Video Gamers Podcast - Gaming Quick Takes - Hearthstone Mercenaries

Episode Date: January 14, 2023

From gaming hosts Paul, Michael and Josh, we're bringing you even more gaming content each week.  Gaming Quick Takes are a short series of game recommendations, funny moments, off-topic chat and more. A small dose of gaming to brighten your Saturdays! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This episode is brought to you by Samsung Galaxy. Ever captured a great night video only for it to be ruined by that one noisy talker? With Audio Erase on the new Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra, you can reduce or remove unwanted noise and relive your favorite moments without the distractions. And that's not all. New Galaxy AI features like NowBrief will give you personalized insights based on your day schedule so that you're prepared no matter what. Buy the Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra now at Samsung.com. Hey guys, welcome to this Quick Take episode. We're so excited to have you here with us. In the past, these Quick Take

episodes actually were only available to those who financially supported the show through Apple subscriptions and Patreon. But due to popular demand, we have decided to shake up the perks for our supporters and we'll be releasing these Quick Takes on Saturdays to everyone, giving you all some extra free content that was previously unavailable to the public. And these Quick Takes are a little more laid back and they're hosted by just one of us. So sit back, relax, and enjoy this Quick Take episode. Shazam! Boom!

Hey guys and gals, it is Josh and I am back with another Gaming Quick Takes episode. As I have done in the past, I'm going to talk to you about some games that I have been playing recently recommendations general stuff every now and then I'll just get completely off track but I've been trying to keep these two game recommendations or things that I think you all should check out and I'm going to do that on this one you know we have done a deep dive on this we have talked about this game a decent bit um but that game is hearthstone now i know what you're saying josh you and paul have talked about hearthstone you did the deep dive on it it's in like the top 10 of your leaderboard why are you doing a quick

takes episode well because hearthstone just released a new mode that they were hyping and paul and i made fun of a little bit on the way that they kind of did the release or the reveal of this new mode because they kind of botched it. But I've been playing it a decent bit the last probably week, and I figured it's worth talking about. I've been having some fun with it. I have some issues with it. But this is a game that anybody can pick up and play. It is free to play. It's on mobile. It's on your iPad, your tablet. It's on PC. I don't know if it's on console. That's the one thing I'm not sure of. I guess you just play it on mobile otherwise. But they came out with their new game mode called Hearthstone Mercenaries. Now, this mode is different than any other mode that's out there.

Paul and I talked about Battlegrounds. That's a lot of fun. I got into Duels for a little while because these modes you don't have to spend a lot of money on. You don't need a massive card collection to be competitive in. It is very easy to spend a lot of money in Hearthstone just buying these card packs for $1.50 or $2. And before you know it, you've spent $1 dollars and you know, you're having fun opening card packs. So, um, but what is Hearthstone mercenaries? Because they did a terrible job on the reveal of this. Nobody understood what the heck was going on. Paul and I told them about it for a little bit. So hopefully I'm going to

explain it a little bit, just clear for you, I guess, and give you an idea of what this is about. Again, this is a completely free to play thing. So it's worth playing. If what I say makes no sense at all, you guys should be used to that. But you know, you can still pick this up and try it out for free. So Mercenaries is basically a almost like a single player mode that they have come up with. And the basic shtick behind this mode is that you start to recruit these famous Hearthstone characters that are mercenaries. And what you do is you form a party with them, and then you level them up and they get stronger. They unlock new abilities, they unlock equipment, and you get to kind of figure out which abilities you like,

which mercenaries you like, and then you can start to build a party around the interactions there and some of the combos. Now, mercenaries uses what I like to call the rock-paper-scissors formula. You have three different types of classes. You have casters, you have fighters, and you have protectors. And each of those are represented by a color. Protectors are orange, fighters are green, and casters are blue. And the way that the game works is each class is strong against one class and weak against another. So for instance, fighters will deal double damage to casters, casters will deal double damage to protectors, and protectors will deal double damage to fighters. And there you go. There's your rock, paper, scissors formula.

So that comes into play a lot because that is a lot of the strategy in this game. But part of the fun of it is that as you play, you might unlock new mercenaries. And again, these are all famous Hearthstone characters. You've got Grommash, you've got Anduin, you've got Jaina, you've got Ragnaros, all of the characters. I didn't play a lot of WoW, but basically, if it's a known character in any of those, they are the mercenaries that you can get. They all start at level one with one ability. As you level them up by playing the game, you get new abilities at level five and at level 15. And then you can also accrue what they call mercenary coins. And what those coins are is you spend them to upgrade the abilities that they've unlocked. So Millhouse Manastorm, he's a caster he uses like an Arcane Bolt. So it's pretty weak in

the beginning, but hey, you're level one. As you level up and you get these mercenary coins, you can spend those to upgrade Arcane Bolt to level two, which likely probably doubles the damage of that. And then the cost to upgrade it from there goes up a lot more, but then it doubles again and it starts to become very strong. Every mercenary has three abilities, and so you can upgrade each of those abilities to certain levels. Some characters might have abilities that are just direct damage. Some might be, especially your protectors, have taunts and heals and things like that. Some characters might have an ability that summons another monster. There's just a huge gamut of things that these mercenaries can do. But I think right now I probably have like 20

different mercenaries unlocked and I have been going through and leveling them up. I've just gotten my first piece of gear for some of those. And what the gear does is it acts like a passive upgrade to some of their abilities to where, hey, this ability activates faster and does three more damage now or something like that. Part of the fun too is building your party. So as you adventure, you can bring six mercenaries with you. You generally want a pretty good mix because again, that rock, paper, scissors system, I don't want to bring six casters, come up against a group of fighters that are going to do double damage to my casters, and then I get wrecked and I die. So having a variety is fun. But some of the things that make this interesting are like the combos.

