Ja7us

The videos linked above (or at least the ones I watched) don't have 2-piece T5, just a regular Feral druid hurting things. It's a nice little bonus, but you definitely don't need it to do well in a solo situation.

 

Mideci

You can't, however, 5-man Kael, Vashj or Karathress due to encounter complexity. You can't 5-man VR due to the time limit and the threat reduction mechanism (putting everyone in melee to take the orbs out of the equation with the threat reducers seems impossible, never mind that there'd still be a ton of healing to do and not enough dps). Leotheras also has a timer and a ton of lost dps time.

Maybe I'm missing something here and you could 5-man FLK, VR and/or Karathress, but I'm very unclear how you'd actually pull that off. Kael (due to the need to create some separation of at least Capernian and Thaladred from "whatever else is going on", the mind control potentially taking out a huge chunk of your mini-raid over and over) and Vashj (due to the real estate and the need to separate killing of striders and naga, and the need to relay cores) seem completely impossible to 5-man.

 

urotas

You can 4-man Karathress without significant problems. You simply have one person tanking them all, and kill the priest first. The hardest part is actually interrupting those heals without a cast time slow, but it's doable even with only one interrupter. A warlock would make it even easier since their curse of tongues wouldn't be removed by the poison cleansing totem. We did Karathress with Unholy Death Knight, Survival Hunter, Resto Druid, Holy Paladin. We also 3-manned Hydross, and 5-manned Leotheras and Lurker. The Leotheras and Lurker fights were easy enough with 5 to probably be doable with 3-4 people without problems too. I didn't even use fire resistance for Leotheras beyond Mark of the Wild, though that's largely from being able to stack anti-magic cooldowns for the later parts of the demon phase. Those chaos blasts still do some heavy damage when you have close to 20 stacks of the debuff.

Testing out Hyjal got as to Azgalor with 5 people, but the dooms proved impossible with such a small group. We also tested out Void Reaver, but him being immune to poisons and diseases cut my and the hunter's damage by a lot. We got him below 50% before the enrage with just 2 people dpsing, so Void Reaver should be easily doable with 1 tank, 2-3 dps and 1 healer as long as the tank isn't a death knight. Solarian trash proved impossible to clear with a small group however, as the trash would just chain mindcontrol the entire group again and again.

From what I've seen you can do almost any normal T5 or T6 boss with 5 people or less. Only the special fights like Azgalor, Gorefiend, Bloodboil etc. would be impossible or at least very hard.

 

Mideci

Fascinating info then... I didn't believe you could tank all the mobs on Karathress together, but apparently you can. I'm also surprised dps is high enough to get Leotheras in time, but I don't doubt you. I'm still not clear on how you extrapolate that Void Reaver is doable with 5 people when 3 are dps when you got him to 50% before the enrage. Was your execution that troublesome you could double dps the next go?

And, this still puts Vashj on Kael on the no list. The core relay on Vashj while also killing enough elementals phase 3 is possible while also kiting the strider is way more than 5 people. And Kael, aside from the fact that Thaladred is still going to require kiting in phase 3, Kael has mind control, the special weapons are still almost surely needed (and might represent a dps drop?), etc. Again, I don't see it with 5.

 

Harne

I agree that Kael is probably not possible with only five people. I have attempted it with seven (eventually adding 3 more people for the easy kill) and the mind control frequently caused a wipe by getting the tank disoriented due to losing the staff aura.

Another fight that is quite difficult for five people is Maulgar. We had no end of problems with hexing and deathcoils and had to add a couple of people to pull it off. I imagine it can probably be done with five with the right group makeup, but we found that fight to be considerably more difficult than expected. The shaman's knockback seems to play havoc with aggro and somebody important always ended up getting hexed at the worst possible time. An ideal group would probably be something like four shapeshifted druids and a mage.

 

Ja7us

You can solve this particular problem by tanking him with a druid, who can provide the staff buff for himself.

 

urotas

A disease immune mob cuts back my damage to around 50-60% of what it normally is. Our survival hunter was using a scorpid for the attempt as we didn't remember VR was immune, and she also lost Lock and Load procs as well as 10% steady shot damage from the glyph from not being able to use Scorpid Sting. If 2 gimped people can bring half of his health down before the enrage, 2-3dps + tank should be more than enough bring him down before the enrage. I was probably a bit unclear on our group setup for Void Reaver. We only had 3 people for him with an unholy death knight, survival hunter and resto druid. Adding 2 extra people should make the fight relatively easy.

