When we talk about Extreme Hunter Soloing, we’re talking about just hunter and pet soloing WotLK instances on normal mode, or instances from previous expansions, including 40-man raids from vanilla. We are not talking about questing or leveling — that’s just soloing. We don’t consider doing a group quest 2 levels higher than you extreme soloing, because that’s just what we expect from the hunter class.
This guide will go over some of the basic concepts of hunter extreme soloing, and other guides will go into detail on the builds and gear and fight-specific strategies.
The Magic Ratio
The ideal in extreme soloing is for the hunter to be able to heal more damage than the pet takes. If you can hit that magical ratio, then you are going to win. It doesn’t matter how long it takes: as long as you can heal more damage than your pet takes, you’ll eventually wear the boss down.
On the surface this means that we’re interested in two things: pet damage mitigation, and our hunter’s ability to heal the pet. Mitigation comes to some extent from the hunter gear, but mostly from the hunter and pet talent choices. Healing comes from talents and glyphs, but also a significant chunk comes from stamina.
Your pet gets a portion of the hunter’s stamina (note: stamina, not health). Your tenacity pet also has a couple of abilities that heal itself a percentage of its maximum health. Thus the more health your pet has, the more it heals with each tick.
Now the problem with the magic ratio comes in fights where you yourself take damage, from unavoidable aoe or random targeted attacks that ignore the aggro target. Your pet has lots of healing, and you have very little. While you do have passive healing from Spirit Bond (which is better the more health you have), it’s not much and these fights are the ones that usually require clever tactics.
So basically when you’re planning for extreme soloing, you are concerned with three things: pet damage mitigation (dodge, parry, armor, crit reduction, and to some extent expertise), pet healing ability, and pet health (gained through hunter stamina, as well as talents).
Four Basic Strats
I’ve found there are four basic strategies that I use to deal with extreme soloing bosses. These are:
- Tank & Spank: You send your pet in and you shoot. You keep up mend pet, and you heal more damage than your pet takes. The fight is eventually won. This covers a surprising amount of extreme soloing fights. These fights are basically just a simple check of your gear and your talent choices.
- Burn: sometimes your pet is taking slightly more damage than you can heal, often on bosses with mini-bosses, or groups of mobs. In these fights it’s important to single target burn down one of them as fast as possible, so that your healing can once again out heal the incoming damage.
- Superpet: on fights where there is aoe or other unavoidable damage that you take yourself, a solid strategy is often to just let your pet do all the tanking, and all the dpsing. Typically this works by sending your pet in, and then running out of range of the damage. You then sit just out of range, and step in every time you need to refresh mend pet, then run back out. If you take a bit of damage, you can bandage while waiting for the next Mend Pet. This is the strat used for the twins in Utgarde Keep, or Gehennes in Molten Core. A variant of this I use on Onyxia, which is just to feign death and let the pet do the tanking, dpsing, and healing – but this is likely to only work on vanilla bosses where the incoming damage is very low.
- Kiting: every now and then you find a boss where the best strat is just to kite him. You set your pet aside, and jump shot kite the boss to death. Keristrasza in the Nexus is a perfect example of a kiting boss.
Don’t Worry About Threat – Don’t Worry About Mana
Again, the two things you’re worried about for most extreme soloing fights is your pet’s damage mitigation, and your pet’s healing. You are not really worried about your pet’s threat for most fights. The reason is that as a hunter, we have complete control over our threat. With a combination of Misdirection and Feign Death, you should not have any problems remaining below your pet on the threat charts.
Mana is likewise not an issue. Most extreme solo fights are not races, so when you get low on mana, you can just pop into viper to restore it up to full.
Turtle For Victory
The best hunter pet for most extreme soloing situations is the turtle. Keep in mind that we’re concerned with damage mitigation and healing — everything else takes care of itself. The turtle has the Shell Shield ability that reduces damage taken by 50% for 12 seconds. This ability is huge. In fact, you can deal with a boss that actually does slightly more damage than you can heal by using shell shield regularly – the pet can heal up to full each time the shell shield is up.
