snape

Are the dragonkin "hibernatable" in Heroic BM?

 

Tinkerfizzle

Having done heroic BM a decent number of times throughout BC's lifespan, one thing I've noticed is how tremendously the difficulty was reduced as gear overall strengthened - early on (pre-2.1, in my experience), you needed a strong, alert, efficient group to reliably finish the zone. A month or two later after 2.1 had been out for a while, it felt like the zone had been massively nerfed, when it was actually just an overall increase in healing, dps, and tanking, to the point where you could bring any kind of backwards makeup and still expect to come out on top, as long as you had a decent set of at least Karazhan gear.

Heroic Hillsbrad, on the other hand, feels much more execution-dependent, regardless(kind of) of your gear level.

 

PsiVen

After a similar experience, I and 4 of my guildmates swore an immortal oath never to return. As far as I know only one group has dared go back after the nerfs, but I imagine it's not even close to as bad as it was. 5-man bosses should not have aoe fears combined with 2 instant melee strikes.

 

Lodekim

Yeah I would love to try it now, back then we had to do mana tide to get past a fel guard, and I think a few times we zoned out after killing a mob to reset, now I could probably solo a lot of that place just by stacking block value.

 

• giansm

I've recently found that Syth and Ikiss in Sethekk Halls are doable on heroic with the same combo. It takes only slightly longer, about 20 minutes. I think the stealth talent is pretty much required unless there are some clever tricks that we did not think of. It is pretty rewarding: you get 3 shards, 1-2 void crystals, 2 badges, a nether, and possibly a gem.

This has got us thinking about what other heroics might be possible to duo, either partially or completely. We might try Slave Pens, since I think that all bosses can be pulled without trash clearing, and we should hopefully only have to kill the stealth-detecting Defender pulls. I don't remember enough about Rokmar's and Quagmirran's damage to know if I will run oom or not, but they do both have AOE that should be easier to deal with in a smaller group.

 

Whiteknight

I've been rather surprised how much stuff is soloable with a well geared protection warrior. Basically (obviously) anything that deals physical damage is a good target - as prot wars with good gear become immune to physical damage.

Not dungeon content, but I've done Durn the Hungerer, various Skettis trees and SMV elite giants solo on my warrior (because I was bored, farming or whatever).

If you have enough armor you can reduce the incoming hits down to fully blockable or almost fully blocked.

Stuff like the elite trees in skettis do zero damage. It's easy to ensure that every incoming hit is blocked (shield block) and the total hit after demo shout is smaller than the total blocked. At this point you can simply kill the mob with revenge.

Don't underestimate the worth of adding just a little block value. If the mob is hitting you for 30 damage after block, adding just 15 block value will double the amount of time you can fight the mob. Adding 30 BV obviously means you can sustain it indefinitely.

 

Ruby Moon

Yes, and it makes a lot easier partys with puggers.

 

Schnappi

It can get even better on a protection Paladin, with liberal (ab)use of Seal and Judgement of Light. I was able to solo Ironaya in Uldaman with my 45 alt and almost got the Stone Keeper as well. The only downside is that it takes ages to clear the trash.

 

Liar

For what it's worth, a Holy Paladin guildie and me on my Feral Druid duo'd Heroic Blood Furnace up to and including the first boss. It took quite a while with just some Bear DPS but it is doable.

The Maker was pretty hilarious since whenever I got MCed my Pala had to BoF or BoP himself just in time because I would *always* Feral Charge him so the boss would catch up to him. Surprisingly, we killed him at the first go although it got close at some points (Paladin dropping to less than 1k health during my MC).

We didn't bother going on because it was already getting late and we didn't really expect to be able to duo the Fel Orc packs you need to clear in succession to free up the second boss (who, if alone, would have been a total pushover).

