Well, except that my paladin is a she 
::cough-cough:strap-on::cough::
Heh heh. Maybe most of you have seen this before, but it was a first for me.
My lvl 54 human warlock had just extinguished the Midsummer fire outside of Silvermoon City, and hearthed back to Light’s Hope Chapel, still flagged for PvP. So she was standing in front of the chapel, reading her map, when some tauren ran up and ganked her before I even knew what was happening.
I didn’t see the tauren’s level but the Argent Crusade guards dealt swift retribution for his crime: They shot him down on the spot, yelling, “You will abide by our rules around here, miscreant!”
I LOL’d 
So … I got a taste today of the loot frustration raiders must feel sometimes.
I moseyed my paladin, Eilyssana, over to Molten Core, and cleared the place out:
http://mister-rik.com/hosted/wow/molten_core.jpeg
In the course of taking out all those bosses, she picked up 4-5 pieces of Tier 1 gear for every class … except paladin. The only Lawbringer gear that dropped was the boots and the bracers. Off trash.
Still, she DE’d 48 Nexus Shards to sell on the AH …
Yeah. It seems that MC, in particular, seems to taunt solo-raiders with cool but useless stuff.
I already told my story about how numb I became in my months-and-months of grinding that place to finally put together Thunderfury. I mention that now because the first half of the bindings of the Windseeker dropped on my 2nd run. It took six more months of fanatical week-by-week clearing to get the second half. It also took that long for the last piece of T1 for the toon (a hunter) to drop.
I think MC decided it was tired of teasing me and “let the baby have its toys”.
I haven’t gone back in on that toon ever since, and rarely with any other. I’d rather grind T4 or T6 gear for my alts than see that miserable place again. And that’s considering that some T6 boss fights can actually kill a 90 if you’re unlucky or careless.
I guess the plus is that, now that I have the two T1 pieces that drop off the trash, I can just skip most of the trash on future runs and go straight for the bosses.
ETA: Or, wait. Is it boots that drop of trash, or belts? Need to go read that article again…
Belts and bracers, the boots drop from Lucifron.
I finally got Mount Parade. I didn’t think I’d manage before 6.0 but some lucky drops put me over the edge.
Now I’m going to see if I can reach 210 before the xpac hits (I’m assuming a new mount collecting achievement will come along eventually. May as well get started)
Well, congratulations!
What was the winning acquisition? (i.e., the mount that pushed you to 200.)
For some reason, I thought there was an achievement for 125 mounts. I’m sitting at 124, thanks to those mounts that drop all over the place in Ahn’Qiraj.
Yeah, I decided to solo my way through Ahn’Qiraj yesterday. I found it kind of … boring. Molten Core was more fun. And what’s the deal with the Temple boss, Battleguard Satura? I never even saw her. I killed the little group of trash roaming about in her room, but she never showed, and I couldn’t figure out if I needed to do something special to get her attention. Also, I couldn’t find my way out of the Temple after killing C’Thun and talking to the dragons-in-humanoid-form in the next room. I had to use my Kirin Tor ring to teleport back to Dalaran and then take the portal back to the Caverns of Time.
Also, why, after killing the first boss in the ruins, do I start at “Hated” with Brood of Nozdormu? When I saw “You are now Hated with Brood of Nozdormu”, I thought I’d done something to piss off Nozdormu. Did they start you at “Hated” just to extend the rep grind, since it was the last raid tier of Vanilla?
Anyway, I made my second solo run through Molten Core. I managed to pick up my third piece of the paladin Lawbringer set (got the gloves). And I think my paladin has now completed the entire hunter T1 set.
I want to do Blackwing Lair, but I’m having a bit of trouble finding the entrance.
Have they made it possible to solo Razorgore, then? Last time I tried it was still a no-go.
My experience is that you take a beating from the various dragonkin in the room while you’re MC’ing Razorgore. If you have any kind of instant self-heal, it’s survivable; pop it after each MC phase ends just before reestablishing control on Razorgore. On my hunter, it was Exhilaration. A shaman would probably drop a healing totem. (That’s the only classes I’ve tried Razorgore on so far.)
Anyone with a non-controllable pet (i.e., doesn’t have a pet control bar) like a shaman’s unglyphed elemental totem or a Terracotta Warrior doesn’t even have to take the entire beating; you can have one of those out and not interfere with MC’ing Razorgore.
Eminently soloable with a little preparation (specifically, an instant-cast heal of > 30% of your health, or a non-controllable tank to distract the dragonkin and thin their numbers some).
As far as I know, she should have been there. At about 700k health, I don’t think you could have killed her and not realized it. I think she does pat around the room, so it may be possible to skip her if you didn’t feel like clearing the room.
If I recall, this was a common complaint. You can walk/run/ride back out, the entire way. Or stone/teleport/portal. Or kill yourself and rez at the instance portal.
Exactly. You had no reputation with the Brood until your first kill that awarded rep points, at which point the game set you at the customary starting rep level for this faction: “Hated”. (Which means the dragons flying or walking around outside of the Caverns of Time will attack you if you try to talk to them.) It takes a fair bit of grinding to get up to Exalted, but the various “put three items together, turn in” quests (in the room next to the first boss) help a lot, since they’re like 1k rep each turn-in. (After you get to “good” rep with them. So there’s a lot of grinding early on, like all raid factions. More so, I guess, since they start you at “hated” rather than “neutral” like nowadays.)
Do you intend to farm BWL, or just visit?
The answer to that question determines whether the attunement quest is worth doing. Once you’re attuned, you get into BWL by manipulating a portal orb in a room at the end of the balcony outside the instance entrance. That just teleports you into the starting area of the instance. Very convenient. But you have to do the attunement quest chain first.
