Your thoughts on the new bosses?

[Simulacrum]

Well I deliberately chose Zoo to counter her hero power. I guess I'll try Anub again with my ramp druid but it strikes me that by the time I get to my late game the board will be flooded with 4/4s.

The AI is pretty bad and will often choose to skip turn 1 to coin out a 3 mana minion on turn 2, in which case he's a complete walkover for ramp druid and probably most other decks. If he spams his hero ability 3 turns in a row it gets rough though, unless your deck is very strong control, like paladin.

[Deleted]

Making progress on Heroic Maexnna. Got myself a healing Paladin deck. Turn 4 you consecrate leaving a board full of 1/1s without any opportunity for her to play anything else. Then you've just got to heal about 7 damage each turn with voodoo doctors, earthen rings and (in the late game) Guardians whilst whittling away at her health with archers, boars, wolf riders and night blades. In theory it's great but sadly I didn't draw any healing all game.

[Deleted]

I ran with my normal druid deck, got the 1st HC boss down, no probs at all.
Then the game kicked me out and can't login, so rest will have to wait for tomorrow.

Impression so far: way too easy

So to update my own experience since the game was more stable today.

One-shot the 2nd HC boss as well, but then got stuck at Maexxana, my ramp-druid just wasn't going to cut it, so I made a specially tweaked Pally deck and after about 3-4 tries the spidey died as well.

I still have the same impression - maybe it was bit too easy, would have liked a bit more "deck tweaking exercises" not just on the last boss. Perhaps a bit more linear difficulty. Maybe it was because the choice of my deck, maybe the AI could have been a bit smarter (though I know that's so easy to say and so hard to do in a game like this). Maybe it was because this is the 1st wing :-)

However - all that aside it was really, really fun little adventure!
Thoroughly enjoyed it and looking forward to next week. Also *really* looking forward to seeing the new cards enter the meta

Well done Hearthstone team!

[Deleted]

Just beat Heroic Anub'rekhan with my Ramp Druid. Naturalise a Deathlord, get a free Ironbark.

[Deleted]

Faerlina wrecks any slow deck, you just didn't realize it because you were running zoolock which naturally negates her hero power pretty much.

Don't know about others but I 1-shotted heroic faerlina on my standard issue priest deck. It's slow like most priest decks are slow and was able to beat faerlina quiet easily. I actually think, looking at the discrepancy between faerlina and the other two bosses, faerlina seems really tame, even on heroic.

[Raiju]

Making progress on Heroic Maexnna. Got myself a healing Paladin deck. Turn 4 you consecrate leaving a board full of 1/1s without any opportunity for her to play anything else. Then you've just got to heal about 7 damage each turn with voodoo doctors, earthen rings and (in the late game) Guardians whilst whittling away at her health with archers, boars, wolf riders and night blades. In theory it's great but sadly I didn't draw any healing all game.

I tweaked my paladin deck the same way last night except with alexstrasza (seems everyone has a similar idea). Just healed till alex then burned with various spells and chargers. Took a couple goes (also ran holy lights and a LoH but LoH seems a bad idea in general)

Hunter seems the easiest method to kill her having helped a friend build a deck and do it. If you do have leeroy it's fantastic for flooding her board before places big things (incase you didn't draw explosive trap)

Faerlina seems to be giving much different mileage, from my experience last night she would hero power EVERY turn. this meant if you didn't play anything by about turn 3 you were in an unwinnable position generally. To add, neither of the 2 'random' hero powers seem particularly random - and actually seems the only good AI involved. I guess I just got unlucky there, since if faerlina doesn't abuse her hero power her deck is very weak.

[Trubo]

Don't know about others but I 1-shotted heroic faerlina on my standard issue priest deck. It's slow like most priest decks are slow and was able to beat faerlina quiet easily. I actually think, looking at the discrepancy between faerlina and the other two bosses, faerlina seems really tame, even on heroic.

I'd say that's mostly because she has the weakest hero power of the three as you pretty much control how strong it will ever be.

[Deleted]

I tweaked my paladin deck the same way last night except with alexstrasza (seems everyone has a similar idea). Just healed till alex then burned with various spells and chargers. Took a couple goes (also ran holy lights and a LoH but LoH seems a bad idea in general)

Hunter seems the easiest method to kill her having helped a friend build a deck and do it. If you do have leeroy it's fantastic for flooding her board before places big things (incase you didn't draw explosive trap)

Faerlina seems to be giving much different mileage, from my experience last night she would hero power EVERY turn. this meant if you didn't play anything by about turn 3 you were in an unwinnable position generally. To add, neither of the 2 'random' hero powers seem particularly random - and actually seems the only good AI involved. I guess I just got unlucky there, since if faerlina doesn't abuse her hero power her deck is very weak.

Sadly I don't have Alexstraza, so I'm worried about getting Maex down. If I can fill the board with 1/1s permanently though and if I can get to the late-game with the guardians it should theoretically be possible to fatigue her out.

[Deztru]

After getting to Maexxna HC.... even though she is beatable I reaaaally dislike the way they made it "heroic" difficulty :/

[Nanaboostme]

All the bosses are a joke. They need to use more variety of cards and spells. Let them use a mixture of different classes. I was hoping theyd improve AI's IQ but I guess theres just no technology out there yet for it. Heroic Maexxna was the only fight I didn't one shot, and it was more of an annoying fight than an actual challenging fight. You eventually figure out her pattern and then its just getting the right draws from there. Too much reliance on her hero power as well.

