Posts with tag solo

Tribunalx sent us this great video about something that's fallen out of fashion lately: Hunter soloing. Back in the day, when Mend Pet was still affected by plus healing (back when there was plus healing), Hunters would routinely take down Azuregos by themselves, but they've since had to sit on the sidelines while other classes stepped into the solo arena. But now, with Mend Pet and Bestial Wrath glyphs, a Hunter stacking Stamina in PvP gear, the new version of Deterrence, and pets with their own Tenacity talents, Hunter soloing is possible yet again.

As Tribunalx says in the video, it's not really easy, and there's a lot you have to keep track of (and Hunters definitely aren't the only class that can do this -- there's probably a Paladin soloing UK and/or a Death Knight out there as well). But it is definitely possible, as you can see above. Maybe we're experiencing a renaissance of Hunter solo possibilities -- next up, The Nexus? Good luck with the Ormorok gauntlet.

The Argent Tournament has been overshadowed quite a bit by Ulduar in patch 3.1, it hasn't been talked about a whole lot since the first thrill of finding out it was actually there in Icecrown. Since that rush a whole lot of things have changed with the Tournament, but beyond the dedicated few, I have my doubts it was receiving as much testing as it needed. That's probably why Kisirani has put out a call for focused testing on the Argent Tournament, asking for as much feedback as you can supply.

Kisirani's thread on the official forums lays out a few things: First, a lot has changed since the early PTR. This means that if you only did the quests in the first week or two of the Tournament, you should try them again before submitting feedback. If you've never been to the Tournament before, Jean Pierre Poulain awaits you on Krasus' Landing in Dalaran. He'll send you out there for free. If you want to do it yourself, the Tournament is just north of Sindragosa's Fall.

We heard a ton of news about the incoming dual spec feature last week, and for the most part, players were pretty thrilled -- besides the fact that we're finally getting the option to have two specs at once, we're also getting the much-awaited ability to preview our specs before they're saved, and the official Itemrack functionality that we've heard about for so long. But there was one thing Ghostcrawler said last week that hasn't sat well with many players: that we'd need to be max level before training for the dual spec feature.

For many players, the main reason they wanted dual spec was to be able to switch between "leveling" and "grouping" specs, and obviously if you're already max level, you won't have much need for a leveling spec any more (more likely you'd be switching between "solo" and "raid" or "PvP" specs). Ghostcrawler's stated reason for requiring a max level was that they didn't want lower level players to be confused by having access to more than one talent spec too early, but as Zarhym says, Cvarto makes a good point: if a player uses only one spec for 80 levels and then gets the dual spec feature, he/she may not have enough experience with different specs to have any clue about how to choose another one.

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. Alex Ziebart will be your host today.

What? Me lace a post title with jealousy? I would never do that! Never ever! Okay, okay, maybe there's some jealousy there. Can you blame me? Screw purps, I want me some orange. Orange is where it's at, cat.

erogroth asked...

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 sounds 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.

Sure, getting together with 40 of your best friends and leading an epic raid on the alternate faction's capitol city can be fun, but I have to say that there's fun to be had doing things all by yourself, too. Some classes were soloing Onyxia at level 70 -- and it seems like just about everyone can solo her at or near level 80. (For those thinking of trying this yourself -- it's good fun and not a bad amount of gold for the effort.) Zul'Gurub and Ahn'Qiraj (the 20-man wing, at least) have both been cleared (mostly) by a lone player. Karazhan has been cleared with a group of 3 -- though in our post-Wrath world, I'd imagine that everything save Netherspite could be easily managed with less. (And at some point even Netherspite is bound to be overcome by brute force.)

To solo or not to solo, that is the question. Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous Hunters (who sometimes seem to think they have a monopoly on soloing content) or to take arms against a sea of dragons (dragons, elementals, demons -- we're not picky), and by opposing, earn epic (albeit under-level) loot. So, tell us, what have you soloed lately?

First we had a Druid do it, then a Pally, and then after Wrath Hunters and Death Knights got into the mix, and now it seems anybody with a pulse and a level 80 can solo the old 40-man boss Onyxia. Here's video of an Elemental Shaman taking the dragon down (Skitlash of the guild Unrelenting on Aman'thul), and we've even heard of a Disc Priest doing the deed (I believe that way back, when the Druid first downed Ony solo, a Priest, we thought on the podcast, was the least likely class to do it).

