Hearthstone Mercenaries Launch Guide – Everything You Should Know As a New Player, Tips & Tricks For Beginners

Mercenaries – the new Hearthstone’s game mode – launches later today! It combines roguelike elements with some more familiar Hearthstone characters, and can be played both as PvE and PvP experience. The mode is a bit more like Battlegrounds in a way that it doesn’t really compare to anything we had in Hearthstone before – it implements a ton of completely new mechanics, to the point that it could have been released as a separate game.

Naturally, if you launch it for the first time, you might be confused about what’s happening. But don’t worry – this guide will cover everything you should know as a new player! I won’t get into any deeper strategies and will try to keep things simple and understandable for people who didn’t follow any news about the mode before its release. We’ll post a bunch of other, separate guides for more advanced players.

When Does Mercenaries Launch?

Maybe the most important question is – when does Mercenaries game mode actually launch? The truth is that it wasn’t actually officially announced, but I’m nearly sure that it will launch at the usual 19:00 CEST / 10 AM PDT / 1 PM EST. 99% of the patches launch around that time, so it’s basically a given.

Before getting access to Mercenaries, you will have to download a patch. Mobile patches, however, tend to launch later than PC – sometimes even a few hours later. Let’s hope that this time they will try to push it all at once, but if you’re playing on mobile and you don’t see a patch at the hour I’ve mentioned above, then you shouldn’t worry – it will be available soon-ish.

Tutorial – Pay Attention!

Unlike the early reveal videos which left viewers completely confused, the mode itself starts much simpler – with a tutorial. Valeera will get you through the basics of combat, buildings, bounties, tasks and so on.

I know that tutorials can be pretty boring, but I really do recommend actually sitting through it and learning. You might be a Hearthstone veteran, but in Mercenaries, you’re still a newbie – it’s a new mode and it plays nothing like others, so if you just skip through all the dialogues to get to the gameplay… you might regret it later, because you won’t really understand what’s going on. As far as I know, there’s no way to repeat the tutorial, so if you end up missing some important pieces, it might take a while to learn about them or find them online. Of course – we’ll try to cover most important things in our guides, but it’s still better to have all the basic info.

The good news is that the tutorial is actually pretty short. The “main” part can be completed in like 20 minutes, during which you learn about the combat, buildings, bounties, tasks and so on. After that, you will still get extra tutorial tasks, but you will complete those naturally as you play through the game mode.

Roles Are Important – Critical Damage

Roles, or “classes” in Mercenaries are more than just a way of showcasing what a given character is good at. If you ever played Pokemon, you might remember that some types would be stronger or weaker against others. And this is basically the same system, just simpler.

• Protectors (Red) deal double damage to Fighters (Green)
• Fighters (Green) deal double damage to Casters (Blue)
• Casters (Blue) deal double damage to Protectors (Red)

This is absolutely the first thing you should remember. When designing your early Mercenaries teams, you will care not so much about specific synergies (those will be more important later), but roles. Ideally, you want to have a balanced party. Bounties have all kinds of encounters, and while you can often take a few different routes, some of them simply can’t be avoided. If you create a team with 5 Protectors and take it against a strong Casters encounter… you might just lose, because they will deal double damage to you. But if you had a Fighter or two, you might be able to chew through them in just a few turns. For the starters, I recommend a 2/2/2 split of roles until you learn more and start building parties with specific synergies in mind. It means that all of your bases will be covered.

One more gameplay tip is that, weirdly enough, you can’t change Mercs you select for an encounter. During the first stage of gameplay, you select three Mercs that will partake in a given fight. However, once you drag one from your hand to the board, that’s it – this one is locked. Even though the fight hasn’t started yet, you can’t drag it back to your hand – all you can do is change its position on the board (some effects target adjacent minions, so the positions might be important – but you don’t have to worry much about that at the start). I hope that it’s something Team 5 will rethink, since I don’t see a good reason why you shouldn’t be able to change your mind in PvE.

