The Queue: Soloing Zul'Gurub like a Q
by Adam Holisky 
Feb 3rd 2009 at 2:00PM
As Alex mentioned yesterday, he and I will be taking turns with the queue. So don't fret, Alex will be back in your loving graces tomorrow. As this is my first post for the queue, I feel like I'm boldly going where no man (Alex is a superman) has gone before. And who better to welcome me than John de Lancie's iconic Q character? With Picard oddly facepalming himself... huh. I hope this isn't a sign of things to come. Anyways, I digress. On with the Q!
037 asked...
"Is it possible to solo Zul'Durub to farm the mounts? If it makes a difference, I am a 10 Man Naxx geared Enhancement Shaman."
Yes and no. The raptor boss you'll probably be able to take down pretty easily, but you might have some trouble with the tiger boss.
For the raptor boss, make sure you have your cooldowns ready for the tight spots and you know how to conserve mana when you're anticipating needing some healing. There were several people able to solo the raptor boss in BC. For those that don't remember the Bloodlord Mandokir fight (aka the raptor boss), you run up the stairs to kill the speaker, then Mandokir comes down and he and his raptor attack you. Kill the raptor first and then go after Mandokir.
With regards to the tiger boss, or High Preist Thekal, you'll want to get each add down to a very low health. Since each add needs to die within 10 seconds of each other, you'll want to bring them down to the range where it'll only take one or two shots to kill them. Save heroism for the end of the adds, since if you get an unlucky miss when you're taking down the add you're pretty much done for.
The other consideration with the Thekal is that you're going to be getting hit a lot, and taking a large amount of damage.
Yltharion asked...
"I haven't found a single titanium node in Scholazar Basin post 3.0.8. Did they limit the nodes only to Icecrown and Storm Peaks? I didn't see such change in the patch notes."
The titanium nodes are there, and I can attest to having several on farm myself. But therein lays the issue. With patch 3.0.8 came the hot new feature of one hit mining. Where titanium nodes might have required three to six hits to clear, it now only takes one to mine all the ore. That means people, especially Druids and Shamans who don't have to worry about dismounting, are mining the nodes faster.
Loudfiero asks...
"My laptop is running Vista and runs WoW-WotLK acceptably. I want to install Windows 7. I hear it offers better performance than Vista. Is WoW compatible with it?"
Yes! I am running Windows 7 on my laptop (along with Ubuntu) right now, and it works great. WoW runs about 10 FPS faster than it did in Vista. I should disclose that there were a few things I didn't do in Vista to increase the frame rate; namely I had Aero turned on, which makes all the windows have transparent borders, etc... But I have those on because my laptop primarily is used to do WoW Insider work in my comfy living room chairs and couch, and not play the game.
Besides the improvements to WoW, Windows 7 is a much much much better OS than Vista. Without going into lots of details, let's just say that when Windows 7 is released, everyone will want to upgrade. Vista will become the new ME.
If you do end up downloading and installing the beta of Windows 7, just be aware that despite its abundance of awesome-sauce, it still is a beta. And that beta is going to expire eventually, and you'll probably want to have all your data backed up or stored in a way so that you can do a completely clean reinstall of Windows when the final/retail version of Windows 7 comes out.
Have questions about the World of Warcraft? The WoW Insider crew is here with The Queue, our daily Q&A column! Leave your questions in the comments and we'll do our best to answer 'em!
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 6)
037 Feb 3rd 2009 2:09PM
Many thanks for your response about soloing ZG. I will give it a try soon!
Dryftwood Feb 3rd 2009 2:39PM
Good luck but be warned. Mandokir still hits like a truck on steroids. If you kill raptor first he'll hit even harder for a bit AND he has a mortal strike. Meaning you're wonderful instant cast maelstrom healing wave can be cut drastically short. I'm also 10 man Naxx geared and the fight is a difficult one even with a MM Hunter.
I've personally found Tiger boss to be extremely easier, but I do run with a friend.
Maiku Feb 3rd 2009 2:55PM
Just did Mandokir on my 79 blood DK last night. I'm in mostly quest/rep gear, mix of tanking and dps plate. It was challenging, but not impossible. The two minute enrage is rough, but otherwise the raptor will stack sunders that will destroy you. I've heard a lot of people suggest not attacking him during the enrage to avoid eating his focused attack (w/e it's called), but I found as blood spec I just healed through it.
GL on getting a mount :)
Snow Feb 4th 2009 11:38AM
I'm not sure of a enh shammy soloing ZG but I do know for a fact a fury/prot warr can easily so all of ZG and even farm attunmen in kara for the horse as well. And since you get instant heals as a enh shammy I would see no problem in farming them except that it will take awhile.
erogroth Feb 3rd 2009 2:12PM
I wonder if a warrior tank can solo any of that stuff.
That aside I posted my question really late in yesterday's queue and I doubt you even got a chance to see it so here it is again.
