Honestly, this progression probably has little to do with positioning, and everything to do with how Hyjal works. ALL of our Hyjal kills have come on a one shot, the night after our first attempts.

Why? Because the zone is mind numbing, it is painful - within 2-3 attempts people are no longer at their prime. You may learn the entire zone, but soon you aren't fresh and you're mentally drained... even if you don't feel it. Hyjal is the first zone I can actually say I was tired in - normally shit doesn't bring me down.

Combine that with the fact that resting and dwelling on anything (in life or in game) and coming back to it is usually extremely helpful.

Being mentally focused is so critical in BT/Hyjal (Kungen: MAX FOCUS?!) - 3-4 hours of no-rep trash will drag anyone but the most devout down. You can power through it, but its just not the same. Maybe our guild is full of senior citizens though. You're dealing with human beings, not robots.

I agree because that's how it has been for us, but personally I enjoy Hyjal, especially once you get to the horde camp. I think it's fun. The Gargoyles and Frost Wyrm's attacking from the sky, the Infernal bombardment, Thrall and the beatstick Tauren Warriors... etc. The zone is really cool to me.

Also, the Necromancer buff makes it fun to be a melee class.

Yeah the Horde camp really is a lot more fun than the alliance one. Our Kaz'rogal strategy is really well defined I think for trash - and makes repeating it all quite nice (other than the occasional instagibs which still bother me). The movement and open atmosphere really makes it much more enjoyable. The problem is just doing it for a few hours with nothing to show for it, and only more trash in sight. You start getting silly mistakes, and a few deaths after 20 minutes of worthless trash and you're wiped.

In the alliance camp you basically sit in one spot and do the same shit for 16 waves... on Horde at least the action starts early. I still think a checkpoint and rep with harder trash/bosses would improve the zone immensely.

The Horde camp trash is definitely a lot more enjoyable (to me, but I am weird) though still painful due to the lack of 'rewards' which motivate some of my raiders.

Splitting the raid dps for Waves 2+4, tanking the Frost Wyrms so the raid doesn't eat too much damage etc... oh and setting up pulls so we didn't lose Tauren who love to beat face regardless of if it is safe.

Learning the trash was the whole thing for us tonight, was both painful and rewarding as we saw huge improvements with tweaks we made. Azgalor's trash was a bit of a letdown after the Kaz'goral trash we put a bit of thought into, but... meh.

We haven't attempted Az'galor trash yet - but I've heard his is simpler than Kaz'rogals... basically that Kaz'rogal's is the hardest of the 4 waves.

We also never did the "splitting the raid."

For us, we put 2 healers and 2 tanks up front in phase 2, and they drag the ghouls into the npcs. The rest of the raid kills the gargoyles, and the npcs end up killing the ghouls just about as we kill the gargs, with a TON of time left in the wave. I don't see how dps are needed in wave 2 at all for the front 3-5 ghouls).

In wave 4 we kill the front mobs as an entire raid then go kill the back mobs. Losing some of those headhunters in the back camp doesn't matter since they'll never see action past wave 4 anyway... you can kill the front, then the back, and easily clear combat before phase 5 even ticks. Plus you keep that raid synergy, and maximize npc damage.

I have heard of guilds splitting their raid for the entirety of the kaz'rogal trash. I guess it works for them though. It is another one of those encounters I suppose where multiple strategies can be effective.

He certainly is, yes.

You cannot really define a strategy and post it somewhere and then expect people to follow it and succeed, it just won't work. Hyjal trash and boss is probably the first encounter design in WoW that requires your raid to think. You have to adept to the waves and you have to get the maximum out of your raid setup. Some setups are melee heavy and it will work. Some are caster heavy and it will work too, just in another way. Hyjal is a challenge, and if you like challenges you will have fun. At least I do.

Hyjal is draining, but well designed imo. The only thing they need to do now is give reputation for killing the trash, because having to slug through that much trash for no reward if you wipe on the boss is a taking it a bit too far (it's hardly like the bosses are complete pushovers after all).

we had 2 hours of wiping yesterday on kaz'rogal trash.
it was nice to see improvements by changing our strategy a few times.

in our last try we wiped to wave 5/6 due necromancer instagibs (need faster sheeps)

what do we have to expect with wave 7 and 8? i think i saw another frost wyrm in wave 7 from my corpse PoV, but nothing else.

Honestly Wave 5/6 were the hardest by FAR for us.

We wiped at end of final wave though..so no boss time yet.

