On Vacation

I'll be on vacation for the next week so I won't be able to post.

Outland Dungeon Hero - Hellfire Ramparts cont.

I cut off the last post at the point I was going to the final two encounters (three bosses two encounters) so to continue from there...

Army of Dead - Cool down reduced

A quick update thanks to MMO-Champion. Apparently in the next patch the cool down on Army of the Dead will be reduced from 20 minutes down to 10 minutes, however the damage from your summoned ghouls will be reduced by 50%. Not sure how this will affect the soloing DK. AotD is a nice damage mitigation ability, plus it gives you some time to get some quick heals in, but I also used the damage output from the ghouls to help me DPS bosses that I needed to down quickly. Most recently this was used to help me down Nazan (the dragon mount in Hellfire Ramparts). I need the added DPS because Nazan is immune to diseases, thus preventing my Death Strike from healing me. It will be interesting to see how this change affects that.

At this time I'm guessing it will only benefit my soloing attempts but I'll have to wait and find out after the patch.

Outland Dungeon Hero - Hellfire Ramparts

So I changed my tactics around a little. At first I was going to run all the BC normal mode dungeons, getting my Outland Dungeon Master achievement and then re-run them on heroic mode to get the Outland Dungeon Hero. Well turns out I don't have a ton of time to run these solo instances, to many guild runs for gear (including my own tanking gear), achievements to earn etc. And honestly soloing these instances is a time commitment that I don't always have when I sit down to play. In order to speed up the process a little I decided that I would be running the instances on Heroic mode, thus completing both achievements simultaneously and saving me some time.

Goblin Side Bar - Zul'Gurub

Goblin Side Bar is an idea I had to bring some gold making tips into the blog. While I am not a true Goblin I am at least part Goblin. I love to make gold and I have a nice pile of it already. I Most of this I gained by playing the Auction house game and while I am not as savvy as some of those out there I do pretty good. Could I do better? Of course but I'm pretty happy where I'm at for now and I'm still earning with very little work involved. While I'm not going to let go of all my secrets on how I do this I will give you some tips that work for me. For more tips/tricks/and ideas read some of the blogs I link to in the sidebar.

Just a quick update on Zul'Gurub from the Goblin perspective. There is a decent amount of money to be made here, including but not limited too vendor trash, various "coins" and "bijou's". I made around 16g from vendor trash my last run and that only included clearing trash mobs that I had to clear to get to the boss, since I was in a time constraint.

Quick Update and Thanks to WoWeconomics

Just wanted to apologize for the lack of posts work is particularly hectic at the moment but I am going to attempt to get on solo run in each weekend, of something anyway.

I also wanted to give a thank you shout out to WoWeconomics who included this blog in their Loot Council post. This is a great site I've been reading for quite a while now so it's an honor to be mentioned in it. I highly recommend it (along with the other blogs in the side bar) for those of you who are looking to make some gold in the game.

I'll be putting together a few posts for this week but I leave for vacation on Thursday so I won't be playing (or posting) for a bit, since the scheduling option doesn't appear to work for me.

Classic Raider - Zul'Gurub Part 2 cont.

I left off the last post with Bloodlord Mandokir and the next boss on the map that I needed to tackle was High Priest Thekal (aka the tiger boss). Now this was one boss my last try I just couldn't kill. The healing and resurrecting him and his two adds do was not wearing me down with hits, but with play time. I spent approx 30 minutes non stop fighting him and his cronies and just couldn't kill them all within 10 seconds of each other. Inevitably one of them would be left with enough HP to last and resurrect one of the others, and then the third. This is actually what lead me to respec, not being happy with my DPS output. As I mentioned in my last post I love the respec (adding Death Rune Master in place of Blood Worms) as it not only helps my DPS (more HS) but also allows me to add my healing abilities in easier without having to wait for Blood Runes.