But time has proven us wrong. Does any of this mean anything? Probably not -- while it's certainly an achievement for these guys, the old bosses will only get easier as time goes on (until, of course, Blizzard decides to break out some Heroic versions of these instances), and the once-feared Onyxia will only become more and more of a punching bag. Grats to everyone who's been able to solo the old lady of raiding, but at this point, if a Disc Priest can do it, anyone can.

One of the changes between The Burning Crusade and Wrath of the Lich King that I'm noticing most strongly now that I've cleared most of the solo and small group quests in Northrend (I needed money for crafting) is how accessible major lore moments are, and how much lore is now being created in the massively multiplayer game, rather than simply being resurrected for it. Yes, we're seeing the machinations of the Lich King, that fusion of Arthas and Ner'zhul we saw created at the end of Warcraft III, but we're also seeing in the Storm Peaks and Sholozar a great deal of new information about the Titans, who they were and what they were up to on Azeroth, and their contrasting opposites the Old Gods. The Yogg-Saron storyline has fingers in Dragonblight, Grizzly Hills, Storm Peaks, and Icecrown at the very least and the quests that reveal the conflict not merely between this vast, formless entity and the Titans but even against the Lich King's forces in Icecrown are surprisingly deep and complex for ones you can do solo or in a group of three or four people.

Paladins have been the solo instance kings for a while now, from BRD to Onyxia to Blood Furnace, but there may be a new contender in town. Felblood let us know that his level 80 Death Knight (I believe this is his Armory page) has soloed one of my favorite instances, Zul'Gurub, going from the snake boss all the way to Hakkar with just his character.

The snake boss, he says, was easy, just a nuke. The bat boss Jeklik silences, and a few of his resists failed on her, so she got some healing off, but she still dropped. Panther and spider went down all right, though the spider's webbing apparently kept him from healing as well -- being silenced, he couldn't cast disease, so Death Strike didn't heal. Bloodlord Mandokir was super tough, apparently -- I can imagine that watching would be pretty nuts during that. On Thekal, the tiger boss, his problem was that he was killing too fast: the boss would get ressed when one of the adds died early. Eventually he just brought them down to 50% and then just nuked all out, and the second phase was easy.

And Hakkar was anticlimactic -- he just basically tanked and spanked. He tried to anti-magic the Blood Syphons, but they didn't heal for much, so he just wailed on Hakkar until he was the last one standing. Quite a feat. Of course, at level 80, he was 20 levels above where this 20 man instance was meant to be, so we probably haven't seen the end of the level 60 content being soloed. But it seems that Death Knights are almost more equipped than Paladins to bring down some of the raid content on their own.

Chalk up another piece of evidence for just how trivial the old world stuff will be when Wrath releases -- here's a video of a Hunter at level 77 (on the beta servers, obviously) soloing the original raid boss herself, Onyxia. There's a little more info about how it was done over on the WarcraftMovies page -- the only way to deal with all the whelps was to max out AoE, so he used a special talent blend just to do this. And it looks like he just dodged or ate the Deep Breaths, as I doubt even a 77 Hunter would be able to put up enough "dots" to down her before she can do too many. Roar of Sacrifice also got a lot of usage -- it's a pet talent that lets a Hunter avoid half of his pet's health in damage. And he says the two-piece set bonus from Hunter T5 helped a lot, too -- over the fight it added up to quite a bit of healing.

Not too shabby. And at 77, this means there's still three levels (not to mention all the endgame gear) to grow. Maybe the fact that Blizzard is revamping/replacing the old endgame isn't so bad after all -- when it's this easy for the highest level players, it's time to move on. Unless, of course, they make soloing Ony an achievement.

[via BRK]

When you decide to roleplay, a whole new world of imagination opens up to you -- soon you realize that all the World of Warcraft is a stage, and all the orcs and humans merely players.

A friend of mine recently complained that lately leveling has been extremely tedious. Even with characters he might feel excited about at first, he eventually gets bored after just a few quests. We talked about this for a little while, and he brought up the fact that if he was going to play WoW by himself he might as well play a single-player game instead.

It got me thinking that, in spite of all the demand people have for more solo and casual content, this is significantly better when we play it together. Even when I play by myself, my eye is always on my friends list to see if someone I know is going to show up and chat with me. Thinking about my friend's problem, I thought maybe it would really help if he and I were to go questing together -- so we found the two characters we had with the smallest level gap between them and we decided to go at it. Rather than just just going through the motions of killing the various enemies listed on our little quest sheets as if we were buying groceries or something, we made it into a neat little roleplay experience.