I have a question about legendary items. Do we know what Legendary items are planned for WOTLK? Are there currently any in the game? If not what are planned for the future or can we speculate? It sound like Ashbringer will not be a item that a player will be able to get. Is that true? Also what about upgrade quest for old world legendary items. It seems like so much work went into getting them (Thunderfury anyone?) that it seems a shame that they are worthless.
Xigageshi Feb 3rd 2009 2:18PM
not sure about any new legendaries but I do recall reading several threads on the forums back in wotlk's beta of blizzard laying down the law so to speak and explicitly stating they would not offer upgrade quests for legendaries or any other loot in the game, because a main component of the game is that it is always moving forward.
Liquoid Feb 3rd 2009 8:04PM
Our MT soloes all of ZG including Hakkar, so, yes, it's possible
hpavc Feb 4th 2009 5:14AM
plenty of videos on it, the best IMO is the guy that also does the aq20 stuff. He clearly did it as a how to and his commentary on last-stand enrage healing is quite well done.
Molloch Feb 3rd 2009 2:12PM
The problem with running WoW on Win7 is that Win7 isn't officially supported by Activision/Blizzard, so there's a chance that any future game patches will break WoW with the only recourse being to install another OS. So while it might work, the answer to the question of whether it's supported is a resounding "not yet". :)
Chet Husk Feb 3rd 2009 3:05PM
Let's see here, one of the biggest developers in the world is going to actively NOT support the upcoming OS from the current leaders in this market? Very likely. I see exactly what you mean.
Thiosion Feb 3rd 2009 3:12PM
@Chet Husk
That would be correct. Surprisingly, Beta is still Beta, even if Microsoft nearly explodes with demand to try a Windows system that isn't Vista. Blizzard isn't going to waste time rebuilding their engine for a piece of software that could totally change before release.
John Feb 3rd 2009 3:12PM
Chet - what he meant is that Windows 7 is still in Beta, so it's not supported. It's not an "official" OS yet. Once Windows 7 goes live, of course Blizzard will support it. But we're still a bit away from that, so any users that have problems caused by Windows 7 are on their own for support.
Molloch Feb 3rd 2009 3:19PM
@Chet Husk
While the operating system is in BETA? You're right, they're probably not, hence why I said it wouldn't be supported YET. That's how software development works. Having worked for what you might consider a large software company (IBM) for close to half a decade, unsupported means just that; unsupported. Beta platforms aren't supported by vendors because adequate testing can't be done to reasonably accommodate them, their quirks, and their nuances. This is because there's no guarantee that the OS won't change before it goes from being a release candidate to general availability.
For Blizzard to assign developers to fix game issues that occur on a beta operating system would be a waste of resources and man-hours.
This is the business of software development. This is how things work. I'm not saying that they'll NEVER support it (nor did I ever make that claim), but the likelihood of supporting a beta platform is slim.
Hotball Feb 4th 2009 1:58AM
@Molloch:
It's not necessarily a waste of resources to fix problems with Windows 7. The point of Windows 7 beta is not just to let ordinary people to have a peek of it, but also to let developers to check whether their applications have any compatibility issues with Windows 7. Therefore, it would be beneficial for Blizzard to iron out any possible incompatibilities with Windows 7 beta, so they can be pretty sure that when Windows 7 is finally released, WoW will be compatible with it.
However, with my own experience with Windows 7, I'd say that driver compatibility may be a greater issue. If you want to use Windows 7 beta to run WoW, make sure you have relatively new or very popular hardwares, otherwise you may not be able to find a good driver for it (although in most cases Vista driver works fine).
grarlex Feb 4th 2009 4:55AM
Only problem I've encountered so far using Windows 7 beta is when the game does its "anonnymous upload" thingy. Then I need to move the Survey.mpq and sometimes another file aswell from \Blizzard Entertainment\World of Warcraft\Cache to the Cache folder in my wow game folder.
doofman Feb 3rd 2009 2:12PM
John de Lancie rules.
Jess Q. Feb 3rd 2009 2:43PM
I agree. I met him at Comic Con this year and was geeking out but did my best to not show it too much. (I'm a girl, it's okay, I can geek out over John de Lancie without it being too creepy.)
Adam Holisky Feb 3rd 2009 2:45PM
I'm a guy and I geeked out when I met him.
Aldheim Feb 3rd 2009 2:16PM
What armor set are the death knights in the Scarlet Enclave (Thassarian, Koltira, etc.) wearing? It's this violet plate with some skulls on it. Is it attainable by players?
Suzaku Feb 4th 2009 3:09PM
It's a plate gear set that isn't currently available in the game. There are three versions of the set, for paladins, warriors, and death knights. There are slight variations in each that make them more visually suit the class.
It was supposedly going to be a PVP set, I recall that it was originally stated that classes would be sharing PVP set graphics, ala S4 / Sunwell gear.