I've been trying out some of the 5-man dungeons for the past couple months with a druid healer friend of mine - we started out doing Mana Tombs and Old Hillsbrad, but we managed to clear Shattered Halls a few weeks back with plenty of wipes along the way.

We've improved a lot since then, and we've been trying out some of the more difficult instances: Botanica, Arcatraz, Steamvaults, and so on. Getting new PvE gear as we go along has made a positive difference for us, and it's certainly added some freshness and fun to the game that's otherwise been a bit lacking in things to do when it isn't raidtime -- certain mob abilities become many times more deadly with two people in the instance, so it really demands a unique level of focus from the group(7k Meteor on Arcatraz final boss's trash, for example!).

Has anyone else had any interest or success with undermanning this kind of content - maybe even 2 or 3-manning heroic dungeons, if the gear level is there?

Edit - Changed the thread title, don't blame me - I just work here!

From the context of your post, I assume iron-manning means doing the instance with as few people as possible? The most I've ever done was intentionally two-man Warbinger Om'rogg on Heroic, with myself as a tank and another Paladin healing.

Whenever he'd switch to the healer, he'd just bubble (or get BOP by myself) while I got aggro back. It took like 10+ minutes, but we got him down eventually.

There are tons of clips on YouTube of a hunter solo'ing various bosses on heroic. Just search 'Hunter versus the world' or something like that.

Well, anything goes, really. Absurd speed runs, undermanning the instance, etc. At 60 my friends and I had a lot of fun trying to do as fast a Baron run in Stratholme as we possibly could -- hopefully there's room for some very fast runs like this with the Zul'Aman timed run component!

Last week I wanted to up the last 2K reputation with thrallmar for new enchants.
As no one wanted to do this instance anymore I went there to farm some trashs solo, and finally a shadow priest join me.

First boss was a joke, but the jelly trashs before him were really fun.

O'mrogg is quite hard with a cloth wearer, but with slow dps it was OK, and Kargath died something like 1s before my last stand ended.

As all in all it was quite easy, and we were willing to test heroics.

As I got shadow resist equipment we went to heroic mana tombs.
Trash were much more harder, specially the ones summoning arcane elementals.
We managed to kill Pandemonius in around 4 or 5 pulls and stopped there.

Third trip was to heroic Ramparts.
First boss was very easy again and we one shoot him.
The road to the bird is quite difficult with some large pulls. Fears and playing with LOS help a lot.
The best we did was killing Vazruden and had the mount around 30% when we gave up and invited a shaman.
The mount fire attacks when he lands are very very powerfull, and my fire resist was only around 150, I think we could do it with 300, maybe next time

Omor was still difficult with 3 people because of all these mana burns,

I soloed SP as a mage, most timeconsuming crap ever. Warlocks have it so much easier with their dots ticking

I've soloed Hellfire Ramparts, Blood Furnace (except 2nd boss, didn't quite manage the 4th wave), and Shattered Halls (except all bosses). I've also soloed significant portions of Slave Pens and Underbog, but didn't have the time to try and clear them (double Shambler packs in UB take about 15 minutes to kill).

SM Cathedral is the highest instance I can successfully pull all at once. ST/BRD/ZF are too nonlinear with healers, else I could probably manage something higher level.

I tried solo kiting a Fel Reaver to Shattrath recently as well. Went great until the guards in Zangarmarsh raped him. Going the other way with the next Fel Reaver, I got within about 15 yards of A'dal before the Shattrath Peacekeepers killed him.

I got really bored one day and solo'd Underbog in my pure PvE tanking gear, but that is about it. The only thing that sucked was having to eat a lot. It was pretty fun to solo the bosses though. I am pretty sure I could do any normal instance with a paladin of my choice behind me.

Steamvaults, Botanica, Shattered Halls and Black Morass all have bosses with DPS checks or add control issues. Did you really think this through or are you just assuming that because you don't take much damage everything would be trivial?

Isn't ironmanning when you do something without leaving for repairs? I think not leaving the instance until it is done and doing it with only what you came in with is how 3/4 of instances are done now anyway.

I think if you're able to achieve a very high level of gear(maybe not even gear currently obtainable for the purpose of having enough dps for some of these bosses, this may be more realistic when Sunwell is released), at least from a Rogue's perspective, it's possible to do add-spawning fights with just two. We probably would handle the Robot boss in Steamvaults the same way as we did the final Shattered Halls boss: Nuke add, dps boss for a few seconds, repeat. It would be a serious act of attrition on your healer's part, but I think if the gear's there, it's doable.

As for Black Morass... I haven't given it a try yet, but I imagine the only way it'd be doable is by killing the Rift Lord in a very short duration while snaring the mobs he spawns, and hoping you can clear the adds by the time the next portal spawns.