Keline

We've cleared ZA today. In my opinion most bosses are way too hard for a guild in Ilevel 115-120 equipment, we barely beat enrage timers (We've killed Illidan twice and had our top DPS there) and our tank is taking considerable damage.

Especially one fight came in mind, the Hex Lord. On the kill, I think he spammed the raid with his AE ability 5-6 times. This ability does massive damage (I think 2 hits â 600 dmg per second for 10 seconds) which is SHADOW damage. Now if you're in an Illidan-farming guild and equip the proper stuff, it will look like this:


Imagine what this looks like if you don't have access to shadow resistance epics. Wearing greens is completly out of the question as that fight is HARD! (4 adds that need to be CCed + the boss who randomly drains special abilities from raid members, e.g. Fire Nova totam exploding for 7500 damage with a huge radius from shaman)

I expect this instance to be retuned because otherwise it will be 2 doable bosses for current T4 guilds.

 

Renew

We didn't use shadow resist and found it fairly challenging. That fight will favor hot classes, chain heal and Circle of Healing/PoH to make it a lot easier.

A shadow Priest will also help a bit.

With boss mods these fights will be come much easier.

Confidence is not Arrogance.

 

Keline

Shadow resistance trivialized the fight. We killed him in the second try (First try we didn't know what would happen, we didn't even have Shadow Protection buffed). Your guild has been farming Illidan for months and you think this fight was a challenge, this speaks volumes about its difficulty

I disagree on the shadowpriest. They don't have spell disruption immunity, so their mind flays will fall off after 1 tick, their mind blasts will take forever to cast as this guy bombards you with 2 hits per second. A shadow priest is essentially helpless during these 10 seconds.

 

Copernic

What's the ZA Lore like? Why the heck are we killing Zul'Jin?

 

Emeraude

Because he's trying to re-establish the Amani Empire, which would conflict with the wants/needs of the Alliance/Horde.

 

Darkrenown

Ah ok. Don't think ayone has mentioned that untill now, it was sounding like tank & spank while avoiding the storm.

 

Vhex

Improved concentration aura and/or earth shield will probably help. And if you don't have either of those you probably have a holy priest or druid then and hot's/pom/coh help just as much.

It's brutal, but survivable. Drop a shadow cauldron and make use of it. Spend a few more weeks farming badges to gear up some more. You don't have to come out of Kara and clear this zone in one night.

 

Dawme

Hex boss is one of the 2 easiest bosses in the zone and you definitely don't need shadow resist... But I agree that some fights are a bit tuned too hard (dragonhawk boss and zuljin). Anyways, I remember we used flasks to beat aran during beta, let the players experience and learn the fights, with some good boss mods, a bit of stuff from new badge epics, and some learning nights, the zone will be manageable by any guilds clearing karazhan.

 

• Falk

A little devil's advocate here if I may... I doubt Blizzard wants its intended target audience to blow through it in 2-3 weeks and then have nothing to do except farm the instance over and over again. So a little unreachable difficulty in the instance seems fine. Decked out half in lv128 epics will help, and lord knows there's a shit ton of them available, at a much more rapid acquisition rate than Karazhan.

But yes, Dragonhawk seems brutal for its place in the instance.

Analogy would be... was Prince Malchezaar hard just with 5-man blues and/or T3? Yes it was... with amazing healers/dps, you'd kill him, but most guilds needed some form of gear upgrade to build a reasonable error buffer around the encounter.

 

◊ Quigon

Karazhan has been nerfed a bunch of times, but perhaps that is their "pacing mechanic." (Aran in particular!)

But wearing Illidan gear and mentioning something might be tuned too hard, may actually indicate something is tuned too hard. Especially if its in the retarded ways: hitting hard to compensate for encounter-difficulty development.

At least with Aran it truly was retard management (although stacking was terrible on that fight... really, really terrible - which is worse?).

 

• Falk

Well, for me personally, I do think in terms of T4/heroic gear when I talk about difficulty. I guess at the moment it is a problem that the vast majority of people testing out ZA are the 2-nighter BT guilds bored witless, and that may skew results somewhat.

Other than allowing premades or a t4 gear vendor (enchanted and with gems this time, please) I don't see what could be done though.

