Reminder: Only one day left until the closure of Duels. The mode will officially shut down with Patch 29.2 on April 16. In case you didn’t know, you can also get a sort of free Tavern Ticket. If you start a Heroic Duels run now, it will get forcefully retired with tomorrow’s patch, so you will both get your rewards (even at 0 wins it’s a guaranteed card pack) and a Tavern Ticket refund.
In a short blog post, Blizzard has announced the shutdown of the Duels game mode. Not just shutdown, in fact, but a complete removal of the game mode from Hearthstone client. There will be no future updates and the mode will be gone in April 2024.
The reason quoted was the shift of resources – they want to focus on Traditional Hearthstone, Battlegrounds and other modes. In fact, some of the Duels treasures will come to Arena in the next season, more details will be announced soon. We also learned that Battlegrounds Duos is scheduled for the next Battlegrounds patch (they most likely mean the 29.2 update which should, in fact, be released around April 2024).
While I know that the mode hasn’t been very popular for a long time (I haven’t been posting new Duels decks myself because they got almost no views), and it’s been basically in maintenance mode for a while now, it’s still sad to see another mode gone.
You can read the whole message below:
As we think about the future of Hearthstone and where the team can best focus their efforts, we’ve made the difficult decision to discontinue support for the Duels Mode. We do not have plans for any further scheduled updates for Duels, and the Mode itself is scheduled to be removed from the Hearthstone client in April 2024.
This change will allow us to shift our resources to where we feel they will have the most impact, including Traditional Hearthstone, Battlegrounds, and more. To that end, Battlegrounds Duos is scheduled for an upcoming Battlegrounds patch, and we’re trying out some Duels Treasures in our next Arena season—more details soon.
We want to thank all our passionate Duels fans for every pile of loot, treasure, and hard-fought victory you’ve collected along the way. It’s been a heroic run, and we couldn’t have done it without you.
Huh. Gotta say, if there was one mode that Blizzard would have retired I was almost certain it was going to be Mercenaries, but I can’t say it’s a huge surprise for Duels to be on the chopping block.
It’s just occurred to me that following 2021 we haven’t really had a lot of great single player content. Mercenaries has more or less been left out to pasture with Mythic mode, I’m pretty certain nobody PVPs on that despite me never attempting it (when was the last Old Guardian video about it? Aside from pointing out that Baine/Trigore is a problem?). The last Book of Mercenaries-esque story was the narrative for Voyage to the Sunken City. Even the main storyline of Festival of Legends was left up to a single Tavern Brawl that we had to play for two weeks.
It’s really a shame, because the single player stories would have gone a good way in elaborating on the lore of each set. I would’ve at least enjoyed solving the Murder at Castle Nathria.
I have to agree. I enjoyed learning much of the lore even if I knew some of it already – and some of them are pretty good too (Uther’s is – obviously if you know Warcraft/WoW – quite dark). I think there just aren’t enough people playing it. Hell, I wouldn’t mind some Showdown storyline, honestly, just because of the Western flavor of the set. But with even single-player Mercenaries failing, I think Blizzard is wary of dumping more labor there. Of course, with Microsoft signing the checks now… that *could* change but I’m not holding my breath. They’re just owned by a bigger company now.
I honestly miss some of the paid adventures. I enjoyed One Night in Karazhan and liked the feeling of unlocking cards as I went. I didn’t like that the adventures were $20 but at least I earned something while doing it. A measly single-class pack (unless you luck out and hit that pity timer for Legendaries) seems like a weak reward even for a free mode. I’d personally love to see something like Shadowverse does: they always have huge single-player content. Legends of Runeterra is even getting with it on single-player.
I think they are putting more effort into event trees because players seem to chase rewards more and it keeps players engaged – which is what any game developer aims for. If you ask some kid who just picked up HS if he wants to gruel through a 30-min to 1-hour story for a single pack, he’d tell you to pound sand. Most people are doing the quest trees for events because they’re easy, some rewards even in a single match. Not saying its right or I agree, but the decision seems economical – even if it sucks.
