Sorry for the double post, but since the last one was over a month ago, I think I'm in the clear.
So, I decided to see what my DK could handle. I'd been flummoxed by High King Maulgar and his council in Gruul's Lair before and even trying it with my friend playing a druid, we still ended up wiping and badly.
After watching a video of a DK soloing the entire council, I decided to make another attempt trying to use a similar strategy.
I failed, but luckily I'd stumbled across someone willing to help me with their Healadin and we tried again.
The second time I realized what I'd been going wrong and I feel really stupid that I hadn't noticed it before. Learning tanking during WotLK had taught me to basically run in, grab all the aggro, and then rip down casters.
You know, basically pulling a Leeroy Jenkins.
Those of you familiar with Gruul's Lair are probably shaking your heads in disgust.
I'll only list the strategy here in case someone else is interested in soloing or duo'ing the place:
The strategy for the council is to trigger the fight, but stay as far away from the Summoner and the Shaman as much as possible, since the former will Death Coil you (fear) and the Shaman will Greater Polymorph you (turning you into a frog).
If doing a duo, Tanks should try and pull aggro while the DPS nuke down Blindeye the healer.á If you're a tank/healer combo, the tank needs to focus the Blindeye, and the healer should try to add any DPS, debuffs, etc. they can.
Seriously, even if you're a Resto Druid, add what focused DPS you can (don't AoE if you can avoid it).
If you're going solo, stay as far away from the Shaman as you can manage (don't break line of sight with him as he'll just run closer and that's a bad thing at the start), you only have to deal with the occasional Death Coil from the Warlock.
You REALLY need damage here, so if you're going in solo with a tank, either stop and go find some DPS gear before this or swap to a DPS spec.
You need to be able to pound the healer (Blindeye) down very quickly, since he can go from 20% health to 60% health with a single spell and for whatever reasons, neither my DK's Brain Freeze nor Strangulate worked.
And you'd be surprised as how fast even 125K health vanishes in this fight if you end up getting chain-CC'd.
Once the healer drops, this fight goes from hair-tearingly frustrating to possible.
You need to target the warlock (Olm) or the shaman (Kiggler) after that, since the Shaman has Greater Polymorph and the other Death Coil.á The Warlock seems to prefer close-encounters, so you can probably just focus him next.á If you're duo'ing the place, have your friend take the attention of the one you aren't handling.
Once one of them falls, the fight goes from possible to almost pathetic.á Drop whichever CC-dispenser you didn't ice and the fight becomes laughably easy.
Gruul himself is an absolute wuss compared to the council. His high HP and his stun is about all he's got going for him. And it's not even that good.
After thanking the Healadin, I decided to see if I could do anything else. I'd somehow gone most of my DK's life without even doing the Icecrown instances, so I decided to solo Forge of Souls.
After that, I was on a roll, so I solo'd Pit of Saron.
I died once thanks to a cheap move that the Ymirjar Skycaller has called "Glacial Strike" which keeps doing damage until you fully heal up. Since I was soloing and I didn't even notice this debuff until I was at half HP. I wasn't able to make it to any enemies that I could death strike in time.
But after that, I was more cautious engaging them and ended up clearing Pit of Saron easily.
Then I solo'd the Halls of Reflection.
The first section was amazingly boring. Only the casters offered any kind of threat. For those of you who have wiped on this due to a bad group, I feel for you. There's no reason that you should have to suffer a tank or DPS that can't handle this fight.
Then I got to the part where you had to flee from the Lich King.
My stream of thought was "FUCKFUCKFUCKFUCKFUCKFUCKFUCKFUCKDIEDIEDIEDIEDIEDIEDIEDIEDIE!"
I cleared it, but the last wave gave me no small amount of stress and I think I'll be looking for some DPS gear before I try to solo that again.