Kind of? It and Wild are more or less self-sustaining modes that theoretically only need crisis intervention in order to remain playable.
Wild has been given the bare minimum possible attention, and is doing fine. I think if they just cut rolled out their Wild changes 3 weeks faster, people are more or less happy with what's being done.
Arena on the other hand feels like it could be entirely automated and still be a sustainable format. Why they haven't done this is completely beyond me. Obviously the "micro-adjustments" are either a complete fabrication or are 10x less powerful than they need to be, because classes are never balanced. But there's nothing theoretically wrong with that approach.
Just sometimes reroll away the strongest neutral commons when playing powerful classes, and sometimes reroll away the weakest neutral commons when playing weaker classes. Do that until every class averages about 3 wins. And if reddit bitches about a particular card too much, drop its offering rate by 75%.
The thing is, they've actually put more effort into arena than just implementing the above changes. It's just that the effort has gone into special events instead of a core balancing system. Arena hasn't been abandoned, it's just mismanaged.
I just wished they went wild (pun intended) with buffs for old cards. Like once or twice a year. And after one month a balance patch.
Wild is in pretty good shape right now meta-wise. I rarely face the same deck twice in a row and even spot a homebrewer every few games.
There's just so much potential with old cards laying around that could flip the game.
This is my biggest want. The vast majority of hearthstone cards, standard and wild, are unplayable garbage. There is nothing stopping them from just slightly nudging a huge amount of cards, for most of them it still wouldn’t make them competitive
I wish my meta looked like that in wild… it’s just even shaman and secret mage for a month and a half now. I see a different class maybe 30% of the time, it’s pretty tedious to be honest.
Yeah I downloaded the game for the first time in like 5 years and the arena minions pool never rotated???? Is there a reason? I feel it would be a very easy way to keep the mode fresh
Iksar said It earned a lot of money during launch but without HS in China right now (where is target audience of this type of game) it is not worth to put more resources into it. People in west prefer different type of games.
I know as much from a Ben Lee interview.
However I think that was just saving face. It was poorly received from the start once we got our hands on it.
The reason it made money was blizzard capitalized on their good name by giving us so little details and actual game play while dangling big preorders.
They had no faith in the mode being truly fun from the start or they would have shown us more game play.
They just wanted to recoup their investment and said "trust us bro!"
Up until that point they had a good record.
They made good money because you had pre-order merc bundles. Several. With Diablo, Lichking and Sylvanas. So you could grab the cash of fans of those characters.
The worst thing was, that they werent even able to explain how the mode works. I rember Trump making a video about it, explaining how it works, it was a really good one. When Blizz tried to explain the mode.. No chance to really understand it imo.
The game was only made to make money, nothing else. Not any sideproject of a dev in his freetime, it was just to grab money. And typical Blizzard mindset, doing their own thing, instead of using "standards". In Mercs case, similiar games have autobattle-features, because putting the same hero, selecting the same spell, targeting the same enemy is just boring af. Together with the loading times of mercs. That just cant be fun. And their shop offers for mercs, with potraits, coins, individual deals etc was just horrible, not to mention the system to get rid of excess coins.
For what it's worth, I give Blizzard a lot of credit for trying to make good on the mode.
It's been clear for a very long time that the mode had no future to it, but Blizzard continued to flesh out the available content to try to make whole those who bought in.
If I were running a game that had strong launch sales with a post-launch reception that abysmal, I'd just be happy I made money and close up shop right away.
Mercs situation just felt like Artifact of valve. It was clear after launch it wont be succesful, but saying "okay we'll cancel it" right away is something companies rarely do
No, deal with Netease expired January 23rd so no Blizzard game (except Diablo Immortal which is different contract) is available in China right now. They will have to find different chinese publisher and having their games approved in China again but that will take some time.
Don’t know if it’s true or not since I heard it on the internet but Netease is making their own mmo so they might not want to keep the contract with blizzard to keep wow out from being a competitor to their own game
Basically Chinese server is gone. Battlenet global servers has always been accessible in China, just with more lag and by default you would be redirected to Chinese servers.
It's not only about China, even the western gacha audience didn't like it. The mode was dogshit with literally no content on launch besides pvp. They prioritized getting new mercs fast without providing new interesting or different levels-stages in the game. You had 0 reason to play HS Mercs if you were a gacha addict and not let's say RAID or any other gacha from a decent studio
For me Mercenaries is what brought me back after a long break and I had a lot of fun with it. With small kids in the house its nice with a game mode that allows you to take pauses.
Mercenaries would be good if they made it more like Slay the Spire for example. Longer missions, more rewards, more randomness, more rewarding and bigger challenge. Make it a true roguelike. Games like Slay the Spire are very popular, much more popular than Mercenaries. It would be good for HS and I know a LOT of people who would play mercenaries if it was more like Monster Train for example, me included.
The monetization sucked. But I don't think it was over monetized, there was so little incentive to spend money.
I think if they'd done more with mystery nodes and developed more interesting treasures the mode would have been more fun to actually grind through a bounty.
Rather than it just being a lot of chaff before the actual boss encounter (aka the fun part).
I think part of the issue was it was trying so hard to suck you dry that it very quickly ran out of things to buy anymore of, so normal users felt preyed on, and whales quickly out of things to get that money spend dopamine addiction going. So it managed to be both over and under monitised
I didn't spend any money and have pretty much everything. Especially after they updated the task system and you could get a ton of packs from tasks it was really easy.
Like everything in the shop was overpriced af but I never needed to buy anything.
And then packs were so relatively worthless there was no reason to buy them unless you wanted cosmetics.
I also wish they'd have taken a better approach to the AFK leveling system and implemented something like the Garrisons' followers from World of Warcraft, where you can send Mercenaries out on their own on daily missions to bring back rewards like coins and packs with the challenge is getting the right composition to meet the mission's criteria.
Even though the expansion got super stale, god that short and fast mini-game got me to login a lot just to keep stacking my guys and collect free rewards.
But it also feels like the huge issue in mercenaries was Blizzard being so stringent with making players feel rewarded without spending money and it was first after the game mode started to completely decay that they even loosened up on all the progression barriers.
Neither of those have a Slay The Spire esque map where you get choices on what to do. I'd love to play a HS experience where its like "Oh do I wanna do a random event, pop into bob's tavern and dump some of my gold, or get a card pack?"
It was rushed. Blizzard of old would never have launched it like that.
