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.
I thought there was going to be other exclusive cards for completing the adventure, (Like Karazhan)
That would make cost of this expansion go over the roof!
Why it's not worth it with gold? You can disenchant golden Zayle and get 1600 dust - it's dust from 16 packs on average. So 12packs for 4 wings (first wing is free anyway) + 300 dust from golden classic pack + 1600 dust from golden legendary= 12+19 (1 pack = 100 dust on average) = 31 packs for 2800 gold.
you can't disenchant zayle
Oh, sorry, didn't know that. Thanks.
From my first impression it looks rather good. Because of anomaly mode it should provide also a lot of replayability. That said though in my opinion it's only slightly better than dungeon run / monster hunt. Many different and random starting conditions are good, but not much of an improvement. That friendly tavern encounter is also nice, but the options there seem way too insignificant. And just like previously with only 8 bosses you might never get the chance to try out this or that cool thing. I'm still going to buy it because it looks awesome as usual, but considering it was free before it seems extremely expensive. Luckily most other people also care about the rewards (I don't except for the card backs because I always "buy the expansion" on launch day) and as explained above if you can make use of those packs and buy with real money you basically get the adventure "for free" or "as a bonus".
So overall pretty good, but could be better. But of course why should they do it if it doesn't make them more money? "Never lucky". I personally would love to spend more on better single player content, but for now it seems most would not. "Never lucky"..., again. Let's see how it will continue. I also didn't tried anomaly mode yet. Maybe it's better than I think. But even then there would still be much room for improvement. Most importanly better deck refinement and an endless mode. I always hate to end up with garbage decks and that if I can make an awesome deck I have to retire it even though I didn't even get a chance to see all possible craziness that could be pulled off with it.
Here's the thing. They could have made each wing award 7 or even 5 packs to make it clearly worth the gold and then we wouldn't even be having this discussion. Why the heck is it 3 packs per wing? Is giving players 10 extra packs really that hard?
This just leaves a bad taste in my mouth. Blizzard holding out their hand for money for both packs and an adventure seems greedy. Yes, I know they have every RIGHT to make money and a RIGHT to charge whatever they like, but that doesn't change that I feel like I'm being nickel and dimed.
Being happy with something seems like a pretty good reason to spend money on it to me. If enjoying something isn’t enough then what is in your opinion?
Being happy with something seems like a pretty good reason to spend money on it to me. If enjoying something isn’t enough then what is in your opinion?
i always use gold to buy adventure.
cz im poor f2p player.
you can save your gold to not buy pack. (earn 100-150 every day from quest and win)
then you can purchase adventure every week.
The free first wing was quite fun. That said, because I am primarily interested in PvP HS (which is notoriously expensive), I will probably just save my gold for the next expansion.
Well okay I was wrong about being told the Adventure was free, but it was sort of implied in the way it was sold. For the last Expansion, the Adventure was free. I guess I assumed this one would be as well. I still feel it should be after spending money on the preorder each time. I am glad I can use Gold as well. Maybe its not a total disaster afterall. I stand corrected and am big enough to admit when I have made a mistake.
Thx.
Pretty fun and honestly pretty easy, at least with Hunter. I defeated all 8 bosses the first run feelsgood
its got a lot of promise from a configurability persective, much more replayable than the other single player experiences.
Its only flaw is that its just so easy. Its heroic mode is easier than monster hunt.
Had an absolute blast playing through with all three classes and hero powers. A lot of content too. Great value compared to just buying packs--compared to older adventures--RIP--with guaranteed legendaries and epics, pretty poor. Regardless, worth imo
so basically ... same price as 15 packs in the store, but instead you get: 15 RoS packs, a golden classic pack, a golden legendary, 2 card backs AND a whole pve adventure with normal + heroic mod (which represents quite a lot of hours of gameplay).
Is it worth it ? hmmmm ... it's funny how people even ask the question, it's worth it even if you don't want to spend too much time on the pve content ... just spend 15-20mins per chapter and you're done
and the anomaly mode, whatever it is
Only "worth" with real money you mean. Even next to that, the difficulty is laughable. Which makes replayability less likely. Its just a blizzard money Heist...
The great Blizzard fanboys heist
You can get the second chapter (Violet Hold) RIGHT NOW