 

Nuveena

I can't speak for other classes, but wanted to comment on the tanking gear. Quite a few tanks didn't much appreciate T5 tank gear to begin with, as it doesn't offer much of an upgrade in survivability over T4 / Karazhan offset drops. As far as I read it, T5 is mostly a threat set which is valuable of course. But for pure survivability, T4 level gear is similar. I have a Kara-level tank set for offtanking and with raid buffs I hit the 18-19k health bracket.

 

Cohren

I think what people in WoW have grown accustomed to is that when they reach a new boss for the first time they usually kill it in that reset. I think you can credit many guilds who have problems with keeping members when they try to learn Kael'thas to this as they blew through SSC in most cases and members expected to kill Kael within a week of reaching him and when he wasn't killed instead of looking at their guilds gear level as a whole they figured other guilds killed him so it must be "my" guild.

For instance, if your guild didn't have the required number of geared Warriors for 4H, what did you do? Probably tried to learn as much as you could of the fight after you cleared all the other stuff you had on farm.

In my opinion I don't see an issue if the Dragonhawk boss requires the targeted group of people a few weeks of farming the instance, Kara, Heroics, SSC and TK to get past that boss. I think it would create a defined line of progression, though it might be out of order from what the community and even Blizzard may view it to be.

 

Illundai

Personally after trying the place out a few times I'm inclined to agree with the general consensus - for it's place it's whackedly tuned...

The bear does hit hard, but due to us actually using tier 6 tanks it was manageable. I think personally that he will need a little nerfing to his damage output, but make other parts of the encounter more challenging.
The eagle is pretty good in my opinion, although for people coming out of Karazhan the raid damage might look a bit overwhelming. Not much to comment on really.
The lynx was odd, our setup might've not been so optimal (2 prot warriors, 2 resto shamans, 1 resto druid, 1 spriest, 2 warlocks, 1 mage & 1 rogue) but man that was quite nasty. The raidwide damage paired with the occasional interrupt caused by his earthshocks made me want to scream in agony. We barely killed it, actually. Mind you, all of us are in tier 6 quality gear. I guess we can't complain about killing a boss in 5 attempts, but I would expect the instance with our gear to be a breeze. It didn't help the Flame Shock was killing people due to no dispelling, I suppose.
The dragonhawk... personally I think it's a REALLY fun fight. Very new and original mechanics. Maybe they need to soften his enrage timer to allow more leeway, cause the DPS requirement for karazhan guilds will be too high. I mean, we can take our time and let him enrage and heal through it on the tank, but t4 tanks will have a serious hard time. I love the retard check added to the fight with the exploding bombs, makes me have flashbacks of Aran

The Hex Lord... I could think of many things there are wrong with this encounter, first of the complexity of the fight is not that bad, but the fact that the mobs are different each time will surely not add to the repeatability of the fight to t4-t5 people. Secondly, the dot or Shadow Storm, whatever it is. What the hell is wrong with that, seriously. We decided upon not using full out Shadow Resistance cause frankly that is just dumb. There is no way the intended audience for this encounter has BT SR gear. They need to decrease the amount of damage it does. This fight isn't even a retard check like the dragonhawk (phase 2).
Secondly, his Soul Siphon. It's a VERY nice idea, but poorly executed in a way. Most of them a very manageable, but a few of them are seriously not on par with the others. The Shaman and Priest one come to mind. Seriously, what is up with 7k fire nova totems? Not to mention the Healing Wave that heals for like 50k. Then the Chain Lightning. Most of the fight favors hugging to make maximum use out of Chain Heal and then that shit hits you in the face the first time for like 8k damage. Not good >.>.
Then the Priest one - mind control, yay. Not bad, just stun, fear, do whatever. Then all of the sudden. Bam. Psychic Scream! Hurray! He runs over to a random dps and instagibs him before we have any clue what's going on. The rest of them weren't that bad, really.
Those are my concerns with the encounter, personally I think the idea is great, but perhaps just not very well executed.

As for Zul'jin, he's pretty well tuned I suppose; phase 3 with the tornadoes took a while to get used to and since we didn't have a resto druid we had some difficulties with the healing. The lynx part was not that bad once you got the idea, neither was the last part.

All in all a very fun instance, but overtuned to where it should be in progression. Me personally, I had to chainchug mana potions on some fights (no spriest for me, but still)... considering I'm wearing BT/Hyjal healing gear, that really seems odd.