Classic Raider - Zul'Gurub Part 2

Zul'Gurub...soloed. Yup I did it, and it's not hard, once you learn the raid. I didn't have much time to spend on WoW this weekend due to RL stuff but I did manage a few hours logged and decided to take some of that time to attempt Zul'Gurub again. As you may have read in my last post on this raid I didn't have to tough a time until it came to Hakkar and then the High Priest Thekal (aka tiger boss). This time through I knew a little more on the bosses and had a respec as well. This time around I did not spend as much time clearing trash as I did the first time, not because I expected problems doing so, just because I didn't have the time needed to do so. I killed all the High Priest bosses before Hakkar but I did not call Gahz'ranka this time and didn't kill the rest of the bosses except for Bloodlord Mandokir (for the attempt at the mount) and then Jin'do the Hexxer after Hakkar just to kill time and clear the rest of the bosses. I did clear all the bosses the last time so I consider this instance complete as far as soloing goes. I will be running this instance again for farming Zandalar Tribe rep(for no real reason other then to become exalted with them).

Goblin Side Bar - Lower Black Rock Spire

Goblin Side Bar is an idea I had to bring some gold making tips into the blog. While I am not a true Goblin I am at least part Goblin. I love to make gold and I have a nice pile of it already. I Most of this I gained by playing the Auction house game and while I am not as savvy as some of those out there I do pretty good. Could I do better? Of course but I'm pretty happy where I'm at for now and I'm still earning with very little work involved. While I'm not going to let go of all my secrets on how I do this I will give you some tips that work for me. For more tips/tricks/and ideas read some of the blogs I link to in the sidebar.

Headless Horseman - Soloed

As all of you know the time of Hallows End is upon us. It started last Sunday and goes for 2 weeks. Unfortunately for many, myself included, the event also brought terrible lag to our servers. It was so bad for most of the week that I couldn't retrieve my mail, thus my profit margin fell drastically. More importantly I left me in no mood to attempt to solo any instances. On Sunday I spent the day watching football and taking the taxi from location to location to get my Tricks and Treats of Azeroth Achievement, along with the approx 320g that goes along with it.

Classic Raider - Molten Core....FAIL

OK so I completed my Classic Dungeonmaster achievement and my intent was to move on to Classic Raider from there. I've already posted about my first attempt at Zul'Gurub and I have some ideas on what went wrong and would like to try them out. Between running heroics with some fresh 80 guild members to help them gear up and to help me replace my tanking gear and finishing my Classic Dungeonmaster I didn't have a whole lot of time to run a raid. With the amount of time I would need to complete Zul'Gurub I decided to postpone that and try Molten Core.

Goblin Sidebar - How I make money running instances

Goblin Side Bar is an idea I had to bring some gold making tips into the blog. While I am not a true Goblin I am at least part Goblin. I love to make gold and I have a nice pile of it already. I'm not anywhere near the gold cap but I could easily buy the Tundra Mammoth or the chopper and still have plenty left over. Most of this I gained by playing the Auction house game and while I am not as savvy as some of those out there I do pretty good. Could I do better? Of course but I'm pretty happy where I'm at for now and I'm still earning with very little work involved. While I'm not going to let go of all my secrets on how I do this I will give you some tips that work for me. For more tips/tricks/and ideas read some of the blogs I link to in the sidebar.

Outland Dungreon Hero - Underbog

I originally thought I would continue on a logical path with my solo attempts and with my Classic Dungeonmaster achievement behind me I would need to start on the Classic Raider achievement. However time will not permit me to follow such a linear path as the Raids seem to take much more time to complete then the dungeons. I will do my best to follow the linear path but work generally gets in the way of raiding on weekdays (haven't even been able to attend a guild raid in a while). On top of that once I trained in dual spec and selected my solo Blood spec I was anxious to test it out. At that point the idea for this blog was non-existent so I ran out to solo my first Heroic instance. No, it wasn't a lvl 80 heroic but a BC heroic, more specifically Underbog.

Classic Dungeonmaster - Completed

I spent quite a bit of time this weekend finishing the achievements for Classic Dungeonmaster. Nothing exciting to report they were all very easy and would be for any lvl 80 toon. I finished the achievement with completing Lower Black Rock Spire and at the same time I decided to solo the achievement Leeeeeeeeroy! in Upper Black Rock Spire. Surprising to me that the Upper Black Rock Spire achievement is not necessary for Classic Dungeonmaster but I will go back and complete that sometime soon.

