One of my readers, Yagamoth, wrote me the other day, asking if I had any tips for soloing old content such as Molten Core or even Karazan. And I’ll be blunt, I hadn’t really tried to solo anything as a moonkin.
So rather than to shy away, I took it as a challenge and set out to solo Molten Core. And well, the place is cleared now, although not with a bit of trouble. Some bosses were easy, some were hard, some nearly made me give up. And I’ll admit, there was a single boss that I needed some help with.
But I went into Molten Core with my usual PvE gear and spec, armed with a bunch of reagents and 4 stacks of water. I figured I would write down a guide for soloing the bosses as moonkin, and maybe we can tweak it a bit.
General pointers
You won’t be able to get through Molten Core without healing. Thankfully, we are able to heal while we do damage, and most of the things you meet inside won’t do too much damage. Before any pull, put up a rejuv and regrowth. This should keep you going for a good 20+ seconds before you start dropping below 90%, and you have ample time to swap out and cast the spells again.
Use your thorns and Mark of the Wild, even a flask if you want to speed things up, but if you are decently geared it shouldn’t be too much of a problem.
Trash mobs
Most of the trash mobs should not pose any problem, cause you can stealth right past them. The Core Hounds can detect you, and are quite good at it, so you should rather kill them off instead of trying to sneak past them. If they catch you, you’ll have to kill them anyways. Molten Giants and Lava Surgers are not much of a problem. Just throw your HOTs up before a pull, and focus down one.
One kind of mob does pose a bit of a threat: Fire Lords. They will spawn pesky little Lava Spawns, which will duplicate if you don’t kill them, and Lava Spawns will silence you. Nuke them down quickly, there aren’t that many of them.
Lastly, the Core Hound packs before Lucifron and Magmadar needs some special attention. If you don’t kill them at the same time, they will start respawning. Hurricane should do the trick for you, though, and if one isn’t going down as fast as the others, you can kickstart the killing with Starfall.
Lucifron
After clearing one pack of Core Hounds, you should be able to pull Lucifron. Always pull with your treants, and let them take a bit of the heat in the beginning. Nuke down his adds first, and whenever you get a curse on you, remove it. They won’t do much damage, except for the occasional 2000 damage curse, and you can easely heal through everything.
Magmadar
After clearing the rest of the Core Hound packs, you can pull Magmadar. Don’t use your Starfall until after the first fear, and be sure to refresh your HOTs before they run out. He doesn’t do much damage, but if he does fear you and your HOTs are off, you might be at a risk. Other than that, you shouldn’t fear much from his laughable 300 DPS fire dot.
Gehennas
Another fairly easy boss. Nuke down his adds, decurse yourself whenever the healing debuff comes up, and move out of fire. Done deal.
Garr
Now here’s a problem. Garr actually wiped me a good five times before I got him down. The main problem are his adds, which does a lot of damage, swings very quickly, and explodes upon death. And for some reason, my Hurricane never did more than around 1000 damage to each. With 60.000 health, you’d need 60 hurricane ticks to get them down.
Starfall is a nice help, but the adds are too spead in the beginning. If you pull with starfall, it wont do much damage overall, because they are too far away from each other. Send in your treants to get the mobs closer, fire up your starfall, start hurricaning and hope for the best. On this, my initial kill, it was a very close call, but thankfully I got through it. I might revise my tactic a bit next time I give it a go.
Shazzrah
Was very easy. Stealth through over to him and watch out for the Core Hound and Baron Geddon. Simply nuke down Shazzrah, but avoid using Starfall, as it will surely pull a bunch of trash packs and lead to a quick demise.
Baron Geddon
Oh dear, what a pain. He took quite a few tries, probably nearly 10, and with the long run back, it was a dreadful fight. Geddon poses a few problems:
Geddon throws you up into the air, and when you hit the ground, you take fall damage based on a percentage of your health. This can be somewhat negated by pulling him all the way into the tunnel and place yourself in a crack where you will hit the wall above you quickly. You’ll still take a lot of damage, though.
