Note: This is an out of date guide from Wrath. For current extreme solo guides, see the Cataclysm hunter guides section.
This hunter extreme solo talent build is designed to absolutely maximize pet health and pet healing ability – and it sacrifices quite a bit of hunter dps to do so.
I also refer to this as the MC Extreme Solo build, because this is the build that I bring to Molten Core. To date I’ve taken down everything in MC except Golemagg (I’ll get him yet) with this build, including Ragnaros the Firelord himself.
Extreme Solo Max Health Talent Build 56/0/15
Click to view the Extreme Solo Max Health Build.
You can see right off the bat that we’ve given up all kinds of damage in the Marksman tree in this build. In addition to losing 5% crit and converting our Int to attack power, we’re also losing Go For the Throat, lowering our pets potential dps as well. Instead, we’ve managed to boost our total health. And keep in mind, the more health our pet has, the more healing our pet will get with each growl.
Survivalist
This is why we went over to the Survival tree in the first place and the main difference with this build. This talent increases our stamina by 10% — and we know our pet, with proper talents, is going to get 63% of our stamina. So this is a pretty substantial health gain for our pet.
Hawk Eye
I just want to point out that this talent was not just filler to get to Survivalist. For Molten Core, there are several bosses that you can out-range their abilities with the Hawk Eye talent, and in fact this makes beating those bosses nice and easy.
Improved Mend Pet
If you’ll remember from our Standard Extreme Solo Build, we usually only take 1 rank of this since it doesn’t improve our healing and 1 rank is sufficient to get rid of any debuffs your pet may have. However, for Molten Core two ranks of this are necessary to get rid of the crazy amount of debuffs that will be applied to your pet. If you aren’t soloing MC, then you can drop this down to one talent point and toss the extra point into Lethal Shots or Cobra Strikes.
Frost…what gear or you using for these builds and your testing?
With the change from SV to MM depending on Uldar gear to maximize DPS do you think it would change your recommended builds if you are not gearing for say Heroics Dungeons versus Naxx 25 compared to Uldar gear?
I am only referring to the extreme BM specs as those have been the builds posted after the release of the patch.
I’ll eventually have a gear post for extreme soloing; however, the extreme soloing builds are not dependant on gear at all. Regardless of what gear you have, these are the builds you want for extreme soloing.
So would this be your build for all those heroics you solo? I wouldn’t think that giving up all that dps would be recommended just for added health. It must take forever to kill stuff (it would in MY crap gear). lol
Dharthus: you should check out our intro guide to extreme soloing: http://www.warcrafthuntersunion.com/2009/07/hunter-extreme-soloing-basics/
Basically your primary concerns are damage mitigation and healing (and more pet health means more pet healing).
I just dropped the pvp spec I had to try out extreme soloing, thinking I may switch what I have (Made it on the fly) for this one. Thanks for posting it!
Also – offtopic – You should get someone to record those panels you’re doing at that convention, I’d be really interested in seeing it and hearing what you and Arust have to say.
Interesting build. I really have to try extreme pet tanking one of these days.
Not to be picky, but your wowhead link on Improved Mend Pet is pointing to Eagle Eye. Damn you cut and paste! Damn you to hell!
Wish I had the gold to constantly respec just to arse around and solo, but I’m lazy enough with farming gold for raids as it is =P
Chimy, just make sure you realize the difference between extreme soloing and pet tanking. They’re different endeavors. The main guides page has a tab for both, however, so there’s no confusion between the two.
Malania, that’s what dual spec is for.
Nice build though Frost. I’m jealous for the extra stamina, though not jealous for MC. You soloing nuts can have that one to yourself.
Would u suggest using this for all level 60 raids such as zul gurub and maybe even blackwing lair?
Also do u reckon theres any chance of soloing any level 70 raids or Hc’s?
Again, would like to buy Triple spec!
@MrJackdaw — its never gonna happen
@kalagdor — this is not necessary for lvl 60 raids – just being BM is pretty much good enough
Malania: Respeccing just to solo isn’t that costly — especially when you consider that MC bosses drop something like 50-100 gold… each. Two bosses covers speccing in and out. Heck, clear it all a couple times and you’ve paid for your dual speccing.
Can’t say this is necessary for MC. I soloed that entire raid with the normal 53/15/3 spec, obviously the normal BM/MM solo spec with the only exception for taking 3/3 Hawk Eye (Took that spec at Geddon, had the normal one until him). As for me, it is still better to have extra healing via t5(2) bonus, with the more damage output, rather than through Growl healing.
Btw, I am not sure how you tried Goleamagg, but I took a few fire res items on me, to deal with pyroblasts, jumped to an unreachable spot on the cliff’s side, tanked the boss with the pet and taunted the adds on myself. All that remained was to keep the pet out of stacking too many debuffs and to manage to keep myself alive. Oh, and don’t forget to turn off Thunderstomp, if you want to try this one.
(The primary idea was to stay on the cliff and constantly taunt the adds on myself, in order to make them run all that long way to me. But the boss reset feature seemed to be bugged, and even if the adds didn’t reach the reset line, the boss would still become invulnerable at some point. Trying the simple tanking and shooting didnt get me past 50% ever.)
