What’s Next for Hearthstone Mercenaries – Looking At The Current State of the Game Mode and Blizzard’s Plans

It has been almost a month since the release of Hearthstone Mercenaries, and Blizzard addressed some of their future plans for the mode in a blog post last week.

In this article, we’re taking a deep dive into what they have announced and into the current overall state of the game mode.

What is Mercenaries? What is Hearthstone?

Before the launch, many people were expecting Mercenaries to be Blizzard’s answer to Slay the Spire. There were quite a few issues pre-launch on communicating what exactly Mercenaries is supposed to be.

The What’s Next blog post gives the most succinct definition directly from Blizzard on what Mercenaries is all about: “Our goal was to figure out how to build a great collection RPG, with deep, strategic combat that you can pick up and play even for bite-sized play sessions. To us, the heart of Mercenaries is collecting Mercenaries, powering them up, and engaging in strategic combat with your foes – be they PvE or PvP.”

In practice, Mercenaries is like Raid: Shadow Legends (insert your favorite gacha here) meets Pokémon. It can be grindy and it can be expensive. Yet, it can also be played completely for free. Some F2P players have almost fully maxed collections after less than a month, which is unheard of in a gacha game! The combat system resembles Pokémon, but it is streamlined and simplified in traditional Blizzard style.

Hearthstone is turning into a platform. There is now a Magic: the Gathering lite, Dota Auto Chess lite, and Pokémon lite, all within the same client. We’re not going to analyze what that means for the game here, but it is important to keep in mind when evaluating Mercenaries: it really is a completely new game, just like Battlegrounds was.

Deadmines and New Mercenaries Content

With the release of the Deadmines mini-set, Mercenaries got its first additional content. Three new bounties were added to Blackrock Mountain, and five new Mercenaries were added to the game. Whether this is the type of content drops Mercenaries will receive more of, we do not know yet. We know that both new bounties and new Mercenaries are planned, but not the exact form they will be added in.

The new bounties – Highlord Omokk, General Drakkisath, and Rend Blackhand – are some of the most challenging Mercenaries PvE content so far. I found the boss fights fun and interesting. As a downside, they were added to Blackrock Mountain, so the path to the boss was filled with the same trash mobs that we had already been clearing for some time.

The new Mercenaries revealed much more about the challenges the game mode has when adding new content.

When you add new content, players want to play it! Surprising, I know. However, it takes quite some time to get new Mercenaries geared up. You first have to grind them up for several hours before you get to actually play with them properly, especially in PvP. In Standard Hearthstone, you get the mini-set cards and off you go to build some fun new decks. In Mercenaries, you grind the abilities and equipment first, and then you get to try out new things.

The new Mercenaries also revealed a thing or two about acquiring Mercenaries and the value of packs. New Mercenaries are added to the same packs, so it is a good idea to save packs for new content to immediately pick them up. Legendary Mercenaries, however, are difficult to get from packs. Conveniently, Blizzard offered a bundle in the shop with the new Legendary Edwin and enough packs to get the others. The monetization of Mercenaries has clearly been thought of much more than the monetization of Battlegrounds.

The value of packs is weird. At first, packs are great. Getting your Mercenaries and the first few hundred coins for each feels good. However, packs will keep giving you coins for Mercenaries that you have already maxed. As you progress in the game, you start to open packs that give you essentially nothing. When new content arrives, you get new Mercenaries again, and packs become a little better. When you have opened the new Mercenaries, packs are bad again.

For a careful spender, there is much you can do to optimize the value of your packs. A little money spent at the right time can make the game much more enjoyable. For a free-to-play player, saving some of your task packs can give you fast access to new content. But who wants to plan and calculate things so carefully? Big spenders are going to open a whole lot of nothing.

New Buildings and Building up Your Mercenaries

The Mercenaries Village has space for more stuff, and we already know about the next building that will be added. Training Hall will give your Mercenaries passive experience gains. Therefore, you may no longer need to carry weak Mercenaries with your farming team to level them up. More details on Training Hall will be revealed later.

I really hope Training Hall will do more. Leveling up the Mercenary to 30 is nothing. If you farm tasks in Heroic Lord Banehollow, it takes at most two hours to have your bench-warmers at max level. However, a level 30 Mercenary with no upgraded abilities and equipment is completely useless.

