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.


So this led me to having some time before football watching on Sunday to do a run. I picked Hellfire Ramparts because it's one of the few BC dungeons that I have run before therefore I knew it already and it's quick. Upon entering the instance I was fairly confident, having soloed this before with my DPS frost spec some time ago, but I never ran it on heroic, not even in a group, before so I was a little cautious. That was before my first pull.

The first pull was a little sketchy, I dropped below 1/2 health and had to struggle a little to regain it but I managed OK by popping Vampiric Blood, rune tap, calling my ghoul and Death Pact. I finished off the mobs and took a minute to figure out where I was going wrong. I decided that I needed to focus on maintaining high health because once I start dropping down, if I get a bad run from RNG (random number generator) I could be toast. As I mentioned I love having the Death Rune Mastery in my spec as it allows form me to use the death runes as blood runes for either HS or any of my other blood abilities like Rune Tap, Mark of Blood, etc. However it also gives me to much leeway in not using Death Strike for healing, seeing as how I only have to use it every other rotation to create those death runes. I think this was my problem, focusing to much on DPS (my main spec and oh how I love those DPS numbers to climb) and not enough on heals.

From then on I re-focused and maintained at least 1 DS per rotation if not both of them. Granted I could have used my other abilities to regenerate health but if I got stuck or missed a clicked..anything I could be screwed. So what if it takes me 5 minutes longer, no big deal it already takes me 30 - 40 minutes to run these instances anyway. That's not to say when I was full health and down to one or two mobs I didn't just start swinging for the fences. I did, can't help it, DPS is in my blood.

So the trash mobs were easy, I had basically three strategies depending on the groups I had to pull. Groups that were all melee (no casters) I would just Death Grip one and start applying my disease, then start to fall back a little as I used pestilence. This allowed me to avoid being hit, for some reason they were just a little slow to come after me (guess I scared them with the power of those first few hits), and allow my runes to come back. Then it was just a spank fest. Beat em up, regenerating health all the while. Wasn't the quickest kills I've had but it was efficient. Now I probably didn't have to do this but I figured if I got used to it that it would only help me out in the higher level instances, so I was practicing how I would be doing it later on (maybe, if it works out the same).

For mobs with casters I would do the same but pull the caster with Death Grip and not back up, cause the caster would just stand there and I'd have to go back anyway (note to self: work on using Strangulate in your rotation for casters). The third strategy was for more then one caster in a group. In this case I would just run up to one of the casters, Death Grip another and start my rotations. The melee would rush in on top of me but anytime I was without a caster near by I would move over to one of the casters to make sure he was within melee range. The reason for this is twofold. One, magic is not a strike so it ignores armor so there for does more damage and two casters go down quick due to all the cloth they wear so I can quickly have less damage being done to me.

Anyway with this strategy I quickly (relatively speaking) made my way to the first boss Watchkeeper Gargolmar. I thought I would be in for a fight with him, I was wrong. Fighting him comes with two healer adds, if you don't kill those first he will call out to them for heals when he gets low. I just ignored him and killed the adds, then moved to downing him. Took a little bit of time (compared to the mobs that is) but it was easy peas. Then I went back to downing the trash. I cleared all the trash in the instance, avoiding no one.

It was pretty much the same throughout, with one exception. After climbing the stairs and dealing with the large group of casters in the hall there is a doorway you come to that leads to the large circular courtyard with adds all around. There is also a patrol that walks around here, my strategy was to take him out first then move into the courtyard and start dealing with the adds. Well I don't know if it was just bad timing on my part but for some reason I didn't just get him and his wolves, I got a whole other group of mobs rushing me as well. So I died, and let me tell you there is very little more frustrating to me then dieing in any Hellfire Citadel instance. Not only is it a long way to run back but I have no idea how to get to each of the stupid instances without a flying mount. I mean really, is it that hard to make it somewhat simple to find the entrance to one of these things? I always end up just above where I want to get in and have to drop down (and sometimes miss like I did this time, causing me to run all the way back) to the entrances.

Well after that 10 minute death due to having to run all over Hellfire Peninsula to get my body I vowed to not die again (and thankfully succeeded). I wasn't able to test out whether it was my timing or something else that caused all the mobs to come since I had killed most of them before my death. This time I just went in and killed all the mob packs one by one.

The mobs down I moved to the second boss Omor the Unscarred, what I consider the second boss anyway since there is no set order to the last two encounters. And seeing as how this post is getting a little long in the tooth I'll go ahead and save the rest for another one.