The Vortex Pinnacle: Get Rich and Fly in Style

[PsiVen]

Okay, maybe not crazy rich. But you will definitely make money, and you can also have a chance at a [Reins of the Drake of the North Wind]. Here's the deal, and your options:

1. Farm Volatile Air

Clear up to the first boss, then reset the instance and clear again. This will maximize the amount of Air you get as you won't have to waste time killing bosses and the double Cloud Prince pull. Take a running jump off any edge and if you get far enough it'll port you to the entrance for a quick zone-out.


2. Farm Volatile Air and a Drake

Clear through to the 2nd boss and kill him for a chance at your drake. This full run takes about an hour. You don't have a realistic chance of continuing beyond that as the trash leading up to the final boss is full of healers that can't be easily interrupted and aren't Elementals, which is important as I'll explain shortly.


What You'll Get

The drops are quite random, but you can expect about 20 Air and 3 greens per run. Sometimes you'll get less, sometimes more.


Okay, what's the catch?

Well, it's not so easy to solo large packs of casters that deal nature damage, even on non-heroic mode. There are some important things that you will need.

Elemental Slayer: This enchant will chain silence your primary target and prevent them from casting painful lightning spells at you.
Reckoning: This talent will proc quite a lot with the number of mobs hitting you, which significantly increases SoI healing and silence procs.
Glyph of Holy Wrath: This glyph provides you with an AoE stun on a 15-second cooldown. You'll need it.
Gear: Even with all this help, it's not easy to survive the onslaught of nature damage. You will need full heroic gear to be comfortable here.

So, throw on Blessing of Kings (nature resist!) and Seal of Insight and let's started.


The Mobs

Armored Mistral
These mobs gain a stacking buff as long as they are in combat, increasing their damage continuously until their Nature strike does 40k+. When stacks start getting high, you definitely want to interrupt it as often as possible. They also melee decently hard.

Gust Soldier
These mobs deal medium damage and I believe proc some nature damage on attacks. They EXPLODE when killed, sending you flying backwards and dealing damage.

Wild Vortex
These mobs chain-cast lightning bolts and will not move unless silenced. Generally the easiest to lock down with Elemental Slayer procs.

Turbulent Squall
These mobs do nothing threatening other than summoning hurricanes which you must continually move out of. Look for the dark circles on the ground.

Empyrean Assassin
These mobs stack a slow debuff on you, which caps out at 20. They deal insignificant damage, and the debuff can be cleared entirely with Freedom.

Young Storm Dragon
These mobs summon one static healing well when aggroed, and deal pure physical damage with a cold breath once in a while. High health.

Cloud Prince
These mobs summon a wave of caster adds when aggroed, deal fair damage on their own, and summon a Starfall "zone" which is a blizzard-type effect which can be moved out of.

Lurking Tempest
These mobs are usually ignored in 5-mans, because odds are someone happens to be looking in their direction. You cannot ignore them! Immediately after you stop facing them, they will start shooting you with lightning bolts. Any pulls done in range of a Lurking Tempest should be executed strafing around the Tempest, facing it at all times.


The Pulls

Armored Mistral + 2 Gust Soldier + 2 Wild Vortex

Hardest pull in the instance, and it's right up front. The good news is that you'll get good at soloing these packs by the time you see the second one, and even if you die here, whatever you killed won't respawn and it's much easier as a 4-pull. I recommend killing the Mistral first, as killing anything else will allow his buff to stack quite high. As with most pulls, you will need to make use of your cooldowns and this is probably where you will bust Lay on Hands.

2 Armored Mistral

Kill one then the other. This one is pretty straightforward, just pay attention and don't let yourself get clobbered by 50k nature strikes when the 2nd one is dying.

Wild Vortex + 3 Gust Soldier

These packs are random, so I will cover each combination. This is probably the most threatening combination, as the soldiers hurt more than Wild Vortex do. Fortunately it's easy to pull, just run up to the Vortex and beat it down first with silence lockdown. Then focus down soldiers one at a time, kiting away before they explode.

2 Wild Vortex + 2 Gust Soldier

You'll need to LoS these guys to get them piled up, just hug the cylindrical face and go around until the casters run all the way up to you. This one is easier than the 1+3 combo as you can kill both Vortexes while keeping them silenced most of the time.

3 Wild Vortex + Gust Soldier

Pretty much the same as the 2+2 combo, possibly a little trickier to round them up.

