Beta 5 Man Instances: Ulduar (Major Spoilers)

Ulduar is extremely impressive. The look and feel of the instances is amazing. The entire zone (Storm Peaks) is the most impressive zone I've seen in this game, by far. I can't wait to see what the raid zone that is not yet implemented in Ulduar will hold for us.

As usual, we did this with just a resto druid, a rogue, and myself - a protection warrior.

Halls of Stone (77-79): Halls of stone is non-linear. You can go to any boss you wish first.

We will start with the Maiden of Grief. She constantly makes really large void zones on the ground below her, so you have to kite her out of them. She also uses a disorient effect on everyone in the party at once. The logical thing to do is have everyone always stand right next to a void zone, and the disorient will walk you into it and the tick of damage will break the effect. However, this boss can't be tuned right, because we didn't bother doing that and just stayed out of void zones the entire time.

The fact that we could easily kill her with just a rogue and myself (while tanking!) dpsing her, and not even using the void zones to break disorient, tells me this boss is way too easy.


The next boss we did is Krystallus. You reach him by going through a series of caverns inside a large cave. The area is very fun for prot warriors because there are tons of non-elite adds that you can round up and aoe down all at once.

The actual boss is like a mini-Gruul. He will do a ground slam and shatter combo just like Gruul. Also quite an easy boss.


The final boss... well, I never saw the final boss. You have to do an NPC escort and then protect the NPC for a long time against waves of enemies and lasers shooting you from the wall before you get into the bosses room. The problem is that it was overtuned and with only three people and no true AoE, we had no chance.

The NPC does some sort of aggro pulse I think, since he never attacked but mobs would constantly come off me to go after him. He doesn't have much health, so died about three minutes into the encounter. He also doesn't respawn when he dies, which I really hope is a bug, since you can't get past the door to the last boss without doing the event.

A developer has posted that they will retune this to be easier because apparently many full groups were having big trouble with this event as well.


Halls of Lightning (80): Another excellent looking instance. This place is pretty interesting the whole way through.

The first boss patrols around a large area with trash throughout it. When he walks by trash, he energizes them with a damage buff. You have to clear a section of the trash when he patrols away then fight him there.

The boss himself is a warrior. He uses several warrior abilities and even changes stances. His ability list on WoWhead contains 16 entries, so there's a lot of variety in his arsenal.

He can spell reflect, has his own Stone Form to remove bleeds and poisons, intercepts your healer, whirlwinds, cleaves... and some other things. He gets damage and attack speed bonuses at some points in the fight, and the damage actually got really intense towards the end. This may be because our rogue disconnected so as usual I had to solo-dps this while tanking. A pretty fun fight for a warrior.


After that boss, you have a suppression-room type area. There are a bunch of non-elites in a big room, and a couple elites by the stairs leading out of the room. The mobs will respawn after a short while (really a long time compared to, say, the RoS hallway). I just ran around and collected every single mob then aoed them down on the stairs.

The second boss has a giant anvil. He uses the anvil to spawn little golems. They seemed to drop aggro for me, constantly getting on my healer. As you damage them they slow down, and when they are almost dead they freeze. After freezing, the boss will shatter them which causes AoE damage. This fight is pretty fun because fighting a giant using a forge and anvil is always entertaining.


The third boss wasn't very difficult except, as usual, our rogue was useless. His computer rebooted when we engaged the boss. The boss applies a debuff to people that damages them and people around them. He got the debuff while offline, making me and my healer have to run, and the rogue died.

After he booted up and reconnected, we were still fighting the boss. So he logs in and gets a battle res. I say on vent, 'the healer has the AoE debuff, don't take the res or it'll kill you'. So, logically, he takes the res and instantly dies. Basically, this boss is so easy we also killed it with just the tank DPSing.


The final boss is in a beautiful room. He reminded me of Murmur, doing a sonic boom type spell. We all actually stacked on him and ate them all and it was still an easy fight. Pretty lacking in normal mode.


Overall, Ulduar instances are awesome. Hopefully Blizzard plans to tune the boss fights some more. I can't wait to see the raid.