Fellwraith

We took him from ~5-10% to dead with nothing but 2 protection warriors standing a couple months ago. Lots of block value, block rating, a few healing items and cheap executes make it pretty easy to kill some of the older content.

You can 2 or 3 man the bloodlord in ZG pretty easily using that approach. Makes for an easy way to get your helm enchanted on a Friday night.

 

Prinsesa

Inspired by this thread, I went ahead and tried soloing Ramparts. Much to my surprise, it worked - with enough block value, everything was a full block, which pretty much made me invulnerable to normal mobs.

The one rough spot I had was with Vazruden/Nazan - Nazan keep taking potshots at me from the air with his Fireballs even while I was fighting Vazruden, something I never noticed before. Then of course, the fight with Nazan himself involved more of those fire patches, which appear to fast to be dodged. I'd always take at least one tick, which meant I was taking enough damage that I had to resort to blowing my LoH. Anyone have tips on bringing down the drake more easily?

"We do want Sanctuary to be the tanking seal"

- Ghostcrawler

 

Taja

Wearing 150+ Fire resist should make it really easy I think.

 

anathor

Ramparts is quite easy to solo (stealth) with a feral druid. For the last boss it's important to note you can fight the 2 bosses separately. Just stay on the outer side of the platform and you should not aggro the orc. Normally the dragon lands every now and then either near the bridge or near the horn (opposite side of platform) and then you can melee it (before it goes airborne again). This is the tricky part of the fight. Once the dragon is dead just engage the orc and go AFK for a well-deserved coffee

 

PsiVen

Hmm, I should think exploiting to pull the drake before his rider is against the spirit of ironmanning content :P To each his own though.

As for making it easier to take the fight head-on, FR should help significantly but it might be a challenge to keep up your block value to go with it. I was able to finish off Nazan months back with all my cooldowns and a few pots (using no FR but aura), by flash healing myself after melee attacks and staying under the AD threshold. With the new AD it would have been harder, but my gear has certainly improved. 50% FR would take away most of the dangerous burst he has.

 

Prinsesa

Thanks for the advice! I bought some cheap fire res greens from the AH to replace slots that I didn't have BV for and that certainly helped.

The next challenge was Slave Pens. Soloing to Mennu the Betrayer was easy enough, but I've found it impossible to scrounge up enough DPS to kill him. The healing ward erases all my progress within the 1-2 ticks it takes me to kill it, and never mind if he places an Earthgrab behind himself.

"We do want Sanctuary to be the tanking seal"

- Ghostcrawler

 

Hegen

To get back to that: there's nothing in the hotfix logs about changes to Ikiss heroic since I ran last time.

 

Jeffrey

I just ran heroic Ikiss duo with bear/tree. Doesn't use polymorph (because we aren't valid targets I presume), does use arcane volley, does use blink/explosion, does use mana shield.
Explosion isn't on a timer, it's on a percentage. He does 3 of them, 75%, 50% and 25% +/- 5% like with the old green dragon specials (not sure about the exact numbers though). Mana Shield seems to be 20% +/- 5%.

3 man heroic Shattered Halls has now been done: WoW-Europe.com Forums -> 3 Man Shattered Halls Heroic (Last Boss Down). Not even that overgeared, the tank has full T4-ish gear and TK trash ring. Props to them.

 

Xav

Well I just soloed Garr. After duoing him a few weeks ago I started thinking if I could do the same thing but without any help whatsoever.

It turned into quite a project and the entire process of reaching Garr solo, and then learning how to handle him and the adds and kill him was expensive. Spent quite a bit of money on repairs and consumables until I figured out how to do it - and contrary to what you may think, the popular Figurine of the Colossus had nothing to do with it, although I did wear it anyway.

I frapsed the last 5% and took periodic screenshots during the fight. Fraps is GarrFinal.avi - FileFront.com
Fraps link edited to the more recent video.

This has been on my mind as something I wanted to do for months basically, never had any success until now though. Figured some people might find it interesting, and I don't think it's been done before!

Couple screenshots:

ImageShack - Hosting :: garr1gu0.jpg
Shortly after the pull

ImageShack - Hosting :: garr2tb9.jpg
Further along

ImageShack - Hosting :: garr3dw0.jpg
All minions long since erupted

ImageShack - Hosting :: deadsl9.jpg
He's dead.