Alternately, you walk into the LBRS/UBRS quest portal and kill your way through UBRS to where another instance portal is. (“Yo dawg, I heard you like raids, so I put a raid portal in your raid so you could portal while you portal.”) It’s on the “far side” of the Arena/Rend Blackhand event.
Seems to be a lot of extra killing (partial UBRS clear every time you want to get to BWL rather than one full clear and then just take the teleport). But that’s why it comes down to whether you intend to farm BWL and want the convenience at the start of each run.
The attunement goes like this:
- Kill Scarshield Quartermaster (non-elite orc outside the instance someplace; usually on the balcony or in the halls around the Blackrock Spire instance entrance).
- Loot quest starter item from his corpse.
- Start quest.
- Enter UBRS (normal portal) and kill General Drakkisath (final boss of UBRS). Obviously, kill anybody else you feel like. You’ll also have to kill Pyroguard Emberseer and Rend Blackhand to progress past their respective rooms. I think the other UBRS bosses are optional.
- Use the orb in the alcove behind where Drakkisath was and complete the quest. You’re now attuned and can use the portal orb outside the instance to port into BWL.
I forgot in my previous post one of the critical elements of winning Razorgore solo: you have to generate some threat while MCing Razorgore or during the inter-MC period, or heal him while he’s under your control, or both. On my hunter, popping Exhilaration healed me for 40% but it also fully healed him (since he was my pet at that moment). That broke the MC, but not before healing him (since you fail if he dies, and the dragonkin spawn will kill him eventually) and also generating a fair chunk of threat to draw some of the dragonkin off him.
Yes, you have to let the dragonkin beat on you or your non-controlled tank summon, or heal Razorgore with an instant-cast heal while he’s MC’d, in order to keep him alive long enough to break all the eggs.
It took me on my hunter about three tries before I got it repeatably right. I don’t remember how I solved it on my enhancement shaman, but probably my earth elemental helped, since they have a pretty good taunting reach and good tanking “instincts”. Since enh shams (not actively fighting) don’t have an instant-cast heal, I don’t think I did that for Razorgore on that try. But it worked.
Oh the final mount was when my engineer finally had enough gold to make the world spinner. But I had the Raven Lord, Vitreous Stone Drake, and Armored Razzashi Raptor all drop within a week of each other.
I guess it depends on whether or not I can farm up a matched set of armor in there.
My suspicion, based on my experiences with BWL, is you’ll need multiple runs to get all of your class’ specific tier drops. Maybe not… you could luck outrageously well and get each piece from each boss. But I’ve never seen it happen.
You’ll still need MC for the T2 legs, though. They drop off of Ragnaros.
I just discovered that yesterday. I ran both my tauren paladin and my nelf priest through there, and both of them picked up the T2 legs.
The tauren actually finished with both the T1 and T2 pants (and nothing else). My tauren has been working on the Lightforge transmog set from the Darkmoon Faire, but hasn’t gotten those legs yet, so I used the T2 (Judgement) legs, and they actually go very nicely with the Lightforge set.
My priest ended up finishing with T1 boots and T2 legs, but she also got the BoE paladin T1 belt, which she mailed to my human paladin. So that paladin now has four pieces: belt, boots, bracers, gloves. None of the “cool” bits. The paladin shoulders dropped for the priest, but since they’re BoP she just left them.
Of course, once you’ve reached the BWL portal you’re past the time consuming part of UBRS, it would take you less than a minute to go and kill Drakki from that point, so might as well do the attunement while you’re there.
Regarding Razorgore, there shouldn’t be any need to get fancy, last couple of times I did it I just MCed him and started breaking eggs. Sure he might have pretty low health at the end, but it’s perfectly doable without healing.
Well, today I spent a year running my human rogue through both Lower and Upper Blackrock Spire (got the achievements for both), so she’s officially attuned to BWL. That letter from Nefarian to the Quartermaster was fucking hilarious
My god, that place is confusing as hell. My only previous excursions into that dungeon were to talk to the Elder for one of the holidays; I’d never tried to run through the whole place before.
I finished LBRS and returned to Acride to hand in the first couple quests he gave me. Then, while trying to find my way to UBRS, I fell through a hole in the floor and landed in front of a big instance portal. I went through, and got a Cataclysm loading screen, so apparently I was now in Blackwing Descent. Not where I wanted to be. Made my way back out and found my way back to Acride, and then, through trial and error, found my way into UBRS.
As confusing as Upper/Lower BRS is, I have to admire the work that must have gone into designing that place. Holy crap, the detail! The intricacy! Much more interesting than Ahn’Qiraj. And in any case, I need to run all of my 90s through there now, because I just saw on WoW Insider that UBRS is being overhauled for WoD, which I assume means it’s being converted into a level 100 dungeon. I’d better get in there while I still can.
Prior to running through BRS, I took my rogue through Molten Core. She ended up with the T1 pants, boots, and shoulders. Plus the paladin bracers, which she mailed off to the dwarf paladin I have on that server. I only have two 90s that still need to visit MC - my nelf hunter and my orc rogue. And I suppose my lvl 89 draenei fire mage could probably handle it okay as well. And maybe my 87 dwarf paladin and 87 troll hunter.
Just to make sure … have I missed any Vanilla raids? I’ve done MC and AQ, and I’m ready to take a crack at BWL. Original Naxx was Vanilla, right? I guess that one’s out of the question. And Onyxia got bumped up to 85, so I guess I won’t be poking in there until I’m level 100 …
So TBC raids are next on my list. I’d like to hit up some WotLK raids, but they may still be a bit questionable for me at this point.