The Dalaran Heist Guide – Chapter 4: The Underbelly (Heroic Strategy)

The Dalaran Heist is out! It’s the biggest and most ambitious single player content Hearthstone ever had. And at the same time, it manages to be one of the most challenging ones. Or, to be more precise, most challenging one when you’re playing in Heroic mode. After spending long hours grinding the first chapter on both difficulties, I have to say that the balance is great. Casual players should not struggle in Normal mode, but they will still have to work for their wins. Veteran players should breeze through the Normal mode, but then Heroic mode will be a real challenge for them – something that was missing from Hearthstone’s previous roguelike adventures.

Dalaran Heist’s fourth chapter follows the player as he wades into the depths of Dalaran’s sewers in a bid to attach Dr. Boom’s bombs to the foundations of the floating city. While it’s not the most glamorous locale around, it does a good job avoiding the “sewer level” trope of video games, providing perhaps the toughest challenge yet in the Dalaran Heist adventure.

With every “good guy” trying to disrupt Rafaam’s evil plan, the Heroic mode of The Underbelly turns into a great challenge that tests your deckbuilding and gameplay capabilities.

Check Out Our Other Guides!

• The Dalaran Heist General Guide
• The Dalaran Heist Heroic Bosses Guide
• Chapter 1: Dalaran Bank (Heroic Strategy)
• Chapter 2: The Violet Hold (Heroic Strategy)
• Chapter 3: Streets of Dalaran (Heroic Strategy)
• Chapter 5: Kirin Tor Citadel (Heroic Strategy)

Twist: Swapped Attack & Health

Each of The Dalaran Heist chapters has its own so-called “Twist”. To put it simply, it’s a mechanic, which makes it stand out and bring part of the story into actual gameplay. It’s also something you need to take into account when building your deck and playing it – especially when we’re talking about Heroic format.

In Chapter 4, the twist called “Swapped Attack & Health”, which, as the name implies, permanently swaps the Health and Attack values of every minion in the game for both sides. Veterans of the game might remember the Thaddeus encounter from The Curse of Naxxramas, but there’s no back-and-forth swapping this time around. This means that you need to tailor your strategy accordingly, taking advantage of the surprisingly high Attack values of traditionally bulky minions on your way to victory. Luckily, the AI is not exactly an expert at doing so, even on the higher difficulties!

Warrior and Druid are the new hero classes made available to you, and both are extremely well-suited for this adventure due to their starting decks – this is definitely not a coincidence. Warrior gets a tempo-heavy build that’s a bit like Pirate Warrior used to be, and it can be especially powerful if you manage to pick up Dragon synergies along the way. Meanwhile, the Druid deck can start out incredibly fast with a token-based approach. Aggression is the name of the game in this week’s solo content as you can easily leverage you early board presence with unfairly high-Attack minions in the mid-game if you construct your deck in an effective manner.

Strategy Guide

In this section, we’re going to get deeper into the general strategy you might want to take when going into Chapter 4. If you’re looking for specific boss guides, click here!

The chapter-specific strategy for The Underbelly is very different from your usual approach because of the potency of twist mechanic. Luckily, the bosses’ decks don’t adapt to the change (though the ones introduced in this chapter are clearly designed with the swap effect in mind), which gives you a leg up on many of the opponents.

Deckbuilding

Unlike last week, you are very much encouraged to swarm the board with minions, especially with Druid. Instead of going “tall” with a board of strong individual ones, like we’ve recommended last week, you should go “wide” and adapt a token-heavy approach instead. Treasures with initiative and card draw capabilities are extra useful in this chapter. Eggs and similar minions with Deathrattles are also fantastic picks. (Keep in mind that minions like Hobgoblin or Twilight Guardian won’t be working the way you expect them to!)

This is also perhaps the toughest Heroic challenge to date, with the early bosses actually having enough of a damage potential to take you out if you’re not careful enough against them. The final boss, Madam Goya, gets a nasty Jade deck to play with, but luckily for us, the AI seems hell-bent on going aggro with the ultimate Control strategy – keep this in mind in the final battle!

We know that the pool of bosses per chapter is not really fixed; however, we do know that certain bosses will appear in Chapter 4 that didn’t appear in the previous chapters. You can read an extensive guide on every single Dalaran Heist boss here!