 

Teez

Only got to testing the Bear boss (two shot him thanks to server lag), quickly between two server crashes. While it was survivable, his damage output in bear form seemed a ... tiny little bit over the top (we *were* using two separate tanks for the two forms). Especially running only one HoT-capable class (a priest; had a pally and a shammy aswell) the DoT's were hurting, and I'm running mostly T6 tanking gear. To the point where I was rotating cooldowns (shadowmoon trinket, last stand, nightmare seed, shield wall, etc.) for each bear form tank phase - it was feasible, but then again I was doing this with 21k hp and a boatload of AC/Avoidance which a tank just leaving Karazhan most certainly does not have. Imagining tanking him in much less gear than I had would seem like a complete nightmare, both for the tank, and the healers.

Mind you - our healers were in T4 & crafted gear mostly, so there'd be quite some space to improve there, but regardless - isn't that what it's *supposed* to be aimed at, progression wise?

Warrior - Shaman - Priest

 

Tresjynn

So, I see most posts saying they're using T5/T6 tanks for their ZA runs, but has anyone here gone through successfully with tanks in T4/Heroic/ZA gears? Is there a certain part of the instance where the tank has to stop, and farm the first half of the instance and/or the heroic vendor to get the new 2.3 gear before being able to go on and clear it all?

 

• Falk

Er, bleeds ignore armor and by nature are mostly unaffected by avoidance... (Doesn't matter if 1 or 2 or 5 "land", it still does the same damage over time) it's one facet of the fight that doesn't get much easier with gear, except HP pool

 

Hate Monkey

I've only killed to the bear boss, but it was with a guildies alt warrior in Karazhan level gear and our t6 geared feral druid. We use the Feral druid in phase 1, warrior in phase 2, and phase 2 is supposed to be harder to heal for with the 2 dots and a normal hits, but it was rather trivial with only 2 healers in BT/Hyjal gear, and 2 healers in Karazhan gear. I know that our dps for that guy was rather insane. I was pushing 1300dps and finished 4th compared to the other classes, a hunter #1, rogue #2, and a ret paladin #3.
People say that the damage for the bear boss is insane, but could it just be the lack of HoTs, bad spec on the tanks, or something else all together?

For the Dragonhawk boss, for the bit I was able to see, it doesn't seem like the fight is to hard with the right set-up, but bring no AoEr's and the find does seem to get out of control quick.

Overall the limiting factor I see is the small ass space they give you to fight in for each boss, and with the aggressive leashing/respawning factors. One little screw up can lead to a nice attempt in a reset. Used to be an accidental BoP was recoverable, now it doesn't seem so. Is this the new 25-man design scheme they are going for now too? Small rooms, easy resets?

 

Teez

My point was that I was taking considerably less damage from his direct attacks - taking the same amount from bleeds plus more direct damage than I was ... painful.

This is probably the one thing that'll make the fight considerably easier.

Warrior - Shaman - Priest

 

• Falk

Well, the Bear phase has three things:

Melee - was hitting me for 2400ish, would be in the ballpark of 3000-3200 for warriors?
Lacerate - ~1400 per 2 secs
Rend Flesh - ~2200 per 1 sec

Rend Flesh is the one that really, really hurts, because when it's on you, that's 2200 unavoidable DPS right there.

We had no warrior too, so no Demo Shout (though Demo Roar is pretty close) and TC.

Looking at it objectively, lets just say a warrior has both bleeds up and doesn't avoid any of the melee swings; that'd be about 4200 damage per second (counting 10% redux on those two bleeds, which I didn't have) to be accounted for at the worst case.

I guess that'd be a little taxing on 3 average-geared healers... though the fight is meant to be a gearcheck of sorts.

Edit: Numbers were off screenshots, I guess combat logs would be really helpful to objectively look at the fight's damage output and compare it to tuning. We should start collecting those, I suppose.

 

Sapp

We just two-shot bear with one full t5 pallytank (tanking bear form) and a mid-t5 warrior tank for "human" form. Other group was t5 shadow priest, t5 elemental shaman, three t4ish healers (two pally, one priest), one t4 mutilate rogue, one bluebie mage, t5 fury warrior.

The failed attempt was 9man without the priest.

