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Chimaera Guide: Warcraft Rumble Season 2’s New Mini
Warcraft Rumble’s Chimaera is the new mini unit that arrived along with the new Season 2 update. It is an expensive flyer which costs 5 gold and has a unique twin-head mechanic which rains down both poison, electric, (and even frost!) attacks on your enemies.
Though it is a new and shiny mini, Chimaera relatively mini and will struggle to perform in both PVE and PVP. As of now, we recommend that you do not spend too much resources on it unless Blizzard decides to buff this mini.
Overview
Rating
- PvE: C Tier
- PVP: C Tier
Traits
- Beast faction
- Flying
- Poisonous
- AoE
- Elemental
Ability
Chimaera’s poison attack hits the enemy with the highest HP and is meant to function as a tank killer, whilst its Lightning attack hits the enemy with the lowest HP and chains to nearby enemies, which acts as a squad killer.
One hidden interaction with this trait is that he can constantly switch targets during battle as his heads will independently look for new targets each attack.
For example, if Chimaera is already attacking a Quilboar to the right of Chimaera and both heads are already locked onto the Quilboar, if enemy Harpies come in from his left, the lightning head will detect Harpies as the lowest enemy HP and switch to hitting them, even though the Quilboar is still alive.
This makes it harder to sneak squad units up on Chimaera as he will not be fully distracted by a tank.
General Impressions and Comparisons
Chimaera has very low health of 450 for a mini costing 5 gold. While Huntress boasts the lowest health of 5 cost minis having 400 health, Huntress has resistant, which makes her much harder to kill than Chimaera, as many of the popular unbound sniping minis like Whelps and S.A.F.E. Pilot deal elemental damage.
At just 7 range, Chimaera has the third shortest range in the game. In comparison, Gryphon Rider has 5 range, but he is always running with the +3 range talent. This means that in any 1v1 duel against any ranged mini, he is likely to be hit first by that mini. That coupled with the fact that his main damaging attack is a poison attack, means that most of its damage is dealt over time, instead of instantly.
Ranged minis who are moderately tanky and don’t die in a single hit can instead get off 2 to 3 hits on the Chimaera before dying. In some matchups, Chimaera performs more poorly as compared to the 4 gold Drake.
Chimaera also has an unfortunate amount of movement speed of Med-Fast.
Except for Huntress, most of the higher-cost tanks and ranged minis, such as Rend, Drake, Tirion, Ogre Magi, Drakkisath, and Necromancer, all tend to move at medium speed or less. This is because being a high-cost unit, you would want to incorporate them into a high-value slow push that is protected by your tank.
However, Chimaera’s slightly faster movement speed causes it to always outspeed your ball of minis, and you will often find that Chimaera ends up being at the front of your units instead of behind your tanks, forcing you to scramble to summon unbound minions to protect Chimaera even from simple threats like a tower or a Darkspear Troll.
Contrast this to running a slower minion like Drake or Ogre Magi, who will always be slower than Rend or Tirion and allows them to stay safely in the backline from most threats.
Should you invest in Chimaera?
Given that Chimaera is a mini you can get for free by just being in an active guild as well as in PvP rewards, and given the rather average performance and similarity to Drake, you may choose to skip purchasing the bundles that gives stars of him, or investing too much XP in it.
After all, Drake performs a similar role and cost 1 gold less. Drake is also key to an underleveled Onyxia clear, which would be preferred over Chimaera due to his slower movement speed and the availability of Mother Drake talent which can activate a bug in the Onyxia fight.
Talents
Frost Shock (Best PvE Choice)
Frost Shock is Chimaera’s best PvE ability as frost is generally one of the strongest debuffs available for both offence and defence, by slowing both the enemies’ movement and attack speed.
This not only lowers the amount of damage your minis and towers take, but it also causes minis to take much longer to close the range to their targets. When facing another ranged enemy, the frost debuff slows down their attacks allowing you to take less damage, potentially allowing Chimaera to win the trade.
Frost Shock being tied to its Lightning Ball attack means that the Frost is easily spread through chaining to multiple targets, ensuring that most enemies will be debuffed. As the AI in PvE generally does not know how to snipe Chimaera efficiently, you can get away without choosing the additional Health talent and focus more on its frost debuffing or damaging capabilities.
Leviathan (Best PvP Choice)
Leviathan is Chimaera’s best PvP talent where human players can recognise the threat that a 5 gold unit poses and will generally try to snipe it as soon as it is summoned.
Do note that the Leviathan stacks are additive and caps at 3 stacks like Hogger, so Chimaera would gain 45 Health per deployment and cap the health increase at 30% hp increase. A dead mini does no damage, so it always helps when Chimaera’s added health allows it to narrowly survive an enemy attack or spell.
Unfortunately, even at the max of 3 Leviathan stacks, Chimaera still does not have enough health to survive Warcraft Rumble’s most OP PvP mini being S.A.F.E. Pilot with the Gnomish Cloaking Device talent, which will kill a 5 gold Chimaera for only 3 gold, without S.A.F.E. Pilottaking a single damage.