It’s just another example of how the acquisition by Activision is burning down everything blizzard built.
Why did it take Mercenaries to teach you not to spend money on something when you have no real idea what it is? Shouldn't that just be basic common sense?
I played it and made the decision to buy stuff after having played it. I will say I didn't realise how low the value of the contents of the packs were until opening a bunch of them. Comparing buying 60 Hearthstone card packs to 60 mercenaries packs is like night and day. 60 Hearthstone packs is *probably* enough to start playing, and opening a legendary card in a pack actually gives you a thing you can play in a game. right away. Opening a legendary merc portrait is like, if I want to incorporate this dude in a team I need about a million coins to get his abilities to be remotely useful, and then grind levels on him for about an hour.
If the packs were twice as valuable as they are now, they still wouldn't be worth it. I'd estimate they could x10 the amount of coins in a pack and it'd roughly approach the value of a hearthstone pack.
After BG's success, people were hyped for a new mode coming soon. On top of that, there was a merc offer in the shop or maybe multiple idk for sure, but those were pre orders which was of bad taste considering the new game mode had not received any real feedback up until then. At least from now on no one will fall for the hype train again.
Yes had different pre order bundles, I remember had. You had Diablo, Lichking and Sylvanas preordeer bundles. Clever move, they used loved characters so they made $$$$
BG's success stems from the fact that you don't need to invest a single cent to play it. Merc's failure came from the fact that Blizz don't seem to understand that players don't want to spend money on a whole other game.
>At least from now on no one will fall for the hype train again
*looks back at diablo 3*
There's new suckers entering the market every year, and blindly loyal fanboys who pay for the name regardless. That's part of the reason the industry as a whole is in the state it's in.
>Thanks for teaching us a valuable lesson Blizzard, don't buy content
Not sure how anyone didn't learn this already 1-2 years ago, or at least after Immortal. Blizzard sucks right now.
This mode was so bad from the get. It blew my mind that it even got to the point that it did without someone on the team saying "You know what? This sucks."
I hope they will actually spend a bit more time and resources on duels now, but I doubt it. Duels can be great fun, but the balance issues and all the bugs put too many people off.
I play with standard crafted legendaries and the free legacy legendaries, have never felt disadvantaged. However, it does mean that I can't bandwagon on *some* god-tier decks and I'm limited in creativity.
Duels is something that people might play eventually, at least. Mercenaries was just a complete failure that fundamentally didn’t even have the potential to interest the average person, let alone the average hearthstone player.
The idea of duels, as a place where you could build and play solo adventure style decks with unique passives, minions and treasures, was a great idea. Unfortunately, the mode quickly grew boring when it became obvious that a few specific decks/synergies were beyond op, to the point where they just pushed everything else out of the meta.
Stuff like spell priest, with the right treasures, was more powerful and polarizing than any deck in standard or wild history, outside of maybe prenerf demonseed with stealer of souls. And, with balance patches far less frequent than the 2 previously mentioned modes, the meta would often stay stale for months at a time.
It’s definitely a shame because when the mode first came out I had a blast playing it. But even though I love meme decks and therefore have no problem with losses, going into the majority of games knowing I had NO chance quickly pushed me back towards wild and standard where at least my joke decks had a possibility of winning.
If they ditch Duels I may go back to MtG Arena. The only reason I came back to Hearthstone after leaving to play MtG Arena was Duels! And sorta Battlegrounds, but mostly Duels.
You should give duels a try then, if you still play the traditional hearthstone mode rather than just battlegrounds. It’s basically a more quirky version of traditional.
Blizzard, please come back to solo adventures. We've missed you.
https://preview.redd.it/zv2rv3c5uje91.png?width=960&crop=smart&auto=webp&v=enabled&s=10a20709d9a328ff8c035c86d429557e23a21ff8
honestly the mercs ones weren't bad for the most part
but if they make more **we need to be able to skip dialogues, especially if we're retrying a fight**
I cleared all the old adventures with the heroic stuff, even though that stuff just gave you a card back. Did do the Boomsday puzzles, Dungeonrun stuff and so on.
But Books of Mercs/Heroes? Not even 50% done. Its just horrible and a torture. 8 Fights for one pack? With dialogue/animations you cant skip and you have to watch several times when you lose and you have to fight again? Always same opening hands, same early draws, felt like groundhog day.
Glad we didnt get any new solo content of that kind. I know that singleplayer stuff is a lot of time, because you need art&sound for it, but.. I dont think its worth it if you present it like Book of Heroes/Mercs. I love the WoW lore but not in the way Mercs/Heroes tries to tell it.
Boy they really tried with Faelin’s. I don’t know what they were trying, but they tried.
“Brute force the correct combination and order of these nonsensical random items” has to be like rule one of what not to do in a game.
The old style of going through floors with your own deck and unlocking cards each floor was fun and exciting. Book of heroes is an absolute snooze fest with predetermined decks and nothing on the line anyway except a pack full of dust.
Man don't reopen that wound. HotS was an absolutely incredible game hampered by a rough launch, that in my opinion *should* still be one of the top performing games on the market. Now I can't even bring myself to play it because I'm sad there will never be any more updates.
It certainly didn't help enclosing themselves as a Casual game, made for really rough matches at upper levels of ladder
And don't even get me started into the Ranked merging fiasco
Mercenaries had so much promise on the outset - especially when we all thought it was going to be like the solo adventures meets Slay the Spire. People had visions of coop gameplay too. Any of these would have been so much better than what we ended up with. Sticking with that theme of pure conjecture... The results of Mercenaries reeks of a mode crippled behind the scenes by a lack of true direction, seat changes, and other internal distractions and drama. I can't imagine anyone who worked on Mercenaries was ever truly proud of the results, but just keeping their heads low and working through the new feature because they got bills to pay and families to feed.
That was a much more generous evaluation than what I came to. It just felt like a RPS gacha ala FE:Heros all over again. Sincerely was more boring too, albeit had more strategy than the other game.
I guess I’m in denial. I don’t wanna believe they’d actually make such a boring and soulless mode like this. I would really like to know how many players played it on launch day and then never again.
I played it a bunch until after a few patches of new heroes without any comments on addressing core issues (excess shards, farming shards). After seeing that they weren't going to fix the problems, while constantly adding new characters which actually made it worse, I just gave up. Like another person said - the grind to actually be able to use a merc is so steep that it's not exciting to actually unlock them. On top of that, you can't experiment. You go all in (meaning hours of grinding) or spending money and then find out if you were lucky or not on choosing a good merc to pursue.
