Friday, November 14, 2008

First Day of Wrath and the Howling Fjord

Well, I got over half way to the next level on my first day of Wrath, and completed my first instance, Utgarrde Keep. Not a terribly difficuly instance especially if you have a good group. I tanked all of the mobs and we easily made our way to each boss. We took on each boss without looking up the strategies and wiped each time. We did down all of the bosses on the second try though.

First Boss: The first boss is Prince something rather. There is a 4 pull right before him that can be pulled seperately. The boss is pretty easy. He shoots shadow bolts for most of the fight, summons some skeleton adds, and will randomly ice block somebody. If he iceblocks the tank, he will start shadowbolting someone else. The skeleton adds come from the doorway, so if you position the boss so that you are between the door and the rest of your party, you can just thunderclap or consecrate to pick up the adds.

Second Boss: The second boss is a Warlock Guy and a Warrior Guy. I think the encounter is kinda like Romulo and Julianne in that you have to kill them fairly close together. I know we burned down the Warlock first, then got on the warrior. They seemed to have a random aggro table as the Warlock would target the healer and need to be shield bashed and taunted. The Warrior will usually randomly charge off and then come back.

Final Boss: The final boss starts out pretty much as a tank and spank and goes down pretty fast. He is the rezzed as an undead and starts to do massive damage (mostly shadow). I believe he also throws around some axes like on Prince Malchezarr. There is another element that apparently silences someone for 8 seconds. Unfortunately that was our healer lol. Overall, it was a pretty cool instance with music that sounded like it came straight out of Braveheart.

Besides that, I did a few random quests, learned all my new levels of professions, and fished a little bit with Phaelia from http://www.resto4life.com/. All of my new cooking recipes are already green again...DOH. I also attempted pugging another Utgarrde Keep as well as the other starting dungeon in the Borean Tundra, the Nexus. The pug of Utgarrde was terrible as I was second in DPS and our healer was level 60 with less that 5k health. After 2 wipes on the first boss I left group. All of the DPS in the group did less than 500 dps. They must have been in Outlands Greens or something because they were terribad.

The Nexus pug went pretty decently, but once again we had some severly undergeared players. The healer was a fresh 70 and most of the DPS was under 400 DPS with the exception of a hunter who was doing around 800-900. I think I am going to have to stick to guild runs while leveling up.

3 comments:

Unknown said...

I did Utgarde last night with 3 guildies and a random hunter. We just blazed thru the area w/o breaking a sweat the pug hunter got 2 upgrades in that run fun times. I was the tank but fury specced ... where the hell are these tanks man?!

I can see myself speccing tank later on if looking for a tank becomes an issue.

I doubt I'll be back in that area sometime soon(i finished all quest in that run) I prefer questing, maybe when I hit 80 for the heroic mode.

Next up is Nexus, prolly tonight I'm almost done with howling. I don't wanna hit that instance though until I got all the quest ... I only want to run that place once then off to the next zone.

So you went back and forth between the two zones? Was Borean pretty crowded?

Darraxus said...

I think all of the tanks went fury/ret/arms/boomkin for leveling which leads to a bit of shortage. Funny thing is that prot has less downtime than any of the other specs.

I got a summon to the Nexus, so I didnt really get to explore the rest of the zone. Looking at the two zones, I actually prefer the green hills of the Howling Fjorde.

Unknown said...

Yeah my GM who is lvl 75 now is leveling as prot. I was really thinking about it I got decent gear for it(5/8 t6) but went the fury route to let my glaive see some action before I fully retire it ... /sad

Do you have the tanking trinket that heals you per block? I've seen tanks aoe 20+ lvl 70 mobs and end up with full health with that trinket =) no joke.

I haven't really stopped and eat some food as Fury this early levels. Thank god they buffed Bloodthirst. If you time it right you will get 7.5% of your hp per bloodthirst. I don't get the full benefits cause they tend to die fast although around 73+ I can see myself using it twice or more and get the full 15% hp heal.

Yeah Howling has that Alaskan Wilderness feeling. Nicely done.