Corrosive Breath (Worst/Most Situational Talent)
Corrosive Breath is a decent talent for PvE. However, it is more niche and suited for specific maps where there are many high-health minions where the double poison stack would have enough time to matter, such as maps with multiple Molten Giants or Stonehoof Taurens summons.
Otherwise, when up against moderate health ranged minis like Pyromancer, double poison would see almost no effect as the mini would die within 2 hits anyway, and frost would be a better way to reduce damage taken from the enemy.
The Best Chimaera PvE Deck
Below is our opinion on the best PvE deck to run Chimaera in. Chimaera can certainly be used in flying or elemental slot of any leader, but Chimaera being an expensive 5-cost mini directly competes with Huntress and Drake which performs similar roles to it.
- Decklist
- Pyromancer
- Whelp Eggs
- Chimaera
- Quilboar
- Earth Elemental
- Harpies
Being the most expensive flying mini, it is no surprise that the deck that best utilises Chimaera is Rend, which reduces the cost of Chimaera to 4. Chimaera takes the usual spot of Drake, and this replacement brings a few advantages.
Chimaera has more AoE coverage and supporting abilities as compared to Drake, which often times performs the same role and AoE coverage as Rend. Its constantly target-refreshing lightning attack allows it to not be distracted by tanks and always clears squad minions easily.
Beefy minis, towers and bosses which Rend and Drake would normally get stuck on and ignore squishier squad minis that may flank them from another direction, would not pose a problem for Chimaera. Chimaera is also better at taking down the stage’s boss, with both Frost Shock or Corrosive Breath providing more support or damage than Drake would.
However, do note that Chimaera moves faster than Rend, so unlike Drake, Rend will not always be in front of Chimaera to sacrifice himself and dismount into his armored tanking mode. You may have to play either of the unbound tanks or Whelp Eggs in front of Chimaera to avoid him being targeted by towers or ranged enemies.
Harpies and Whelp Eggs provide good value for 2 cost, with Harpies being the highest DPS mini with their poison shredding claws, and Whelps provide an unbound assassin to snipe off key enemy mini anywhere on the map.
Blackrock Pyromancer rounds up the deck by providing some ground support to take chests and provide additional ranged damage, though she can be replaced with Dark Iron Drawf where the maps have valuable gold mines you want to easy access to.
The Best Chimaera PvP Deck
Chimaera is pretty bad in PVP generally due to the existence of the most popular PvP mini, S.A.F.E. Pilot Pilot, which is an auto-include in every PvP deck and who can easily kill Chimaera on her own with a crash into it plus an ambush shot to its face.
This Tirion Chimaera deck however aims to deny the interaction with the opponent’s S.A.F.E. Pilot. Chimaera will be your core mini who does most of the damage, who you will keep alive at all costs and support all the way to siege your enemy base.
Do note that this specific deck is designed around the current PvP season rotation where Dragon Towers are in effect, as Chimaera being a ranged mini takes very little damage from the Dragon Towers, which would not be the case vs weeks with normal arrow towers or Rocket Towers. In those weeks without Dragon Towers, you can consider changing Quilboar for Earth Elemental which can tank the physical damage from the towers much better.
Chimaera works as a very good hypercarry due to his unique dual twin heads attacks allows him to clear low hp minis easily and not be distracted by enemy minis like Quilboar which are usually summoned to distract high-cost units. The current PvP meta is to make valuable and positive trades in gold against your opponent with cheap yet efficient units like Grpyhon, S.A.F.E. Pilot, Whelps, Dark Iron Dwarf, and Quilboar. Chimaera is good against all these decks which run very cheap and squishy minis as he is not easily distracted by unbound units unlike his competitors like Huntress. The fact that he is flying further reduces the amount of minis that can actually hit it.
With this composition, you are looking to use Tirion to keep Chimaera healed up so that S.A.F.E. Pilot is unable to clear your Chimaera easily. For example, if S.A.F.E. Pilot crashes into Chimaera and Tirion is near him, he will heal Chimaera up enough so that he does not subsequently die to the ambush shot.
Alternatively, you can drop your Holy Nova right after she lands to heal up your Chimaera to grant her resist, countering S.A.F.E. Pilot fully. Although this is an expensive combo, currently players usually do not have enough other answers for Chimaera as they are often running the mentioned cheap minis or ground minis, who are all very weak against Chimaera, and will have to waste a lot of resources on inefficient trades to try and bring the Tirion Chimaera combo down.
In this season’s map Arathi Basin, Blizzard is also a very popular spell due to the many chokepoints created by the bridges. Holy Nova being able to grant resist can allow your units to survive and heal back up from Nova’s heal coupled with Tirion.
Stonehoof Tauren is included to deal with ranged minions that pose a large threat to your Chimaera such as Huntress, Pyromancer or Troll.
Alternative PvP Chimaera Deck
Another PvP deck that makes use of Chimaera well is a Rend deck.
Like the PvE deck, Drake is replaced with Chimaera as they both fulfil a similar role. However, this deck while being the most common use of Chimaera, does not do anything special to justify its inclusion over Drake other than Chimaera having a higher health pool, so although this deck is still strong and will net you wins, you would probably see equal, if not better performance by including Drake instead of Chimaera.
