Very nice. Everything is laid out step by step. (It does make me wonder if the upgrades are worth all the trouble.)

click

From what I've seen and heard of the new sets...yes and no. If you are running MC semi-regularily, no, the set isn't worth it (imho). If you aren't, then the D2 sets are worth it, depending on your income/patience/time.

The limited math I have done suggests that the blue pieces of the Dungeon 2 sets are better than the Dungeon 1 equivalent, but not as good as the Raid Tier 1 set. However, the purple Dungeon 2 items seem to be *better* than the Tier 1 equivalents, though in most cases not as good as the Tier 2 pieces.

For priests, the Dungeon 2 boots (which you get halfway through the quest series) are better than the Tier 2 Transcendance boots, at least according to my reckoning.

Just a little firsthand account on what I've done thus far.

The first part for the bracers is extremely easy. Farm some blood/venom samples (depending upon your faction) and bring your bracers plus 20g to the quest giver. Done and done.

The second chain takes a bit of doing. The guide above lists all the mats, so I won't get into that. The only part you have to actually go out and gather would be the volcanic ash. I found Flamecrest and the Ogre mound in the Steppes to be the best spots.

Once you have the Ectoplasmic Distiller, the fun begins. It requires one Goblin Rocket Fuel each time you activate the machine, and you're given 8 of them upon completion of the prior quest. If you play your cards right, you can definitely get by just using those 8, but it doesn't hurt to have some spares. Ideally, pair up with one other person who has the quest, tag a bunch of the mobs you need, and plant the distiller before killing them. You won't even go through the 16 rocket fuel you start with between the two of you.

I've just turned in the distiller along with the ectoplasm, and have yet to tackle the next step. The biggest advice I'd give to someone is to team up with one other person for this step if you want to do it on the cheap. Goblin Rocket Fuel was selling for 1g each before the patch hit on Thunderhorn. And now it's 2-3g apiece. Much better to get it done with what you're given, then sell any surplus.

To add my comments. The bracers are essential free.

Ectoplasmic Distiller:
You need to kill 12 ghosts in silithius, eastern plaguelands and winterspring. (See the guide for where to find them.)

Winterpspring: You can easily get the 12 kills with 2 goblin rocket fuel.

Silthius: The ghosts spawn 1-3 bugs, it is probably best to ask someone for help. used up 3 goblin fuels, but I had luck with the spawns.

Eastern Plaguelands: I waited until a eyeless observer spotted me and quickly setted up my Ectoplasmic Distiller. That seems to be a good tactic, except I should have tried it in a less busy time. I used 4 goblin rocket fuels. (Beware the ghosts fear you.)

The next step is the baron run in 45 minutes. So far I tried it twice, both times we wiped.
Group Set Up:
Warlock:
My twink, best blue equip. Has +300 damage and needs to drink a mana potion every second mob group^^.

Paladin
My Tank: Farmed enough Mana potions to drink every encounter. Best blue equip.

Hunter
Rhok'Delar, ~ 4 T1

Mage
1 T1, blue pvp set/dm

Priest
4 T2, 2 AQ40, a few mana potions, but basically never needs to drink.

It seemed like we would have managed it with no time to spare. Both times we had an unlucky fear.
On the second try, we had around 20 minutes left and were almost at the frost mage boss.
I'm unsure wheter a group in complete blue equip can manage it. I doubt it.

A group in full blue could manage it. It's just a question of knowing what you're doing and bypassing any loot concerns along the way.

One thing that saves a TON of time is to make a mad suicide dash after Malekei. Run your party to the gate and use a DI, Soulstone, Rebirth, or Reincarnation to recover. Resurrect the party and begin the Abomination gauntlet. You skip a lot of pulls this way.

Well, we all know strat pretty well. Noone needed anything from strat, we were using teamspeak and kept on chain pulling.

While we did make a few mistakes, I don't think we could have saved more than a few minutes. So we would have had around 16 minutes for the last part. I know that another similar equiped group did that last part in 13 minutes.

That means, assuming a perfect run, we could do it in 39 minues. I don't think a group just in blues can do it as fast as we. Well I'd say try it for yourself and report your run.

