Sethep

Does anyone who maybe runs ZA regulary on the PTR know if they have actually tuned some bosses so far?
I'm interested in reports from Kara/T4 and early SSC players.

 

Bretek

I've been on recon for our guild on Uther. Our guild has Kara/Grull/Lurker on farm. Plan on getting Hydross, VR, then Tidewalker and have gotten relatively close on all 3 of them.

I took our guild for the first time through ZA tonight. 8/10 have never been in there before, and I was the only one that had downed any bosses (was just the bear).

Tanks: Prot pally, Prot warr
Heals: Resto sham, Holy priest, Holy pally
DPS: Shadow priest (me), Lock, 2 Mages, Rogue

We downed Bear w/o too much trouble. Tanks just had to get the feel for it.

Eagle: Gauntlet was fun, Eagle wasn't too bad, though the eagle spawns were a pain. We just dps's them during collapse with seed of corruption and mage aoe, and left them alone otherwise.

LYNX: I haven't been able to down this guy in a pug, and guild did better, but didn't pass 50% mark.

The saberlash was tough, but once healers were informed, were able to handle it.
The spirit form was an extremely tough phase. I think this was due to the totem, mostly. We may not have been spread out enough or just didn't down the totem enough, but when that totem is thrown in with a flame shock... Our healers ran oom before the fight was half over. Not sure how to get through this boss, yet.

Overall, I'm pleased with ZA. Bear and eagle are fine once the strat is known. Lynx was hitting maybe a little too hard, and I haven't heard of or seen any fixes to these bosses that I could tell, though I had only downed the Bear before (Probably 5 or so times, though).

Hopefully I can find some pugs that can take me further through this.
Dorotek, Dorolyn, Doroliv on the PTR-PVE Alliance side.

 

Tracekill

Slight typographical error in the section on Malacrass:

We gnomes may resemble imps but we generally use Fireball not Firebolt. Excellent guide, helped our guild get down 4 bosses on our second attempt, you guys do excellent work!

 

Lavode

Hmm..No ZA encounters have been retuned as far as I can tell, and to be honest, they went onto the ptr very well tuned already, which I suspect is due to the really long delay that the voice chat ptr caused.
However, a number of the class changes on the ptr appear to be the direct result of fight mechanics from ZA.
Taunts being moved to physical hit takes a lot of the randomness out of the bear boss, because even with no + hit gear, landing a physical ability on a boss is a lot easier than landing a "spell", and tanks do occasionally have some physical hit on their kit to boot. Incidentially, it will also make alar less annoying.
Dispells being moved to 40 yard range permits you to position your healers reliably outside of the lynx boss shock range, which is vital - With 30 yards, being in range to dispell the tank of flameshock while outranging earthshock yourself was rather touch and go, and if you get it wrong, you get gibbed.
And of course, there is the way the entire instance is asking you to bring a good protadin if you know one - Dont get me wrong, any tank class can do all of the fights in ZA fine, but in many ways, zul aman is the Shattered Halls mercy run dialed up to 11, and that means prot paladins do shine.

 

joinoel

I had a question on the Gauntlet part before the Eagle Boss. We had 1 Protection Warrior and 1 Feral Druid. I was wondering about how you go about doing that part. Our AoE was dying soon after we got the eagles adds. Should we just grab 4 elites, tank kill those then grab 4 more, until we reach the stairs? and how fast should we move up the ramp to avoid being overrun? Any advise is greatly appreciated.

 

Mizerok

Just do one set of elites at a time, it's extremely simple ~_~

 

songster

Have you tested it with a group none of whom has gear better than 2/5 Tier 4? That's what's accessible from Karazhan, and what ZA is ostensibly aimed at.

From my limited PTR experience, I'd say that a lot of Kara-farming guilds will get a very rude shock on zoning into ZA. I hope they all have some Heroic badges in the bank, because the new Heroic gear will be necessary to bridge them from Kara into ZA.

