Heroics I tried (Corrupted Ancient, Xaravan, Lord Banehollow) were more manageable by comparison so I’ll get the Anduin, Gul’dan, Mutanus coins quick when I decide to do so.
i thought i played a lot the last couple of days, but Im still no where compared to you…
I still doing the same 3 move combo every turn with Cariel>Xyrella>Samuro, while leveling up randoms that appear to be all useless mercs. So many characters seem just bad, even imagained as fully maxed. Its common sense I will never get to PVP level, its amazing that many people are actually grinding this basic game like that.
I am probably progressing much better than thought I was, since I am only missing three heroes (The Lich King, Sylvanas, and Raganaros) out the top 27 heroes from Lunaloveee’s PvP Tier List.
I used all my Malfurion coins to craft him late last night, and six hours of playtime later he is only 21 coins away from making a third upgrade.
My main goal for the five hours that I played today was to get the 6 upgrades needed to max out Diablo’s abilities. I managed to get 3 upgrades with almost enough coins to do a fourth.
I have 23 level 30 heroes now.
I have spent close to 9k gold on Mercenaries, despite how unsatisfactory it feels to open Mercenaries packs. I really hate the all coins packs.
Ya, I am spamming the same abilities with PvE comps that include Xyrella and Samaro as I farm mostly the The Barrens level 8 Heroic and the Felwood level 29 Heroic dungeons, while getting and completing tasks.
Having said all of the above, the process is way too grindy, and I am afraid that I may get burned out on Mercenaries before I field a good PvP comp.