So after having played - since dec. of 2014 with the gvg era - a bit of every mode and seen a bit of what the game has to offer, I tried the 2021 mercenaries mode and Oh boy, the mode still has a huge potential.
I played +/- 50 hours of it only to see how ABSOLUTELY INSANE the grind to get every character & max them to abilities level 5 is : a legendary character costs 500 coins. Speedrunning an hour of the same raid with Ragnaros (as seen by Old Guardian on YT) gives 500 coins across 3 characters.
There are 116 mercenaries as of today.
Reaching level 30 FOR TWO CHARACTERS takes 50 hours through the training grounds. Characters are barely able at level 30 unupgraded to clear heroic dungeons.
To sum up : unless you pay, you’ll NEVER enjoy pvp or high level dungeons. Except if you are ready to sacrifice THOUSANDS of hours prior to having the whole content unlocked
Working as intended. They never intended it as anything more as a wallet drain. After having THREE mega bundles at the outset, it was apparent that was all the thought they put into it.
To say nothing of their failed promises to deliver on issues like coins (and the massive let down when they “did”) and others.
In game tournament mode died to nonsense like this.
Really sad, because Mercenaries had the potential to be the most enjoyable HS mode. It’s extremely interesting and enjoyable to play. There is a fair number of different decks and strategies available, and the dungeons on heroic present - much like the Boom Puzzles in adventure mode - very specific gameplay that requires thinking to be beaten.
When you think about it, that Battlegrounds was never meant to be more than a casual mode - and is now where most of the top tier players spend their time and the most popular mode - while there was a massive focus on Mercenaries marketing / ressources only to fail like that …
The mode is amazing to play, but I won’t spend 500€ on it to just get the base content, and won’t grind for 3000 hours either.
And just imagine what it was like when they first came out. It was EXTREMELY GRINDY. They have actually improved it since launch, sadly though, mercenaries turned out to be a total flop.
True enough, by the way. I don’t know whether I should laugh at or feel sorry for those instant-gratification kiddos who first spend thousands of real-world ‘coins’ to max everything ASAP (‘I Wanna Play NOW!’), then quit, because they are disappointed.
I beg to differ. I’ve maxed all my Mercs (completely F2P, by the way), moreover, I’ve finally quit PvP, which has been less and less fun while more and more stressful or frustrating, however, this might be one of the best times I’ve been having with Mercs, partially due to those funvisitortasks (I’ve got some more interesting or challenging ones, too), which, despite their randomness, can be almost like puzzles from those events, partially because now I can play or try whatever I want, no need to optimise or farm anything while at it.
REACHING LEVEL 30 (LEEROY JENKINS!!!) has never been a particular problem, by the way, and training grounds are more of a convenience feature, although I personally aprreciate it a lot. Besides… Are you in a hurry? Do you want to speed-run the whole mode, then start producing angry posts or videos how you are FRUSTRATED and BURNT-OUT with the mode?
Which is not quite true, at least re high-level dungeons (PvP is just, as said, not fun in general, in my opinion) — moreover, nowadays many more of them are solvable ‘on a budget’, e.g. with only rare mercs in the party (which itself is a puzzle, by the way, which one could enjoy), since we’ve received a number of phenomenal ones.
Which is generally not even necessary for PvE, by the way.
Yeah, there’s still some grinding with doing task chains etc, admittedly, but it’s not as bad as you describe.
I’d say it is the most enjoyable mode for me.
Exactly.
Funny, because people bemoaning this might have spent much more grinding their ladder or BGs.
I always say that there’s absolutely no hurry with this mode, it’s not about INSTANT GRATIFICATION and getting everything RIGHT NOW, then toying with it for a little while and becoming FRUSTRATED (as with practically anything in this era of cultivated ADHD, overconsumption and getting oneself ‘amused to death’, as the classic put it) — instead, I’d recommend playing at your own pace, enjoying the road (or just relaxing if you’re doing a little farming — that’s an option, too) and the different stages of this journey — I’d say they are fun in their own various ways, then seeing where you get with it.
When Mercenaries was released, I had an alternate F2P account, which I used to spend over 10k gold on testing out the new mode, while giving what I thought was quick and valuable feedback:
“1). The PVE sucks and much could be done to improve dungeon runs to make PVE much more fun. There are so many things that can be done to improve PvE.
2). Mercenaries is way way way too grindy.
3). Pack values are horrible, since they lack duplicate protection and included cosmetics. Mercenaries packs provided the worst pack opening value and experience that I have ever encountered in a game.
4). PVP, like most of Hearthstone, suffered from major balance issues, which doomed PVP to feel very repetitive.
5). A build up of huge surpluses of unusable coins for maxed out mercenaries felt bad.
