85 Prot Warrior soloing – part 1

While clicking around in Analytics, I’ve noticed a metric ton of visits from keywords like “solo ignis the furnace master 85” or “can you solo onyxia at 85” and similar. Well, I haven’t done Ignis or Onyxia yet, but I definitely consider these a worthy challenge.

So far, I haven’t done much solo raiding since Cataclysm launched – I’ve got the expansion pretty late in December and have been busy with leveling, putting together a decent tank and dps gear, doing current heroics and Archaeology. I did went through Outland heroics for the reputations though, and they are now all even easier than they’ve been on level 80. You pretty much breeze through all of them without ever stopping to eat. Which is obviously not surprising at all.

Even the Magisters’ Terrace, which still posed a bit of a problem when I was level 80, is now totally farmable. I’ve just done it and it took me about 12 minutes from entering to looting Kael’thas. You still should watch out for his gravity phase, as the orbs can kill you if you stand in them for too long, but otherwise it’s a joke. You can avoid most of the trash packs as well.

Speaking of prot spec, I have a slightly different one for soloing – 2/3/36, with points in Blood Craze, Field Dressing and Impending Victory. Out of all of these, the Impending Victory is the most useful talent here – because the mobs I’m killing are so low level, they don’t give experience and don’t normally enable Victory Rush to be used. Generous spam of Devastate fixes that, and Victory Rush procs from Impending Victory heal me for about 13k. That’s plenty. Blood Craze is less useful, healing for some 2.5 – 5k health at a time, but it goes off often enough to be around half of healing done – it’s just hard to proc Victorious on old mobs that have very small health pools. Oh, and of course don’t forget the Victory Rush minor glyph, since you’ll be using that a lot. Rest of the glyphs are standard, and the minor glyph is not necessary – since you don’t have to sit and wait for mana, you just charge to the next mob and heal up.

Gear is also more or less standard. What I’m using is a mix of my prot and arms gear from heroics, but it doesn’t matter much at this point and you don’t need any fancy healing trinkets – at least not until we get to the harder parts.

Which will come in a few days, when I’ll finally go through Wrath heroics and see what’s possible there. See you in a few days after I’ve done it.