Category: icecrown citadel

Kurn’s Guide on How to Successfully Clear Heroic Halls of Reflection Without Being Lame and Cheap

If you’ve been doing the new dungeons that came out with 3.3, you’ve been in a fail Heroic Halls of Reflection group. That’s just how it goes. Everyone seems to be having an awful time of it in a pug.

The nature of the first two boss encounters is very different from any we’ve seen in dungeons previously. You have a circular room and get adds spawning in 360 degrees around you. I think you start out with 3 and end up with 5 in the later waves, but I’m usually too busy tanking or healing to pay attention to counting mobs per wave.

Because of the way adds spawn, and the types of adds that spawn, many, many people have decided that “line of sighting” the adds is the way to go. The theory is that if you’re hiding in one of Marwyn or Falric’s alcoves, the mobs will have no choice but to charge the alcoves and you can AOE/etc the mobs down, making things a lot easier.

Nonsense. For any player who actually knows how to play their class, and not rely on 2-3 buttons to AOE crap down, these are not terribly difficult encounters to do without a LOS strategy. I personally hope that the LOS strat gets nerfed out the wazoo, because it encourages extremely lazy and poor play, in my opinion.

Moving on, your mileage may vary, of course, but this is how I do it as a tank.

Since I’m tanking on a paladin, I stand near the center of the room. My preferred kill order is: GHOSTLY PRIEST, PHANTOM MAGE, then whatever’s left, with a loose priority of SHADOWY MERCENARY, TORTURED RIFLEMAN, SPECTRAL FOOTMAN.

I inform my group of this order and tell them to run to the consecrate I’ll be dropping if they have aggro.

If there’s a Death Knight in the group, I ask them to Death Grip the Phantom Mage to the group. Alternatively, I can pull them to me if my Avenger’s Shield is up. If there’s no mage, DK’s should DG the Riflemen. Alternatively, a priest can Shackle a ranged, a ret pally can Repentence, any pally can Turn Evil (although I’m usually too busy to spare 1.5 seconds of cast time, which opens me up to being crit), hunters can freeze trap/use freezing arrow.

What’s that? Yes, I do, in fact, encourage the use of crowd-control. It’s logical. There is a crowd of mobs. We need to control them. USE YOUR CROWD-CONTROL ABILITIES.

Of course, at the beginning of each pull, everyone can (and does) grab aggro very easily. So I drop a Consecrate, use Hand of Reckoning and Avenger’s Shield if needed and then, this is sort of the key, when they’re all piled on my Consecrate, I use Holy Wrath. BAM. Stunned, and their hatred of me is probably pretty secure.

I almost always save my Righteous Defense for the healer. And if my healer is a priest, I will do what I can to cleanse various poisons off the healer, myself and the group, basically in that order.

So, I kill the priest first. Why? When there are other, very dangerous mobs still up?

Simple. The priest heals and since I have very few interrupts with long cooldowns on them, and since I can’t rely on puggers to always interrupt, we get rid of the priest first.

The mage goes second (unless it’s CCed) because of the fact that its mirror images (Phantom Hallucinations) will explode for 10k each and that’s on top of the Flamestrike, which is seriously annoying. They do a ton of damage, basically. Everything else is easily taken down, but the mages can put out a ton of damage in a short period of time that affects the entire group.

I like to get rid of the Shadowy Mercenaries next, if possible, for three reasons: a) Kidney shot means I have no avoidance at all for 3 seconds — or the healer is out of commission for 3 seconds, b) Shadowstep is evil, c) Deadly Poison and Envenomed Dagger Throw stack poisons that can be potentially dangerous without a Cleansing Totem or any of the three healing classes who can cleanse poisons. If you’re a shammy, Cleansing Totem on these waves beats Healing Stream and Mana Spring, hands down.

The Spectral Footmen can sort of chill out. They’ll shield bash, which is no big deal if I have aggro on them. That’s why I like to go after the Tortured Riflemen next.

Not only are these guys ranged, which is a pain, but they’ll CC and impede our movement with Frost Traps. Hand of Freedom to the rescue! But the big thing to watch out for here is Cursed Arrow. It increases the amount of magical damage the person with the curse takes by 50%. If you can decurse, DO SO. I’m talking mages, druids and resto shammies. That debuff has *got* to go. Apart from that, if you have someone who can dispell the freezing traps, these guys drop low on the priority list.

And then you deal with the Spectral Footmen.

Falric and Marwyn aren’t difficult at all after the trash, but after having witnessed this twice in two days, I need to remind people not to stand in the Wells of Corruption that Marwyn casts. They’re little purple circles on the ground. Don’t stand in them. What do they do? They apply a stacking debuff (that’s a curse, fyi, mages, druids and resto shammies!) that increases your shadow damage taken by 30%, 60%, 90%, etc. This wouldn’t be too bad, ordinarily… except for “Shared Suffering” – “Inflicts 6,000 Shadow damage every 3 seconds for 12 seconds. If dispelled, splits the remaining damage equally between all players. Magic effect.” So don’t stand in the wells.

Okay, so once you’ve dispatched Falric and Marwyn, you have a wee bit of trash and then the Lich King toys with you for a while.

There are four barriers and each barrier drops as soon as all the undead mobs from that wave die.

Ghouls are easy, just keep them off your healer.

I then like to take down the WITCH DOCTORS, but I need to keep aggro on the abominations because they have a Cleave. So why the Witch Doctors? Curse of Doom, Shadow Bolt and Shadow Bolt Volley. They’re casters, so if you can silence them at all to keep them moving, that’s a huge bonus. The Witch Doctors cause the most damage, the Abominations are just there to distract you and the Ghouls are just there to cause havoc. Given that the Aboms are very mobile, and can be brought way back to the wall to fight, the Witch Doctors simply have to be the priority so that if your DPS is a little slow, you do not risk having to stand right next to the Lich King to finish up a Witch Doctor before the wall breaks.

The Lich King’s aura ticks for an obscene amount, so you need to be aware of his position and yours and get the hell out of Dodge.

The only major issue on this is the last group. You’ll basically have a double spawn before the last wall. You will be seemingly overrun here. This is where cooldowns come in handy. When the SECOND group spawns:

– Heroism
– Tank cooldowns
– DPS cooldowns

Don’t forget to drop aggro if you can — fade, feign, invis, etc, just to make sure your tank can adequately pick everything up. There’s little cleansing here, just some Curses of Doom, but again, CC can help out — as long as your CC target is closer to the wall than the Lich King. Holy Wrath is godly here, for any kind of paladin, so be sure to use it on cooldown.

Then run like hell and you’re done.

Note that if Jaina or Sylvanas die, that’s it, it’s a wipe. Until they die, you still have a chance, even if only one person survives to run to the airship.

For those classes with cleansing abilities who don’t typically cleanse, (prot and ret pallies, shadow priests, DPS shammies, mages, moonkin and the like) I HIGHLY recommend getting Decursive to help you quickly cleanse/dispell stuff off people to help out your healers, for all instances, not just this one.

I hope this helps out people who might have previously struggled with this instance. In short, just use your class abilities as best you can. CC, don’t steal aggro, focus stuff down and you’ll be collecting your loot ASAP. :)