Update: I ditched the broken YouTube video and used Vimeo, so the video should be working now.
It’s true that we dwarves are sometimes hard on our wee gnomish freeloaders. But deep in our hearts we feel for them, we understand the impulse to dig too deep and bring about disaster. After all, we took them in when they irradiated their homeland and no other race would have them.
So it goes without saying that we dwarves will lead the charge to retake Gnomergan.
In honor of the upcoming in-game event to reclaim Gnomergan a group of five stalwart heroes from the WHU guild teamed up to defeat the dreaded Gnomergan instance, which I’ve no doubt has claimed more player deaths than any other 5-man in the history of WoW.
Group of all level 19 hunters take down Gnomergan.
Our all hunter group consisted of myself, Hrist, Bella, Arthemystia, and Ali. It took a lot of preparation, planning, and time. Not to mention several wipes (we basically had to one-shot our way to the key boss. When we wiped, the trash was back and we had to re-clear). But we succeeded in downing an instance intended for a group 10 levels higher than us, and we did it with just hunters.
I actually ended up with over 2 hours of footage — and Arth was collecting footage as well. I decided to just leave the whole thing on there and speed it up insanely fast, though I did somewhat slow down specific section so you can see what strats we were using for various obstacles, as well as for boss fights. Arth will be putting together a video at a more reasonable pace with just select bits of the run, which I think will be more interesting. But after the pain this video caused me, I’ve no desire to go back and just pull highlights. (Whenever we wipe I left the graveyard footage in so you can tell it was a wipe, but then restarted it when we reached that spot in the instance again).
We found we needed around 12%-13% hit to tackle the level 25-28 elites in there. We also also thought out our pet options carefully. At level 19 all pets are identical except for their special ability, and turtles don’t get shell shield until level 20. We found ravagers were particularly useful in dealing with trash because of their stun. I used a moth for the self-heal to give more longevity on boss fights, while bella brought a tallstrider.
The hardest thing was the trash, and not the bosses. At our low level our proximity aggro range was huge, and we spent a lot of time doing very careful pulls. Every wipe was because we pulled way, way too much trash.
Our general strategy for trash pulls (other than careful positioning) was to have each hunter put a pet on a different mob, then focus fire dps the mobs down in order. It turns out that a pet can’t hold effective aggro on multiple targets, making bears and crocs not worthwhile — not that they could survive two of those mobs beating on them for long anyway.
We also pulled aggro from our pets very easily, so we spent a lot of time ping-pong kiting. Whenever the mob would get close to someone, another hunter would distracting shot it off, etc. During the early multi-level corridors we were able to do take advantage of the terrain for some creative kiting – I slowed down an example of that in the video.
The dark iron dwarf corridor was particularly painful and slow going, as we crept along the wall to avoid pulling the entire corridor – I slowed down a section of that on the video as well.
Thermaplug wasn’t too bad. He has a threat wipe halfway through that shrugged off our pet aggro instantly and we kited him around for the rest of the fight. But it was still sweet, sweet victory.
What this run made me realize, more than anything else, was how incredibly horrible of players we were back when I was first level 28 and doing Gnomergan. Now my knowledge of threat and aggro, positioning, and kiting are instinctive. I can only assume that they were non-existent back then, because Gnomergan was horribly difficult when I first did it.
One of my favorite moments was on our scouting run, when I had my bear, Bohr. My and Hrist’s pets were swapping back and forth on aggro on a mob, and I was watching the target of target nameplate flip back and forth between the bear and Hrist’s pig, Moar. Moar – Bohr – Moar – Bohr.
Oh, and no glorious run would be complete without a record of our badass dps:
Full Gnomergan clear, level 19 hunters.
(17 votes, average: 4.94 out of 5)
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Wmg block it man, after i got all excited too.
nice going frost and all
Yeah its blocked :/
Member
you guys are flippin’ crazy! can’t wait to see this video.
What in the world is WMG, and how can they use copyright grounds to block a video posted by the creator of the video?
Dues Payer
WMG is warner music group, and they prolly blocked it because of music used in it. i guess /shrug
i saw it before it got blocked (it was on arths page i believe) and it was awesome. if memory serves me correctly, it involved 2 ravasaurs, a moth, bear, and a pig.
assuming thats correct, im curious if this was intentional, or did yall just bring whatever you had. the stuns, swipes, and self healing moth seems deliberate but im just curious. im surprised no carrion bird, at least for bosses since it does a demoralizing roar/shout ability.
and no feign death or misdirection. did the pets hold good threat? i figure if mobs are bouncing around between 2 pets, thats effectively doubling the health of the “tank” so thats probably good.
