WoWInsider has a brief report on a playable demo at E3:

Zul'Aman sneak preview at E3 - WOW Insider

There's not much detail in the article, but they do claim it is a 10-man that is intended to be more "casual" than Karazhan.

Id love to see mounts and enchants similar to ZG to give guilds progressed past it a reason to go back. Id love a dragonhawk flying mount to go with my blood elf.

They placed it below Karazhan in the progression ladder? That is disappointing. I think a 10-man placed at mid-kara difficulty to begin and progressing from there would have been much more well-received.


Oh well.

Um, a pre-Kara raid instance certainly wasn't what I thought the game needed. If that info is accurate, I'm expecting an instance a bit like the old 15 man UBRS...

More casual than karazhan does not imply easier.

Personal reading of that is that it'll be easy to get into the zone and complete at least some of the content (and distinctly smaller in scope too so quicker) but that there'll be some optional bits, the mentioned escort quests for example or bosses like Jindo in ZG, that offer added challenge and reward. Effectively trying to put in a combination of an easy grab 10 people and go instance and something else for the post Kara but not 25 man raiding groups to do, assumedly with the usual niche hooks (enchants, crafting, unusual drops, skill books or whatever) for those that don't need the usual gear but would like a reward for going.

I hope Zul'Aman contains items that made ZG and AQ20 running, even for a guild who was in naxx.

Awesome enchants and class books.

Since TBC took care of good helm/leg/shoulder enchants, maybe ZA could offer belt enchants, or better versions of what is already existing in game.

I can see the logic behind making ZA not part of a 10-man progression that starts in Karazhan.

Currently, Karazhan is part of progression, and currently it's where the majority of each server's raiding population is. I know at least in my little corner of my server, everyone's in Kara; I know a handful of people that aren't part of a regular group.

Thing is, I know my Kara group has plans to eventually step into SSC/TK, and drop Kara from the schedule once we no longer want much of anything from it. That's our plan for progression: Kara -> Gruul/Mag -> SSC/TK -> Hyjal et al, if we get that far.

Most of our raiders are not hardcore. We're serious players, we're skilled for people of our level of play, but the general consensus is that we want to avoid raiding more than 3 nights a week.

My point, which I'm making in a roundabout way, is this. For a casual raiding group like us, putting in ZA as part of a definite parallel progression path from Kara essentially leaves us with a choice of either a) dealing with the headache of organizing ZA groups from what will probably be a pretty cohesive 25-man raid by that point, along with trying to fit it into the schedule despite people's desire to avoid over committing themselves to raids, or b) skipping ZA because it just doesn't fit into the schedule, and we'd rather work on 25-man raid bosses with the nights we do spend raiding (since 25-man raids involve our whole crew, and help us progress along the main progression sequence, whereas ZA is likely to be like ZG or AQ20: hopefully some nice gear and some fun fights, but ultimately a sideshow).

Blizzard doesn't want ZA to be neglected, and they're listening to players complaining about what a headache Karazhan is, logistics-wise, so they're making ZA more accessible.

I don't know that that's necessarily the answer. Kara is very accessible; as I said, I know very few people that don't raid Karazhan.

The only oddball idea I had was this: if ZA is more accessible than Kara (no attunement, possibly a shorter lockout, smaller size making one-night full clears feasible for even fairly casual groups once the fights are mastered), but a step up in difficulty and loot...

I certainly wouldnt have picked it as being more casual then Karazhan, sure their are some classes shortchanged in the gear department, But between badges,heroics,arena, honor rewards and tradeskills their is a ton of epic choices before you even get to Kara.

Perhaps I was hoping for the aq20 to Kara's zg, Some alternate gear, overall a bit harder,trade skills and spell books. Something that helped guilds who had kara on farm make progress into 25 man zones.

More casual than kara doesn't mean anything other than a full clear will be potentially faster. All I'm imagining when Blizzard says that is less trash.

