Beta 5 Man Instances: Utgarde Keep (Major Spoilers

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

Utgarde Keep (70-72): When you first enter Utgarde Keep, you will get to see the new fire effects that blizzard uses in large scale for the first time unless you've done Brutallus. It's pretty nice looking.

The best thing about this instance is the large amount of non-elites. There are tons of opportunities to pull whole rooms of mobs and just go crazy with the new protection warrior AoE abilities. It was the first instance I did in beta, and it is a great initiation to our new abilities.


The first boss is rather uneventful. The best part of the fight was that when I did it, he would summon little adds that didn't have a model. So we spent most of the fight battling very tiny white and blue checkered boxes that show up for NPCs with no model.


The second bosses is actually two mobs. You fight them both at once, and one is a caster. The only interesting part is that the first one to die is ressed as a ghost that can't be hurt. So you must kill the second NPCs while the ghost of the first one is still attacking you. When we killed them, they didn't drop any loot, so hopefully that's fixed by now.


The final boss is just a tank and spank with some really loud, funny sounding roars. When you kill him, one of the battle maidens from the death knight starting area comes down and resses him, and you have to kill him again. Pretty boring fight.


The instance is rather boring, but it serves it's purpose as an entry level 5 man very well. I'll always hold it dearly in my heart as the first place I got to mess around with Shockwave in.


Utgarde Pinnacle (80): During our run through this instance I got some pretty serious Shattered Halls deja vu. It was really challenging. Out of all the 5 mans, this one was the hardest for our little group by far.

The first boss has an excellent little event before you engage her where a very big Lich King/Arthas talks with her for a bit. My memory is a little fuzzy on what exactly happened during their talk but I believe he turned her into one of the awesome looking battle maiden NPCs, and you fight her like that.

When you actually fight her she's pretty much a pushover. Tank and spank with her making a couple torches shoot fireballs at you. Every once in a while she puts someone on her altar and a big sword slowly descends toward the person. You kill three orbs to release the person. I imagine that if the sword reaches the person they die, but never saw it happen. The instance starts off deceptively easy.


The second boss is similar to the last boss in Arcatraz. You start an event in a room with six really big animals trapped in stasis, and it releases two of them at random, one by one, followed by a third who is always the same. It was very easy and nothing notable stands out in my memory from the encounter.


The third boss is where things start to get fun. You walk into a long empty hallway and he is standing at the beginning next to his proto drake. When you approach him, he mounts the drake and takes off. A bunch of mobs fill the hallway in rows just like in Shattered Halls, and mobs will constantly spawn at the back and charge you.

So you fight your way up the gauntlet constantly killing the spawns and the rows of immobile mobs. It's rather annoying because of the large amount of casters, which will constantly run out of melee range. During all this, the boss will fly over your head and his drake deep breaths on you. The breath does a bunch of initial damage in sequential ticks similar to Ony's deep breath, and leaves a trail of ice on the ground for about 10 seconds that will hurt anyone that walks on it.

The drake's positioning varies each deep breath so you have to adjust where you tank everything on the fly. There are harpooner mobs which will throw harpoons at you, and they stick in the ground and are lootable like the spines from Naj'entus.

When you get to the end of the gauntlet, you still have to keep picking up newly spawned mobs while using the harpoons you collected in a row of harpoon guns when the boss on his drake is in range of them. After a few volleys, the drake will be killed and the boss lands on you.

The boss will do a whirlwind just like the Arms talent where he moves following someone while whirlwinding. It does a lot of damage to low armor people - it killed our rogue very quickly when the boss first landed on us. I was able to stay in for the entire whirlwind if he stayed on me with it no problem.

What I did was bring him to the middle of the long hall so that when he whirlwinds my healer could run to the end of the hall, and then the boss will come back to me when it's over. We didn't have a battle res so this was another really long fight that I basically solo DPSed.

The hardest part was the gauntlet.


I haven't actually done the final boss yet because we were right in front of him last night when the server went down. If he turns out to be interesting I'll comment on him later.

The trash pulls leading up to the final boss were very interesting. Lots of casters, lots of patrols. We're all impatient and just pull several groups + pats at once and it was really very difficult in those circumstances, but incredibly fun.

There's lots of trash you can skip in this instance, and I recommend it since mobs like the abominations have an annoyingly high amount of health.


Overall, both of these instances are very fun. The second one is challenging and I definitely see it turning into the Shattered Halls of the expansion.