 

Liebestod

Personally, I think a more interesting challenge would be speedruns. I'm honestly surprised that there isn't an established WoW speedrunning scene out (that I know of) to see how fast various instances can be cleared under various conditions. It'd probably be really popular.

 

Harmann

I'm really curious to try out Enhancement Shaman + Prot Paladin combos for undermanning content. Way I figure it, you've got a tank with a ton of threat and mitigation and you've got a very strong DPS class who is also able to heal and have infinite mana (JoW for Enhancement Shamans is absolutely ridiculous).

Some zones I'd love to try would include MC, ZG, AQ20 as well as as normal/heroic TBC instances. I think AQ20 would be a lot of fun though.

BWL seems pretty much impossible to duo anything in or at least impossible to get to duoable content without it first being cleared out. AQ40 might be interesting.

Thoughts on what the best 2 man combos are?

The way I see it, there's a few routes you can go depending on your goals...

1) Healer + Heavily gear tank can clear most anything that is possible for 2 people to clear. It just takes forever.
2) Healer + Arms/Fury Warrior. AE Burn everything down while the healer (hopefully) keeps you up. Pretty speedy clears in zones where this works.
3) DPS + Tank. Fast kills, but the tank could possibly die.
4) Hybrid DPS + Tank. This is where my Enhancement Shaman idea comes in. Not much less DPS than Rogues, can heal surprisingly well, infinite mana with a Paladin partner... though still lots of mana regardless of partner due to SR.

 

Sagus

Might not be as impressive as soloing a heroic, but what about low manning raid stuff? I know in the 100% warrior avoidance thread, people are speculating about duoing/trioing Gruul. Would be nice to see someone actually try it. Also other stuff would be interesting. Preferably without exploits, although that warlock soloing hydross was pretty cool. I know back when I played FFXI, low manning stuff was really popular, like single party killing of the equivalent of a raid boss. I was kind of surprised that you don't really see that too much on WoW, maybe because pretty much every fight in FFXI is tank and spank, while WoW has DPS checks, healing checks, all sorts of things to prevent you from merely being able to outlast the boss.

 

nfw

How did you get to Garr, invisibility potions? Also, did you have to use health potions or other consumables?

 

Xav

I used invisibility potions to get to him, yes, but it's a LOT harder than you think, and takes a long time. The kill I did use some health potions on but I don't think it was necessary, after learning more as I did the fight I'm confident I can do future kills without any consumables besides invis pots.

 

Menisco

I actually duo Ikiss every day (resto) with a feral friend(heroic that is). Got it down to a science. We dont have anywhere near the gear you guys have (max is kara gear), but its not needed. Jeffrey is right, he explodes exactly 3 times. The polymorph is actually a good thing, so I never fight him in tree form. I get the poly and heal myself, not wasting mana on me, only on my friend. I never tried first boss on heroic, but on normal we can do it fine. My guess is that it would require better gear than what we have. But we don`t need to kill him to get to Ikiss.

I had this plan of badge farming with a stealth group. Had some problems with the people I was "recruiting" to do it, so it never took off. My project was farming 20 badges a day with a 5 man stealth group. I have a blast doing stealth runs, so it was really sad that the project didn't go as planned. Maybe one day I'll find a group willing to do it. Or we can even one day open a discussion on it =).

Anyways, nice seeing that people try to do things differently for fun.

 

Elysianlight

Hey Xaviera I have some questions about your Garr kill.

First of all about how long did the actual kill take? And secondly approximately what level of gearing would you say is needed for the job? My tank gear is mostly tier 4 with some offspec items from BT.

Am I too undergeared to do this? I gave it a go and did actually manage to get to Garr but he made short work of me, unfortunately I think I might have survived a little longer if I didn't accidentally pull one of the 2 pathing core hounds but my health dropped pretty quick.

Could you provide like a small rundown on how to do this or is it just a fact of my mitigation not being good enough? And I was also kinda curious do you kill the adds first or focus on Garr fulltime?

 

Kdorf

Here's a vid of a warlock from my guild doing the solo Quagmirran:

BelmieQuagSolo - FileFront.com

And all the rest of his: Eternal Movies @ Scarlet Crusade (US)

 

Xav

40 minutes, start to finish.

I think it may be possible with mixed tier 5 and ZA epics, but I'm not too sure.