So I have three murlocs that all feed off of each other in the sense that one ability says, hey, for each murloc in your party, repeat this ability. And so it's a damage ability, but because I have three murlocs, I shoot three of those, which does a ton of damage. The problem with a combo like that is if one of them dies, everything kind of falls apart at that point because I'm not getting those multitudes of benefits from there. So general gameplay, you go on these missions, you pick three of your mercenaries to fight at any given time, and you were generally up against three other enemies. And then you just take turns. It's kind of a slow paced game. That's one of my complaints with it. But you say, hey,

this mercenary, I want you to use this ability. And then you target that guy. Hey, this mercenary, I want you to heal this guy because he's getting low on health. And oh, hey, this third mercenary, I want you to activate taunt so that the other enemies are forced to attack you. And then everybody does their damage. Everything kind of resolves while you just sit there and watch. And then it's back to the action phase where you say, hey, mercenary one, I want you to do this. Mercenary two, do that. Mercenary three, do that. And so on and so forth. So there is a good bit of strategy involved. Like I said, hey, I want my fighter to attack their caster so that he's going to do double damage. Oh, but the other team has a protector who's going to do double damage to my

fighter, and the AI is smart enough to do that. It will target my fighter, and there's this back and forth. So after you do everything and you select all your actions, the turn kind of plays out and then it's just rinse and repeat. This is a very chill, slow paced game. I am having fun with it, but you have to understand this is not fast paced. This is more that you're focusing on the progression of the characters. I like the leveling up system. I want my characters and my mercenaries to get stronger. I want to unlock new abilities and the abilities that I unlock, I want to accrue those tokens to upgrade. So I find that part of it to be a lot of fun. This is the perfect game to just completely zone out on. Honestly, when I don't feel like playing anything that requires too much energy or action, or maybe I'm just sitting at my computer having a snack or eating something,

I'll pull up Hearthstone Mercenaries because it's just very chill to just sit and play. I don't know how long-lived this will be for me. Again, it is very slow-paced and not a lot changes. Obviously, as your characters level up, they get stronger, but you also come across stronger enemies. For now, I have not come across any enemies that have really cool mechanics. I think the neatest one so far has been that every ability has a speed rating to it. So it kind of says, hey, this is like your initiative. This is when this skill will fire off compared to the enemies

in your other characters. And one boss punished you if you acted too early. And then the next turn it would swap and it would punish you if you acted too early. And then the next turn, it would swap and it would punish you if you acted too late. And so I would have to kind of time my abilities according to that boss, or he would just kind of wreck everybody. So there is a little bit of strategy and kind of thinking involved there. But for the most part, this is just try to take somebody out as quick as you can and then rinse and repeat. So there's a lot of fun to be had. Again, this is just kind

of a chill, relaxed game. I think there is a lot of enjoyment to be had there. You can spend money on this. If you spend money on it, basically you get these packs that might unlock new mercenaries, or they give you a lot of those tokens so that you can upgrade their abilities. These are all things that you can do by playing the game, but spending money just accelerates that. And so that's kind of where their scheme comes from for getting you to spend money on this. But you don't have to. You can unlock all this stuff just by playing.

If you're a fan of Hearthstone, it's well worth checking out. Again, I'm having fun with it. I think I'll probably sit there and play it from time to time. I don't know that I'll dive into this just like crazy because I don't know that the gameplay is there unless things change once you get into the higher levels. My characters are only in the low to mid 20s. I know you don't even unlock a gear until you get to level 30. I don't know what the max level is. I'm sure that the boss fights and stuff get harder and harder. There's also a PVP element to this. That is a lot of fun to take your group of mercenaries and your strategies and then put those up against other real people and what their characters and strategies are as well. I've been having fun with that. But again, it's slow

paced. It's not any faster, more exciting because you're going up against a real person versus the AI. It's worth checking out. Again, Hearthstone's great because it's on mobile, it's on tablet, it's on PC. You can play this from just about anywhere, which is a lot of fun. There's a lot of other modes in Hearthstone. There's a reason that we rank this game so high. Not all their modes are great. Mercenaries has been fun. I don't know how long that will last, but for now, I wanted to bring it to your attention to say, hey, this is worth checking out. Might be something you really enjoy. It might not. And if it's not, hey, it was free and all you did was waste a little bit of time testing it out. So, all right, that's it for

me for this bonus episode. I've gone a little bit long, but I just wanted to make sure you guys and gals knew everything about it and why I would recommend you checking this out. All right. Thank you for the support. Paul and I both really appreciate it. And I will recommend you checking this out. All right. Thank you for the support. Paul and I both really appreciate it. And I will see you on the next bonus episode. Have a good one, everybody. See you later.