The DK Solo Thread 3.0

[Nangz]

First attempts on heroic LK 25 and I got him! Wasn't too bad but alot of it was because of gear. 518 ilvl.

First pull got him to 17% before berserk. The next 3 failed to transition problems and the 5th was a kill!

Would love to get a better explanation on valithria 10 man soloing. Best my bloodworms could do was 62% before he soft enraged and I disconnected from too many mobs.

[krakken]

First attempts on heroic LK 25 and I got him! Wasn't too bad but alot of it was because of gear. 518 ilvl.

First pull got him to 17% before berserk. The next 3 failed to transition problems and the 5th was a kill!

Would love to get a better explanation on valithria 10 man soloing. Best my bloodworms could do was 62% before he soft enraged and I disconnected from too many mobs.

I'm trying to do LK 25H solo for the 2H sword for transmog but I keep hitting enrage barely after P3 transitions. I don't raid too much on my lower pop server and my ilvl is only 492 (mostly from LFR + MSV). Looking around I see there is a way to take a plague scientist to the frozen throne room but no specific instruction on how to. I figure it'd be easy as just controlling it and going over the teleporter. Nope didn't work.

Is there any trick to doing that? I feel like gear is such an issue in doing. Unfortunately I feel gear will be an issue and my guild quit raiding in this tier.

[MagmyGeraith]

I'm trying to do LK 25H solo for the 2H sword for transmog but I keep hitting enrage barely after P3 transitions. I don't raid too much on my lower pop server and my ilvl is only 492 (mostly from LFR + MSV). Looking around I see there is a way to take a plague scientist to the frozen throne room but no specific instruction on how to. I figure it'd be easy as just controlling it and going over the teleporter. Nope didn't work.

Is there any trick to doing that? I feel like gear is such an issue in doing. Unfortunately I feel gear will be an issue and my guild quit raiding in this tier.

That was fixed in beta, sadly. Unless there's something new, I don't believe it's possible.

[Deleted]

http://i.imgur.com/wYWEuuX.jpg (LK 25H)

That's really easy now days lol, pushed to 10.5% with 3min 21sec to berserk.

[Trubo]

Mind checking my napkin math I posted in reply to someone asking about Blood Dks and soloing Mandokir?

Quote Originally Posted by Evil Inside View Post
This is no longer possible iirc.

Eh, not exactly true. It's just a really high gear check.

Decapitate
Unlimited range
Instant
Bloodlord Mandokir charges and Decapitates his target, inflicting 14625000 to 15375000 Physical damage.

For the sake of argument lets say that Mandokir always inflicts the maximum amount of damage with this attack. I'll be using my DK as an example and running a maxed Blood Shield going into the fight.

1. Weakened Blows reduces damage dealt by 10% so 15,375,000 * (1-0.1) = 13,837,500

XXX2.. In-game as Blood with Blood Presence active I mitigate 52.45% of all Physical damage. That means that before all other damage reductions are considered I only take 13,837,500*(1.00-.5245) = 6,579,731 physical damage.

XXX3. Defensive cooldowns add in a multiplicative fashion so: Damage taken from cds = 6,579,731*[Bone Shield's damage taken (1-0.2) * IBF's damage taken (1-0.5) * AotD's damage taken with full procs (1-0.5208)**] = 1,261203 Physical damage taken

XXX4. Blood Shield caps at your max life so 1,261203 - 532,999 = 728,204 damage

XXX5. Damage from 4 - my life = 195,205 (overkill)

As we can see my DK would not survive the attack and thus not benefit from the Vengeance of that attack due to the removal of overkill Vengeance. However I am not in fully optimized gear either. Best gear I imagine is Parry+Dodge ASSUMING same Strength values as on dps pieces. Trinkets I'd want either the Shado-Pan Assault tank trinket OR Relic of Niuzao + Stuff of Nightmares OR Fortitude of the Zandalari. If someone wants to run the numbers of a Blood DK in full ToT LFR gear be my guest.


**Assuming my trinkets+FC+DRW are up so that my Parry+Dodge = Relic+Lei Shin's+FC+DRW+Dodge = 47.08% (Parry) + 5.46% (Dodge) = 52.08%

XXX Edit: Forgot to account for Weakened Blows. Reworking the napkin math now.

