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All of the latest Mists of Pandaria newsThe 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 3 of 6)
Matchu Feb 3rd 2009 2:41PM
You mean south-west of Darnassus? That's Exodar and the Azuremyst/bloodmyst Islands.
Loudfiero Feb 3rd 2009 2:34PM
2 questions related to rogues:
1) Do poisons crit?
2) What is the best stragedy a rogue can use against the various DK specs.
I have been owned by my friend's unholy DK in duels even when I was 5 levels over him shortly after WotLK launch. That's just wrong...and it's not like I can't PvP....
My complaints are, they resist poisons, they wear plate, they dodge/parry more than warriors it seems, they have reduced stun duration and when I was at 30% and he at 15% a bloody self-heal brings him right back to 60% - WTF?
One stragedy I tried was blinding him and sprinting away with his ghoul in hot pursuit. I wanted to solo the ghoul. No sooner do I turn to fight the ghoul, I get Death Grip'd from 100 yards away or some crap like that... I mean - seriously, wtf!??!!?!?!11
Xigageshi Feb 3rd 2009 4:00PM
welcome to the club pal, the we-get-face-rolled club, I used to be a member for the last four years, luckily in wotlk mages are teh roxors and a get to clean the floor with people, now I know how all those rogues felt when they'd tell us "mages are fine l2p" :P
its the dynamic of any rock paper scissors class based game that some classes kick other's into the stone-age
look at it this way, you can still stun lock most everyone else. :D
Nintai Feb 3rd 2009 9:33PM
Deadly poison does not crit, but the others do. i really have no answer on the pvp question as I don't pvp much at all, but with envenom and poisons ignoring armor (mut spec) I don't have a whole lot of trouble with DKs.
Laynne Feb 3rd 2009 2:34PM
I think someone likes Next Generation :)
Ah, those were the days...
Impatience Feb 3rd 2009 2:38PM
Any additional suggestions for improving system performance for those of us running Vista?
OneWing Feb 3rd 2009 5:54PM
Do a google search for something like, "Make Vista look like XP" and find something that looks reputable. That's what I did when I tried Vista and I now have a hard time going back to XP to play WoW. The performance difference is huge to me. I run an 8800 GT OC and was starting to get artifacts when Wintergrasp battles ended. Installed Vista on a new partition, clean install (which I'm sure helps too) and I'm running on nearly full settings without artifacts and almost no clipping. Night and day compared to running in XP.
Nfinit_D Feb 3rd 2009 2:41PM
this may sound nOObish, or just plain dumb to ask, but....
regarding Heirloom items, they are marked "bind to account" if im not mistaken.
So does this mean they can be sent to another realm as long as ur sending it to a toon on ur account (though i dont know thi would work with the current mial-sending options)
Like i said might be stupid thing to ask, but i dont have any 80's..or 70's for that matter, due to casual-level time limits and being an extreme altoholic
Thanks in advance
Loudfiero Feb 3rd 2009 2:44PM
How would you "mail" that?
Speaking of that...when do we get "account banks". This way I don't need a separate guild (and vault) for all my toons....
Jess Q. Feb 3rd 2009 2:48PM
If you give the item to a toon and transfer your toon to that realm, it works. Other people have done this already. You can then mail the item around to toons on the other realm. And I guess if you wanted you could transfer that toon back to the original realm.
Unfortunately I haven't thought up a way (and don't think there is one) to give the item to toons of another faction but on the same server. Which is really unfortunate for all my low-level Alliance toons who don't get to share any of the wealth my Horde main has.
Belna Feb 4th 2009 8:29AM
@ Jess
There at least 2 shared AH's for Aliance and Horde, Booty Bay and Gadzachstan. You can put up a cheap item in that AH from the Aliance toon for an insane amount of money and let it buy by the Horde toon. That way you can transfer money from the Horde to the Aliance toons or the other way around.
Valerii Feb 3rd 2009 2:57PM
Druids do have to dismount even out of birdform to mine. Herbalism and skinning they don't, but they need to shapeshift to humanoid to mine things.
Horris Feb 3rd 2009 3:01PM
But the advantage with druids is that flying again is just an instant cast away. The few seconds it takes to mount up can have a serious impact on how fast you can farm nodes.
Valerii Feb 3rd 2009 5:43PM
No, that is true. I stand somewhat corrected. There's still dismounting required.. but it is much quicker to get going again.
Brewski Feb 3rd 2009 3:29PM
Did WoWInsider recently change image servers? I've lately found that a lot of images on the site no longer show up while I am browsing at work. All images hosted on "http://www.blogcdn.com/..." have been blocked at work via the firewall. Navigating to any webpages on that domain results in a fancy firewall message, so I know it is being blocked at the domain level.
Not that I go to WoWInsider at work...or am doing just that right now.
As for a WoW question, has there finally been a post dismissing those 3.1 fake patch notes? I'm tired of explaining to my guild why they are fake...
RipeTomatoe Feb 3rd 2009 3:29PM
I'd just like to state that in Vista when you run a full-screen application all the desktop features, like Aero, go to the lower settings, it doesn't stay see-through, so that's not the reason why, it's because Windows 7 has been optimized to save CPU, GPU and RAM performance.
Kekci Feb 3rd 2009 3:37PM
Here is a question :
What is the minimum number of player you need to farm Phoenix mount? Any idea
Arturis Feb 3rd 2009 3:43PM
To rephrase this question in a more amusing way:
How many players does it take to unscrew Alar's light bulb?
Scuthell Feb 3rd 2009 4:04PM
What ever happened to Blizzard Wallpapers? They used to come out with new World Of Warcraft wallpapers every once and awhile, yet recently all they release are crappy TCG and comic ones. Any idea if we're ever going to see new good wallpapers?
Suzaku Feb 4th 2009 3:09PM
Blizzard's web design staff are presumably lazy bastards. See the WoW Encyclopedia and the Wrath of the Lich King Bestiary, both of which are unfinished.