Thanks to insane gear inflation in Wrath, I've been curious to see whether I could SOLO bosses from previous expansions who drop shiny mount rewards. Over the weekend, I learned to take down the 5-man heroic Magister's Terrace, where Kael'thas has a chance of dropping a white Blood Elf chicken. It takes me the better part of an hour to make the run, but it's actually challenging, so I enjoy the effort.
With that out of the way, the next question was the level 60 Zul'Gurub 20-man raid. I ran this place into the ground at level 60, and never even saw the Raptor boss drop the Troll raptor mount. However, I read that the fight was soloable, so off I went to ZG. It turns out that yes, the raptor boss can be soloed by a mage. He has a habit of stopping to whirlwind and generally running slowly, so you can kite him around the instance until your cooldowns are ready, pop the water elemental and mirror images, and do a bit of damage. It took over 17 minutes, but I was able to kill the guy.
Wait a minute.... what the heck is that second item that dropped?!
This was the mount that I've always wanted the most, but I hadn't even considered that I'd ever actually get to own it if for no other reason than because of the 3-day raid lockout. I even farmed up the rep on my Tauren because I figured that would be as close as I'd ever get. Some days, the RNG decides to smile on you, I suppose. I'm not sure if this technically counts as having dropped on the first try, since I have killed that boss a few dozen times in raids, but I'll take it.
(P.S. Of course, we would have major breaking LOTRO news come up literally as I was taking my celebratory screenshots. Go ahead, Turbine, take the spotlight, really. ;))
Grats on the mount. That's quite an achievement. Seventeen minutes of kiting, yikes.
ReplyDeleteWow, wow, wow! Congratulations!
ReplyDeleteThat's a great looking gnome mount, for sure! :)
WoW, grats on that. I've been killing him and the tiger boss for a while, with no luck yet. No luck with Karazhan or druid boss either.
ReplyDeleteHi fellow mage here and new to your blog. Could you show me where you learnt to solo the raptor boss? and also Kael'thas. thanks!
ReplyDelete@Xan: The Raptor boss you can Youtube, but it's pretty easy assuming level 80 and 5-man quality gear. Basically, you're kiting the boss around until your mirror image cooldown comes back up, then you pop your MI and water elemental and DPS for 20 seconds, and then go back to kiting.
ReplyDeleteHere's a mini-guide to Magister's Terrace, the key is to ignore the strategies you are supposed to use (except on the second boss) and rely on overwhelming DPS from being over leveled and geared. Some of the trash pulls are harder than the actual bosses.
- The first boss you can kite around by jumping on his platform and then going around the other staircase while he chases you. When he stops to eat a crystal, ignore the crystal and DPS him.
- The second boss requires you to stop and ice lance an add between each frostbolt you throw at the boss, so that you get a DPS buff. You want to pop the elemental and mirror images and move away from them so your casts don't get interrupted by AOE, save your icy veins for when your pets are dead.
- For the third boss, you have to treat the whole thing as an AOE pull and just spam Blizzard (MI and elemental tanking), with the caveat that some combinations of adds are very hard and might require you to leave the instance for 30 minutes to reset it. It's very hard to burn the healer down first single target, but if you AOE she'll waste too much time healing her teammates and you can finish her off.
- Kael himself is easy, as the majority of his damage is in the form of easily resisted level 70 spells - spam DPS in phase 1, and phase 2 requires you to swim around in the air and stop to DPS when you're far enough away from the glowing balls of death.