I'll try it again next weekend.

On conservation of Rocket fuel:

I was able to get the ectoplasms by using 7 rocket fuels (quest gives you 8).

This was my method:
Kill stuff other than banshees in Corin's Crossing until you see a mess of banshees near (4-5) respawns are pretty quick. Sometimes you'll see lower levs doing the quest where they free spirits of Darrowshire, I help them of either faction and they will usually help me in turn.

get your first ectoplasm mob kill to 30% before dropping distiller, pull things into the range and kill them quickly

In Winterspring I think you have to try to not to use only 2 rocket fuels, unless you go at a time where 15 other people are farming them.

I helped other people when I saw someone else doing it. I'd let them tag, then help them kill stuff and pull stuff off them so they can chain pull instead of worrying about health etc... They were generally grateful for this and a couple times I got a couple extra kills in while their distiller was still up (you can get ectoplasms from any friendly faction distiller). I would wait until they said they were done before pulling my own into their distiller radius though. Stay out of party in order to give them all the quest items though. I figure pulling stuff they could pull/kill and using up their rocket fuel is bad form.

This morning was what I would estimate was my 10th try. (all pugs)

The group wasn't exactly just in blues, but fairly close:

A warrior on the quest. I belive he was in mixed blues, but i don't remember, I was mostly worried about the dps.

Me (on the quest), a priest in 3 virtuous + 5 lt. commander's (blue) with a benediction, other gear was generic 5 man dungeon-quality.

A rogue on the quest with gear from ubrs and a full dungeon set (3 upgrades of course). Good blue weapons and knew how to go all out.

A fire mage in partial MC gear, not on quest

a hunter with blues and an incomplete T0 set, not on the quest.

We followed what is on our server the conventional farm run path: nerub, backtrack, get to baroness and pull any nearby groups that we'll pull moving forward, make sure everyone blows cooldowns on fears, pull baroness, go to maleki, skip magistrate, kill right group and get the gate closed--we didn't have any wipe recovery so we couldn't do the death run from maleki to gate.

Our first run we had killed maleki only a little behind schedule. Baroness in particular was slow, 3 possessions, as the tank couldn't get his intimidating shout off before he was possessed and used it, but forunatley no adds. Later, someone backed up into the group of thuzadin casters to the left of maleki's tower (looking at him) during another pull, wiping us. Twice. After that we proceeded as a practice run, the prisoner dying more than halfway into the abomination event. 10 minutes later, the baron died, and we reckoned that accounting for the double-wipe and the fact that you only have to wake the baron in time to win, not kill him, we figured we would have failed anyway, but as a matter of seconds.

We were group looting bosses (fast enough that I didn't have to insist on no-loot, which was how i'd been doing most of my pugs till then), and skipping loot on trash, but on the second run we got incredibly lucky and one of the elites before the gate that starts the timer dropped a book of prayer of shadow protection, which i needed, learned, and used the rest of the run. Things were proceeding more smoothly and faster than before in general, until in the tunnel between baroness and maleki our MT reported on TS that his screen had frozen. After about 30 seconds of delay, we resumed pulling trash with 4 as he rebooted his machine and reconnected right before we needed to pull maleki's guards. Pulling quickly but with more careful grouping, we avioded any extra pulls beyond an unavoidable trapped crate, and got the gate closed sometime before the 10 minute warning. Abom event went well, usually one would wander in and get shacked while the one before it was at about 50%. Skelleton charge ended with 3 minutes on the debuff, while wating for the door to open we agreed that baron would be pulled with 3-5 seconds on the debuff in whatever shape we were left in. Managed an extremely aggressive AoE fight against the four skeletons, charging them where they stood while the mage and hunter AoEd, the warrior and rogue took down one at a time, and i offtanked the others and somehow managed to not lose anybody. Scrambling in I finally got to see a non-empty cage, and sat down near dead and OOM for drinking + eating with ~25s on the debuff.

