EJ Forum Community - Zul'aman testing - Page 2

Muggins · 10/12/07, 7:35 PM

Willing to do some testing on the EU pvp realm. As soon as the character copy page is available that is, swings and roundabouts at the moment.

Eloran · 10/12/07, 7:42 PM

Anyone know the current reset timer for ZA? I'd like to hop in a group tonight possibly, but not if I'll be locked out for the next 3 days when the rest of my guild hopefully gets their copies completed.

Wintern · 10/12/07, 7:48 PM

Originally Posted by KrinKer

Btw, When blizzard said that Za would be casual friendly they fucking didn't know what the fuck they were talking about. Ok first boss is pretty easy ( but needs a hell of a lot of gear ) but once you hit boss 2-3-4 you need some tactics and good players. We barely made the enrage timer on dragonhawk and we had people in bt/hyjal gear for the most part

Agree, although boss one is harder than the Eagle boss imo, this instance will be really hard for the guilds it is aimed at (tier4/5), especially Dragonhawk. I can definately see it being nerfed before it's been released. Reset timer is either at 12 or 24 hours.

Swordwaltzer · 10/12/07, 7:52 PM

Originally Posted by KrinKer

Btw, When blizzard said that Za would be casual friendly they fucking didn't know what the fuck they were talking about. Ok first boss is pretty easy ( but needs a hell of a lot of gear ) but once you hit boss 2-3-4 you need some tactics and good players. We barely made the enrage timer on dragonhawk and we had people in bt/hyjal gear for the most part

Not taking into account the possibility of really bad tuning, there are probably alot more effective strategies (gimmicks?) that worse geared guilds will have to try to get by while BT/HS-geared people can just zerg everything down basically. Also with Z'A-loot being of the quality that it is, equal to T5-level raids, it has to be atleast as hard even if it's 10 man instead of 25.

mek · 10/12/07, 7:59 PM

It sounds like you just bruteforced the Dragonhawk fight, which is pretty AOE heavy. I'm sure it'll definitely trouble casuals as much as Illhoof did in Karazhan. Coordination and class composition are > gear on those types of fights.

It sounds like moderate amounts of nature resist gear on the raid will compensate for poor skill on the Eagle fight.

Balkoth · 10/12/07, 8:37 PM

I'll see if I can transfer, Hyjal/BT geared Shadow Priest. Let me know what times you're going to try to put something together and I'll try to make it.

Hate Monkey · 10/12/07, 8:38 PM

The bear boss strat is a little off, but close:

2 Phases:
First phase - Human form:
Has a random charge.
Mangle - Increases damage done by bleeds by 100%.
Second phase - Bear form:
Applies 2 different bleed effects - Ripe Flesh(iirc) and one other.
Raid wide Silence - unsure of range, 4 seconds long, does 1000ish damage.

Phase 1 go in, tank and spank, heal the random charged people.
Phase 2 have the 2nd tank taunt and reposition to avoid the nasty cleave.
When he goes back to human form, have the first tank taunt it.
Repeat till dead.

Got these nice bracers from him tonight:

Losar · 10/13/07, 12:08 AM

Send Losar a tell Alliance-side on the PVP SERVER for an invite to a somethingawful guild I'm also running to test ZA. Have a sense of humor and have fun. Mention you're from EJ.

C-2 · 10/13/07, 12:18 AM

The trick for the storm seems to be to run underneath the person who gets lifted in the air, we grouped up on the boss after he did his hurricane type ability. It seems to be on a timer not % based. Edit1: The CL range is 15 yards minimum range, and the timer for the storm seems approximately 70 seconds. Not dead yet but this boss seems fairly easy once we get the 'transition' down, if you can even call it that

edit2: no timer, the storm seem completely random, not dead yet but he has very low HP and as long as people are paying attention, it should be fairly easy after a few attempts

Chewy · 10/13/07, 12:20 AM

Originally Posted by Hate Monkey

The bear boss strat is a little off, but close:

2 Phases:
First phase - Human form:
Has a random charge.
Mangle - Increases damage done by bleeds by 100%.
Second phase - Bear form:
Applies 2 different bleed effects - Ripe Flesh(iirc) and one other.
Raid wide Silence - unsure of range, 4 seconds long, does 1000ish damage.

Phase 1 go in, tank and spank, heal the random charged people.
Phase 2 have the 2nd tank taunt and reposition to avoid the nasty cleave.
When he goes back to human form, have the first tank taunt it.
Repeat till dead.

This sounds pretty much exactly like what I saw during this fight.

For the Dragonhawk avatar, we could not figure out who the boss was targeting with his fire breath ability. You say it's a random person in the raid? It seemed like my ToT was showing him targeting melee only. Perhaps I was just not paying attention. Also, we were spread out as far as we could while he was doing this fire breath thing and we were still having 3-4 people hit by it every time. I was in the corner with no one remotely near me and I was getting hit near every time. Maybe a little more testing will show the true nature of this ability?

