Hearthstone’s brand-new single-player adventure, Tombs of Terror, is now available. Chapter 1 and 2 of Tombs of Terror are both playable with Chapter 1 being free and Chapter 2 costing 700 in-game gold or $9.50 AUD. Like the Dalaran Heist that came before it, Tombs of Terror is a multi-chapter PvE experience that tells a story. This time around, Blizzard is telling the story of the League of Explorers as they attempt to stop the Plague Lords.
Each chapter is made up of eight games against a random selection of bosses, created specifically for the Tombs of Terror. In total, across all four Chapters, there are 78 bosses. So far, playing the first two chapters, I’ve come across about 35 of them.
They’re all quite varied and have unique Hero Powers, decks and strategies. However, not all bosses are created equal as Blizzard Dave Kosak and Dave Ayala explained.
Tombs of Terror Bosses
As you play Tombs of Terrors chapters, you’ll regularly see the same bosses, though the order they appear changes almost every time. I asked Kosak and Ayala if it’s difficult to design a boss that will work equally well as the first boss or the seventh. Kosak was quick to correct me and explain that there are tiers of bosses in Tombs of Terror.
The first couple of encounters pull from one tier, the next couple of encounters pull from another and then the sixth and seventh boss are pulling from the same tier.
Of course, the eighth boss is the plague lord, so that helps us.
Interestingly, balancing boss fights is something that Kosak said is pretty easy. “Fortunately for us, what happens is if we find a boss that’s really, really hard, we can just move it to a later tier and it fits in perfectly. And if the boss is pretty simple, we can move him lower.”
Another interesting fact about the bosses in Tombs of Terror is that the team designed the chapters based on feedback from the community. After the Dalaran Heist, Kosak told me that players expressed disappointment in seeing the same bosses when a new week started. “Even though there was a bunch of new content in the chapter, the very first thing you see was something you saw before,” he explained adding that the chapters all had a shared boss pool. In Tombs of Terror, “we divided up the bosses, they are unique per chapter, so when you get to a new chapter, you’ll see all different bosses.”
To ensure variety over time, when players beat a chapter, the bosses from that chapter are added to the overall shared boss pool and will appear in other chapters. And because each chapter has its own plot twist, it makes fighting these bosses a bit different.
You get the best of both worlds. You get unique bosses per chapter but you also get all that variety just like you did in Dalaran Heist, so we’re pretty stoked about that.
Right now, you can tackle the bosses from the first two chapters of Tombs of Terror. Chapter 1 is free and Chapter 2 costs $9.50 AUD.
