Greetings, fellow achievement hounds. This week we return to the Glory of the Hero series and tackle two dungeons at once: Utgarde Keep and Utgarde Pinnacle.

This is the full Glory of the Hero guide, organized by dungeon:

• Part I: Ahn'kahet
• Part II: Azjol-Nerub and Culling of Stratholme
• Part III: Drak'Tharon Keep
• Part IV: Gun'drak
• Part V: Halls of Lightning
• Part VI: Halls of Stone
• Part VII: The Nexus
• Part VIII: The Oculus

Utgarde Keep

There's only one achievement to worry about in Utgarde Keep, and -- as befits Wrath's easiest heroic -- it's one of the simplest required for the meta.

On the Rocks

Easy, easy, easy. During the fight, Prince Keleseth will attempt to imprison random group members in Frost Tombs, and for this achievement you just need to ignore the Tombs and heal the person inside through it. Since the former is pretty much standard for all dungeon finder groups -- and because it's fairly common these days for Keleseth to die before even one Frost Tomb has run its course -- you're not likely to have any real difficulty getting this.

Healing the damage isn't very hard, but I feel like I should note:

• The tank can get tombed. If he has a pack of skeletons on him in addition to Keleseth, this can be on the tough side unless he has good gear. Fortunately, Keleseth's damage is primarily caster, and you can have a ranged DPS "tank" Keleseth for the interim.
• If the healer gets tombed and there's no one else in the group who can heal, the tank should blow some cooldowns to stay up unless Keleseth is really dying quickly.

Honestly, though, this achievement will be among the least of your worries.

Utgarde Pinnacle

Utgarde Pinnacle's achievements are a bit more involved than their counterpart in Utgarde Keep.

The Incredible Hulk

I get asked to do this a lot while tanking for dungeon finder groups, and while it's not a particularly difficult achievement, it's very easy to botch.

The basic idea is to have your tank maneuver one of the two nearby Scourge Hulks onto Svala Sorrowgrave's platform to await the damage done by Ritual of the Sword. See the big sword slowly dropping toward the platform when she's trapped a player? When it lands, it does about 10K damage to anything it hits plus a DoT. Ideally, you want your DPS to drop the hulk's health to around 10Kish so that the sword (or DoT) will kill it.

The two problems with that nowadays are how fast Svala dies to geared DPS and the fact that you only get one Ritual of the Sword. What often winds up happening is that an overzealous DPS nukes the hulk too quickly, it dies before it reaches the platform, the group scrambles to get the other hulk DPSed down and positioned, and it's too late because the sword's already dropped.

So my recommendations are:

1. If you're the tank, make sure you don't have any reflective damage buffs (e.g. Retribution Aura, Thorns) on you. If you have something like a Titanium Shield Spike on, just be careful not to let the hulk's health get too low.
2. If your group is well-geared, assign only one DPS to hulk duty.
3. You can pull the hulk either before or during the Svala fight, as you prefer.
4. The tank must call out or, without voice chat, macro STOP DPS as the hulk reaches around 25k life. DoTs and bleeds are likely to take it down to around 10-15k.
5. Have the tank position the hulk on the platform and sit there; any tank with the gear to survive Utgarde Pinnacle can take the Sword damage. If the hulk needs a little more DPS, the tank can put some hurt on it.
6. Make sure the hulk is at around 10k life.
7. Sword drops.
8. Hulk go boom.
9. If the hulk doesn't go boom, it has to die while the Sword DoT is still on it -- so blow it up as fast as possible if it's still alive after the drop.
   

My Girl Loves to Skadi All the Time and Lodi Dodi We Loves the Skadi

As with some of the drake achievements from The Oculus, these achievements are often easiest to do if you do them together. Actually, after Blizzard changed the harpoon requirement from five to three, it's become almost impossible not to get My Girl Loves to Skadi All the Time, assuming your designated harpooners are half-awake.

If you have a high-DPS group:

1. Ask the DPS/healer in advance to pick up one harpoon each.
2. Pull the event as you normally would.
3. There are three Ymirjar Harpooners among the mob packs (assuming you go from the beginning to the end of the hallway), and each will drop a harpoon.
4. Each player assigned to harpoon duty should loot one and station themselves at one of the three harpoon guns at the end of the hallway (one player per gun).
5. When Skadi gets within range of the guns, all three should be fired. Congratulations, that's My Girl Loves to Skadi All the Time.
6. Skadi will land, the tank will pick him up, and DPS should just burn him down normally. Any remaining adds here should be AoE'd, as they're otherwise likely to aggro the healer.
7. With good DPS, all of this should happen in under three minutes, granting you Lodi Dodi We Loves the Skadi.

If you have a low-DPS group (and I disavow all knowledge of the following technique, but I'd be lying if I said this wasn't exactly how people got this pre-3.3.2):

1. Ask the DPS/healer in advance to pick up one harpoon each.
2. Pull the event as you normally would.
3. There are three Ymirjar Harpooners among the mob packs (assuming you go from the beginning to the end of the hallway), and each will drop a harpoon.
4. Each player assigned to harpoon duty should loot one.
5. Once you have all three, the group returns to Gortok Palehoof's room.
6. Kill anything that's still chasing you, but you should drop combat momentarily.
7. Run back into the hallway. Skadi will have despawned. One DPS should remain at the beginning; the rest of the group should run up the hallway to the harpoon guns. The tank should position herself close to the doorway.
8. Once the group is in place and Skadi has reappeared, the DPS at the beginning of the hallway should start the event and run up the hallway to join the rest of the group.
9. The tank will need to grab and hold aggro on all of the trash mobs. Blow cooldowns if you need to.
10. When Skadi gets within range of the guns, all three should be fired. The DPS who started the event should have enough time to reach a gun if he's on harpoon duty.
11. Skadi will land and the tank should pick him up. You will almost certainly still have a few trash mobs around, so AoE them down and then go full bore on Skadi himself.
12. Congratulations, you now have both achievements!

King's Bane

To be frank, until recently I was unaware that there was any amount of strategy to this achievement at all, and your odds of getting it are close to 100% in any group with good DPS.

Put very simply, Bane is a buff that Ymiron will cast on himself 20 seconds after being engaged if he isn't otherwise busy. And by that I mean -- at 80, 60, 40 and 20% life, he will run to one of the nearby ships to buff himself with additional damage or abilities from a vrykul ancestor. If your group can get him to these intervals within 20 seconds each time, you will never see a Bane cast -- and that's usually what winds up happening these days unless you get a group full of fresh 80s in greens for Utgarde Pinnacle.

The group DPS required to achieve that is a not-terribly-high 7,077, which works out to a little less than 2,400 for each DPS (and even less in practice, because the tank will be putting damage on him too). So that's the usual King's Bane strategy -- kill the dude as fast as you possibly can. That's it. If your group is competent, you will simply never see Bane cast at all.

If your group is on the undergeared side, the achievement is still very possible. Because Bane is a two-second cast, you have some advance warning on when to stop DPS, and the tank can use her handy-dandy STOP DPS party macro that she's got lying around from The Incredible Hulk. Once Bane is cast, it's only triggered by direct damage spells or abilities, so all the group has to do is sit and wait for the five seconds it'll take to drop off. Once it's off, you can resume DPS normally.

But you will probably never have to worry about that. I'd be very surprised these days if you couldn't get King's Bane with any given dungeon finder group.

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