Each mercenary has access to different abilities, giving you a wide range of strategies to try.
Mercenaries have levels.
When you level a mercenary they get stronger and will obtain new abilities.
Your abilities can also earn experience to level up.
The maximum level of each mercenary is at least 30.
Your mercenaries can equip gear that they find in runs. This gear makes them stronger and you may want to find certain pieces of each merc.
You find more mercenaries by playing the game.
A few factual issues here:
As I understand it, your abilities don't earn experience; they become upgradeable to higher ranks as the mercenary levels up. Once the upgrade has unlocked at a certain level, you must spend Mercenary Coins to complete the upgrade.
There are two kinds of "gear": equipment and treasures. Equipment applies a passive bonus that usually applies to one of the mercenary's abilities. Equipment is part of your collection, and one piece is selected for each mercenary before you start a run. You can craft equipment with mercenary coins.
Treasures, on the other hand, are temporary bonuses you find in the course of a run. They function like the treasures in Duels, and they disappear at the end of the run.
The map is the only part of this game that resembles Slay the Spire.
The combat in Mercenaries is nothing like a deck-building card-battler. The combat abilities and equipment for each Mercenary are fixed at the start of the run, and they are always available during every round of a fight (unless they have a cooldown).
In a deck-builder, the strategy is all about making your deck efficient so that you'll draw what you need in combat. In Mercenaries, it's about using your fixed abilities to the best effect by maximizing synergies among party members and by exploiting the damage triangle wisely.
That is a Spirit Healer. It resurrects one random mercenary that has died in battle.
Normally, if one of your mercenaries dies, it's out for the rest of the run. You start with a party of six, and you choose three of those six for each battle. Dead party members will reduce your options in future battles.
The game is not unbalanced. It's just balanced in a way that you don't like. And balance aside, it's hard to make an argument that the overall quality is bad.
If you don't like the product, stop buying it. But making a stink about the new monetization options is silly when the game is actually cheaper to play than it ever was before. It's still expensive, granted, but not because they added cosmetics. In fact, the more money they make from cosmetics, the more wiggle room they have to cut us breaks on cards.
Clunky and limiting as the Hearthstone UI is, building a new game from scratch would be more expensive in terms of time and money, and a lot riskier from every angle. Remember how long Mercs has already been delayed? Add a couple more years onto that for a standalone version.
News flash, buddy: Blizzard does not actually want people playing these games for free.
There's no "keeping up with the Joneses" in PvE, so I don't know where you're getting this "2-3 times a year" figure. You just play with what you earn in-game, forever, no problem. It's no one's fault but your own if you compare your free-player experience with a paying player's.
Furthermore, the ability to spend gold on Mercenaries is VERY good for me. After buying the Stormwind pre-order bundles and using my class packs, Standard packs, and most of my dust, I hardly spent any of the gold I'd saved up for that expansion. As the gold continues to accumulate, I was starting to wonder what I'd ever do with it all.
In the U.S., a 6-month sub costs $77.94, which is worth about the same as 60 packs plus a Tavern Pass, I guess? The Stormwind packs aren't particularly useful to a lot of people, however -- especially those who might be willing to fork over 75 bucks.
It has been a while since I played Battlegrounds, but most of these seem really strong to me. Pirates, not so much, but I may just lack the experience to see it.
Warlock and Mage are popular in all brackets. The two of them combined make up at least 25% of the meta at every level. Try as you might, you cannot cherry-pick data that contradicts that.
A deck that beats the meta is a good deck. It doesn't matter if you think it's weak in a vacuum. This game isn't played in a vacuum.
Those are the kinds of things they change on a regular basis after a game goes live. They aren't fundamental at all.
The nature of a beta test has changed a lot over the years. For a company like Blizzard, it is all about marketing. It is certainly not a platform for ongoing development.
(And LOL @ "you probably don't want to hear this" as if your typing it in an internet comment makes it true.)
Battlegrounds and Duels are both still in beta. Do you think it's because they haven't worked out the tech yet?
No, it's because they haven't figured out how to monetize them without pissing everyone off. I don't think they'll make that mistake a third time. They'll have a money-making plan from the very start with Mercs.
They put a lot of effort into this trailer, unlike the Stormwind one, which was cheap trash in comparison. I guess we know where their priorities lie.
It makes me wonder how shocking the Mercs monetization will be. I don't think Blizzard would spend resources to hype something that wasn't expected to bring in a lot of cash right out of the gate.
It was shortly after launch. It was free, and I had enjoyed both MtG and WoW off and on, so I figured why not?
I spent a very long time completely ignorant of the meta or even how to play well. Eventually, I decided to try to get good at Arena, which improved my skills a lot. (Any amount would have been a lot.) I got tired of Arena before getting super good, but at that point I could at least play Ranked without completely embarrassing myself. I remember loving Druid the most, I think? The versatility of the class always appealed to me.
I think what I liked about the game overall was the possibility of coming up with new ways to use underappreciated cards and pushing classes in unexpected directions. Now, of course, I see how such efforts are actively thwarted by the game's design, but I still like to mess around with off-meta stuff once I've ranked up as far as I care to go in a given season. (Yes, I'm the guy you run into at Diamond 5 or 10 trying to make Sheldras Moontree work. Spoiler alert: It doesn't.)
No, any deck that contains 15 spells cannot be called Zoo. What we see here is Handlock.
And it takes a LOT of cheek for someone at Blizzard to actively suggest that people should play a deck containing two of the nerfed cards. It's like, "Hey, we 'nerfed' a couple of these cards, but we also recognize that our changes will not hinder the deck in any way."
You know what number is also "more than 50"?
53.
So is 57.
And so is 862, but I don't think they'd say "more than 50" in that case.
