Free WoW Guide: Stratholme

Stratholme is an undead zone that is limited to 10 people only. Some parts can be single grouped. Some are best done with 2 groups. You can both pick up gear here that benefits you when raiding in UBRS and MC and Onyxia, and you can work on basic raid tactics in this zone. This is meant to be a broad overview of the zone and some of the raid value that you can obtain from it and not a detailed walkthrough.

Stratholme is divided into two sides: The live side and the dead side. The zone is basically a burning town where the undead control some and the Scarlet Brotherhood controls some and they battle each other with you killing them both.

If you are an agent of the Argent Dawn, put on your trinket so that you will see and be able to collect the Scourgestones for faction. Scourgestones are turned in to an NPC that is located by White Hope Chapel in Eastern Plaguelands. A high enough faction results in better purchases being made from the Quartermaster. One of those purchases is an item that lets you add +5 To All Resistances to one of your items. That makes Scourgestones worth collecting.

Now, when you zone in and clear the initial undead in your way you will reach an intersection. You can go left or right. Left leads to the live side and ultimately a fight with the demon boss. The right leads to the undead side and ultimately a fight with the baron.

The live side is a lot of fun. As you reach the Scarlet stronghold and work through it periodically you trigger attacks by the undead on the living and they come storming in and you find yourself in the awkward position of defending the brotherhood from the undead so you can fight in deeper and kill them all. It is not the purpose of this guide to get into all of the misc. single group quests that you can solve there but since many pulls are 3 to 6 scarlet brotherhood (or an equal or greater number of undead) you will need to practice the skills of crowd control, proper tanking, aggro management etc..

The dead side is also fun with a number of nice challenges. It is very important that whenever you pass under a bridge with a portcullis that the entire raid move as one unit. If you do not, they will often slam down, trigger an event and divide the raid so that only a portion can participate. With only 10 troops are your disposal this is often a fatal mistake.

If you see any of the “eyes”, kill them ASAP or they summon reinforcements. Always… always… kill the eyes first. You know they are there because you will head the shout “The Living Are Here!” and the eye will become visible. It has very few hitpoints so kill it very rapidly. You will wipe if you don’t as it will chain summon elite high level mobs until you are dead.

Blizzard keeps tweaking Strat and in patches in the 2nd Quarter of 2005 they are adding many new magic items. They are also once again tweaking the baroness to make it so that when she pops out of the person she possesses that they are at full health.

Note: The sword-smith quest is also in Strat. You need to 5 man to the dead side in order to get that done. You can reach this quest the fastest if you take the back door into Stratholme.

There is a backdoor into the dead side that is entered via a cave to the east of Stratholme in EP. A rogue can pick the lock if you don’t have a key. This is useful if you are doing the dead side quests since you avoid a fair number of mobs on the way.

You can find a complete listing of quests involving Stratholme located here:
http://wow.allakhazam.com/db/qlookup.html?zone=67