Twid

With that stacked of a melee group, I would strongly recommend replacing one mage with a warlock for CoR, and you could feasibly replace the other mage with another lock for CoS to justify the spriest. Of course, you probably would want to drop the resto druid for an ele shaman and just have the paladin solo heal the place.

When the paladin needs to tank the aoe packs, just have the ele shaman wear healing gear.

 

Elerion

There's a surprisingly large amount of incoming damage at times, since you'll be chainpulling and at times doing multiple packs. A solo healer isn't a good idea, I think.

 

Zupal

Has anyone had luck with a Healer/Hunter combo with max NR tank pet and hunter aura
(~200NR)?

Seems plausible but I wasn't sure if the pet tank lacks sufficient NR/hp to make this worthwhile.

I regularly hunter/healer Azuregos (on one computer) but the resist requirements are much much less.

 

sashka

Pre-expansion a priest friend (holy) and myself (prot warrior) did alot of 2-manning, doing all of the 5-man instances plus through emberseer in uBRS (with a spare person to touch the altars in uld and uBRS), one of the things I've always found interesting is how much more you have to understand boss abilities (figuring out how to time banshee MC in strath comes to mind the most). Emboldened by reading about the Rajaxx solo (and because the priest wanted the +healing to gloves form) we headed out to AQ20 this past weekend.

Kurinaxx was a hillarious joke, the fight came down to running in circles to avoid sand blast and just modulating healing after the MS wore off, and interesting thing to note is that he will actually enrage multiple times. On our kill (first pull basically, we had some early screwups because we tried to skip too much trash) he did the normal enrage @50%, it wore off and then he enraged again a couple minutes later, it wore off at 4% so he didn't get a chance for a third.

Rajaxx was fairly simple - we did it the whole even straight with NPCs rather than ninja, we lost 2 NPCs total - one early on because of the "kill xxx" commander, and one to Rajaxx himself at sub 20%, overall very, very easy, for the most part we'd have only 1-2 mobs left in each wave when the next came - the big exception being the one commander that BoP's - he ended up dying after we'd cleaned up the next named, could have probably kept up completly if we hadn't lost the early NPC and I'd made a /assist Androv /cast Devastate macro.

After Rajaxx we went after moam - we learned that the slimes are unduo-able - I could burn them to ~70% in full DPS gear, then I'd get consumed, they'd poison nuke the priest to death and full-heal as they ate me, the obsidians were a joke however with only one person to manadrain. Moam himself was tough, we used the back wall of his area so that I could avoid taking fall damage - we tried outranging but it appears that after breaking out he walks over to be in range of someone before exploding. Eventually we established a rythm - I went full DPS gear, zerker stance and burned him until the first stone form priest nuking as well since Moam would take the mana anyway, we'd get him to ~75%, I'd pick up the elementals, priest would stay at max range, and I'd pop trinkets and cleave them down in defensive, dodging back under the wall just before the explosion and picking Moam back up, I could fairly reliably have only one elemental up when Moam returned and the priest could outrange all the explosions, tricky part was keeping up with healing against the elementals counterspell. From there it was just a slow grind down, our final kill came on attempt that saw him exploding four times, I used a relentless assault flask and two greater arcane pots in tight situations, the other interesting thing to learn was Moam burns 1k mana each time, if you stay under ~900 he will never mana burn, which led to the somewhat hillarious result of multi-proccing clearcasting being a bad thing.