Charged at 5s, managed to finish drinking before any emergencies or getting dragged into combat, baron fight went smoothly and wasn't terribly close. Dropped legs, which the hunter needed anyway, and the cage was opened and I got my ysida freed, which you turn in to her for a bag of potions and an amulet to deliver to her husband's ghost.

Over teamspeak, I heard the strong texas accent of the the MT, informing us that he needed a beer.

We killed the magistrate before portaling to IF to brag. He didn't drop anything interesting.

-- frink

If your group is sufficiently equipped, DPS tanking may be the best method of doing things, since standard tanking would probably take too long, given that your group is only doing roughly 90% of its overall DPS potential. Swap out that Paladin for a similarly equipped Warrior (or one of the others, and keep the Pally so you can do the suicide run thing), and give that a shot. If your group is in such high-quality gear, you shouldn't have many problems if you play it aggressively enough.

Remember, these quests are designed for people who have never been to MC/AQ20/ZG/etc; or, that's what Blizzard would like for us to think

Some pinchpoints:

Goblin rocket fuel is made from Volatile Rum, Firebloom, and a leaded Vial. Spangles ran out of fuel because all the ecto locations were so heavily camped.

She went to Taneris, spent a few hours beating up pirates and dockworkers (how do you get out of the hold in the drydocked ship?) and accumulated 30 rums. Her engineer alt Owewa made the fuel, and the extras have been handed from guildie to guildie ever since.

Owewa also makes delicate arcanite converters for the guild. The problem is Ironweb Silk, of which there was none at the AH at one point. Spangles farmed the pesky Lava Crawlers between Thorium Point and BRM for an hour, accumulating 6 silk (the drop rate is 6% - 8%).

She then found copious numbers of Ironweb Silk posted at AH for 3g-8g each, much to her surprise. It turns out that the Felcloth Bag (24 slot enchanting bag) requires 4 Ironweb silk. Spangles plans to camp the lava spiders for several more hours.

Stonescale Oil has spiked at 10g each, up from 1g prepatch. This is silly. A good fisherman can catch oodles of eels.

Spangles has tried B45 several times, has never made it to the Aboms. The key is to run with the same group, so that experience accumulates. Hard parts: not blundering into the mobs that you don't have time to pull, and killing Eyes in a timely fashion.

This quest is the most difficult, and the most fun, of any quest Spangles has ever done. It is changing the way our guild runs the Strat instances. 65 minute Scarlet?

QFT!

Our successful route:



Someone else's route:

https://host99n.ipowerweb.com/~bodyacom/wow/gauntletMap.jpg

Some guesses at our timing:

Entrance to Baroness (9): 13 mins, there are quite a few patrols through here and she takes a while to kill, especially when she keeps MCing our tank, he takes too long to whittle down.
Baroness (9) to Nerub (11): 5 mins, Hug right and pull around corner and back through the path cleared, a quick kill.
Nerub (11) to Maleki (10): 12 mins, watch adds because this is an unconventional route
Maleki (10) to Abomination Gates: 5 mins

That puts the Abominations at 35 mins and the Baron at about 43.

Group was Warrior, Mage, Rogue, 2 priests. Earlier attempts with a druid instead of a second priest. 2 Healers minimizes downtime and allows for chain pulling or a margin of error through accidental adds (which we had plenty of).

Put Loot on FFA and get over leaving sparklies behind. (except the mini-bosses and stitchings).

Mage and priest clear ziggs while rest of the party starts next pulls.

Our group is overgeared, with a nice selection of MC gear. However, I believe it is entirely doable without MC gear, it simply leaves less margin for error and will proably require more learning runs.

I needed 10 ectoplasms. I used 3 in Winterspring, doing 4 ghosts with one charge. Solo.

I used 5 in Silithus. First helping a gnome warrior who was on the quest, and then a dwarf priest. The priest and I teamed up. He also used up some of his fuel.

We then proceeded to the Eastern Plaguelands and at first tried the place north of the chapel. With very little success. After that we went to Corin's Crossing. But there were no banshees. I proposed Northdale. Northdale is a bit dangerous because of the eyeless watchers. But it worked out for us.

If you kill anything else at Corin's Crossing, it might come back as a Banshee. I was doing mine late at night and saw only a few people there at the Crossing.

