Is Hearthstone’s Mercenaries Mode Pay-To-Win (P2W)?

It’s safe to say Mercenaries mode hasn’t launched in a pristine state and it’s still rather barebones in terms of content in many ways, but we’ve still seen enough of it since its release to be able to evaluate its foundations. What are your odds as a free-to-play player, and is there a healthy value proposition in play here? Where exactly does this fall on the scale from Dota 2 to Raid: Shadow Legends?

PvE: Go Grind Your Heart Out

Let’s get the topline item out of the way first: if you’re simply looking for some mindless fun against the AI, you’re golden. No pre-orders or pack openings are needed as there’s little to no value in leveling up a wide range of Mercenaries across the board.

Get a strong party of six (or even just three with another trio of scrubs on the bench) with which you can get through the bounties, maybe a couple of heroes specifically required for certain bosses (which is rare, especially if you have no interest in Heroic), and you’re good to go: just like in Constructed, you can easily get your hands on one good deck – or in this case, team of mercs – without going overboard, but you’ll miss out on some gameplay variety.

In essence, this has little to do with the winning aspect of the game, but having fun is a very different question. Here’s the thing, though: as we’ll discuss later down the line, the gameplay experience of Mercenaries revolves so much around grinding that spending money on the mode doesn’t really change this aspect of the time you spend with it.

Going free-to-play won’t stop you from getting those Ws against the AI, which is a decent starting point. The lack of stamina bars and the (currently) fairly small collection of Mercs, plus the endless grinding option (hello Heroic Barrens Level 8!), so the game’s current state doesn’t necessitate spending money to perform well. Hell, we’ve even seen those pre-ordering complaining about just how little benefits they got for their investment. So… good job?

PvP: You Can’t Escape the Lvl 30 Barrier (Or Task 7)

Even in the case of Mercenaries’ PvP mode, there’s only so much you get from your financial “investment.” Your characters get specific equipment unlocks at level 30 and once you complete Task 7 – neither of which pathways you can grease by purchasing packs.

It is true that fully maxing out your character will net you some extra stats (making it all but necessary for a leaderboard attempt, but it’s not like this will affect 99% of the player base), but that doesn’t change the fact that you already have to make the conscious decision to dump a lot of time into Mercenaries either way, which is something you can definitely decide for yourself after an extended free-to-play binge.

Does this make the PvP experience good by itself? Not particularly so – almost every battle seems to begin with a Cariel/Samuro/Xyrella mirror with the corresponding dice roll, and though the ultra-picky matchmaking system may improve the gameplay over the long run, it just leads to overly long queue times, many matches with AI bots and still somewhat poorly matched matches at this current juncture – not to mention the fact that there’s a pretty reliable way to game the system as well to farm bots and rating points.

All in all, the issues with Mercenaries’ PvP mode have more to do with the general value proposition rather than the pay-to-win side of things, at least at this early stage. With a large patch with some more playable characters slated for November (and then more in future updates), there may be a point where the simple option for endless grind isn’t enough to keep up with those willing to buy up all the unlockables – but as things stand right now, there’s no real way to skip the leveling-up process, and those base stats (coupled with the lvl 30 equipment) make all the difference.

There’s basically no endgame to speak of either, meaning you have to invest an inordinate amount of time into becoming one of the select few playing out a very tight and limited PvP metagame – time investment you can’t actually make up for by spending money. With more heroes and (probably) more levels to come, this investment requirement will inevitably increase even more, making the value proposition even worse.

This is also a part of why spending money on Mercenaries is questionable at best: your purchases will depreciate in value extremely quickly as the level cap goes up and the roster of heroes expand. Even in Constructed’s current pace of rapid nerfs and extra mini-set releases, at least you know that your cards will be around in Standard for two years, and even if they lose their relevance in the metagame, there’s some sort of “resale value” to speak of. Right now, we just can’t know what to expect from the new game mode in this regard. Caveat emptor.

So Is the Game Mode Pay-To-Win?

You can have all the coins in the world if your hero is level one: where does that leave a whale? In that sense, Mercenaries is definitely not a pay-to-win experience as all the purchases will offer you is a slightly faster way of leveling up your heroes, which you will inevitably have to grind for anyway, if only to slowly complete your tasks.

Just like with traditional Hearthstone, there’s nothing in Mercenaries that is ultimately paywalled: everything can be unlocked through playing, and the ability to grind as much as you want is certainly a more user-friendly feature than what many gacha games offer. Does it make it a worthwhile proposition to unlock everything in Mercenaries, though? Time is money, both are valuable, and right now, the game mode as a whole seems to be lacking, the same sort of quasi-beta release we’ve seen more and more often as of late in Hearthstone. Ultimately, this might be the best argument against spending money on it right now: perhaps this judgment call will be easier to make when the mode is more fleshed out and there’s more endgame content to experience.