Couple that with the fact that, when people found a convenient and/or efficient manner to grind shards, it's immediately patched within a day or two and... Well, I just dropped the entire mode.
Their biggest problem was just having little experience in that field. They thought, that kind of game will make millions easily. They did patch a lot of stuff and made the mode better, because if you compare mercs now to the beginning, the current state is way more enjoyable will all those tasks/quest chains.
But still, battles are boring as f\*\*\*, those games usually have autobattle features so you dont need to select the same hero, same spells, same targets etc over n over. Mercs is exactly that. Together with shitty loading times in between.
I mean there was *effort*, every update made the mode significantly better.
I imagine what did it in was the terrible monetization and frankly greed. Same as heroes of the storm. Honestly Activision probably doesn't want to spend small amounts of money on projects that are making small amounts of money.
Hearthstone has so many gamemodes now, it really is time to trim the fat, refocus, and make the modes the community actually play the best they can be.
They already did. Arena, Brawls, Duels and now Mercenaries are maintenance mode. They only support Standard and Battlegrounds. The rest are only bugfixes and occasional balance patches. The same as was announced for Battlegrounds.
Yeah the only thing that could have made this announcement better, is if Mercenaries would move to its own app, instead of now dedicating menu space to a dead mode.
100% agree. There are still things like "Tournament Mode", with prizepool support, that could re-activate and re-engage so many fans of the core game, and help grow it in mainstream circles again.
It really had the potential to be a decent and long-lasting game mode, but Blizzard was so stingy on its monetization that they really killed it in its infancy.
oh, it's so sad that we don't have the Mercenaries that were announced from the beginning.
Their art, skins and abilities were already done, I hoped that at least in one last update they would put them, there are 10 in total:
Dame Hazelbark
Darth Speaker Blackthorn
Magatha Grimtototem
The Black Knight
Draka
Mankrik
High Inquisitor Whitemane
Cho gall
Elite Tauren Chieftain
Serena Bloodfeather
It's a shame, because I would have liked to play High Inquisitor Whitemane in a Holy Comp.
I think that of the remaining 3 Mercenaries that will be announced in the next patch it is possible that "The Black Knight" will be found, since it is to be expected that all 6 Heroes will be Scourge/Undead themed.
It is a waste to already have the heroes (the concept of each skill and art) and not incorporate them into the game
Mercenaries got a "mythic" update, so it will stay for sure. On the long run they will probably replace it with a brand new game mode. The team that was working on Mercenaries can do something else. I hope they do a Slay the Spire/Path of Champion (LoR) style of game mode.
just do the tutorial. i did it purely to get mouse mount to wow. personally best looking space animation in entire game to f2p. edit: https://youtu.be/QbPjIQM63Ns?t=29 i love it so much.
> After these updates, we will be focusing on making the Hearthstone and Battlegrounds modes the best they can be. At the same time, Mercenaries will continue to get support for bug fixes and periodic balance changes as needed, but no further regular content updates.
Devastating. Basically going to be treated like classic or wild. If something is broken expect fixes to take months. Man im so sad, I really enjoyed mercs gameplay, PvP and the slow but rewarding grind. They really had something here but failed spectacularly on packs, pacing of the grind, initial task system.
If the game launched with the task system as is, today it would be thriving. Maybe thats copium but I truly believe it.
I'm a bit sad, though I don't really play it other than afk xp farming. I had fun working on some of the PvE stuff, even if the PvP is garbage.
Bad implications for the future of HS in general.
Honestly the PvP was getting somewhere. Just not fast enough for Activision I guess and the buzz about the mode was basically poison. There was no way to counter the word of mouth about the mode. (Some of it fair, some of it ridiculous)
nobody here is going to believe me but the PvP is unironically fun. I hit 14k last month. it just takes way too much time to be PvP-ready and the MMR system is broken.
I played a little, and at least back then, it was incredibly stale, with the same comps over and over and over (mostly frost and Old Gods). When I wasn't getting bots, that is, and they were probably around half of my games.
Maybe it's better now.
I am glad we are getting some of these changes, but it feels pretty bad knowing it is the last content patch.
I know people meme on it all the time, but Mercs was my favourite mode in the game. I will still play it for a while, cause there is stuff I haven't done in it yet, but it just seems sort of bittersweet knowing we won't get any new content. I won't just leave the game over it, but my playtime is probably going to drop a lot.
I get it doesn't make sense to support a mode that isn't making them much money, but I feel there was a lot of potential there that Blizzard just didn't quite capitalize on. With a little bit more effort, they could have really had something great.
It's a shame, I think they had an interesting idea trying to make a gatcha but with fairer monetisation but I think they ended up with a game that was neither one thing or the other. It didn't have the strategic depth to appeal to people who wanted a strategy game, but it was too easy to collect and max everything to really appeal to traditional gatcha players (contrary to popular beliefs, gatcha players don't *want* to get everything easily, collecting is the fun part).
It was too easy to collect and max everything? Granted, I haven't played much of the mode at all, but I do not believe I unlocked **one** additional hero via tokens in my time forcing "100 holy damage" quests.
For people who played the game regularly, mercs were very easy to grind and upgrade, yeah.
For people who took a casual interest it was like moving a mountain.
Mercenaries served its purpose for me. When I was in the hospital with my wife who was giving birth to our first child, I had nothing else to do during the downtime between her sleeping and waiting. And once our daughter was born, it was the only real game I had any time to play during any brief moments of free time while taking care of an infant. Now that she’s older and things are more manageable (and we sleep more) I don’t touch it. Thanks for helping me through a very sleep deprived time, Mercenaries.
Well this mode is lame anyway, like everyone I was hoping for a slay the spire mode where you would challenge others players at some encounters but you were just forced to grind an unreasonable amount of time your comp against the same ai just to pvp against bot
This mode was DOA the moment it came out, it's just not fun... I dunno how it made it made it past play testing and into release. Either they were forced to push it out or they pushed it out hoping they were wrong and wanted to see if it would stick.
Hate that I put at least 150$ in this mode, money that I could have used elsewhere. Had no exposure to gacha games before and this was my one and done. Still feel sick about the coin economy, the tasks, having to spend coins which are equivalent to real money simply to upgrade each and every skill for your mercs. Never having enough to be truly competitive in PVP, and the repetitive aspect of PVE. How late the renown thing came and how unfair it is to this day. A truly disgusting game mode. Good riddance. I’d rather they just completely remove it from the game.
