soloing tot up to ji-kun: what i know so far.

[SylviaDragon]

Soloing up to ji-kun on my hunter.
PLEASE NOTE! I have only solod this twice now so I am still learning and perfecting everything. I wanted to share what I have learned so far so other petopians can try for their own mounts but keep in mind I’m no expert. Please share your own tricks and advice if you can.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
First off let me say that my hunter was about 677 at the time of her first solo and has the normal brd tier 2 bonus. This is not something a casual player can solo just yet thanks to the nasty damage some of the fights dish out so if you really struggle with the first two bosses you will probably have to get some more gear before you can take down council.

My spec info:
Spec: BM
Pets: spirit beast tank and core hound for hero before the pull.
Talents: posthaste, intimidate (irrelevant), spirit bond, thrill of the hunt, stampede, barrage, adaptation.
Glyphs: misdirection, animal bond, mending. (for special bosses) liberation. The deterrence glyph is also optional.
Macros:
For auto misdirection to your pet or focus target: /cast [@focus, help] [@pet, nodead, exists] Misdirection
For an easy instant cast of spirit mend on yourself without having to click on your portrait: /cast [target=yournamehere] Spirit Mend

Please remember to bring healing tonics, flasks, pots, ect ect with you. You will need all the buffs and healing you can get for the third and fourth boss.


Jin'rokh the Breaker
This guy is a cakewalk. If you need a little extra kick on this fight be sure to pop hero and prepot before the pull. Your pet will be taking a decent amount of damage so make sure you have the mending and animal bond glyph up and running. Don’t forget to use last stand if it looks grim but you really should not need it.
Just stand at max distance from the boss while still being in range to heal your pet. Keep your pet up and tank and spank. You will not get the damage buff from the water since it will not spawn and you will have to constantly side step the balls of lightning but even during the thunder storm the damage taken should not be life threatening.
The biggest danger is getting too close to the boss or letting your pet die. The boss will target someone in melee range to pick up and throw. If he grabs you, you will lose aggro and the boss will despawn.

Trash
In case you were not aware, the floating trolls with the blue field around them (found on and near the bridge between the first and second boss) will punt you off of the bridge and insta kill you if you touch their blue field. So….yeah don’t let them touch you unless your dream is to be a pinball.

Horridon
Another fight that turned out to be pretty easy once you get some gear. The faster you can down him the better so be sure to pop hero and use a pot and prepot if you feel the need. Once again your pet will be taking more damage than you. Pull Horridon over to the gates as they open. The gates are on a timer and will continue to open even if you neglect to close a previous gate.
Use misdirection and barrage to take care of as many adds as you can while still hitting the boss. Switch to adds if their numbers start to become an annoyance. General rule of thumb for the adds is that the bigger ones do the nasty spells. This fight will also go much smoother if you can finish off the boss before too many frost trolls start rolling out since they have a plethora of nasty dots to deal with.
Keep an eye on the timer for the dinomancers and nuke them as soon as they come out so they don’t get a chance to heal the boss. Be sure to pick up the orb asap to close the gates and gain a 50% damage buff against Horridon.
At 30% health war god Jalak will jump down to fight. At this point your pet will start taking extra damage and will need to be watched. You will want to save some cds to blow on Jalak as soon as he drops down and use another agility pot if you have to. (You can try saving stampede for this part if you want to give that a try.) After the war god dies, Horridon will gain a 50% damage and attack speed buff so you will need to finish him off fast.
If you struggle with the dps on this boss, you may want to wait a while before trying to clear up to ji-kun.

Council of Elders
No more games. You are playing with the big boys now.
The Liberation glyph and posthaste talents are 100% mandatory here! your pet will not be taking too much damage and whether you like it or not you are going to be hit by the boss quite a bit and can’t prevent it so if you want to switch out a second glyph for deterrence go ahead and give that a try. You will want to keep the animal bond glyph!
This is where you will want to use all your buff items. Flasks, prepot, hero, food, runes….anything that I’m missing: use it. You will want all the help you can get. ( Also keep in mind that the gates take a long time to close after a boss pull so if you try to escape after a bad pull the bosses will reset. It’s a good way to get some practice in without having to waste buff items.)
Start out on the right side with frost king Malakk. As a dps he is your biggest threat. Blow EVERYTHING on him. You won’t even know if you have a fighting chance until he is dead. He will be the first to get possessed which will cause him to apply a massive dot called frostbite. Even if you dps him down past the limits of his possession he will still cast a lesser dot called Biting Cold. If either of these dots hit you your best chance at survival is to try and run out and reset the fight.
HOW TO AVOID THE DOTS: keep a very close eye on the timer for them. I can’t recall if they both have a cast bar (sorry) so it will take some trial and error on your part. What you will need to do is hit camouflage just before he gets the cast off. Feign death also seemed to work on my last kill but needs more testing. You HAVE to avoid his dot or you will die.
Once the frost king is dead start working on Sul. During this whole thing he will be trapping you in sand. This is why you need posthaste. Try to stay on the move to avoid what you can and when you do get caught, use disengage to escape the trap. It’s really important not to use disengage on anything else while this guy is still up. If you mess up, use Master’s Calls.
Sooner or later possession will pass to Kazra’jin. Now depending on how good your dps is, his energy may be getting close to a 100 while you are working on Sul. If you can’t kill Sul fast enough to leave enough time to dps Kazra down before he hits 100 energy, you will want to start softening him up a little. Either way the third boss will get close to hitting 100 energy so using your next agil pot at this point is a good idea.
Keep in mind that Sul (and the priestess as well) will be spam casting spells at you so the faster Sul dies the less damage you will take. be sure to use your healing tonic about mid fight and spirit mend on cd. After Sul is dead start spamming disengage as soon as it’s up for the extra heals.
Now you just have to dps down the last two bosses, bouncing back and forth between them depending on who is possessed. Try to kill as many loas as you can and avoid bursting Kazra'jin during his overload ability when possessed as it will reflect your damage back to you and force you to use a cd to survive.
This is a very unforgiving fight and will take practice. you may only scrape by with 20-10% health by the time you beat them.