The real grind is to get coins to upgrade the abilities and equipment of your Mercenary and to unlock the equipment through tasks in the first place. In practice, you grind through their task chain. When you reach task 7, you have all the equipment, but you barely have the coins to upgrade things to a playable level. After a few more tasks you can do PvE with your new Mercenary.

For PvP, things are worse. When you have fully upgraded every ability and equipment on your Mercenary, they get a +1/+5 stat buff. People are now getting there, and it makes a big difference. This adds at least a whole day of grinding for a new Mercenary. I really wonder whether this stat buff should even exist. Remember the joke that golden cards should give some advantage, like +1 attack or something? The joke is real in Mercenaries.

What about money? Mercenaries is in a weird spot when it comes to real money. If you spend a LOT, you can get all the coins you need. However, no matter how much you spend, you can look forward to grinding the game for around three hours per Mercenary to get them maxed. Some of that can be done simultaneously for a group of new Mercenaries, so the overall time spent is five hours for a group of three new Mercenaries. This drove many content creators away from the game, as they just wanted to buy everything and start creating content, but there are no shortcuts.

What a strange model. It’s not pay-to-win, you still need to spend a lot of time. Nothing is time-gated, so if you spend a ton of time, you can have everything for free in a few weeks. Yet, many players have difficulties in building up their teams, and spending money beyond opening the Mercenaries generally feels bad.

Task Farming and the Mysterious Stranger Rework

I do not know how Blizzard thought tasks were to be acquired, but it took players no time at all to start farming them from Mystery coins. You can get four tasks per day from a fully upgraded Campfire. You can get around seven tasks per hour by grinding Mystery coins for Mysterious Strangers. Tasks are vital to progress. This is not hard to figure out.

Blizzard already nerfed task farming once by connecting Mysterious Stranger appearance rates to the level of the bounty relative to the level of the highest Mercenary in the party, but this just moved the grind from Air Elemental to Lord Banehollow. A little slower, but still perfectly doable, especially with a good Fire comp.

More is coming: “Currently, we’re working on another adjustment to how the Mysterious Stranger works, which will be included in a future patch. We’re also considering holistically re-assessing Normal and Heroic Bounty rewards. On both fronts, we’re testing solutions with player interests in mind, and will have changes to share soon.”

If the Mysterious Stranger farm is killed without a valid replacement – like more meaningful bounties – everyone who has done their farm will have months of advantage and no one else can enter the PvP game. Surely, that cannot happen. I hope.

In the current state of the game, Mysterious Stranger farm is the only effective way to progress your Mercenaries. Heroic bounties are meaningless apart from the challenge some of them present. Completing normal bounties is ineffective as well. If you want a specific Mercenary, grinding a normal bounty for a day or more is one way to get it. Grinding Mysterious Strangers for a couple of weeks gets you several Mercenaries, but not necessarily the one you want. So, you often end up choosing between getting something fun in the near future and little in the long term, or getting good things in the long term but little fun anytime soon.

PvP Matchmaking

Mercenaries launched with a highly advanced matchmaking system. So advanced, in fact, that often you could not find a human to play against, as no one brought a team exactly as powerful as yours, at the same MMR, and at the same time. So advanced, that people could play themselves to the leaderboard with underpowered teams, avoiding everyone who had a good team.

I have to say, the matchmaking system sounded good on paper. It just did not work out nearly as well in practice.

Blizzard has already done multiple passes that reduce the importance of your team in matchmaking, and we can expect more to come.

It’s a Beta, But Is It Fun?

Unlike Battlegrounds, Mercenaries did not launch with the caveat beta in its name. However, it is very much in the beta stage.

The progress path is unclear. The rewards system is all over the place. Access to meaningful PvP is behind a major barrier. There is a lot you can buy in the shop, but their value is also all over the place or uncertain.

Players have built the main progress paths out of the ragtag bunch of content Blizzard had prepared. Tournaments have been run with no real tools to support them and plenty of uncertainties about the appropriate format (picks, bans, one party, many parties?).

Yet, I like the core gameplay in Mercenaries. These Pokémon-like battles can be a lot of fun. The best Heroic bosses are puzzles that have multiple solutions. PvP is full of mind games, and if it can get past the Cairne/Diablo meta, it has a chance to become something deep and highly competitive.

Blizzard has a lot to deliver to make Mercenaries great. From the What’s Next blog post, we can see that they are touching the right themes: progression, rewards, PvP, pack value. If they can get it all just right, Mercenaries has a chance to be a great game. However, we do not know enough details about their plans to see if they have what it takes.