I agree Kael'thas and Vashj are probably beyond a 5-man group at least for the moment. For Vashj getting through phase2 would be the difficult part. One tank could tank all the naga, but then you'd need 1-2 dps for Striders, ~2 dps for elementals and however many extra you need to catch tainted elementals in time. 10 people should be definitely doable, but it would be interesting to try with 7-9

 

Gaj

On Heroic MgT Delirissa, it looks like you burned her down before the adds. Is that the recommend strat for this fight? I'm tempted to give it a shot on my mostly blue/heroic geared feral alt.

 

Schnappi

I can confirm that 10 manning Vashj is indeed very much doable. The size of the area and LoS are annoying for healing though.

 

Open

For me by far the easiest is burning her down first. With the Maul Glyph & Berserk if she doesn't die within a short period of time, something else next to her will. Keep the focus on her and try and catch a heal with Bash and/or Feral Charge and you should be set. If you get a Shaman healer be prepared for a more drawn out fight, however. Rooting the shaman then losing the Priestess might let you squeak out a kill before roots expires, as well.

 

Pyros

I'm wondering if you need that many people, couldn't a DK tank all the nagas and also the striders while kiting around, and only have one person applies slow/curse of exhaustion on the striders, who would also take elementals that get through and the nagas and stand near the pillars to click when he has orb, leaving you with 1(2?) healer for the tank, and the rest as DPS to kill elems fast. You'd only need a few ranged DPS too, something like 2hunters covering a huge area using pet. Seems like it could be done with Unholy or Frost DK tank, Holy paladin, Affliction lock in the middle, 2 Hunters and maybe one or 2 more DPS depending on how hard elementals are at 80, but I doubt they're that hard.

 

Mysticum

You are right. The first time I watched it, it looked like Regrowth instant + Nourish. But of course the quality, and the incredible speed made it hard to recognize. I will def try this out when 3.0.8. goes live. Seems very doable for me, and I really want to do Maiden as well. Stay tuned for progress

 

Lucinde

I think the main thing here is that phase 2 would take an unreasonably large amount of time, which would cause you to get way too many striders up. Even if you do a flawless phase 2, you'll get you 4 striders and 6 naga's. I honestly don't think a single tank can kite 4 striders and tank 6 naga's without getting screwed by an AoE fear at some point. And then you got like 10 mobs alive, you dunk the 4th core. Your tank needs to pick up Vasjh. Vasjh does roots, AoE fear. Vasjh does her shock thing, tank stunned, clothie gibbed, 10 adds randomly running. You need two tanks.

Killing elementals won't be hard, but you still need 2-3 GCD's to do it and you'll spend a disproportional amount of time running around. I realize that at 70 a hunter could solo a side, but that was without having to actually handle the core himself and with a healer nearby, in LoS and at range. With mentioned setup, the tainted's poison will murder you as it still ticks for 1500 a second and on top of it I can't see how a single player can handle two sides from a logistics point of view. The DPS is not the problem, it's all the moving.

You'd be looking at at least 6 dps people just to handle all the portions of the fight and then 2 healers, one of which has to be able to cleanse poison. Even then I guess a single ranged dps will be hard-pressed to handle a full stairs section and also dps the tainted's, pick up the core, wait for someone to throw it to, then run back up and actually dunk the core (or pass it on depending on which generators are still up) and still keep the amount of elementals that reach vasjh to an acceptable level. 5% each doesn't sound like a lot, but it also affects her special attacks and we may be level 80, 3 active static charges at +100% are going to hurt no matter what. And then there's the semi-hard enrage from the poison bats.

I'd be surprised if it could be done with less than 10.

 

urotas

A death knight tank can kite the striders while tanking the naga, but things are going to get very hectic if you have 4-5 naga, 3-4 striders and Vashj all attacking the tank at the start of phase3. Vashj''s Shock Blast and Entangle would alllow any remaining striders to reach the tank resulting in near permanent chain fearing. The nagas also use hamstring very often, which makes kiting the striders much harder unless strong slows like Chains of Ice are used.

Chains of ice works wonders on the striders, but there's a limit to how many striders you can keep effectively chained while still doing any aoe damage on the naga and striders. Chains of Ice would allow nearly uninterrupted ranged dps on one strider, so one dps on them should be enough to kill each strider before the next one spawns while still taking care of any loose elementals.

