With the Wrath of the Lich King nearing the end of its life cycle I'm finding myself increasingly bored with running the same heroic dungeons for emblems on my main and alts. I've reached the point where my main just doesn't 'need' the frost emblems to the extent he did four or five months ago, so I've stopped running the random daily. So, when I'm not taking my main into Icecrown Citadel how do I pass the time? Gathering achievements and trying to solo Burning Crusade heroic dungeons.

As a hunter, with relatively decent PvE and PvP gear, soloing old instances is not all that difficult. I'm sure there are many different ways to go about it, but I thought I'd share how what I do. I usually stick to the Burning Crusade instances as they make a nice change from the Northrend Dungeons that I've grown sick - thanks to the emblem grind - and they can be a good source of gold and materials for various professions. I'm also grinding reputation with a few of the Burning Crusade factions so it helps with that as well.

For soloing regular Burning Crusade instances I usually just stay in my regular raiding Marksmanship build and PvE gear, break out my turtle, and just burn down mobs as fast as possible. More often than not, the mobs are dead before they do too much damage to Terry (the turtle) or they start whacking me in the face.

The 'burn' method isn't quite as effective in heroic instances, particularly when there are packs of three or more. One thing you'll learn quickly is that even level 70 heroic mobs can hit quite hard. This is why I often switch to my 'soloing' spec for the heroic Burning Crusade instances.

My soloing spec

My soloing spec is basically just a Beast Mastery build that also goes into the Survival tree to pick up the 10% stamina talent, Suvivalist. When you are soloing the more difficult content, your number one priority becomes keeping your pet alive, which is why I go for Beast Mastery. It has quite a few talents that can help heal your pet and to help your pet avoid damage.

A screenshot of the build I use is below.

As you can probably tell, I've sacrificed a lot of the DPS talents in this build in favour of talents that give myself and Terry as much stamina as possible, make Terry easier to heal, and help Terry avoid as much damage as possible.

My soloing pet

I chose Terry the Turtle as my soloing pet because of his Shell Shield ability. Shell Shield allows the "turtle partially withdraws into its shell, reducing damage taken by 50% for 12 sec". Very handy for tougher boss fights or for when the turtles health gets low. Activate shell shield, then mend pet and your turtle should be back to full health. Turtles can also deal out a degree of AoE threat using the thunderstomp ability. A crocolisk or bear may edge out the turtle in terms of threat, but when it comes to durability, the turtle is the way to go. With Beast Mastery talents threat becomes less of an issue as well.

My gear

As opposed to DPS, one of the key statistics to stack when you're trying to solo stuff is stamina. The more stamina you have, the more health your pet has. The more health your pet has, the more your healing abilities, such as mend pet, will heal your pet for.
So when it comes to gear you want two things. You want to make sure that you have at least 132 resilience. When you combine 132 resilience with pet talents, this is the point that you pet will become immune to critical hits from bosses. You'll find resilience on PvP gear. As a general rule, PvP gear also has a higher portion of stamina than PvE gear, so PvP gear naturally makes a good choice for soloing.

A lot of soloing guides recommend picking up two pieces of Tier 5 hunter gear - from the Burning Crusade raids Tempest Keep and Serpentshrine Caverns - as the two piece set bonus from the Tier 5 Riftstalker set causes you to heal your pet for 15% of the damage that you do. Obviously this would make keeping your pet alive a lot easier, but for some people finding a group for these old school raids will be difficult. Currently I only have one piece of T5 gear, and without it I'm able to solo Heroic Magisters Terrace, which I consider one of the hardest of the Burning Crusade heroics. So, T5 isn't absolutely necessary if all you want to do is solo Burning Crusade heroics, however I'm sure it'd make it a lot easier.

I have a few pieces of gear that I break out just for soloing. The first is the Bubbling Brightbrew Charm I picked up from one of my many runs during Brewfest last year. I have the chest piece Hauberk of a Thousand Cuts that I picked up in ICC10 after no one else wanted it (and there were no enchanters in the group). In the three gems slots I stack three Solid Majestic Zircon's and I enchant it with +10 to all stats. That gives me over 210 stamina from one piece of gear alone. Although the Hauberk is itemised more toward an enhancement shaman, it works out ok for soloing purposes as, coupled with the stamina, it also carries a relatively high amount of attack power. Our pets attack power scales with our attack power. More attack power, more threat. The rest of my gear is primarily PvP gear, with the exception of my weapons.

The pull

For the average trash pull I usually send Terry in to see what he can stir up. I'll engage Bestial Wrath and Intimidation, then misdirect to Terry and Volley away. I'll throw Terry a heal if he needs it and switch to Aspect of the Viper if my mana is starting to look low. The key to soloing is keeping your pet alive. If you're pet is alive, the mobs will generally be hitting him/her and not you. Soloing is good practice for monitoring your threat. Install an addon like Omen and you'll be able to see where you're threat sits in relation to your pets. You want to make sure you're pet is higher on the aggro table than you at all times. Some of the level 70 heroic mobs hit very hard and if one or two start pounding on you, your life expectancy will be low. If you see your threat climbing you have a few options to drop threat. You can misdirect again, switch to Aspect of the Viper and just autoshot for a while, stop firing altogether, and if none of that works, resort to Feign Death.

Most boss fights I'll stay in Beast Mastery and concentrate on keeping Terry healed while autoshotting and throwing in some serpent stings and steady shots. Occasionally I'll need to switch to Marksmanship to burn the boss down before something happens. These fights are usually the ones where I have trouble keeping Terry up, so the strategy becomes 'kill the boss before it kills me'.

The loot

Some of the old Burning Crusade instances drop some fairly decent loot. Personally Heroic Magisters Terrace is the one I frequent the most, largely in the hope that Kael'thas Sunstrider will drop his damn Swift White Hawkstrider. He also drops the Phoenix Hatching and for enchanters, the still sought after, Formula: Enchant Boots - Cat's Swiftness. All bosses in Magisters Terrace have the chance to drop Orb of the Sin'dorei, which can transform you into a blood elf for 5mins.

In summary

Once you get the hang of it, and used to changing your priority from DPS to pet care, then soloing older heroic instances isn't that hard. The other night for example, I found myself in Heroic Steam Vault with a shortage of arrows. Unable to use my bow, I completed the instance dishing out some hunter melee pain and dropping traps while Terry took care of his business. Soloing old stuff can be a lot of fun, occasionally a challenge, great for grinding old school reputation and even somewhat profitable.

Well this post turned out to be a lot longer than I anticipated. Kudos if you read it all. I got a lot of inspiration for my soloing from the Warcraft Hunters Union. There's a lot of good examples of what you can solo, including videos of Frostheim soloing some old raid bosses.