Dual-class Arena guide: Best hero combinations, card tier list and more
Our quick guide to getting the most out of your free Arena tickets this Halloween.
Hearthstone's Doom in the Tomb event for this year’s Hallow’s End reintroduces dual-class Arena, so we’ve got an updated guide to help you through. This time around in Arena, every card in Standard is gone, and every card exclusive to Wild format is available for selection. This means a lot of you will be playing with cards you’ve never used before, so hopefully this guide is helpful to you!
You receive one free Arena entrance pass from Blizzard for the first two weeks of Doom in the Tomb, so you can give these classes a go with minimal risk to your gold reserves, with the same prizes available.
There’s a whole lot of potential combinations, but we’ve been working hard to narrow down the best ones to pick from. The first class you pick will be your Hero portrait, while the second gives you that class’ Hero Power.
Both classes chosen will offer you cards throughout the draft, and it’s up to you to keep an eye on your deck list and the synergies offered to you.
If you've any advice of your own for getting more out of the new Arena over the next week or two, share your tips in the comments!
For this year’s version of dual-class arena, we’ve got some tips on how to draft the best possible deck, as well as handy tools used by the pros which we’ve found really helpful.
This video from Tempo Storm goes into a little more detail if you’ve got the time, but below we’ve listed our tier list for class picks for your convenience. The best classes to pick second have Hero Powers kept in mind, as some are far more useful in Arena than others.
- The best Hero first picks in order are: Paladin, Warrior, Priest, Warlock, Shaman, Hunter, Druid, Rogue, Mage
- The best Hero second picks in order are: Warlock, Paladin, Shaman, Druid, Warrior, Rogue, Mage, Hunter.
Despite Rogue and Mage being strong Hero Power picks, each class’ win rate in Arena is too low to warrant picking them unless you really feel like the class synergies will serve you better than your other options. Remember, there are loads of potential combinations for cards and Hero Powers, so don’t take tier lists too seriously - you might find a combo everyone else has missed!
As the Tempo Storm video suggested, Hunter isn’t a great class in Arena at the moment, but it has the potential to be strong alongside Druid given each class’ Beast synergies. Look out for more stuff like this! Maybe cheap Priest spells will work extremely well with Mage’s Flamewaker, or Shaman can combine with other Jade classes like Rogue or Druid to make a strong Jade Golem-focused deck. It’s all up to you in this game mode.
Dual-class Arena tier list
If you’re looking to push your Arena drafts to the next level, we recommend using draft helper sites. There are two popular ones used by professional players and streamers: The Lightforge and HearthArena. Each one contains a list of cards that have been assigned a certain relative power-rating to help you make the right choices during the drafting process.
We like the HearthArena desktop client if you really want to go full tryhard. It’ll give you an overlay on your screen in real-time as the cards come up so you won’t have to worry about typing them in every single time. Alternatively, you can just keep the site up in another window - there’s no time limit for Arena drafts.
We find these helpers most useful when giving a second opinion on a draft pick, but you can use them to completely do your draft for you if you aren’t feeling it. Either way, check out the HearthArena tier list for a more comprehensive database.
Tier lists of this nature are a little divisive, as many players feel they take much of the skill out of a fundamental aspect of the Arena challenge. A lot of people are using them these days and so you're unavoidably putting yourself at a disadvantage by not using them - especially if you’re a new player.