Dec 10, 2009

Posted by Spooner | 5 Comments

The Hall of Reflection: 5-man Arthas Kill

The Hall of Reflection: 5-man Arthas Kill

halls of reflection 1Yeah 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

halls of reflection 2You 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).

halls of reflection 3Marwyn 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

halls of reflection 4Once 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.

  1. IMO the last fight is a step in the right direction for heroics. The tanks need to do their job well, the healers need to do thier job well, and wtf is this? The DPS have to have a certain standard as well? OMG the fails may actually realise they suck and get better as opposed to being carried through every god damn instance.

    I mean honestly, has there been a single WotLK heroic fight that actually requires dps to pay attention and be at a certain standard. I am fairly sure that EVERY boss could be bought down in its own time, only putting more stress on the healer. Like i said, a step in the right direction :)

  2. I’ve only been in HoR once on heroic and it was a wipe fest due to people not helping the tank out manageing his agro and getting everything gathered up. Shouldn’t be to tuff to stand in a certain spot between each wave…… But overall I really liked the instance plan on going back with some friends tommorow to finish it.

  3. HoR really does require players to have some kind of reaction time, that’s why I love it. You can REALLY tell who’s distracted or who’s simply just too slow for more clutch encounters.

  4. I have been there about 5 times already. I m a druid tank. Dodging most of the melee crap, however, dps I have been there does not have any clue how to Crowd control. These are people with raid gear. I haven not been raiding for a long time, but I know what it feels like a good ol’ 5-man dungeon style play (From the glorious days of level 60′s). This dungeon is very hard these days due to the DPS trying to impress itself with stupid rotation and high output dps. I mean, come on , which hunter does not understand the basic of laying a trap to control a character; answer: a hunter that hs macroed and uses 3 buttons in rotation. .. A priest who keeps shackling the footman isntead of the hunter or the mage that blasts the team up… BLIZZ, what have you done to this game???!!

  5. Acer… its not blizz who have done anything to wow, its the players that need to get better, and btw, whats so glorious about “the days of level 60′s”? there were no good instances that lvl and barely many lvl 60 instances for only lvl 60!

Leave a Reply