Again, remember that we aren’t worried about threat, and we aren’t worried about damage. Our two main concerns are mitigation and healing.
Every Boss is Different
Well, that’s not entirely true. Many bosses are just a plain tank & spank. However, the exciting and fun part of extreme soloing is not those fights, but the crazy fights that you have to get really creative to solve. For a lot of these you’ll find that you need to use custom talent builds (hunter and pet) or specialized gear, or different consumables, to exploit that opening you see in the boss fight. And those are the fights that you’ll wipe a lot on — but let me tell you it feels damned good when you finally beat them!
Coming up soon on the WHU: extreme solo talent builds, and pet talent builds, for various extreme soloing situations
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nice article! I’ve been running around with a bear for everything other than raiding, because of the nice multi-mob aggro… but I think I will have to try a turtle for some of the harder single target things I haven’t yet been able to solo.
Are there any lvl 79 or lvl 80 turtles out there to tame? Elites even? I’d rather not raise one from lvl 75 if i don’t have to
Soloing old instances has been a lot of fun and has been a breath of fresh air from doing dailies just for the sake of doing them. It’s -killing- me not to have 2T5. Been able to get down pretty much all of ZG, AQ’20 and half of MC, but I’d really love to have it for some of the other fights.
My goal? Windfury. Got 1 piece of the bindings already!
@Blackenwood: Doesn’t appear so. Highest is Sand Turtle in Borean Tundra at 70:
http://petopia.brashendeavors.net/html/families/family_turtle.html
Which of course is about as helpful as a lvl5 turtle since the pet will automagially become 75 when you tame it…
You have my attention Sir.
*Superpet* That made me laugh so hard I cried…
Nice guide, and I look forward to the Talent and Gear guides.
The more I read through this the more that gear appears to be the most important factor. I had never thought of having more than one gear set – currently optimised for SV, although I’ve been BM for a long time – a high stamina set seems to be the way to go.
More money disappearing into the AH!
Member
Not sure about many fights, but with 3/3 hawk eye, you can outrange all of Baron Gedon’s abilities, while still being able to shoot him. Makes the fight a lot faster(20+ min fight gets turned into a sub 10 min fight).
Admin
Gear is certainly a factor, but not a huge one. I solo’d Onyxia and Nexus just in my raid gear, for example.
However, pvp gear with stamina gems/enchants is going to help you. And this will become a bigger deal in patch 3.2, if they keep resilience transferring to our pet (40%) and have the base damage reduction with resilience.
My recommendation is to start doing the daily battleground and collect honor to get those pvp pieces!
I believe Blizzard’s plan for Resilience in 3.2 is that it will reduce damage done by players, but not damage done by NPC’s. So that bit of itemization will be wasted for soloing.
Admin
Chris: Do you have a link for where they say that? I didn’t see it in their notes, and haven’t been able to find a reference.
I think this is it, though there may be an earlier reference…
http://blue.mmo-champion.com/28/17899681400-resilience-change.html
This is the key quote: “Changing resilience to affect player damage is an attempt to make it unattractive to tanks and make it less useful for PvE in general.”
Dues Payer
well im new to the extreme soloing dungeon world. ive always challenged myself, taking down the nexus watchers in coldarra and the storm giant in howling fjord by myself. i followed your guide and go nexus down and had a blast with kiting keri. i did utgarde, but apparently i have to switch mindsets and get into thinking creatively because prince keleseth screwed me. i did the feigh death to reset the adds, and for a while im ok, but as soon as bestial wrath wears off, im get chain frost tombed, unable to out heal the damage. i lose all control in a tomb, masters call doesnt work cuz its not that type of immobilization. im gonna play around with it more but its certainly a challenge, and i like that. you reckon there will be fights we just CANT solo, not because we cant heal it or our skill is low, but the fight involved mechanics that prevents our type of soloing?
