Death Knight Soloing Karazhan, Attumen Edition
Author: Roboticus
24,252 health; 60.5% physical mitigation; 16% dodge chance; 13% parry chance. Would this be enough for Karazhan? Freshly equipped with my Master’s Key, I began my journey in earnest to see how far a DK can solo into old-world raids.
For preparation, I specced into a 33/0/38 spec for this attempt. I will not be reading any guides for this solo project, so I may well have made some mistakes in the spec. These attempts come before the expected buff to Improved Death Strike in patch 3.1.2 which will boost its healing by 50%, and so I’ve created a hybrid build that combines many of the self healing abilities of Blood with the 3rd disease of Unholy, which will also boost the healing of Death Strike by 50%.
Attumen Trash
The trash pulls leading to Attumen are well designed, each pull is a step harder than the last, starting with a single Spectral Charger, leading to pull of 2 Spectral Chargers and 3 additional humanoids.
The best way to approach these pulls is to Death Grip one of the humanoids and back-peddle as you Icy Touch and Plague Strike him. This lets you get both up so you can Pestilence before the additional mobs reach you. Don’t be afraid to use Rune Tap to fill the “Death Strike Gap” you create with using your runes to get the diseases up.
Taking Down Attumen
Time to face down my first real boss attempt.
As I quickly learned, the make-or-break point of this fight is Attumen’s curse: Intangible Presence. An additional 50% chance to miss means you might get a string of Death Strike misses that could leave you hurting. Worse yet is when you have a series of Pestilence misses, find your diseases fall off, and then need to waste even more runes (while missing) to get them back up.
My first attempt I wiped terribly, but I figured out what to do. I do not read any information or strategies about a fight, so my attempts require on-the-fly decision making and adaptations. Clearly, I was not quick enough the first time. On my second attempt, I applied the rule of using a cooldown every time I had 3 Death Strike misses in a row, first using Rune Tap, then Icebound Fortitude, then if needed, one of the more potent cooldowns. By timing them in this way, I could reliably counter the strings of misses from each curse.
And so, 700 dps later (curse you, curses), I had downed my first raid boss as a solo DK.
Attumen dropped 35 gold and 2 epics which vendored for an additional 15 gold. This easily repaid my repair bill and hinted at the potential for significant cash-farming from boss drops.
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