Utgarde
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Totem Talk: Utgarde Pinnacle, the Oculus, and heroic Utgarde Keep/The Nexus
And we come at last to the conclusion of our big loot rounup for the five mans and heroic five man instances that debuted with Wrath of the Lich King. How appropriate that this shopping list should conclude on Christmas Day. Loot luck bless us, every one!Since it is the holidays, I hope you'll forgive me if I dispense with my usual verbosity and move right into the instances and their loot tables. I will be mentioning leather or even cloth drops if they seem really superior to mail for a specific talent spec, so you'll just have to bear with it. (Believe me, I'd rather focus on mail.)Let's go bust open some piñatas.
WoW Insider's Utgarde Keep walkthrough
If you're dying to see the inside of some of Wrath's dungeons, you're in luck. We've put together a small walkthrough-in-pictures for Utgarde Keep for you to peruse. If you're in the Wrath beta and haven't run Utgarde yet, maybe you'll be able to put this to good use. If you're not in the Wrath beta, look through it anyway! It's a nice little preview of the dungeon and the types of mechanics you'll be running into when you first reach Northrend.If you don't know what Utgarde is, it's likely the first dungeon you'll run through in Wrath of the Lich King if you're the instancing type. It's set in the Howling Fjord, and is a vrykul fortress from which they plan their attacks on Alliance and Horde settlements. It's the first of two dungeons that will be taking place in Utgarde, the other being Utgarde Pinnacle.As always, if you want to see a larger version of the pictures, click the Hi Res button in the upper right of the gallery. I especially recommend that for our Northrend galleries, you simply can't see some of the detail in the low res versions. %Gallery-29459%
Dungeon depth in the past, present and future
The other day, Kromzul of Burning Blade posted a thread in the official Wrath of the Lich King forum about dungeon design. He asks if instances will be deeper than those in the Burning Crusade, and I agree with most of what he says. Essentially, the epic, sprawling dungeon crawls of old have gone extinct with BC.Bornakk chimes in to say that The Burning Crusade dungeon design was heavily influenced by player feedback, wishing for more Scarlet Monastery-esque dungeons. I can see that, and to an extent, I agree with that, too. Scarlet Monastery, while shorter and more linear, was also pretty cool.Personally, I don't think that it really comes down to one or the other. Take Dire Maul, for instance. Each wing could be tackled in a straightforward, linear fashion. However, each of them also had alternative routes, and some of them even had alternative ways of defeating them. For example, Tribute Runs in Dire Maul: North. Plus, they were even connected via the library. If you really want to, you could go from one wing to the other without any loading screen.