Also, Z'A reset timer seems to be 24 hours (I had an 18 hour timer at one point, so it isnt 12)

Rokub · 10/13/07, 12:41 AM

Originally Posted by C-2

The trick for the storm seems to be to run underneath the person who gets lifted in the air, we grouped up on the boss after he did his hurricane type ability. It seems to be on a timer not % based. Edit1: The CL range is 15 yards minimum range, and the timer for the storm seems approximately 70 seconds. Not dead yet but this boss seems fairly easy once we get the 'transition' down, if you can even call it that

edit2: no timer, the storm seem completely random, not dead yet but he has very low HP and as long as people are paying attention, it should be fairly easy after a few attempts

We cleared the whole instance earlier today.

As soon as the storm is coming it starts raining and getting misty and I believe you can see who it's even being cast on. Just run to that person asap and your good to go. Very healable. As per the birds that are flying around we doted them.
We did discuss not doing anything to the birds and after the storm ends seeding them and aoeing them down because they seemed to all come down to us after the storm, but we didn't get to test it out.

Xantcha · 10/13/07, 1:03 AM

Originally Posted by ANSeranov

Do you think that maybe there's a different tactic that would let you do it? My guild, which is just starting SSC/TK will NEVER match the DPS of a BT/Hyjal guild, and I fail to see how they think it'd be tuned around a guild of my level if you're going all-out and just barely making it.

Maybe that's why it's on the PTR. <_<;;

We ran 4 healers, 2 prot tanks, 4 dps. We never had issues with the enrage.

Renew · 10/13/07, 1:36 AM

The Bear boss has a lot of HP.

The Eagle boss is very melee unfriendly. We had 3 Warriors and 1 Rogue. Two of them died and the fight became much easier. In Karazhan we ran a heavy melee comp and weren't punished on any fights that I can remember.

The enrage on the Hawk boss is not something that is going to wipe you, though it was a lot easier since we had all the birds dead by 40% (and had tier 6 gear).

The Lynx boss is annoying without an spriest. I really hope they look into mana sooner rather than later. The difference of having a shadow priest is night and day.

brunnor · 10/13/07, 1:53 AM

Hex Lord Malacrass - Starts with 4 adds. Each add is able to be CC'd by the logical way. Sheep the ogre, sleep/sheep snake, shackle the undead thing and banish the elemental. We killed him with 2 dead and the banish/shackle still up. Didnt notice anything special about them being alive/dead. Each of these adds have a special ability but its nothing too bad, never got to see what the ogre did cause he died so quickly, but the snake had a poison bolt volley type. The elemental had infection disease debuff much like Emeriss had with damaging those around you, and the undead has a short duration AE fear.

But anyway... He has a decently nasty ae that does tick damage to the whole raid, starting at about 400(maybe 300) dps for a good amount of time 15 seconds maybe. Doesnt seem like much for now but it gets worse later one, will get to that in a sec.

During the fight randomly he will soul drain a target of the raid taking their abilities for his own. Rogue gives him SnD and blind, warrior gives WW and spell reflect, druid gives thorns and lifebloom(maybe moonfire), priest gives heal and MC, pally gives consecrate and holy light, hunter gives traps(dont know what else), and we didnt see lock shaman or mage. It will only be classes of people in your raid.

About every minute it seems, he drains power from the raid. Taking 1% per person per minute and giving it to himself. So he gains 10% damage and size. It doesnt seem bad being how its a shortish fight but combine with the AE that started as 300-400 dps it really stacks up. Its just a soft enrage cause you wont be able to heal that forever.

Dont know how much health he did, but it took us 4 1/2 minutes to kill 2 adds and him. Group make up was 2 rogues 1 hunter 1 lock 1 spriest 1 prot warrior 1 resto shaman 1 holy pally 1 tree druid 1 feral druid. All BT/hyjal geared out.

We two shotted it with a 4% wipe the first time, nothing too hard but our gear made it go by pretty quick. We killed Zuljin as well but dont have it in me to write another strat for now.

Zifna · 10/13/07, 1:54 AM

It is the belief of the raid that I am in (me + 6 For Great Justice + a couple of other guys) that the Eagle Boss's AE consistently targets the furthest target from the boss. We got some people buying reagents but we're gonna test this next pull so I'll let you know in a few.

EDIT: Doesn't seem to always hit the farthest guy, but we may have had people swap positions a bit too much. Something to watch but not to rely on at this point.

The positioning we found that worked well was with the boss tanked at the far wall and the raid in a smallish semicircle around him. Basically the idea seems to be to spread out somewhat while still minimizing the distance any one person has to run to get to another person, and without putting too many shocks on your tank.