Completing the 45-min Baron Run

With the lack of any more 40 man raids in my future I've been having fun going back to the single group dungeons in World of Warcraft. While they have little gear that’s an upgrade for me I like helping friends complete their tier 0 armor set and trying to get the rare epic drops off bosses. It was in the middle of one of these runs that I realized I hadn't finished the tier 0.5 quest set yet. I looked up the quest rewards on thotbot and realized the shoulders and boots where both upgrades for me. Thus I set out to complete the step of the quest which I had been stuck on for several months, the dreaded 45 min baron run.

It had been a while since the last time me and my friends had attempted the timed Baron run. We had just started doing ZulGurub successfully and we each had about three epic items. None of this helped us much since it seemed everything went wrong. The bats kept adding at inopportune times, we kept getting feared into enemies, and we spent a lot of time guessing what mobs we had to pull to make it to our goal. Now with the much better gear from the Molten Core we were finally able to get to the Baron with a minute to spare.

I wanted to give a brief description of our group makeup and what rules we followed in getting to the baron in time. Unfortunately like idiots the first we did the run we forgot about having some AOE to take out his skeletons which heal him. We ended up wiping though we did get him to 5% like three times that fight. Talking about it we realized we could do round robin on holy water and the paladin's holy wraith to take him out. So we used my treasure sniffing to get a nice stockpile of holy water then reset the instance.

Group Composition:
Paladin - 7 tier-1 epics
Druid - 7 tier-1 epics 1 tier-2 helm
Warrior - 5 tier-1 epics 1 tier-2helm
Rogue - 5 tier-1 epics
Hunter - all blues and greens

Pre-Run Strategy:
1) Set-up a small ventrilo server which is actually free on the ventrilo website

2) Found a map called the gauntlet.jpg which gave a good idea of what mobs to pull during the run.

3) Bought Blessed Sunfruit for the casters to quickly regain mana

4) Combined all the Greater Mana Potions from Stratholm Supply Crates and gave them to the druid. He popped them like pez candy during the run and almost never had to sit to drink.

Run Strategy

1) Pulled the Banshee Baroness all the way back to the gate for easier handling

2) Fought the Spider Boss in the corner next to his Ziggurat to avoid him moving around

3) Rogue and the Paladin coordinated stuns to keep necromancers from life/mana draining

4) Hunter always had a spare mob in his improved ice trap so we could always be fighting.

5) Skipped the Magistrate until after the baron was defeated

6) For the Abomination fights pulled 4 mobs on the right side of the gate then moved into the slaughterhouse area. If you don't the abominations will start coming quicker then you can kill them.

7) Used a paladin shield on the druid so he could hurricane the non-elites that spawn after Ramstein (no relation)

I know a lot of people say this run could be done with blue gear and much worse class mix then we had. However, the amount of practice and luck that would go into that would probably be equal to about 30 runs of undead Stratholm. I don't think that many repetitive runs would be very fun. So I recommend either having three people in full sets of tier-1 armor or two people in tier-2 armor. We had tried months earlier with a tier2 mage and priest helping us complete the run but you really need your tanking class to be well geared. I haven't tried it out but I think a tier 2 warrior and everyone else wearing blue items could probably also complete the run with a minimum of practice.