Ability Speed & Cooldown

The basic gameplay of Mercenaries is actually quite simple once you get into it, but one of the biggest challenges is from the Ability Speed & Cooldown system.

Let’s start with Speed, as it’s one of the most important mechanics and many tactical decisions will depend on it. When each round of combat starts, you will select the skills your Mercenaries will use. Once you lock in all of the abilities and press “ready”, everyone on the board will use their skills one by one. Now, the order in which those are used depends on speed. What’s important is that the lower the speed of the ability, the quicker it is. Not the opposite! When there’s an ability with Speed 2 and Speed 4, Speed 2 will be used first.

Speed is very important for multiple reasons. For example, if you have a high speed move, you might kill your opponent before they have a chance to use theirs. Similarly, many skills debuff an opponent – Xyrella’s Blinding Luminance ability deals damage and reduces target’s Attack stat. So if you use it before they can attack, their hit will now be much less powerful. It might also be relevant when casting healing abilities – one way or the other. On the one hand, fast healing abilities are good to sneak a heal before enemies land their skills and potentially kill one of your Mercs. On the other hand, slow healing abilities can be useful during your first turn – e.g. if you Taunt with one of your Mercs and then cast a low speed healing on it, the healing ability will be used after all the attacks already went through and the damage has been dealt. All in all, speed is very important and you will need to plan for it in nearly every combat. Just one more tip is that you can check out what ability your opponents in PvE have queued by hovering your mouse cursor over them (or pressing on them on mobile, I assume) – it shows the ability name, effect, and speed. Be sure to use that knowledge when queuing your own skills.

During combat, after all of the abilities are locked in, each character will have a chat bubble above its head showing the order of their skills – “1st”, “2nd” etc. Quite commonly, multiple Mercs will try to use abilities with the same speed – in this case, all of them will show e.g. “1st?” with a question mark. Such ties are resolved – like it usually is in Hearthstone – randomly. It’s probably the biggest RNG in the mode, because sometimes the difference between your ability being 1st or 2nd is a matter of life and death. If you don’t want to encounter such ties, you can also try using abilities that either slow down opponents or speed up your allies – those are common and quite powerful in the right situation! Ties between friendly Mercenaries are resolved in the order you picked their abilities. E.g. if you have two Speed 5 abilities, the one you pick first will always go off first.

Now the Cooldown, which is much simpler. Some abilities, usually the more powerful ones, have a Cooldown. This one is pretty simple – at the start of the encounter or after you use it, you need to wait X turns in order to use it again. If an ability has Cooldown 1, you CAN’T use it on your first turn. You can use it on your second turn, and if you do, you again have to “skip” using it for one turn. So an ability with Cooldown 1 can be used every second turn at most – e.g. T2, T4, T6 etc. If you have Cooldown 2, just add one extra turn of wait – so it’s T3, T6, T9 etc.

Stick With One Party Until You Learn How to Play

After completing the tutorial and doing some related Tasks, you will get eight starting Mercenaries – Grommash Hellscream (Legendary Protector), Tyrande (Epic Fighter), Blademaster Samuro (Rare Fighter), Cariel Roame (Rare Protector), Cornelius Roame (Rare Protector), Millhouse Manastorm (Rare Caster), Rokara (Rare Fighter), and Xyrella (Rare Caster).

You will also get a few Mercenaries Packs, resulting in a few extra available characters. Since those will be random, I can’t give you any Merc-specific tips & tricks, but I want to emphasize one thing. If you’re just starting to play, the mode might seem overwhelming. There’s a lot to learn and the problem is that you don’t even know what Mercs you might need, what their abilities really do, what equipment they have and so on, and so on. In order to not spend the first few hours of your gameplay looking through each Merc you have, you should probably stick with a specific party.

