The achievement happens when the drawn card turns golden. At least that's what happened to me. At the time i thought it was when drawing a legendary because "orange gem is close enough to gold i guess" but I drew a normal common card that became golden and the quest triggered.
Maybe it's because it was the second card I drew from the same Gold Panner, maybe the card drawn has a chance of becoming golden, I don't know, but that's what happened.
I think it's the one where you pick wrong. At least the only progress towards that achievement happened when I missed the mage one (he also missed mine, but from both my experience and the one you recalled, I can reach that conclusion).
First day of new expansion and my opponent is playing....*drumroll*.... Mill Rogue. Wow, talk about peak release day experience.
Also, I tricked that player 4 times with Suspicious Usher and got 0 achievement progress. HS and bugs, name a more iconic duo. But hey, since the expansion had a cool theme, they got a lot of money for it so hurray marketing department, you got a bonus! Shame it came right out of the QA budget but oh well, can't have money for everything, amirite?
When you're playing control and finally pushed the perfect amount of board pressure to win next turn but your opponent's The Juggernaut pulled the GorehowlMr. Smite combo for your opponent to burst you down.
Adding to @HentaiLover's comment, some buddies would also highroll you into an almost infinite loop. Triple Brann into Friend of a Friend gives you 3 shots at discovering some pretty powerful buddies, like Tickatus' buddy (which gives you 3 Darkmoon Prizes of a higher tier) or Flurgl's buddy (which transforms all 6 star units into Amalgadon as it is the only 6 star murloc), for example. Zephrys' buddy also gives great consistency to this strategy as it can easily give your second copy of Brann (if you only have one) and Friend of a Friend himself.
I did this strategy recently, ended with 4 Divine Shield/Poison Amalgadons (three of them golden), an ultra buffed [Hearthstone Card (SI:7 Sefin) Not Found], brann and a flex spot, a full hand which included two copies of my original buddy (which I didn't have time to play) and more random buddies and random cards I bought just for the sake of spending all gold before the timer ran out.
If you want a taste of the power of this card, just check Dog's last game posted on Youtube.
I completely understand your point. Botting is an issue and it was with it in mind that my rates were so unfavourable. 3000 Rokara coins would get you 75 gold which is virtually nothing if it means grinding a bot for a full day. The idea was more focused towards rounding up you gold to multiples of 50 rather than making excess coins a full blown resource farming option. In fact, that pack I used as an example is the mother of all highrolls: max number of merc coins of the highest rarity multiplied by 5.
And as far as especially the last paragraph, I do hope for a gameplay overhaul as well. Mercenaries, imo, is still in Alpha. The idea of converting Merc specific coins into "blank" coins for every Merc is also an interesting proposition, but that would also be an interesting proposal, except the exchange rates would also have to be insanely small as to not encourage more botting. My idea would just allow Mercs to be a bit more interesting for a non Mercs player due to the chance of getting gold.
Ok, so Iksar himself said on his last Q&A recap that they know extra coins on Mercenaries are a porblem and that they are "actively looking at solutions". So, here's my idea: converting them to regular gold (you know, the one you buy packs with).
Now, here's the biggest issue with the idea: what's the right conversion so that HS's economy doesn't completely break down? Well, that's not an easy answer, considering a lot of the resources for the game mode are either through packs, tasks or bounties.
Tasks give a total of 1640 coins (for himself + randoms) + 3 packs (when task 7 = equipment, the new mercs give let's say 100 extra coins, rounding up);
Packs give mercs, skins and coins. Now, it's not easy to round up an exact number without opening a butload of packs (and I'm not gonna spend money just to know that number), but by looking at the image from the HS wiki and my own experience, you can conclude that no pack gives out more than 5*50 (so 250) coins, unless you have all the skins and open a "duplicate skin", which will be converted to 50/75/100 coins (depending on merc rarity);
Bounties give an assortment of coins, depending on the dungeon, but they give out at most... honestly, I couldn't find how much they give and I'm not in the mood to do a Heroic run on Alterac Valley just to check how many coins we get (especially since I don't have that many maxed mercs). So, for the sake of rounding up, I'll say they also give out up to 250 coins.
