10/22 Update: We are currently in the process of rolling out a hotfix that makes the following adjustments to Mercenaries:
• We are adjusting the appearance rate of Mysterious Stangers to be based on the relative level of the strongest Mercenary in your party compared to the suggested level of the Bounty. This move is to encourage people towards more engaging gameplay instead of repeatedly taking on low-level Heroic Bounties with highly over-leveled Parties.
I agree that doing Lv8 Barrens is mind numbing, but this change doesn’t match their statement.
Encouraging more engaging gameplay would mean adjusting the MS rate based on your party’s level AND increasing the MS rate if your team’s level matches the bounty’s level.
All this change does is make the grind even worse to frustrate the player into buying packs.
I mean most of the time your going for tasks to get gear, maybe I missed where packs can drop gear that let you skip the task process for them, for coins this sucks and is clearly a “pay us money for coins instead of playing the game”, but for items it’s a stab in the gut of every player even whales who pay a ton.
So, for players who want to spend little or no money to build their collection, it takes far more grinding than it does for players who buy that packs and only need to grind the first 7 tasks for the equipment.
I wish I saw this before wasting a couple hours of my life thinking I was just unlucky. Fine then I will farm normal winterspring with my level 30 party so I can keep getting tasks and powerleveling my team. This is such a trash solution to the problem.
Exactly. People didn’t like having to run air elemental over and over for tasks so the genius plan was to make people grind snowclaw over and over again. He’s the easiest level 30 run so he will be the farming target instead. What a thrilling change of pace.
The problem is how ridiculously grindy and dependent on tasks you naturally only get 4 of per day the whole progression system either needs to be rethought or there needs to be an efficient way for people to get more tasks. The solution is not change where people have to mindlessly grind
Players: “Man, mercs is so boring, the only f2p way to farm half the coins a merc needs at a decent speed vs p2p is to repeat lvl 8 bounties over and over and over”
Blizzard: “We hear you players, and want to make your time more engaging! That’s why we’re, nerfing f2p coins so it takes longer, and offering nothing in return! BUYOURCOINPACKSNOWTM!!”
Players: “… This is like asking for your soup to be served hot, since it was ice cold, and the cook responding the only way they know how. By lighting the entire building on fire.”
i won’t be surprised if whoever makes heartstone update will run an election into government position.
they already acting like one.
making a solution without thinking about reality which actually negating the said solution.
just like some government from my country using an expensive net to protect river from trash pollution.
but he forgot how barbaric local people are to the point they broke the said net in less than 24 hour.
he also forgot the river is still dirty by the way.
I’m sure they’re seeing the problem as people completing their collections of mercs with equipment too quickly without buying anything. The irony though is that this doesn’t even solve that problem. I’ve been doing the same thing as before but on normal Snowclaw instead of heroic air elemental and it takes only slightly longer than the heroic air elemental did. The mystery token is now somewhere on levels 4-6 so it takes anywhere from 2-5 fights to get there with 3 being pretty normal. Because the probability is now adjusted based on your level compared to the suggested level he’s mysterious stranger is showing up there a lot now. The fights are only taking me slightly longer than before just spamming xyrella, samuro and whoever has the most HP among the level 30s I’m farming tasks for.
the claim is, they want to encourage people towards more engaging gameplay.
the result is, they are discouraging new player toward fighting pit more than before and nothing changes for the PVE part.
repeating place “A” into repeating place “B” doesn’t make the game more engaging.
it just repeating the same mistake.
guess what changes ?
i don’t dare to make a claim because i didn’t test it out yet.
but i am sure something else is changing.
p.s: it’s the same crap reason they use to refuse auto squelch function.
it’s better if they state “they don’t want to implement it.” because it’s more logical than the reason they used.
they don’t want UI in the menu to be clogged is the most crap reason i ever heard,
option is called option because you have an option to choose from.
Well. i’ll be honest, i was already thinking of giving bust on mercs and calling it good.
I got Samuro and xyrella finished, i want thrall but not the patience. if it’s a axe nerf, i won’t even be able to ever even level the subpar legends i have. (Illidan is rated D tier and alexstraza doesn’t seem too good without the only 2nd dragon.
I know modes are made to make money, they can’t give away everything for free, at the same time. I wasn’t even ever super enthusastic about the mode in the first place. It’s always just unironically been a pay and grind walled experience. Sure you could, even as a critic argue that it was 50% f2p, but now coin packs and nerfing or slowing f2p attempts at coins.
I guess it could be a trivial tap (it is blizzard and they might respond to feedback), but. There’s a fair chance that this is already dampening my already bleh enthusiasm for the grinding of the mode unless it comes with some better ways to target coins or doesn’t end up doing much.
Why play a mode that’s pretty much just minimum budget paywalled 3 move pokemon, that charges you money to even grind more than 1 move, where whales either fight eachother in 4 minute ques or just fougth bots over and over to reach high mmr until removal?
I mean, the afk xp is nice, but. I don’t know, they’re sending mixed messages here on “mercs is entirely f2p!” “We’re nerfing tasks if your mercs aren’t the right level.” “I spent 3 hours to farm 15 mutanus coins of 2000 and it failed to drop 5 times in a row”, and “If you spend 2000-2500+ coins [Full 18 tasks are like 1000 specific / 2000-2500 coins], you get +1/5”
It’s just hard to know that even if the game is still f2p friendly if it’s whale bait or not or just gonna pull a bait and switch later or just go mild. Either way, i was already kinda losing interest in the mode and got xyrella + samuro finished and the realization i would never be able to grind any meaningful amount of coins to max any other mercs without huge timesinks to just win vs bots better when im not even competitive in the mode.
there is plenty of pokemon genre in play store,
mercenaries is basically bare minimum of everything.
instead of making a content, they are stalling and slow down player to enjoy same stuff over and over again with the recent update.
heck, if i want to enjoy old stuff might as well goes back to ragnarok online and burn geographer with fire spell.
at least there is nostalgia value for me by repeating this stuff.
i was grinding ursela windfury (in the the stange after felwood) cause the coins are for good mercs… it levels up middling mercs quickly and i can run through it will Xyrella/Samuro/Cariel without dying.
got back to back strangers. so im thinking of sticking with this level for now
I’ll never understand how they plan to make the gameplay more engaging by drastically increasing the amount of time you have to spend doing it. It doesn’t matter how much more fun the gameplay is if you have to do it for 10 times as long as the tedious method that got deleted, it’s going to be more tedious.
someone else got an idea about showing up the number of task mercenary have done since we currently can’t see the task list if we don’t have the said task.
or other small changes that could be made.
heck, even new mercenaries is better in my perspective.
There’s is absolutely ZERO way you are farming tasks only “slightly” slower than the optimal way before the change. You could farm out a mystery slot in 3-4 minutes the old way. There’s no way you can do that now and the extended length makes it even worse when you don’t hit a stranger.
BTW: That’s not the optimal farming team in game. The optimal team is Anduin, Xyrella, Velen. Absurd AoE and AoE healing constantly.
