The Lynx whirlwind thing is a pretty unique mechanic really, he charges at people and not just around like Kargath. I can't remember the exact reason and why we did it, but we were all bunched up and we didn't get royally owned by the lynx rush. The people he went after got it, nobody else did. If it was truly a whirlwind effect, everyone in the stack should have gotten it. Instead I think he just picks 4-5 people to charge and apply the dot on.

Notice when it charges around that it goes directly to people, stop up and goes for another one. It's not random whirlwinding around. Killed Zul'jin twice now and yes, the lynx phase is definitely the bitchiest of them all.

As mentioned earlier watch out for the Lynx phase. He can often melee the Fixated person once or twice - he crushed our 3rd-on-Omen Shadow priest for 13k after a fixate tonight. After that I stopped sitting and waiting for him to come back and just followed him to the Fixate target the dragged him back to the tank spot.

I can confirm this, just killed him a while ago, the exact HP seems to be 80% though, so we let him sit at 81% till he started a shadow volley, then started droping him to get him as low as we could without his power drain, got him to about 73% before the first power drain.

On PTR we killed three adds once, just to not have problems with CC and the stupidly high latency, was no problem really. Generally banish for example is a piss poor CC as it cannot be refreshed at will. If it breaks during his shadow aoe, the caster will get tons of spell pushbacks which means you really need an off tank ready, otherwise you have dead healers. We ended up killing 2 and CCing 2, but only using CC that can be refreshed at will, shackle + sheep for example. Ofc you can get unlucky and they just break during aoe, if you have a 2nd tank in your raid, he really needs to be aware of that. And I would keep none of the adds controlled that can do heavy aoe stuff. That's just asking for trouble.

I'm in a guild still working on Kael - Thus we are T4-T5 geared.

We finished our first ZA clear last night, and I thought I would comment on Malacrass(clearly the hardest fight in ZA)

Our group makeup when we killed him was.
2 Holy Paladins
1 Restro Druid

1 Prot Warrior

2 Rogues (1 dagger/1 combat sword)
1 Arcane Mage(2 pc T5)
1 Warlock(destruction)
1 Beast Master Hunter
1 Shadow Priest

Regarding the Spirit Bolts.
(1) Lack of AOE healing probably made it harder then it had to be. A shaman or a holy priest would of been great!
(2) We have no BT shadow gear, so we went with 0 SR(just the priest buff)
(3) We found that dampen magic worked wonders for reducing the Spirit Bolt damage. Dampen magic reduced about 25% of the spirit bolt damage. Dampen magic is generally a net gain if heals are twice as big as the damage pulse. Spirit Bolts are a very fast/low damage attack so it made sense.

We found that we could do about 25% damage per spirit bolt wave. We could generally last 4-5 waves of spirit bolts. We had the CC to match our adds:
Dragonkin - Druid
Elf Healer - Mage
Nature Elemental - Warlock
Undead - Shadow Priest
The adds would occasionally break at an inconvenient time, but we were far better off straight burning him.

It required some luck, some of the Soul Drains are far nastier then others. (listed in order of difficulty)
(1) Warrior - In the later phase with his damage up 40-50% "Warrior Soul Drain" was pretty nasty, just because of the MS. The whirlwind is easy to avoid. The spell reflects seems very hard to avoid, but the MS burst with low mana at the end was hard to deal with.
(2) Priest - The flash heal wasn't hard to interrupt, but we just had trouble dealing with the Mind Control. MC seemed to last fairly long. I think he psychic screamed me once, but it may of been one of the MC victims.
(3) Paladin - The consecration ticks for 2k(Seems a little extreme). He cast consecration twice and tried to flash himself twice. He would generally consecrate and then cast the heal. The mage had to be ready to steal the Wings.
(4) Rogue - He stacks wound poisons rapidly, so they have to be abolished. I'm a dwarf, so I stone formed to help out.
(5) Warlock - Don't cleanse the UA. Avoid the rain of fire.
(6) Druid - We spell stole the life bloom(mage had to watch carefully). The thorn wasn't bad at all.
(7) Mage - He keeps you rooted with frost nova and randomly targets people with frost bolts, which can be interrupted.
(8) Hunter - It seemed possible to avoid setting off the traps. For some reason you can see his traps. Probably the easiest of the soul drains.