@quivering:
I’d say there will come a day where u CAN’T solo. If, one day, we’re able to solo Naxx… Fights like Razuvius and Widow or even EoE where you’re skill as a player is wasted and you’re forced to play a mini-game. Those instance can’t be won alone because of the stupid mechanics of the fights.
I’m biased cause my main’s a priest and I’m forced to MC those fights in Naxx instead of dealing DPS. All the research on your class and gear in the world won’t help you defeat a mini-game. I really hope Blizz doesn’t add more fights like that. They’re fun, don’t get me wrong, I just don’t want to see WOW devolve into a bunch of mini-games to fit the Wii generation.
~Old-timer steps off soapbox.
Member
I have to say that your extreme soloing blogs have really hit the spot with me. I would describe myself as a ‘serial soloist’ because I am the kind of miserable crank who hates teamwork and being in a guild.
I have always been a ferocity pet fan (a devilsaur or cat mainly – though the devilsaur annoys the hell out of me because of it waddles like a duck and is a noisy git), but I am now officially converted to your soloing build and the turtle – which totally ROCKS! The difference is unbelievable and has allowed me to go places that I never thought I could go alone. Many thanks guys.
On that note – I just started a new hunter to see what difference it made from the very beginning. As Alliance, I got her down to the Barrens to get her first turtle, then as soon as she hit 20 into WC to get Kresh (solo of course), and now I am looking forward to a promising future – just me and my trusty turtle!
Will the WHU at some point have a list of the instances that -can- be solo’d in this fashion?
Admin
Oooh, good question. I may have to put together a partial list at some point, though to be honest I don’t have a lot of interest in soloing BC content. Certainly the vanilla 20-mans and all of Molten Core, and the first several normal-mode instances in wrath. I suspect a great deal of BC content is also soloable.
The guides are the bes my dps has ghon up a crap load and I just soloed Onyxia and The Mechanar reg not shure if that counts but it was a chalange. so tks for all the help love this site
talk about you typo’s lol best*
Couple of notes….
Quivering…a trick I learned from doing lots of H UK runs is when you get frost tombed, you can F1 (target yourself) and tell your pet to attack you. It’ll break you out of the tomb and then you can resume the attack. I haven’t gotten that far solo, but know it works cause I’ve done it a couple of times. If the party hasn’t agreed ahead of time that we’re going for the acheivement, I always have my pet break me out.
Admittedly, I haven’t soloed regular UK yet, but tried with my Bear and got through the Proto-Drake pens before calling it. The last group of 3 was hard and I couldn’t heal my pet through the damage so I had to kill one, feign death, rez pet, kill the other two. With that I decided to pick up a turtle.
My turtle will ding 80 tomorrow so I’m planning on working my way through the old content to get a grip on how it works. My question, has anybody extreme soloed BC heroics? I’m sorely lacking in acheivements from BC (dinged 70 the August before WOTLK came out) and really want to give them a try.
Since I don’t know them very well I’m gonna give them a try on regular first (many of them I haven’t done at all). My best guess is that on heroic they’ll actually be harder than regular UK. Regular UK and Nexus are designed for lvl 68+ Is that right?
Okay,
Ran through regular Blood Furnace today (got the acheivement) and it was nothing… So after downing last boss, switched to heroic and went back in.
I’ve changed my gear a bit now, but it was considerably tougher. First, my turtle with roughly 16k really struggled with 2+ mobs. Two, it is slow….really slow.
Some things I learned:
Don’t skip any mobs: sometimes you need to kite, pull into the other room, LOS pull, etc. so give yourself plenty of space to work. Think like a healer when it comes to Mend Pet Its a HOT so cast it pre-emptively or early so it can mitigate the damage at the beginning. Likewise with Shell Shield, use it early and often. Its on a one minute cd so use it early and you might get to use it again.
Blood Furnace specifically required me to pull very carefully, use freezing arrow and immolation trap. I’d lay freezing arrow, then take a couple of steps back, drop immolation trap, then MD to pet, pull with serpent sting (hopefully the one that isn’t gonna go into the freezing arrow/trap). After the mobs run over the immolation trap, I send pet in, Feign Death, cast Mend Pet, Shell Shield and go.
