So, with the new patch, a lot of classes (particularly tank classes) got some pretty substantial changes, and at least for druids it's opened up a lot of ironmanning potential that wasn't there before. Just the other day I soloed Shattered Halls without much difficulty at all, and Steamvault, though much trickier, went down shortly thereafter. Anyone had any new 3.0 ironmanning experiences?

We 4-5 manned most of kara, and it was a complete joke. Aran with 4 was a little tricky though, as solo healing through the elementals and his damage was still a bit rough. Hoping to try 5 man ZA sometime this weekend.

I made it to the first boss of nonheroic sethekk solo on my prot warrior alt, and got him to 15% without much of a plan. If I had used my cooldowns better (and possibly had a healthstone) I could have done it.

Postpatch stuff I've done along these lines. The L70 mage was mostly in S2-4 PVP gear, the stuff you can get without arnea ratings. The others were in leveling greens.

Scholomance with L69 paladin and L70 mage on autofollow occasionally cleaning up trash packs. Easy. Even did the baron timed event. The mind controlling ziggarat boss was a problem, solved by the mage committing suicide-by-paladin to get it down to one player vs boss. Mind control sucks when two-manning things. Scholomance with L70 mage and mid-60ish priest on autofollow...a bit more challenging. Some of the stuff there still hurts on cloth before it can be burned down, and there are places where silence and spell interrupts happen. Had the priest not been dual-boxed but actually played, it would have been easy.

Normal Ramparts with L70 mage and L62 discipline priest (not dualboxed, 2 players). The last fight was hard, the aggro switches on transition when dragon landed were a PITA to manage. The rest was mostly being careful on the pulls.

Normal Blood Furnace with a L70 mage and L66 paladin dualboxing, one active at a time, the other on autoattack or afk. Paladin did the pulling, the mage would open up and put pally on autoattack when the pally had blown most of her instant cooldowns and established a little threat. The first boss was hard due to mind control issues. The mage had to kill both the boss and the paladin. The second boss we wiped after clearing the fourth wave but the fourth wave died from DOT damage and the pally released, returned and soloed the boss. (paranoia about reset meant the mage did not release). The main issue there was mana....while it lasted could keep up with the waves without a healer. When it ran out, we got into trouble quick. Skipped third boss as quests didn't require it and the fight dynamics looked to have some of the same issues that gave us trouble with the first two bosses.

Mostly I've been too busy trying to get the paladin ready for Wrath to do much in the dungeons. I think we could have done a lot of the Zangramarsh and Terokkar dungeons two-man, but had no real incentive to do so as didn't need the rep or anything in them.

With the buff to Bear damage I found it incredibly easy to solo Slave Pens and Blood Furnace to complete Outland Dungeonmaster - Achievement - World of Warcraft (as I believe they are the only 2 dungeons without an associated quest to kill their end boss). Granted I am in near full Brutal/Guardian, I can imagine it easily being doable in S2.

I'm quite surprised you mentioned being able to do Shattered Halls with little difficulty. Back when I was trying to farm it for the Savagery Enchant, me and a friend (combat rogue in near full S3) tried to duo it but got stuck on Grand Warlock Nethekurse, being unable to kill him in time once he began his whirlwind.

Yeah its hardly impressive, but we've 5 manned kara, and we 6 manned ZA and got all four timers (With 4/6 having done za like, once before.) I'm pretty sure both are 3 mannable, though it would be slow. Heroics any tank+healer in good gear should be doable.

*edit* Any normal instance is also a joke, and has been for some time. Like damn near a year ago, 70 holy priest, 70 Shadow Priest, 67 shadow priest, and 70 elemental shaman did all of normal shattered halls. Now I imagine like any two man combo with some sort of heals/aoe could solo it pretty easy.

Nethekurse and Kargath were about equally hard I would say. The trick with Nethekurse was 1) I wore near-cap SR, which meant I resisted most deathcoils (and his Dark Spin is part shadow, part physical as well) and 2) I burned like crazy through the whirlwind but didn't get too aggressive. If you back out of melee you can cast heals on yourself for the duration of barkskin and not take too much damage. 2t5 is also incredible for any sort of ironmanning.

Remember that Dark Spin's main damage source is its melee range physical tick, so evasion on your rogue friend is your strongest weapon there. You can also tranquility for big heals if you've got multiple people in there.

Steamvault was the real challenge of the two, particularly the first boss. I had to resort to jumping off the edge into the water and healing; her hurricane is just brutal, and the ~5 second stun doesn't help either. Kalithresh was actually pretty straightforward, it was just a question of mustering enough DPS to kill each tank. What I did was to make sure I had 100 rage going into each tank (which means just flat autoattacking the boss off the pull, plus maybe a demo roar) and then rotating cooldowns and hoping for lucky crits on tank 4.

