Guild Wars 2

Let’s start one

Our group just finished three instances, and here are our findings so far:

Dredge Area:
-you start with a coordination puzzle. Travel up the gantries, until you face a closed door. To open a door, you must take a side branch of the gantries and have someone stand on a pressure plate. Now, the group will have to split up – one part defending the pressure plate, one part going through the door to get to the next plate. Repeat until you get to an area with two plates. These two simultaneously open the control panel, which in turn open up the next door
-fighting dredge is nothing new, until you hit a large circular door guarded by two dredge. On their corpses, you will find cannons – these can be used to destroy the door itself.
-don’t run through, there is a crowd of dredge inside. You will be fighting a dredge champion here. He will always have one dredge veteran as support, the rest can be killed off eventually. Champion uses a blocking skill, and I know he once got approximately half the possible boons at a time.
-final boss is an ice elemental. The ice elemental is invulnerable. To remove invulnerability, lure him under a pot of molten metal and have someone pour the metal on him. This makes him vulnerable for a short time.
-key is luring the boss from liquid metal container to container, so he can be damaged.
-the ground where the liquid metal will hit is recognizably scorched
-an immobilize/snare skill can help make sure you hit the elemental
-if the elemental kneels, he is using a skill to heal himself. Interrupt this at all costs, or all your work will be in vain. An overcharged shot (launch) interrupted it even with defiant stacks.

Grawl area:
-in the inital room, you will face waves of Grawl
-you will next need to proceed down a corridor. Flaming boulders roll down the slope, leaving burning trails. You need to avoid the trails as they burn you. You will have periodic safe spots to the side to catch a breather.
-the Grawl shaman uses a shield skill that negates all damage. The shield can be brought down using flaming boulders that spawn on the floor.
-at about 10% health, the shaman will jump down into the flaming lake and become a much stronger form. The party must now travel down, jumping from platform to platform
-at the bottom, you will face the Grawl shaman. He will be a general nuisance, but when his health is brought low, he will sacrifice a captive to summon a shield again, and three annoying lava elementals. Don’t be fooled – he does not run out of captives. Our observation was that the shield granted immunity to next 40 damaging attacks, with each poison/bleed damage tick removing a shield layer. So, keep him bleeding and poisoned to bring the shield low ASAP, else he will heal up again.

Sons of Svanir area
-beware – the cold here is lethal. If you stand in the cold, you will gain stacks of a damaging effect, which will eat your health faster and faster
-to keep the cold away, you need to stand near a fire. You will find rusty torches, which can be used to light prepared log piles. once a fire is lit, you will gain a cold-negating effect, which will protect you from the cold while you run to the next log pile. Some, or perhaps all, fires can burn down and may then be re-lit using a torch (attack with it).
-proceed down the slope, jumping over the missing pieces.
-at the bottom of the valley, you will find a large pile of logs (5-6 fires worth). You will need to defend here against a few waves of Sons of Svanir. If the previous fires didn’t burn out, these definitely do, so someone should keep an eye on them-
-next you will face a frost elemental. There are three piles of logs around him, but they burn out quickly and need to be re-lit constantly. The elemental is not particularly tough HP wise, but has a special skill that calls a blinding blizzard. You will be teleported a bit away and see nothing for a short time.
-a nice trick here is to leave one torch on the ground at exactly each log pile. This way, you will see the torch (as a dropped object) even through the blinding blizzard, allowing you to navigate)
-next is a dark forest, which seemed to no longer be subject to the environmental cold effect (the elemental just killed is supposed to be causing the freezing). The forest is very dark, and patrolled by Sons of Svanir with wolves.
-eventually you will reach an ice cave. The cave contains a champion shaman. The shaman summons ice blocks (limiting movement? LoS? not sure of the effect, really) , encase players in ice and summon and an ice storm (a series of large AoE circles – TWO waves of those, so keep running away to a clear spot). The shaman seemed to disappear at times, not sure of the mechanic’s details.
-the shaman’s ice at the beginning split the party into two, closing off two players out of the area the fight is in. To enter, we had to go a bit back and find a totem. Interacting with the totem got the two of us into the room to fight.

That’s about all we’ve got so far.
Side note: I got a destroyer lodestone somewhere in there, so loot is potentially interesting.