Wednesday, January 17, 2007

Relmstein rocks the Hellfire Ramparts

My Hellfire Ramparts Walkthrough

The first instance in the Burning Crusade is a short one and only contains three boss fights. Its about as challenging as Dire Maul North with the mobs hitting about as hard as the Ogre Reavers there. The big difference you notice in the dungeon is that the boss fights are a bit more challenging then the ones commonly found in Azerothian (yes its a word) dungeons. Before going in make sure to do the quests from your faction's respective tower/base near Hellfire Citadel. This will eventually lead to the quest "Weaken the Ramparts" which has good blue rewards. For the Alliance do "illfire Omens" then go to the castle in Honor Hold to talk to the lieutenent in there for the quest.

The path to the first boss (Watchkeeper Gargolmar) is paved with small groups of fel orc hunters, warlocks and reavers. Also present are non-elite dogs which don't hit very hard but stack a bleed effect much like the infamous hounds of Molten Core. While clearing through these small groups make sure to kill the dogs first since a fully stacked bleed effect does over 700dmg a tick. At one point while clearing groups, a small pack of 3 dogs will be sent against you so be on the lookout for them. When you get to the Watchkeeper be relieved that he is not as nasty as he looks. Simply make sure to kill his two gurards first as your tank keeps the Watchkeeper busy. His special ability is a charge so keep everyone close to the tank during the fight. The boss also has a reduce healing effect so its in everyone's best interest to burn him down quickly.

After the Watchkeeper you have a fun group to kill at the top of a spiral rampway. Its comprised of 4 warlocks and a warrior and is situated so that its easy for the warlocks to fear you into the next group of mobs. To avoid this use line of sight to pull most of the warlocks onto the spiral rampway. Make use of any crowd control and interrupts your party has to stop the Warlocks from casting Rain of Fire. After that fight clear your way to the open area ahead and turn right. You can see the final boss flying on his mount at this time but you'll want to kill Omor the Unscarred first.

If you have silent shot or another way of pulling casters then the two orc warlocks in front of the Unscarred can be pulled first. The Unscarred himself is probably the toughest boss of the instance but has no range attacks which makes the fight fairly easy if you have non melee dps. His special abilities are: a gravity flux which will send one member of the party high into the sky, a DoT life drain, and felhound summoning. He also hits especially hard and almost always uses the gravity flux on the tank. Get ready for someone to grab aggro when the tank all of sudden finds himself with a good view of Citadel.

After providing Omor with some battlewounds go back to the open area and get ready for the final boss. The two guards in front of the bosses Vazruden and Nazan trigger them to attack when they die, so be ready. One is a fairly simple warrior boss without many hitpoints who will attack from the ground. While doing this his dragon looking mount will throw fireballs that explode and burn on the ground. This is very similar to the the Bat Priestess encounter in Zul'gurub so simply avoid stepping onto the patches of fire.

You'll want to quickly kill the warrior boss since eventually his mount will land and start using a cone of fire attack which hits for around 1500. Its quite common for the mount to land and catch everyone in the cone of fire and wipe the party. To avoid this have someone run down to meet the dragon mount and turn him away from the rest of the party when he lands. Once the mount dies a chest will spawn after a couple of seconds with two blue items in it. Also an Ominous Letter can be found on one of the bosses which provides a nice quest for the next instance, The Blood Furnace.

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

Your first instance already? Wow. Great rundown of the process. Thanks.

Relmstein said...

gitr:
Thanks, so much of the expansion was a lagfest last night that we were pretty much forced to do an instance.

kaziel:
Yeah I thought I had heard about an exploit with that boss. The only problem with the current fix is that people can ninja things out of the chest, just like Domo's chest in Molten Core. Hopefully one day Blizzard will be able to make the need/greed roll system work on items in chests.

Anonymous said...

My party found Omor very easy but we wiped 3 times on Nazan. Nazan was hitting me for about 400-500 normal and 800+ crit.

We will probably try again tonight with a holy priest rather than a shadow priest and see if that helps

Anonymous said...

Actually we have been doing the last two bosses in the reverse order you are presenting, clearing that platform first, all went well.

Anonymous said...

The "three dogs" you have to look out for are skippable. If you nuke down the Beastmaster fast enough (about 10s) they won't come.

Relmstein said...

Kaziel:
Ahh the Omor the Unscarred update is useful. I'll have to make our druids/mages on the lookout for the person with the AoE damage debuff on them.

Anonymous:
Usually my group is moving so fast that we forget to keep an eye open for the beastmaster who summons the dog pack. However, we just wiped for the fist time yesterday because the dogs aggrod the next pull early. So we'll be keeping an eye open and burning him down quickly from now on.