Posted by Spooner | 4 Comments

The Hall of Reflection: 5-man Arthas Kill

Yeah not really, your little group of players against the Lich King isn’t going to get you far but it is cool to try and DPS him down. The instance itself is somewhat manic but always fun and action packed. There’s everything you need for an amazing experience: lore, action, loot, dynamic events.

First off, you enter the instance and watch a lot of lore stuff unfold. I had a video of this event but it got corrupted somehow and I could only salvage a few screencaps. Safe to say Jaina (in my case as I am Alliance) will walk up to Frostmourne (which is sitting right there in front of you unguarded) and try to commune with the souls it’s consumed. Uther comes out and there’s a lot of awesome dialogue. Basically the Lich King is all powerful and Arthas is nothing more than a fading presence in the back of his mind. There must always be a Lich King of sorts or else the scourge would run rampant across the world out of control killing everything in their path. As if on cue, Arthas shows up and calls forth his two captains to kill us all and bring us to his throne room, Jaina runs off after him as the door closes.

So now you’re group is left alone in the sword room with a bunch of ghosts from Warcraft 3 and the Lich King’s two most trusted captains:

Falric and Marwyn

You will have to go through 10 waves of spirits before the encounter is over, essentially this is a PvP fight. Priests, Mercenaries (rogue), Footmen (warrior), Riflemen, and Mages will activate and aggro in waves. The rogues will poison and stun you, the priest will dot and heal, the mage will mirror image/vanish/frost nova and so forth. The footmen will fear and “tank” you and the riflemen will use traps and mortal shot. Eventually you will get to wave 5 and fight Falric, repeat the same process for waves 6-10 when you then fight Marwyn.

The first captain has a sword and shield and feels like a warrior. Falric  is mostly about dispelling magic debuffs. Impending Despair will stun its target after 3 seconds if not removed, and Quivering Strike will frequently drop the tank’s dodge by 20%. He’ll also cast an AOE fear that causes damage and his Hopelessness aura will reduce all players’ damage and healing done by 20% (double that in heroic).

Marwyn is pretty much a dual-wielding Death Knight. He uses Obliterate a lot which does a very large chunk of damage (mitigated by armor though) and spawns a Well of Corruption underneath random payers which causes Corrupted Touch (astacking debuff that increases shadow damage you receive). The shadow debuff is a bad thing because he will sometimes hit players with Shared Suffering which causes shadow damage (4000 per 3 sec for 12 sec) and if it gets dispelled then that damage is split up among all players. Elsewise, he will drop the maximum health of players by 25% with Corrupted Flesh which can be a pain in the ass.

Wrath of the Lich King

Once they die, you get to collect loot and move on down the hall to find the Lich King fighting with your faction leader. Jaina/Sylvannas will be at 1% health and then freeze the Lich King in place and yell for you all to pretty much run away. As you escape the Lich king will be chasing after you spawning tons of undead as he moves. He will however, be slowed by this aura that does tons of damage if you get close to him so stay away, also giant walls of ice will block your escape and the only way for them to go down is if you kill all the scourge he sends at you. It’s a pretty exciting and somewhat manic event but when you reach the end and are about to die, your faction’s gunship will come in for a very badass entry and nuke the hell out of the cliff-side causing huge boulders to block the Lich king inside his citadel. Take the ramp and get on deck for your loot and an epic escape from certain death.

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