There will be another frost wyrm, yes. And wave number 8 is made of ghouls and abominatios if I remember correctly. Last wave is easy if you were able to survive that long.

I'm surprised that people are wiping so much on the trash. The most important part of it is not to have tanks doing stupid things (always let the NPC's or totems get initial agro, then pull stuff off while sheeps/shackles are going off), and keep the NPC's alive as much as possible. Abominations are the biggest cause of NPC death - you need 3-4 tanks splitting them up and priests actively shackling abominations that NPC's are attacking to get them to go to a different mob; try and get them on the Abom you're focusing DPS on, or one of the other mobs.

Having tanks taunting the stuff that is actively attacking NPC's and if theres no-one DPSing their mobs keep them moving them so they can see if an NPC rips easily. One of the other things to do is use Ret aura and Thorns - if you have someone with improved of both it's ~90 damage return per hit, and even without its around 50 if you have both on. As long as you can get initial agro, it isn't so hard to keep fast hitting mobs like Ghouls on you with NPC's pounding on them.

Having hunters drag individual mobs back to things like the Tauren's/Thrall in the horde camp or the Knights/Jaina in the human camp helps a lot too, as it takes one mob away that is going to get gibbed by a load of NPC's before it can do much as well as bringing more DPS in to the group if you can get them all the way back.

Slot 1 = random melee ability, reduces damage done by the target by 10% or something similar (not sure, we never use it anyway).

Slot 3 = Spirit Lance - direct damage (6k?) and slows target by 90% movement speed
Slot 4 = Shackle - ~15yard AoE shackle for 6(?) seconds
Slot 5 = AoE Volley - ~10k damage to all enemies within ~20yards.

Slot 7 = Shadow Shield - gives the target a shield which absorbs 10-15k(?) damage.

That's probably more informative than a screenshot would give you :p

Here's the full teron strat :
4 3333333333333333 54 33333333333333 54

heh and thanks!

You forgot a "5" on the front, and a "7" just before you die on whomever has aggro on the spirits at the moment.

Actually he didn't forget a 5 in front. Unless you are very experienced with this part of the fight, I would recommend always using shackle first. The constructs never reach anyone if this is done properly.
Oh and I only use 8-12 3s between 4 and 5. :P

Wave 5 is the entire fight, including the boss. If you get through it cleanly, barring a tanking mistake in wave 8 (easily possible to get insta gibbed there) you should be home free.
It can seem overwhelming because sometimes 6 will be coming just as you are wrapping up 5, but 6 is relatively easy because it's just Gargoyles and Frost Wyrms. If there is ever a time to Bloodlust and use CDs, that's it.

Yes, on Kaz'Rogal trash, pop timers on Wave 5. That's the hard one. (Protip: On Azgalor trash, Wave 1 is the hard one. Kinda nice how that works out.)

Basically, more aboms = harder. They kill NPCs if unattended and they have more hp than anything else so they're going to cause you to run over your allotted time more often than not.

Exactly, we killed Archimonde last night, and I am not even honored yet. Thats just stupid.

If you know nothing about the upcoming trash pulls though, it is rather disconcerting for Wave 1 to be 6 Abominations and 6 Necromancers. Might just be enough to make you immediately portal to Shattrath for the night until the raid reset...

Granted we've only killed the first boss in hyjal but we had the same experience. We killed kael'thas and were really excited. Hit hyjal only to be brought down by the trash waves. We came up with some decent strategies but people were tired and we just couldn't do it.

Zone in the next day, everyone's fresh, one shot winterchill with one tank who couldn't stay connected.

I do enjoy hyjal, but after several rounds of trash people are itching to get to the boss. A lot of people hated general rajaxx from AQ 20 for a reason... but once you had it on farm it was a pretty fun fight. At least the respawn on the NPCs seems like 5 minutes rather than 15. At least blizzard learned something.

For us wave 6 was the hardest out of Azgalor waves, just because we have no problems handling lots of mobs, but that many banshees and necros coming all at once just gibs someone really fast. We ended up having a paladin get initial aggro on the mobs and bubbling before the shadowbolts hit him, while hunters peel some off from either side and rogues drop down from the tower to cheap shot necros.

It is very irritating that we would have killed that boss 5 times over yesterday if Thrall wasn't in his gimped state. We were running 8 melee + tank yesterday so we had real problems with rain of fires, even if Thrall aggroed as late as 70%. 4% wipe was the worst...next time we'll only bring one melee group.