Classic Raider - Zul'Gurub Part 1

First I have to say wow, great job WOW. This instance was a blast, of course I am a big fan of Zul'Farrak which I used to run quite often for the fun of it and a little gold making. This instance is the first Raid level instance I am attempting to solo, and just the second time I've been in the instance. Yes I have run this one before, but it was with a group of guild mates and they had already cleared much of the instance before I go there, so I was completely lost in this large and crazy instance and while I did get the achievement the first time I did not down all the bosses nor see most of the content. What I did get to do the first time was get the quest to obtain the Mudskunk Lure used to summon Gahz'ranka. So I entered the quest ready to gain one of two achievements Deadliest Catch, seeing as how I already acquired Zul'Gurub on my previous run. Much to my surprise there were two more achievements I could potentially get on my run, the Swift Razzashi Raptor and Swift Zulian Tiger achievements for the two mounts that have the potential to drop from two of the bosses inside. So with fingers crossed I entered the portal ready for anything I might have to face...or so I thought.

Begin at the Begining - Step 1: Classic Dungeonmaster

Before I start increasing the difficulty level of soloing instances I want to finish all the low level instances that I have not completed yet. There are a few that I run a lot, including Stratholme (for the mount), Zul'Farrak, Scarlet Monastery, Stockades, all of these I run for enchanting mats, cloth, and AH sales. I do fairly well on the AH with these runs but they only account for a small percentage of my overall profit. As I continue to advance in instance difficulty I hope to increase this percentage and increase my profit. But first comes the task of completing the Classic Dungeonmaster achievement. Here is the list of dungeons for the achievement, the ones I completed will be in bold:

Army of One - The Rules

As I've stated in my first post, my goal here is see how far I can progress on my DK soloing dungeon and raid content. I hope to eventually get to the Heroic lvl 80 dungeons and to successfully solo those. I wanted to lay down some ground rules to give you an idea of how I will attempt to go about this.

Please allow me to introduce myself - My Gear

Ok so my tank gear currently stinks. I have a couple of epic items (helm and chest) and the rest are blues. I'm not to worried about having the best tank gear at first, for some of the lower level raids and heriocs I think my DPS set will be better. The extra strength I have will allow me to plow down the trash faster and give me more heals with my blood spec. But as I progress I'm going to need better tanking gear which means grinding more heroics for emblems and possibly buying them off the AH. I'll list my relevant (what I think is relevant anyway) stats for each set below.

Please allow me to introduce myself - My Death Knight

So I feel like I may be a little out of order here, my intent was to talk about my gear next but I realized I should introduce my My Death Knight, probably should have done that before the post about my spec but hindsight, as they say, is 20/20. So on to my Death Knight:

Please allow me to introduce myself - My Solo Blood Spec

So as I stated before my main spec is Frost DPS. I love the spec, love the damage output and am pretty OK at the rotation (still need some work but I'm never satisfied). But for soloing raids, high level instances, and heroics I don't think it will cut it, just not enough self healing going on. So enter my new blood spec. I took the basic tanking blood spec and tried to add in as much self healing as I could. I don't know a whole lot about blood spec so I did read up on a couple of forums including Wowhead and Elitist Jerks. I had some recommendations from a few folks on wowhead and made some changes from my original spec. I'll start with the one I have and as I progress if I feel the need to change anything I will.

Army of One - The begining of a Journey

I've always run low level instances on my high level characters for some quick cash, but those instances have been just been vanilla WOW ones, and one or two runs throw Ramparts to see if it was profitable. There is good money to be made running the lower instances and I am still trying to get my mount from Stratholme. Most of this money for me comes from rare drops, cloth, and enchanting mats, the mats I use for both scrolls and selling on the AH. But recently I heard of some Death Knights (here on known as DK's), Hunters, and Palladins soloing BC Raids and WoTLK heroic instances. Now this was something I had to try, I had to know how far I could go with it and I thought I would blog about my experience.