Malhoof’s guide to Northrend Instances: Halls of Stone

Yes, I know I skipped a few but I am sure that by now a lot of the WoW community has already surpassed them anyway so I will go back and touch on those places from the heroic PoV.

Halls of Stone: Just when I though that all the dungeons of Northrend were impressively designed, I walked into Halls of Stone and my jaw dropped.  This place looks like a team of people spent months just making the details look good.  And they did all this impressive graphical design and aesthetic without impacting performance.  For a video game as old as WoW is, these sorts of graphics would have required a massive cut scene and cinematic.  Blizz somehow got them to look great and keep the game smooth, though I was prepared for them with my new video card.

Krystallus

He is a simple (even on heroic) boss.  He is a weak miniature version of Gruul.  He does an AoE slow effect which leads to immobilization, and he does a very weak shatter that does damage to you depending on the proximity of other players to you.  And he has a very small knock back, just enough to be annoying.  He is easy loot.  Ran him yesterday on heroic to get 1 of our tanks geared and he asked what he has for abilities on heroic and a guy in the group said “He hands us badges and shards”.

Maiden of Grief

Maiden of Virtue-basically the same fight as maiden in Kara which makes her a joke.  The only difference is the void zones she puts down.  They hurt if you don’t move out of them quickly.  She does her consecrate ability and her repentance.  Just keep your melee out of the void zones and collect her loot.

Tribunal of Ages

This is an interesting event, made very difficult of heroic mode.  Once you talk to Bran Bronsenn he walks up to the console and starts messing with the computer which triggers the “security features”.  These are trash waves that get progressively harder and harder.  While these waves are coming at you the faces up on the walls start shooting “frickin’ laser beams out of their frickin’ eyes”.  So you have adds coming form the stairs and lasers shooting you from behind and doing constant AoE damage that gets worse and worse.  Survive the waves of mobs and open the chest, there be treasure.

Sjonnir the Ironshaper

Big Iron Shaman (and prolly a precursor to the new shaman AoE spell).  This guy isn’t bad, he has a lightning bolt, a static charge that does minimal splash damage, and the cool one is Lightning Ring which does a fair amount of damage in a hell fire type spell.  This would be a really cool AoE for shamans and make those shields they are wearing mean something.  He will do the lighning ring to anyone in range of him so melee needs to stay on their toes.  He also summons adds to him which will quickly aggro to your healer, so they should be dps’d quickly.  They have low HP so prolly no need for a tank to grab them but they will cause some problems if ignored.  He also has a lightning shield but it is a joke, basically it causes small lighting balls to explode on you when they get close but they never seem to do any real damage.  Imp GotW negates most of the damage they do anyway.