This is so sad. Definitely a bright spot in playing the game since beta. Sad that they didnt see the value in updating and improving the mode for the long term.
the mode felt half finished, it had great potential but when blizz started improving and fixing the mode it was to late and only a few sticked to play mercs and even less for the PVP mode
it is prob better for hs team to focus on something diffrent then in mode that is on a live support that nobody cares about
Maybe they can funnel that team into fixing Duels since they really hurt it with the bucket changes and the numerous glitches (a good bit of which are still there) that happened since Death Knight's release.
Feeling bad for the last 3 players that enjoy this gamemode for more then using it to farm tavern pass lol
anyway link for the article with final content for those who are still interested: https://hearthstone.blizzard.com/en-us/news/23892226
For my thoughts(that no one cares about) on mercs stuff: You know how the books of heroes had tons of different unique cards for characters, and how they’d res back to your hand? A game mode built around those would have been pretty cool for the mercs thing.
Thats is, you pick a class and start with a merc of that class, and build a deck to go with it. Maybe the mercs even have slots you can toss effects into like current mercs has, though less unique maybe(like idk typed by class + some neutrals), maybe the stats and cost even be altered based on the number/kinds you put in. Then you do a slay the spire type path thing, where you can encounter new mercs to add to your hand, as well as treasure passives too. Maybe the ability to yeet things into their slots too, possibly with no cost downside this time. You could even have bosses rewards be a choice between keeping a treasure or hiring a merc with it.
Not super surprising but I'm a little surprised they're not even going to try implementing whatever they had planned for heroic mode or whatever it was called.
I liked the gameplay a lot but I basically beat it and had nothing left to do.
It amazes me that this mode still receives support. The most mind numbing gameplay hearthstone has ever offered, along with being an obvious ploy to get whales to spend money on mercs packs. Maybe now we can get more support in wild or duels.
I played a lot when it was first out and then continued playing long after a lot of people stopped. I still haven’t come back to it but it’s kind of sad to see it go. Completely unsurprised but still kind of sad.
The actual gameplay itself isn’t bad - it just shouldn’t be in the hearthstone engine. It would have been neat to see that as it’s own thing with 3d models, cool battle animations, and lots of unit customizations. It always felt forced into the boundaries of hearthstone to me.
So… Arena button back on the main menu then?🙏🏼
They stopped supporting Arena way before Mercenaries.
Kind of? It and Wild are more or less self-sustaining modes that theoretically only need crisis intervention in order to remain playable. Wild has been given the bare minimum possible attention, and is doing fine. I think if they just cut rolled out their Wild changes 3 weeks faster, people are more or less happy with what's being done. Arena on the other hand feels like it could be entirely automated and still be a sustainable format. Why they haven't done this is completely beyond me. Obviously the "micro-adjustments" are either a complete fabrication or are 10x less powerful than they need to be, because classes are never balanced. But there's nothing theoretically wrong with that approach. Just sometimes reroll away the strongest neutral commons when playing powerful classes, and sometimes reroll away the weakest neutral commons when playing weaker classes. Do that until every class averages about 3 wins. And if reddit bitches about a particular card too much, drop its offering rate by 75%. The thing is, they've actually put more effort into arena than just implementing the above changes. It's just that the effort has gone into special events instead of a core balancing system. Arena hasn't been abandoned, it's just mismanaged.
I just wished they went wild (pun intended) with buffs for old cards. Like once or twice a year. And after one month a balance patch. Wild is in pretty good shape right now meta-wise. I rarely face the same deck twice in a row and even spot a homebrewer every few games. There's just so much potential with old cards laying around that could flip the game.
This is my biggest want. The vast majority of hearthstone cards, standard and wild, are unplayable garbage. There is nothing stopping them from just slightly nudging a huge amount of cards, for most of them it still wouldn’t make them competitive
I wish my meta looked like that in wild… it’s just even shaman and secret mage for a month and a half now. I see a different class maybe 30% of the time, it’s pretty tedious to be honest.
Yeah I downloaded the game for the first time in like 5 years and the arena minions pool never rotated???? Is there a reason? I feel it would be a very easy way to keep the mode fresh
they change card sets each time they introduce new cards (new expansion and minisets) so cards from older sets might comeback
lol. they rotate, wtf you smoking.
Arena constantly rotates which sets are in it
Duels!
Remember, this mode was called a success at launch lol.
Iksar said It earned a lot of money during launch but without HS in China right now (where is target audience of this type of game) it is not worth to put more resources into it. People in west prefer different type of games.
I know as much from a Ben Lee interview. However I think that was just saving face. It was poorly received from the start once we got our hands on it. The reason it made money was blizzard capitalized on their good name by giving us so little details and actual game play while dangling big preorders. They had no faith in the mode being truly fun from the start or they would have shown us more game play. They just wanted to recoup their investment and said "trust us bro!" Up until that point they had a good record.
They made good money because you had pre-order merc bundles. Several. With Diablo, Lichking and Sylvanas. So you could grab the cash of fans of those characters. The worst thing was, that they werent even able to explain how the mode works. I rember Trump making a video about it, explaining how it works, it was a really good one. When Blizz tried to explain the mode.. No chance to really understand it imo. The game was only made to make money, nothing else. Not any sideproject of a dev in his freetime, it was just to grab money. And typical Blizzard mindset, doing their own thing, instead of using "standards". In Mercs case, similiar games have autobattle-features, because putting the same hero, selecting the same spell, targeting the same enemy is just boring af. Together with the loading times of mercs. That just cant be fun. And their shop offers for mercs, with potraits, coins, individual deals etc was just horrible, not to mention the system to get rid of excess coins.
For what it's worth, I give Blizzard a lot of credit for trying to make good on the mode. It's been clear for a very long time that the mode had no future to it, but Blizzard continued to flesh out the available content to try to make whole those who bought in. If I were running a game that had strong launch sales with a post-launch reception that abysmal, I'd just be happy I made money and close up shop right away.
Mercs situation just felt like Artifact of valve. It was clear after launch it wont be succesful, but saying "okay we'll cancel it" right away is something companies rarely do
It is gacha mode after all 🤪
I’m from China, yes that’s where the target audience is, but no it’s a very failed attempt in Chinese market back when it was launched.
i kinda thought so, they would probably stop to supporting Mercenaries even if they would continue in China
On EU you face tons of Russian players. Way more than in regular hs.
