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.


Another aspect of Hallows End is facing he Headless Horseman in the graveyard at Scarlet Monastery. He drops a few items you need for another Hallows End achievement so most people do him in groups of 5 daily. This time around he is a level 80 elite and at one point summons a few adds. From the first time I encountered him I decided I needed to try and solo him at some point.

Now most people probably won't try this because the whole idea of facing him is to get a chance at some gear and possible some drops that will help you with getting the achievements associated with this holiday. Also he drops a mount (very rarely) so if you go with 4 others and each of you takes a turn calling him you get at least 5 chances to get what you need. I don't much care if I become Hallowed or not (the overall holiday achievement) even though I am a bit of a achievement junkie but the thought of attempting to solo and 80 elite got me excited enough to take him on alone. I have never before even attempted to solo an 80 elite so this was a good test for when I get ready to run lvl 80 instances.

Upon entering the graveyard I cleared as many of the mobs around the HH tomb as I could, not that I was worried about them getting in on the fight, I was more concerned with accidentally targeting them instead of the HH, his head, or his adds. Yes I said his head, for those of you who haven't run HH before the encounter goes down like this. You summon him at one of the tombs in the graveyard. He comes out riding his horse and attacks you, you DPS him down until his health is almost gone at which point his head leaves his body and runs around. You have to then DPS his head until the health runs down at which point it rejoins his body, he gets back on his horse and is once again at full health. You repeat this twice, the third time he summons pumpkin adds which you kill and his head once again leaves his body. This time after draining the health of his head he dies. Not to bad but he is an 80 elite.

When I started the encounter I wasn't very confident feeling my gear wasn't good enough for the encounter and the fight went better then I expected. I did loose health and had my low health alert trigger a few times but I was able to recover using one of the healing options I have available, those would be Rune Tap, Mark of Blood, or Death Pact usually couppled with Vampiric Blood. One nice part of the fight is that when his head leaves his body it doesn't appear to directly attack you, giving me time use bandages, potions, etc. I'm not sure if it's on a timer also or if you could use the time to regain cooldowns, at some point it appeared that I didn't get his head's health down low enough yet it still rejoined the rest of him. The one sticky point came when he called his adds, I used a DnD to DPS all of them at the same time and came up to a point where I was quite low on health with his three adds and him attacking me. I popped Vampiric Blood and rune tap and then a potion and called Army of the Dead. Nice part about Army is it does give you a damage reduction while channeling. The extra DPS from my army helped and I used a Death Pack near the end of their summoning time, not sure if I really needed it because he died shortly after but better safe then sorry after all.

I feel good that I accomplished this but I still think it's an easier encounter then the instances so I'll take my win with a grain of salt. Still makes me think I'll be able to work through the Northrend instances when I get to that point (with gear upgrades of course).