(Reminder) “Ulduar Grand Championship” In-Game Event Guide, How To Unlock All The Free Rewards

Update: We’re roughly in the middle of the event and given that it’s the most difficult one so far I decided to post a reminder. If you still haven’t started working on it, I recommend that you do it soon. Try to not miss any Daily Event Quests.

A new event system was introduced in Hearthstone a while back. Instead of doing them through regular Quests (usually chained together), we have a separate event UI with its own rewards track, unique quests, and so on. It’s a huge upgrade compared to what we previously had – it’s significantly more intuitive now.

A new event has just launched. It’s called “Ulduar Grand Championship” and it lasts for 19 days (until August 22 at 10 AM PT / 19:00 CET). It means that you have plenty of time to complete enough tasks to get all of the new rewards.

It’s the most difficult event we had so far. Most of the previous events could be completed by simply playing the game, you didn’t have to pay too much attention to them. But in this case, I feel like more casual players can actually miss the final reward, because 4k XP is A LOT.

Rewards List

There are 5 different reward tiers:

• 250 Event XP – 1x Standard Card Pack
• 1000 Event XP – 1x Festival of Legends + 1x TITANS Card Packs
• 2000 Event XP – 1x Standard Card Pack
• 3500 Event XP – 1x Golden Standard + 1x TITANS Card Packs
• 4000 Event XP – Death Knight Hero Skin – Zombie Queen Scarlet

Summing up all the rewards gives us six card packs (including one Golden) and one Constructed skin. Here’s the close-up of that skin:

How To Unlock All Rewards

In order to unlock all 5 reward tiers, you need to get 4000 event XP. But how hard is that, exactly? How much do you need to play in order to do it?

There are three ways to earn XP in those events. Here’s how the system works:

• Quest Chain – Most of the XP comes from the main Quest Chain. In this case, it gives 2800 XP, which is a lot, but still far away from the 4000 XP necessary. You can’t finish all of the tasks at once, you can only do one per day. After you finish one, the next unlocks with the daily Quest reset. Keep that in mind, because it means that you can’t rush through all of the tasks on last day, you need to spread them over a few days.
• Daily Quests – On top of the main Quest Chain, players get extra, usually pretty simple Daily Quests. In this case, they give you either 50 XP or 100 XP. You can reroll them once per day like the regular Quests. Trying to reroll 50 XP ones into better ones is a good strategy, but keep in mind that rerolling the higher XP one will always give you a lower XP one.
• XP for playing – And finally, players get extra XP simply for playing the game. The exact rate is unknown, but players estimate it at around 40-45 XP per hour. So, for example, a 7-minute Constructed match would give you around 5 XP, while a 25-minute Battlegrounds match would give you around 18 XP.

So now that we know how the XP is earned, let’s see how much you need to complete this event. The entire Quest Chain gives you 2800 XP – so you have 1200 XP to earn between the Dailies and XP from playing. Given that Daily Quests can give you either 100 XP or 50 XP, if we average that to 75 XP, it means that you have to finish 16 of them in order to get the Quest done. And that doesn’t count any XP you get for playing – more realistically you would finish it earlier.

However, those calculations assume that you don’t skip any dailies and you get a 50/50 spread of high and low XP Quests. But it can get much tougher. If you low-roll dailies and mostly get 50 XP ones, and you skip half of them, that would leave you with with ~20 hours of XP grinding by playing the game in order to finish it. That’s why it’s super important to finish all of the Quests if you want to complete the event.

All in all, this is the most difficult event we had so far. Unless you play A LOT of Hearthstone, you will probably need around 10 days to finish the Quest. If you’re a casual player and you really want the final reward (Death Knight skin), I suggest that you try to not miss any dailies, as that will mean that you will have to play a lot of extra Hearthstone.