His Living Bomb, which is what throws you into the air, scales in damage based on your +damage. So you can imagine that, if this was balanced around having 300 spellpower, your 4-5000 spellpower will hurt like hell. You should keep rejuv and regrowth up all the time, and probably use nourish and lifebloom to get yourself up.
He casts inferno, which does increased damage over 6 seconds. When he does this, run away from melee range, because it will take away a lot of your health.
Lastly, he slowly burns your mana, so the fight is limited to whenever you run out of mana. You need your mana to damage and to heal and to switching back into moonkin form. Geddon does pure magical damage, but you want the mana regen from moonkin form to get ahead of the mana burn. Eventually, either you will run out of mana, or he will run out of health.
Sulfuron
Not a very difficult boss, just an annoying one. He has four adds, which will heal each other when one goes to low health. You won’t be able to AOE them all down reliably. Instead, nuke down one and use starfall when it goes below 50%, and you should be able to get the first one down before it gets a heal. After that, its just a question of continuing this, and eventually you’ll be able to kill the healers off before they heal each other. After that, Sulfuron gets nuked down.
Place yourself way in the back of the cave, so you don’t pull all of the trash packs when you pop it.
Golemagg
Alright, time for honesty. I couldn’t solo Golemagg. When his hounds are close, they will attack faster and with increased damage. I got him to 75% before he killed me. So I brought in a paladin friend, which made everything a lot easier. Yagamoth tells me that he pulled it off, but this was with a crazy list of trinkets and resto gear, and all sorts of PvP items I don’t have. If he wants to, he can elaborate on his method for killing Golemagg below.
Majordomo Executus
This is not a terribly difficult fight, but you should keep your HOTs up vigerously. Barkskin and AOE will help you nuke them all down fairly quickly, but they will from time to time teleport you to the fire pit in the center, and you’ll have to run out of it with your HOTs running.
Ragnaros
The Dreaded Firelord is.. not so dreaded. In fact, he is fairly easy to get by if you’ve made it this far. Stand yourself with your back agaist the wall closest to him, and his fire bomb wont throw you away. Keep your HOTs up, use your treants to keep him focused a bit in the beginning, and nuke. Nuke. NUKE.
At best, you should be able to nuke him down before he submerges, and you won’t have to deal with his adds. If they spawn, you should be able to swap into bear form and swipe them down, but if you nuke him hard enough, he should go down without any problems.
Congrats!
You have now soloed Molten Core. Well, almost. We cheated a bit on Golemagg, but maybe we can figure out something. Ill definately go back and solo Molten Core again, cause this first solo netted me the very expensive +30 SP enchanting formula, which goes for several thousands of gold. And hey, is there anything more badass than a moonkin wielding the Hand of Ragnaros?
I’ve been wondering about this, myself. Since the Hand of Rag will no longer exist I may try to create one. I will def try all this out and most likely recruit my pally friend (since he wants a Thunderfury). Thanks for the research
Just got extremely lucky and got the legendary item from Ragnaros on my first farm run. Completed the mace after buying out the AH the same day. And yes, a moonkin wielding the legendary is getting some attention lol.
Blood of the Mountain, BoE Tier 1, Sulfuron Ingots and Fiery/Lava Cores sell very well depending on your server. I 2man MC with a shadow priest in 20 minutes including travel time there and each week we net about 1500g each.