GarrFinal.avi - FileFront.com [ 234 MB, 5:34 long ]

I made another video, of my 2nd kill, which shows the pull and the beginning/'main' part of the fight, but sped up. I omitted the 30 minutes of just Garr bashing which is pointless, but I show the end again. It basically shows how to do it, so I guess if people are bored enough now/really want a Thunderfury it will start to get quite popular.

I used ~750 block value, and with the 19k armor I had in that gear, I was just barely doing full blocks. Now, you can do it with less armor, and less block value, and even less block rating, but you'll take damage, and have to use consumables. I used some health potions just incase I didn't resist every single explode, in which case I'd have gotten pretty low and had to use one then. In the future, I won't actually use any pots until I'm at very low health which would assume I was rather unlucky to begin with, with resists.

Anyone who's tried this, or done Garr, will quickly notice from the video that I had 0 immolates, ever, and if you think about it, you'll understand why!

I kill 2 adds first because I think after enough side strafing/pathing back and forth that the mobs do, they will extremely rarely path to a side of me that nullifies my mitigation. (Killing 2 adds causes them to not path AS much because there's not as much overlapping.) This also heavily depends on your positioning with the wall - if you're not in a good enough 'wedge', the mobs WILL start to path to your sides and behind you and you will get hit. This is magnified by the explosions when the Firesworn die - if you aren't wedged in properly your positioning will get screwed up, and you'll take a lot of damage.

I spent a while working out the kinks and exactly how to do it, the sweet spots, and the timing needed to get to him cleanly. And it was fun! Not too horrible a waste of time if you're an enchanter, either.

 

Elysianlight

I think i can get around 650 bv and 18k armor with devotion and probably around 15/15/35. This is about stacking block right?

And as a paladin I can judge blessing of light for some kind of healing.

Still haven't figured out the immolate bit but im sure I will eventually, im having alot of fun trying to do this and hopefully ill pull it off eventually and get a binding woo :p

Thanks for the helpful videos and posts

 

Xenicore

Yep. Three separate times now, myself and Taintedh (my healbot shaman) have 2-manned heroic Murmur from the first shockwave-like ability he uses onward (roughly 28 percent to 0 percent). Our gear is all Karazhan/badge reward items, so we were quite proud, as were our puggie groupmates that for some reason or another cannot fathom how to get out of a blinking circle in time. It was cute to see them cheer us on while being dead for the entire encounter.

Interestingly, the two of us have also two-manned much of Aeonus in heroic Black Morass; again, our groupmates died (starting to sound like a healer issue, but it's not) and the two of us brought him from roughly 55 percent to 0 percent.

There's nothing magical about any of this in hindsight, and it's obvious to note that it's simply an issue of mitigation and regeneration/intelligent ability/spell usage. However, what I found to be most interesting about these encounters when undermanned is that you notice small discrepancies and details that would otherwise be lost in the "zerg" as a previous poster referred to it. For example, on heroic Murmur, as a feral tank I found it interesting and exciting to experiment with spell/ability usage in order to prolong our efforts. When everything's slowed down, and you're left to play the game of attrition, a barskin/tranquility coupled with +dodge trinkets at an opportune time gives more thrills than anything in Karazhan or Zul'Aman ever has (for me, anyway). Watching a rogue and warlock finish off 30+ percent of Laj from Botanica on heroic was quite entertaining as well, as was discovering that a shadow priest mcing the Splicers in heroic Botanica can clear out the mobs quite fast with Death and Decay. You tend to learn more about the game when you're FORCED to squeeze out every possible drop of blood from the stone, so to speak. Much of these things are obvious to the informed player, but finding it out for yourselves is rewarding nonetheless.

Separately, I was able to solo all of normal Ramparts with blues and about 150 fire resistance in gear/buffs. Not exactly profitable, but fun as a "see if you can do it" sort of thing.

/edit

I recalled a few instances where slowing down the encounters (due to having less DPS from iron/undermanning content) led to insight that otherwise may be lost in the "zerg."

