Hearthstone: What to Expect from Curse of Naxxramas

Hearthstone hasn’t been available that long, but there are already millions of people playing each month. Some play mostly ranked matches, while others take to the Arena for their entertainment; some prefer to just play casual matches as they build up gold and get new cards. With so many gamers playing Hearthstone, very few play against the computer in single-player matches. That will likely change when Curse of Naxxramas releases this summer.

The new single player adventure is set to include five wings, each representing one wing from the Naxxramas raid in World of Warcraft, as well as a new battlefield to play on. The wings will be released on a weekly basis for five weeks, with the first being free-to-play, the next three wings requiring gold or real money to play through, and the final wing unlocking once the other four are completed. Completing various aspects of the wings will grant the player access to the 30 new cards featured in Curse of Naxxramas, with one Legendary card guaranteed with the completion of each wing.

Blizzard has yet to comment on exact pricing details for Curse of Naxxramas, but it’s expected to fall in line with Expert Deck and Arena pricing. The developers commented on multiple occasions that they want gold and real money to be viable options for playing through the Curse of Naxxramas adventure. With that in mind, some people have speculated that each wing will cost 150 gold, the same as one Arena run, although with 30 cards on the line, and a guaranteed Legendary for each wing, that seems a little low. We expect perhaps double that (300 gold or $3.99 per wing), but nothing has been confirmed at this time.

There are 15 bosses that must be fought and defeated in Curse of Naxxramas. The first three wings feature three bosses each, with the fourth wing containing four bosses and the final wing featuring two bosses. Each boss will be unique, just like the classes in the game. Each will have a unique hero power (boss power?), as well as unique cards awarded to the player after defeating the boss. However, there will also be game-changing cards that only the bosses can use, which will not be available to players. These cards have been described by the developers as, “totally unfair” and “totally brutal.” Expect most of the bosses to be more difficult than the expert-level AI characters in practice mode.

The list of bosses and their respective wings are as follows:

In addition to the bosses in each wing, there will be class challenges specific to each character class in the game. There are nine class challenges in total, each tailored specifically to the corresponding class. Completing the class challenges awards one class-specific card, making up nine of the 30 cards you can acquire in Curse of Naxxramas. You get 15 cards from the bosses (one from each boss), along with the one Legendary card for completing each of the five wings. That’s a total of 29 cards, leaving only one left to collect. At the moment, Blizzard has not yet announced how the final card will be collected. In total, there are 21 neutral cards and 9 class-specific cards, all of which will be available in Arena once Curse of Naxxramas is released.

We’ll have more on Hearthstone: Curse of Naxxramas in the weeks ahead.