I'd kill skeletons and aboms etc.... until I got a string of banshees. The respawn rate there is pretty high.

Managed to finish the ectoplasm part of the quest using 8 rocket fuels. It would have been 7 except I forgot you had to stay within range of the gizmo. The Sithilus ones are definately the trickiest because of the damn bugs spawns. IMHO unless you have some heals, this part will chew through your rocket fuel really quickly since you'll have a bit of downtime every one to two pulls.

I found the ones in winterspring really easy and was able to get 9 ectoplasms with one rocket fuel. For the ones in Eastern Plaguelands, if you head to Northdale you can gather them pretty quickly, since all the undead there drop the stuff. A tremor totem or fear ward would have been really nice here as I lost quite a bit of time due to the constant fears.

Like I said before, if you're going to do any of this solo and don't have heals, I'd strongly recommend stocking up on bandages before you go to minimize downtime in between pulls.

PS. If you're after ironweb spider silk for the converter, I've found the plague lurkers in WPL have a pretty good drop rate.

edit. Forgot to add: the wiki guide recommends you grab the Fel Elemental Rod while you're collecting ectoplasm in Winterspring. I strongly agree. There's an insane amount of flying around involved in this quest, and anything that cuts some of that down is greatly appreciated. Thank god for my ultrasafe transporter.

Best 45 Min Baron Map Yet!

Puts my MSPaint creation to shame and even optimizes a bit of our route.

When you get to the Dire Maul collection portion you'll find that the Ogre Warbeads are not distributed by Group Loot but can be picked up by anyone who has the quest. So if you're a stand in the back ranged damage / healer kind of toon and one of the melee types has the quest, you'll get them ninja'd out from underneath you unless you get a little more agressive about snagging them. Hopefully you'll have kind guildmates who will share or give you the entire run's worth but if you end up having to PuG these runs don't let yourself get screwed out of the warbeads.

On to BRD and hopefully the next set of upgrades

I was in a successful 45 minute Baron run yesterday. (I just went along to help.) My warlock was clad in basic blues except for level 32 "of the eagle" green gloves, and Orchid Amice, green Shoulders, 54 Armor
+4 Strength
+4 Stamina
+15 Intellect
+3 Spirit.
The hunter in the party had never been there before. The rest of the party was well equipped, but it proves that at least 1 party member can be undergeared. And btw, we all died at one point to adds, and used the SS to reincarnate, but even with the deaths we were still successful.

Good job Alram (even if you are a traitor to the Horde)!

It can be done with everyone in blues, you just have less margin for error. Our last try we missed by about 3 minutes with 3 deaths and another bad mistake. If we did that mistake-free we would have been successful. Haven't tried it since but should again soon.

Unfortunately (other than not screwing up), DPS is the real factor it seems, which is why it seems it'd be so much easier with epic clad people. We did much better when I went full DPS along with everyone else.

Yeah, stick an epic warrior in to soak up the damage AND do a lot of it, and an epic priest to heal anything that needs it, and you can get away with murder in there.

Yup, epic wearing warrior familiar with the instance makes for smooth sailing. Took a group with everyone else in mostly blues (and at least one who didn't know how the baroness encounter worked) through it and engaged the Baron with ~8 minutes to spare.

It took one abort at baroness (my warrior got MC'd and it took them way too long to wear my warrior down) and one training run (about 4-5 unecessary adds from bad positioning early while clearing the crystals and an agressive warlock minion pulling 8 abominations at once wiping the group to put the nail in the coffin - esp. when the priest didn't wait for the wipe to take a combat res/SS) to get to that point. The follow up was nice because I didn't have to waste nearly as much time explaining what we were doing in TS and people didn't repeat the same mistakes.

Definitely seems reasonable for an all-blues group who gets some practice and gets the execution down.

I'd say the Baroness is the #1 roadblock. Who she possesses makes all the difference in the world. If she grabs the warrior, it can take long enough to bring him down that she's ready for another possession almost immediately upon his release.