In fact, there are lots of quests in the game that are very appropriate for roleplaying. When you get together with your friends to level up and quest together, you can focus on the quest that has the deepest possible connection to your own character, or the one with the most intrinsic storyline. Of course there are many other throwaway quests you can do along the way, like "kill 10 Generic Humanoids" or whatever, but it works best to pick one that seems to have some meaning to you or your character and start there.

We've mentioned solo instances before -- just like more midlevel content, Heroic versions of old world instances, and player housing, they seem to be the kind of content that players seem really interested in, but Blizzard isn't all that excited about implementing. And now they've come up again on the forums, and once again Bornakk has given a few good reasons why it just wouldn't work for the game Blizzard is making.

Tremallyn of Shu'halo is actually asking for scalable instances -- he says that if 10 and 25man groups are going to be playing the same instances in Northrend, why not scale those down to five man and even solo versions, so all players can get a chance to see the content? Bornakk replies that the rest of the game already is solo content, and that they want the endgame dungeons to be more exclusive. We've heard other good reasons before -- to tune an instance for every class, with all of their varied strengths and weaknesses, would require Blizzard to water down the instance so much that it wouldn't be nearly as dynamic an experience as you can have with a minimum 10 people in the party.

Not that it's impossible -- other games (I know of one in particular) have scalable instances, some of which are even tuned for one player. But at the same time, we play MMO games for a reason -- if you really just wanted to play a great single player experience, there are a wealth of single player games to choose from out there. And if you really want to do an instance solo, you could always just wait 10 levels and do it solo anyway.

This past weekend, Turpster, Daniel Whitcomb, John "BBB" Patricelli, and I all sat down for a good hour's worth of discussion about the biggest posts over the past week of WoW Insider. We call it the WoW Insider Show, and the latest episode, number 40, is now available over on WoW Radio and in iTunes.

• We answered a ton of reader questions on email, including the ongoing discussion of what Turpster should do to ding 70 on his Shadow Priest, and why Blizzard has overpowered a lot of high level crafting items.
• We talked about the news that two classes had soloed Onyxia, and whether it's impossible for other classes to do it.
• We chatted about killing Kil'jaeden, and whether those endgame kills matter to the rest of us who aren't in those guilds.
• And we talked about account sharing: why people do it and why Blizzard doesn't want you to (and will ban you for it).

Plus, if I'm not mistaken, you can not only hear Turpster doing a Sean Connery impression, but also John P's favorite new song, Pugging Kara Blues. It's a really fun show this week, definitely give it a listen.

And don't forget, if you have comments or questions, you can email them to us at theshow@wow.com, or go ahead and jump on WoW Radio's forums -- next week, we'll definitely be taking a look at some of the topics that have come up in there for sure. Enjoy the show this week!

Yes, our weekly podcast is back on the air tomorrow -- it's everything you love about WoW Insider, in pure, distilled audio form. This week, Daniel Whitcomb and John "BigBearButt" Patricelli join myself and Turpster to chat about all of the most popular posts on WI in the past seven days, including the big news of the game being beaten yet again, the Onyxia soloing that's been going on lately (first a Druid, and then a Paladin), and why account sharing is wrong, mmkay?

And of course we'll be chatting live on IRC at irc.mmoirc.com in the #wowradio channel (or just over on the Chat page on WoW Radio), and we'll be reading and answering your emails and questions -- send us a note if you'd like at theshow@wow.com. And come to think of it, there's some fun stuff to chat about over on the show's forums, too, so we'll have to throw some of that in as well.

We go live at 3:30pm EST (which is 8:30pm GMT), so if you're around, definitely be sure to tune in and listen live. We'll see you then!

The Druid who Soloed Onyxia seems to have become the Shot Heard Around the World. It was just Monday that WoW Insider brought you the video of Serennia of VANQUISH (Cho'gall, US) downing Onyxia. Today, as if challenged, tipsters sent in the video of a Paladin named Par (Khadgar, US), slaying the dragon by his lonesome. A few posts on the Official Forums have discussed the feat. It will be interesting to see if other classes step-up to claim solo Onyxia-credit in the next few weeks.

Thanks to everyone that sent this in!

Edit: There's some question about the original Onyxia Druid soloing - it wasn't Serennia the character, but Serennia the player (who is the Warrior of the same name). According to several commenters, it was Serennia playing on a druid's account. Also, the original Warcraft movie blurb is signed by Serennia of VANQUISH.