HFP Shattered Halls and other endgame instances in TBC

[Rowdysattva]

I am going through the instance content in outlands on my way to northrend and i noticed that some of the instances in the wiki have great write-ups and some have none at all. In my opinion there are some tricks for Shattered Halls... which is one of the instances so far that is giving me trouble. I just dinged 70 on my pally in the instance and my shaman were 67 and dinged 68 in the instance... so there is no trainning yet for those levels.

Anyway, some of the info on the interwebz for guides proved to be not completely accurate. I will let you know what i found helpful here and what i saw as i went along and hopefully it can get logged somewhere or added to the wiki so others don't have to learn the hard way unless they want to.

First boss in SH was really, really tuff. I wiped on him several times. He has an ability that causes a shadow rift to open under you and does about 1000 damage a tick. He will also fear you and it heals him... skillcoil. When you approach the room there are three mobs in the room with him. When they are dead he will attack you. If you don't kill them he will kill the mobs for you and then attack you. The mobs are non-elites if i remember so i would take my time fighting them and use it as an opportunity to set up your guys. If you wipe you can enter the room again and he will not aggro you. I set up my four shaman in a line spread out in a line way back by where you come in the room. Toons don't need to be super spread out... but spread out. I had all four of the toons have a different keybind for there "move forward" and the same key for their move backward. I sent my tank into the room got aggro and then turned my tank around to be in front of the boss but also facing my shaman. He doesn't announce who he is going to screw with his shadow rift so i had to watch for it. The rift will open very fast and do massive damage so reacting fast is key. When your toon is targeted there will be a red swirl around them and on the ground. When i saw that (it can appear on your tank as well) on one of my shaman i would use my keybind to move them forward and off it. The rifts will persist for a time. I found this was much, much faster than manually moving my toons by clicking in their windows and it let me stay with my tank. I tried to have them all stay with me on follow so we could all jump off of them like in the video for the boss in underbog... but your follow lead time is not fast enough and your guys get hit and it is bad. This was the trick to beating him. When he is at 20% health he does a bladestorm move and it does huge damage... but he doesn't move when he is doing it so you can move away... even your tank and just dps him as hard as you can. At that time he will also throw random shadow bolts out to smash you regardless of aggro... so any big dps him in an instant things you have can be saved for this time as his burst here is huge. If you have shaman rememering your grounding totems and to reapply them at key times is also a win.

Second boss was no big deal. When his weapon glows he will hit for fire damage and then do two big blast wave attacks... just being ready to heal a ton here is what i did and it was great. Also he has two head and when he emotes he switches which one is dominant and his aggro resets. So if you tank has dots that is great... if you toons have dots they may pull aggro at this time. He is immune to growl and taunt.

I am still working on the last boss. I learned that if you spread your guys out into the corners to avoid his whirlwinds... if you wipe they are not in line of sight to rez and it is a gy run. I will let you know when i have him more figured out.

I know the northrend will be all the rage now... but i hope we can build out the community data base of TBC instances for the 70 and above instances too. I will be happy to contribute as i go through them.

ANyone have any advice for any of these instances?

[Rowdysattva]

And a question. I was wiped and rez and wrote my post. Now i can't get back into the instance cause "Additional instances can not be launched, please try again later". Does anyone know how long the game holds your boss kill place... there were already some elite respawns... but will i have to go back through the boss now as well if i come back in a few hours?

ONE OTHER NOTE:
There is a place in the instance where you have to make your way through a hall that is being filled with fire from flame archers at the end of the hall. As you make your way through there are several groups of five non-elites that will keep coming at you... they don't ever stop... till you get to the end and get the archers. The places where the fire arrows land needs to be moved off of fast as it deals over 500 fire damage a tick.

[Perrigrin]

And a question. I was wiped and rez and wrote my post. Now i can't get back into the instance cause "Additional instances can not be launched, please try again later". Does anyone know how long the game holds your boss kill place... there were already some elite respawns... but will i have to go back through the boss now as well if i come back in a few hours?

This means that your instance for some reason got reset, and that the instance server is to busy to create new ones right now - Keep trying, sometimes it takes a few seconds and sometimes 10 minutes - It's really bad on and off on Chamber of Aspects (EU).

[Dominian]

it never happens when i corpse run from the gy but if i go back to the town and get repaired the instance reset. Even if i killed the first boss wich is strange since it shouldnt happen on heroic.

[nomenquis]

it never happens when i corpse run from the gy but if i go back to the town and get repaired the instance reset. Even if i killed the first boss wich is strange since it shouldnt happen on heroic.

Thats not true, heroic instances also reset / can be reset. However, only trash respawns, not bosses.
Clear some trash in a heroic, go outside, switch difficulty to normal and back to heroic again and enjoy the respawned trash ^^

kind regards

[Ualaa]

Actually for heroic CoT the one with 18 waves of mobs and bosses on the 6th, 12th and 18th wave for the Karazhan attunement which is no longer required...

If you wipe and lose the event on say the 18th guy, you can reset the entire instance and still get the 6th and 12th boss on the reset, along with all of the trash. But the bosses only drop loot once, so if you're doing heroic daily and fail, you have to deal with the bosses a 2nd time but don't get loot/badges for doing so.

As far as I know, that's the only heroic where you can reset the bosses, but that's probably because its an event.

Incidently, this instance on normal used to have insane drop rates for knothide leather and spider silk. The drop rates were nerfed, but its as good as anywhere else for that level of leather and there's never any competition. It was nice when the drop rate was 3x as good as anywhere else, but even after the nerf (a lot more scraps instead of always dropping leather) it was good.