So what I would recommend is using a few your favorite starting Mercenaries (or Mercs you have opened in your first packs) as a base for your party and then fill the other 2-3 slots with new ones or the ones you haven’t played with yet. It will accomplish a few things. First – it will level them up. Remember that the new Mercs you open start at Level 1, and the quickest way to level them up is taking them on a higher level bounty together with your stronger Mercs. Second – you will get to try them out while your base team does most of the job – this way you can learn what they do, what are their strengths and weaknesses, without really putting much on the stake. Even if they die, your base party should finish the Bounty and they will all get XP anyway. And third – if you would switch between parties of low level Mercs, you would have to repeat low level bounties all the time, stopping your progress. But if you take e.g. 4x high level Merc + 2x low level Merc, you can tackle a higher level bounty and progress.

This tip is especially important if you purchased pre-orders or you plan to buy a lot of Merc packs with Gold. Sure, it’s fun to open 30 different Mercs right away, but unless you learned all of their powers before, it will be very difficult to make sense of all of that.

Upgrade Campfire & Finish Tasks

Campfire is one of the key buildings in your Village. No matter if you’re a F2P player or your goal is to spend a lot of money on the mode, you want to focus on your Task Board (which is accessed through the Campfire). First and most importantly – it’s a place where all Tasks are listed. The first Tasks you will see will be the tutorial ones, but soon after you will start getting more. Tasks are sort of Mercenaries-related Quests – they will ask you to do some gameplay-related things and reward you with Packs, Coins and so on.

If you’re a F2P player, Tasks will be your main source of rewards. Each Mercenary you own comes with their own Task Chain – their Tasks will be related to how you play them. They might task you to deal X damage with a given Merc, or use a certain skill X times. Finishing an entire Task Chain for a specific Merc will give you 3x Mercenaries Pack, 1.5k Coins, and full equipment for that Merc. And the last part is why tasks are important even if you already own all the Mercs. Doing Merc-related tasks is the only way to unlock their equipment – and as you can imagine, Equipment is pretty important since it boosts the Merc’s skills.

Campfire has three tiers – 2nd and 3rd ones unlock extra Task slots. This means that you get more Tasks every day and progress through your Merc chains much quicker. You get new Tasks daily, so especially at the start, you should try to complete all of them before the reset (they reset at the same time your regular Hearthstone Quests do). You will have to grind through a lot of tasks to unlock all the equipment, so it’s better to start right away!

Check out Bounty Rewards – Farm Coins For Your Favorite Mercs

At the end of each bounty, there’s a rewards chest, containing a bunch of Mercenary Coins. While one of the Coin slots is dynamic and it gives you Coins for a random Merc in your party, the other slots aren’t – each bounty has a specific list of Mercenary Coins that can drop from it. The best thing is that you can check it before embarking on a bounty – and since you can repeat the same bounty X times, if you know that it can drop Coins for your favorite Merc, you can farm it over and over to get enough Coins to Upgrade it. Coincidentally, if there’s a Merc you want to test out, you can grind a Bounty to get enough Coins to craft it.

For example, if you’d like to craft Uther, you can find a bounty that gives e.g. Uther + Xyrella + Rokara Coins, then keep playing it. It might still take a while to get enough Coins for Uther – since it’s a Legendary costing 500 Coins – it’s cool that you can do it F2P and if you commit, you can easily upgrade the Merc to full just by repeating the specific Bounties + doing that Merc’s task chain.

More Mercenaries Coverage Coming Soon!

For the next few days, we’ll be busy with a ton of Mercenaries coverage. We already have a Mercenaries Heroes Guide (showcasing all the 51 launch Mercs – the visuals are a bit outdated compared to the launch version, but we’ll update them soon!), Village Guide, Coins Guide, as well as a general Mercenaries Game Mode Guide. We still plan to cover Bounties, PvP, Best Early Meta Party Compositions, and probably a few more. Let us know in the comments if you’d like to see any other guides!