TenTonHammer's First Look at "The Steamvault"

Now that I have finally hit level 70 in the Beta I am in the process of exploring a few of the level 70 instances. Last week I gave you a preview of the Shattered Halls in the Hellfire Citadel, this week I head to the Coilfang Reservoir in the Zangarmarsh. My objective there is to explore and preview to you the Steamvault. The Coilfang Reservoir, houses four instances.

The instances in the Coilfang Reservoir are as follows:

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Getting to the Coilfang Reservoir and finding a group

Getting to the Coilfang Reservoir is not the easiest thing in the world to do, as it is hidden deep in the center of a lake in the north area of Zangarmarsh. By deep in the center I mean that literally, the entrance to this instance is found at the bottom of the lake. To get to it you must swim down to the bottom and find a tunnel that leads even further down. Once in the tunnel there is steam entering the water and you will find that you can breath at certain points, allowing you to get deep enough into it to reach an underwater cave full of air. This is the Coilfang Reservoir Instance area.

Being near the end of the beta period there are many level 70 players and I had no issues getting a group using the LFG system. I was in a group within 5 minutes of starting the search for one.

The Steamvault

As with the Shattered Halls, the fun started right away upon entering the instance. Meaning we didn't get off to a great start. The female naga casters are a major pain, and you run into them right away. If you do not crowd control them you will be in serious trouble. The opening pulls are 2-3 melee MOBs and 2 caster MOBs, and we ran into them without really seeing them. We then let the casters get away on us and it caused an early wipe. After rezzing and regrouping we re-entered and were a bit more careful.

It was actually a good thing, as it shows that there is some serious difficulty in the game again, which is fun. We proceeded to take it a bit slower and more careful and worked out way through several packs of nagas and a few giants. We got to a fork in the road and went left up the ramp. A few pulls later we were at a boss.

"Wait a sec, isn't the Warlord Kalithresh supposed to be the last boss?" one of the groups asked. Yeah, he is... Ooops, OK, so you can skip the other bosses here. Time to find out if he can be killed before the others or not.

One of the group had been through before so we knew that he would buff himself during the fight from the various tanks around the room. Other than that we knew very little about the fight. We found out very quickly that if you do let him get buffed, you die. After a few attempts we got the strategy down. Keep DPS on him until he starts drawing power from a tank in the room and then kill it FAST! Even the tank had to stop DPS on him to help get the tanks down in time. If he finishes channeling from the tank he becomes buffed with +100% attack speed and +75% damage. Worse, it stacks from one tank to the next. You can survive if he gets buffed once, but more than that and you are looking at a wipe. The other abilities that he has is a magic reflect (so casters should be careful) and a random target DOT that does 500ish damage a tick.

The fight felt a little like a mini Buru fight from AQ20, which is very cools since that is one of my favorite fights. The fight will take a little bit of practice as he has a ton of health and you really need to watch for the point in time to switch to attacking the tanks. If you miss the call, you will lose the fight. Even if you catch the call, you really need to max DPS on the tank to take it down in time.

Once he was down, we had to go hunting for the other bosses. In the process we found more MOBs that worked in a similar way to Nagas from other instances in the Coilfang Reservoir in that they summoned nearby slaves to assist in the fight. Sometimes they would summon 4 - 6 additional MOBS to help! This could be tricky as the healers (in this case me) had issues not drawing aggro while healing the tank from so much damage at once. The key to these MOBs are focus, kill the nagas and the slaves disperse.

The next Boss that we found was the Mekgineer Steamrigger, who is a giant mechanical boss. He had several abilities including a physical damage reflection and the ability to summon MOBs that repair him. The key to this fight is obviously controlling the repair MOBs and getting them down as quickly as possible, while watching for the damage reflection shield and stopping all attacks. The fight was very entertaining and we downed him the first attempt.

Having defeated what was supposed to be the 2nd and 3rd bosses we went looking for the 1st. We got all the way back to the beginning where we had turned left and instead went straight. We found the first boss not far from there on a platform.

The boss is the Hydromancer Thespia and is flanked by two elemental guards. We had heard that a warlock helps so that you can banish one to make the fight easier, just our luck, no warlock. We found out right away that the guards hit HARD and FAST. They wiped us on our first 2 attempts. On the third attempt we managed to down them quickly but at the cost of two of our party members (our hunter and rogue!), so much for DPS. All we were left with was our druid tank, a mage for DPS and myself healing. The fight took a long time but we actually managed to three man her down! Hurray!

The instance is a significant step up in difficulty from earlier instances other than the Shattered Halls, which seemed much harder than this instance. Overall the whole instance was very entertaining and we really liked how different the boss fights were. They all took timing, skill and teamwork. Even though we had a few wipes in the run we finished is a bit under 3 hours. Once you know the fights you could probably run this instance in about 90 minutes.

My main complaint with the instance was that the map was very hard to follow and that you could do it in almost any order you wanted. This could be a good thing as you can farm what you need from the instance, but it could also turn out to be very bad as you could end up with a group that only wants items from 1 or 2 of the bosses, and they may not be what you want or need. I would prefer a little more order in the instance, others may not agree though.

I took many additional screen shots which are all available in our gallery here: TenTonHammer visits the The Steamvault .

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