With Moam down I threw out that we should go try one of Ossirians trash, our first pull was meter/shadowbolt with swarmguards - probably the toughest combo for duo and we ended up killing it on the first pull, we checked Ossirian, figured he seemed healable so ran back and finished clearing his room. After several tries (including having the whole room bugged out and crystals stopped blue beaming to debuff him) we decided I needed NR to avoid the stun - I grabbed my Hydross set, threw on a what little extra (green dragon bow and thunderfury) I had on top to try to make up for no totem plus my pvp trinket and we went at it again. Our kill attempt ended up taking just over 25 minutes - once we got in the groove the fight was actually quite simple, I resisted most stuns and would only trinket out if the priest either started close or had CoT on him, non-enraged ossirian hit for very little so the priest could spend most of the time outranging the curse, throwing hots/PoM and spotting crystals, we only had 2 close calls where he enraged for ~1 second each time, once was between autoattacks, the other he got off one swing, the fight ended up coming down to more of a waiting for him to go shadow for the priest to nuke, or nature so TF would do more, turns out I never did the quest for turning in his head, so that was nice to finish off.

After finishing ossirian we went back outside and knocked off 3 greater windstons (1 fire, 2 earth), I really wish we could try the unnerfed versions because as they are they were an utter joke, but should be profitable if we can find people to do the single scepter -> 90g turnins.

The next day we grabbed a few others to knock off the ooze in buru's area and went to work on him. He made Moam look easy - I could easily keep up with spawns and eggs if he followed the priest, but it was a tough kite and eventually an unlucky stack could end it, if he followed me twice in a row the priest would go OOM killing eggs, our best attempt clocked in at 25%, we're going to grab another person or two some other time just to check if the enrage is feasible to 2-man before we bash our head into phase 1 much more - it's doable, but a bit of a luckfest to get through ~12 follows flawlessly.

Overall it was a fun trip, we'll probably farm Kurinaxx + Rajaxx now - they're both easy to try and get the enchanting form and the cash + 10g vend books is worth it. Moam was a bit too tight to reliably kill, and Ossirian just takes forever + has alot of trash.

 

karokajoka

We did AQ20 last night with a group of five:

Prot Warrior (me)
Feral Druid
Warlock
Spriest
Holy Pally

Couple things:

- The slimes are no problem at all, you just need to outrange them. Our first attempt on them, the consume was outhealing the dps from the feral, lock, and spriest. If you stay at range on them, they will just spit poison at you which will be resisted 80% of the time, but they cannot consume since no one is in melee range.

- Buru was easier with five, but we had him bug out on the wall and teleport us. Also, do NOT try to tank him before 20%. His dismember dot was ticking on me for 5k (I'm in SSC / TK / Badge gear).

Overall we found this zone to be almost perfectly tuned to a good five man group. The difficulty level resembled a heroic, and we netted each around 70 gold from boss drops and vendoring the level 60 spell books. Ossirian was the most fun, having the feral off tank and pop out for decurses. Ossirian didn't hit hard enough to matter on me or the feral, but dps was too slow.

Eventually, we just kited him to crystals so we could get him vulnerable to shadow.

 

Grizlor

Tried to 2 man emeriss the other night as arms warrior (in hydross gear) and resto shaman, we got him to 80% after about 10 minutes before wiping to bad luck with sleep/noxious breath non resists, even with capped NR.

This fight is definitely doable, but with the 15 minute debuff after a fail makes the random "haha you lose" possibilities pretty annoying.

 

Ozworkyn

I'm new to Paladin's and their talents, Can anybody explain to me in a nutshell how they are able to (for i.e.) pull entire SM, or 4-5 pulls of same level and still come out on top? I understand Bubble (but which one of them), healing, maybe being prot, and/or bandaging come into serious play here, but I know I'm missing something... mostly because I havent even hit 40 yet, much less outlands or Level 70.

 

• Chicken

Seal of Light and Judgement of Light along with Reckoning provide pretty good amounts of healing; swap in Judgement or Seal of Wisdom for mana regeneration, and if you have a good shield so that you can fully block you get pretty good avoidance too.

I didn't do too much AoE pulling while I was leveling though, but I did solo a bunch of elite quests once I had Ardent Defender simply because the amount of damage I took was so low the amount of healing provided by Seal and Judgement of Light was high enough to keep me up forever. That was back with the old version of Ardent Defender though, with the 50% damage reduction below 20% health, the new version (While generally better) is actually less good for soloing tricks.