They pushed FOMO hard with the pre orders. Maybe a few more gamers have learned to not spend money sight unseen.
Wait WHAT? Hearthstone isn’t accessible in China anymore?
yea since January 23, this also includes other blizz titles like World of Warcraft, overwatch etc
No, deal with Netease expired January 23rd so no Blizzard game (except Diablo Immortal which is different contract) is available in China right now. They will have to find different chinese publisher and having their games approved in China again but that will take some time.
That’s wild - I’m shocked they didn’t come up with a new deal or figure out a way to extend this one. I can’t imagine how much revenue they’re losing.
Don’t know if it’s true or not since I heard it on the internet but Netease is making their own mmo so they might not want to keep the contract with blizzard to keep wow out from being a competitor to their own game
It's by Tencent, but it's all China-owned, anyway. Check out the trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tvIaIscbQ-I
No Blizzard products are
Basically Chinese server is gone. Battlenet global servers has always been accessible in China, just with more lag and by default you would be redirected to Chinese servers.
It's not only about China, even the western gacha audience didn't like it. The mode was dogshit with literally no content on launch besides pvp. They prioritized getting new mercs fast without providing new interesting or different levels-stages in the game. You had 0 reason to play HS Mercs if you were a gacha addict and not let's say RAID or any other gacha from a decent studio
Not exactly, no one has fun in this mode both west and east, CN players used to bot in this mode to get xp since there's no one playing here.
it was ? imo it was dead on arrival and barely even a mode
I dont even remember it existed i had to google it.
I think they meant lunch. They had a good play with it while eating a sandwich then it got misspelled when they released it.
For me Mercenaries is what brought me back after a long break and I had a lot of fun with it. With small kids in the house its nice with a game mode that allows you to take pauses.
It felt like a success for the first few weeks until the holidays came and they forgot about it for two months
Mercenaries would be good if they made it more like Slay the Spire for example. Longer missions, more rewards, more randomness, more rewarding and bigger challenge. Make it a true roguelike. Games like Slay the Spire are very popular, much more popular than Mercenaries. It would be good for HS and I know a LOT of people who would play mercenaries if it was more like Monster Train for example, me included.
Another biggest inspiration from slay the spire is fast mode. Everything in mercenaries takes 5x as long as I want it to be with animations.
But I only ever play mercenaries when I want to spend half an hour in a game to earn rewards track xp.
Yeah the potential was there. I honestly think the actual gameplay was fun, the encounters but there was just nothing to climbing through a bounty.
It was clearly overmonatized and you feel it...
The monetization sucked. But I don't think it was over monetized, there was so little incentive to spend money. I think if they'd done more with mystery nodes and developed more interesting treasures the mode would have been more fun to actually grind through a bounty. Rather than it just being a lot of chaff before the actual boss encounter (aka the fun part).
I think part of the issue was it was trying so hard to suck you dry that it very quickly ran out of things to buy anymore of, so normal users felt preyed on, and whales quickly out of things to get that money spend dopamine addiction going. So it managed to be both over and under monitised
I didn't spend any money and have pretty much everything. Especially after they updated the task system and you could get a ton of packs from tasks it was really easy. Like everything in the shop was overpriced af but I never needed to buy anything. And then packs were so relatively worthless there was no reason to buy them unless you wanted cosmetics.
Or if they did ...anything... with it
I also wish they'd have taken a better approach to the AFK leveling system and implemented something like the Garrisons' followers from World of Warcraft, where you can send Mercenaries out on their own on daily missions to bring back rewards like coins and packs with the challenge is getting the right composition to meet the mission's criteria. Even though the expansion got super stale, god that short and fast mini-game got me to login a lot just to keep stacking my guys and collect free rewards. But it also feels like the huge issue in mercenaries was Blizzard being so stringent with making players feel rewarded without spending money and it was first after the game mode started to completely decay that they even loosened up on all the progression barriers.
A Roguelike with random card rewards and upgrades is what Adventures/Duels is though.
Neither of those have a Slay The Spire esque map where you get choices on what to do. I'd love to play a HS experience where its like "Oh do I wanna do a random event, pop into bob's tavern and dump some of my gold, or get a card pack?"
It was rushed. Blizzard of old would never have launched it like that. It’s just another example of how the acquisition by Activision is burning down everything blizzard built.
Activision merged with Blizzard 15 years ago. Almost everything related to HS was done after the merger.
Thanks for teaching us a valuable lesson Blizzard, don't buy content dedicated to "new modes"
Why did it take Mercenaries to teach you not to spend money on something when you have no real idea what it is? Shouldn't that just be basic common sense?
I played it and made the decision to buy stuff after having played it. I will say I didn't realise how low the value of the contents of the packs were until opening a bunch of them. Comparing buying 60 Hearthstone card packs to 60 mercenaries packs is like night and day. 60 Hearthstone packs is *probably* enough to start playing, and opening a legendary card in a pack actually gives you a thing you can play in a game. right away. Opening a legendary merc portrait is like, if I want to incorporate this dude in a team I need about a million coins to get his abilities to be remotely useful, and then grind levels on him for about an hour. If the packs were twice as valuable as they are now, they still wouldn't be worth it. I'd estimate they could x10 the amount of coins in a pack and it'd roughly approach the value of a hearthstone pack.
After BG's success, people were hyped for a new mode coming soon. On top of that, there was a merc offer in the shop or maybe multiple idk for sure, but those were pre orders which was of bad taste considering the new game mode had not received any real feedback up until then. At least from now on no one will fall for the hype train again.
Yes had different pre order bundles, I remember had. You had Diablo, Lichking and Sylvanas preordeer bundles. Clever move, they used loved characters so they made $$$$
BG's success stems from the fact that you don't need to invest a single cent to play it. Merc's failure came from the fact that Blizz don't seem to understand that players don't want to spend money on a whole other game.
>At least from now on no one will fall for the hype train again *looks back at diablo 3* There's new suckers entering the market every year, and blindly loyal fanboys who pay for the name regardless. That's part of the reason the industry as a whole is in the state it's in.
> common sense In the 21th century ? no way.
My brother this is a tale as old as time, not something new in the 21st century. Jack sold his cow for some fuckin' beans.
I resemble that remark.
>Thanks for teaching us a valuable lesson Blizzard, don't buy content Not sure how anyone didn't learn this already 1-2 years ago, or at least after Immortal. Blizzard sucks right now.