With the fight being so random you just have to wait till you get a combo you can survive. We seemed to have trouble getting through a priest soul drain without someone getting killed.

It was our first time to see him, and it took us many attempts to get him down. For people gearing purely from ZA and Kara it will take plenty of avatar clears to get geared for this, but it is only a 3 day reset. I'm not really looking forward to fighting him again. We did get the gnome trinket though. Gnome trinket is very cool.

Note: We cleared with a Protection Paladin, but quickly figured out it was a DPS race, so we had to shuffle people the prot paladin out, and more DPS in. I really don’t like doing that.

Note: The flame wall that locks you in with ZulJin looks very nice.

Edited for grammar/spelling - sorry, there are probably many mistakes left.

Bear with me as it is a fairly lenghty wall of text. But to anyone that is interested, it is a detailed account of ZA from the perspective of a group that has no access to 25man content.


Did ZA for the second day today with a group of friends that is purely geared on Karazhan + Heroic items. (Been clearing Karazhan for a long time, between the 10 of us, I think there are only 3 items that could drop in Karazhan that anyone would actually need, that just never dropped for us)

Group set up:

Tanking:
1x Protection Warrior
1x Feral Druid

Healing:
2x Holy Paladin
1x Disc/Holy Priest (Deep Disc, has Pain Suppression)

DPSing:
1x Mage
1x Warlock
1x Rogue
1x Hunter
1x Elemental Shaman


Took us 2 attempts to down Nalorakk. The fight seemed tuned appropriately. Tank never came in danger of dying during troll form, and the sheer amount of damage in bear form demands a lot of heals from your healers for a while, but nothing unmanageable. Healer miscommunication cost us the first attempt when we had the bear form tank die. However, we reset him, ressurrected that tank, buffed up, killed him next attempt and still made the timer with 1 minute left on it (Hooray).

On to Eagle. Both our tanks had already done the gauntlet on the PTR, we explained how it worked, and we set it up with the warrior going up front tanking both elites and picking up birds with tclap/cleave as best as he could, Mage/Warlock would go for heavy burst AoEing on every wave of birds and they died fairly quick. Feral druid stayed on the back picking up the reinforcements, and we had the hunter dpsing the reinforcements by himself in the back -- the idea wasnt to kill them, just thin their numbers down. After the 2 elites from the front died, we dragged everything with us and kept pulling. We lost the warlock on the last pull to birds (they seemed to come in at a faster rate). At that point me (warrior) and the druid just mass tanked birds/reinforcements as best as we could and we rushed to kill the tempest, and made it with only the dead warlock as a casualty.

Explained how the fight worked, didn't do the warlock dotting method (our warlock is 0/21/40), instead, we had the hunter and the elemental shaman use whatever burst they could spare on the birds, I think they did chain lightning and multishot/arcane shot on the birds. It worked pretty well. Took us about 5 wipes to fine-tune positioning and we ended up going with a two positionings strategy. Position 1 (at the start, and after every storm) where we are spread out far, making use of most of the room. Every 45 seconds or so we called for people to tighten it up, and we moved closer, and then finally we collapsed under whoever was lifted up in the air. With 6 DPSers (feral druid flexibility for the win), we were cutting through about 20-25% of his hp every storm. Took us 5 storms to kill him.

Moved on to clear to the lynx boss. We didn't AoE anything down on those pulls, the lynxes just seemed to have way too much hp, so we had me and the druid mass tank everything, splitting about 3 mobs each, and dpse'd down the lynxes first and then finally the mother (we did notice how she seemed to get angrier and angrier as her children died -- rightfully so) but since the pull worked pretty well we didn't try to kill her first any other time, we just had a main assist mark things, and we adjusted our tanking threat output accordingly. All in all, a fairly easy trash clear, but longer than all the others.

This is how we set up for Lynx -- Warrior tanked it (we had mixed feelings about who should have tanked him since he doesn't crush and thought the druid might be better suited, but ultimately we decided that if I could do it without much hassle, then I should do it. Took us 3 attempts. First attempt we had people not pay attention to their range and they ended up eating shocks and dying. Second attempt I was insta-gibbed on the pull by saber lash (We were actually dragging him back to where he started -- a mistake we didnt make again and just misdirect pulled it to us at the entrance and had people spread out after that).
Fairly simple fight, people were quick with dpsing the totems down, and we DPS'd the Cat during split phase. Hunter wasn't having his best day and he actually forgot to tranq twice. It is quite a burst, but it is survivable. I had about 20.5k (22-23k when inspiration went up) armor with devotion + mark of the wild and ironshield potion.