At level 70 just good gear makes up a huge chunk of avoidance, and [Figurine of the Colossus] can be an easy way to heal yourself up to full when pulling extremely large amount of mobs with a high enough chance to block.

buff /bʌf/ Pronunciation[buhf]
–verb (used with object)
- to reduce or deaden the force of

 

malthrin

Just as a note, when you see terms you're unfamiliar with, searching them on Wowhead: Thrall-tested, Jaina-approved. will usually pull up the talent or ability in question.

 

Ozworkyn

Thank you Malthrin, sorry :-/

 

Anedris

Basically, with half-decent prot gear you can pull all of SM-Cath and take almost zero damage, because you block every attack, resist 99% of all spells, and blocked attacks do no damage to you. You can use seal/judgement of light to heal up any incidental odds and ends that get through and just consecrate until they all die.

It's kind of fun.

(A prot warrior could probably do this too, although you might need the Kargath trinket to heal yourself, and it would take far far longer to kill everything.)

 

• Chicken

On another note, when soloing the Scarlet Monastery's Cathedral that way, make sure to save Mograine and Whitemane as last mobs. You do not want to be forced to sleep by Whitemane while still having most of the mobs in the Cathedral attacking you, it's unhealthy.

buff /bʌf/ Pronunciation[buhf]
–verb (used with object)
- to reduce or deaden the force of

 

sashka

Interesting on the slimes, we didn't try outranging because prot warrior + holy priest range ability is... lacking, plus even when they were just nuking at range the poison would destroy us due to the stacking DoT component.

From my experience Buru would be easily doable with 3, I could see ayamiss being possible with 3 as well (maybe even 2, in something like a paly/hunter combo, especially if the pet could tank sub 50, which I think it could). Agree on Ossirian, it was very clear that 2 tanks and a healer could easily just stand there and eventually drop him, it would just be very dull. Out of curiosity, how many waves/explosions did you go through on moam? (if any, i could see pure burning him before the first explosion with that group).

 

karokajoka

We actually only had one stone phase on Moam. Our benchmark at 60 with a 20 man raid was to get Moam to 50% when he went to stone, and we dropped him to 40% with the 5 at 70. We had the warlock banish one and we nuked the other two adds before going back to Moam, and he died just as he came out of stone form.

I think he exploded twice on us as well. Once before going stone, and once while in stone. The explosion hits for about 3k, so we just ignored it and went straight with burning on him.

I would agree on Buru with three. Two would be a real challenge, though. I don't think kiting / eggs would overwhelm you, but eventually you'd get screwed on the adds that spawn.

On Ossirian, our shadow priest was hitting for ticks of 70 with Mind Flay when we just tried to tank and spank him. However, if you want to go that route, I would assume melee dps would be most effective. Just tank him where he spawns and you won't have to worry about tornadoes.

The other thing we've taken to doing is working on AQ40, but we can't seem to get past Skeram with less than 20. Everything with him is a joke except for the Mind Control, which is quite annoying when you try to do it with only three tanks. Any ideas on how to avoid the MC? (Shadow Resist gear? Maybe outrange it?)

 

ayb

I don't think the MC is resistable or rangeable. Just have to CC the MC'd person.

 

sashka

The bugs weren't actually an issue so long as they stayed on me (they have some of the most ADD aggro I've every seen) I could easily melee them to death even kiting, it was the problem that with a 2 man you're looking at a tank and a healer, and at ~20k hp, the healer goes OOM quick if they have to chain kill eggs due to the tank getting followed, it's one of those things where it isn't particularly hard to to it once, but having everything go right for the ~12 kites required to hit 20% is just painfull, throwing an extra ranged person (preferably a warlock or hunter I'd say) at the fight would stabalize everything, but defeat part the whole purpose in trying to 2-man.