I perhaps have a softer spot for Mercenaries than most, because I had a pretty bad phase in 2021 and just about anything that looked like rewards for effort, even if it was tedious grinding, was good enough for me back then to just get on with the day. And even then, the devs could still manage to shove in some storytelling with Mercenaries through repeating the Kazakus-Onyxia storylines, having Khadgar confront the Echo of Medivh, the League of Explorers tracking the Old Gods all the way back to the Darkmoon Faire, and so on. Mercenaries had the potential to be another source of content generation for Team 5. Duels… not so much, and I can only guess that with every new expansion with the various class archetypes that get introduced, even more balancing headaches would have to be addressed.
Hearthstone is at a mature stage that’s similar to the MMO that spawned it, I imagine. Unless I’m Rarran trying to get people interested in modes, I don’t think I’d recommend the game to newcomers. It’s hard to recommend any game that is absolutely savage to newcomers who have to play against people who’ve been maining since Day 1 of open beta.
I agree. If something should be removed as well are Mercenaries. I never liked this mode. I hope they will fugure out something more appealing.
Mercenaries is also essentially dead. They announced that the mode will no longer be supported about a year ago: https://www.hearthstonetopdecks.com/big-final-mercenaries-update-coming-in-patch-25-4/
However, unlike Duels, they decided to leave it in the game because it costs them basically nothing and it won’t get “broken” and need fixes. The difference is that Mercenareis has static content and new Hearthstone releases have no impact on it. In Duels, however, all of the balance changes, new releases etc. affect the game. For example, let’s say that a card get buffed and it’s now broken in Duels. Or one of the cards/treasures/whatever available in Duels gets bugged because of some newly released thing and it keeps crashing the game.
So there would be two ways going forward – one is to keep bug fixing and balancing Duels (probably not very often, but still, they would have to keep some people on that task) and the other is to just remove it completely.
So ultimately, they probably realized that almost no one was playing Duels so they decided that axing it completely is better option than just leaving it in and letting it become more and more imbalanced/buggy with time.
It’s sad and I don’t like them removing game modes, but the truth is that Hearthstone isn’t getting any younger. Playerbase gets smaller with time and Duels was never very popular to begin with. I would love them to repeat the success of Battlegrounds, but at this point I’m not sure if it’s ever going to happen.
Well… theoretically they don’t need fixes. There was one round of Mythic I couldn’t complete because Vanndar’s conquest of Alterac Valley was complete, so he was just attacking all of my heroes with +50 attack on Speed 2 without waiting for the cooldown. But that’s what happens when you leave a game mode completely to pasture.
FU blizzard!
I only played duels since they “fixed” standard around Scholomance then fixed it more with SireD and then even more…
No hold on’
After 10+ expansions thhey should learn the skill “dont break your game witb each expansion” like Wizards and MTG did. .
Nope…
Conclusion 4 me is: this will happen again (patches, shamanstone, even/odd, voidlord meta etc… )
So no point playing standard….
Oh and i had 1 wild deck i liked a lot Mechacthun Warlock and well….
Battlegrounds still is fun but …
Oh yeah and ….
Mercenaries
That is silence
And duels needs to go ?
Again
Gj blizzard
To be fair, as much as I enjoyed Duels, it was a mode built on the ashes on the Dungeon Run single-player randomness that I don’t think anyone seriously enjoyed either.
Nothing’s worse than building a great deck than getting rolled by someone who scored better treasures than you did, or someone who was offered cards with better synergy than you.
I feel they’ve been phoning in Duels long since Scholomance, just sort of throwing in heroes and seeing what sticks. Not great for balance, especially with Dual Classes having more of a card pool to use than the original hero pool.
Honestly if they use these wasted resources to make the rest of the game better? Good riddance.
Oh and i hated duels at release!
My point exactly. No one plays it.