[Grimsdott]

I'm having bit of a problem with Morchok (lol). How exactly do you manage Stomps? His hitbox is so small that I haven't managed to run 25y away even once and I did ~10 attempts on him. That was in dps gear. I figured I might as well switch to tank gear and outheal it but no difference there. Still 300k+ and eventually I run out of cds + berserk might be an issue in tank gear even though I never even got him below 50%.

So how?

Also, is it worth to run close to crystals or is the explosion damage negligible?

[Deleted]

I'm having bit of a problem with Morchok (lol). How exactly do you manage Stomps? His hitbox is so small that I haven't managed to run 25y away even once and I did ~10 attempts on him. That was in dps gear. I figured I might as well switch to tank gear and outheal it but no difference there. Still 300k+ and eventually I run out of cds + berserk might be an issue in tank gear even though I never even got him below 50%.

So how?

Also, is it worth to run close to crystals or is the explosion damage negligible?

Well you can play goblin and jump away to reset stacks, roll engi and rocket boosts to reset. If you ain't goblin or engi you can still reset by running downhill towards to tower and use deaths advance.

Another useful tip would be to use IBF glyph if things get hairy.

[Deleted]

I'm having bit of a problem with Morchok (lol). How exactly do you manage Stomps? His hitbox is so small that I haven't managed to run 25y away even once and I did ~10 attempts on him. That was in dps gear. I figured I might as well switch to tank gear and outheal it but no difference there. Still 300k+ and eventually I run out of cds + berserk might be an issue in tank gear even though I never even got him below 50%.

So how?

Also, is it worth to run close to crystals or is the explosion damage negligible?

Start running like 2-3 sec before he starts casting stop and you'll get extra range, if not just use Death's Advance.

[Deleted]

I'm having bit of a problem with Morchok (lol).

Stack mastery and ignore the crystals.

For the stomps, you can avoid some by jumping off the back of the temple but it takes a bit of practice to get the timing right (roughly 0.7-1.0 sec on the DBM timer). In each cycle I soaked the first (big blood shield from previous phase) -> jumped -> soaked with IBF (glyphed) -> jumped.

[Arctagon]

Mind checking my napkin math I posted in reply to someone asking about Blood Dks and soloing Mandokir?


Eh, not exactly true. It's just a really high gear check.



For the sake of argument lets say that Mandokir always inflicts the maximum amount of damage with this attack. I'll be using my DK as an example and running a maxed Blood Shield going into the fight.

1. Weakened Blows reduces damage dealt by 10% so 15,375,000 * (1-0.1) = 13,837,500

XXX2.. In-game as Blood with Blood Presence active I mitigate 52.45% of all Physical damage. That means that before all other damage reductions are considered I only take 13,837,500*(1.00-.5245) = 6,579,731 physical damage.

XXX3. Defensive cooldowns add in a multiplicative fashion so: Damage taken from cds = 6,579,731*[Bone Shield's damage taken (1-0.2) * IBF's damage taken (1-0.5) * AotD's damage taken with full procs (1-0.5208)**] = 1,261203 Physical damage taken

XXX4. Blood Shield caps at your max life so 1,261203 - 532,999 = 728,204 damage

XXX5. Damage from 4 - my life = 195,205 (overkill)

As we can see my DK would not survive the attack and thus not benefit from the Vengeance of that attack due to the removal of overkill Vengeance. However I am not in fully optimized gear either. Best gear I imagine is Parry+Dodge ASSUMING same Strength values as on dps pieces. Trinkets I'd want either the Shado-Pan Assault tank trinket OR Relic of Niuzao + Stuff of Nightmares OR Fortitude of the Zandalari. If someone wants to run the numbers of a Blood DK in full ToT LFR gear be my guest.


**Assuming my trinkets+FC+DRW are up so that my Parry+Dodge = Relic+Lei Shin's+FC+DRW+Dodge = 47.08% (Parry) + 5.46% (Dodge) = 52.08%

XXX Edit: Forgot to account for Weakened Blows. Reworking the napkin math now.

Go Purgatory and call it a day?

[Trubo]

Go Purgatory and call it a day?

Was under the impression that you don't get vengeance from the attack that pushes you into purgatory.