6). Mercenaries did not seem ready for release, which made it feel like players were duped into paying to alpha-test a new mode.
In summary, rushing a mode that was too rawly designed (and with very greedy marketing strategies) to market without being able implement improvements quickly has doomed Mercenaries into being a niche mode that feels more dead than alive.”
Even players who dump a lot of cash into Mercenaries to reduce a lot of the grinding, so that they can mostly focus on playing PvP competitively, probably still hate the amount of grinding they have to do. And after they spent all that money, they quickly end up playing players, who mostly did the same thing—spending a lot—only to be facing the same 4-6 best comps over and over again. How boring.
Many of the players who play Mercenaries only for the PvE are an enigma to me—there are so many better games out there to play.
And how many times are you gonna spamthe samething (yeah, it’s three different links — not everyone seems to notice, or I could be wrong)?
Lo and behold: someone graced us with some nearly year-old personal notes, are we supposed to get on our knees and pray?
Besides, I’ve lost count how many posters there’ve been — all thinking their particular… ahem… opinion ivaluable, of course, how could it possibly be otherwise — dropping in basically to inform everybody how they’ve got nothing to say on the topic, since they are not even actual players, and their definitive verdict to boot.
Also, creating posts or threads just to cross link other threads is against coc:
Cross Linking Threads
This category includes:
Linking to threads from other forums
Creating threads with the sole purpose of linking another post
If a player is found to have participated in such actions, they will:
Be given a temporary ban from the forums
Though once again, it’s doubtful pro company poster gets actioned, because the mods ignore everything, up to and including hate speech and real life threats from pro company posters.
But note, for those paying attention: pro company trolling desperately trying to distract from the topic: the failure of mercstone and the numerous issues with it.
Stay classy mods, team 5, actiblizz, and microsoft!
You seem really alienated by others sharing negative opinions about the Mercenaries mode.
I re-shared some of my early in-depth observations about Mercenaries to confirm some of what the OP said was indeed true and to help forewarn new players about some of the important pitfalls of Mercenaries.
When Mercenaries was released October 12 2021, I grinded around 6 hours a day for a month, which made it clear that most F2P players were not likely to field more than one of the best PVP comps with maxed stats, before new Mercs and comps started such a grind all over again for them.
Also, it was my opinion that while trying to keep up with competitive PvP, a player could easily spend more money on Mercenaries than they used to spend on Standard for a new mode that is even less rewarding to play after the newness quickly wears off.
Mercenaries is the greediest mode in Hearthstone with the poorest return for the time spent playing it. I wish I had abandoned the mode much sooner than I did.
I really regret the time and resources that I wasted while exploring Mercs, and I am trying do others a favor by sharing my experience.
Lastly, I do not get why players would invest a ton of time into Mercs PvE only to omit playing PVP, since the PVE that is less fun than dungeon crawl games from 20+ years ago.
Was this ^ directed at me? I have been playing Hearthstone since Season 1, and I played Magic the Gathering for twenty years before Hearthstone’s release. I have experience at evaluating such games, and I put enough time into Mercs to understand the mode—gaining enough knowledge and information to support my opinions.
It’s not like Sparkyelf is providing any information that contradicts what I or the OP has said about Mercs—in fact, he confirms that PvP, the reason most players invest money into the mode, swiftly feels unrewarding to play:
Oops, I should have omitted that point from the my list of observations, which were originally made in 2021, since excess coins on maxed out heroes can now be converted to Renown.
But I will say, converting 16266 coins to only 2080 Renown does not feel good at all.
No, I seem unimpressed by pretentious forum posts whose authors appear to exhibit a celf-centred worldview in conjuction with a shallow, emotion-based surrogate of an analysis with a supposedly moralising and definitive verdict.
Why don’t you go to some topics about Ranked Standard and share the breaking news that Naxx has been released?
You know, I can nearly immediately tell the feedback on an actual player (like this or even on Old Guardian’s channel [1] — there are often good and rather critical points raised there, easily recognisable by someone more or less familiar with the game, in my view; by the way, I’ve written about some of them, too, but what of it — this is mostly a forum of ‘writers’, not readers, isn’t it?) from somebody who has, as said, just dropped in to share their undoubtedly insightful opinion?
Yeah, being completely playable F2P, unlike some others I could mention.
Well, there are probably many things that you don’t get, what of it?
If one looks at some data about the popularity of different game modes [2], which is gathered from one deck tracker (Firestone) and may not represent the whole player base, however, it shows some trends consistent with other sources and thus might be considered more or less plausible [3] , then it’s quite clear that Mercenaries is mostly about PvE, at least in terms of popularity, which seems to have been the idea in the first place.
Oh, and every one of these persons described there — I’ve lost count of them on this forum, actually — is clearly special and unique, with the world revolving around them personally.