So, how much gold should we get for the extra coins? I'd say, not that much, just some extra change so your time isn't completely wasted while not being so much you'd run a bot on early game bounties for insane amounts of gold. Which brings me to my proposition: For every 200 extra coins you have of a certain merc, you can redeem X gold, depending on rarity. More specifically, 5G for rare mercs, 10G for epic ones and 20G for legendary mercs.
This way, even if you were to get 250 coins of a certain legendary merc on a Merc Pack, that would be worth the equivalent of 25G: 25% the base cost of a Merc pack, i. e., the same disenchanting to enchanting rate dust has. And also, this change helps with another small inconvenience: ever since the change to the reward track, we've always received gold in multiples of 50, which means you'll always be left with up to 45 "useless" gold leftovers if you don't play arena or duels.
So my avatar in this site is my old dog. Does that make me a dog? No, I'm still a person.
So why the hell does Wildpaw Gnoll still count your Rogue cards as cards from another class just because you're a Rogue dressed as something else? Who even considered this as good design in the first place?
I will say this though, and this is my personal opinion: the reason why I haven't completely given up on Mercs (and HS in general) is that the devs still care about the game. I don't put my money on it because I don't like a lot of the current design decisions (or because I don't want to spend 20€ on 8 Jpegs and a couple of voicelines in BGs case [come on, T5, lower those prices, I bought Valheim for 17€ around 5 months ago and have almost 300 hours of play time already while juggling studies and work, that's just so much more value than what you're offering it's almost sad]), but I understand why people still put money on this game. Just look at how the devs still try to cater to the requests of the community while having to deal with Bobby Kotick's greedy little shadow everywhere. Iksar doesn't need to do weekly AMAs, he chooses to. Celestalon doesn't need to do weird puzzles for us, he chooses to (although dude, spend more time fixing bugs, Wildpaw Gnoll is a buggy mess, for example). Those are just some examples. But we also see a lot of community interaction through advertising content creators and other background stuff like that. That's why HS survived through 7 years of game life or the rise of other digital card games like LoR or MtG Arena or Artifact (LUL) or other "HS killers".
I dont actually recall a Wildpaw Gnoll bug, far as I know its working as intended. Can you clarify on this?
Quote From ElSabidon
And it's not like we only see Activision's grubby little fingers in Mercenaries, I feel a non insignificant percentage of the design process in Standard HS is revolved around selling the newest expansion above all things, which is why the newest expansions feel like the most broken ones (just look at a card like Soulciologist Malicia, an insanely powerful card that was a staple for a couple of expansion cycles before being rendered useless not because she was nerfed but because the environment around her just started chewing her for breakfast) [yes, this is a power creep rant, you can ignore it].
I dont think there's anything particularly wrong if expansions are designed to overtake the previous meta. In fact, I'd argue that's particularly one thing it should be doing: freshen up the meta, something which the midset tends to fail doing.
There are cards that are still seeing play from earlier expansion. Librams, amusingly enough, sees more play after it was first introduced and are still seeing play now. Insane cards can be pushed away simply because of the meta is not conducive to it, not necessarily because of power creep.
Regarding the Gnoll: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I10Xy831K9Q Starts at 1:28. And something similar did happen to me. In my case, I was playing wild, added Grumble, Worldshaker to my hand (so far so good), played him and returned him to hand using Shadowstep (at which point Wildpaw Gnoll's cost did not decrease) and replayed him, with Wildpaw Gnoll increasing its cost. I don't have Maestra, so I was always a Rogue, so the card couldn't even get "confused" by that factor.
Regarding the Librams: they did get buffed. Aldor Attendant started as a 2 mana 2/3. Not saying that's the only reason the package became good, but it did become much more efficient from that point onward. But that wasn't my point regarding power creep. I believe the current design process has the flaw of shunning past expansions too hard. Yes, a card like The Demon Seed can exist, but if every other warlock archetype gets completely outclassed by it, then that card becomes a problem. And while it's impossible to have a meta where every card has similar power levels, it is possible to have metas where weaker archetypes can still fight with stronger ones, like the Un'Goro meta or even the OG Old Gods meta. It just feels the current metas revolve too much around the new instead of harmonizing the new with the old.
EDIT: Although I do have to say, the Libram package is still one of their best designs regarding balancing the new with the old.