I think cause my pet didn’t have as much health as I needed…I really couldn’t handle more than 3 at a time and that’s with trapping. As for the first boss, he was easy by comparison to the multi-mobs before him.
I got as far as right before the room with the 2nd boss but it was slow….I called it cause I know that the 2nd boss has the lever and you get mobs of 3-4 before him…So I’m gonna try and get some better gear (PVP or otherwise) so I can get my pets health up a bit more (changed my BM spec to max health build, which gave me 20K and my pet 18k…).
Considering that everyone is gearing by running heroics and heroics are becoming seriously easy, this makes WOW challenging again.
Got a question that I can’t see answered anywhere but apologies if it is covered:
What is your preferred method to get to the first boss of MC -either Lucifron or Gehennes?
I have gone in MC solo b4 to get me a doggie pet and used FD along with invisibilty potions to get to where I wanted. Is there an easier way to quickly get to the first fight?
Admin
Here’s how I get to the first boss: I clear the first pair of giants and 1 of the firelords. After that you can just walk past most of the mobs.
Going to Lucifron once you get to the bridge you have to clear most of the mobs out thereafter. Going to Gehennes you’ll need to kill a corehound and a surger, and then several mobs around Gehenees to clear for the fight (2 pathing corehounds, an Annihilator, and possibly another pair of giants, iirc).
I tried to solo stuff when i was 70 and it was going wel, now im 80 the world is open for the taking.
A tip for solowing Garr, you dont need to clear any trash iff you just walk past the wall to the back of the room, hug the wall and send your pet in to the clossest add and do your thing.
I do it this way every time, i got a extra corehound directly one time when i pulled butt i can take that.
The new Scroll and LW Drums are very nice for solowing but dont bother on this fight, it will just get disspelled by Garr himself.
Butt what my question is: i mostly use my Healing/DPS spec for solowing now adays because with 25000 HP my pet is save and doesnt need a larger HP.
How much DPS are you guys pulling when your tanking/solowing. Depending on the fight ofc.
Im in my tanking spec with 2 T5 and now since 2 nights ago 2 stamina trickets around 2500 dps in MC, Kara and Zul.
Just wandered on to this interesting blog. This is the only one I have read so far, and I realize this post s probably out of time or a repaet of content covered elsewhere…but FWIW….
IN the comments Frostheim said
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I can only testify to the 5 mans on regular in BC (haven’t tried heroic – I was mostly wrapping up old quests out of boredom and doing some rep grinding).
All the regular 5s are pretty easily doable….I would think for most any 80 hunter. The bosses, with only a couple exceptions, are incredibly easy. The real kinda tedious work is with some of the trash mob grinds and pulls.
I’m a survival hunter and inititally used a wolf with success. Wanted to try a turtle. The best place I have found by far for pure pet leveling speed is Onslaught Harbor in Icecrown. Especially the monastery steps and surroundings. All the mobs are 79 or 80. They don’t so much damage and die quickly + they also repop rapidly.
I like the turtle. I had to untrain thunderstomp though because it was breaking my wyvern sting and icetrap CCs.
THe only LK (regular) instance I have tried is UK…easy up to the first boss but multiple icetombs did me in.
Personally, I have had much better success with my PvE gear than with my PvP. For me the best defense has been a good offense.
I am told many hunters are soloing LK heroics by using BM tenacity builds + a couple peices of T5 gear for the terrific pet healing bonus + the potent glyph of mending pet….but I imagine all of this has been well covered elsewhere on this blog. Look forward to reading it all.
K, time for a stupid question. Notice I admitted it was stupid so no one else should feel obliged to comment on the fact it its. I think I know the answer, but I may be missing something so I’ll ask. How do you get into ZG without being in a raid group?
Admin
You need to be in a raid group to get into any raid instance; however, the people you’re grouped with don’t have to be online.
