World of Warcraft: Hellfire Ramparts
Lore:
The Horde and Alliance charge headfirst through the Dark Portal, ready to take on Illidan and the Burning Legion for…um…reopening the Dark Portal, I guess. And being mean to the Draenei (and later the Blood Elves). But who’s there to greet you? Why the remnants of the old Fel Horde, wondering what the fuck Thrall did with all those people they sent across the void a while back.
They’ve set up shop in Hellfire Citadel, a big broken fortress in the middle of the Hellfire Penninsula, and if you want to get in to give Kargath Bladefist the whatfor, you’ve got to go through the Ramparts first. Actually, no you don’t. But just pretend you do, ok? For me. And Kargath really isn’t even in charge. And these guys barely have anything to do with the rest of the story of the expansion, but SHUT UP!
Degree of Difficulty: Easy
People either love or hate Burning Crusade trash packs. They all have some kind of stun or knock back, they all have a gimmick, and they almost all run. So crowd control really shines. It’s boring for most players, and cripping for bad groups, but some people really love it. The trash in Ramps is never hard, but it can get dicey, especially in the first hallway, because it’s all so tightly packed.
As for the bosses, there’s nothing terribly difficult here. Watchkeeper Gargolmar is a standard warrior PvP fight with a couple of weak adds. The toughest thing about him is killing the trash around him without accidentally pulling him and getting overwhelmed. Omor the Unscarred has a few skills, notably summoning adds, a spell reflect, and a banish, that get really annoying really quickly, but he’s skippable and a bit of a pushover. Vazruden and Nazan are not difficult, but you have to fight them both in two phases without much time to breath in between your kill of the final trash pack, Nazan, and then Vazruden. If you run away during the first pull you can actually glitch this fight and kill Nazan as many times as you like.
Special Features:
Hellfire Ramparts is the first instance in the game to offer a seperate “Heroic” mode with the same fights just tuned for higher level characters. The loot drops were bumped up to be level appropriate and the bosses have a few thousand more hitpoints and some new abilities. The Hellfire Heroic Key can be purchased from your faction appropriate vendor in Hellfire at Honored.
Recommended for Levels: 60-63
Some good drops for players new to Outlands, but they’ll be replaced quite quickly as you tear through Outlands content. The Heroic mode stuff is painfully out of date nowadays. Still, it’s one of the most worthwhile instances to run in the LFD utility as soon as you can, and a lot of people like running it because it’s so compact and fast.
As for achievements, an 80 can solo this pretty easily, assuming you can avoid getting swarmed by the first couple groups of trash, because they can still knock most 80s around a bit. It’s probably worthwhile just to wait until you’ve got fairly decent gear, get the Heroic key and just steamroll the place for two achievements.