I agree on skeram - he's like vael in BWL in keeping you from continuing past, then again with the numberous enrages and other, similar mechanics in AQ40 I don't know how small you could get, we cleared skeram, sart, bugs and frank with ~15, and would have probably had huhu easily if we'd had 2 hunters instead of one, and probably would have had her anyway in another couple attempts - all our healers were new to the fight, so they were having issues with silence/soaker assignments.

Emps would be interesting to see how few you could do it with, I'd think the best layout would be something like 2x paly tanks (neither emp is immune to holy, so they can tank both emps, one on each side), 2-4 healers depending how much it takes to keep the paladins up (I could see 2 on melee/1 on caster being possible, but I'm not really sure), then however many DPS it would take to down before enrage, maybe 10 people total if they were geared like the 9-man gruul group?

C'thun would also be interesting to see how low you could go, phase one could dang near be 5-manned I'd think (although it would take forever), mind flay tentacles die almost instantly at 70, and there should be plenty of time to kill claws and still have at least dots ticking away on him. Phase 2 would probably take a few more to keep up with all spawns + 1 person in the stomach, and again, would take forever.

Of course the suck that is post-emps trash would take more than either c'thun or emps, and it might be tricky convincing people to come down just to clear trash and then zone while you underman the big bad. It's interesting how many bosses can likely be done with massivly fewer people then their associated trash.

 

karokajoka

Yeah, we ran into that with Vael. Tried to ten man him and got him to 7% before the wipe. BA just eats too many people for you to underman it. Interestingly, I was able to survive BA while tanking him. I got lucky with a Last Stand / Nightmare Seed combo, and big heals from a couple Pallies.

Razorgore with 4 or 5 is hella fun for a tank as well. One Orb Controller, one tank, one healer, and one / two people killing mages makes the fight easy.

We also wanted to go underman Noth, but the Stoneskin Gargoyles present a bit of a problem. With seven people in the raid, you can't kill them in time - or at least we couldn't.

 

Ja7us

Myself and a few friends have set a goal for ourselves of 3-manning (or attempting to 3-man) every heroic instance. So far, with very little trouble, we've done all three hellfire instances and all three coilfang instances. The toughest fight so far was the Black Stalker, who I believe we got on our second try; everything else was either a one-shot or a wipe due to something dumb and avoidable. We'll be moving on to Manatombs next, and I expect that to be much more interesting.

 

Lookit

It is very easy to control who gets MC'd, at least. It's simply the closest person to the boss. Pre-BC, we just had our holy pallies equip gear with only +Heal and no +Spell Dmg (obviously no longer possible) and unequip their weapon. Then they'd just stand directly in the center of the boss and all melee would stay at max melee range. When the MC hit, the pally would typically drop a harmless consecrate or heal himself a few times before getting CC'd. The only harm was if the pally put Blessing of Sacrifice on the boss. With a 40-man raid pummelling away, the pally's health would drop pretty fast.

 

Chirality

That used to work, I'm sure...but they recently (in 2.0) changed all similar target-nearest abilities to a true 'target random within range'. Moroes' blind, for example. Or Capernian's Conflag (which has a small minimum range).

Thus I doubt this would work any longer.

 

sashka

Yea, trash requiring more people than bosses is annoying - it's hard enough getting a raid to do old-world stuff most of the time, needing them to clear trash and then wanting to drop them for the actual boss makes it even worse (especially in BWL where certain trinkets are STILL highly desired).