Well, once more,my respect to you for simply trying it without thinking about it too much ^^
Actually, I don’t think my Golemagg kill was that crazy (well, maybe somewhat, if you consider respeccing for a single boss as crazy
). I simply do have quiet some valuable PvE and PvP pieces for soloing. To make it short, I used:
- Offset PvP pieces to reach crit immunity (5.6% crit reduce)
- T9 Resto pieces for crit with Rejuvenation
- Double Solace (The Mana regen trinket from from coliseum normal & hero)
- Mana regen/dot spec (basically ignoring eclipse & nuke talents and speccing Dreamstate & Intensity)
Tactic:
1. Always keep Demoralizing Roar up, it makes a huge difference in incoming damage.
2. Keep all 3 hots up as long as possible
3. Dot & keep the elemental Debuff up ^^
Actually, 2nd in damage were thorns… Too bad 1/3 of that damage was wasted ^^
For most bosses in MC I can advise you to use the Frost Badge Trinket and/or the BQL trinket for some minor ‘survival’ uses in case something goes out of hand.
Note: Karazhan can be soloed up to the Prince aswell. Whoever soloes the Prince as a Moonkin earns my respect
(My best try was 20% o..o)
OMW to Karazhan…
Ok yeah, Maiden just owned me, i cant solo her without three thousand pools of mana… (which is what 2 sollace and a mana regen build gives you
)
Well, in Karazhan I used a normal raidspec oô.. (+ Crit immunity + BQL & Badge Tank trinket ^^)
Then i should try maiden again, was kind of fed up with my Star-cides (forgot Karazhan had so much trash and kept dying due to poorly casted Starfalls x_x), by the time i got to Maiden i was really frustrated, hah
Aye, I guess I should check out Karazhan a bit as well. I do it PvE style, though!
I’d say, most bosses are fairly doable without crit immunity, as long as you push them through the phases fast enough (or you don’t mind randomly dying due to bad luck ^^)
[SPOILER] – if you want to figure out the bosses yourself, don’t read any further ^^
Regarding normal PvE equip:
- You probably need to burst through Attumens “Horse & Riders separate”-phase fairly fast as that’s where the incoming damage is relatively high.
- On Moroes you should be perfectly fine with PvE, as you can probably burst down the adds without them reaching you
- Maiden is a separate issue… I could only kill her by running around (or in circles), keeping hots on my and dots on her. Not exactly an interesting fight, but I found out, that you can pull her through whole Karazhan. (I ran through Moroes room down to Attumen, through the cellar up again towards the Opera event ^^). Actually you may find a good ledge, where you can jump down, nuke & heal while she walks down to you.
- Opera events are easy.
- The Curator is annoying, as you can’t hurt him with arcane, he also hits for a good amount.
- Terestian is easy. But only use Starfall once, otherwise you’ll kill the big Imp and Terestian may Chain you afterwards.
- Aran is easy (as long as you don’t let him interrupt you as I did xD)
- Netherspite is easy, as long as you keep running in and out of the red beam in between nukes
- Nightbane is easy, as long as you nuke him to 75% as fast as possible. While he is in the air you can still attack him and even push him to the next air phase. The skeletons are easy to get rid off with a single starfall. (Note, Nightbane does hit hard, so a single crit may kill you)
- Chess… Well, it’s not exactly hard..
- Prince, nearly impossible. Well, impossible without crit immunity. I think he can be done with a good amount of luck, but I didn’t want to spend much more time trying.
I’d love to see you soloing Nightbane, I nearly made him stay in the air the entire time with my crit immunity gear. With PvE you can probably keep him there even better
Quick advice for Add-Bosses: You can try to summon Valkyries by casting Hurricane. (You don’t need a target, each pulse has the chance to proc a Valkyrie). Doing this, you have more damage at the start or even a temporary tank. They actually tank fairly well, because they heal themselves for a good amount.
Sidenote: Zul Gurub is easily completable aswell.
Sidenote2: The Devourer of Souls in FoS Heroic is also easily soloable
Hi guys my tip of the day for Baron Geddon solo. clear the first group of trash in his room next to the lava pool. once this is done fight him right at the edge of the lava, when the bomb has 1 second or so left before it blows just jump into the lava. he will teleport you back to him but you dont get the fall damage. makes the encounter very easy imho.