In addition to kicking off the Hallow's End celebrations and bringing even more bundles to the game shop, the Hearthstone team has been continuously working (and likely not sleeping a whole lot) to prepare even more crucial hotfixes for various pesky issues that have become known over the past week.
We have known for a while now that a patch was coming and expected to release "early-mid this week" (thanks to communications from the likes of Tian Ding and Senior Game Designer Paul "Kaizor" Nguyen over on the Mercenaries subreddit's Discord server), and now the official word is out:
Quote From Nicholas 'DeckTech' Weiss Patch 21.4.3 is starting to roll out now, so should be on all devices by the end of the day.
We also have a list of all the things we can expect to work properly now (again or for the first time):
Quote From GnomeSayin We are in the process of deploying a hotfix patch (patch 21.4.3) that includes the following updates:
- Fixed a bug affecting Ranked Legend external ratings (internal ratings were not affected by the bug).
- Fixed a bug causing Daily and Weekly Quests to be unable to be completed in Casual mode.
- Fixed a bug preventing the Bloodsail Deckhand discount from carrying over after a Celestial Alignment was played. Now, if you play Bloodsail Deckhand and then either player plays Celestial Alignment, the first weapon you play will cost 0.
- Fixed a bug where Southsea Scoundrel sometimes did not count as a Battlecry effect.
- Fixed a bug that blocked a small number of players from entering the Mercenaries mode using specific devices.
- Fixed certain Mercenaries Tasks that could not be completed as written: King Mukla’s Task 9; Cairne Bloodhoof’s Task 2; Antonidas’s Task 3; and Baron Geddon’s Task 10.
- Fixed a bug where dealing Critical Damage to Jaina prevented her Ice Block Talisman from triggering.
- Increased the spawn rate of furbolgs in the Winterspring area.
10/19 Update 2: correction to the bug fix regarding Southsea Scoundrel.
10/19 Update 3: correction to spelling of “furbolgs”; removed language from last week referring to a patch “next week.”
Some of the notes above might warrant a small explanation, in case you haven't been up to date with what was going on:
Wonky Legend Ratings
Somewhat "shockingly", not everyone has chosen to exclusively focus on the huge new flashy thing that was the arrival of the Mercenaries mode, with a faithful group of players still sticking to their tried-and-true Ranked climbing. And it didn't take long for some of them to start noticing that something didn't feel quite right when it came to their rating gains at Legend. It's tough enough to grind ranks up there even under the best of circumstances, let alone when your victories don't grant you nearly as much as they should. Numerous reports followed, the developers took notice.
As a result of all of this, there will be some consequences that might affect most indviduals who have tried to play and climb through the Legend ranks for the past week:
Quote From Nicholas 'DeckTech' Weiss Dev is telling me “yes,” players should expect this to correction to result in some adjustments. (Since ladder is relative, I expect that whether you adjust up or down depends on the player).
Quote From Nicholas 'DeckTech' Weiss Ranks are getting fix reactively, as well as affecting future games.
Quote From Nicholas 'DeckTech' Weiss The leaderboard will update with that once this rolls out.
While this is mainly something that concerns a relative minority of players (~several thousand per region at this point in the month, with some climbing on 2 or even 3 servers simultaneously) - if you are currently one of the Legend rank holders, don't be surprised to find out that your rating is suddenly different to what you have left it at. For better or for worse.
Attention, Mercenaries Taskmasters
If you've been grinding a lot of PvE encounters in the new mode and dilligently hunting tasks for your Mercenaries (courtesy of one Mysterious Stranger), you might've run into peculiar issues while trying to complete some of the goals being asked of you. Not everything turned out to be just a case of misleading text with wrong ability names being listed, or having odd workarounds (like Cairne's Task, actually): the likes of Antonidas and Mukla were genuinely blocking people's progress and forcing them to abandon and move on in search of something else. Definitely not what anyone wanted to see as part of their daily task reset.
Should be all good now. (Source)
Do note that we've also had reports of several other tasks not progressing quite as intended, and that this round of hotfixes might not've managed to squash all of the related bugs just yet. Just in case, be on the lookout for such:
Quote From Donimbatron Scabbs #14 is also not able to be completed. Sylvanas #17 has a weird workaround which requires Tamsin to be used. Mutanus #9 has weird behavior and Voone#14 progress doesn’t trigger upon rush attacks and requires a 2nd turn to manually attack with dragons
Quote From GnomeSayin Thanks for the report. I’ll pass these along to the team to be fixed in a future update.
We don't have an extensive list of all possible weird or broken interactions, but there've been many various reports of the kind. If you find yourself stumped by any particular task, we recommend asking in the relevant Discords and forums/comment sections (including our own!) - chances are somebody might know a way. And if nothing seems to help, make sure to add your post in the official thread as listed above, or file a separate bug report. As you can see, it's all being closely monitored and worked on.
Lastly, we were also treated to the following lovely update by Paul "Kaizor" Nguyen:
Quote From Paul 'Kaizor' Nguyen Hey all, just wanted to take a short moment to thank everyone for the bug reports and to give a little update on what to expect next!
There's still a few more task bugs that didn't make it this patch, but will hopefully be fixed in the next major patch. Will be moving forward with expanding/loosening the matchmaking and seeing how that goes this week. Hopefully we can fix the rematch bug as well.
Other fixes/QOL we're going to address in the near future is:
- Letting you view your team during treasure selection
- Saving equipments/portraits on a per deck basis
(To set expectations a bit - this won't make it some of the next patches as those are already in the pipeline. So if you see other things in there… just know that they were already planned way in advance!