I like to do the spider first, then the Baroness. I'll burn the 30-min cooldown on my warrior at that first boss so it's not at the Baroness' disposal when we fight her. Warrior MC + Shield Wall meant almost two minutes to burn down that walking hulk of metal. No thanks.

In the last runs I was on (before I went on vacation), I had adopted a special gearset just for the baroness, specifically targeting low HP (for making me easier to turn back) and high damage (for trying to take her down in 2 MCs)

I blow my 30 minute cooldown ON the baroness by starting with bloodrage + intercept + recklessness. This not only keeps her from using it, it gets a good bit of damage on her too. I'm always sure to have potion, tuber and AB trinket shield cooled down and ready if necessary since berserker + recklessness can surprise the healer sometimes.

Frost nova is the key to a successful warrior mind control on the baroness. Warrior is helpless when frost nova'd and low HP allows the party to turn me back easier.

Last night we killed the baroness with Mogo, Marn, Keshoga, Doomstar and Xarhud. We burned her hard on the original pull, and when she MC'd, she grabbed Keshoga. We burned him down quick and finished her off when she came back - no 2nd MC. I'm not sure what it was about this group or what we did that got her down so fast.

Oh, and Keshoga hurts when under enemy control - about 1k damage to Mogo and myself before I could even see the red name bar.

Had you cleared the area around her? In the 45 minute runs we pull her away, which doesn't allow for as much time for damage before the 1st MC. If you have time to clear the mobs away and fight her at the zigg, you can get significantly more damage on her before the 1st MC.

I do know that if I do the baroness with Keshi anymore, I make sure I'm dual-wield in DPS gear, not all turtled up. At least I can take some melee damage that way.

And, she's a pure-DPS fight. No amount of tanking will help on her. The faster you burn her down, the less trouble she causes.

A note about Keshoga and damage:

1) she's got the extra-crit and extra-damage-crit shock and lightning talents. If she crits on a shock, that's 1000-1200. Normal shocks/lightning are about 5-600. Debuff when possessed increases damage.

2) with the randomness of WF, that big, slow, 3.6 sec 2h *really* hurts when it procs.

We didn't fight her at the zig, but we didn't pull her back as far as the 45 minute runs do. However, that little combo of ours can really dish out damage since Xarhud was in shadowform, Keshoga was using his mana for damage (mostly), Mogo was healing while beating the hell out of things with her two-hander and we had a pissed off wolf and Marn. I don't remember how much damage Doomstar does either.

Yeah Marn can crit aimed shots for 2400 on a fully sundered mobs if I have Mark of the Wild on me. I crit an aimed shot on Keshoga for 1800 when he was possed.

I'm not sure if we fought her all the way back or not. I'm not sure how far back you guys pull her, but I was standing behind the gate when we were fighting her, so we puller her a ways, she was behind the 3 ghoul pack that we left on the right hand side. I puller her with my DoT and cheetah'd back to the group. I thought about pulling her with aimed, then DoT'ing her on the run and using FD to make sure aggro transfered to the warrior but didn't.

I do believe that our lowest DPS was Qantaqa who was pushing around 90 DPS. But Mogo has the big old hammer and Keshoga has a big hammer now too, so really it probably has to do more with gear. Marn is using the Perfect Poison Quest reward X-Bow which turns out to be a little bit better DPS (and the +hit helps that too) than his old Ancient Bone Bow, I've gotten that axe of mine the +25 agi enchant since last time in there for more AP and crit chance. We just have some better gear from doing the ZG and AQ 20 runs. Heck I was looking and really the rest of the T0.5 upgrades are likely not worth it for me now anymore. Only the pants and chest are a clear upgrade over what I'm wearing now.


Oh and the boots still didn't drop. I'm like 0-20 now on seeing them drop.

We pull her about to the cart, sounds like you pulled her further. Must have been the Hunter DPS

T0.5 are not extraordinary until considering the 6/8 set bonus. Most sets have a pretty significant DPS booster on the 6/8 bonus that makes it worthwhile to use 6/8 T0.5 and 2/8 random other pieces. For the sets I've looked at extensively (warrior DPS set and warlock) there are no better blues for the optimum 6/8 config and it takes multiple pieces of (attainable) purple gear replacing T0.5 stuff before you get overall improvement. But, of course, it takes the whole 8 pieces before you can get the optimum 6/8.