Trash to dragonhawk was pretty fun, we liked the scout design very much, kept us on the edge during certain packs having to keep watching for a scout spawn.

Jan'alai was by far the fight that took us the most attempts to master, something around 10 or 12, but it is very nice that you can reset him fairly easily and ress everyone up while he is despawned. Fire bomb minigame was something everyone seemed to enjoy -- dynamic, fast, but at the same time easy. We handled the egg hatching like this: Kill the right hatcher, and let the left hatcher open about 6 eggs -- this way it took us about 3 waves to clear each side (only 2 on the second side, since the third break was the 35% mark). We had the hunter set down a slowing trap at the path connecting the eggs and the main platform, and then into the main platform, we had an earthbind totem down. This pretty much ensured that the dragonhawks were snared down 100% of the time. We had the feral druid running in there and picking up the first dragonhawks as they spawned, warlock seeding, mage blizzarding (he is frost), and the shaman/hunter throwing whatever they could to help, with this method we were able to clean the dragonhawks almost completely clean without having any squishier people take any substantial amount of damage. What took us a handful of attempts on this guy was perfecting the dragonhawk kill method, after we started trapping/earthbinding it was like we had got over a mountain and Jan'alai died with about 2mins 30 left before berserk.

After having read up here and WoR about the fights in ZA, we were convinced that we would be stuck for a while on Malacrass when we saw that we would have to heal ~9k damage on everyone every minute. We had people put on some stam gear to help. We got Blood Elf girl, Fenstrider, Dragonkin and the Undead Ghost. At first we were keeping the girl sheeped the whole time, sleeping the dragon on the pull, shackling the ghost, and we killed Fenstrider --> Dragonkin --> Ghost. We wiped a handful of times with that setup, so we switched it up. We killed Dragonkin --> Fenstrider and permanently CC'd the girl and the ghost. We had a few wipes while we were learning what every class gave him as abilities, had a rough time when he drained the paladin -- we saw the consecrate, and this is when my brain gave out on me, for a second I thought (It's just consecrate, when is the last time I ran away from a paladin consecrating me?) and stood on it until it ticked for 2700 -- which seemed a bit ridiculous as other AoE effects like rain of fire didnt hit for nearly as much or as often (2700 every second is a lot when the radius is big enough that you have to take at least two ticks to get out). Spirit bolts were not a big deal, healers had it locked down pretty well. Had the priest in the paladins group with concentration aura doing prayer of healing on their group, and the paladins took care of the other group. After we switched to the kill 2, cc 2 strategy he went down in a couple of attempts.
Switching from killing 3 to 2 mobs and working the healing assignments the way we did were the big milestones in beating this fight.

Our group is pretty casual and only gets all 10 people together to play on the weekends, so our ZA attempts are over for this week. We didn't even take a look at Zul'jin, as we were pushing it late for some people. Next saturday we're going back in hoping to kill Zul'jin and fully clear it. We thought we would have saturday and sunday to work on ZA, but it turned out that the instance reset on sunday morning. Saturday we cleared all 4 Avatars, today we cleared the 4 avatars again plus Malacrass. I will wait until Zul'jin to pass final judgement on the zone, but so far we have not hit a brick wall anywhere, and the instance seems completely doable to any Karazhan+Heroics group that is willing to put in the effort and focus into the zone.

Re: no time bonus from Dragonhawk, is it possible your simply meant to get him last after recieving bonuses from the other 3? We never got more than bear in time so I've personally no real clue.

make up? and i assume yall potted up for it too?

It's not bugged based on what GMs have said. Bear = +15, Eagle = +10. It's meant to be a challenge for t6 guilds. Any Z'A-clearing group can do three prisoners, since that's just "move fast and don't wipe." 4 is what requires you to be perfect. We did Eagle-->Bear-->Dragonhawk-->Lynx today, and had I think 22 minutes left after Eagle (+10) and ~28 minutes left after bear (+10). But we were slow on the Dragonhawk quadrant and only had 13 minutes left after him. We ended up about 4-5 min short.