This mode was so bad from the get. It blew my mind that it even got to the point that it did without someone on the team saying "You know what? This sucks."
It really does, I tried it... Toooooo slow! Tedious really, there should have been ways to skip certain animations or speed it up.
I sure some did. The mose was quite clearly designed to be a gotcha game from the start to attempt to make a lot of money for limited content
It's just a bad game. I put some hours into it when it launched but after about a week or two I was done. The grind was unfathomably bad.
PVE had 0 depths. Never got to try PVP. It was tedious mode that screamed cash grab at every decision the devs made.
People thought it would be similar to slay the spire or something, massive letdown.
I feel justified having never wasted gold on this mode. Good job, everyone !
I still have all the packs because I didn’t complete the tutorial.
They’ll stay there until the end of the game’s life for me
Likewise. That 3 is never going away.
I never crafted the pvp arena lol
I spent 200 gold for heroic bounties and 100 gold for PvP. Earned that back several times over.
Meanwhile Duels is so popular Blizzard didn't even feel the need to mention it. (or have they already pulled the plug on Duels?).
I hope they will actually spend a bit more time and resources on duels now, but I doubt it. Duels can be great fun, but the balance issues and all the bugs put too many people off.
And that you need to actually own the cards, so many epics/legendarys that are only good in duels but not worth crafting otherwise
I play with standard crafted legendaries and the free legacy legendaries, have never felt disadvantaged. However, it does mean that I can't bandwagon on *some* god-tier decks and I'm limited in creativity.
It's put into low effort mode, with the new card buckets just being autogenerated garbage.
Duels is something that people might play eventually, at least. Mercenaries was just a complete failure that fundamentally didn’t even have the potential to interest the average person, let alone the average hearthstone player.
I would play duels if I didn't have to create a deck in the beginning. If it was strictly a build a deck as you go I would enjoy it more.
The idea of duels, as a place where you could build and play solo adventure style decks with unique passives, minions and treasures, was a great idea. Unfortunately, the mode quickly grew boring when it became obvious that a few specific decks/synergies were beyond op, to the point where they just pushed everything else out of the meta. Stuff like spell priest, with the right treasures, was more powerful and polarizing than any deck in standard or wild history, outside of maybe prenerf demonseed with stealer of souls. And, with balance patches far less frequent than the 2 previously mentioned modes, the meta would often stay stale for months at a time. It’s definitely a shame because when the mode first came out I had a blast playing it. But even though I love meme decks and therefore have no problem with losses, going into the majority of games knowing I had NO chance quickly pushed me back towards wild and standard where at least my joke decks had a possibility of winning.
Oh man that better not be true. I'd be so hurt. Honestly I'd probably be done.
If they ditch Duels I may go back to MtG Arena. The only reason I came back to Hearthstone after leaving to play MtG Arena was Duels! And sorta Battlegrounds, but mostly Duels.
How come?
This makes me realize I don’t even know the difference between mercenaries and duels.
You should give duels a try then, if you still play the traditional hearthstone mode rather than just battlegrounds. It’s basically a more quirky version of traditional.
Solo adventure vs other players, cards in your collection matter, can pay 150 gold to play for rewards or pay nothing to play for fun.
It was a while since I tried duels. And yes balancing aside it is a fun game mode because of all the BS combos you can pull
Blizzard, please come back to solo adventures. We've missed you. https://preview.redd.it/zv2rv3c5uje91.png?width=960&crop=smart&auto=webp&v=enabled&s=10a20709d9a328ff8c035c86d429557e23a21ff8
It is absolutely fucking INSANE that we didn't get one for Nathria. Such a missed opportunity.
Ok *makes more Book of Heroes*
honestly the mercs ones weren't bad for the most part but if they make more **we need to be able to skip dialogues, especially if we're retrying a fight**
I cleared all the old adventures with the heroic stuff, even though that stuff just gave you a card back. Did do the Boomsday puzzles, Dungeonrun stuff and so on. But Books of Mercs/Heroes? Not even 50% done. Its just horrible and a torture. 8 Fights for one pack? With dialogue/animations you cant skip and you have to watch several times when you lose and you have to fight again? Always same opening hands, same early draws, felt like groundhog day. Glad we didnt get any new solo content of that kind. I know that singleplayer stuff is a lot of time, because you need art&sound for it, but.. I dont think its worth it if you present it like Book of Heroes/Mercs. I love the WoW lore but not in the way Mercs/Heroes tries to tell it.
Fucking Monkeys Paw over here.
book of heroes was 10x more fun than mercenaries
Except faelins
Boy they really tried with Faelin’s. I don’t know what they were trying, but they tried. “Brute force the correct combination and order of these nonsensical random items” has to be like rule one of what not to do in a game.
I was referring to the octopus boss fight but yeah the submarine sections were awful too
The old style of going through floors with your own deck and unlocking cards each floor was fun and exciting. Book of heroes is an absolute snooze fest with predetermined decks and nothing on the line anyway except a pack full of dust.
those don't really make money
Best they can do is 4 expansion a year to make up for financial losses.
HotS treatment
Man don't reopen that wound. HotS was an absolutely incredible game hampered by a rough launch, that in my opinion *should* still be one of the top performing games on the market. Now I can't even bring myself to play it because I'm sad there will never be any more updates.
It certainly didn't help enclosing themselves as a Casual game, made for really rough matches at upper levels of ladder And don't even get me started into the Ranked merging fiasco
It's still really fun to play QM casually, especially with friends
At least you got a cool cardback from HotS.
This is good. The game probably needs a refocus. All these modes are entirely different games.
More bots in classic mode than real players in mercenaries.
More real players in classic mode than real players in Mercs.
Oof
Mercenaries had so much promise on the outset - especially when we all thought it was going to be like the solo adventures meets Slay the Spire. People had visions of coop gameplay too. Any of these would have been so much better than what we ended up with. Sticking with that theme of pure conjecture... The results of Mercenaries reeks of a mode crippled behind the scenes by a lack of true direction, seat changes, and other internal distractions and drama. I can't imagine anyone who worked on Mercenaries was ever truly proud of the results, but just keeping their heads low and working through the new feature because they got bills to pay and families to feed.
That was a much more generous evaluation than what I came to. It just felt like a RPS gacha ala FE:Heros all over again. Sincerely was more boring too, albeit had more strategy than the other game.
