The Great Dalaran Heist Has Launched! Two Wings This Week, First Wing Free
Hearthstone's newest adventure, The Great Dalaran Heist, has launched!
Join the newly-formed League of E.V.I.L. in their attempt to subdue the magical, treasure-filled city of Dalaran.
What Launches This Week?
There are two chapters available this week.
- You can get started for completely free with the first chapter, The Dalaran Bank, today.
- The second chapter, The Violet Hold, is also open today and can be purchased for 700 gold or $6.99.
- You may purchase the entire adventure for $19.99, a discounted cost.
- Other wings may be individually purchased ahead of time, allowing you to unlock Zayle, Shadow Cloak early.
- The remaining three chapters unlock one at a time over the next three weeks.
This Week's Twists
Each chapter has a special passive mechanic called Twists. These effects are active during all your games in that wing and will change up how you play against each boss. Here are the twists you can expect for this week's chapters.
- Dalaran Bank (FREE Chapter) - Coin-filled Coffers
- A 0/3 Cache spawns on the opponent's side of the board. Breaking it gives 2 Coins to each player.
- The Violet Hold - Imprisoned Minions
- At the start of the game a random minion from each player's deck is locked on the board. It will unlock once enough turns have by that are equal to its mana cost.
Is The Adventure Worth It?
There has been a lot of discussion about whether the adventure was worth the cost, so let's break it down. First though, what do you get when you buy the entire adventure?
- 15 Rise of Shadows Packs
- 1 Golden Classic Pack
- Zayle, Shadow Cloak Golden Legendary Card
- Two Card Backs
- The Great Dalaran Heist Solo Content Adventure
Let's make some quick assumptions to make this real easy.
- Everything in this article has been priced in USD, you may value your local currency differently.
- We don't care about the gameplay - everyone will value it differently.
- You're buying the entire adventure at once. Don't buy wings individually with money, it is $28 =(
- Golden Zayle, Shadow Cloak is hard to price. The decks aren't perfect and it is pointless if you have a large collection.
- The card backs are cosmetic and have no gameplay changing value so we don't care about them.
That brings to the real meat, the card packs. Is the adventure worth buying for the card packs?
Sort of. Kinda. It Depends.
Forgetting the golden classic pack, which has a minimum dust value of 300, let's talk about store prices. You can purchase the 15 Rise of Shadows packs in the shop for $19.99, the exact same price as the adventure. That establishes a nice base of the adventure being completely worth purchasing if you were looking for some more Rise of Shadows packs. We aren't getting a deal on the Rise of Shadows packs, but we also forgot a ton of content above.
Now, if you're on team gold, I've got some bad news. This is not at all worth it for the packs. You're losing 1300 gold on the Rise of Shadows packs purchase which means all the stuff we were going to temporarily forget about, that needs to be worth 13 card packs to you. We can bring that loss down a bit though if we consider you get at least 300 dust from the golden classic pack (worth 300 gold) so you end up paying 1000 gold extra for a golden legendary, two card backs, and solo content.
TL;DR: Buy with real money if the packs are your main concern and you want the most pack value. If you don't need the packs and hate solo content, don't buy.
Ultimately, Buy The Damn Adventure
Just have some damn fun with the game for a change!
Adventures have always been worth purchasing in Hearthstone. Even though the format and the rewards have changed over time, Blizzard does a really good job at making sure the rewards are fantastic - they want us to buy it =).
Dalaran looks to be the best piece of solo content the Hearthstone team has ever put out for us, so if you enjoyed past content (paid or free) you should love this one. Hearthstone is supposed to be a fun game and solo content can add that value of joy to the table quite easily. Forget about ladder for a day a week over the next month and chill with the League of E.V.I.L.
her? A clock is a she? Are you suffering from terminal, late-stage feminism?
I don't get why it's not worth buying it with gold. I have no idea what to do with my gold anyway, so for me it's fine spending gold.
Right there with ya, buddy. I already bought it with money, but now I'm regretting it. I have 3,015 gold and after collecting every card in Standard it'll just be piling up, more and more. I guess I'll have one big buy after the next set releases. :/
how about u start wasting gold for wild packs then
How do I go about buying old/Wild packs? lol, as far as I know that's not a possibility with gold. I have 29,900 dust at the moment.. but I'm not interested in wild play at all.
you buy packs with gold when the new expansion arrives.
Why did you think that? You get better rewards here though - 15 packs, a golden pack, golden Zayle (if you own it all), etc.
Did you beat 5 bosses? If you read the reward information, that's what you need to do to get the five packs.
Seems too easy. Beat both heroic areas simply picking the draw 2 extra cards treasure. Not really fun when you are steam rolling the opponent to the point that it can't do whatever op thing the enemy is supposed to be doing.
I'll give them props though for adding the resume single player games option.
True that, they had no clue how to balance it properly, heroic felt like playing regular mode, not even challenging.
Why didn't i get my 3 packs for the Violet Hold
Enjoying the content so far, just been doing chapter 1 normal and heroic with Rakanishu. Fun and a fairly mild difficulty. Both done.
Anyone else only able to think of "the rock" Dwayne Johnson when they go to the tavern?
this is a fun adventure for a short while. I milled half the bosses in the first chapter (even the final one, who dropped Fel Reaver while I had a Quest Mage deck with several coins).
paying in gold means that I'm not spending real money, how is that not better than paying 20 bucks?
Also earning and paying with gold is gonna feel much more rewarding when I actually get to play the wing
its better for you. for me its better and easier to just spend money. i have money. i dont have time to grind gold.
Well, for one, you get anomaly mode straight away with actual money.
Secondly, I hear some people don't have that much gold to spend, or just have a small amount of cards to the point where getting 28 packs instead of 15 is a major difference.
Furthermore, 20 bucks is a pretty small amount to pay for so much content. I happen to have a lot of gold to spare and have been F2P all the way since beta, but I totally understand how 20 bucks is acceptable for many people.
Some simple math brought me to 108 variations of Hero/Hero power/Starting deck archetype, that's even before counting the Heroic mode that doubles it and anomaly mode that I suppose also does a lot to increase replay-ability (I assume, don't have it yet as I'm using gold to buy it).
Well worth the gold. I think I'm going to embark on a couple of weeks of using friends to complete quests in order to have more time for this. Judging from past heroic it might take a while.
P.S. Failed twice on the first wing, once with basic mage (ran out of cards on 5th boss) and once with 2nd hero/power mage (Queen stole my Ragnaros with Frostmourne), then unlocked the 2nd wing and won first try with Hunter... Still have to check out how Shaman works out.
nicely new PVE, more funs heroes, abilities, eggs :SeemsGood:
I've found the Blizzard employee.
I doubt Blizzard has employees with such limited knowledge about running a business.
Doesn't even understand the concept of free samples which from looking at all their games is common practice over there.