Under the Banner

Group makeup: MUST have a full group and all players should be over level 20. A guardian and minstrel are essential, the other spots can be filled by anything. If you’re going for the final boss, your group should be closer to level 25. Our group makeup was: Guardian, Minstrel, Captain, Loremaster, and 2 Hunters. All of us were level 23-24.

The first part of the instance is elite spiders. There are some pretty big pulls of these. The rest of the instance is a mix of undead elites and quite a few non-elite mass pulls. Because of this (undead can’t be crowd controlled) haveing good solid AoE in your group will be important.

The Skull Key
The barrow has 3 bosses. 2 bosses that are a little easier and one final boss. To get to the final boss you need to forge the skull key. Each of the easier bosses carry half of the key. To get the key made you have to have the quest (given near the prancing pony in bree), and turn the 2 key halves into the quest giver. He then sends you running around bree to have the key made. The rewards for this quest are outstanding.

Once you have the key, you can skip certain parts of the great barrow to get to the end boss quicker. The key is required to gain access to the final areas of the instance, so that you can kill the 15 Accursed Fel-Spirits. Only one person in the group needs to have the key. There is one door in the instance that requires the skull key, but still won’t open even if you do have the key. I think it’s bugged, because we tried it several times with different characters.

IMPORTANT NOTE: you have to fight all of the bosses in their room, but if the fight goes bad, you can leave the room and reset the encounter. Keep in mind, all of the boss fights in this instance are ENDURANCE fights, so conserve power.

Boss 1: He summons groups of non elites periodicaly during the fight (when he gets to certain health levels). The boss will STOP fighting you while you take down the normal undead he summons. He does this 3 or 4 times, and each time there are more of them (7 or 8 the final time). You have to take down the non elites fast, they don’t hit hard and have moderat health (500-600), but if you don’t take them down in about 30 seconds the boss starts fighting again anyway. Usually when the boss rejoins the fight he’ll do some heavy damage to the whole party by ranged AoE, and may drain someone’s power to nothing. He did this to our healer on 2 separate occasions so we had to reset.

Boss 2: There are actually 2 bosses here. You fight them one at a time. This is an INSANE and FUN fight. You should be proud of your group if you make it through this.
-The fight works like this: Guardian approaches boss on left and starts to attack. Boss on the right is neutral and can’t be harmed. As you are fighting the boss on the left, he summons non elite minions to help him. He summons wave after wave of slow moving undead. You have to AoE them down while the guardian works on the boss. As soon as you kill the first boss the second one goes hostile. He also summons wave after wave of non-elites to help him. Because the tank must focus on the boss, the minions will be hammering away on your DPS clasess. Each wave gets progressively bigger. Toward the end of the fight, the second boss stopped summoning minions, we moved him up onto the steps and finished him off. If you find that your group can’t win this fight… it’s ok. The FIRST boss drops the key half, so just kill the first boss, have everyone loot him and then run out and reset.

Final Boss: This boss is a level 25 Nemesis. He does massive AoE screams that hit for a channeled 400ish damage. His normal hits are for around 150. He also periodically summons an elite spirit to help him in battle. The elite doesn’t have that much health but needs to be taken out quickly. Anyone that can do ranged damage should stay as far away from the boss as possible.
This is a long fight (boss has 14500hp), a blue conjunction midway through will make a huge difference

Hope this helps you all! The great barrows is an awesome instance with some pretty amazing encounters. It’s not really meant to be done in one sitting. The rewards for completing the 5 quests in here are outstanding. Good luck!

Here is a little map of the instance I made: I’m not POSITIVE about the exact path to the second boss. This is by memory and that place is a maze. Some passages actually run overtop of other passages