Tank 1: Enrage + Badge of Tenacity
Tank 2: Berserk
Tank 3: Enrage
Tank 4: Badge of Tenacity
Tank 5: Enrage
Tank 6: Berserk if it's up (should be either up or close, otherwise cross your fingers).

When a tank was due, I would just spam click it, and as soon as it enabled I'd mangle to get it on cooldown, lacerate+cooldowns, and go at it with maul, mangle, swipes like crazy.

The only fights that will give you pause with 3 people are Illhoof, Prince and to a lesser extent Curator. Pre-patch we were able to 3-man everything up to Prince except Illhoof, and prince was reliably ending up in the 8-12% range before we were overwhelmed by p3 infernals. I'm sure postpatch he wouldn't be too difficult. Illhoof, on the other hand, is hard like a motherfucker. Higher postpatch DPS on the chains would help a lot though, especially when your DPS gets sacrificed.

Illhoof seemed a joke. I have 8k hp (on my shaman) and was in chains for damn near the entire length (only the prot warrior switched to attack them). Our aoe was all the prot warrior and my fire elemental totem. Curator we killed in one evo both times, and our dps was hardly high (I ran about 1100, priest about 800, feral druid about 5-600). Prince was easy, though I almost went oom as we switched the priest for a hunter.

Chess was the hardest thing for us the first time. Wiped once, so decided to control the king, and the two rooks. Then have the people moving pawns grab a healer and the queen, and that strat seemed to work rather well. Aran we killed the elementals, and it wasn't hard at all.

Just soloed normal Mechanar as enhancement shaman. Two hour and 26wipe but cleared whole place. Feral spirits are wonderfull addition. Those puppies can stun and taunt. Also those heal like maniacs. Maelstorm weapon is another very powerfull ability when soloing. Intant heal about onve every 7-10s just keep me live. I tryed Onyxia and managed to get it to 50% but second phase was pain. Too slow but still hectic. I also tryed Kurinaxx but enrage at 30% was too hard for me. Kurinaxx healing debuff don't work for self healing and maybe some other class can do it as Shaman I met my limit.

Does Pathaleon not use mind control if you're the only one in combat. then?

Correct, mobs will not MC if there is only one valid target.


I soloed the some of the 5-man quests in SMV today as Ret (the 72 Fire Elemental (you do have 3 NPCs help), 72 Zuluhed, and the 70 Dragon needed for Gorefiend's Armor).

While they don't have their health/damage decreased, it was doable with Ret dps + healing abilities + plate armor. I am sure a Feral could do these as well. Only the first one took me a few tries (when I did it I swapped to healing weapon/shield when I had aggro so I would heal until the NPCs got aggro back).


Assuming the 70 heroics don't get unnerfed, I would guess many classes would be able to iron-man all of them at 80.


Edit: I just realized a Ret could solo Onynia. First get Crit immune (PvP gear), need 5.6% crit removal. Then use Seal of Wisdom for phase 1 and 3 and Seal of Light for phase 2 (due to many whelps).

It will take about 25 minutes, but you do get 200g.

A Hunter has done it, lots of pathing exploiting though.

Hunter Vs. World 9 - Solo SV Heroic By Dysphoria

Onyxia does too much damage, 3.6k flame breath on a full protection warrior, so about 4-4.2k on normal paladin, that's a lot, and she does it pretty frequently. also her melee isn't a complete joke, 1.5k + some other stuff, I really doubt anyone can solo her at the moment.

Onyxia has been soloed pre 3.0 multiple times by druids/paladins/warlocks.

Her melee is absolutely a joke, as is her flame breath. By far the hardest part of the fight is phase two. I got her to around 45% on my first try ever, and the gear I was using could have certainly been optimized. It took too long and isn't really my idea of fun, but it is easily doable.

This has been done by a Paladin pre-3.0

Legit Solo Onyxia By llamacar

We did 2 clears of Karazhan with 3 people, the most difficult encounter was The Chess event. No joke.

Having done this, how did you find chess difficult? Just have the healers spam heal the king and it's a joke.

I've done it twice, though not after the latest mana regen nerfs. I used a damage seal instead of SoW/SoL, since self-healing needs weren't very high - you can generally keep yourself up with the AoW procs

The main challenge is to survive the boredom and keep yourself topped off. You'll occasionally take 3k flame breaths and cleaves, followed by a fear and knockback right when you try to heal. (Murphy's Law guarantees that you'll have no AoW procs at just that moment)

Probably not that impressive as all I did was clear trash, but a frost mage is really quite nice for soloing (humanoids especially).

I was ~3k short of Lower City exalted the other day, it was in the middle of the night so no one around to get a group with. So I went to Shadow Labyrinth and started clearing the trash just to see how far I could get. You can easily clear the whole first room and some of the packs in the second room. You can also avoid the big overseers and sneak into the third room (with the Ogre boss), but I found that it's generally not worth it timewise. It's better to just run out and reset the instance and do the first room again.