That would make it
1 tank on Nagas, Striders and Vashj
1 ranged dps killing striders, contributing damage on the naga when no striders present, and taking care of any loose elementals.
2 healers, might need 3
2 dps (hunters) for elementals and tainted elementals. Might need 3

Elementals hardly have any health anymore, so they're pretty easy to kill as long as you can reach them. The hard part would be getting everywhere in time to kill the tainteds. Hunters would have an advantage as they could simply target the tainted elementals through targeting macros, and send their pet ahead with dash. A BM hunter pet could probably solo an elemental by itself too. Doing it with 1 healer would be pushing it, especially as the healers would likely need to help with handling cores. There's no spot where you could reach everyone, so even 2 healers they'd need to do a lot of running around to keep everyone healed.

As long as the striders are taken care of in time, tanking Vashj with a lot naga shouldn't be a problem. Tanks can do many things now that just weren't doable at lvl 70. Not only is the aoe damage of all tanks a lot better now, you can survive much more. For example on Anetheron I tanked Anetheron with 4-5 infernals up constantly. My own aoe damage was enough to finish off the fifth infernal each time before the 6th one spawned. The naga on Vashj are still only lvl 70, so their damage is more than managable with just one tank. The striders are a huge problem though, and kiting a strider while tanking Vashj would be extremely risky.

 

Pyros

Yeah I forgot some aspects of the fight, like the fact you actually had to kill striders, that they weren't despawning. I wasn't counting on chains of ice to kite them though, but the affliction lock to exhaustion curse them and do some dps at the same time(spread DPS), while the DK would just run around, dropping DnD every cooldown for range/AE threat, and keeping some icy touch/death coils into the striders to keep them on himself. One healer might be too little though, but to be honest I can't exactly picture the size of the room. I was thinking of a holydin because he can beacon the tank, then just run around healing people, assuming they're in beacon range, but then again it might not always be the case depending on the size of the room. However in phase3, correct me if I'm wrong, but can't Vashj be ranged tanked anyway? I mean her damage output is much higher, but you don't actually need to be static to tank her, meaning you could keep kiting striders right? Also I forgot one detail about Striders, were they hitting insanely hard, or was it only the chain casting fear that made them untankable? A DK could lichborne for 15secs of fear immunity(as well as 25%miss) to burst all the striders down once vashj spawn, with vashj misdrected/DnDed to him. Also I'm wondering, if the water elems are such low hps, couldn't you just kill them as they reach the upper platform instead of having to camp down the stairs, making healing much easier, and only have one BM hunter with like a warp stalker pet to kill the tainted.

It seems like an interesting fight to underman though, and I guess Kael could be interesting to underman too. Most other fights are trivialized by current gear, but those ones based on execution are still challenging for a small group.

With that said, I think you could get 2T5 without killing either vashj or kael, there's still 3bosses, and if you follow the advices in this thread you can make decent 5mans to kill them.

 

• Chicken

In case anyone's interested, I finally got around to uploading my video of soloing Big Bad Wolf somewhere:

Karazhan: Big Bad Wolf solo

Sulfuron Harbinger is also definitely soloable as Paladin, his adds run themselves out of mana fairly easily, and also keep themselves out of mana as their DoTs cost less mana than their heal does.

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

 

◊ Sarutobi

For Ayamiss you can actually reset the stacks by running aroumd the corner outside of her room on the Buru side. She will not reset or evade back to full health.

 

SeanDamnit

For the achievment whores out there -
Now that 3.08 is out and reputation gain for old world factions is a LOT easier, I wanted to ask if anyone had any recommendations or tricks for solo/low manning rep grinds for some of the factions. For example, I know one trick to get Cenarion Circle rep is to to the Rajaxx event up til Rajaxx himself then wipe or reset it somehow and repeat.

Anyone have any similar tricks for Hydraxian Waterlords, Brood of Nozdormu, or Zandalar Tribe?

Card carrying member of the Inapropriately in Love with Hilary Duff Society.

"Yeah, well, if we could all get what we want I would be eating dinner out of Hilary Duff's skull right now" - Salabesh

 

Xelopheris

Hydraxian doesn't have fast enough respawns. You can clear the trash then reset the instance repeatedly up to a certain point, but once you're going on boss rep, you just have to clear it weekly. Brood of Noz is the same thing -- so much rep from trash, but after Neutral you only get it off of bosses. Same for Zandalar.