So we've got some handy Quality-of-Life changes and even bigger stuff to look forward to!
Welcome Back, Casual Questing
Many of us like to jump into Casual Mode when trying to complete Daily Quests quickly and efficiently in a stress-free environment, so this option suddenly not being possible (even though it still seemed to work now and then for some people, if reports were to be believed) had some players initially worried that it might've been disabled on purpose. Luckily, nothing of the sort. Things should be back to normal by now, and people like myself can embrace AFK completions of "play 3 games as X class" in there once again. Ahh, missed it already.
About Battlegrounds Ratings Correction
We've also been informed of an upcoming resolution for a certain early and temporary (yet with lasting effects) Battlegrounds-related problem. The following message pretty much explains everything there is to it:
Quote From GnomeSayin Hello all,
Last week’s patch introduced a bug that unintentionally caused people who played Battlegrounds immediately after the patch to have their rating reset. We quickly squashed that bug so that no more players would have their ratings reset in this way, and, at the same time reset the affected players’ rating to what it was just before 21.4.
Unfortunately, this introduced another bug that caused them to gain more rating than intended for each game following the initial fix.
Tomorrow, we will be implementing a fix that will stop players from gaining this unintended bonus rating. For the top 10% of players who benefitted from this bug, we will also be reducing their ratings to adjust for those unintended extra gains.
We will update this post once that change has gone live.
21.4.3 is a server-side patch so no downloads will be required. It is now live everywhere so good luck with rolling only the right Mercenary Tasks!
Comments
Nice, really looking forward to those particular Mercs QOLs they mentioned.
God dammit, I just abandoned my Mukla task yesterday thinking the patch got delayed.
Would really like to know how much time was spent in QA for mercs. All these post go-live hotfixes don't give me a lot of confidence in HS anymore 😓
it'ss pretty clear that Mercs didn't release in a completely finished state, but at this point it's obvious that they were under time constraints and couldn't delay it any longer. Seeing how much last minute stuff was clearly still being added it's actually quite impressive how functional it is for the most part.
Cudos for how well this article was written and mas cudos for all the links! I learned even more reading the side articles i missed previously.
Glad to be of assistance!
Update 1: added a note towards the end of the article about the upcoming Battlegrounds Ratings Correction.
Update 2: added a message from Paul "Kaizor" Nguyen at the end of the Mercenaries section.
Casual mode quest completion!!!!! I've missed you.
Ive been playing mercs everyday from release, have been grinding up tasks like everyone else, completed the pve, all my mercs except for 3 are level 30, and Im still dumbfounded that there are some even crazier than myself, grinding up the tasks up until #17. I think the highest Ive gathered is #10.
Just curious about those who grinded up the tasks. Is it really faster getting coins for mercs you dont have yet this way? Or will just battling the specific bosses for specific coins be faster? All my effort and Im still at least 100 coins away from an epic, 300 away from a legendary.
I have completed all tasks (there are 18 in total) for Xyrella, Samuro and Cariel.
It's a resounding YES the most efficient way to earn coins and craft missing mercs (even legendaries) is spamming tasks. I'd say it's even better than opening packs.
If you target certain bounties, you may get coins for the one you need maybe once every 3 runs, and even then you can get lucky and get 40 coins or just get 15, so bounty targeting is WAY too luck based.
With tasks you are guaranteed to get up to 40 legendary coins in one go, and legendaries proc pretty often. Tasks are the way to go for sure.
I only target specific bosses if I'm missing 50 or less coins to craft a legendary, otherwise don't bother. Sometimes you need 4 or 5 runs just to get your last 30 coins, it's quite insane.
Oh yes, some people sure are determined with all these task completions.
I don't really find the time to hunt the poor stranger guy pretty much at all, but it is indeed a faster route on average. Just because the tasks give you so many coins for your Mercenary of choice (on top of extra random ones, and even packs for the final few). Heroic bosses especially are far more time consuming coin-wise, and not even absolutely guaranteed to give you what you want.
Yeah, that's what really peeves me up the most - that bosses will sometimes just not give you the specific coin you need. For some reason it'll instead just roll around your merc team. I feel that team5 have set a low drop rate for epic and legendary coins in the boss chest, which is a dick move because its hard enough to grind as it is.
Yeah, definitely makes task grinding the better choice for coin accumulation on Mercs you already have.
Pro tip (kinda, and perhaps you already know this): if you grind up to and including task 17, don't obtain task 18 for any character you want to grind coins for. Then, fill your campfire with tasks for other mercs in your party. What happens is that every subsequent time you encounter a stranger, you get a guaranteed 15 coins for the character who doesn't yet have their task 18 complete per stranger. This is great because it's an easy, infinite source of coins that will allow you to pick up any skills/items you missed and want to level on a character where the last 80 or so coins from the final task wouldn't have been enough.
I would only do that if you already own all the legendary mercs and want to max out a specific one as soon as possible.
The value of getting a new task for a merc, even if the merc is on task #1, is way greater than getting 15 coins for a specific merc, because a task that rewards a lot of coins for a random merc is always way more value than getting 15 specific coins.
Missing out on a new task for 15 measly coins is not good IMHO.
Gee thanks. If they had been transparent about the problem i could have been playing on launch day. I had to find out from another Chromebook user what the exact issue was so I could work around it. Also re: "small number", Pretty sure Chromebooks are popular. I use mine for websurfing and mobile games because I hate playing on a tiny screen.
Doh, that sucks. I certainly wasn't even aware of such problems.