What can we solo?

| Sunday, December 21, 2008
Yesterday I found myself a bit short of gold due to my new mount. I was sick of dailies, since those were what paid for that elementium-plated exhaust pipe. So, I went soloing... in raids.

-My first stop was the easy one: panther boss in ZG. This was an easy fight at 70, with the only potential danger involving me forgetting to bring enough shields. Now it's even easier and much faster thanks to unlimited mana and controlled damage.
-Tiger was next, which failed because I got sick of killing one, maybe two axe throwers, and then dying due to a long chain-stun. Later I killed tiger with some guildies who I noticed farming for the mount and weren't saved yet.
-The fishing boss was a challenge, and also an achievement. Fitting with my random luck (yes, random luck, would you like any more redundancy? Perhaps a short gnome?), the turtle tome dropped. I tried 5000g (the deposit is about 50s, so it's worth trying), then noticed that the going rate is around 1500g. Oh well, it's still a lot.
-Broodlord was a challenge, a very fun one. It was also a slow fight, sustained with divine plea and based mostly on auto-attack and shield of the righteous. Both of those spells are really transformational for soloing, I could not have anticipated the power of them. He dropped nothing too great except a paladin token that I can't use yet because of rep.
-Spider was a joke. The adds are weak. The health drain that used to seem like such a problem (OMG ROGUES, KICK!) is cleansable. Her health isn't even all that high.
-Venoxis (snake, but for some reason I actually know his name) was very slow. First phase he heals. And heals. And heals. Eventually he went OOM and I was able to hit him into snake phase. Then it was a merry-go-round of getting out of poison clouds. He died much faster (thanks to enraged attack speed and no heals). Then I died from a poison cloud.

What failed?
-Bat did more damage than I could heal through due to the long fight. If I had a shorter interrupt cooldown I could solo her with only a bit of difficulty, but the long cooldown means that I would have to outlast her mana, which could take a very long time. I easily killed her with the help of a guild shaman and warlock.
-Tiger I already explained with axe throwers. Did I mention that the tiger cubs flee and the stun causes the throwers to run to ranged and aggro nearby groups?
-Hakkar I didn't even bother to try and my guildies weren't eager to help, I was lucky to even convince them to do bat.

Onward to Karazhan.
Pre-Attumen trash was easy, but drops very little gold or even expensive greys. Attumen was a bit tricky since he hits harder than I block and the stun hurts. However sacred shield is a huge help since this can absorb a surprising amount of damage. That's another spell that I did not anticipate being such a huge help for soloing. He failed to drop the mount or scope schematic (I saw it only once, lost it to a really low-skill engineer, got very pissed). Now that I know I can solo him, I will be going back.

Pre-Moroes trash might be worth farming. It's like 100 mobs which drop 30-70 silver and die very easily. I didn't bother to pull anything on the way to Opera/Maiden, but that also could be fairly profitable. Moroes himself was too much of a challenge. I gave him two tries, got to 30-40% before dying. This seems very possible with better gear since at a certain point I can eliminate just about everything except the garrote which SoL/JoL can probably heal through or at least buy enough time. Also better gear means adds dead sooner. In the future I might also leave the prot warrior alive to feed reckoning charges.

After that I headed to Onyxia. She was faster than at 70 when I was ret, but still seemed slow, I suppose because 25 minutes it a fairly long time. The whelps were an annoyance as ret, as prot they were a chance to use sanctuary for regen and more targets for HotR to trigger SoL. I really should remember to farm her regularly. 200g for half an hour, not including DEing the BoEs, isn't too bad, and it's sure more interesting than most farming.

I wonder what the full limits are for a level 80 paladin. I can easily solo Garr in MC. Baron seems possible as holy with FR gear; as prot I lack the regen since I still need to actually heal. Shazzrah doesn't sound too hard. I expect that Gehennas would be easy if not for the stun. With a ret spec that might be survivable due to the short stun break on BoF and the reduced duration from prot. The rest are all mysteries to me, except Magmadar who I got down maybe 20% before hearthing out. Easily duoable, but I'm not sure how much gear could help since so much damage is fire, but FR means lost avoidance so then physical hurts more.

I find a sort of excitement in finding strange ways to farm that take advantage of our unique combination of durability, AoE damage, and varying levels of healing. Why be like everyone else killing mobs for motes and the same daily over and over? A profitable challenge with some bragging rights attached, how can you possibly refuse that?

2 comments:

Kiryn said...

My prot pally buddy and I (on my boomkin druid) have started farming ZG (for the mounts) Onyxia (for gold and bags) and MC (for a shot at Thunderfury bindings) and we're finding it quite fun.

Tiger's not so bad with two people. You don't even need to fight the trash, you can slip right through and stand near his platform. I resist most of the silences anyway. Most of the heals get through but we just focus DPS on whichever one has more health.

Garr we only wiped on because I was dumb and summoned my treants right as he was blowing up his minions, sending my treants halfway across the room right into a corehound, which came straight at me despite my attempts at shadowmeld. My pally friend quickly went oom after that since Garr kept wiping all of his buffs off.

Baron Geddon was probably the most epic, since I was practically running oom healing both of us the whole time. I was running against my innervate cooldown and even had to use a potion.

Raptor and Onyxia were pretty straightforward. I was amused that we went into Ony with little more information than "I think I remember hearing something about whelps?" and how very little damage the Deep Breaths actually did to us at 80.

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