 

Grahamiam

Any shamans soloing tips? I've taken down Onyxia, the Snake and Hydra bosses in ZG pretty easily, but I can't even kill the first 2 giants in MC nor the first 2 bugs in AQ20, largely due to the knockbacks. Am I relegated to 2 manning the cool stuff or have any shamans pulled off more?

 

Ja7us

For Zandalar, you can trash-farm almost everything in ZG until Revered or whatever and then turn in your stacks and stacks of bijous and coins for rep; pretty sure those go all the way to exalted.

 

Oxylos

While this doesn't particularly help your shaman woes depending on how you fare further in, you can skip the giants in the front of MC by jumping into the lava to the right of them and hopping over.

 

Mideci

Even worse, you still get no rep from the regular mobs on the end of the grind. It's bosses only... So you can't cut short the Hydraxian Exalted run much at all.. The last thousands will take you weeks to complete.

 

• Chicken

As this is probably somewhat interesting for the achievement hunters, approximately what to expect for each of the Northrend Dungeon Elders, including the fact if they were soloable for me personally.

Elder Jarten, Utgarde Keep - This elder is located on a niche at the side near the first staircase just after the first boss. The bare minimum you need to pull are two Ironhelm Vrykul at the entrance, and then two Forge Master groups. The rest of the mobs along the way to the elder can be walked past without aggroing if you're careful, this includes the first boss. For me this was fairly simple as the mobs are all level 70 or below.

Elder Igasho, the Nexus - This elder is located where Ormorok the Tree-Shaper is. This one is technically doable without aggroing any mobs at all if you're very careful, though with a bit less care you can get away with just aggroing non-elites. If you do aggro an elite pack, it's helpful to note that the non-elites in this area will, when killed, give a buff that regenerates 4% of your health and 2% of your mana every 3 seconds. I personally did not have to worry about pulling the elite groups either, they die fairly easily.

Elder Nurgen, Azjol-Nerub - This elder is located near the lake you land in after jumping down after the second boss, you will need to kill the first two bosses to reach him, including all the trash. For me this was doable, though the trash to the first boss was annoying due to the Web Wrap ability they had, which is basically a ten second stun you can't really do much about as the only way to interrupt is stunning the mob casting it. The other parts were fairly easy, though I imagine Hadronox being more annoying if you can't cleanse poison.

Elder Kilias, Drak'tharon Keep - This elder is located in King Dred's raptor pen, you will need to kill the first boss, all the trash to the first boss, one group of elite spiders, and a few raptor handlers, the second boss can be skipped by hugging the walls. This was doable for me, but would most likely be very hard to do for someone of a class/spec less suited towards soloing.

Elder Yurauk, Halls of Stone - This elder is located on the way to Krystallus. You will need to clear a fair few dwarf packs, and some golems. Once again doable for me, but as with Drak'tharon, most likely very hard to solo for many people.

Elder Chogan'gada, Utgarde Pinnacle - This elder is located just past Skadi the Ruthless, this means you need to kill the first three bosses, and the vast majority of trash along the way to get there. When I tried soloing it, I ran into trouble with the first pull of four mobs, which included two Vrykul Seers, whom simply did too much unavoidable damage for me to survive. I also have my doubts I'd manage to kill the bosses here even if I did clear their trash.

Elder Ohanzee, Gun'drak - This Elder is located in the area Eck the Ferocious is in in Gundrak, and because of that only possible to reach on Heroic. This one is not soloable, even with stealth capabilities you'd still need to kill Moorabi to reach the area this Elder is in.

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

 

saiyajinmaster

Working on Soloing Rag (Tried a few times last night, came back today expecting to find Domo up to resummon him...instead neither is up. Not good times). For any enterprising DKs most of the MC bosses are probably pretty self-explanatory, but there were a few that were tricky.

Lucifron was fixed somewhat in 3.0.8 so that rather than prepatch where you had unlimited runes, his curse does in fact double your rune costs. That said, I noticed that your death runes for single rune attacks won't deplete still if they're the wrong kind of rune by default. I was blood at the time (I don't recommend it for soloing anymore, its staying power isn't as nice as it used to be and the change to the glyph hurts it more than it helps, also Blood Aura seems not to be functioning), if I used Death Strike it would put all my unholy/frost runes on cooldown, but once they came back as death runes I could keep heart striking forever without putting the last two death runes on cooldown. Still fairly easy, though harder than pre-patch.

