Patch 21.4, available tomorrow, will bring Hearthstone’s new game mode, Mercenaries! The patch also includes some bug fixes and preparations for other updates in the future.
A Village comes to the tavern
With Mercenaries comes a new way to interact with Hearthstone: the Mercenary Village. This is the starting point for all things Mercenaries. In the Village you can manage your collection in the tavern, start contracts, jump into the Battle Pit, and much more! As you play, you can also upgrade the buildings in your Village to optimize their functionality and efficiency. Some upgrades are free and unlocked when you play, while others cost gold. Initially, upgrading your Village completely will cost 900 gold: 100 to unlock the Battle Pit, 200 to upgrade the Starting Point (which unlocks the Heroic difficulty of contracts), 200 to upgrade the Campfire (to add a tile to the Task Board) and 400 more to upgrade the Campfire again (to add another tile to the Task Board). You can learn more in our post about the Village and the collection.
Mercenary ranking and match finder system
The Mercenary Battle Pit will have its own match finder and ranking system. This new system is the most complex in the entire history of Hearthstone, created to adjust to all the variables of each game of Mercenaries. And if you can’t find the perfect match, we’ll create it with new AI technology! Soon we will tell you all the details of this new system in one of our next articles.
A note on missions and other known issues
At first, most of the daily and weekly missions will not be compatible with Mercenaries. The only missions that can be completed in Mercenaries will be those that require winning games in any mode and those that require playing a certain number of turns. In the next patches, we will fix missions that are not working as expected, and we may add new daily and weekly missions or adjust the text of certain missions that already exist to include the Mercenaries mode.
Don’t worry, you will be able to complete your daily and weekly missions in the other modes. Additionally, the new Mercenary Campfire tasks are separate from the daily and weekly mission system, so you can complete them to receive even more rewards. You can visit the forums for a list of known issues that can be seen in version 21.4.
A spooky season is yet to come
Preparations for Halloween will begin in Patch 21.4, with festive decorations and fun costume aesthetic options arriving next week. The Fairy Tales Combo includes fairy tale-themed hero skins for Rexxar, Jaina, Thrall, and Anduin. The Battlegrounds: Halloween Combo includes alternate bartender Medivh in full dress and seven costumed hero skins. Once you choose your costume, the celebration will begin in patch 21.6 (details will be shared closer to its release date).
Game improvements and bug fixes
- Fixed a bug that caused the center of the screen to not respond to any clicks.
- Fixed an issue where the Blood Knight would cause Highlord Dragonford to activate for all minions, regardless of whether they had Divine Shield or not.
- The 3/3 token that summons the Beast has been renamed to Pip Sagacity.
- Fixed a bug where when the Dueling Treasure of Humility Domain was in play and the affected minion was Silenced, the minion would heal for 1 Health.
- Fixed an issue where minions empowered by the Vengeful Armaments Duels hoard would retain their buffs if they were moved from the board to hand or deck.
- Updated the writing and scoring of various Duel cards and effects to be clearer and more consistent with the established Hearthstone format.
- Fixed an issue that caused players to get stuck in a player’s content from Project K-Bum and the Dalaran Heist, causing the game to stop working.
- Fixed a bug that made friends who were online, but not in the Hearthstone client, available to invite them to a friendly challenge.
- Fixed a bug where you couldn’t challenge your friends again after completing a match with them.
- Fixed a bug where having your friends list open when reconnecting to Battle.net would not propagate the list at all.
- Fixed an issue where the options menu would not be fully displayed when playing Practice mode on mobile devices.
- Fixed a bug that caused package types to switch places on the screen to open packages.
- Fixed a bug that displayed achievements as completed after clicking on them.
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