Soloing Firelands as a warlock

[JustRob]

So after getting my destro lock to lvl 100 today, I thought I'd start doing Firelands for the legendary staff... And it was harder than I expected. On my paladin it was a faceroll, so I confidently went in on 25m normal.

First I got raped by Shannox. When I had my voidwalker out one of his pets would place some kind of trap on me that disabled me from doing anything whatsoever. Had to watch myself get killed in order to escape. I figured that only happens when you're not the tank, so I went in without voidwalker... Then my face got eaten off.

Ran out, put it on 10m normal, and finally I was able to kill Shannox. Then I went out again and put it back to 25m normal, tried Baleroc. He goes down so slow. His adds swarm on me while my voidwalker is on Baleroc, and they do a shitload of damage so I can't ignore them. And when Cataclysm / Howl of Terror is on cooldown, that becomes a major problem as I have to single target dps them, disabling me from attacking Baleroc in the process. I tried to reset him to get out, but he wouldn't reset and I just soulstoned myself and decided to let them kill me.

After that I ran out and quit. All in all this has been much, much more trouble than I expected, and I have to ask: Is this purely a gear problem? Because I have ilvl 599 / 600 right now, and I wonder if ilvl 615-640 is gonna make much difference.

[Delaios]

For Shannox, just nuke Rageface if you do it on normal, building up full embers on trash if needed. Shannox gets a minor enrage, but a voidwalker should shrug that off.

I assume by Baleroc you mean Bethi'lac (spider), since Baleroc has no adds. During MoP I'd kill her (on my hunter) before any of the adds even got up the nest.

For Baleroc himself you can abuse the Alysrazor flying buff when it's fully stacked to make him melt away.

Are you sure you didn't accidentally do it on heroic? Check the instance portal to be sure. If there's a skull in it, it's on heroic. I've had to switch back and forth on characters before to get it right, sometimes even between 10 and 25 man.

[JustRob]

Oh, I meant Rhyolith, not Baleroc. No idea why I mixed those up.

Yeah, I'm 100% sure it wasn't on heroic.

[Cute Chen]

So after getting my destro lock to lvl 100 today, I thought I'd start doing Firelands for the legendary staff... And it was harder than I expected. On my paladin it was a faceroll, so I confidently went in on 25m normal.

First I got raped by Shannox. When I had my voidwalker out one of his pets would place some kind of trap on me that disabled me from doing anything whatsoever. Had to watch myself get killed in order to escape. I figured that only happens when you're not the tank, so I went in without voidwalker... Then my face got eaten off.

Ran out, put it on 10m normal, and finally I was able to kill Shannox. Then I went out again and put it back to 25m normal, tried Baleroc. He goes down so slow. His adds swarm on me while my voidwalker is on Baleroc, and they do a shitload of damage so I can't ignore them. And when Cataclysm / Howl of Terror is on cooldown, that becomes a major problem as I have to single target dps them, disabling me from attacking Baleroc in the process. I tried to reset him to get out, but he wouldn't reset and I just soulstoned myself and decided to let them kill me.

After that I ran out and quit. All in all this has been much, much more trouble than I expected, and I have to ask: Is this purely a gear problem? Because I have ilvl 599 / 600 right now, and I wonder if ilvl 615-640 is gonna make much difference.

I can't say for warlock, but those ~15 item level points made a huge difference for my warrior. Blow up Rageface before the other one.

[Jester Joe]

First I got raped by Shannox. When I had my voidwalker out one of his pets would place some kind of trap on me that disabled me from doing anything whatsoever. Had to watch myself get killed in order to escape. I figured that only happens when you're not the tank, so I went in without voidwalker... Then my face got eaten off.

Shannox himself shoots out the traps, they have a couple of seconds before they arm, just walk out of them and kill the dogs if not on heroic, should be easy. Rageface is the most important because he can stun you for way too long, if anything, you can use the traps on the dogs and you can trap them if they walk over it.

[Aensland]

At your ilvl, you're actually doing less dps than a lvl 90 with mythic SoO gear would. Things got a LOT easier for me at over 630ilvl. You can pretty much just blow everyone up by then. Oddly enough, heroic Rag felt easier than many of the other bosses for me. Shannox was probably the hardest early on, due to the mechanics.

[jaymzkerten]

All of 10N firelands was soloable as a quite geared warlock in 5.4, and with the changes in 6.0 it made even 25H quite trivial as a warlock. Yes the gear will help, but understanding the mechanics goes a long way as well. I solo 25H on my 662 warlock every week, and I also do 10H on my 92 and (at the time) 96 warlocks, and the only issue I have is I need to switch to the soul leech talent on majordomo to make my VL indestructible.

