Coming back to Northrend this past weekend we picked up where we left off on our list, which was with the Halls of Stone up in Icecrown. We had been there, or at least a little ways into the instance, for the Lunar Festival. Now we were back to finish it off.
First we had to get there.
We had all grabbed the flight point when we were there previously, but not everybody had a connecting flight point… and we are still in the classic era where you can’t just fly through undiscovered flight points. That comes later.
But some of us could get there and use the summoning stone… if we could see the summoning stone.
Invisible Summoning Stone
I know I have mentioned the draw distance issue in WoW Classic a few times, but here is another example. You can see somebody standing in the distance and some trees beyond them. The summoning stone is right where they are standing, but you cannot see it until you close about half the distance from the flight point.
I know, it isn’t the worst issue in the game… I am starting to make a list of issues with Wrath Classic… but it can be annoying if you want to find specific things… like a summoning stone.
Anyway, we got there and were ready to summon. Our group for the outing was as follows.
Halls of Stone group
Once everybody was summoned it was into the instance. This time, rather than looking for an elder, we were there to clean the place out.
Map of Halls of Stone
You come into the instance at about 10 o’clock on the map and some vague memories of the place told me that the main boss was at noon and we needed to do something in order to get to them. And then there was a quest marker on the path off at 3 o’clock, which seemed the likely source for unlocking.
With that in mind we decided to go counter clockwise from where we came in, starting in the Crystalline Quarry, which was where we found the elder on our past visit.
Up at the end of that swirl we found Krystallus, the first boss.
There he is
He didn’t have a mana bar or anything, so we decided to just have at him and see what came of it. And it started off pretty well. And then, about a third of the way into the fight he did something and all the casters, who were standing bunched up at range, died instantly.
No healing and down on DPS, the end result was inevitable.
Face down again
We decided to do a little research and discovered that he has a one-two set of abilities that turns everybody into an AOE bomb essentially, so if you’re all standing together, things go badly.
So we spread out for the second run, which ended up going much better… though when the fight ended my experience bar disappeared. That was because I had hit level 80.
Level up on the boss kill
I had, perhaps, been hitting the Argent Tournament dailies a bit too regularly. But now I couldn’t get any further ahead of the group at least!
That done, we moved around and headed down the 6 o’clock path to the Hall of Repose where we found the Maiden of Grief. I guess repose means different things to different people.
Insert Uldaman/Ironaya reference here
Having looked up the first boss, I had glanced at the details of the second, which mostly mentioned staying out of her gunk. It will rot your teeth, among other things.
There she is, rotting in her own gunk
While we fumbled the instructions… there was something about the tank and the healer running into the gunk at some point to break a stun effect… we managed to power through.
Repose achieved
Now it was time to head down the path at 3 o’clock where we ran into Brann Bronzebeard, He was the quest giver and once we were ready we followed him down the path to the Tribunal of Ages.
Brann was anxious to get there
Down at the end at the Tribunal of Ages, Brann stops and waits for you to talk to him. It seemed quite clear that he was going to do something and we were going to have to protect him through an event.
Welcome to the Tribunal of Ages
Again, vague memories of doing this back in 2009 or some were in the back of my head. So we sent Brann off to do his thing… which seemed to mostly involve exchanging Northrend lore trivia with the Tribunal… while we tried to keep waves of baddies off of him.
Things got a little out of hand on the first run and Brann died. Fortunately, like the rest of us, he just revives and shows back up again. So we took a second run at it and, while not perfect… Ula died… we did managed to defend him and get the ear full of lore about Ulduar that the instance seemed keen to inform us about.
Having done that, Brann said he would meet us outside the door to the final boss, where he let us in and again we had to cover him while he fiddled with some equipment while the main target, Sjonnir The Ironshaper, fought us while summoning waves of helpers.
It was as chaotic as the last event, right down to Ula dying again, but we prevailed in the end and the boss went down.
Halls of Stone complete achievement
Brann had some nice upgrades for some of us when we turned in our quest to him. After that we lined up and took a screen shot with Brann at the end of the instance.
It is all Brann in the end
While we had some hiccups, it was not a tough run. Still, when I went back to look at my post about our run back in the day, we seemed to have skated through much more easily back then. But we were also a full group of 79s then as well.
That leaves us with four more instances currently in Wrath to tackle, and four more that have yet to be brought into the game. We still have a ways to go. But we’re all closing in on the level cap. After I leveled up Fergorin his 79 and Beanpole 78, so we’re almost there.
The Ancient Gaming Noob 