Hydromancer would probably give you more trouble since she'll hit you with the lung burst debuff or enveloping winds + lightning cloud. You could pot out of one every 2 minutes with a restorative elixir, but I'm not sure what you'd do after that. The damage from both of those abilities isn't trivial, so you'd need to find a way to kill her and the adds quickly.

A couple trinkets with healing abilities, a few consumables and a lot of block value/block rating will get you pretty far in most of these instances. I wouldn't underestimate the staying power of a protection warrior, low dps or not, we can still tank most encounters to death.

Paches could probably do Shattered Halls, the adds are easy enough to tank to death and they're mostly melee/physical damage. Steamvaults is questionable, it all depends on how you deal with Thespia. Black Morass and Botanica are out of the question until you can do more dps somehow.

Yes, [the non-bosses] should be doable solo for a well-geared prot warrior as well. I don't really heal myself that much, and most of the danger comes from the 1-2 casters each pull that you could spell reflect.

I think it's fair to skip bosses or certain pulls that have mechanics to prevent this sort of thing. For instance in SH, it is very much impossible for me (or anyone I'd imagine) to solo Grand Warlock Nethekurse because he heals with every deathcoil and deals significant melee/shadow damage. I was able to survive several minutes using high-block SR gear, but he was still healing to 100%. On the other hand it's quite doable to 2-man with a dps+healer.

That goes for Murmur too. We unintentionally 3-manned him on Heroic (after wiping repeatedly) when the two goofuses went off and killed each other at about 95%.

In TBC, I haven't really done as much Iron-manning as I did pre-TBC, but I've managed to kill pretty much everything, besides the last two bosses, in ramparts solo a few months back.

Other than that I, like others have done, solo farmed the plans for felsteel gauntlets in crypts and not just the single pull, but every pack with a monk in it. As long as I can get a caster mob down before I die, so I only have melee mobs left, anything that deals purely melee damage(to a certain extent) can be solo'ed as a prot warrior, given sufficient level gear and block value.

As an aside, I did some low-manning with another prot tank Pre-TBC and we cleared both LBRS and DM-North without any great difficulty.

I don't think it counts, but once me and some friends ran regular SL topless. It was pretty funny. Our tank was complaining that all the mobs were staring at her boobs. XD

sort of related, what's the easiest boss/instance to farm for shards? By easiest I mean some combination of shortest time/least people required to kill 1 boss, DE the loot, and repeat. Prices have just gone through the roof on my server and I'm getting really sick of every enchant costing me 150g+ in mats.

BM is 20 minutes for 4 large prismatics, steamvault is pretty fast for 4 shards too.

I would imagine you would need a melee class as your DPS to do this really effectively - fury warrior comes to mind. DPS Rift Keeper/Lord, break off when adds spawn, then back on the keeper.

When I wrote this, I had a hunter in mind, but after your post I second-guess any mana-using class as dps in an ironman.
Tank- Warrior. Reasons: Imp TClap, 5 Sunders, Demo. Druid possibly for higher armor?
Heal- Druid/Pally. Reasons: need longevity. Sham might prove more useful if Mana Tide is enough?
DPS- I think this is the role that would require the most selectivity. Enh Sham for WF/SoE and Lusts On Demand? Rogue for the king of DPS plus stuns on adds? Fury warrior for no multi-target selection penalty? Lock for more CC and unlimited casting?

Lock is a good choice if Demo Saccing a VW or FG.

Pally Tank + Affliction Warlock (gogo Seed of Corruption!) + healer (any kind would work. I've healed Heroic BM np, and I know any class could.) would be hot.

A paladin tank would be a poor choice to underman heroic BM. You'd be pretty screwed on mana without the DPS to drink.

Garr with 3, after my attempt to solo him failed around 70%:

http://i112.photobucket.com/albums/n...407_235716.jpg

Hakkar with 4, all the priests were done with 3:

http://i112.photobucket.com/albums/n...807_001758.jpg

I would imagine that the quickest shards / man-hour would be farming Shadow Dust / Time-Lost Scrolls in Skettis, soloing or 2-manning the 4 summoned bosses (4 shards) and then 2-manning Terokk for whatever he ends up giving you (sometimes BoE blues, sometimes BoE epics, sometimes BoP blues). 4-5 shards for about 1-1.5 man-hours total isn't too shabby compared to what it would take to fish them out of instances. As a bonus, you also get a ton of cloth, grays, etc.

Ooo, good point.

I should know this, my pally's prot. >_<

I've been tackling Sethekk Halls in a duo for shards. 2x Druid (resto, feral). ~15 minutes, kill both bosses, 3 shards.

Not undermanning, but before TBC-launch we made a sport out of doing a Tribute-run in record time. Shaving off 10 minutes every new try, we ended up with a record of 19 minutes, 20 seconds. (Using rogue LP, no keys).
We had some tremendous fun with that at least.

Even got it frapsed.

Heroic BM is a different beast entirely (or at least was when I went last). Arguably it is the toughest heroic.

Honestly I found it easier (though not by much) than Heroic Old Hillsbrad. We did them back-to-back one night, and I found it funny that OH seemed like it was more work on my part.

Old Hillsbrad really is no joke. I haven't been in a while - but my all-guild elite group couldn't handle it (however, this was back in March before the Heroic nerfs).

It's been a while since I tried this, but when I needed rep for heroic dungeons (read before I was TK attuned since I needed rep, so mostly kara and blues) a shaman friend and mine started on 2 man Shadow Lab. We cleared the entire first room, and then some of the 3 pulls by the boss. We killed one of the big fel guards or whatever they are, but it took like 8 minutes so we stopped there.

I was able to solo the entire first room and some of the 3 pulls by the boss.

Obviously not a chance in hell of doing those big fel guards though. 3 elites in a dungeon is usually the max that I can try to take on though.

Heroic OHB proved quite bland with the exception of spawning the first boss. It's just a CC-fest. Indeed it rates as one of the more difficult ('Heroic' SP/Bog?). You can take as long as you wish to clear the zone- waiting for CDs etc. The difficulty becomes null when you take this into consideration.
For 'ironmanning', I believe Heroic BM would prove a nice test of bringing less than the prescribed amount of people. The trash hurts (the MSing trash is no joke), there is no real downtime (even after bosses as far as I've noted), there is no CC gimmick, and the 'enrage timer' is Medivh's shield breaking. The only help you would have are beacons, and those would be in shorter supply (obviously, you're under-staffed). CDs must be timed, everyone must be geared, and you must enter the zone with both strategy and challenge-embracing mindset.

This thread has inspired me to try it sometime. Hats off to the OP for making Heroics fun again.