Well its like ZG... you will zone in and have the option of moving towards 4 bosses however you want, after doing one you can stop and do the others another day, then once you finally kill them all you can do the final bosses.. (or atleast thats how I understand it)

Im kind of disapointed at how... replicative of ZG its seeming, sure it will be fun to start with, but I doubt some 'weekly' quests will be enough of an attraction to keep it desirable, there will need to be something unique.

True, casual doesn't mean easy. Guess I'll just have to wait and see. I agree with people that shoehorning ZA into the Kara -> Gruul -> Mag -> SSC progression chain would probably be a mistake - but equally I hope Bliz doesn't intent for it to be ZA -> Kara either.

(Also, I'm kind of sick of troll instances. ZF, ST, ZG, ZA...blah. Sick of trolls. Sick of orcs. Sick of bugs. Isn't it about time we got another human instance? )

The game needs a lot more raid content. Probably a 10 man easier than Kara and one that is harder.

And a 25 man easier than SSC.

Hopefully some good rep rewards as well. Violet Eye was kind of disappointing in that regard.

I think blizzard isn't retarded and will put some must haves in the instance that will send people into it like ZG did.

Hmm pretty sure that ZG was tremendously popular because it was for raid groups half the size of MC. The guilds that I saw hitting ZG that weren't already hitting MC were the ones that simply weren't big enough to field 40 person raids.

But going back to ZG: a way in which Zul'Aman could be "more casual" than Kara whilst being of the same difficulty level is by having much more freedom regarding order in which bosses can be taken on - much like ZG, where you had 5 priests and 4 other bosses that you could really hit in any order you chose.

Look at the people having problems with, for example, Moroes because no priests are online that night. Obviously he can be done without them, but for less geared/experienced guilds that's a huge hurdle, and if you can't down Moroes that blocks off almost the entire instance. If a Moroes-like boss that really benefited from a certain class makeup was just one of the bosses off the side of a path, like the Zul'Gurub priests, that would be a lot less of a problem, just do other stuff and hit him the next night when hopefully the right classes are logged on.

Not true at all, we still had people coming along to ZG runs for those few exceptional drops such as Will of Arlok, ZHC and their PvP trinkets, not to mention the enchants.

I really kind of hope for new shoulder enchants (god damnit I have enough dodge) but I really hope it doesn't become the hassle that ZG became for me when I had to go back for a new enchant every time I upgraded my helm or legs and so did everyone else.

We were running zg right to the end of classic for enchants. Indeed we are still! running ZG as one of our 70's has decided he want a mount and can normally find enough bored people on a friday night to kill those 2 bosses.

How is this not exactly what the game needs? Kara isn't an overly casual-friendly instance, somewhere around AQ20's level if not harder for a guild to progress through. The game clearly lacks a true UBRS-like instance.

Some might want a post-Kara 10-man, but really.. Kara is supposed to be a stepping stone to the 25-man instances if not done concurrently with them, and having a post-Kara 10-man would create issues with 10-man loot being equal to or better than 25-man loot.

The beauty of past small raid content has been the horizontal expansion of loot -- new spell books, new enchants, pvp items, etc. -- so that the smaller raid wasn't actually producing a large amount of loot that competed with larger raid instances.

I know Zul'Aman has been in the works for a long time, but is anyone else terribly underwhelmed by it? It sounds like the instance is ZG 1.5, did some intern whip out the design during weekends away from home?

When I first read it I thought I was reading an article 2 years old about Zul'Gurub - aspects, Hakkar (cough I mean Zul'jin) boss who takes on traits, the optional witch doctor boss... hmmm, it all sounds very familiar!

Too early to really judge I suppose, hope they put in portals and such from Shattrah, otherwise getting over to Ghostlands is going to be retarded for alliance. Glad they are putting in 1 new 10 man, but they should be talking about 3-4 new 5 & 10 mans and 1-2 new 25 mans after 9 months. Its sad that Blizzard seems to be getting even slower about pushing out new content as we are getting close to 3 years of WoW.