 

Cereal

WoW Forums -> Zul'Aman Clarification

 

Diogo

Can ZA be done without Kara gear? Yes, but they better have at least full heroic gear. The first boss, the bear, is ridiculously easy, but it is also a tank gear check. I tried it with my guild's main tank, and even though we were in a pug with 3 people who did less damage than the protection warrior, we one shotted it. But I also tried it once with a full blue off tank, and those cleaves (which were hitting my guilds 4/5 t5 MT for 7 or 8k) were suddenly hitting him for 13, 14k.

So it KZ CAN be skipped, but I doubt many will be able to pull it off.

 

songster

I'm not interested in knowing whether you can skip KZ, I'm interested in whether it's actually ended up tuned for a KZ-farming guild. I literally do not know anyone who has tested it under those conditions. I hope to God there were some people on the PTR actually testing it with the intended gear level.

Does anybody here know of anyone who has tested ZA while not wearing any 25-man loot, or at the very least not wearing any SSC/TK loot? If so, what were their experiences? What I'm absolutely not interested in is the experiences of people who did it in "Kara gear apart from a 4/5 T5 tank" or "Kara gear except for the healers" or "Mostly T4/T5 gear" - and that appears to be 100% of this thread.

 

◊ Vectivus

Well, for perspective's sake, a guild zoning into Karazhan for the first time doesn't rip through and kill every boss in their first week, either - they take a few weeks to gear up, rotate new people through, and learn the strategies.

So yes, the T5 annihilation that descended on ZA for the marginal upgrades or preferential allocation of itemization stat points doesn't necessarily reflect the so-called 'target audience', but I would hazard a guess that ZA is tuned to require a guild that runs nothing outside of 10-man content to have to - just like everyone else - wipe and learn to progress.

 

bludwork

A guild that is farming kara.. farming not barely making it through, should be able to kill the first boss with little difficulty. It's a gear check for tanks and healers. Not sure about the rest, especially the gauntlet and mob packs that run away and call for more. Those require significantly more burst dps than what it takes to kill prince & nightbane.

Also don't forget the badge gear is SSC level, even if you continue farming kara and heroics for a month after release your raid should be geared enough to make inroads into zul'aman. I don't think blizzard intended it to be easily cleared by anyone breaking out of kara.

 

Jeffrey

One difference here is that you need 2 good tanks instead of just one good tank. It's basically Moroes except checking for full epics instead of full blues. I know a fair amount of smaller guilds which have barely been lucky enough to gear up 1 tank with Kara gear, now they need 2. Shouldn't be a huge problem with the badge gear but it does stop a lot of smaller guilds from jumping in at release day.

We had a mostly T4/T5 gear raid. We cleared the trash to dragonhawk (Jin'Alai), no problem. We did some wiping not knowing what to expect, no problem. We did some wiping from not being able to DPS stuff down in time, no real problem... should've been a cakewalk with some T5 though. A bunch of people left after respawns, we invited people in mostly Kara gear and "better" blues.

No problem you'd expect? Well, we couldn't even down the scouts on the way to the dragonhawk. Given some more coordination, we probably could've downed the trash but the boss? We struggled in T4/T5... no chance in Kara gear.

In that version there was absolutely no way to skip Kara even if you are some "amazingly elite guild". The upgrades people get in Kara are simply too huge for that. Unless they consider farming heroics forever and getting the new badge loot as "skipping Kara".

Disclaimer: EU PTR is actually located in the US giving a free bonus 500ms lag, some of the DPS might've been trying new specs, PTR was buggy, was the first 2.3 build etc. We also went dragonhawk as the second boss, apparently a bad choice.

 

• Falk

Brutal Swipe - Spells - World of Warcraft

You either weren't splitting the damage, or blues gave your tank a total of 3-5% physical mitigation (counting 10% damage reduction from defensive stance)

It's not a cleave - this has been mentioned multiple times in the thread.

 

tekkel

Well my guild tested ZA with mostly kara and arena gear. I was tanking as a prot pally with a feral druid next to me. Bought 2 items from the new badge rewards and otherwise I was running mostly heroic/kara gear and the tier4 pieces from gruuls. Next to that I had a ring and trinket from ssc/tk but that was it. Most of the people in the run were like that. 80% kara gear 20% 25 men gear.

