Solo Warbringers for mounts and profit

I got into Zandalari Warbringer farming a few months ago when I was just looking for something else to do. I came for the mounts, and I stayed for the gold. Back in 5.2 when they were added to the game, they were camped 24/7 so I didn’t bother with them. Nowadays, I find them alive with regularity. I’ve made as much as 20,000 gold in a single day just from the stuff that these guys drop.

Hunters can solo them easily with a few simple tips. What prompted me to write this was seeing so many hunters fail at this. The Warbringers have hard-hitting abilities which can kill your pet very quickly, but if you know what abilities to watch out for, it’s a complete cakewalk.

The Drops

In total, the value of a Warbringer’s drops can vary from 100g – 1000g per kill.

• Each Warbringer has a 5% chance to drop their mount (they will drop the one they’re riding, one of 3 different colors). This may seem like a low drop chance, but I have vendored at least 10 of these things. They aren’t as rare as you think.
  • Slate Primordial Direhorn
  • Jade Primordial Direhorn
  • Amber Primordial Direhorn
• They always drop a Small Bag of Zandalari Supplies which contains gold (around 25g usually) along with ore, herbs, or leather. Motes of Harmony are found is abundance as well.
• They have a 30% chance to drop a Big Bag of Zandalari Supplies in addition to the small bag. These bags are the money. For example, the herbalism bag contains about 9 stacks of herbs including as much as 20 Golden Lotus. A leather bag may have 3 or 4 stacks of Exotic Leather along with some Magnificent Hides.
• They always drop 3-4 Stolen Insignias. These items grant 1000 rep for the various Pandaria factions and are BoA. The best part? If you don’t need rep on any of your alts, they vendor for 17g50s each.
• They have a small chance to drop a Brawler’s Guild invitation.

Hunting for Warbringers

The map above shows their fixed spawn locations. You can easily spot them because they’re always accompanied by a large, flying Pterrorwing. They respawn approximately once per hour, with a little bit of variation. They key to chain farming them is picking the best routes and also having means to get around the continent as quickly as possible.

The Wormhole Generator: Pandaria for engineers sends you to a random spot in Pandaria. I’d say about half the time it will send you somewhere useful, but sometimes it’ll send you to the arse end of nowhere or right beside where you used the darn thing.. It only has a 15 minute cooldown so it’s worth using whenever you don’t have anything to kill nearby.

If you’ve completed the Gold challenge modes, the teleport spells granted to you are also helpful. I get the most use out of Path of the Black Ox and Path of the jade Serpent because they put me right at the start of my two main farming paths.

Path 1: Quickly fly back and forth between the Jade Forest and Kun Lai spawns.

Path 2: Start at Townlong Steppes or Krasarang and fly between the 3 spawns on that side of the continent.

It takes a long time to fly between these two paths, which is where the teleport spells mentioned earlier come in handy. You can also hearth back to the shrine to be put in the middle.

After you kill them, you should start revisiting them in the same order approximately 45 minutes later. If you’re lucky, they will be popping just as you arrive, which means less chance of someone else grabbing the kill.

Hunter Tips

The abilities each Warbringer cast vary somewhat. The two main ones you want to watch out for are Vengeful Spirit and Meteor Shower.

Vengeful Spirit summons a ghost that slowly moves towards whoever is highest on its threat table. It hits like a truck and can kill your pet very quickly. When one of these is summoned, pull your pet away from the Warbringer and kite it away 20 yards or so. Just far enough that your Mend Pet will get aggro on  the spirit so it’ll come for you instead. If it keeps moving towards your pet, just keep pulling the pet back when it gets close.

Meteor Shower hits pretty hard as well, but Mend Pet can almost always heal through it. If you aren’t very geared, you may want to use something like a turtle so you can use its Shell Shield during this. If you keep your distance the meteors are easy to avoid.

I like to delay Bestial Wrath if the Warbringer has Horrific Visage so the pet spends less time feared.

You should run with the following 3 major glyphs and talent to most effectively solo the Warbringers:

• Spirit Bond (talent) for the extra healing
• Glyph of Mending — your pet will usually die without this
• Glyph of Misdirection — Taunts do not work on Warbringers so you will need to spam MD on your pet frequently
• Glyph of Animal Bond — Extra heals

Keep Mend Pet on your pet for the full duration of the fight. If your pet dies, it’s as simple as resurrecting it and feigning death. If you use these glyphs and pay attention to the Vengeful Spirits, it really shouldn’t happen too often.

I usually do this with a spirit beast for the mastery buff and extra emergency heal (just leaving it on autocast is fine). Is tenacity spec necessary? Not really, but if your pet is still dying even though you keep Mend Pet up 100% of the time (to things other than Vengeful Spirits) then you may need to switch.

As with anything, the more gear you have, the easier it’s going to be. If you’re above 550 ilvl, the only mechanic you need to pay attention to is Vengeful Spirit.

Don’t forget about the Warscouts

Zandalari Warscouts spawn  in the same location and then patrol nearby. You  can sometimes find two of them alive in the same zone. They always drop one stolen insignia and have a chance at dropping the loot bags, so they are definitely worth killing. They use the same abilities as the Warbringers but have significantly less health.

Good luck!