Blizzard announced the new Forged in the Barrens Rewards Track this week. In a commendable exercise of transparency, they even included full details of all levels and a comparison chart that shows the main differences between the new Forged in the Barrens Rewards Track and the Madness at the Darkmoon Faire Rewards Track. It seems that Blizzard has been learning a lot about communications since the initial Rewards Track launch, and thanks to that we are now in an excellent position to evaluate their most recent offering.
In this article, I take a deeper look into the Rewards Track: Is it good? What are the real differences between the new Rewards Track and the old one (including the ones Blizzard did not highlight)? What do you need to do to be prepared for the Rewards Track reset? Should you buy the new Tavern Pass? Let’s find out!
How Good Is Forged in the Barrens Rewards Track?
Blizzard made this graphic to showcase the differences between the new and the old Rewards Track:
The addition of Mankrik at the start of the Rewards Track nets everyone one additional (non-disenchantable) Legendary card, and even though you cannot turn it into dust, it’s still a big deal as Legendary cards are difficult to come by. There is also one more card pack, one more Tavern ticket, and 14 non-disenchantable Golden cards added to the mix. The Golden cards are mostly cosmetic, as by the time you get them, you most likely already have the regular versions. Two of the Golden cards, the ones you unlock last, are Epic Primordial Protectors, which means that it is possible that you have not received their regular versions before you reach them in the Rewards Track.
There is something to be said about the card pack distribution: Forged in the Barrens Rewards Track will give you three Forged in the Barrens packs and eight Year of the Phoenix packs, whereas Madness at the Darkmoon Faire Rewards Track gave five Madness at the Darkmoon Faire packs and five old packs. If you already have all the old cards, there are two fewer relevant packs in the rewards track, but if you have any holes in your Standard collection, the Year of the Phoenix packs are usually better than packs from specific expansions in filling those holes, so they can be quite valuable.
The pacing of rewards has been improved, as the first 50 levels of the old track have been split in two and are now 100 levels for roughly the same overall rewards. In the old Rewards Track, your rewards slowed down to a crawl in the late 30s and then sped up again in the bonus levels after 50. Unless you did not reach level 50 in the old Rewards Track, this change does not affect your overall rewards, but it makes the Rewards Track feel much better. The bonus levels are unaffected: they are now levels 101-400 instead of levels 51-350, but they work the same way, and the overall gold you can gain remains the same at 20,650 (5650 from the non-bonus levels and then up to 15,000 from the 300 bonus levels).
Overall, then, the new Rewards Track is better than the old one for all players. Even in the worst case, you get an additional Legendary card, a Tavern ticket, and some dust in exchange for two fewer current expansion packs. In the best case, you can make use of all the packs and gain the additional Legendary card, a Tavern Ticket, an additional pack, and maybe even some new cards from the non-disenchantable Golden cards.
What to Do Before the New Rewards Track?
Complete your Madness at the Darkmoon Faire achievements. Madness at the Darkmoon Faire gameplay achievements will no longer grant XP when patch 20.0 arrives sometime next week. If you want Rewards Track progress from those achievements, this is your last chance to complete and claim them.
Claim your Rewards Track Level 50 Hero skin. All other unclaimed rewards will be automatically claimed on March 30th, but the Hero skin choice will not. You will be able to claim it in a future patch if you have earned it and left it unclaimed, but there is no estimate as to when that will be, so it is best to claim it now.
Should I Buy the New Tavern Pass?
Madness at the Darkmoon Faire Tavern Pass was mostly worth it for the cosmetics. It offered some Hero skins, a card back, and a Coin skin, as well as some XP boosts that made you progress through the Rewards Track faster. Notably, these XP boosts were not retroactive, so you got more from the Tavern Pass the earlier you bought it. Considering that you can often get packs for $1 each from bundles and the price of the Tavern Pass was $20, you needed to earn at least 2000 additional Gold from the Tavern Pass to make it break even with buying a bundle from a gold perspective alone. This meant reaching level 155 without the Pass (level 195 with the Pass). Curiously, it was also possible to play too much Hearthstone to benefit from the Pass: if you reached level 311 without the Pass, you no longer received at least 2000 Gold from it, because you hit max level.
Forged in the Barrens Tavern Pass is slightly different. The XP bonuses work the same way, and there is the same amount of gold in the new Rewards Track, so gold-wise it is the same as the Darkmoon Faire Tavern Pass. However, Forged in the Barrens Tavern Pass also includes an additional Legendary card in the form of Diamond Blademaster Samuro, whereas Darkmoon Faire Tavern Pass did not include a bonus Legendary, only a Golden version of the Silas Darkmoon Legendary that you got for free anyway.
We do not know the pricing of the Forged in the Barrens Tavern Pass yet, but if it is $20 like Darkmoon Faire, it is now a very attractive deal!
