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Utgarde Keep was long thought to be abandoned, a relic of a lost civilization among the central cliffs of the Howling Fjord. Yet in recent days something has roused the fortress' slumbering residents, the vrykul. Feared to be allied with the Scourge, the savage race now terrorizes nearby settlements.
A Note: I'm going to be doing all of these as a druid in badge gear, no outside buffs unless I'm wiping too much.Defeat the bosses in Utgarde Keep. In the Lich King Dungeon Achievements category. Always up to date with the latest patch (9.0.2). (Taken From Wowhead) Utgarde Keep is the first dungeon located on the shores of Lake Cauldros in the Howling Fjord.
Utgarde Keep
Zone in, take a look around, and put up Mark of the Wild- this will be important later. Get in kitty form, hit prowl, and start weaving through mobs and patrols.
I'm not sure if you can stealth through the first two mobs. I forget about that useful ability until I was halfway through the forge room.
Either way, first pull: Root one of the mobs, change to bear, and kill the other guy. If you feel like you are taking too much damage, use Demoralizing Roar.
You can dodge and weave through the next room, easy. I marked the patrollers for you.
Sneaksneaksneak into the forge area. You have to kill the groups here, sorry. Root one of the mobs, go bear and eat them up. Remember Demoralizing Roar and don't be afraid to use your cooldowns if you need them.The next group is exactly the same. Try and Bash Cauterize if you can. After them, we get to the stairs and the dragon room!
You can sneak through here and into the first Cullen's room very quickly. However, you do have to kill the 4 in front of the San'alyn. I rooted one and moonfired the heck out of another. Switch targets when the rune casters put their immunity shields up. Now, here comes the vampire boss. At first I thought, 'No big deal. I mean, he can't frost tomb me.'
Utgarde Keep Mount Drop
Heh, yeah. That went well.
I can't see doing him, even at my gear level. 15 second stuns where you take damage and and keep getting beaten on, that happen over and over again, are impossible to handle solo. However, since he is low level, with MotW up you may be able to resist the vast majority of them. I decided to skip him and start prowling towards the next bosses.
You can sneak through here with no trouble. Be careful of the geists; they run really quickly.
After this, you reach the first (and only) mobs here that can detect stealth: wolfies.
Go up the stairs and, if you're lucky, you can dodge the patroling wolfie. If not, kill it. Up the stairs, and through the tunnel, you'll come to the next bosses. They are ridiculously easy to kill. Glyphed maul and swipe are your friends here.
Keep on stealthing. I didn't have to kill a single mob until Mr. The Plunderer after these two.
Speaking of Mr. The Plunderer, he's cake. Run out of the way of Smash and he goes down like
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Grats on soloing Utgarde Keep! Next up, the Nexus!
Introduction
Heroic Utgarde Keep is arguably one of the easiest of the heroics. With a team of experienced party members to surround yourself with the instance should go by pretty easily. Just get yourself a defense capped tank and a decent set of DPS who preferably know the boss fights and your on your way to a pretty carefree heroic run. Like with my Nexus suggestion I feel that 1600 is a solid number for starting most heroics but you can probably make due with 1-150 less than that.
Trash Mobs
Most of the trash in this instance consists of Vyrkul and undead with a few dragons and wolves along the way. Luckily these Vyrkul don’t hit as hard as their angrier brethren in Utgarde Pinnacle. There isn’t much special you really need to do here. Watch for picking up more than one group on a couple tight knit fights and you should be fine just running with a riptide+2LHW combination on most encounters.
The first section of the instance will consist of groups of Vyrkul, pull them carefully as to not aggro the entire first hall and you should be fine. The next room is the same deal, a couple groups of Vyrkul in close proximity – this will lead you to your first boss (Scroll down for boss strategy).
Next is the “dragon room”. Make sure when you encounter the dragons, that the tank faces them away from the rest of your party as to not get them caught in the cone of their fire breath. Taking down the dragons first then the Vyrkul generally works best. Clearing left half of the room and leaving the right is an easy way to cut some time off of the run. Next there are halls filled with undead, most of them are non-elite mobs huddled around a single elite. These halls are a breeze, but you might need to use your cleanse – the totem is a waste, just use the spell on the diseases. Then some more Vyrkul. Next will be the boss duo (Scroll down for boss strategy).
After this boss there are more Vyrkul and undead rooms and halls. Watch for patrols in the rooms with stairs as they usually have a Vyrkul with a pet dog moving up and down them and at one point there will be a roving group of Geists in a room with a set of stairs and some Vyrkul gatherings, Vyrkul stand in your way for the rest of the way to the final boss of the instance (Scrolldown for boss strategy).