Here's my two cents: we're being fed an alpha stage game and being sold a buttload of bundles on it. Now, I'm not saying this is solely T5's fault (although there is a small amount of blame to share to them, they did release the game in this state), this is mostly Activision doing Activision things.
And it's not like we only see Activision's grubby little fingers in Mercenaries, I feel a non insignificant percentage of the design process in Standard HS is revolved around selling the newest expansion above all things, which is why the newest expansions feel like the most broken ones (just look at a card like Soulciologist Malicia, an insanely powerful card that was a staple for a couple of expansion cycles before being rendered useless not because she was nerfed but because the environment around her just started chewing her for breakfast) [yes, this is a power creep rant, you can ignore it].
And this is why Mercenaries has a lot of issues. The game's focus is around money, not fun. That's why the game mode feels (and definitely is) unfinished. That's also why there were so many bugs around tasks, that's also why tasks (your main resource generator) are hidden behing a single RNG tile per run or that's why we don't have a use for excess coins yet, even if that one is a bit counter intuitive (if we could have a use for extra resources, we would feel less bad spending money). All these issues and more show that we're playing a rushed game mode whose main focus is making us spend more and more money rather than giving us a good experience. Hell, that's even why some of the initial design ideas we we're promised got scrapped, like "evolving" our mercs (which we can see it was a thing in the initial design through the baby King Krush skin or baby King Mukla skin or even the young Anduin Wrynn skin or how there's a clearly living Arthas Lich King skin or a clearly alive Elf Sylvanas Windrunner skin.
Just compare Mercenaries to Battlegrounds: the latter was made with the sole purpose of being almost like an one off thing for a while, but since the primary focus was on fun, it now rivals the main game in playrate and even viewership on Twitch, for example (just look at how a lot of HS content creators shifted their focus to BGs).
I will say this though, and this is my personal opinion: the reason why I haven't completely given up on Mercs (and HS in general) is that the devs still care about the game. I don't put my money on it because I don't like a lot of the current design decisions (or because I don't want to spend 20€ on 8 Jpegs and a couple of voicelines in BGs case [come on, T5, lower those prices, I bought Valheim for 17€ around 5 months ago and have almost 300 hours of play time already while juggling studies and work, that's just so much more value than what you're offering it's almost sad]), but I understand why people still put money on this game. Just look at how the devs still try to cater to the requests of the community while having to deal with Bobby Kotick's greedy little shadow everywhere. Iksar doesn't need to do weekly AMAs, he chooses to. Celestalon doesn't need to do weird puzzles for us, he chooses to (although dude, spend more time fixing bugs, Wildpaw Gnoll is a buggy mess, for example). Those are just some examples. But we also see a lot of community interaction through advertising content creators and other background stuff like that. That's why HS survived through 7 years of game life or the rise of other digital card games like LoR or MtG Arena or Artifact (LUL) or other "HS killers".
The dev team would certainly want a lot more investment on their work (through more QA testers mostly, but also through card designers or a bigger balance team or probably through something more trivial like more artists for a more varied art style on their cards) but daddy Activision would probably just disregard their request. And yes, Iksar has stated multiple times he likes a smaller team, but I'm definitely sure he'd welcome an extra pair of working hands.
PS: Regarding the Deathblow Grom task you mentioned, the game didn't count game ending Deathblows, i.e., when you would activate Deathblow on the final enemy. I know this because I recently did that task on Cookie, the Cook's fishes and it counted all of them except for the last one I ended the fight with. It then happened again for like 3 fights (me triggering Deathblow on the final opponent) and I finally realized what was happened. Then I triggered the Deathblow on a non final opponent and it counted and now I assume it works that way for every single Deathblow related tasks, but I could be wrong and it could just be a Grom thing.
PPS: Sorry I got a little ranty at times, I tend to do that.
Here's another bug based achievement: I killed a Tirion Fordring with Hollow Abomination but no "Get Over Here!" achievement was given.
PS: The name of the achievement is ironic, though, I did the achievment in a Grim Patron shuffle deck to try and finish the Spammy Arcanist (which I would have if a certain Knife Juggler didn't snipe the 2 HP minion my opponent had). But yeah, that achievement is tracking correctly, as is the Dread Imp summoning one.