Remember that because of the XP bonuses, you want to make the decision on whether to buy the Tavern Pass as early as possible. The Diamond Blademaster Samuro at the start of the Tavern Pass makes this decision even more urgent to prevent you from opening a regular Samuro from your packs – you need to claim the Diamond Samuro from Tavern Pass before you open any Forged in the Barrens packs to avoid getting a duplicate!
Conclusions
Blizzard keeps moving in the right direction for Hearthstone players. The available rewards are improved again with this Rewards Track, so the life of a Hearthstone player is pretty good right now!
Does anyone remember how they promised events with bonus battlepass xp but didn’t deliver? Instead they gave out some of the rewards that would have been earned from the bonus xp and everyone thought everything was okay?
I think you misunderstood it.
They promised events that will give extra XP in the old rewards track, before revamp. The plan was for rewards track to give less XP and for it to be bumped by the event rewards to the current levels.
But people didn’t believe Blizzard about events plus complained that XP shouldn’t be tied to events, so they reduced the necessary XP to hit level 50 INSTEAD of doing XP through events.
So what they did is a bit like giving people all the XP events, but without events. Instead, events gave regular stuff like packs.
And I’m not arguing whether it’s a good approach or not – just saying that they delivered exactly what they said they will deliver. And honestly, I don’t have much to complain about when it comes to new rewards system. Especially now with 100 levels instead of 50 for “base” part, progression should be quite smooth and rewarding. Now the only thing I’d really tackle to make HS actually F2P friendly is even more rewards for new players (because regulars can already more or less keep up) and an upgrade for the Dust system.
Thanks for the article, good collection of info.
The Samuro pushed this to a purchase for me. A guaranteed legendary I wanted, sure. I hit level 155 without the pass today, so with this pass I would have made the 20 packs for $20 benchmark.
So what I’m saying is: xp boost gets me $1 packs and I get a bonus (diamond) legendary. Cosmetics are all just things I get too. Yay!
Hi, Old Guardian. Your articles are great as always. Is there an estimate as to what level you need to reach in the new tavern pass to make it worthwhile? Thanks.
Basically means that you should not open your bundle packs early before the launch date if you plan on buying the pass? Any dates on when it becomes available? Or Will it be on launch day?
This has been an ongoing discussion on Twitter and the devs have said that they will come back with some answers early next week before the pre-release becomes available. The current protection that has been announced indeed cannot protect you from opening duplicates if you open your packs during pre-release.
Hey guardian,
You are forgetting about a simple thing: if you buy any pre-order, you are guaranteed to get 2x free legendaries, and they are getting to your collection instantly after logging in for the first time after expansion launch. And samuro could be one of those 2x legendaries.
So anyone who pre orders, is not safe in samuro duplicate.
https://www.hearthstonetopdecks.com/you-cant-get-blademaster-samuro-mankrik-from-pre-purchase-legendaries-as-a-part-of-duplicate-protection/
Thanks, mate! You cleared it for me, appreciate it.
What about Monday quests (including weekly ones) which we get on March 29th? Should I keep it? What profit will be the next day when expansion released?
Well, it depends on whether you want to finish them for the Darkmoon Faire or the Barrens rewards track. Unless you haven’t hit level 50 in the current track, I think that saving them for the new one is a better option.
I’d probably finish just enough to hit next level (e.g. if you have 1k XP I’d do one Quest to get 1.5k) and leave the rest for new rewards track.
But ultimately there isn’t much of a difference there.
Thank you for your reply, friend.
I think the best option is to reach next level on darkmoon via 1 quest and the rest quests I would keep for the new expansion.
I really hoped that the mega bundle would contain this tavern pass. I still feel strange that the biggest pre-order you can get do not give you “all the things” of the next expansion.
I think that it’s a business decision. Average person who can throw away $80 on the Mega Bundle can also afford extra $20 for the pass, so bundling those together would probably lose them some money.
But I also wish that Tavern Pass would be a part of big pre-order.
True but you also have people like me, who could maybe consider spending Maximum 80$ (and I insist on Maximum), but since I know I would have to spend an extra 20$ for the tavern pass to really get “everything”, well I would more likely only spend these 20$ in the end.
So at the end of the day, they miss a chance of convincing me and I’m sure other people to go for the mega bundle
Yeah, I have stopped caring about pre orders as well, Tavern pass is good enough for me. Had it been included however I might do a pre order here and there.
They probably did some research and decided that the gains will be bigger than losses this way in the end. But hopefully they will experiment with Tavern Pass in the more expensive pre-order. We had pre-order values change many times over the years, after all.
This is exactly what I`m doing for this expansion. I was thinking if I should buy the pass or the mega bundle. Since I also play BGs, even the bundle containing the BGs perks (which is pretty weird) I would rather choose to buy the pass + perks (20$+15$) individually than spend 80$ in the bundle. Is more than half of the price.
I would certainly buy a mega bundle for 90$ containing the pass too. This looks too greedy for me.
*Less than half of the price