I haven’t kept up on Hearthstone in a long time so I didn’t know what to expect out of Mercenaries Mode. After trying it on the first day, I was pleasantly surprised and ended up playing it almost the entire day.
While I find it a bit strange that it basically carries over nothing from the base game (including most dailies and weeklies not being able to advance in it), I’m mostly okay with that because I really enjoy it. It’s sort of like a persistent version of the dungeon modes, which I was somewhat fond of but found no point in replaying, and unlike most of the existing PvE modes the rewards are repeatable so there’s a reason to come back once you’ve finished a mission.
Even despite the fatal flaw for me that I’ll get into, I’ve found myself popping in for the daily visitors and getting dragged in longer than I planned. It’s a great mode and I’d love to see more of it.
There’s one issue for me, though, and it casts a shadow over the entire mode that I expect will continue to linger in future updates. I specify “for me” because I recognize this is subjective, but it’s something that I realize also affected Pet Battles in WoW for me.
When I play something like Pokémon, or Pet Battles, or Mercenary Mode, the appeal for me is putting together a team of my favorite cool or cute characters and blast through my opponents.
I bring up Pokémon because it’s often compared to Pet Battles for obvious reasons. The major difference is that in Pokémon I can always finish the game with whatever team I want, and get replayability from playing it again with monsters I like that I couldn’t fit into my first team.
Unfortunately, in both Pet Battles and Mercenary Mode, as a result of what I presume is to make the modes more challenging, the encounters are built around the opponent’s team, rather than the player’s. In other words, once you get to max level content, if you want to have a reasonable chance of victory, you can no longer take your favorite characters and you can’t make your own strategy, you’re forced to counter the opponent’s.
I basically stopped trying to advance once I reached Winterspring in Mercenaries Mode because it just stopped being fun for me. I’ve completed all of the bounties that I’ve tried, but when my team of favorites has to claw for every inch of progress and some encounters can just wreck me beyond my control purely on combos, I don’t really feel like going further.
It’s not that I don’t want any challenge or don’t want to work for it. I pulled a victory out of a really bad situation with my favorites, and after making a terrible mistake with another team on a boss, I buckled down and squeezed out a victory in the last possible turn with exact damage, and yeah it felt good because I knew I earned that from very precise planning.
That’s just not what I want from the mode, though. I want to make Jaina and the Lich King and Grom fight alongside each other and not hit a brick wall in the story. I’m also afraid that, if Pet Battles are any indication, any future Mercenaries Mode content is going to start at max level and probably be designed with increasingly more specific and challenging strategies, requiring specific counters to ever see any new content, and I’ll never get to play with my favorites in anything going forward.