[Deleted]

My thoughts on all three heroic bosses now I've got a good look at each:
> Anub'rekhan seems somewhat overpowered even with a deck of powerful minions. It doesn't feel like a puzzle it just feels like an overwhelming tide of 4/4s. I guess the puzzle is you've got to find a way to cheaply kill the Deathlords so you can get huge minions on the board early. But it's pretty hard going. I double innervated an Ironbark out on turn 4 and it died immediately without effort.

> Faerlina feels like a decent challenge but isn't overly difficult. It's satisfying to beat. I guess it has a puzzle too but that puzzle is basically "play zoo".

> Maexnna is by far the most puzzle orientated boss. She seems pretty impossible to beat unless you exploit her hero power. Which I think is pretty fun.

Overall the normal modes are far too easy but the Heroic modes are a lot more like what I was hoping for. I do think that there needs to be some sort of reward for the Heroic modes. The obvious one is the golden cards, and a card back, though I'd go so far as to say that the Legendaries should only be unlockable via Heroic mode.

[Raiju]

Sadly I don't have Alexstraza, so I'm worried about getting Maex down. If I can fill the board with 1/1s permanently though and if I can get to the late-game with the guardians it should theoretically be possible to fatigue her out.

Gotta worry about your own fatigue - she will make you draw if you get unlucky even if you don't draw cards (unholy swords or w/e). I I did end up getting her to 23 before alexstrasza'ing just because I had nothing to do (full hand) and 7 extra damage would've been more than doable even though I hit fatigue myself! :P (had 29 hp so no worries there)

Alternatives are priest and freeze mage, as already mentioned hunter is super cheap

Any class works with a little good RNG in the beginning, and I echo what other said - if she can't kill a minion 1 to 1 she generally won't even try to attack them. Use this to your advantage if you get a bad draw (just watch out for her assassinate card necrotic poison)

[Deleted]

I tweaked my paladin deck the same way last night except with alexstrasza (seems everyone has a similar idea). Just healed till alex then burned with various spells and chargers. Took a couple goes (also ran holy lights and a LoH but LoH seems a bad idea in general)

You don't even need Alexstrasza for it, the "strat" can be much cheaper really.

1) Spend the beginning rounds setting up the board - her side should be filled with 1-attack mobs (most likely those little spiders). Now she'll do static 7 damage each round.
2) You need following cards in your hand: Guardian of Kings, Arcane Golem and Earthern Ring Farseeer
3) Start dropping the Guardian and the Golem each turn. Don't drop any other cards. You'll eat 4 health off her, she only does one damage to you.
4) Rinse and repeat until she dies.
5) If you're in danger of running out of HP before she dies, you can "heal" by doing couple of rounds of Guardian + Faarseer together. You won't do any damage, but you'll "heal" two HP per round. When out of dangers way, goto 3 and continue killing.

You can of course substitute the extra heal with any other healing spell or a Voodoo Doctor (though you'll only gain one HP per turn).
It's a bit of a kludge really and at some point you'll probably fill your hand andd start burning cards - this shouldn't be a problem though, I had plenty of cards left in the deck (8-9) when she died

[Deleted]

I'd say that's mostly because she has the weakest hero power of the three as you pretty much control how strong it will ever be.

Absolutely; the hero powers represent the primary challenge on the heroic bosses.

Sadly I don't have Alexstraza, so I'm worried about getting Maex down. If I can fill the board with 1/1s permanently though and if I can get to the late-game with the guardians it should theoretically be possible to fatigue her out.

You don't need alex to beat maexxna. I was able to beat her without too much trouble using a hunter deck. I used explosive trap as early board clear, and a combination of battle crys to heal, silence and cheap removal to keep the board under control. Deadly shot for the big guys, multishot and explosive shot for the smaller guys, kill command, buzzards for card draw, etc.

In fact, because maexxna never kills your minions, just throws them back, I was able to draw an insane amount of cards with the buzzard. I won on my first turn of fatigue, while maexxna still had ~10 cards in her deck.

Alex is great but not necessary in any of the heroic bosses.

[Raiju]

Naturally, but I only tweaked my deck once due to how bad the servers were last night. I didn't even add in any charge minions outside of the 1 I had.

[Deleted]

Heroic Maexnna beat. And all it took was about 20 turns of double earthen ring, steady shot.

[Deleted]

Overall I'd say I was a little disappointed (so far) with the heroic difficulty. I never expected the normal mode or challenges to be particularly tricky, but I did hope heroic modes would require longer than an hour or two to complete.

I purposely avoided Hearthstone related forums so that I could figure out the heroics on my own. Handlock is my favourite deck so I downed the first boss in 1 attempt just using the deck I thought would fit. 2nd boss is obviously easier with an empty/low card hand so I aggro zoo'd her face off in 2 attempts. The final boss proved a little trickier. I had 3 attempts before I built a deck with charge and heal minions. 4 attempts and it died.

[HisDudeness]

Mage deck full of blizzards/flamestrikes/heals/barriers and ice block did the job for me. I had Alex also so just held on, got to like 3 health I think and put up a ice block that never got used and basically got her down to no cards and took control. Was rather easy. Cone of cold/Frost nova help out also. Use a novice engineer x2 to really get the cards racking up so you get what you need early. Start picking off the 1 health spiders around 4-5 and then use your hero power on the stealthed minion to keep it at 4 health to flamestrike down. If you play it right, She will unleash her whole hand eventually to get nuked and then its game over.