Lore:
We cleared out the Deadmines, beat Edwin VanCleef and saved the municipality of Westfall from…a giant ship. That would…kill all the Murlocs? I’m not really sure. We did get rid of the leaders of the Defias bandits, which was cool.
Except that it wasn’t really. We were kind of big jerks who killed a guy who was representing a union of people who got stiffed on a bill for rebuilding Stormwind. Glorified slave labor, in other words. And it turns out that VanCleef had a family. And they weren’t real happy about us killing him. And if there’s one thing we do in WoW, it’s clean up our messes.
Degree of Difficulty: Hard
The trash is not particularly numerous or difficult. As Blizzard’s first attempt to put a heroic version of an old school instance and update its storyline, it’s pretty clear trash wasn’t high on their priority list. Don’t go nuts, take your time, but none of the trash should give you trouble.
Glubtok, an Ogre mage starts off the instance, and is fairly uncomplicated. He does a lot of melee to start, and blinks around the room. During phase two, however, he teleports everyone to the center, and starts shooting spells at random locations and creates a big wall of fire that spins around him, avoid it and you’ll be fine. Helix Gearbreaker is a goblin riding an Oaf who throws bombs and leaps from player to player doing melee damage and causing AoE timed bomb damage to that player. You will have to kill the Oaf before killing Helix, and the Oaf himself can do up to 100% damage to the target of his Smash. The Foe Reaper 5000 is a giant mechanical construct that does heavy physical damage. One player in the group will have to control another robot at the bottom of the room to keep adds from attacking the other players during the encounter. Admiral Ripsnarl is a Worgen who phases in and out of the fight. DPS should focus on killing the adds lest they overwhelm the party and wait for Phase two to start and the adds start spawning faster than you can kill them, at which time you dump all DPS on Ripsnarl.
“Captain” Cookie, the Murloc in a Pot is an interesting fight. He will drop bad food on the ground that starts a continuous poison AoE that can only be cleared by walking over “good” food that doesn’t have green gas around it. Stacking on Cookie does fire damage. So the fight must be started and ended quickly.
If you’re playing the heroic version of this instance, you are then thrown into a “dream state.” Click the valves to escape the fire and kill Glubtok again. Stay there to kill Helix again, don’t bother with the adds as they will quickly overwhelm you. Avoid the instant kill electric beams and kill Foe Reaper 5000. Then you must kill the worgen attacking the spirits of Ripsnarl’s family before they die or you will die. Then you start the fight with Ediwn’s daughter Vanessa VanCleef. She will occasionally cast Deflection, at which point DPS peels off to fight the adds that drop in. At 50% and 25% health left, VanCleef sets off bombs on the deck which you must avoid by clicking on a rope on the side of the ship. She does this again at 0 health, but you just have to run away from her at that point.
Special Features:
This is the first instance introduced that has both a low level (Normal) version and a level 85 (Heroic) version. It was also the first rewritten entirely to take advantage of WoW’s changed storylines.
Recommended for Levels: 18 (Normal)/85 (Heroic)
This is a weird one. It’s still a great low-level instance and drops some nice gear for people leveling up through Cataclysm’s new content or via the dungeon finder. However, a lot of people really don’t like the heroic version despite the interesting new storyline.
There’s little trash and the first round of bosses aren’t particularly difficult. The heroic only content, however, takes too long for a Random dungeon and some parts are needlessly difficult. The instant kill electrical beams in particular seem silly, especially when Glubtok earlier in the instance had basically the same gimmick. The Foe Reaper too seems needlessly complex for a regular instance.
