From Dungeons to Duels (and Beyond): Revisiting The Dalaran Heist

The Dalaran Heist remains the biggest and boldest solo content piece in Hearthstone’s history, but how does it hold up after a couple of years of feature creep? Does Rafaam still steal the show (and the city)?

Check out previous part, in which we revisit Rumble Run here!

New Year’s Resolution

After the decidedly lackluster and fairly unpopular PvE iteration of the Rumble Run, it was clear that the Dungeon Run format would need to significantly evolve if it were to keep the players’ attention. Team 5 certainly delivered on this, and then some, though the added complexities and intricacies of the expanded vision did come with the downside of further exposing the creakiness of Hearthstone’s AI.

As part of the year’s ongoing storyline pitting the League of Explorers against the League of E.V.I.L anew, the players got a chance to experience Rafaam’s bold takeover and, erm, theft of the entirety of Dalaran, basically by strapping rockets to the floating city, courtesy of Dr. Boom. Hearthstone’s storytelling approach was never exactly on the serious side of the spectrum, but the Year of the Dragon marked its decided shift into kiddie territory of the solo content side of things (most notably the Galakrond’s Awakening mini-adventure, which we’ll get to soon enough), but even in this game’s context, this pretty much amounts to jumping the shark.

Ultimately, this means you’re not playing as the brave hero or the bold villain, but rather as one of the various henchmen involved with the task, no doubt as a seamless way to introduce additional and alternative hero powers. By this point, the PvE experience has explicitly transformed into a sandbox with supremely high power level options to mess around with against a hapless AI, reducing the challenge somewhat to make room for additional spectacle.

Many new improvements were brought to bear here beyond the usual Dungeon Run formula, and The Dalaran Heist gameplay experience still serves as the biggest and baddest solo mode we’ve seen in the history of Hearthstone.

Dalaran’s Delights

First of all, there are Twists, perhaps better explained as Gimmicks, as part of each of the five chapters that slightly spice up the traditional Dungeon Run-esque gameplay experience. These generally affect the actual battle scenarios. Since the AI has little to no grasp on their gameplay effects, they all practically serve as a difficulty reduction element, most notably Crowded Streets in Chapter 3, which limits the number of slots on the board to four for both sides.

It’s worth mentioning that the Imprisoned Minions mechanic from Chapter 2 also served as a great tutorial-slash-introduction for the keyword itself, neatly linking the Constructed experience to the PvE one. Chapter 5 offers four additional pre-set bosses to expand the traditional encounter length to twelve, which really only serves as a bit of a gauntlet and a way to further jack up the power levels on both sides.

To provide further replay value, Anomaly Mode also became available at the time of the fifth chapter’s release, with additional Twists like “All spells cost (2) less”, “Both players start the game with two extra cards and Mana Crystals” or “All minions have a 50% chance to attack the wrong enemy”, among others. It makes sense to only release this kind of a feature at the tail end of the content’s intended life cycle, tossing in the new options once everything else has been released instead of potentially inducing burnout by incentivizing players to replay the first chapter over and over again. No doubt the same idea led to the staggered releases of the henchmen (and, effectively, their hero powers and alternative starting decks, too).

There are also the Tavern Encounters, which both serve as an important gameplay tool (allowing you to make adjustments to your deck, which is vital considering your starting set of cards are pre-determined) and the introduction of one of the most beloved characters in Hearthstone history: Bartender Bob. Yes, there’s also Bartendotron, but who cares, really?

In total, there are 27 hero powers distributed across the nine heroes, 75 unique bosses, plus new Treasures and the Anomaly mode. There’s a lot to play around with there, and many of the concepts introduced would later find a new home in Duels or Battlegrounds (like Boon of Light, an alternate Paladin hero power wielded by George to great effect in BGs today – interestingly enough, it cost 2 mana in the PvE content to begin with). And how could we forget about the golden Zayle, Shadow Cloak, an incredibly disappointing card in light of what Whizbang the Wonderful brings to the table, with five poor and never-updated decks offered at random, guaranteeing an abysmally low win rate even at the time of its release.

Was It All Worth It?

Perhaps this is a bit of a controversial take on The Dalaran Heist experience, but it seems somewhat unnecessarily bloated in retrospect. The fact that a decent chunk of the features and characters introduced here eventually found a home elsewhere in the game is great to see – but then again, this was always the case with the PvE content pieces.

There’s also the recurring thorny question of just how much Team 5 benefits from having people endlessly replaying a solo content piece, not expanding on their collection, and not increasing the pool of players in the queue in the PvP modes. Those fully on board the PvE grind didn’t exactly need something like Anomaly mode to keep returning to Dungeon Run and its counterparts, and I’d wager good money that 95+% or the player base doesn’t have every hero power unlocked. Those elements, of course, are fairly grind-heavy and likely didn’t require much development time to implement, but one has to wonder a couple of years down the line whether a portion of production would have been better spent elsewhere for Hearthstone’s overall health.

There’s no denying that The Dalaran Heist serves as the pinnacle of Hearthstone’s PvE content so far (though perhaps this might change with the launch of Mercenaries Mode). It’s a feature-rich experience that naturally builds on the strong foundations of the original Dungeon Run setup. However, there’s only so much complexity you can pile onto a solo gameplay experience in Hearthstone when your opponent is as limited in skill as Hearthstone’s AI is, and the sandbox appeal of a game mode like this is ultimately going to be rather limited. There’s a reason why Team 5 haven’t undertaken any similar development task since then, and why the later solo content releases of the Year of the Dragon relied on much of this framework instead of further improving on it – as we’ll see next time, the Tombs of Terror content is a similar sort of remix we’ve seen before, rather than a full-scale evolution.