 

Jeffrey

I've been doing it 3-4 man. Works very fine, 25 mins for 3 badges, a nether, 4 large prismatic shards and 1-2 voids. There's only 3 packs you have to clear, the first defender pack, a patrolling pack (pick one) after the first boss so that you have a safe spot to pull defenders and the second defender pack. Third defender pack (patrolling in Rokmar's room) is skippable with proper timing of Dash.
I absolutely don't see a reason to run OOM on the shaman guy/Quagmirran but Rokmar's damage when enraged might pose a problem.

As for other stealthables (note that I haven't tried these since 2.2, we decided that they're not worth it given the time/effort required):

Heroic Underbog is doable too with a full stealth group of 5 but getting around in there is a game by itself. It's also a lot harder to do with a small group - bog lords grow huge, the hydra guy does insane DPS if not downed quickly (his debuff stacks to 10, 3k every 3 seconds plus rather high melee damage), Black Stalker and his adds just do too much DPS to keep outhealing forever.
This is actually pretty alright with a full group if nobody makes any mistakes, ~35 min for a nether, 4 badges, 5 shards and 1-2 voids. But mistakes are very, very likely near the end (fast moving patrols between some groups which already have little space between them) and the corpse run is roughly 10 minutes...

Botanica is also kind of doable, we only tried normal though. As far as I know the mobs have the same levels on heroic so it should be the same. You'll need distract, Shadowmeld passive, +stealth boots and improved stealth (or a stealth potion, I guess). But I doubt you can duo any of the bosses, all of them have DPS checks of some kind.

In Heroic Mechenar you can easily stealth around to the first two gatekeepers and boss. Don't see a real reason why the first gatekeeper wouldn't be duoable but the boss has a berserk timer (on heroic) and I don't think you can pull the second gatekeeper safely without killing him. No chance for Nethermancer/Patheon duo and even with a full group you still have to clear.

Steamvault might be possible to stealth around in but I very much have my doubts about duo'ing any bosses. Naga boss is too much of a pain without CC on one of the elementals, machine boss berserks and I don't think I need to explain Kalitresh.

 

Hegen

Ikiss heroic is actually much easier with 2 players than with more. A combination of tank and healer with some reasonable manareg is all that's needed. The reason why it's so easy: with only two players in combat, Ikiss stops doing the arcane explosions. The arcane volleys remain, but are easily healable. Even for regular 5-mans there: if the DDs take too much damage, or if you need to run with a healer without group heal, just let the DDs die if necessary and proceed with a tank/healer combo. Just be sure to tell them before the fight.

 

Hate Monkey

A fairly decently geared, T4/T5 minimum tanking geared warrior can solo the Panther Boss in ZG as long as they have [Figurine of the Colossus]. Takes about 8~ minutes, less if you're fury spec and can put out decent damage, and requires two shields sometimes. A quick 40~ gold, and the gold from the items.

Seen it done plenty of times while trying to get that offhand fist to complete the set for my alt. It's something all MT warriors should go out and do every 3 days.

The best part is that you can sneak by every mob, and evade off the last 5 mobs you'd aggro and not even have to fight anything except the boss itself.

 

ANSeranov

A Horde buddy of mine on Agamaggan frapsed himself doing that. It's pretty hillarious.

I'm wondering, has anyone two-manned Headless Horseman? I've heard of people 3-manning it, but it's a really stupid easy fight, and I figure 2man could be done.

[Yuuzu] [80 Draenei Shaman][Kilrogg]
[Soulu] [80 Draenei Death Knight][Kilrogg]
[Soulu] [80 Human Warrior][Durotan]
[Karina] [77 Draenei Paladin][Durotan]
[Ikarii] [70 Dwarven Rabbi][Durotan]

 

Pachwa

Another key to this trick is getting the 2 piece Tier 4 bonus (Chance on parry to put up a 200 point PW:S basically with no cooldown). You can get an insane amount of these shields per fight since there are a million panthers beating on you.

If history is to change, let it change. If the world is to be destroyed, so be it. If my fate is to die, I must simply laugh.