Magmadar...I just clear the first pack of dogs and send my ghoul in on him to pull him out to where Luci is (Or you can clear more dogs but really who wants to? They're obnoxious), just don't stand in the fires obviously. Very easy, very long.

Gehennas I'm convinced still cannot be soloed, but possibly in the next tier of gear. Burning ALL of my cooldowns (AotD etc) I can manage to down the two adds with about 75% success, but by the time you get to Gehennas your health is too far depleted. I tried multiple specs and setups to no avail. Even though the heals are weaker, I found frost worked the best because acclimation uptime is great due to his shadowbolt spam - I parsed on prior runs without being frost that 75% of my incoming damage on that fight was shadowbolts, and you can almost stay ahead on healing even with the curse but it's just a bit too close. Increasing damage with another tier might push it over the edge. I suppose another option may be DPS gear since he's so much magic-damage based, will experiment with that next time.

Garr...just pull him into the corner and wail on him. Very easy.

Geddon I'm sure is cake with resist gear, I was lazy and didn't use any, and stayed unholy. Even though you can probably cheese it with gear or frost spec, doing it as the other specs is a rush and I highly recommend it. The biggest enemies here are the fall damage and the inferno. I would kite him back and forth around the tunnel between Garr's room and where he starts, and when I get living bomb run up onto the wall and keep running into it to mitigate the fall damage, while still running out for infernos which will still kill you very quickly without resist. Took a long time and was very fun.

Shazzrah - The burst of the AEs surprised me at first, but there's no tricks - obvious boss is obvious.

Golemagg - As the pally solo was noted earlier, the trick is to not let Magma bursts stack too high, which means you need to constantly pestilence diseases around between him and his dogs, and then death strike spam the dogs while you're resetting the debuffs. Make sure ALL cooldowns are up for his 10% enrage and let your debuff stack clear before entering it. You'll start taking a ton of damage relative to a DK's healing capability, and I know I ended the fight with maybe 20% or less hp, and it was dipping constantly with the knockdowns.

Sulfuron - Fun fight, the irony is that the first time I tried I knew I'd have to run the adds out of mana, but still failed miserably because the damage intake was too high. The trick that helped most was not attacking him but staying on adds (I figured they're healing anyway might as well stay on him), when he runs off to throw spears LET HIM STAY THERE. His melee hurts a bit too much to want it in the mix, but if he just stays 20 yards away throwing spears at you you can survive it no problem. Just keep on the adds until they're OOM, keep spreading pestilence to keep them all slowed, long fight but it was fun.

Majordomo - I was frost for this, only because I figured I needed to respec for Rag anyway, and this was after my attempts at Gehennas where I was Acclimation spec (I had a mage friend come help finally after deciding that it was either impossible, or close enough that I needed to wait until another day). Fairly self explanatory, keep pestilencing diseases around (I simply always used my blood runes for pest on any of the multi-mob bosses, keeps rotation easy and keeps everything debuffed). There's quite some damage initially but it goes down rapidly as they die.

Rag - I only tried a few times last night, built some FR gear today to try again, my notes are that Acclimation alone won't save you, it won't consistently stay above 1-2 stacks, and the knockbacks are brutal. Position yourself NE along his ring so that if you do get a KB you fall into the lava, and then burn AMS to get back without hurting too badly. Sons had some insane burst and almost killed me, but I suspect the FR will help a lot with that too. Ultimately the knockback was just too much to handle. Once that's under control he should be one of the easiest in the instance.
Edit: Thanks to a guildie with better memory than mine, wowwiki stated Domo respawned after 2-3 hours, but I'm being told it's 12, which does ring a bell. Should be able to test the FR set within an hour.


For almost every boss I just used my standard Unholy tank spec, and those that I did with other specs I'm convinced the unholy would have worked just as well. Staying frost for Rag just for the extra bit of protection, and the damage is nice.


Followup edit: Rag down.
I made 3 of the 4 Flamebane pieces, and had enough BoJs for the badge boots. I specced frost with Frost Aura and Acclimation, in hindsight the aura was great, acclimation was probably not worth it. Even when I would be sitting at over 350 resist I rarely resisted knockbacks, and instead relied on a cooldown rotation to keep me alive while swimming back. VERY fun and challenging, fight was ~30 minutes.
Filefront link to 6xspeed fraps of Rag.