I was prompted to write this article by continuous sour experiences with daily questing in Hearthstone. This has been an on-and-off thing for a while now, but the recent change to quests has made me question it again. That is not to say that the quest system is bad, just that some parts feel like they are outdated and kept for no good reason whatsoever. But before I get to that, let's get some perspective about the quest system in general first.


Maximum Amount of Gold Earned From Quest XP During the Expansion Lifetime

We are going to assume that the expansion lifetime is roughly 119 days which equates to 17 weeks. The majority of expansions were released on Tuesday or Thursday. This is important for the purpose of (not) having an extra set of Weekly Quests count towards the Rewards Track of an expansion. The numbers could change in the future, let's just work for this average that has been true in the past, to keep it simple.

I am also going to completely ignore high-roll Quests for these calculations, meaning possible 100g or 80g Quests in the old system and 1500 XP Daily Quests in the new one.

Rewards Track XP and Gold thresholds are taken from here, here and here (thanks Torgal).


Scenarios

  • Scenarios (A) will show the absolute minimum effort with every Daily Quest being a low-roll (900 XP or 800 XP respectively) and all Weekly Quests skipped.
  • Scenarios (F) will show the best effort, every Daily Quest rerolled into a 1000 XP and all Weekly Quests completed.
  • For purpose of scenarios (B) and (E), I assume the Ranked Weekly Quest skipped (2500 XP).
  • Scenarios (C) represents 900 XP Daily Quests with all Weekly Quests completed.
  • Scenarios (D) represents 1000 XP Daily Quests with all Weekly Quests skipped.

OG Reward System

I'm putting this here just as a reference, so we can see that things are better now, but we do have to play more actively.

  • Expansion lifetime: ~119 days (17 weeks)
  • Total Gold earned when
    • every Quest rewards 50g: ~119*50=5950 g
    • every Quest rewards 60g: ~119*60=7140 g

Current Rewards Track

  • Expansion lifetime: ~119 days (17 weeks)
  • XP needed for LVL50: 155200 XP
  • Gold earned at LVL50: 5650 g
ScenarioDaily Quest XPWeekly Quest XPTotal Quest XP
per Week
Total Quest XP
per Expansion
Rewards Track
LVL reached
Total Gold Earned
A190006300107100403350
B190035009800166600586050
C1900600012300209100877500
D1100007000119000423750
E11000350010500178500676500
F11000600013000221000957900

Original Rewards Track

Show Spoiler
  • Expansion Lifetime: ~119 days (17 weeks)
  • XP needed for LVL50: 192200 XP
  • Gold earned at LVL50: 4200 g
Scenario Daily Quest XP Weekly Quests
XP
Total Quest XP
per Week
Total Quest XP
per Expansion
Rewards Track
LVL reached
Total Gold Earned
A2 800 0 5600 95200 37 2300
B2 800 3500 9100 154700 45 3600
C2 800 6000 11600 197200 51 4350
D2 1000 0 7000 119000 40 2700
E2 1000 3500 10500 178500 48 3900
F2 1000 6000 13000 221000 56 5100


Difference Between Current and Original Rewards Tracks

Show Spoiler

Keep in mind that when we compare current and old Rewards Tracks, we cannot simply compare old and new Levels, they do not correspond to each other due to the XP differences. But we can still compare the maximum amount of Total Gold Earned since we can derive that from each Rewards Track respectively.

  • XP needed for LVL50: -37000 XP (~20% decrease)
  • Gold earned at LVL50: +1450 (~35% increase)
Scenario Daily Quest XP Total Quest XP
per Week
Total Quest XP
per Expansion
Total Gold Earned Total Gold Earned [%]
A +100 +700 +11900 +1050 +46%
B +100 +700 +11900 +2450 +68%
C +100 +700 +11900 +3150 +72%
D 0 0 0 +1050 +39%
E 0 0 0 +2600 +67%
F 0 0 0 +2800 +55%


Conclusions

All gold amounts mentioned in this article are solely from doing quests, you will get much more in the end when you add up XP from playing and achievements. Not to mention the non-gold rewards.

  1. The current Rewards Track provides roughly 1050 - 3150 more gold compared to its first iteration.
  2. Almost half of the Total Quest XP per expansion comes from Weekly Quests.
  3. Roughly 20% of Total Quest XP per expansion comes from the Ranked Play Weekly Quest alone, which can be a good or a bad thing:
    • if you don't have time to play Ranked, you are losing only 20% of the total potential rewards from questing,
    • but 20% still isn't a small amount.
  4. Trying to re-roll every single 900 XP quest into a better one has only a very small effect on total rewards during an expansion lifetime.