The first room is about 300 rep and only takes 10-15 minutes to clear, it's far from ideal in terms of reputation per hour but you don't need anyone else around to do it, and you get all the greens for yourself :>

I'm also lacking some Keepers of Time reputation so I went to Old Hillsbrad Foothills this morning and even if the packs are bigger with 4 mobs compared to 2-3 in Shadow Labyrinth it's not hard either. Old Hillsbrad is a bit more annoying with far more "hunter" mobs but it's not a big issue. Clearing all of Tarren Mill (before heading to the castle where Thrall is) and clearing all the barracks and summoning the first boss was quite easy and gave a fair bit of reputation. The mobs are lvl ~66 also which helps a bit.

Going to try Thrallmar and Shattered Halls when I get home today, unless I find a real group of course. :> It should be doable also, the only annoyance I can see is the 5 mob packs with hunter mobs and I believe the legionary mobs are immune to slowing effects. But with Water Elemental and all the rest of the tricks up a frost mage's sleeve it shouldn't be impossible. Far more entertaining than doing normal instances!

I can't imagine soloing any bosses as mage though, we have way too little health armor and basically we're dead if they're not kiteable through frost's slowing effects. But all slowable trash is fair game, even easier if they are humanoids.

Just did Durnholde Nonheroic last night with the following team, triple-boxed with default UI (ie, at any given moment, only one character had a player pushing buttons. The other two were afk or in the case of the tank, just autoattacking)

All chars L70
Protadin with unbuffed 13k health, 14.5k armor, uncrittable, about 40% passive avoidance without holy shield/redoubt running/proccing.
Fire mage with S2-4 PVP gear, in her "Stam suit" not her "DPS suit"
Discipline priest with 4/4 undead slayer gear and crafted tailored epics

The Durnholde trash were pretty much all about CCing the wardens until everything else was dead and then fighting them solo. They sucked. AOE fear and scattershot is tough on small parties. Groups were otherwise gathered up by paladin with shield, hammer and consecrate, then burned down by mage. In the pull with two wardens, fearwarding the mage was key. That was still a messy pull though, the tank died because the mage was chasing wounded critters around to finish them off and the healer ran behind a building out of LOS of everyone.

The Lieutenant was pretty trivial. I think I just opened with pally, blew the pally cooldowns and dps'd it down with the mage, without pulling aggro even though the pally was feared etc a couple times.

The first half of the escort quest wasn't bad. Letting Thrall beat up one guy by himself while burning down the others let us repair health/mana bars. Althought the mage died on last trash pull and we had to rez her while the pally and Thrall fought the 2nd boss+adds for a while alone. Luckily they hit like little girls and I was able to get organized, top off the pally with the healer while the mage was eating and then the mage killed stuff one by one.

None of the waves leading up to the inn were hard. The trick to the dragonkin waves was to shield-gather the melees and run over and stun the spellcaster, then hammer/consecrate and have the mage burn the neatly gathered group down. The Epoch hunter is a PITA, took several tries, final one had all dead but mage, mage at 200ish health. There are not enough cycles to deal with the impending doom DOT and you need to scatter the 3 characters to avoid aoe damage. The mage needed to use both invis and ice block to dump threat, the pally needed all her tricks to mitigate damage when the healer died due to inattention/inability to cleanse the dots.

Had we have 3 players present the 3 could have done it easily. Doing it with two would have been tough. The tank would be essential. An active priest could likely heal through the much longer fights that would ensue without the mage. An active pally tank might be able to heal himself more while holding threat so the mage could focus on raw DPS, but the wave attacks might have been hard to restore health bars/mana bars. If anyone has done it with just one character I'm very impressed.

Gave up trying to solo Onyxia as a hunter at 70. P1 and P3 are quite doable, although it gets a bit intense at times because she seems to have a pretty hefty de-aggro in her knockback, which leads to having to Misdirect and Feign on cooldown to avoid pulling aggro off the pet.

The Whelps in P2 are quite doable too, however the problem for me was that I couldn't heal myself with anything other than bandage and potion. I could probably round up a few more items to heal myself with, but I don' t see it working with the number of fireballs I take during the phase, and how long it lasts.

Video of a P1->p2 attempt up at Hunter tries to solo Onyxia at 70 | Veoh Video Network if anyone wants to pick up trying where I gave up.

The sad thing is that I'm quite sure it would be doable at 70 for most or all classes if fire protection potions didn't incur potion sickness - and the achievement could have been left in Fight would be quick too, about 10 minutes per phase.

2 manned her with a holy priest as a consolation prize (i.e. covering up the repair bills) in 20 minutes instead, pet tanked. Again, only issue was keeping the priest below the pet's threat in p1 and p3.