Coathangers!

Or:

A few days ago, I finally finished the 45-minute baron run portion of the tier .5 chain. As luck would have it, my kilt also dropped that run, leaving me with only the helm and chest level of my tier 0 set. So for the last couple days, I’ve been working on advancing the chain as far as I could solo. I spent several hours killing the ogres outside Dire Maul for their beads (and sent a guildie enough runecloth to buy an elekk). I then soloed Scholo for dark runes, and hoped that my helm would drop (no luck there, but let me just say that Gandling is a huge pain to solo–as he will pretty much chain teleport you the entire fight.)

With these items acquired, I set out for the Ring of Law in Blackrock Depths to challenge a group of five gladiators to mortal [k]ombat. I ended up dieing on the first attempt, as I didn’t know what my kill order should be. On the second attempt, I dropped an earth elemental at the very beginning (the mobs are immune to taunt, but the big guy still kept a couple of ‘em occupied by punching them a lot), then burned down the engineer, rogue, and warrior, in that order.  The engineer does the most damage, while the rogue has a short stun with a longer silence effect, and the warrior mortal strikes. Luckily I didn’t have to deal with a healer, so they went down fairly quickly, even for a resto shaman. After that, I was free to pick off the hunter and mage. This was one of the most challenging five-person encounters at 60–and the inspiration for the Delrissa encounter in MrT–it’s not an easy thing to solo. I ended up using a healing pot and two charged crystal foci, because I spent so much time silenced and/or mortal struck.

Running through these quests has taut me two things. First, the items that were the easiest to acquire when everyone was 60 are now the biggest hassle. Dark Runes, for example, used to be so common most people just sold them to vendors, but now they sell for around 20 gold each on my server. Second, resto Shamans are as close to unkillable as I’ve ever gotten. The combination of mail armor, a shield, earth shield, and a healing stream totem lets me pretty much ignore most incoming damage. While earth shield’s spell interruption protection means that, if things start to go badly I can heal myself reliably, no mater how many mobs I happen to be fighting.

Unfortunately, I’ve once again come to a point that requires a group. The next step in the chain requires not only a return to UBRS to kill Pyroguard Emberseer (how much you want to bet he drops my gloves, now that I don’t need ‘em?), but also a jaunt into Silithus, to kill the Duke of Cynders, who can only be summoned through random chance or the use a Signet of Beckoning (remember what I said about the stuff that was easy at 60 now being the hardest to get? Pretty much anything having to do with Silihus falls in that category).