[Arctagon]

I'm a little behind on my death knight, so I don't know, but from the videos I've seen, it looks like it does indeed give you Vengeance. I admittedly don't know whether it's been fixed since I saw those videos, and Vengeance has been given a cap since then, but given that it still works (don't see why it shouldn't), you should still not have any problems finishing him off even with lower Vengeance.

[alaeda]

How much gear do I need in order to attempt BoT 10m normal? Is around 490 enough?

[Trubo]

I'm a little behind on my death knight, so I don't know, but from the videos I've seen, it looks like it does indeed give you Vengeance. I admittedly don't know whether it's been fixed since I saw those videos, and Vengeance has been given a cap since then, but given that it still works (don't see why it shouldn't), you should still not have any problems finishing him off even with lower Vengeance.

From what I've heard of Vengeance:

MoP Pre-Patch - No cap, overkill damage granted vengeance
MoP Live - No cap, overkill damage no longer grants vengeance
5.1 or 5.2, forget which - Vengeance capped related to max health again to discourage level 80 twinks from soloing level 90 raids.

Personally I haven't tried to solo Bloodlord since I got the panther+raptor in Cata. Only reason I'm making a fuss about surviving the attack is that you should not get any vengeance from Decapitate unless you survive the attack and without the crazy amount you're going to have trouble killing Bloodlord before the 2nd Decapitate that's what, 20-30 seconds after the first?

[Braindwen]

MoP Pre-Patch - No cap, overkill damage granted vengeance

Max health was the limit on how much damage could give vengeance. So overkill was basically ignored from the start.

The change was changing that from max to current health. It has no bearing on Mandokir, but to illustrate, doing Chimaeron, if I stack up an absorb while staying at 1 health, I will get a vengeance buff of +0 AP from his swings.

But overall, the less you're overkilled by (and you DEFINITELY should take purgatory, as you're almost definitely going to have overkill), the more vengeance you'll get. You'll still get a tiny amount thanks to some other hotfixes though, for example if you could completely survive the 15million hit without any overkill, you'd get 675k AP. Seems like a lot, but only surviving about 3/10ths (maybe a bit less) of it in the mop pre-patch was worth ~1.4M.

(it's also only that high because Decapitate ignores armor. If it were reduced by armor, you'd get a whopping 270k AP. Wheeeeeeeeee)

[Deleted]

**Assuming my trinkets+FC+DRW are up so that my Parry+Dodge = Relic+Lei Shin's+FC+DRW+Dodge = 47.08% (Parry) + 5.46% (Dodge) = 52.08%

Is this with the 4% str from drums? And does FC really give more parry than Swordshattering? Also might be worth considering using a Potion of Mogu Power if you haven't already (not sure how much % they give at 90).

[Morry]

Max health was the limit on how much damage could give vengeance. So overkill was basically ignored from the start.

Nope. In preMOP patch Decapitate gave me over 900k AP and I had only ~400к hp.

[Kiqjaq]

Nope. In preMOP patch Decapitate gave me over 900k AP and I had only ~400к hp.

Change was applied well after the pre-patch. It was several months into the 5.0 tier that Paladins discovered they could solo current raid bosses.

[Deleted]

Change was applied well after the pre-patch. It was several months into the 5.0 tier that Paladins discovered they could solo current raid bosses.

This, vengeance wasn't fixed when MoP was released, took a few months.

[Monteverdi]

I've had a lot of people ask on my server and in my guild how to solo Zandalari Warbringers. Compared to some of the raid bosses that DKs can solo, these are a joke, but I thought I'd put some basic tips here for anyone out there who's trying these and might be having trouble.

• If your gear level is low, or your health is starting to drop, kite the Warbringer away from the spirits it summons. The spirits do quite a bit of damage (however don't kite too far away - they have a short leash right now and can reset if you aren't careful.)
• I take Desecrated Ground as my last talent and use it, Lichborne, or a preemptive AMS to avoid the fears. Fears hurt, and can lead to the boss resetting.
• Space out your heals. Don't spam death strike just because it's up - use it intelligently to maximize your healing and your blood shield uptime.
• Enjoy all the free loot.

Seriously, these MOBs are pretty easy, but are also a great introduction to soloing as a DK for those who've never really tried, since you do need to manage your abilities wisely but there aren't raid mechanics that have to be cleverly dealt with.