I remember an interview a while ago where a dev (I think it was the weekly AMA guy, don't remember his name) said that their design philosophy regarding big mana cards changing from essentialy being big mana cards to big mana win conditions. Lightforged Cariel is such a card. Not only because of the soft AoE (which can be set-up with Equality or Libram of Justice the turn before to be much more impactful), but because the Hero Power makes it so it's much harder to remove their minions (and everyone should know how dangerous it is to leave a minion on board against a Paladin) combined with an anti-combo weapon that also works as a makeshift free Hunter hero power.
This is the Control wet dream and yet somehow feels balanced, because unlike other win conditions the game has introduced over these last expansions, Lightforged Cariel can actually be countered by somthing other than finishing the game before she's played.
Care to elaborate? She is definitely a win condition in and of itself
Yes. That's what I said. She is a win condition, but has counters, notably weapon destruction, which makes her more balanced than other win conditions.
Also, with Shadow Word: Nibble around, you can really punish your opponent for having a board.
PS: How do I make it so the site shows Shadow Word: Devour when I say Shadow Word: Nibble using the [card*] (minus the *) tag? You know, the same way I did with Topsy Turvy or Gnomeregan Infantry.
Also, with Shadow Word: Nibble around, you can really punish your opponent for having a board.
PS: How do I make it so the site shows Shadow Word: Devour when I say Shadow Word: Nibble using the [card*] (minus the *) tag? You know, the same way I did with Topsy Turvy or Gnomeregan Infantry.
Kind of awkward when you consider this is an aggro card that synergises with healing and virtually all healing in Priest is Holy spells, while Priest's only aggro deck excludes those exact healing spells.
The achievement happens when the drawn card turns golden. At least that's what happened to me. At the time i thought it was when drawing a legendary because "orange gem is close enough to gold i guess" but I drew a normal common card that became golden and the quest triggered.
Maybe it's because it was the second card I drew from the same Gold Panner, maybe the card drawn has a chance of becoming golden, I don't know, but that's what happened.
I think it's the one where you pick wrong. At least the only progress towards that achievement happened when I missed the mage one (he also missed mine, but from both my experience and the one you recalled, I can reach that conclusion).
First day of new expansion and my opponent is playing....*drumroll*.... Mill Rogue. Wow, talk about peak release day experience.
Also, I tricked that player 4 times with Suspicious Usher and got 0 achievement progress. HS and bugs, name a more iconic duo. But hey, since the expansion had a cool theme, they got a lot of money for it so hurray marketing department, you got a bonus! Shame it came right out of the QA budget but oh well, can't have money for everything, amirite?
When you're playing control and finally pushed the perfect amount of board pressure to win next turn but your opponent's The Juggernaut pulled the Gorehowl Mr. Smite combo for your opponent to burst you down.
Switcheroo could also switch mana costs but that feels like a different nightmare waiting to happen.
Hmmm... Blizzard, where are my packs? I was promised a mild dopamine rush from opening packs, where are they if I can't find them even in the store?
EDIT: Ok, I found it. Apparently, I had to close the Battle.net app, not just the game.
Adding to @HentaiLover's comment, some buddies would also highroll you into an almost infinite loop. Triple Brann into Friend of a Friend gives you 3 shots at discovering some pretty powerful buddies, like Tickatus' buddy (which gives you 3 Darkmoon Prizes of a higher tier) or Flurgl's buddy (which transforms all 6 star units into Amalgadon as it is the only 6 star murloc), for example. Zephrys' buddy also gives great consistency to this strategy as it can easily give your second copy of Brann (if you only have one) and Friend of a Friend himself.
I did this strategy recently, ended with 4 Divine Shield/Poison Amalgadons (three of them golden), an ultra buffed [Hearthstone Card (SI:7 Sefin) Not Found], brann and a flex spot, a full hand which included two copies of my original buddy (which I didn't have time to play) and more random buddies and random cards I bought just for the sake of spending all gold before the timer ran out.
If you want a taste of the power of this card, just check Dog's last game posted on Youtube.
I completely understand your point. Botting is an issue and it was with it in mind that my rates were so unfavourable. 3000 Rokara coins would get you 75 gold which is virtually nothing if it means grinding a bot for a full day. The idea was more focused towards rounding up you gold to multiples of 50 rather than making excess coins a full blown resource farming option. In fact, that pack I used as an example is the mother of all highrolls: max number of merc coins of the highest rarity multiplied by 5.