Curious about Golemagg. What specifically makes him so hard? With all our tricks I hope there’s some way to down him solo. Scarnik, how did your method work?
My first run was last week – had fun with the challenges (especially Garr), but could not get Golemagg. Called for guild help, and with a priest healing he went down fine.
For added difficulty I was towing three 55-60′s who wanted to come. They pretty much stayed out of fights, but meant clearing a lot more trash, especially after they died. This week I’m either going solo or leaving them at the entrance.
Golemagg is always hard, but it turns out the secret is this: Golemagg puts a stacking debuff on your pet that’s horrible. The trick is to sick you pet on the dogs and let its aoe aggro and your MD get threat on golemagg. If the pet isn’t attacking Golemagg directly, it doesn’t get the stacking debuff. Then your healing should be enough for the fight.
However, this does mean that threat is a big problem at the beginning of the fight. I find I need to actually dps the corehounds a bit while waiting for a FD cooldown — I need to keep the dps up for the pet healing.
Ummm, just wondering if Hawk Eye is really required, what bosses does it help on, etc?
Hawk Eye is a big deal in Molten Core – not so much anywhere else. In Molten Core it will help you on Gehennes, Geddon, Shazzrah, and Golemagg. In particular I’m not certain that Golemagg would be possible without the ability to outrange his pyroblasts.
Do you need all three points in it then?
Yeah, you really want all three for MC, gives you a bit of wiggle room (but really, almost none).
Okay, thank you Frostheim
If you are looking for a build that works well in MC that is a little more “fun” (i.e. you can kill bosses a lot quicker), I highly recommend this one here:
http://www.wowhead.com/?talent#cVbhzggRwuheot0ecoZc:VciM0z
I finished all bosses in MC on my first attempt with the above build wearing two pieces of tier 5 (gloves and shoulders) and two pieces of furious gladiator gear (helm and boots). Those were all gemmed and enchanted for stamina. The rest was my regular raid gear (around ilvl 232). I used a turtle who, with the buffs recommended by Frostheim, had 28.3k health and whom I hardly had to heal at all due to the tier 5 two-piece bonus.
It was really fun and I made a ton of gold doing it (not even counting the Sulfuron Ingot that sells for 1200 gold on my server). All of Frostheim’s strats were spot on.
Though the level of the mobs is not a problem, The Black Morass (Opening the Dark Portal), otherwise known as COT2 presented an interesting challenge.
Took 2 tries.
How?
Bring a bear or croc (multi-target) tenacity pet, have them engage the elite then lay a snake trap and explosive trap at the portal, MD to pet when you can and don’t let any of them slip by.
Using the above method Medivh never dropped below 100%. An interesting challenge.
I used the pet tanking spec for bear that frost recommends as well as the BM spec. Don’t have tier5 but was wearing 1 piece or Furious and 1 piece Deadly and 2 pieces tier9. Pet had roughly 21k and only really needed healing during the last fight, but 1 Mend Pet kept him at 12k until the end.
Why? I never did Kara cause WOTLK dropped a couple of months after I dinged 70 and still had the key quest.
Nefastis (Alliance-Echo Isles)
Thank you Frost for the build it very appreciated. Its awsome to be able to solo dungeons for the thrill and gold. I tried using it last night and made it through Heroic Blood Furnace, sure took about an hour, but was sooo happy to be able to do it by myself. Its just so fun to be able to do things like that by myself, and a bit profitable. Thank you again.
Why would you need the exotic pet telent?
The exotic pet talent provides you with 4 more pet talent points which make pet tanking far more doable.
Build is gay, whats the point of hp if it takes you x10 times longer to pwn, and its not like you can run instances with this gay build, and who lvls without instances? In closing if you can not kite or control aggro between you and your awesome pet you should not level because you make hunters look like huntards. I dont need hp, by the time my pet looses aggro the target is one shot before death. With heal pet any pet can hold aggro and live for extended periods of time.
something tells me you have completely missed the point
Hey, Frost, even though the above build listed is no longer valid; it is still possible to go in and solo up all of Molten Core post 4.0.1.
Did it in two different spurts; but, did manage to go through and kill all the bosses.
I used the Pet Build that you have posted and took the initial BM spec posted up on the Scattered Shots section and swapped points out from Improved Kill Command into Improved Mend Pet and took points out of Go for the Throat and tossed them into Hunter vs Wild. The pet I used was a bear.
Gearwise, I was in there in my ICC 10, 25, and Emblem of Frost (now Mark of Justice) gear (with some of the ICC 10 and 25 pieces being Heroic pieces).
Glyph wise, I followed what was listed in the Scattered Shots guide and dumped in Glyph of Misdirection to take advantage of what the new glyph has to offer. I must say, the tooltip does not lie.
But, yes, it is still very much possible to go in there and solo it as a BM hunter with the new patch.
frost I know your probably busy doing various cata related things, but an updated build would be awesome!