Dues Payer
heh not ravasaurs… ravagers.*
blocked by WMG. I can’t wait to see it, with or without music. I wouldn’t go near the place until I was about level 40 LoL
Correction: Gnomes will be leading the charge into Gnomer.
You can follow us and provide some Volley cover. =p
Member
Well done!
I saw in WHU chat that you are doing some testing of pets for us wee hunters.
awww, /sadface I wanted to see
After actually reading the article, I really would like to see the video. When around level 30 I decided to solo gnomergan because of the quests and lack of people to group with. Oh such fond memories of failure!
Member
Nice job! Not something I would ever want to do in 100 years so pr ops to you 5.
Member
The tune from this little gem right here should fix everything all up:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q0l4T9kRlBE
Just repeat as needed for length of video above. ‘Course, we don’t know how long it is because WMG blocked it!
The ‘I’m a Hunter’ tune by Frost et al should be more that appropo (and of course way cool!) for a 5 hunter clearing of Gnomergan and avoid any copyright issues
Member
Gnomer….blech…ptooey…pshaw…ughhh….gack…!!!
My least favorite instance. Oh blessed legal crap video blocked. I guess there is a use for lawyers other than firewood.
Stupid WMG…
This was insanely fun. Practically a raid at our level and how we approached it. We all had this massive level of paranoia with the alarm bots and all the pulls.
Pet choice – Ravager: The thought behind the ravagers was their stun Ravage and they do fairly good damage. Gorramit actually managed to handle some serious damage for a little while and the stun, while bosses shrugged it off and higher elites, really helped with casters and to handle the damage he took. We had 2 ravagers, this is true, I had mine and Arth brought one for the second round which was a great idea.
Pet Agro: Pets, if given enough time, held aggro fairly well. But enough taps from us and they lost it and rarely got it back. If we had aggro on something before a pet did, very very rarely did it ever pick it up off of us unless we just… ignored it and let it smack us around. Basically once we pulled off a pet, we played ping-pong with distracting shot till it died. We had no other choice.
Grats on that I went once when i was lvl 30 on my main (hunter obviously :p) and didn’t go back on any of my alts! It’s Hell
Can’t wait to see the vid if you can get it back up
Member
An interesting choice of pets. I swapped my bear for a scorpid, will see how this goes. I am loath to dump my raptor for a ravager. Will wait on that
Couldn’t see the video but really like the hunter experiment!
Sonicwhu, if you read this please log into the alt guild and set up officers or transfer leadership To one of minibellas alts please?
Admin
Are you guys still unable to see the video? ‘Cause I see it just fine, and typically they just kill the audio, not block the entire video (well, usually if they detect copyrighted music, they just put an ad for the song on there – which is ideal)
Ya it still says its blocked and it wont play at all for me.
Yea, says blocked for me as well.
Member
No see video
/cry
Member
Maybe upload it to Rapid share or something. I’d gladly download this.
AWESOME!!
I had been wondering whether an all-hunter 5-man would work. Now I wanna try one!
Can’t wait for the all-hunter Warsong Gulches, Arathi Basins, etc. That oughta be a blast and a half.
No video here, I don’t know what is it. Youtube from my iphone won’t display it at all. I am at work currently, when I get home I will post if I can see the vid. I am going to bet its a DNS problem.
Hahah! Forbidden donut.
Video is working fine now with Music and all, great job guys awesome effort
Just watched it:D woooo!
very fun guys:D thanks !
DAMN YOU! DAMN YOU ALL TO HELL!!!
We steamrolled through WC like it was Coldridge Valley. VanCleef and the Deadmines was almost laughable. Stocks gave us pause for thought but was no real trouble in the end.
Then you and your uncommonly good looking band of heroes had to go and make us look like amateurs!
What next … Molten Core?!
Nah… seriously: way to go! You give us all something to aspire too!
Absolutely amazing guys! da hunters of WHUville have just declared war on Blizzard, rawr!
Contributor
“…you and your uncommonly good looking band of heroes…”
Best. Comment. Ever.
The music freaks me out, even having seen Fight Club. I guess it matches the paranoid focus we needed for the run.
Just watched it. Outstanding !! ….think I’ll try to PUG deadmines tonight lol
Now that the video is up on Vimeo I had to come abck and watch. Excellence! Out of curiosity, what was the power aura that you setup?
Contributor
The power aura was for pet heals. Any time we were in combat and our pet heal wasn’t up, it would show. I had the same one set up on mine. We weren’t all tanking every pull, but Frost was our MT for most of the run, so my heals had more downtime than Frost’s.
Member
sweet mary, what a run! no wonder you’re our leaders!
The chart clearly proves that women are inferior to men when it comes to DPS. That’s empirical stats right there.
Either that or experience with hunters anyway.