The Stat Squish brought with it a new buff for running old-school raids. While I think the main intention was to account for the smaller difference between, say, level 90 gear and level 85 gear, it seems to have more than compensated, such that it's actually not too hard to solo even Cataclysm content.
I have three goals: Shadowmourne, Dragonswrath, and the Fangs of the Father. (Also the single achievement I have left for Glory of the Icecrown Raider 10-Player, "Been Waiting a Long Time For This.")
Fangs of the Father:
This was where I hit my first hurdle. I went into Dragon Soul on my Undead Rogue. While Morchok's abilities that split damage proved a little tough to deal with, I eventually powered through, killing the boss quickly enough to avoid most of these. From there, it was pretty much cake to get to Hagara, who you need to pickpocket in order to get the first quest item. (I actually had Glyph of Disguise as well, so I wound up looking like a giant Orc shaman lady for a few minutes after that.)
The only real wall I hit was that it costs 10,000 gold to decrypt the decoder ring. With a new expansion on the horizon, and the fact that my Horde characters have way less disposable money, I decided to table this for a bit.
Dragonswrath:
After killing either Cho'gall, Nefarian (85,) or just the first Molten Giant in Firelands, casters can get a quest to get this legendary staff. Simply going down to the Caverns of Time, Anachronos will give you a little cutscene and then send you to collect items off the bosses in the Firelands. It's a 100% drop rate, but you need 25 off of the seven bosses in there, so it's something that will take a few weeks anyway.
Soloing Firelands on a Mage is not trivial, but with decent gear and some judicious use of cool downs (it also helps that as a Draenei, I have Gift of the Naaru) you can get most of them. I had better luck last week, clearing all but Ragnaros, but this week I got stuck on Shannox, so I've only got nine of these embers. Still, at 100 this should all be very easy. For this stage, at least, it's really just about diligence.
Shadowmourne:
Being an expansion behind the other two, it's rather trivial killing things in ICC these days. Shadowmourne requires you to run the instance on 25-player, but this shouldn't be too difficult, as it doesn't scale up enough to become much of a problem. The one sticking point for a while was, ironically, the Gunship battle, but this week they fixed it so that the cannons scale with your item level. Now it's likely you'll take down the enemy ship before the opening dialogue can even begin.
I was able to get much farther in this chain than in the other two. The first step requires you to collect quest items off of Festergut and Rotface, as well as 25 Primordial Saronite (which you can buy for gold off the Legacy Justice Vendor inside the instance - it'll come to a couple thousand.) The final piece of the puzzle is Light's Vengeance, Arthas' old hammer from his Paladin days, which can be found in Frostmourne Cavern in Dragonblight. Arthas will show up there and summon a big swarm of ghouls as well as a Var'gul guy. You'll have to wade through the ghouls (which is absolutely trivial at 90) and get to where he threw the hammer. The hammer will then start destroying the ghouls with the Light, as well as killing the Var'gul. However, when you try to pick it up, the Var'gul's skeleton will arise and you'll have to kill him as well. Again, this is really simple (I did it at 80 back in the day without too much trouble on my Paladin's off spec.)
With these components, you can create Shadow's Edge, which is the axe that will eventually become Shadowmourne. Unfortunately, while it was an amazing weapon back in the day, it's not that special now, but you'll have to use it in a number of quests that follow.
The first requires you to collect fifty souls with it. I could have sworn this used to be a thousand, but I'm not complaining. To do so, you need to strike enemies in ICC with the weapon (and it has to be a melee strike or auto-attack. Howling Blast does not count.) When the enemy dies, you get the soul. Easy peasy. I managed to get this just by fighting up to the Valithria Dreamwalker fight (which is tough for a class without a healing spell - read: impossible - but you can skip it.)
With the 50 souls, you'll then set about getting the blade infused with Unholy, Blood, and Frost. You start with Unholy.
To get the Unholy Infusion, you have to fight Professor Putricide and use a new special option when transformed into an abomination. This can be a little tough for soloing, as the abomination's health does not scale up with level. What I did (after reading it as a suggestion online) is to go as Blood (healing myself with Death Strikes against the gas and ooze adds he summons) and get him to about 75% health. When his slime puddles were big enough, I cast Army of the Dead and then ran to his desk, transforming into the abomination. While he was distracted by the ghouls (they can't taunt him, but it seemed my aggro was reset when I went abomination) I simply went to the puddles and scooped up as much as I could. When you get a full bar of slime-fuel, you can do the infusion. I then let Putricide kill the abomination-shell and then defeated him the ordinary way, which was enough to get me credit for the quest.
The next step is where I've hit a bit of a dead end. This requires you to get the Blood Infusion by fighting Lana'thel and biting three other players while vampirized. This would seem to be completely impossible while soloing, so I'll have to put this off until later.
Old School Running:
There are a handful of abilities that seem to remain unsquished, but Blizzard has been implementing hot fixes a lot lately to squish them. With the between-expansion lull, it's a great time to go back and see how well you can do soloing old content. There are titles and mounts to be had, and a huge slew of transmog gear as well. I've personally finally gotten a full set of Paladin tier 8/25 and an Azure Drake mount. Anyone at level 90 should have a pretty easy time with Classic, BC, and Wrath content (Yogg-Saron might still be a bit of a challenge, given the whole Sanity mechanic,) and with a little skill and gear, much of the Cataclysm content is also relatively easy to solo (I've killed 6/7 of the bosses in Firelands on a Mage, the king of squishy classes, so it must be doable.)
No comments:
Post a Comment