Hate to break it for you, but these are your personal problems, really.
Yeah, I’ve seen a small army, as reiterated a few times already, of this kind of posters. What you all probably don’t realise is that your posts, so similar both in form and content, generally look like this: ‘I once dated a boy/girl from X, even spent 20 coins on a lunch together, however, later he/she dumped me (we broke up). I am so frustrated and disappointed, thus it is clear that boys/girl from X are trash, and I cannot possibly undestand why would someone even come close a boy/girl from X’. About the latter part especially — I could nearly litreally link a handful of examples written according to this pattern, but don’t really feel like it now.
Which is, again, the same kind of ‘expert’ (read: clueless bypasser’s) analysis that I keep mocking. Compare it to something more proper [4], for example (I’ve written about it too, but don’t feel like self-citing too much here).
The best comment from this ^ link that you provided is:
In response to this ^ pontification, I am simply going to quote you:
The Mercenaries mode is completely designed to force players to do a tremendous amount of PvE grinding in order to obtain competitive PvP comps.
The PvE to PVP play ratio is the most obvious part of Mercenaries’ design. You cannot simply look at a graph of data comparing the hours spent playing PvE vs. hours spent playing PvP in order to determine that PvE is the more popular and fun aspect of the mode, since there is no way to avoid PvE while developing mercenaries for PvP. The more important point is that both the PvE and PvP aspects of Mercenaries is quite bad and unfulfilling.
But hey, thanks for once again with helping to confirm the truth of one of mine and the OP’s points—and the most common complaint about Mercenaries:
Thanks for sharing the graph and Old Guardians’ comments, which reveals how big of a dumpster mode and a failure that Mercenaries is. Mercenaries is the least played and popular mode in Hearthstone—it’s even less popular than Duels, and that says a lot.
To quote Old Guardian on the topic of Mercenaries’ popularity and success: “It’s a pretty grim tale for Mercenaries, I have to admit…Mercenaries is not exactly thriving.”
Well, how about this ^, his words echoes my own sentiments about Mercenaries from 2021.
Mercenaries was a terrible idea that should have been scrapped. I’m still annoyed I have 3 packs I’ll never be able to open stuck on my screen. Actually tried to complete the tutorial so I could finally get rid of them but got so bored I stopped caring. Same thing with duels, it could have been a really fun mode but they don’t support it and then just leave it in permanent “beta”. Lol
Do you even know what ‘irony’ is? Apparently, not — it’s not in the curriculum of ‘Modern Educayshun’/‘That Texas education’/[insert the right option there]. Instead, it’s full of ‘comps’ (which isn’t even an actual word), brilliant logic (you cannot simply look at the data and draw conclusions from it ) and so on, apparently…
Again, The Arbiter has graced us with their presence to pass judgement. Everyone, get in here… on your knees and pray!
Yeah, seen that one in Medivh’s parlour in Karazhan — a magic mirror… ‘No, you!’
I’ve got an idea what’s behind it, but I’ll not go into it here.
In terms of popularity, absolutely (which is not surprising, given that it is, akin to the Puzzle Lab, the mode to use one’s brain in, which is definitely not mainstream at all). And that should concern me, for instance? I definitiley don’t need all those undoubtedly talented individuals (read: netdeckers etc) to play whatever I want and have fun with it.
As for this army of angry guys, lemme tell you this: thanks for you money, I guess, to have kept Mercenaries going, since I’ve had a lot of fun with them, as for your opinion — it is very important for us , as the stereotypical phone robot would put it (so please don’t hang up ).
I hope ol’ Boba finally feels happy after reading this. Yeah, this one is specially for you!
It figures.
Anyway, I definitely do not recommend ‘Mercs’ to those who… how do I put it… get bored quickly, it’s just not your thing.
Its simple: if you play it fot PVP this game is absolut disappointing, no discussion. But if you have fun with the PVE its a nice option of F2P game with constant LevelingUp something which can be a very satisfying feeling.
Joke is one the guys who cant accept that there are peoply with other taste then themselfe
One of the worst parts is not even the grind, probably, but coin flips, as well as the same players, not to mention bots, stalking you… Plus the unfortunate system with not seeing the starting ‘hand’, reliance on guesswork instead of skill… And finally, the same problem as with PvP in general: all those netdeckers and such.
How dare they!!!11111 Have fun the way they want. Big baby no agree, big baby get angry… Smash!
to max everything ASAP (‘I Wanna Play NOW!’), then quit, because they are disappointed. 
I definitiley don’t need all those undoubtedly talented individuals (read: netdeckers etc) to play whatever I want and have fun with it. 
, as the stereotypical phone robot would put it (so please don’t hang up 
). 