Tortos
This will be another tricky fight for hunters because it can be such a mess. Both you and your pet will be taking damage and there will be lots of adds so you will really have to try and mix and match some of the recommended glyphs to get a flow that works best for you.
Once again buffs and prepots are recommended for this fight. You want to get him down as fast as you can. Pop hero and go nuts. You are the only target for the cave-ins and adds so you will have a lot to deal with and the turtle adds won’t respond to MD.
Watch your feet and be sure to sidestep the stuff falling on top of you. You will get stunned by quake stomp and see a good chunk of health vanish. You will want to use disengage as soon as you regain control because you will have a massive stack of caveins all crashing down on you at once.
Use barrage and MD on the bats and turtles as much as possible but your main priority has to be the boss. Unfortunately between the quake stomp and the punting from the turtle adds you will usually find yourself getting knocked around way too much to interrupt stone breath, which is why this is a dps race. if you pace your heals and use deterrence on the first two stone breaths you should be able to at least eat three breaths before you are out of time. If you are lucky enough to find yourself in a position to kick a turtle into the boss do it for the 50% damage buff.
If you can get one or two of the turtles down it greatly helps keep the room from getting too cluttered but I have found that the best method for me was to just keep kiting them around the room and avoid them as much as possible since their knockback makes it hard to avoid more important attacks. This is another nasty fight but if you got this far then you should be able to solo everything from this boss up to ji-kun.

Megaera

Please note that each time you kill one of her heads, that head’s damage will increase. So far I have only rotated between green and blue, ignoring fire since that’s how groups always do it. I assume rotating between all three is better but this has not been tested yet.
Try and spread your cds out between the heads, using stampede for one of the very last heads since the damage will steadily increase through the fight, increasing your need to kill the heads as fast as possible as the fight continues.
You can pop hero at the start to get rid of the first head and pace yourself from there. Note that you can’t kill a head during rampage so if a head is at low health and rampage is not over, don’t waste BW or any other cds on it, save it for the next head.
There will be some nasty things to avoid if the heads stay alive too long after the end of rampage. There will be beams, bombs and puddles you will need to run out of to avoid damage. There is a sweet spot for killing the heads since bursting them down too fast will waste cds that can be used on the next head but leaving them up too long allows them to stick around and start using special abilities. Rampage is actually the safest part of the fight since the damage can be healed through with spirit bond and an occasional spirit mend.
Also remember to always stay on the opposite side of the head that your pet is on since the breath can really hurt. Aside from that it is mostly just a tank and spank. You will want to save your defensives and longer cds for the end of the fight since things start to ramp up around head number 5.

Ji-Kun

Hay you made it! congrats. Hay did you get the rare toy off of the snail trash? They drop a cool toy if you’re lucky you know. well, anyway, back to chicken. (seriously, Ji-kun totally sounds like chicken…) this is a really easy fight. Switch back to your basic pet tank glyphs, MD and mending. Your pet will be taking the most damage this fight. Pop hero, nuke the boss and…well...that’s pretty much it.
Just stay on the platform, ignore the nests and don’t stand in the vomit. When downdraft is being cast get up close to the boss, turn your back to her and disengage. Posthaste will keep you from being pushed off.
If your pet dies just use deterrence, rez, MD, FD and then it’s back to dpsing. She is a really easy fight guys. Best of luck on your mount hunt. If you made it this far you certainly deserve a lucky drop!

[Nimrod]

Biggest piece of advice I can offer for multi-target fights is: use the Misdirection bug. It'll save you a lot of time and effort since you won't have to worry about threat at all.

[Xota]

I feel like I'm cheating now. My mage was in a ToT group that fell apart before Ji-Kun, and now I just keep extending and sharing the raidlock with my hunter and druid (and other characters for 2-manning). I suspect the group fell apart because the other people were planning on doing this themselves.

If your not using an alt's extended raid lock, and you want to farm for the snail toy, then after you kill all 5 snails, set raid mode to heroic. It will ask if you want to leave, say yes and you're sent out of the instance. Set back to normal and re-enter.

[SylviaDragon]

cool. thanks for the advice. I'm not actually subbed right now but i did wonder how people farmed the toy. now i will know if i ever come back.