A first look at Legion’s Maw of Souls dungeon

Today the World of Warcraft devs pitted a North American 5-man team of streamers and YouTube personalities against their European counterparts in a race to finish the new Legion‘s Maw of Souls dungeon on their official Twitch channel. This was our first time to see the new bosses in action. Spoilers ahoy after the jump.

The Maw of Souls is a 5-man dungeon out of the Stormheim zone with three boss encounters: Ymiron, Harbaron, and Helya. As with the larger zone it’s nestled in, it has a Wrath of the Lich King-era vrykul feel to its denizens and architecture. It extends the lore of the vrykul by exploring the lore of their afterlife. Adventurers will be going on a voyage of the damned and ultimately battling a fallen val’kyr queen.

Shoutcasted by Assistant Game Director Ion “WatcherDev” Hazzikostas and Community Manager Josh “Lore” Allen. a US 5-man and EU 5-man team raced against each other on Twitch through the dungeon. The first boss they encountered was King Ymiron who you may remember from Wrath of the Lich King. He returns bigger, badder, and undeader than ever with a number of new abilities including a healing debuff, an AOE fear, and the ability to call on the fallen as reinforcements.

Both teams downed Ymiron more or less at the same time and blew a horn which teleported them onto a boat that takes the dead to the afterlife — there are apparently visuals or a cinematic for the sequence that aren’t implemented just yet. They fought their way to the second boss, Harbaron, the Ferryman. The navigator of the ship has his own set of abilities to deal with, but the key one to watch out for that we saw in this dungeon race was Fragment. This creates fragments of the target’s soul, and each of those fragments does increasing amounts of damage until destroyed. So fragments need to be targeted and killed ASAP.

The EU team pulled ahead getting to the final boss first and this final encounter is quite impressive. Helya was a val’kyr queen who was banished to underworld where she oversees the transport of souls to their final resting place. Except you’re living beings that have invaded her ship of souls, and she won’t stand for that.

She erupts from the water at the prow of the ship and in the first phase of the fight you must attack her tentacles that burst through the deck. When you defeat them, the holes they leave behind in the deck remain in place, and you must work around them for the rest of the fight. Also, the location of where the tentacles burst through the deck is random — so memorizing the locations won’t help. While you’re focusing on the tentacles, Helya is attacking your party with a wide array of other abilities, but the damage you do to her tentacles damages her also.

After the first round of tentacles are destroyed, she disappears below the waves and resurfaces under the front of the ship, destroying a good chunk of the deck in the process. Now you have only half the space you had before to fight her, plus all the holes in the deck the tentacles have made that you can’t walk through limiting your mobility. Have fun in phase 2, as more tentacles sprout and Helya unleashes another barrage of damage dealing abilities.

The EU team was the first to do enough damage to her tentacles to drive her off and win the race. This is where we learn from Ion that we don’t truly kill her, but merely annoy her enough to make her leave. On the bright side, she leaves behind a treasure chest and your group gets to return from the land of the dead. You can check out video of the EU team from the perspective of Qelric, playing a Frost Death Knight (warning, some language is NSFW).

The US team finished the zone a few minutes later, and Ion announced that Maw of Souls will be going live on the alpha realms tonight.