My point is that there's still room for a surprise reveal of an extra-special card or two closer to launch ... if they choose to play it that way.
"Has become"? LOL, as if it happened just recently.
A few factual issues here:
As I understand it, your abilities don't earn experience; they become upgradeable to higher ranks as the mercenary levels up. Once the upgrade has unlocked at a certain level, you must spend Mercenary Coins to complete the upgrade.
There are two kinds of "gear": equipment and treasures. Equipment applies a passive bonus that usually applies to one of the mercenary's abilities. Equipment is part of your collection, and one piece is selected for each mercenary before you start a run. You can craft equipment with mercenary coins.
Treasures, on the other hand, are temporary bonuses you find in the course of a run. They function like the treasures in Duels, and they disappear at the end of the run.
The map is the only part of this game that resembles Slay the Spire.
The combat in Mercenaries is nothing like a deck-building card-battler. The combat abilities and equipment for each Mercenary are fixed at the start of the run, and they are always available during every round of a fight (unless they have a cooldown).
In a deck-builder, the strategy is all about making your deck efficient so that you'll draw what you need in combat. In Mercenaries, it's about using your fixed abilities to the best effect by maximizing synergies among party members and by exploiting the damage triangle wisely.
That is a Spirit Healer. It resurrects one random mercenary that has died in battle.
Normally, if one of your mercenaries dies, it's out for the rest of the run. You start with a party of six, and you choose three of those six for each battle. Dead party members will reduce your options in future battles.
The game is not unbalanced. It's just balanced in a way that you don't like. And balance aside, it's hard to make an argument that the overall quality is bad.
If you don't like the product, stop buying it. But making a stink about the new monetization options is silly when the game is actually cheaper to play than it ever was before. It's still expensive, granted, but not because they added cosmetics. In fact, the more money they make from cosmetics, the more wiggle room they have to cut us breaks on cards.
Clunky and limiting as the Hearthstone UI is, building a new game from scratch would be more expensive in terms of time and money, and a lot riskier from every angle. Remember how long Mercs has already been delayed? Add a couple more years onto that for a standalone version.
News flash, buddy: Blizzard does not actually want people playing these games for free.
There's no "keeping up with the Joneses" in PvE, so I don't know where you're getting this "2-3 times a year" figure. You just play with what you earn in-game, forever, no problem. It's no one's fault but your own if you compare your free-player experience with a paying player's.
Furthermore, the ability to spend gold on Mercenaries is VERY good for me. After buying the Stormwind pre-order bundles and using my class packs, Standard packs, and most of my dust, I hardly spent any of the gold I'd saved up for that expansion. As the gold continues to accumulate, I was starting to wonder what I'd ever do with it all.
People have been saying it would be some form of gacha monetization for at least six months. If it surprises you, you've been hiding under a rock.
How dare a game company develop a game and expect people to pay for it!
In the U.S., a 6-month sub costs $77.94, which is worth about the same as 60 packs plus a Tavern Pass, I guess? The Stormwind packs aren't particularly useful to a lot of people, however -- especially those who might be willing to fork over 75 bucks.
It has been a while since I played Battlegrounds, but most of these seem really strong to me. Pirates, not so much, but I may just lack the experience to see it.
Warlock and Mage are popular in all brackets. The two of them combined make up at least 25% of the meta at every level. Try as you might, you cannot cherry-pick data that contradicts that.
A deck that beats the meta is a good deck. It doesn't matter if you think it's weak in a vacuum. This game isn't played in a vacuum.
I never believed all the comments about Rogue being trash-tier. It's nice to see some data confirming my suspicions.
Those are the kinds of things they change on a regular basis after a game goes live. They aren't fundamental at all.
The nature of a beta test has changed a lot over the years. For a company like Blizzard, it is all about marketing. It is certainly not a platform for ongoing development.
(And LOL @ "you probably don't want to hear this" as if your typing it in an internet comment makes it true.)
Battlegrounds and Duels are both still in beta. Do you think it's because they haven't worked out the tech yet?
No, it's because they haven't figured out how to monetize them without pissing everyone off. I don't think they'll make that mistake a third time. They'll have a money-making plan from the very start with Mercs.
The downvotes just make it all the sweeter when I come back in October and say I told you so.
They put a lot of effort into this trailer, unlike the Stormwind one, which was cheap trash in comparison. I guess we know where their priorities lie.
It makes me wonder how shocking the Mercs monetization will be. I don't think Blizzard would spend resources to hype something that wasn't expected to bring in a lot of cash right out of the gate.
It was shortly after launch. It was free, and I had enjoyed both MtG and WoW off and on, so I figured why not?
I spent a very long time completely ignorant of the meta or even how to play well. Eventually, I decided to try to get good at Arena, which improved my skills a lot. (Any amount would have been a lot.) I got tired of Arena before getting super good, but at that point I could at least play Ranked without completely embarrassing myself. I remember loving Druid the most, I think? The versatility of the class always appealed to me.
I think what I liked about the game overall was the possibility of coming up with new ways to use underappreciated cards and pushing classes in unexpected directions. Now, of course, I see how such efforts are actively thwarted by the game's design, but I still like to mess around with off-meta stuff once I've ranked up as far as I care to go in a given season. (Yes, I'm the guy you run into at Diamond 5 or 10 trying to make Sheldras Moontree work. Spoiler alert: It doesn't.)
No, any deck that contains 15 spells cannot be called Zoo. What we see here is Handlock.
And it takes a LOT of cheek for someone at Blizzard to actively suggest that people should play a deck containing two of the nerfed cards. It's like, "Hey, we 'nerfed' a couple of these cards, but we also recognize that our changes will not hinder the deck in any way."