 

Kirsh

I imagine that he is 2-mannable, but it might take some doing, and I don't know what second class you would want to take. It could probably be done with a Rogue/Warrior. I was able to solo him down through his horseman phase (with ~950 block value and a Demo shout he does 0 damage) but I didn't have enough DPS as prot to take down the helm. I think if you brought a rogue, he could vanish through Phase 2 to not get conflagged, and could DPS in Phase 1, the head phases, and Phase 3.

 

ANSeranov

Too bad he's not undead, a prot pally might be able to solo him with extreme amounts of spell damage and block value. :x

[Yuuzu] [80 Draenei Shaman][Kilrogg]
[Soulu] [80 Draenei Death Knight][Kilrogg]
[Soulu] [80 Human Warrior][Durotan]
[Karina] [77 Draenei Paladin][Durotan]
[Ikarii] [70 Dwarven Rabbi][Durotan]

 

Douglas

One thing I always wanted to try was a "Buster Keaton" run -- completely silent. No voice comms, no /say, no /yell, no /p, nothing but built-in emotes like "/point" and "/cheer".

I mean, the best 5-man runs I've been on have been like that anyway. People get into each other's heads, and just know what the right thing to do is in order to advance the team's goals, without bothering to communicate. When a problem happens and, without any communication, you see four different people react in precisely the correct way to solve it, that's something, that is.

 

Tiffara

One night while we waited for our fifth to get to Revered, we tried duoing the Felguard pats in Heroic Shadow Labs (#4 was helping #5 with rep, and #3 was afk). With a KZ geared paladin and feral druid it was just possible, if you didn't get unlucky, although pretty slow.

I managed to solo the last boss in (normal) Blood Furnace from 80% or so as a 70 holy paladin, when my group got surprised by the AoE. According to my friends, it was a fun show to watch.

 

• giansm

I'm not sure why you didn't see any, but when we duo Ikiss he always does 4-5 arcane explosions, as well as volley. Maybe it's related to the fact that he never casts polymorph because we are both druids in form (tree and bear)?

Also, we recently tried duoing heroic Slave Pens with success: we had to kill the first Defender pair but did not have to clear any other trash (we could avoid the Defenders on the bridge by jumping off the ledge onto the metal area below). The run took about 35 minutes with my partner using DPS gear in cat form on the first boss and tanking gear in bear form on the second and third bosses. The only detail we ran into was that Mennu's healing totems were so strong that before my partner made a macro to quickly kill them, he would heal back nearly all of the damage done to him in between totem drops.

 

Hegen

When I discussed that in the German WoW forum, I got confirmation from other warrior/priest combos, so the polymorph not happening for you druids may be the reason. I got polymorphed quite frequently.

Or it may have been changed in a hotfix (last run was about 5 weeks ago). If will check with the hotfix logs.

 

rhwei

I was part of Heroic Sethekk group that got knocked down to myself (tree druid) and a warrior at about 30 percent, we didn't see any more polymorphs or blinks/arcane explosions, though we did get volley fairly regularly.

 

Edenfall

Well I haven't really had time to Underman any Heroics, but I was really proud of the fact that me and some friends managed to "Underlevel" BFD on our Alts. At the next last boss all I could do was spam Polymorph until it actually hit.

By the way, if anybody were to try and underman Heroic Shattered Halls - Record it - and post it on Youtube or whatever no matter if you fail or succeed.

 

Anedris

Heroic Shattered Halls is far less than it used to be. With a supremely overgeared paladin tank it wouldn't surprise me if it was doable with three or even two people (ironically the first boss would probably be the hardest bit).

 

Jebraltar

Kargath + adds is pretty brutal on heroic, not sure that I'd want to stretch a kill out like that.

 

Tulathros

Our kara raid has been farming kara now for months and so we decided in the lead up to ZA to do Naxx instead.

When we get to Heigan the Unclean all bar 2 people in the raid managed to die so a prot warrior and holy priest killed him from 30%.

that was the longest half hour of my life, watching them slowly kill him as i lay on the floor dead.