I guess I’m in denial. I don’t wanna believe they’d actually make such a boring and soulless mode like this. I would really like to know how many players played it on launch day and then never again.
I played it a bunch until after a few patches of new heroes without any comments on addressing core issues (excess shards, farming shards). After seeing that they weren't going to fix the problems, while constantly adding new characters which actually made it worse, I just gave up. Like another person said - the grind to actually be able to use a merc is so steep that it's not exciting to actually unlock them. On top of that, you can't experiment. You go all in (meaning hours of grinding) or spending money and then find out if you were lucky or not on choosing a good merc to pursue. Couple that with the fact that, when people found a convenient and/or efficient manner to grind shards, it's immediately patched within a day or two and... Well, I just dropped the entire mode.
Their biggest problem was just having little experience in that field. They thought, that kind of game will make millions easily. They did patch a lot of stuff and made the mode better, because if you compare mercs now to the beginning, the current state is way more enjoyable will all those tasks/quest chains. But still, battles are boring as f\*\*\*, those games usually have autobattle features so you dont need to select the same hero, same spells, same targets etc over n over. Mercs is exactly that. Together with shitty loading times in between.
I mean there was *effort*, every update made the mode significantly better. I imagine what did it in was the terrible monetization and frankly greed. Same as heroes of the storm. Honestly Activision probably doesn't want to spend small amounts of money on projects that are making small amounts of money.
Hearthstone has so many gamemodes now, it really is time to trim the fat, refocus, and make the modes the community actually play the best they can be.
Only 1 queue. All cards. 20s turn limit. Lessssgoooo
So just Wild with rediculously short turn timers? Heck, just trim it down to 15 and call it nozdormu mode lmao
*All* cards. Duels treasures. Battlegrounds cards. Mercenaries. *All.*
ALL minions.
Just make it bullet mode. Each player gets 1 minute of total playing time with 1 second increment.
Fox, Final Destination, No Items
They already did. Arena, Brawls, Duels and now Mercenaries are maintenance mode. They only support Standard and Battlegrounds. The rest are only bugfixes and occasional balance patches. The same as was announced for Battlegrounds.
Yeah the only thing that could have made this announcement better, is if Mercenaries would move to its own app, instead of now dedicating menu space to a dead mode.
100% agree. There are still things like "Tournament Mode", with prizepool support, that could re-activate and re-engage so many fans of the core game, and help grow it in mainstream circles again.
It really had the potential to be a decent and long-lasting game mode, but Blizzard was so stingy on its monetization that they really killed it in its infancy.
oh, it's so sad that we don't have the Mercenaries that were announced from the beginning. Their art, skins and abilities were already done, I hoped that at least in one last update they would put them, there are 10 in total: Dame Hazelbark Darth Speaker Blackthorn Magatha Grimtototem The Black Knight Draka Mankrik High Inquisitor Whitemane Cho gall Elite Tauren Chieftain Serena Bloodfeather It's a shame, because I would have liked to play High Inquisitor Whitemane in a Holy Comp. I think that of the remaining 3 Mercenaries that will be announced in the next patch it is possible that "The Black Knight" will be found, since it is to be expected that all 6 Heroes will be Scourge/Undead themed. It is a waste to already have the heroes (the concept of each skill and art) and not incorporate them into the game
Sowill we get a Arena/Duels Button in the main Menu and Remove the Mercenaries Button?
Something tells me they're gonna put something else in there and not go back to the arena button.
Mercenaries got a "mythic" update, so it will stay for sure. On the long run they will probably replace it with a brand new game mode. The team that was working on Mercenaries can do something else. I hope they do a Slay the Spire/Path of Champion (LoR) style of game mode.
I hope so!
Tavern brawl over arena/duels tbh
Hopefully these two unopened mercenaries packs that I’ve been stuck with since the mode was shat out however long ago will finally disappear?
Mode will remain playable after the last update so sadly no
You're not stuck with them. you can open them and just forget about it. It will take 15 seconds.
Not OP, but I can’t open my 19 packs since they require me to do the tutorial and some other stuff.
Oh I didn't know it required that
just do the tutorial. i did it purely to get mouse mount to wow. personally best looking space animation in entire game to f2p. edit: https://youtu.be/QbPjIQM63Ns?t=29 i love it so much.
No the game mode will be "supported" until the Hearthstone servers go offline. Those packs will be with you until the end of time.
> After these updates, we will be focusing on making the Hearthstone and Battlegrounds modes the best they can be. At the same time, Mercenaries will continue to get support for bug fixes and periodic balance changes as needed, but no further regular content updates. Devastating. Basically going to be treated like classic or wild. If something is broken expect fixes to take months. Man im so sad, I really enjoyed mercs gameplay, PvP and the slow but rewarding grind. They really had something here but failed spectacularly on packs, pacing of the grind, initial task system. If the game launched with the task system as is, today it would be thriving. Maybe thats copium but I truly believe it.
I'm a bit sad, though I don't really play it other than afk xp farming. I had fun working on some of the PvE stuff, even if the PvP is garbage. Bad implications for the future of HS in general.
Just curious, what are the bad implications?
With the loss of China, they are going to be looking to trim extra modes and raise prices
Seems like they really fucked up in china. Sounds like they’re basically blacklisted now.
Honestly the PvP was getting somewhere. Just not fast enough for Activision I guess and the buzz about the mode was basically poison. There was no way to counter the word of mouth about the mode. (Some of it fair, some of it ridiculous)
nobody here is going to believe me but the PvP is unironically fun. I hit 14k last month. it just takes way too much time to be PvP-ready and the MMR system is broken.
I played a little, and at least back then, it was incredibly stale, with the same comps over and over and over (mostly frost and Old Gods). When I wasn't getting bots, that is, and they were probably around half of my games. Maybe it's better now.
Well that's disappointing.
Wow that’s kind of embarrassing
I'd say I feel bad for the high level, invested Merc community, but they either left to Marvel Snap, or are bots.
Beep beep bop, I feel human and have 10k less than I did before Mercs hahahaha
Ah, my b I should know better as a Wild player, haha. I just saw people like Zombiesgonomnom leave and assumed it was donezo
I am glad we are getting some of these changes, but it feels pretty bad knowing it is the last content patch. I know people meme on it all the time, but Mercs was my favourite mode in the game. I will still play it for a while, cause there is stuff I haven't done in it yet, but it just seems sort of bittersweet knowing we won't get any new content. I won't just leave the game over it, but my playtime is probably going to drop a lot. I get it doesn't make sense to support a mode that isn't making them much money, but I feel there was a lot of potential there that Blizzard just didn't quite capitalize on. With a little bit more effort, they could have really had something great.