As a prot paladin both shannox and baleroc are completely trivial as the mechanics they do only target dps and will not target tanks, so no traps/rageface stun on shannox, and no crystals on baleroc. Simply face tanking as a warlock will not change these mechanics since you are still a dps spec. As Jester Joe pointed out the traps are shot from shannox himself, not from the dogs. You just have to watch your feet or have DBM yell at you to move (there are separate DBM plugins for older raids, one for each expansion). If rageface starts raging on you just tell your VW/VL to attack rageface for a few seconds and he'll stop attacking.

I cannot see why you would have issues with the adds on rhyolith, the small adds have so little health that you can blow them up with a single FnB conflag, and the large add takes more damage the longer it is up. The only thing that will give you a hard time on rhyolith is if you leave the active volcanoes unchecked; having multiple 20 stacks of the debuff they put on you will give you a bad time. His health goes down slow because he has a buff that reduces damage he takes, and the buff is lowered by running him over active volcanoes.

Absolute worst case scenario you can cheese the first 5 fights by simply getting 25 stacks of the ring buff from alysrazor and then flying over and nuking the boss.

[JustRob]

I do Firelands every week on my ret pally, and I never had trouble with Rageface or anything like that. It's like now that I'm no longer the one who has the most aggro, all these new mechanics come into play that I never had to care about.

[Harsesis]

Might I direct you to the following thread for all your post 6.0 Warlock soloing questions.

http://www.mmo-champion.com/threads/...um-WoD-edition

[jaymzkerten]

I do Firelands every week on my ret pally, and I never had trouble with Rageface or anything like that. It's like now that I'm no longer the one who has the most aggro, all these new mechanics come into play that I never had to care about.

Are you sure you are doing the fights as ret? I know for a fact that on my ret paladin rageface will in fact use face rage on me, and unless you are killing shannox in under 10 seconds the only way to clear it is to bubble it off. The only time I've seen neither crystals nor face rage was when I killed it on my blood DK, which tells me those mechanics don't target tanks period. Crystals don't seem to be a thing (I seem to recall those only targeted ranged dps) so I can see how that's a new mechanic for you, but the others are still there.

[Deleted]

Yeah Rageface will eat your face as Ret. You can DS out of it though (maybe BOP? dont remember). Wings and nuking Shannox on 25hc, then DS and continue nuking him is how I typically do it.

[HardlyWaken]

Rageface gets off of you with damage dealt to it. Try avoiding the raps and Dotting the pet while still dpsing the boss. Additionally, dont let the dogs run over fire traps, they get trap immunity if you do, however, if you can run them over the red traps without them being immune you can take one of the dogs out of the equation entirely.

[Life-Binder]

did 25 Normal FL as a ~625-630 ench shammy last week - it was my first time ever in FL (I didn't play during Cata and most of MoP) and I only "wiped" once on the bird due to not knowing what to do and once due to fall damage from getting knocked up into the air on some Ragnaros trap

rest was a semi-afk faceroll pretty much

[Deleted]

wait a little more, its a ilevel problem

at 664 i just dismount, stand still and press starfall , everything dies, health stays 95%+ all the time

[JustRob]

I dunno if Rageface eats your face on ret, but every time I engage Shannox, I target Rageface first and he dies pretty quickly. Usually in 10 seconds or less. Then I do Riplimb and then finally Shannox. 100% doing it as a ret pally, I haven't played prot in ages.

[jaymzkerten]

If you are killing him that fast then you are killing him before he gets a chance to pounce you.

And EvcRo, all 10H cata fights are very faceroll even as a fresh 100 with crap gear. At most any given fight will have 1 mechanic that you should *maybe* pay attention to so you don't die, but most of those are things like telling a pet to attack rageface if he pounces, sidestepping the traps on rag, or picking off a couple of the yellow oozes before pulling yor'sahj and aoeing the entire room.

[jaymzkerten]

As a followup, just full cleared 25H firelands on my 607 lock, didn't wipe on a single fight. Still used the alysrazor buff to cheese baleroc but otherwise did every other fight as normal. Gear doesn't make much of a difference here, just understanding of the mechanics and what you still need to watch out for.

[laughtrey]

Use Demonic Servitude, Grimoire of Supremecy and summon the Abyssal. He tanks and does a ton of AOE damage.