The bear went easy for us. 1 shot np if u know the tactic. We went on to the eagle and made it through the gauntlet the first time without a mage or warlock. Me picking up the front 2 mobs + eagles and a feral druid picking the mobs up in the back. Didn't even get hit hard enough to regen the mana I needed to keep tanking so they don't hit too hard. This part of the instance will be a problem if u rely heavily on mana using dps.

The boss itself took a few tries to sort the tactic and he went down fairly easy. We then moved on to the lynx boss. Tbh the trash to this place takes a bit too long. Alot of trash to clear compared to the bear and eagle. Maybe we can skip some but I think it took at least 30 minutes.
The boss itself posed some problems for us in the fact that he hits fairly decent and then does the saber lash style attack. We used 2 tanks in front of him. The druid could actually tank him better due to higher health buffer. I got 1 shotted 3 times by the saber lash for 10k when my health wasn't topped off before it would hit. Running around 16k hp buffed wasn't enough or my healers were slacking too much.
We managed to get a decent amount of phase changes but seemed to lose people to the totems+shocks. 3% was our best try and with some better tactic and positioning he would go down.

Tbh the saberlash attack is a bit too heavy hitting. If u wouldn't have a priest and warlock with u the health buffer on an average geared kara tank might be too small to take those hits with only 2 people in front of him. Having more take the hit makes u need to watch another semi tank to top off after every saber lash. The fact that u can evade the saber lash makes it reasonable that it's meant to be taken by 2 tanks only. Maybe a little less damage on the lash or a longer cooldown on that ability would make this fight a bit better for kara equipped tanks.

 

◊ Zerchi

Has anyone worked out the specifics of the chest timers?

There's this thread where people reported some of the timer oddities they've seen (which we've also seen):
WoW Forums -> [BUG] ZA Timed Quest not giving 20 min

And Hortus responded:
"This is working as intended, you should get an addition to the time you already have remaining, not a reset of the timer."

So I'm not sure if Hortus just didnt catch that they lost time (based on the original assumption we had that we'd get 20 minutes per boss, not just 20 minutes for the first boss), or if it's intentional that different bosses give different bonus times...perhaps to impose an optimal kill order?.

 

Solaerl

Ok. Very long post that, thanks to a crash, was lost before I could finish it. Here's a rewrite.

My guild just tried ZA for the first time on Wednesday. We're what I think the tuning target is: a Tier 4 guild where most of the people in the raid have farmed out Karazhan and Gruul's Lair. A few people have Void Reaver gear as well, and maybe a piece of gear from Lurker. We do ok, but we're not really powering through the instance with BT gear and experience.

I'm sticking my neck out along with the necks of those in my guild.. Here's the WWS report for our run. There were nine of us there, along with a PUG hunter: WWS Report. I edited the logfile to restore the real names so that Armory links would work, and renamed the bosses to bosses from ZG so that WWS, which has no support for ZA yet, would recognize them as boss fights.

Overall the instance is very tough, very challenging, and I would say might be tuned a little too high for your standard fresh-out-of-Karazhan guild. We didn't power on through it and we've only been there one night, but I fully expect to kill Nalorakk (Mandokir in the WWS report) handily, and only take another night or two to adapt to Akil'Zon (Arlokk in the WWS report).

Nalorakk

The trash leading up to Nalorakk was not especially rough, though we did wipe a few times learning how to handle the last pull before engaging Nalorakk.

Nalorakk himself was quite tough, but doable. Valdra was our dps warrior who respecced to prot for the raid, and he tanked Nalorakk during the troll phase. I tanked him during the bear phase. After a few false starts, we got the taunt rotation down and didn't have an instance where the wrong warrior got mangle or anything like that. The roughest part of the fight is definitely the silence. I have 17k health and with his 2.5-4k hits, his 2000 dps bleed, and his 750 dps bleed, often even druid and priest hots weren't enough to keep me up through the silence. It didn't seem like the silence was avoidable (I think it has a 50-yard range), and at no point during any of the attempts did I dodge or parry either the Rend Flesh or Lacerating Slash. I contrast that to Prince, whose attacks, even at his most dangerous dual-wielding point, can often be greatly mitigated. Three healers was an absolute necessity here, though we can get away with two good healers on me against Prince. The Nalorakk fight is definitely not on par with Prince's difficulty. Still, it's tough, but I don't think it's greatly overtuned.