And as far as especially the last paragraph, I do hope for a gameplay overhaul as well. Mercenaries, imo, is still in Alpha. The idea of converting Merc specific coins into "blank" coins for every Merc is also an interesting proposition, but that would also be an interesting proposal, except the exchange rates would also have to be insanely small as to not encourage more botting. My idea would just allow Mercs to be a bit more interesting for a non Mercs player due to the chance of getting gold.
Ok, so Iksar himself said on his last Q&A recap that they know extra coins on Mercenaries are a porblem and that they are "actively looking at solutions". So, here's my idea: converting them to regular gold (you know, the one you buy packs with).
Now, here's the biggest issue with the idea: what's the right conversion so that HS's economy doesn't completely break down? Well, that's not an easy answer, considering a lot of the resources for the game mode are either through packs, tasks or bounties.
So, how much gold should we get for the extra coins? I'd say, not that much, just some extra change so your time isn't completely wasted while not being so much you'd run a bot on early game bounties for insane amounts of gold. Which brings me to my proposition: For every 200 extra coins you have of a certain merc, you can redeem X gold, depending on rarity. More specifically, 5G for rare mercs, 10G for epic ones and 20G for legendary mercs.
This way, even if you were to get 250 coins of a certain legendary merc on a Merc Pack, that would be worth the equivalent of 25G: 25% the base cost of a Merc pack, i. e., the same disenchanting to enchanting rate dust has. And also, this change helps with another small inconvenience: ever since the change to the reward track, we've always received gold in multiples of 50, which means you'll always be left with up to 45 "useless" gold leftovers if you don't play arena or duels.
Battletag: ElSabidon#2943
Region: EU
Trade Only?: Yes, I will show you my quest then you go first
DONE
So my avatar in this site is my old dog. Does that make me a dog? No, I'm still a person.
So why the hell does Wildpaw Gnoll still count your Rogue cards as cards from another class just because you're a Rogue dressed as something else? Who even considered this as good design in the first place?
Regarding the Gnoll: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I10Xy831K9Q Starts at 1:28. And something similar did happen to me. In my case, I was playing wild, added Grumble, Worldshaker to my hand (so far so good), played him and returned him to hand using Shadowstep (at which point Wildpaw Gnoll's cost did not decrease) and replayed him, with Wildpaw Gnoll increasing its cost. I don't have Maestra, so I was always a Rogue, so the card couldn't even get "confused" by that factor.
Regarding the Librams: they did get buffed. Aldor Attendant started as a 2 mana 2/3. Not saying that's the only reason the package became good, but it did become much more efficient from that point onward. But that wasn't my point regarding power creep. I believe the current design process has the flaw of shunning past expansions too hard. Yes, a card like The Demon Seed can exist, but if every other warlock archetype gets completely outclassed by it, then that card becomes a problem. And while it's impossible to have a meta where every card has similar power levels, it is possible to have metas where weaker archetypes can still fight with stronger ones, like the Un'Goro meta or even the OG Old Gods meta. It just feels the current metas revolve too much around the new instead of harmonizing the new with the old.
EDIT: Although I do have to say, the Libram package is still one of their best designs regarding balancing the new with the old.
Here's my two cents: we're being fed an alpha stage game and being sold a buttload of bundles on it. Now, I'm not saying this is solely T5's fault (although there is a small amount of blame to share to them, they did release the game in this state), this is mostly Activision doing Activision things.
And it's not like we only see Activision's grubby little fingers in Mercenaries, I feel a non insignificant percentage of the design process in Standard HS is revolved around selling the newest expansion above all things, which is why the newest expansions feel like the most broken ones (just look at a card like Soulciologist Malicia, an insanely powerful card that was a staple for a couple of expansion cycles before being rendered useless not because she was nerfed but because the environment around her just started chewing her for breakfast) [yes, this is a power creep rant, you can ignore it].