Just get a guildie to put an alt in your group, convert to a raid, then they’re free to log off and switch to their main while you head in for the raid soloing action!
So I tried to solo UK last night, got to twins, and wiped about 5 times. I tried the super pet approach, but got nuked by shadow bolts evettime I stepped in to MP. Any help would be appreciated.
i have had a turtle for solo since lvl 51 when i got the silver in hinterlands (all my pets are silver. u are a hunter for crying out loud). but my ? is why not macro shell shield and mend pet? at the start of a fight just hit S.S. not the macro. then when u need to mend pet hit the macro and both would proc. or is that inefficient?
Okay.
On reg UK, I tried to solo with my turtle. Actually went pretty smooth until I got to Prince Keleseth.
1st try: He frost tombed me every chance he could and I pulled pet to release me, no luck.
2nd try: I just had turtle and didnt’ bother with releasing me from frost tomb, no luck.
3rd try: Tried a combination of Bestial Wrath every chance I could, Feigning Death to avoid Frost Tomb…No luck
Any suggestions?
Got Prince Keleseth today.
The trick is dropping Explosive Trap, Snake Trap, using Master’s Call and Beastial Wrath.
Just keep healing your pet and pretty easy.
Now working on next boss.
Member
Love the blog and was wondering about something for extreme soloing. I understand due to healing and mitigation that the turtle is the absolute best when it comes to this, however I was wondering if anyone has tried it with something else, say a Rhino. I only ask because all my stable slots are filled and i have enjoyed the Rhino tanking for me on normal dungeons (BC and Pre-BC early instances not lvl 70 ones so far). If the turtle is really the only option I would make the change.
I just love the Rhino, especially when he gets big and red.
I recently decided to start solo-ing on my hunter. I’m in full 10/25 ICC gear for my raiding spec (3101 wow-heores/5901 in game). I’ve been building up T10 pvp gear as well as using some raid gear, gemming and enchanting for stamina, I’m up to 34k HP for myself and 28.9k HP for my turtle. UK is a pretty easy run (got snagged on the two boss fight, but was able to just powerhouse through it). Some fights I just stay in my raid spec because i can burn down at around 6k dps, but you’re right.. most fights are just slowly grinding the boss down. I’ve ran through a few regular 80 dungeons, working on trying to solo H UK but have to sharpen the strategy. My pet can offtank naxx pretty easily as well as an emergency OT during heroics when I get stuck with an uber undergeared tank via the random dungeon finder. I’ve gotten a lot of laughs from people, most of them have never seen a Huntank before. It is a unique experience to say the least. I heard that pretty soon they’re going to make resilience non-transferable to your pet therefore getting rid of their def. cap. and will mark the end of extreme hunter solos. Apparently making hunters (with the right build) able to solo isn’t what Blizzard had in mind for our class.
Oh in UK, you can trinket out of the frost tomb, as well as use Bestial Wrath, it too removes movement impairing effects : )
Member
Not really anything of huge merit here, considering the accomplishments of many here, but I have begun the X-solo journey myself. Starting slow, as I am not geared yet, still in T9 and under mostly, and gemmed for ag/crit mostly. I am working toward heavierweight pvp gear for a dedicated solo set, gemmed accordingly. Anyway, started just running BC dungeons to get a feel for the dynamics, and have made it through 12, and just finished Magisters’ Terrace. I have always loved solo play, and never even ran a dungeon until my main was 80. But, when me and HouseOnBack (my turtle) conquer challenging instances it is way better than just topping the dps charts in a run, or standing around getting your gear ogled by others. A good team is fun stuff, and rewarding, but soloing is just a much deeper sense of achievement. Anyway, will keep coming back to WHU as it is THE place to be for any aspiring hunter!!
I want to solo with skoll/loque/Arcturis. Shame they would have no shield and the worng talent tree. All those bloody hours camping/ following ( ESP loque ) seem less and less useless as even in BM they aren’t the best dps pets. Bufftime please blizz!