The only way I think we could improve over our first performance in that fight would be to ensure that the tank has all HoTs active throughout the silence. We weren't quite as good about that as we could have been.

Akil'Zon

After killing Nalorakk, our next target was Akil'Zon. The eagle boss has a short gauntlet before him where you advance, pulling trolls by twos, all while fending off another group of troll adds from the rear, as clusters of birds swoop in continuously. It took a few tries to get the rhythm, and I think this section is tuned appropriately. It's not a total cakewalk for us, but it wasn't crazy-hard either. You just have to know to keep advancing forward, and not stopping to get the last troll add down before pulling the next group.

Ok. For us, Akil'Zon was crazy-hard. First, the encounter has been buffed since most of the encounter write-ups and kill videos were made. The big difference at the moment is that eagle adds are fast. As in, if you try casting anything slower than a 1.5s spell, the bird will be out of range by the time the cast completes. We'd seen strategies that said to AoE, use seed of corruption, etc, but those rarely hit many birds and were very mana-inefficient, especially for such a long fight. The only time we'll AoE in the future is when we're collapsed onto the player with the lightning cloud.

Akil'Zon hits decently hard, but worse than that he hits pretty fast, and it wasn't unusual for him to eat up my shield block charges with two quick hits and then sneak in a crushing blow before shield block was ready again. This happened quite often during one attempt, though in later tries it happened relatively rarely. We were a somewhat melee-heavy group, so the nature AoE punished us accordingly. I have the feeling that we might need to replace that second tank who served us so well during Nalorakk, since it's actually easier to do the fight with the tank standing apart from the group shooting his gun than it is for him to dps. I hate fights that do that. I understand the need to prevent people from stacking to trivialize the lightning-cloud portion of the fight, but once again it's a mechanic that punishes the raid for bringing melee classes.

We had no problem collapsing onto the person with the lightning cloud. Easy. The biggest problem, by far, was with the eagles. I'd seen guides, videos, that said just to ignore the eagles and heal through the damage.. that's crazy. Maybe Tier 6 - geared groups can get away with that, but for a Tier-4 raid the damage but out by the eagles is just insanely high. Somehow we were keeping up with it, but just barely. Sometimes a clothy would get eaten alive by a 4k nature zap, a few hits from the eagles, then maybe one lightning tick while collapsing, all within the space of a few seconds, faster than healers could react to, and that would be the end of him. The fight isn't too bad without the eagles, but with them as it is now.. it feels tuned too high for the groups that the instance was supposed to be aimed at. I fully expect to see a few nerfs come release here.

There are a few more things I would have liked to have tried again with the second boss (have the warlock only use instant-dots on all eagles, etc) because I think we could have gotten him down (he was at 38% at one point), but the gauntlet had respawned and then we got a "server shutdown in 15 minutes" notice, so that was the end for Zul'Aman for the evening. I like what I've seen of the instance so far, but again, I think it's a bit tougher than it was intended to be.

 

Lavode

Having the warlock instant dot the eagles is the correct tactic, and the eagle boss gets one hell of a lot harder if you try to deal with them in nearly any other way because the dps of whoever is trying to kill them goes to nearly zero, and the birds dont actually die, so their dps on the raid starts to pile up very fast, but a warlock can stay on top of them reasonably easily.
This is a general rule for how ZA bosses fights work - if you dont have a rock solid tactic as far as positioning and execution goes, the fight becomes very, very harsh to heal, but doesnt actually insta-gib you. So if the incoming damage seems out of whack, dont assume its overtuned, think about what you might be doing wrong.

