Located in the Eastern Plaguelands, Stratholm is a little out of the way.

Death knights probably have it the easiest – they can use a death gate to go back to the Ebon Hold in the north eastern edge of the Eastern Plaguelands. You can also use this to avoid running out of the entire instance after killing Lord Rivendare – although you have a flight from the Ebon Hold instead.

For non-death knights the fastest way there is the Path of the Necromancer which teleports you outside of Scholomance in the Western Plaguelands. From there it is a short 2 minute flight north. However you’ll only have this spell if you did Scholomance as a challenge mode dungeon during Mists of Pandaria.

The Horde can hearth to the Shrine, take a portal to the Undercity and then fly east to the northern edge of the Eastern Plaguelands.

The Alliance have a little further to go; we’ll hearth to the Shrine, take a portal to Ironforge and then fly to Northpass Tower. This will take around 7-8 minutes to do. There is an alternate route – Shrine to TBC Shattrath to the Isle of Quel’Danas and then fly south to the Eastern Plaguelands. However that route takes roughly the same amount of time as flying from Ironforge!

Once in the Eastern Plaguelands you need to head to the Eastwall Gate – you don’t use the dungeon entrance located where Stratholm is on the world map.

Once there, the Eastwall Gate looks like the below. You can just click on the gate to enter.

When you enter the undead side of Stratholm the list of things to do appears on your screen – you’ll can’t skip all of the bosses in the instance to kill Lord Rivendare.

You gain access to Lord Rivendare you’ll need to kill three bosses, destroy their Ash’ari crystals, get Ramstein the Gorger to spawn and kill it.

The route I take is:

1. Nerub’enkan
2. Baroness Anastari
3. Maleki the Pallid

You can skip the boss Magistrate Barthilas if you want.

There is a tempting path from Nerub’enkan to Maleki the Pallid – marked with a No Entry sign above – but you do not want to as gates will close, locking you in, and you’ll have to kill lots of small insects before you’re allowed out!

Do not go down here!

Enter into the Slaughter house and round up all of the undead abominations.

Kill all of the abominations – this is probably the most annoying part of the instance! Once they’re down Ramstein the Gorger will spawn.

Once Ramstein is dead a stream of undead will come at you from the right hand side – just AoE these down. Then kill the four mobs which spawn inside the slaughter house and walk out to you. Kill those and Lord Rivendare is accessible.

It doesn’t take that long to run Stratholm – on my shaman it took me 6-7 minutes to kill Lord Rivendare, run out, sell loot and reset the instance. This was mostly thanks to using ghostwolf to go at 140% speed inside the instance.

You don’t want to go much faster than this as you can only run 10 instances an hour and at 6-7 minutes you’re right on that limitation anyway. Using an addon like SavedInstances to track the accountwide limit of 10 instances per hour is very helpul.

I do loot the mobs; whilst it’ll not be that profitable – only 25-30g per run – you do occasionally get very nice transmog greens. Sometimes they’re even worth a reasonable amount of gold, even with the flood of transmog items the salvage yard has brought.