Welcome back to The Queue, WoW Insider's daily Q&A column where the WoW Insider team answers your questions about the World of Warcraft. Adam Holisky will be your host today.

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.

Tags: druid, druid-forums, dual-boxing, mining, nodes, patch-3.0.8, recruit-a-friend, rogue, soloing, soloing-instances, soloing-zg, titanium, titanium-nodes, windows-7, windows-vista, zulgurub

Filed under: Druid, Shaman, The Queue