Less and less useful*
hi frost.
i’ve been trying to get my brood of nozdormu up to exalted. i’m at 300/21000 revered right now and all that’s left for me is AQ40 (did the War of the Shfiting Sands already). Trouble is, i’m misanthropic these days — raid burnout due to too many laughable hunters in my guild screwing up our icc25, so i’ve basically decided to eff guild related activities for awhile — and soloing is where it’s at for me.
I mostly have no trouble (even w/o T5) getting past everything i want to except for one boss: Prophet Skeram. I cannot handle the MC here. Has any hunter got a strat that makes this work? Has anyone tried just letting their pet do it all for the whole fight?
i’ve tried everything so far: unequipping all my weapons (i beat my pet to death with my bare fists), FD’ing to let pet handle it (invariable i “wake up” and get MC’d and wipe), hiding (never works) etc…
anybody? tips? vid to prove it’s possible?
Hi, Frost and folks.
I want to thank you for helping me put the fun back in WoW. I recently rolled a new Hunter-main, and I saw your soloing articles in passing.
Inasmuch as PUGs are the reason I keep taking long breaks from WoW (I just get too angry at the jerks), I thought I’d give this a shot as I level.
I’ve done Ragefire & Wailing & most of Deadmines so far, and it’s a whole lot of fun. It’s great to be able to set up your own pulls at your own pace, see the nooks and crannies and landscape of the instance without the go-go-go, and the accumulated loot isn’t bad, either. =)
For me, I’m finding that being 5 levels over the bosses is worth a shot, and if I wipe too much, I gain a level or two and try again. A handy thing is that at barely gray, you’re not gaining XP so you’ll stay at your desired attempt-level.
Again, this was a great idea and I thank you for it.
Hi Frost,
Want to try to do some extreme soloing myself and leveling my turtle at the moment. However, I was just looking at the Best Pet Tanking Pet guide: http://www.warcrafthuntersunion.com/2009/07/best-pet-tanking-pet/ and Arthemystia states that “Turtles won’t hold aggro well, so they don’t make good tanks. “.
I’m trying to get my head around this, would it be possible to explain this? Would the turtle be used for extreme soloing, whereas the bear/croc be best for normal tanking?
Many thanks!
I just found this site recently and got very excited. As a long time WoW player, I had already finished the Heroic BC dungeons prior to Achievements being recorded. (I think I only had Heroic Magister’s Terrace recorded.) None of my guildies want to do the old BC instances and now I have started doing them solo. I did Heroic Ramparts with a bear, easy enough although the first boss fight was a bit of a challenge. I attempted Heroic Blood Furnace, and got to Broggrok fine, but that chain sequence of mobs just overwhelmed the poor bear once the 4 mob groups released. I then trained a turtle up to 80 and ran it again. Much easier! I skipped many mobs by dismissing pet, running past groups of mobs and FD. Much faster, you just need to find clear areas to get up. I would love to get the T5 pieces, but finding anyone that wants to do SSC is quite a challenge.
Thanks again for all the great info!
Turtle is for Extreme Soloing and makes a viable tank for that.
Bear/Croc are pet tanks for running with groups.
When did they make the change to resilience?
Hi, guys.
I thought I’d let people know that it seems that the classic instances seem to be soloable now. (At least by Hunters =D )
I don’t know if it’s because they’ve been nerfed somehow or what, but I was just able to solo up to & including Gahz’rilla (level 46) when I was level 48. I believe the quest was yellow for me, and I know the trash was at least green.
My point is that for those who are levelling up new toons, I think soloing through instances as you progress is a fun way to get oodles of experience & loot.
I don’t know if it’d count as Extreme Soloing, but running the level-appropriate instances in place of a 5-man party is seeming pretty challenging & enjoyable to me, so I thought I’d mention it for others.
Thanks,
Hornshot
Member
I wanted to know what level you can think of starting extreme soloing? I am doing it with a dwarf 80 but now I want to try to go more extreme and try for instance VC with a lvl 19-22 hunter.
BTW awsome website, congrats and keep the good work!