And this is why Mercenaries has a lot of issues. The game's focus is around money, not fun. That's why the game mode feels (and definitely is) unfinished. That's also why there were so many bugs around tasks, that's also why tasks (your main resource generator) are hidden behing a single RNG tile per run or that's why we don't have a use for excess coins yet, even if that one is a bit counter intuitive (if we could have a use for extra resources, we would feel less bad spending money). All these issues and more show that we're playing a rushed game mode whose main focus is making us spend more and more money rather than giving us a good experience. Hell, that's even why some of the initial design ideas we we're promised got scrapped, like "evolving" our mercs (which we can see it was a thing in the initial design through the baby King Krush skin or baby King Mukla skin or even the young Anduin Wrynn skin or how there's a clearly living Arthas Lich King skin or a clearly alive Elf Sylvanas Windrunner skin.
Just compare Mercenaries to Battlegrounds: the latter was made with the sole purpose of being almost like an one off thing for a while, but since the primary focus was on fun, it now rivals the main game in playrate and even viewership on Twitch, for example (just look at how a lot of HS content creators shifted their focus to BGs).
I will say this though, and this is my personal opinion: the reason why I haven't completely given up on Mercs (and HS in general) is that the devs still care about the game. I don't put my money on it because I don't like a lot of the current design decisions (or because I don't want to spend 20€ on 8 Jpegs and a couple of voicelines in BGs case [come on, T5, lower those prices, I bought Valheim for 17€ around 5 months ago and have almost 300 hours of play time already while juggling studies and work, that's just so much more value than what you're offering it's almost sad]), but I understand why people still put money on this game. Just look at how the devs still try to cater to the requests of the community while having to deal with Bobby Kotick's greedy little shadow everywhere. Iksar doesn't need to do weekly AMAs, he chooses to. Celestalon doesn't need to do weird puzzles for us, he chooses to (although dude, spend more time fixing bugs, Wildpaw Gnoll is a buggy mess, for example). Those are just some examples. But we also see a lot of community interaction through advertising content creators and other background stuff like that. That's why HS survived through 7 years of game life or the rise of other digital card games like LoR or MtG Arena or Artifact (LUL) or other "HS killers".
The dev team would certainly want a lot more investment on their work (through more QA testers mostly, but also through card designers or a bigger balance team or probably through something more trivial like more artists for a more varied art style on their cards) but daddy Activision would probably just disregard their request. And yes, Iksar has stated multiple times he likes a smaller team, but I'm definitely sure he'd welcome an extra pair of working hands.
PS: Regarding the Deathblow Grom task you mentioned, the game didn't count game ending Deathblows, i.e., when you would activate Deathblow on the final enemy. I know this because I recently did that task on Cookie, the Cook's fishes and it counted all of them except for the last one I ended the fight with. It then happened again for like 3 fights (me triggering Deathblow on the final opponent) and I finally realized what was happened. Then I triggered the Deathblow on a non final opponent and it counted and now I assume it works that way for every single Deathblow related tasks, but I could be wrong and it could just be a Grom thing.
PPS: Sorry I got a little ranty at times, I tend to do that.
Add Knife Juggler and Deathspeaker and *Puff* hilarious OTK deck.
Here's another bug based achievement: I killed a Tirion Fordring with Hollow Abomination but no "Get Over Here!" achievement was given.
PS: The name of the achievement is ironic, though, I did the achievment in a Grim Patron shuffle deck to try and finish the Spammy Arcanist (which I would have if a certain Knife Juggler didn't snipe the 2 HP minion my opponent had). But yeah, that achievement is tracking correctly, as is the Dread Imp summoning one.
Yes. That's what I said. She is a win condition, but has counters, notably weapon destruction, which makes her more balanced than other win conditions.
Oh wow, I was trying to do it way too wrong. Thanks
Checks notes... nope, still prefer Topsy Turvy in my Gnomeregan Infantry OTK Priest.
Also, with Shadow Word: Nibble around, you can really punish your opponent for having a board.
PS: How do I make it so the site shows Shadow Word: Devour when I say Shadow Word: Nibble using the [card*] (minus the *) tag? You know, the same way I did with Topsy Turvy or Gnomeregan Infantry.
Kind of awkward when you consider this is an aggro card that synergises with healing and virtually all healing in Priest is Holy spells, while Priest's only aggro deck excludes those exact healing spells.
Sweet sweet Priest card draw, how much do I need you.