I was one of the healadins, usually ret but respecced holy to do ZA. My holy gear is fairly t4 heavy with a TK trash belt and a Brighthelm of Justice being the only gear past that.

All the people with good armor stood just in front of the warrior tank to soak up "brutal swipe", it was hitting me for 6-7k or so but I think there were only two of us actually soaking, tops. The positioning to get the swipe to splash seems really really tight.

Keeping the bear tank topped out all the time meant that even a bad silence was pretty manageable. The two pallies were assigned to keeping the current tank up, priest was doing raid healing during human phase and joining in on the tank for bear phase.

As a side note, the Rend Flesh attack could be dodged/parried/miss, which prevented the 2000 DPS followup bleed from taking place.

All in all, not too bad a fight. I really doubt people won't be complaining about it in a few weeks when they have some more practice at it and some ability timers are released. Especially if it turns out that the Brutal Swipe, Surge, Deafening Roar and Rend Flesh are on semi-predictable timers.

 

Lavode

Did the bear in a semi-pug yesterday since we didnt have enough people from the raidgroup succesfully copied - killed him with me tanking bear phase in 2 piece t5, Belt of natural power and the rest all t4 /new badge awards (I transfered over with 290 badges) Healing was a blue/kharazan (guildy alt) restoshaman, a t4 priest and a t4/t5 resto druid (guildy main) and while it took a couple of tries, he did go down so he is definatly not stupidly overtuned - Going back tonight with some more mains, and most importantly, with one of our warriors and a warlock along- HP pool and raw armor is everything here so I expect it to be fairly doable with commanding and bloodpact.

 

• Falk

Rend Flesh was avoidable? I think he was spamming that ability; seemed like it was up on me like almost all the time.

Blagh, it's really looking more and more like combat logs for bear dude would help, especially since we're discussing tuning for a gearcheck. Do help out and get some if you guys do ZA any time soon.

 

Dynasty

How I am testing is bringing low geared tanks etc for certain fights if possible, as I said easlier I had 2 t4 prot wars to test the bear form and human form and yes its quite possible, if you have an alt tank or know one, keep trying to do a dif boss with a lower geared tank and report the results, I'll try and get more soon, But I can say 2 t4 prot wars with gruul/kara gear ONLY can do the bear boss even with 2 palas and a priest and also 9man it, sure the fight takes time to do 9man, but Im keep challenging how much tuning etc it needs. I'll say from my tests so far this guy matches as Blizzard says: Nightbane difficulty, and think of it Nightbane way long ago when you first were doing him and not the NB you run into nowadays and laugh at, but hey thats only my opinion.

What we also have to remember is that Guilds when Kara first came out, did not finish it in 1 or 2 nights, it took them some time, ZA is the exact same in terms of that, Blizzard will not want something you just run through and laugh at it, they want you to learn it and get comfortable with it first and then run through it and face the time trials, things will be nerfed a little when it finally comes out, so keep posting here guys, then sum it all up and send to Blizz or do the in-game Feedback option

Btw my char name is: TDR on PVE test-realm EU guys if you want to help me out in checking more stuff, keep tweaking the strategies around a bit

 

Nenormalen

I went to ZA yesterday and liked it a lot, but as many have already said, some fights feel challenging even for people with full T6. We didn't have the best setup yesterday, but Hex Lord was quite overwhelming. The shadow channeled AOE hurts a lot, people will need SR or a lot of HP/healing power for there. Moreover, some abilities he can steal become very nasty. 60K lifebloom on proc, which MUST be spellstolen or else...9K fire nova totems followed by chain lightning...I feel that early SSC/TK guilds will get quite a challenge on him and on the boss before. But after all, this is not an instance which is meant to be cleared in 5 hours on the first go (like Hyjal/BT guilds can do), so with a bit of practice I think even lesser geared people will be able to clear the place in a few weeks.

Zul'jin was okay, the tornadoes take 1-2 tries to get used to, but overall it's a nicely tuned fight.

Trash is not too much in the instance, which is a big plus. Nothing kills enjoyment more than 10 consecutive pulls of the same mind-numbingly boring trash pulls.

We failed the timed event due to 2 wipes on the second boss, so I can't really comment on it, but after 4-5 clears when everyone knows the place in-and-out, I think the time will be just right.

Overall a nice job by Blizzard, keep up the good work and give us similar quality of original and enjoyable encounters in Sunwell.