Cloud Prince + 2 Wild Vortex

LoS them around the corner to round up the casters, and quickly AoE down the whipping winds. Kill the casters while moving out of Starfall before you get to the Prince as he has higher HP.

Cloud Prince + 2 Gust Soldier

LoS around the corner and treat like the other pull. This one is a little tougher as you need to explode the soldiers safely and you will take more physical damage.

4 Turbulent Squall

AoE them all down at once while strafing out of hurricanes. Kill both packs, these guys are easy.

2 Empyrean Assassin

These pulls are not a threat at all. Freedom yourself at 20 stacks to kill them faster, if you see the debuff fall to 4s duration Holy Wrath and kite until it falls off.

Young Storm Dragon

Aggro at range and let him come to you. He does a fair amount of damage but nothing you can't heal through.

2 Cloud Prince + Lurking Tempest

This pull is particularly tough because you must AoE down a large number of whipping winds with no place to easily round them up with LoS, and you must face the Lurking Tempest for the entire time. Focus on surviving long enough to kill all the adds, and then you can slowly work the first Prince while avoiding Starfall spam. You will be constantly dazed by Typhoon, so you need to continuously strafe to avoid Starfall.

4 Turbulent Squall + 2 Empyrean Assassin

This one gets interesting, as you will be snared so much at 20 stacks that strafing out of the hurricanes immediately is not possible. However, if you keep moving rapidly and target down the Assassins first, you should be able to Freedom out of the snare often enough to avoid most of the damage.

Grand Vizier Ertan

Stand as close to the center of his hitbox as you can, and get to work. If you fall behind on WoG+SoI healing alone, don't be afraid to Divine Light yourself. He's just casting lightning bolts at you, repeatedly. Every 30 seconds he will gather the cyclones which will do additional lightning damage, rotate your cooldowns here. This fight takes 7-10 minutes to burn down his 2 million health.

Altairus

This boss is more tolerable than Ertan as he provides you with 100% haste, but you do have to reposition when the wind changes. He doesn't do much damage, so you can get away with either SoV+WoG or SoI+ShoR with an occasional WoG. I think SoI+WoG turned out to be the higher DPS option. After 5-6 minutes he should be dead. Like Ertan, you can get away with Divine Lights here thanks to the haste buff.

[pyrile]

That first pull is very annoying, I did find that if you walk around the outer ring and then start the pull from behind/off to the side and then pop around a pillar it will cause a LOS and they will come to you, however it is important that once you have them grouped together that you place your self back in the middle of the room or you take a chance at getting nocked back off the platform and will be whirlwinded back up.

[inthedrops]

I've been using this technique PsiVen to make some extra gold.

Good tip above. Also, use AS to silence the ones at range to bring them to you. Sometimes LoS is a pain still.

[pyrile]

I have notied that some mobs for some reason completly disregard the LOS mechanic

[KysenMurrin]

Armored Mistral: 100% kiteable. They spend to much time casting and move very slowly. Only really useful on the double Mistral pull on the first bridge, though.

Edit: Wow, that double Cloud Prince pull before the first boss is brutal. Think I might leave this alone until I get better gear.

[Skye1013]

Hm... do you think this would be doable with a Blood DK? Or is WoG spec highly OP for it?

[PsiVen]

Give it a shot. I'm not sure Blood is well suited to it since Death Strike healing tends to shine when damage intake is higher than you can handle on your own, but I'd be interested to see the results. My suspicion is that the litany of stuns and silences we have makes us uniquely suitable to this sort of farming, moreso than WoG's raw healing output.

[Sleetza]

Might actually do this when i get bored I was wondering if somebody already soloed Altairus on heroic mode? After so many %s I've gotten off with just me standing or just me and a mage standing and me putting out like 3,5k hps it really convinced me this boss should be soloable by a geared tankadin. Just takes a week to kill him

[Skye1013]

Give it a shot. I'm not sure Blood is well suited to it since Death Strike healing tends to shine when damage intake is higher than you can handle on your own, but I'd be interested to see the results. My suspicion is that the litany of stuns and silences we have makes us uniquely suitable to this sort of farming, moreso than WoG's raw healing output.

Does the overhealing bubble from GbtL work on magic damage, or is it physical only? DKs (from what I've experienced/read) is physical only. Which could also make it more difficult. I'd test it out, but my laptop is currently unuseable (the power cord broke and the battery died. )