Tho it raises the question, which bosses in 40-mans are undermannable?
MC - doable with 3 or less across the board
Ony - 2-manable, possibly soloable
World:
green dragons sans taerar are 2-mannable with spell reflects and good positioning, taerar comes down to how many it takes to kill adds before unbanish, a stacked 5 for sure, maybe fewer
Azuregos - 2 for sure (tank + healer), possibly a single tank druid shifting out to heal himself, or is there a gearpoint where a hunter could heal his pet through the whole fight?
BWL:
Razor has been 3, Vael minimum would probably be some sort of stacked combination of 1 tank + 1 healer and lots of rogues and killing him before he ate the raid?, dunno
Broodlord -> Chrom: seem semi-reasonable to 5-man, probably smaller in many cases, trash is a different issue however
Nef - 10?, nef himself could be held with 2 paladins I think (1 tank, 1 healy, class calls are irrelevant, fears would be annoying, but he'll follow the tank so nobody should die to it), so it comes down to what does it take to do the drakanoids at the start and 20%?

AQ40:
Skeram - issues with MC and tanking, if it was anything OTHER than earthshock i'd say warlock tank it, as is I don't see it possible with less than 10-15, and that with luck
Bug trio - keeping Yauj from healing is the real issue here, 10 should be doable, not sure how much more you could cut down
Sartura - first fight where enrages crop up, still, 10 would probably be enough something like, ~3 tanks, 2 healers and heavy physical DPS
Frank - I could see this with a single prot paly tank (assuming mortal wounds on him rolls the same as it does on kurinaxx, I don't think he hits hard enough to kill the tank between rolls, and nothing but him and snakes should hit hard enough to get through +block value), so 1-2 healers, and ~2-3 DPS to keep up with snakes would be sufficient, it would take awhile tho.
Huhu - The sleep+silence makes under-manning tricky since it knocks people out of the fight, and it'll go long enough you probably need 2 tanks to reset stacks, plus the enrage, I'd say 10 would be about the minimum, and you'd still need a bit of luck
Emps - See earlier, 2 paly tanks + 1 DPS on bugs, ~3-4 healers, and then whatever DPS it takes to kill before enrage, call it 10?
Viscidous - Unfortunatly never done this fight is there an enforced timer on frost, if not that would be a major constraint, if not, you could eventually do him with a fairly small number I think
Ouro - Like visc, haven't done, but so long as you could hold the healing, seems fairly undermannable
C'thun - I could maybe see this with 5, 10 for sure

Naxx:
Patch - 1 tank + enuf healers to hold him + minimum range DPS to kill in timer?, pretty much pure number crunch rather than fight mechanic
Grob - His enrage is excessivly lengthy, so could probably do fairly small, just need enough to keep up with spawns and kill before enrage,
Gluth - A bit too much going on to underman by too much I think
Thadius - One of the hardest to underman since you're being double-hit with lack of people to stack buffs, but on paper comes down to the same numbers game as patch
Anub - 1 tank, 1 hunter, 1 healer, and a DPS warrior on spawns? if war + hunter was enuf to keep up with spiders the tank could eventually kill him, no other major fight mechanics to worry about, so only additions would be more DPS
Faerlina - enrage + lots of mobs, I'd say 10 might be possible, but I'm really not sure
Maexxna - tank + healer + 3 on walls + 2 to peel people off walls, and enrage is still scary even at 70, 10-15 minimum probably
Noth - probably 5-mannable as you were thinking, if you could get to him
Heigan - No clue what the minimum number to hold down a side would be, plus the DPS race at the end, at least 10 I'd guess, probably more like 20, more of a gearcheck than a bodies game tho
Loatheb - this was done with 5 at 60, I'd guess 3 (war + spreistx2) would be doable, don't know if you could cut it down to war+spriest only
Razuvius - the brute-force minimum would probably be a tank, 2 priests and however many more healers it takes to keep up an add - paly OT's adds in a corner, priests alternate MC tanking with healing, he dies eventually, depending how they hit might even be able to have a paly OT adds while healing
Heigan - 2, tank + cure, this was done by accident at 60 after most of the raid had failed at dancing, would be the height of tedium to do it 100%->0 tho
Horsemen - Ugh, you'd need at least 4 tanks (maybe cheese 3 if you just blow up the first add HARD, but that's difficult to do with few people so... bleh), plus other rotations... we'll go with "alot" compared to a normal underman
Saph + Kel - I don't have enough experience with the fight to even venture a guess, MC's on kel would be a real killer tho

I find the theorycraft almost as interesting as the actual fight, it's like getting extra raid encounters trying to do some of these sans people!