Bear: Will but huge pressure on your troll phase tank if you dont have him stacked on top of the bear phase tank.
Eagle: Eagles must be kept down, and the obvious static charge + collapse combo.
Lynx: Lynx phase has the same brutal swipe the bear boss does, and the troll phase has a 30 yard 5k damage earthshock which he uses more or less on cooldown as a counterspell - Which means you will loose any caster who is closer than 30 yards to the boss to totem+shock combos. Position them further away. Dispell the flameshock dot. (suspect this fight is why dispells got 40 yard ranges in 2.3.. )
Dragonhawk: Letting the hatchers break just the right amount of eggs is pretty key here.
Shaman; outrangable shadow aoe.

 

Illundai

So you can outrange the Shadow bolt aoe on Malacrass now or what?

Yes, Death Knight tanks are/were too good in 3.0.x. Having 38k HP, 76.81% Avoidance (Miss incl.) and not gimping your threat in the first tier of gear is broken. (Yes this is clickable)

 

Malan

Did the last pull before the bear boss get massively buffed or something?

Shitting up every single thread on EJ since '06

 

Metaphysic

Has anybody completed the timed quest within the past couple weeks? Both times my group has done it, the time hasn't been added onto the remaining time but instead reset to 20 minutes. I'm curious if we're missing something or if the quest is currently bugged.

The raid I run with is primarily t5/t6 geared. We killed the bear boss with 8 minutes remaining, the eagle with 12 minutes remaining and engaged the lynx with 1:30 remaining. I've thought about it and I don't see how we can cut much more time off of our run; we chain pulled, didn't wipe and are over-geared for the zone.

 

Malan

Is there any other way to deal with frenzy if you don't have a hunter, other than "suck it up and heal through it"?

Shitting up every single thread on EJ since '06

 

lovely.liesje

Ok, wednesday 2.3 is supposedly going live and as raid organizer I have the wonderfull task of making us 2 or 3 ZA teams next week
We're a guild on a very slow server if it comes to raid content and as such we've been in SSC and TK for about a month now having downed 3 bosses in each. So you could savely say that we have about T4 level equipment.

If you would plan in ZA party for us, what class composition would you go for and why?
I especially wanna know if certain classes or skills are needed to get passed anything, like for instance a certain ammount of spell interupt or disspellers and stuff like that.

Thanks!

 

Eylirria

I'd go with 2tanks/3healers/5DPSers as a general rule. But going more in-depth this is the group I'm going to be in for ZA, for what it's worth:

Tanks: Protection Warrior(MT) + Feral Druid(OT)
Reasoning: Protection Warrior is a solid all-around tank for any situation. Granted, the druid could be better under some circumstances, the druid is there for off-tanking and DPSing where possible, putting the group at 6 DPSers -- I'm of the school of thought that you should always be killing things as fast as possible, it puts less strain on the healers and on the DPS. I'd rather not drag any fight on ZA, since some have berserk timers, and soft-timers (ie Malacrass). So basically, we'll have 2 very solid tanks where needed, and if we only need 1, then the OT turns into DPSer #6.

Healers: Paladin, Shaman, Priest
Reasoning: Shaman takes care of raid-healing almost by himself. Paladin is a solid MT healing battery and the Priest is mostly aiding tank healing, but can help with raid healing where needed. You could ditch the priest for a ToL druid, there is really no right/wrong here, just need 3 good healers.

DPS: Shadow Priest, Mage, Warlock, Hunter, Rogue
Reasoning: Shadow priest goes without saying. Mage/Warlock take care of most CC situations as well as AOE. Hunter can help with CCing IF needed, but otherwise there for the fact he's ranged DPS and can Tranq shot the Lynx boss. Rogue is there for it's high DPS and interrupts. Keeping it light on Melee, as it can be very punishing on some fights like the eagle avatar.



This is how the group I will be in will be set-up.

 

legatto

I saw a few fights that mention outranging things as a tactic. How do shadowpriests fare on those fights? Will I be spending alot of time wanding between refreshing dots and mb/swd?