Why Are There Low-Roll Quests in the Game?

Now, to the main reason why I wanted to write this article. First, I wanted to figure out for myself what would be the optimal effort to spend on questing. Since I don't like to play Ranked very much lately, that one Weekly Ranked Quest can be quite tedious for me. Second, I wanted to present a base for my argument - Why are these 900 XP, low-roll quests still in this game? It makes even less sense with the recent change to their XP reward, increasing it from 800 XP to 900 XP.

Why wasn't the change to a full 1000 XP? Why keep the low-roll quests with such a minimal XP difference? As we've demonstrated earlier, the difference between low-rolling every quest or tryhard to never complete anything worse than a 1000 XP one is so marginal that it is mostly not even worth the hassle.


That brings me to the problem I have with low-roll quests, they create that bad feeling of missing out, even though what you are missing out on does not matter that much in the end. A couple of hundred gold total at worst, in reality, less.

I would like to re-roll my quest because I don't want to do the one I currently have, not because I got unlucky and rolled low.

With that comes another issue, how often do you not re-roll a 1000 XP quest just so you don't end up with a 900 XP one? I'm fairly confident I know the answer. What is the point of having high-roll quests in the mix, if players are discouraged to try to get them? If you re-roll a 900 XP quest, you just want to get to 1000 XP, if you get a high-roll, jackpot! But you don't really care if that happens or not, since the chances are so slim. You might also not have time, or not want to complete the 1000 XP one waiting for you, but fear of rolling into 900 XP makes you bite the bullet. That does not sound like a player-friendly system to me.


In the current pool, there are 65 different Daily Quests of which only ten are 900 XP ones. And six high-roll ones, awarding 1500 XP. Two of which actually felt like high-rolls in the old system, one being "Watch a friend win in Spectator Mode." and second "Challenge a friend. You both earn a reward!". A full card pack or an 80g (or 160g if you traded with a friend for theirs) did feel like a really nice reward, didn't it? The rest of the high-roll quests are just the basic quests with a higher requirement, but wait, Weekly Quests already act the same way, for the most part! Mhm.

One of the latest changes in the old system was to make 50g quests be easier to complete and 60g quests be a bit harder, while also guaranteeing a re-roll from 60g to always land into 50g quests. So players who wanted to finish their quests faster would have a guaranteed option to do so and were penalized with lower rewards. Why?

Nowadays, there is such a little difference in the amount of rewards players get out of the re-rolling hassle, why continue to create an environment of feelsbad moments for no good reason?

We'll look at Legends of Runeterra for example as their baseline for quests is 1000 XP and high-roll is 1500 XP. Sounds familiar, eh? But there are no low-rolls! If you don't want to play a certain champion or a deck, just re-roll the quest without any fear of losing out on anything and do a different one. I know, mind-blowing concept. Lately, they even introduced "dual" quests, where there are two different conditions to be fulfilled and you only need to satisfy one. Maybe so that players with small collections don't feel forced to craft new cards or re-roll just to clear a quest? Whaaaat?


The Future

The Rewards Track itself is still undergoing changes, which makes sense, and will most likely continue to do so for a foreseeable future. So is there hope for more changes to quests as well? I think so. How about making all basic Daily Quests in Hearthstone easy to complete, which for the most part they are already, get rid of low-roll quests completely and perhaps introduce more high-roll quests into the mix. With Weekly Quests being a thing, they could keep them as a kind of unique way to incentivize players to try different game modes, while not forcing them to do so, keeping the requirements reasonable. And make the high-roll quests to be slightly more difficult versions of basic ones. All the pieces are there, the system as a whole just needs a little bit of a nudge to get where it could (should?) be.

So to answer my own question, why are the low-roll quests still a thing? I honestly don't know. Is that a remnant of the old system that devs didn't realize could be removed or does it have a specific purpose? If so, what is it? Would the argument be to have players log-in every day to try and get rid of low-rolls and not only every three days to clear their quest log? And by logging-in each day, there would be a higher likelihood that players stick around more? Maybe. I just hope that going forward, we will eventually get a quest system where you are completing the quests you want to, not the ones you are left with because you fear you might lose out otherwise.


Well, that is it from me. If you managed to read all the way here, go get yourself a cookie, you deserve it! What is your opinion on the current state of Quests in Hearthstone? Let us know in the comments below.