My only question is the decrepancy in time received from bosses. A lot of people have reported getting different times from bear/eagle, and even dragonhawk giving them some time, when we personally haven't seen any.

You can Dispel/Cleanse the mindcontrol. If you had two paladins and a priest in the raid and it was any problem at all they were doing something very wrong.

You cannot cleanse it, only priest dispel works. If you only have one priest, and that priest gets MCed, there's nothing you can do to remove it, except perhaps a pvp trinket.

Purge works too. I'd imagine felhunter dispel, arcane shot, and shield slam do too. MC has always been removed by offensive dispels only.

Purge does not work, you cannot purge a DEBUFF, you will just remove their buffs. Arcane shot is the same, as is shield slam. Felhunter dispel I do not know, I believe it's may work since I think it's supposed to basically be priest dispel.

That's funny, because you can purge the mind controls on Lucifron, for instance. I'm pretty sure your ultimatum is incorrect, but its quite possible you can't purge the Malacrass mind control.

I am fairly sure our Shaman was purging the MC. Are you speaking from experience or theory?


In regards to the timed run, it's nice to at least know the mechanics of the event now, we were under the impression we would get time from every boss, and the dragonhawk not giving time that we were planning on hurt. We actually thought it was buggy, because after we killed the bear boss, we got no loot in our bonus chest. I think I am going to try Bear -> Dragonhawk -> Eagle -> Lynx next time. To me, the make or break part of the run is the dragon hawk trash. You screw around, and can easily add a few minutes onto your clear there. And every minute really counts.

Would be nice if the last bonus chest gave an extra trinket (or the mount) every time, as that's what most people that can accomplish the task are really there for.

I am curious what people feel is the most ideal group for the timed run.

I am thinking this is a pretty solid group:
G1: Prot Warrior, Feral, Rogue, Fury Warrior, Resto Sham
G2: Lock, Mage, Shadow, Holy Paldin, Healing Priest/Resto Druid

just wondering if anyone else has noticed this trend for the timed event

1st chest is always some miscellaneous armor piece
2nd chest is always a waepon
3rd chest is always a ring
4th chest ???? (never completed)

our order was also bear/eagle/dragonhawk/lynx. It could also be in that case:

bear -> misc armor item
eagle -> weapon
dragonhawk -> ring

please post your findings!

We got the bear mount from the 4th chest twice, assuming it was the 4th chest.

Turns out you can pan your camera around and loot it. It's in a bag inside a vase in the lynx's room. One of our dwarves picked it up on treasure finding and was able to loot it despite failing the timed event on the way to the dragonhawk.

Perhaps, but that begs the question: Would any Tier 6 guild want the timed drops? A few of them are decent, I suppose, but most are outclassed by Tier 6 25 man equivalents. Seems like all the real upgrades are on Hex Lord... and by real upgrades I mean [Hex Shrunken Head] which I doubt I'll ever get.

Firstly for what Csi said:

We've run ZA every reset since release, and can confirm this seems to be the way that the chess loot is being decided.

Talibb said:

Maybe until this is fixed, its possible to just go Bear -> Eagle -> Dragonhawk and then just cheese Lynx? Free mounts for all?

Both the guilds that got the Bear mount on Manno got it from lynx timed so it seems you just need to be good enough to do lynx in 20 minutes for a shot at the bear mount.

The clear to dragonhawk takes 4 mins~ from start till end if you take the route where scouts respawn. We did sorta fuck it up and had 2 people killed though on the way. We have hatchers hatch one entire side on Jan'alai, so two hatcher waves and we can just DPS the boss freely from there all the way to 0%.

I'm still trying to brainstorm more ways to increase our time, which I think is possible. Bunching everyone up on the MT on the eagle boss before a storm just so the storm is right on top of him and people can push out that extra DPS without having to worry about moving. Might be possible to skip some of Lynx trash too if their aggro radius isn't as big as I think it is.

Maybe it's not needed though with the bugged chest thing for Lynx. I'm a dwarf and I never used my find treasure the first two resets. My guild is gonna shit itself when they figure out we coulda have gotten another 2 bear mounts =(