Keleseth himself is an ... interesting fight. He'll occasionally summon a group of skeleton guards, so my "2" key got a workout as I spammed Arcane Explosion. The other thing he does is freeze a random party member in a block of ice where they take damage over time. The ice can be targeted by your allies, much like the Demon Chains in the Illhoof fight back in Karazhan. It doesn't have much health, but it's important to react quickly when he freezes someone.
Anyway, we killed him - and lo and behold, he dropped a pretty damn nice one-handed dagger with a hefty amount of spell power on it (considerably more than the Ring of Blood staff I was currently using), so I rolled for it. Unfortunately, it was an upgrade for our Priest as well, and he rolled too - and won. Blast it all. I'm rather wary about the whole "Spell Power" change that they're implementing in this expansion, and fully intend to touch on it later ... but this is already going to be a long one so let's just move on. In the meantime, I'll just say that it's slightly silly that they call something that big a "dagger," so a Priest can somehow wield it when they don't have the ability to use, say, the much smaller Inventor's Focal Sword.
Bah, humbug.
We went on, and I had fun figuring out that I could Spellsteal the Runes that the Vrykul casters use on themselves, because some of them give fairly nice buffs (100% increased damage or auto-Fireball, for instance). Furthermore, the spell graphic was actually very cool - unlike the current shield bubbles in the game that are really just flat images rotated to match the viewing angle, these are actual, 3-D bubbles. A nice touch.
After a bit of stair-climbing, we met the Keep's second boss - or rather, bosses - Skarvald the Constructor and his Necromancer pal, Dalronn the Controller. This is a very simple and straightforward fight: Skarvald will Charge random targets, and Dalronn will, uh, cast magic of some sort. We killed the Necromancer first, but after he drops his shade sticks around, continuing to spam magic until Skarvald dies too.
And... that's pretty much the fight. Really nothing special at all, unless there's something I was missing. They dropped a pretty nice leather chestpiece, though.
Some more killing and more climbing stairs finally brought us back outside, so we could once again appreciate everything being really, really pretty. It was interesting to note that when fighting a Proto-Drake Rider, you can target either the rider or his mount, though I'm not sure if killing either first makes much of a difference. Still, from what I know, that's a mechanic we'll see more of in the future so I'll let you know how it turns out.
A few pulls later, and we were staring at the final boss of Utgarde Keep, our assassination target - Ingvar the Plunderer.
Ingvar is a significantly more complex fight than the previous two bosses in the instance; he's also a lot more fun. There are two phases to the fight, both of which have two (similar) abilities worth mentioning. During the entire first phase, he will periodically use Staggering Roar, which does a fair amount of damage (about 3k) to everyone within range, interrupting spellcasting for six seconds. It is possible to avoid this by using the pillars around where Ingvar stands, much in the same way as you would in Sethekk Halls against Talon-Lord Ikiss, or in a high-rated Arena match. The other ability is Smash, which does a tremendous amount of physical damage (more than 20k before armor mitigation) to anybody in a cone in front of him. It's possible to outrange the cone, but probably much safer if the tank keeps him faced away from the rest of the group.
Since Smash can hurt even a beefy, well-armored tank, it is possible with proper positioning to duck behind one of the pillars as he casts it - it may also be possible to try and run out of the cone area, but I'm not sure how well that works. Either way, good healing is necessary.
After a good amount of stabbing, burning, and all that other stuff, the Vrykul commander dropped ... and I admit to being momentarily perplexed, because there weren't any shiny happy loot sparkles on his body. After a few seconds, though, there was a purple-black Beam of Evil hitting the corpse from the sky - a Valkryie-ish thing by the name of Annhylde the Caller. She yells something about him serving the Lich King, and that's ... probably not a good thing.
She raises Ingvar and then flies off for some ... unexplained reason (you'd think she'd help him against us, seeing how we, uh, just killed him once already) leaving us to square off with the Zombie-Viking for round 2. Er, Phase 2. ...you know what I mean.
His abilities are similar to that of his living incarnation, though naturally more powerful. His AoE is now a much quicker cast (all but impossible to avoid through LoS), does about a thousand more damage, and increases all shadow damage taken by 5% - so in effect, this becomes a bit of a DPS race, because it keeps stacking every time he does it. I'm not entirely sure what Dark Smash does that's different from the not-as-Dark version, but whatever it was, it killed our tank pretty damn dead.
In the end, it came down to our Rogue and healer, but since the Rogue had a Warglaive he was clearly entirely too overpowered and we won. Hooray!
There is a shortcut back to the start of the instance, though there's a bit of a bug with it at the moment. Ideally, players jump down a shaft and fall into water like in Wailing Caverns ... however, as it currently stands, you fall through the floor right before the exit shaft, and instead of safely landing in water painfully land on a large wooden rafter. If you're at full health, you should be fine, but it's still something I'd hope they fix before it goes live. Unless, of course, the evil Vikings intended for it to be this way as a trap - I guess they're just "Thor losers."
I think that ... may well be the worst pun I've made in these journals yet.
After turning in our quest, we decided to continue on and check out some of the other dungeons in our level range ... but, since this is once again longer than anticipated, I'll leave those tales for another day.
So, Utgarde Keep. It's got some cool things, and it's certainly by no means bad in any sense of the word, but it's definitely not the best dungeon they've done. For the most part, it's just not all that impressive, with the exception of the final boss fight (which I found pretty damn fun). I suppose the first boss, Keleseth, is a fun encounter too, but all-told there are better instances in the game.
Thankfully, however ... there's stuff that more than makes up for the lackluster Catacombs of Utgarde Keep, two of which we'll get to very shortly - Azjol-Nerub and The Nexus are coming up next, so stay tuned!
See you next time!
-TMTCJ(z)
If you're one of the lucky few to get into the Wrath of the Lich King Closed Beta Test - and stay tuned since we might have something on that front soon - come join Jayne(z), the Awesome Brigade, and the <Evil League of Evil> on the Northrend (PvE) server! We'd love to have you!
