Guide to the Iron Tomb

Quick primer for the game's first instance.

Found in the starting zone of Freemarch, Iron Tombs is the first instance Defiant players will encounter. Tuned for players of level 17 and higher (many will prefer to wait until level 19) , this is a pretty standard dungeon crawl with three boss encounters and plenty of undead minions lying in wait. Iron Tombs is steeped in lore as players attempt to foil the plans to the Endless Court who seek to aid Regulos in destroying Telara.

Group Configuration:

A single tank and healer are sufficient to build a group around, leaving room for your choice of DPS to fill out the party with any healing soul being a viable option – including the Chloromancer.

Quests:

There are five total quests available for Iron Tombs, none of them need to be picked up beforehand as they are all given inside the instance:

• Release the March Wardens: the first quest you will encounter and it is given automatically upon your initial zone in. This straightforward quest tasks you with vanquishing all three boss encounters
• Relics of the March Warden: is given by the NPC Eliam’s Ghost at the zone in and it requires you to loot three items from the second boss encounter.
• Source of Control: is also dispensed by Eliam’s Ghost and it sends players into the zone to retrieve Sourcestone Amulets.
• You Are Who They Call: is given after defeating the second boss encounter, players will be given a clickable item that they will use to drag Spectral Screamers back to a central location
• Laid to Rest: obtained from the NPC Tobias Leighton inside the zone and the objective is to destroy several Death Shards throughout the zone.

Damaging the Death Shards will begin to release waves of mobs, so be careful to dispatch each wave before resuming dps on the shards. Releasing too many waves is an easy way to wipe your group

Bosses:

Caor Ashtone
This encounter is the easiest of the three and is a standard tank and spank with a DPS race component. Once the tank establishes initial agro, DPS can open up on him as there are no tricky mechanics in place to prevent the tank from holding threat. Caor doesn’t hit the tank too hard with melee, but he uses a fast DoT named Ashtone’s Curse to create a stacking debuff on the tank that will make them unhealable if the fight goes on too long. This debuff is called Jagged Wounds and is not dispellable, so make sure to keep big heals coming as it builds and keep DPS on task to prevent a wipe.

Three Kings Event
The second encounter is a council style event known as the Three Kings. The event begins with a scripted animation showing Alsbeth summoning the bosses Humbart the Bold, Laric the Ascendant and Derribec the Magus. The event starts off with each boss attacking after the one before it is killed, beginning with Humbart. Humbart is the easiest of the three and should be tanked facing away from the group as he has a nasty frontal cleave that also knocks back effected players.

His statue can be used as a barrier if the tank keeps their back to it, giving the rest of the party plenty of room to attack.

Once Humbart falls, Derribec becomes active and will begin nuking the tank hard with his Life Rend spell. The good news here is that it is only a single target ability, but it does hit hard. Laric engages once Derribec is dispatched and uses a fast cast heal ability to frustrate opponents. Keeping the heal interrupted will help make quick work of Derribec and then the real fun begins. Phase two consists of all three kings resurrecting at once and engaging the group. The tank will want to save any AoE threat cooldowns for the start of this phase. The kill order for this phase will be the reverse of phase 1 as Laric should be your initial target. Focus fire each boss down and be mindful of interrupting Laric’s heal. Once the triumvirate have been finally laid to rest a treasure chest will appear for you to loot.

The Orb Room:
While this isn’t a boss encounter, the orb room is a gauntlet style encounter that requires a moderate amount of coordination and haste to complete. This room may look overwhelming at first due to the large amount of mobs, but interspersed throughout the room are clickable orbs that will help kill any npcs in their area. The trick here is that these mobs will continually respawn unless they are all killed before the respawn timer hits. Our group found success by sending the tank ahead to the next orb with the healer staying in between as the dps burned down the remaining mobs. Completing this gauntlet will allow you to access the area that contains the Sourcestone Amulet for the Source of Control quest.

Ragnoth the Despoiler:
The final boss encounter in Iron Tombs, Ragnoth the Despoiler is also the most fun. This scripted fight is aided by an NPC who helps to negate Ragnoth’s most devastating attack – Flame of Ragnoth. The fight starts out fairly straightforward as the tank will engage and spin the boss away from the group to avoid his frontal cleave. Healing can get a bit dicey with the cleave and a direct nuke, but the party shouldn’t take any damage here so focus on the tank. Periodically throughout the fight Ragnoth will being to channel the flame spell and you will notice just before this happens that Eliam’s Ghost will appear and also cast a shield, all players will need to run into this shield to avoid death. Ragnoth does follow the tank over, so be mindful of positioning to keep the party safe from his other attacks. The fight continues to repeat these two phases until Ragnoth is put into the ground. In addition to saving your bacon, Eliam’s Ghost is kind enough to stick around and open up a portal to whisk you out of the dungeon.

Iron Tombs is a nice introduction to Rift instanced zones and helps to reinforce the lore of Telara nicely. Even though there are only three boss encounters, you will want to block out a decent amount of time due to density and overall amount of trash mobs throughout the zone.