 

Ja7us

Well if you enjoy the theorycraft for an encounter where you have fewer players, what about one where there are more mobs?

A very rare instance bug can sometimes lead to every mob in the instance spawning twice. I've seen it twice, ever; once in Stratholme and once in Scarlet Monastery. Every mob in the instance spawns double, including bosses, and if you can kill them, each copy drops loot. I'm sure everyone has heard tales of the double-spawned MC, or the Quad Emperors in AQ40.

How many double-spawned L70 raid bosses can be killed double? I'm willing to bet quite a lot of them... but it's really a very interesting proposition, and a lot of fights gain significant depth.

Ex: Double Maiden has the potential to cast two Repentances slightly out of sync, and effectively 4k nuke the range and keep them stunned for almost 20 seconds if the timing is bad; Hydross has two copies that have to be moved across the like together (mass AoE) or separately (keeping track of separate timers); every boss with an enrage has to be killed in double time; even Shade of Akama would become a brutal gear check, since two shades beating on akama would mean you would have to have somewhere in the neighborhood of triple DPS to win.

What bosses could still be beaten? Attumen, obviously, and many other tank-and-spank types could be won simply with patience. Some would simply be too hard; I doubt double Illidari Council would be possible simply because the overlapping raid damage would roll up instant-kill so often it would be hard to take it to the finish.

A lot of fights exist in that nebulous interim, though. Double gruul would be a DPS test but possibly not too challenging with T6 DPS; you could just double tank them, and one copy would just die before the stacks were high enough to threaten the tank; then it's just a matter of killing the second one before he becomes unhealable. Double Maulgar would be an extreme coordination and organization check that could lead to a lot of fun min-maxing; One moonkin on both shamans, one mage on each krosh, two tanks and some warlocks handling both Olms; maybe an overgeared feral double tanking both maulgars; and then enough DPS that you can split them into two groups and still burn Blindeye's shield. And the beauty of it is that almost every raid in the game can be theorycrafted like this, and a lot of them get exponentially more interesting.

Magtheridon is my personal favorite (if it would even work; there's no guarantee that both Mags would be banished when you clicked cubes, which I suppose would make it impossible). If not, though; you have 10 channelers to tank and burn, and they all get buffs every time you kill one. The final channelers would be sporting 6, 7, 8, 9-stacked haste and damage buffs and would be incredibly brutal. Not only that, but with so many channelers to burn down (and the comparative loss of DPS from having more tanks and healers to manage them), both Mags would most likely break free and start quaking and novaing before you've finished killing them. Oh, and you need double teams of clickers, since they'll cast blast nova at separate times.

 

Krandoth

Prot can AoE grind sort of similarly with the shield from sporregar rep and a shield spike.

Edit: Same principle anyway, as it's not as good.

 

Soraxis

One good way to do this would be to bring two feral druids into an instance, have one tank the other heal and when hes oom switch, rinse and repeat.

Not the same as 70 dungeons of course, but Ive done it easily while leveling up a druid, same principle can apply if you have enough tanking gear and a good healing staff to switch in.

"Time is like a monkey, you think its there and then its gone eating a banana."

 

karokajoka

We ran the numbers on Patch for 10. If you figure on six dps'ers, you need them to pull in the neighborhood of 1,500 dps to get him down before the enrage.

We also tried to just outright tank on Instructor. Unbalancing hit me for around 17k, which is bad, but not necessarily a killing blow. My gear has improved since then, but I was running something like 19k buffed HP and 17k armor or so.

I'm now at 22k hp buffed and nearly 18k armor. We've also considered having our feral druid tank grab him.