Right I think (I have not looked really closely) if I could use the gloves, chest, legs, bracers, hat, and belt with the gear I have now it would be better, but that would require the entire upgrade chain and 4 of the pieces woud then be purples. The bracers compared to my curent gear and the boots would individual piece downgrades, only better because of the set bonus. I'm currently using the gloves, bracers and belt. Bracers only because they have an enchant and the others I got don't and I don't have any GEE's sitting around to get it enchanted.

Heck I acutally took off two pieces of beastmaster today after getting the new boots I had enchanted. That lost me the 4 piece bonuse (which is the 6 piece bonus for the upgrade) of 40 AP. But the net result was only -22 AP, -157 HP, +1.17% crit and +15 mana. Since I had upgraded my boots and right now I'm using 1050 RAP with Aspect of the Hawk up as my baseline to work my health and mana around when looking at balancing the gear and my health was still over 3400 unbuffed I think I've upped my damage. That was what really got me thinking that the other upgrades might not be worth the time. When a couple of the pieces are stat downgrades over what I have (bracers and boots for example) the initial thought was that the gold outlay for some of the stuff I might have to purchase start to make me wonder.

I admit as a hunter it's hard to judge the value of the 2% crit on the pet, 3% more damage for the pet, 10% armor for the pet and 3% more damage for the pet that I would get. These stats in some fights are completely wasted though as the pet just won't be able to even add a little damage. I know all of those would help me solo grind the elite dragons better and the times when I have to use my pet to MT an instance (much rarer these days) it will help too. And while I can control my pet well enough to make it actually be helpful in the ZG and AQ raids without taking mana from the healers, which can be witnessed by me+pet leading the last 3 Keepers raids in total damage done over AoE mages, and the marks hunters + pet who have better gear than I do as well. Pet damage is a fixed quantity since with the expection of those 4 beast master pieces it doesn't scale with gear. The hunters damage does scale with gear more and since my damage is greater than the pets right now it helps more to up my damage even more, in most case. This is why you see very very few beastmaster raid hunters. Last ZG run me+pet was 210 DPS. I was 145 of that, pet was 65. I've already got the gloves that give the 2% more crit, so I can get it 3% more damage so I could kick the pet up to 67 DPS or so with that. I guess the 10% more armor (500-700 more raid buffed) amd the 3% life (100-150) might allow me to keep the pet in combat a few seconds longer so that the damage would go up a little bit more. But really my pet is less and less useful the bigger the instance gets. In ZG I tank the spider spawns on Mar'li. I cna keep a raptor or bat from damaging an AoE mage, I can keep a zerker from moving around after the knockback (since the wrathed pet won't move and if I leave growl on will usually be 2nd or 3rd on the aggro list) and I can add a little bit of DPS on the focus fire targets and on some of the bosses (including Mandokir even with his whirlwinds). I know in MC the pets will be even less useful for even damage additions. So the stats on the beastmaster set that buff the pet become wasted stats in the later stages of the game even for a hunter who uses his pet a lot.

I still have 22 2/3 GEEs after 2 characters through the beginning upgrade quests + I have the enchanted leather (6 2/3 GEEs worth of LEEs) for 1 character ready for the next part after the 45 minute baron. Plus I gave some GEEs out to others doing the upgrade quests.

Let me know how many you need =)

Conc -- Tank / Bank

You cannot pull the Baroness too far. We once pulled her almost to the grate and she resetted and returned to the ziggurat.

This guide is very nice and detailed. However, I believe that the drop rates for the Ogre Warbeads are much better than listed there.

Last night it took about 2 1/2 tribute runs for both Conc and I to get all of our warbeads. I'd estiimate the drop rate for warbeads on ogres in DM North to be closer to 1:4 than 1:10.

Make it a point to kill every ogre in Dire Maul North and you'll get all your beads in one run. At least it did for me.

(Ogre bosses don't drop beads.)