- Having to choose which party member of the 3 dead that would help us most on heroic Murmur with just tank/healer up: led to choosing the fire Mage with Molten Fury talent--this, plus an innervate and a threat wipe from death made for some rather impressive DPS for a partial 3-man.
- Many times Earth Shield has been enough coupled with LOTP to keep me up against heroic bosses, leaving my Shaman healer free to DPS between applications. This makes encounters go extremely fast, allowing us to complete heroic Slave Pens in 37 minutes (I know this time is accurate from noticing the cooldown remaining on my hearthstone from an RFC hearth JUST prior to beginning). Of course, the shadow priest helped with reducing downtime.
- In general terms, learning how to "stretch" your cooldowns and using terrain and encounter designs to dramatically increase longevity (pole-dancing around circular geometry on bosses as a druid, healing myself and shifting back to bear to continue to tank, etc).
- Intentionally using rank 1 spells with Eye of Magtheridon equipped on mobs/players that have temporarily high/complete resist rates (think phase lashers in Dire Maul or Cloak of Shadows) to proc spell damage increases for future attacks.

I believe it to be true that desperation brings out creativity like nothing else can. Even in a video game, time feels like it slows down, adrenaline kicks in, and you find yourself thinking two steps ahead when all of a sudden you're faced with disaster and frantically attempt to salvage the situation. These, in my opinion, are the most memorable moments I've experienced in 2+ years of WoW.

 

• Snowy

Must be something about the zone... my mage was able to solo Thorngrin after the rest of my party wiped at 50%. He doesn't sacrifice with only one person alive and stopping to hellfire lets you get off a few spells.. then his running speed isn't the quickiest, allowing free use of swivel fireblast/lance while jumping. Quite fun to pull stuff like that off though, since the other people are usually in awe of what you just did.

Paladin: Pyla
Mage: Pylah

 

Xenicore

Oh wow, interesting. Yeah I suppose using the ledge effectively and blinking "through" him prior to hellfire to get back up to it after dropping is feasible. That zone is my favorite heroic (aside from Arcatraz for pure excitement/random variables in the encounter designs) simply because of all the different ways and methods that exist to do the pulls/bosses. Inevitably, such encounter/instance design leads to loopholes that allow 1 or 2 people to underman parts of it, I suppose. I see this as a positive and not a flaw, however, since it gives rise to creative usage of game mechanics that are NOT what most would consider to be exploiting.

Looking back on this thread, many have pointed out situations where group-wide damage attacks (think Quag) suddenly aren't so awful with just two people in the party. Also limits the possible targets for RTS (random) attacks--never undestimate the power of pre-emptive measures, I suppose.

Someone mentioned enhance Shaman + protection Paladin; has anyone done anything exceptional with this combination? You'd think the commingled regen mechanics coupled with dual-hybrid pairing and decent damage output would allow for some reasonably fast, effective 2 manning of heroic bosses not including ones with enrage/add-related dps checks.

 

ohcrocsle

The talk of speed-runs reminds me of the Ramparts farming runs we used to make while leveling. It wasn't undermanned, but our group had a 23 minute record for the instance when we were all 60-64. Those runs were some of the most fun I've had playing the game, and I agree that instance speed run competitions would probably garner a lot of interest.

 

Mideci

Have done heroic SP in <30 mins, double-checked time. Not a super-geared group, but a feral druid tank that keeps pulling and pulling.

I'm sure it can be done in less by better geared folk, too.

 

Captain Winky

I've been trying to farm the +12 Stam to boots enchant in Mana Tombs, and it's not too bad. However, you pretty much need to have stealth, as the Priests are all past the first boss. Feign Death may work if you do it carefully. As a Rogue, the pulls are trivial. In the first room past the boss, there's a patrol that's either 2 Priests or 1 Priest & 1 Sorcerer. After I kill that, I kill two packs of 3 on the left side (1-2 Priests & 1-2 Sorcerer). Then there's a patrol of 2 on the right side that you can catch between packs. After that, there's a group of three that you can pull around the lip near the entrance to the next room and away from the patrolling voidwalker. You can do the same with the mobs near the umbrellas at the other end of the Voidwalker's patrol. There are also two packs in the room with 4 mobs each, but generally only one is a priest. Sometimes I'll kill it, loot, and vanish, but I don't usually bother.

This totals up to between 6 and 13 Priests per reset, depending on spawn luck. Also, as an added incentive, the first chest for the instance frequently spawns next to one of the packs of 3 in this room, or sometimes next to the five mana leeches. If you have to kill the leeches, a combination of Blade Flurry and Cloak of Shadows makes them easy.