Hearthstone: Loatheb Heroic Guide for Priests

After Noth the Plaguebringer and Heigan the Unclean, here I come before you with a guide to beat the last boss, Loatheb, on heroic difficulty in Plague Quarter. This guide is for Priests but any class can easily handle Loatheb with the right minions, I mainly chose Priest to heal myself in between turns in order to mitigate Loatheb's hero power; however, any class is really viable for this encounter.

So let's start our guide with a brief introduction to what Loatheb can do. Loatheb has 75 health on normal mode and his hero power is to deal 3 damage to enemy hero (us) for 2 mana. However his health increases to 99 and the mana cost of his hero power is reduced to 0 on Heroic mode so this fight is a race as you will be receiving 3 guaranteed damage from his hero power every single turn not to mention additional damage from his minions.

                           

You may be asking yourself "99 health? WTF how is that even doable?". Well, Loatheb has two spells that will summon spores on his side of the board with 0 attack and 1 health. When you kill off a spore all of your minions will receive +8 attack buff. So basically you rush him down before he kills you. But of course there are things to look out for but this boss is actually the easiest one among the 3 bosses in Plague Quarter so with the right deck you can tackle this one pretty easily. By the way if you are thinking of trying Alexstrasza, don't even bother because she will get destroyed as Kel'thuzad doesn't appreciate "cheap tricks". I am very glad Alexstrasza doesn't work to be honest. Loatheb is one of the most unique bosses with a very original mechanic so why would you just Alexstrazsa and yolo 2 Fireball and 1 Frostbolt? Come on people.... 

Loatheb has two spells to summon Spores and you have to find a way to play around at least one of them in order to be successful and it's called Sporeburst. In order to mitigate Sporeburst you will want to have low cost minions with more than 1 health. But you can never know what Loatheb will do, he can use this spell twice in a row to wipe up your board or instead just use Faceless Manipulator on a Spore which is just plain hilarious. On the other hand Deathbloom is not a spell you should be particularly afraid of. You will only lose 1 minion to Deathbloom anyway so if you have a lot of minions on the board Deathbloom will actually help you to buff up your other minions.

                 

Loatheb on Heroic mode starts the fight with a Spore and 3/6 Fan Creeper. There are multiple ways to deal with this Fan Creeper but the idea is to take him down for sure on turn 2. So if you get a really bad starting hand and can't deal with the Creeper by turn 3 or 4 you might as well concede now because you will have received too much damage on your hero that you won't have enough time to race. 

Here is the Priest deck I used for this fight and the basic strategy you have to follow in order to deal with the Creeper and ultimately kill off Loatheb.

The idea is to get as many cheap minions as possible to flood the board so when you kill a spore you will have other minions to get the buff and attack Loatheb. You will want to try and get cheap minions with at least 2 health but even if it's a 1 health minion just take it. Tokens are great for this fight so even when Loatheb kills a minion the summoned tokens can mean life or death in extreme situations.

Mulligan: In order to tackle the starting Fan Creeper, as a priest you have multiple options. On mulligan you will want to get Elven Archer or any 1 mana minion (preferably Stonetusk Boar) with Holy Smite or Shadow Word Pain. But Shadow Word Pain is too slow as you will want to have minions on the board instead. 

Strategy: The best way to start the game is with an Elven Archer to kill off the spore on turn 1. Immediately on turn 1 you will have 9/1 Elven Archer on the board so you can use this minion to kill off the Fan Creeper on your second turn. Another tactic is to use Stonetusk Boar on turn 2 and Holy Smite on the spore to buff up your Boar and trade with Creeper. You might want to avoid putting a 1 mana minion on turn 1 if you can't handle the spore on the very same turn because in most cases Loatheb will trade one of his minions with your 1 mana drop on his turn. Loatheb mostly plays Deathcharger on his first turn so your 1 mana drop will most likely die to either Deathcharger or Creeper if you fail to buff it up. But this is Loatheb, he does some crazy things, so there is still a chance that he won't trade.

After tackling the Creeper simply use up all your mana to put down minions and make sure at least some of them have more than 1 health so you will have some minions who will survive Sporeburst. As a Priest your Lightwell and  Cleric are the best possible options, they are pretty cheap and have a lot of health. But of course there are a lot of other good natural cards too. For example if you get good RNG with your Knife Juggler you might not even need to use a minion to attack a Spore and lose extra 8-10 damage in the process but in my case I never drew my Knife Juggler (I only have 1, if you have 2 running 2 of them might not be a bad idea at all) so it is not a necessity. Haunted Creepers are excellent here in case Loatheb decides to use double Sporeburst. You will still have 2 1x1 minions on board. I also decided to run Weblord because it has a very high health, besides in this deck there are only like 1-2 minions with Battlecry so it won't affect you that much anyway.

When you have good board control and have your minions buffed up Loatheb will definitely use Poison Seeds at some point to completely wipe up the board and summon 2/2 Treants for every minion that died. When I killed Loatheb on Heroic mode I actually got my kill with these Treants. I had about 7 minions on board buffed up to like 17/2 with the Spores so when he used Poison Seeds I still had 7 2/2 Treants. After he casted his Sporeburst, I used two treants to kill two Spores to buff my minions up and get my lethal with the rest 5 treants. In case of Poison Seeds, Loatheb "might" also use double Sporeburst to completely kill all your treants. At that point there is nothing else to do but drop any minion you have again.

Loatheb is easy, you just need the perfect starting hand. After a good starting hand you just hope that Loatheb won't do his aoe 2-3 times in a row in one turn. That's the only thing you hope for, if he doesn't do that you will kill him in no time. But even if he does; you will still have enough cheap minions to keep putting on the board. It's actually the most entertaining encounter among the 6 Naxxramas bosses that have been released so far. Have fun and good luck!