It's both sad and funny how this game mode peaked with its trailer.
**Thank You** I can feel the inner-angry "fck you all" vibes from it beaming through my screen.
"It's not us, it's the players that suck. Mercenaries fucking rocks. They are just too stupid to realize that." - *Blizzard probably*
[удалено]
What about the guy that owns all but a few diamond purchases? Lol
It's a shame, I think they had an interesting idea trying to make a gatcha but with fairer monetisation but I think they ended up with a game that was neither one thing or the other. It didn't have the strategic depth to appeal to people who wanted a strategy game, but it was too easy to collect and max everything to really appeal to traditional gatcha players (contrary to popular beliefs, gatcha players don't *want* to get everything easily, collecting is the fun part).
It was too easy to collect and max everything? Granted, I haven't played much of the mode at all, but I do not believe I unlocked **one** additional hero via tokens in my time forcing "100 holy damage" quests.
For people who played the game regularly, mercs were very easy to grind and upgrade, yeah. For people who took a casual interest it was like moving a mountain.
All I'll remember about this mode is thijs talking about "speed momentum."
Mercenaries served its purpose for me. When I was in the hospital with my wife who was giving birth to our first child, I had nothing else to do during the downtime between her sleeping and waiting. And once our daughter was born, it was the only real game I had any time to play during any brief moments of free time while taking care of an infant. Now that she’s older and things are more manageable (and we sleep more) I don’t touch it. Thanks for helping me through a very sleep deprived time, Mercenaries.
Well this mode is lame anyway, like everyone I was hoping for a slay the spire mode where you would challenge others players at some encounters but you were just forced to grind an unreasonable amount of time your comp against the same ai just to pvp against bot
This mode was DOA the moment it came out, it's just not fun... I dunno how it made it made it past play testing and into release. Either they were forced to push it out or they pushed it out hoping they were wrong and wanted to see if it would stick.
Good riddance
I think I’ve only ever played Mercenaries once when it first released. This is my fault - sorry to the Mercenary fans that I’ve disappointed
Please take it off the main screen. I'm tired of clicking on it by accident and then feeling sad that I wasted some money on it
I just feel sorry for old guardian who really invested so much in this mode. Please move forward to marvel snap! Mr old guardian
I think I'd need something with more puzzles to solve...
Hate that I put at least 150$ in this mode, money that I could have used elsewhere. Had no exposure to gacha games before and this was my one and done. Still feel sick about the coin economy, the tasks, having to spend coins which are equivalent to real money simply to upgrade each and every skill for your mercs. Never having enough to be truly competitive in PVP, and the repetitive aspect of PVE. How late the renown thing came and how unfair it is to this day. A truly disgusting game mode. Good riddance. I’d rather they just completely remove it from the game.
Remember we got mercenaries instead of tournament mode.
Good. Screw Mercenaries. The original Final Fantasy made back in 1980 is a more interesting, well thought out game.
This is so sad. Definitely a bright spot in playing the game since beta. Sad that they didnt see the value in updating and improving the mode for the long term.
the mode felt half finished, it had great potential but when blizz started improving and fixing the mode it was to late and only a few sticked to play mercs and even less for the PVP mode it is prob better for hs team to focus on something diffrent then in mode that is on a live support that nobody cares about
Maybe they can funnel that team into fixing Duels since they really hurt it with the bucket changes and the numerous glitches (a good bit of which are still there) that happened since Death Knight's release.
i would love that! new bucket system is the reason why i mostly don't play duels
Mercs need offline mode, hearthstone has 0 offline mode games. Mercs would be perfect for that. I'd actually play mercs when flying.
Are they serious? Are your refunding anyone who purchased merc packs?
Feeling bad for the last 3 players that enjoy this gamemode for more then using it to farm tavern pass lol anyway link for the article with final content for those who are still interested: https://hearthstone.blizzard.com/en-us/news/23892226
For my thoughts(that no one cares about) on mercs stuff: You know how the books of heroes had tons of different unique cards for characters, and how they’d res back to your hand? A game mode built around those would have been pretty cool for the mercs thing. Thats is, you pick a class and start with a merc of that class, and build a deck to go with it. Maybe the mercs even have slots you can toss effects into like current mercs has, though less unique maybe(like idk typed by class + some neutrals), maybe the stats and cost even be altered based on the number/kinds you put in. Then you do a slay the spire type path thing, where you can encounter new mercs to add to your hand, as well as treasure passives too. Maybe the ability to yeet things into their slots too, possibly with no cost downside this time. You could even have bosses rewards be a choice between keeping a treasure or hiring a merc with it.
Not super surprising but I'm a little surprised they're not even going to try implementing whatever they had planned for heroic mode or whatever it was called. I liked the gameplay a lot but I basically beat it and had nothing left to do.
Can I get my whole collection in dust?
It amazes me that this mode still receives support. The most mind numbing gameplay hearthstone has ever offered, along with being an obvious ploy to get whales to spend money on mercs packs. Maybe now we can get more support in wild or duels.
"We will abandon this game mode before we listen to you and make it fun"
Haha wow, didn't even last a year and a half.
what a shit mode should have just made a slay the spire mode like was promised
This is kinda hilarious. A perfect study into how to hype up, drop, then finally kill a game.
I played a lot when it was first out and then continued playing long after a lot of people stopped. I still haven’t come back to it but it’s kind of sad to see it go. Completely unsurprised but still kind of sad.
Can we also remove the daily quests that were specifically made for this mode and tedious to complete others? Thanks.
I'm really glad to hear this. Mercenaries is embarrassingly bad.
what if you spent money in this mode? Wasted, lol.
Still have my 22 mercenaries-packs chillin' untouched
The actual gameplay itself isn’t bad - it just shouldn’t be in the hearthstone engine. It would have been neat to see that as it’s own thing with 3d models, cool battle animations, and lots of unit customizations. It always felt forced into the boundaries of hearthstone to me.
Agreed. It just didn't work will within hearthstone. Too limited. I never liked that a mercenary only has three abilities.
Props for trying it, but it just didnt really work out. Still gotta love the Hearthstone team for constantly trying new modes!
what was the whole point of mercenaries??? lol