Utgarde Keep Loot
Additional: For the most the instance is groups of Vyrkul in between bosses. So long as you take the CASTERS down first, you won’t have a problem, but they can really hurt your party especially if it’s melee heavy as they do a sort of corpse explosion type spell.
Prince Keleseth
This is the first and easiest boss of the instance. The strategy is pretty simple. Have everyone stack up on the tank, the only exception would be a hunter as they need a minimum distance to do adaquate damage, but even they should be standing as close as possible. If you have a paladin tank this fight is a breeze, all they have to do is keep concencration down, but other tanks can do just as well. The reason you stack is that there are going to be waves of trash skeletons coming at you in groups. They are more annoying than dangerous, but if they get onto a soft class you can lose them pretty quick. The best bet is that you draw them all into one area so the tank can just swipe them up as they keep attacking the boss. The other reason is that since there are in fact waves of mobs coming at you while you combat this boss you will have adds getting pieces of DPS as well as yourself from time to time and spamming chain heal makes easy work of it when everyone is standing right on top of each other. The only other quirk of the boss is that he will ice block random party members and the ice needs to be broken for them to be able to do anything again, this is very key if they ice block you – the healer, or rarely the tank.
Dalronn the Controller and Skavard the Constructor
This is probably the most interesting fight but can also be the most painful if your group isn’t up for the coordination challenge it can present. The basic idea behind the fight is that you are fighting two bosses at once. One is a caster who fires shadowbolts and the other is a melee who hits pretty hard. When you kill one, they come back as a ghost version of themselves, the difference between the ghost and the actual version is that the ghost has random aggro tables, so ocne you kill it they will essentially attack whoever they want. Which is why you want to take one boss to 10 percent health, then switch to the other boss and kill him, then go back to the first and finish him off. It’s a DPS heavy fight because of this. An additional note that your group should know is that the melee (Skavard) will do a charge move hitting people who are farther away and this resets his aggro table, meaning the tank will have to retaunt and gain more aggro after he does this. However, there is an easy way to get around this and that is to have your group in tight around the fight so he doesn’t have the space to initiate his charge. The second strategy is to kill one or the other and hope they don’t wipe you while they’re running around in ghost form. This is easy in normal UK, but in heroic it will rarely work unless you have over-geared DPS in the group.
Ingvar the Plunderer
The final and arguably the most difficult boss of the instance is Ingvar the Plunderer. You will exit the keep into an outside area of the instance which you will clear of Vyrkul on your way to him. Feel free to show off your Ghost Wolf form in the mean time. The battle area you will fight Ingvar on is a circular area with pillars around the inside of it. These can be used as key strategic advantages during the fight. You will want your casters at max range and near the first set of pillars you will see as you enter the area. These will help in case your tank doesn’t know what he’s doing. If you have shadow resistence buffs available, go ahead and take them. There are two phases to this fight. You kill Ingvar once and he will respawn and come back for a second round as a Scourge version of himself – meaning this is the hard phase. The first phase is pretty simple, he will do an AOE that does less damage the further you are away from it, which is why your casters are at range. It is a weak AOE so this isn’t a big deal just yet. Once you down him he will lay there for a while and will be rez’d by a Valkyree, when he coems back to life he unleashes a big AOE so don’t stand near him. When the tank picks him back up he’ll pull him to the furthest side of the circle away from the ranged. Now when he does his AOE (Dark Smash) it will be legitimate so your melee will take cover behind the nearest pillar. The key is that the tank tanks him facing the wall, not the group. The smash is mostly a cone so there shouldn’t be much damage being caused if they do this right as he stops in place once he starts casting. If your melee get behind a pillar they will usually take no damage at all. The main threat as far as damage goes however is his floating axe he will summon, it whirlwinds for a ton of damage and your tank should be tanking him away from it once it spawns. If it catches a soft melee they will basically die right off the bat. The save bet to heal this fight is to keep your tidal waves buff up from Riptide so you can keep everyone topped off with quick LHW’s. Keep earth shield on the tank and everything else should be fine. It’s not a healing intense fight unless the rest of your party members are failures. There is also a shout debuff he casts that will cause havoc if you are casting when it hits, so keep an eye on Ingvars timers. Deadly Boss Mod add-on really helps with this timing.
Utgarde Keep Loot
(WORK IN PROGRESS)