The Dalaran Heist Guide – Chapter 5: Kirin Tor Citadel (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 (actually, this wing may even cause them to break a sweat), but then Heroic mode will be a real challenge for them – something that was missing from Hearthstone’s previous roguelike adventures.

Dalaran Heist’s fifth (and last) chapter follows the player as he finally breaches the Citadel to oust Dalaran’s leaders and allow Rafaam to finally take control and enact the first part of his evil plan. With the good guys on full alert, this is an extra-long and extra-challenging encounter that pits you against some of the most difficult opponents you’ve ever encountered in Hearthstone’s PvE content to date.

With the Kirin Tor’s best and brightest all trying to disrupt Rafaam’s evil plan, the Heroic mode of The Kirin Tor Citadel is a genuine challenge to complete even for veterans of the game, making for an excellent 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 4: The Underbelly (Heroic Strategy)

Twist: Four Additional Encounters

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 5, the twist is called “Four Additional Encounters”, which is exactly what it says on the tin. Get ready for a grueling set of extra encounters stitched onto your usual Dungeon Run: this lengthened challenge can even cause some difficulties even in Normal mode. Based on our playtesting experience, the “bonus” bosses seem to be the same ones every run, culminating in battles with Archmage Vargoth and Khadgar.

Warlock and Paladin finally join the fray, providing you with the full swathe of classes to choose from for the final portion of this adventure. Unlike last week, when the aggressive decks of Warrior and Druid worked very well with the chapter’s twist, you will actively have to build your deck in a different direction this time around. The Warlock hero’s starting deck is fairly weak to begin with, and the Paladin’s focuses on a tempo-heavy approach: this is not a viable approach for a 12-boss Dungeon Run where the final opponents have three-digit health pools to chew through. It is imperative that you prepare for grueling battles and have a late-game strategy regardless of which class you’re playing with as you conquer Dalaran for good.

Strategy Guide

In this section, we’re going to get deeper into the general strategy you might want to take when going into Chapter 5. If you’re looking for specific boss guides, click here! Based on what we’ve seen so far, the finalencounters will always pit you against the Archmages of Kirin Tor: Vargoth, Kalec and Khadgar, in that order.

While the chapter’s twist may not seem that impactful at first, it actually does have a major effect on your gameplan. Any deck with a purely aggressive approach will get mowed down by the later bosses, and if your goal is to grind them out, you’ll have to prepare for them early on with your card and treasure selection. Some of the later bosses are extremely nasty and can be very difficult to deal with and have brutally unfair resources that can easily take you all the way to fatigue.

Deckbuilding

Since grind is the name of the game, treasures which allow you to fight a long battle are extremely useful. This includes Potion of Vitality, Elixir of Vigor, EVIL Propaganda and Case Study alongside the usual suspects. If you managed to pick up value-generating cards, any way to copy and re-summon them also becomes extremely valuable.

You should have a good idea of what makes a deck work against the regular challenges at this point, and it goes without saying that anything capable of taking down the Archmages will be more than good enough against the rest of the opposition you will face. They will all force you to play the long game but they also provide very different and quite specific deckbuilding challenges. Vargoth’s hero power will pit you against an endless swathe of resources yet it’s essentially a battle for board control to stop him from leveraging the spell damage bonuses. For Kalec, the innate spell damage puts a clock on you: there’s a certain point where he’ll be able to regularly wipe your minions with a single card and burn you to death once fatigue comes near. Meanwhile, Khadgar is essentially a constructed Conjurer Mage on steroids, presenting the best (or worst) of both worlds. However, he’s perhaps the worst at pushing you off the board once you can take over – but that requires very aggressive use of removals early on against any of his minions that synergize with spellcasting (Sorcerer's Apprentice, the Elemental summoned by the hero power and Archmage's Apprentice, which, believe it or not, is actually a thing in his deck.

We know that the pool of bosses per chapter is not really fixed; however, we do know that certain bosses will appear in Chapter 5 that didn’t appear in the previous chapters, and that the Archmages are always going to be your final opponents in your battle for Dalaran. You can read an extensive guide on every single Dalaran Heist boss here!