Warrior already gets 10% reduction on bleeds, so a druid stacking max resilience will 'only' match a warrior with normal tanking gear on in bleed mitigation. A warrior in PVP gear though...
(Assuming resilience actually does affect PVE dottage. I want to know too!)
I was just wondering if you anyone could tell me a good group makeup for Zul'Aman? I haven't run the instance yet, but my character copy went through yesterday and should be running it soon. I assume that the makeup should consists of 2 tanks, 5 dps, and 3 healers approximately, but I was wondering how much CC should we have? My guild is currently trying to form a group for ZA when it's released, and thus far we think that we will have a spriest (me), elemental shammie (raid leader), moonkin, and holy priest. Any suggestions to fill in the remaining dps slots?
Definitely a resto druid is very useful for the bear boss. Like was stated above, mage and warlock are a good idea (I would almost say mage required?)
I was just curious about a few things I've encountered in ZA so far and appreciate any answers.
First off, how exactly do you handle the trash clear to the Eagle boss? Our group tried to clear it a few times, but between the birds and the two trolls spawning behind us we got overwhelmed pretty quickly. I assume there's something we missed, as compared to all the other trash we encountered, this was far more difficult.
A second question I had is in relation to Lynx boss. Having never experienced it myself, how exactly does the "Saber Lash" type mechanic function? We only had the two tanks as our melee, and even with them standing directly on top of each other we'd get one of them randomly 1 shot as the other was untouched by the attack.
I was only in a PUG, and most of those were around the gear level you'd expect for someone coming out of Kara, but these encounters seemed a bit difficult for the group.
Bear boss:
quite simple really. Stack the tanks on top of each other, and stack the crap out of HP /group buffs (bloodpact, commanding kings, fort) on the bear phase tank - HP > all - the vast bulk of his damage in bearform is not mitigatable or avoidable (and he doesnt crush) so the key to this fight is simply to have enough hp that healers get time to heal you back up after silences. 20k hp made him straightforward, a warrior can presumeably get by with 18k due to defensive stance.
Concentration aura or the Bloodfurnace heroic neck on the healers is also highly helpful - the actually tricky bit is to clear to him fast enough that you can burn his hp poll down before the timer runs down. Trash dps matters!
Lynx boss: We kept loosing people to flameshock -> earthshock comboes. It occurs to me that we were likely being very silly. Its a shaman shock.. what is the usual range of shaman shocks? 20 yards or so?
Gaunlet to the eagle boss needs practice. will post when we have a good strategy for it of some kind.
I was just curious about a few things I've encountered in ZA so far and appreciate any answers.
First off, how exactly do you handle the trash clear to the Eagle boss? Our group tried to clear it a few times, but between the birds and the two trolls spawning behind us we got overwhelmed pretty quickly. I assume there's something we missed, as compared to all the other trash we encountered, this was far more difficult.
Think of Shattered Halls corridor with the archers? Know that one? Similar mechanic used here. What happens is roughly 3 eagles come every Id say 15-20sec? You must make your way through the area killing off the elites while handling the eagles, once you kill the last elite on the stairs before the boss, the eagles stop spawning and you can take a breather. Keep pushing on. If someone dies, tell them run in and get back quickly, as you get closer to the stairs there is muh more going on and its very hard to find adequate time to res, so get some mana/hp back and prepare for more action.
Think of Shattered Halls corridor with the archers? Know that one? Similar mechanic used here. What happens is roughly 3 eagles come every Id say 15-20sec? You must make your way through the area killing off the elites while handling the eagles, once you kill the last elite on the stairs before the boss, the eagles stop spawning and you can take a breather. Keep pushing on. If someone dies, tell them run in and get back quickly, as you get closer to the stairs there is muh more going on and its very hard to find adequate time to res, so get some mana/hp back and prepare for more action.
Humanoids spawning behind are a new addition today to the gauntlet.
Have your OT pick them up and drag to the group when you aoe the birds. Max focus on the set of two stationary humanoids first then proceed to aoe any birds and continue up the slope dragging with you the spawned trolls. By the time you reach the next set those trolls should be on low health due to dots/ AOE effects. Proceed to focus dps on the two new stationary humanoids and aoe the birds again. The troll's should now be dead from aoe/ dots leaving your OT free to pick up the new set which will be approaching from the back.
Hmmm... every time I've gone through the Eagle boss trash, I noticed extra guards spawning at the back. but they'd bug out and not do anything. (targettable, but "Invalid target" for attacks) I assumed that when working properly they'd just hang around behind to prevent run-back zergs... if they continually spawn and attack from behind, that'd be pretty hectic.
Yesterday (15.10.07, EU PVP) we went to the eagle boss and it was pretty nasty ...
Birds comming from the front, and two guys with 28k HP each will spawn and add from the back ... over and over again.
We used a holy pala to "tank" the bird, then seed and aoed them ... if you once get to the stairs, with the boss, there's a mob with 150k HP .. once you attack, all respawn stop. Burn him down, and kill the boss (eagle) which is pretty easy.
But the way is more like a "bossfight" used twice BR (Feral&Resto) and one priest died and run back in ... We used almost all CD, Manapotions, HS etc.
We were all SSC/TK equip with 4x T5 and it was pretty hard ... so i expect them to patch it for a slower respawn or adds with less hp ... otherwise almost not possible for a "kara farm" guild.
----
I don't know if it was mentioned earlier ... a bug or exploit ... Jan'alai, the boss with the eggs .. if you enter ZA and go over the small lake in the middle and turn right, there's are broken stairs with the boss on top. If you don't want to kill all the trash, just nuke him from the view of the broken stairs. He keeps evading, but the event starts ... so he teleports all persons in ZA to his area and do his "balls of fire" if you are good, you can go on otherwise just run down the stairs (on the otherside) put an SS(ankh, or Pala will do to) on a healer and don't come too close to the grp at the feet of the stairs. Use SS rezz all your party and you can kill the boss without one trashmob ...
Hmmm... every time I've gone through the Eagle boss trash, I noticed extra guards spawning at the back. but they'd bug out and not do anything. (targettable, but "Invalid target" for attacks) I assumed that when working properly they'd just hang around behind to prevent run-back zergs... if they continually spawn and attack from behind, that'd be pretty hectic.
We did two raids yesterday, one before the 6pm reset and one after. In the first, we had exactly that. Lots of mobs piled up at the bottom of the hill and then despawned when we killed the boss. In the second raid the mobs correctly ran behind us. It's a pretty rough dps check, we got through it without too much trouble but then we outgear that instance by a mile. I am pretty sure this is gonna be a problem for karaz/ssc geared guilds.
For setup reasons especially for that trash a prot paladin would have been very, very good. Also helps at lynx due to a ranged pull. We wiped there due to the lynx raping a healer on each spawn. After that wipe we just told the OT to run towards our lifebloom druid shortly before phase switch cause that's where the lynx ran, guaranteed. But a prot pala would have solved that with a ranged pull as well.
But wth is up with the timed run here? After you kill the boss a little gnome spawns that runs through the place and fireballs urns. It took well over a minute until she nuked the one where the epic was in. Losing a minute waiting for loot while being on a timer is brilliant design.
For the hex guy I really do not think you need SR. We wiped once cause we did not know how his aoe works, tried to keep three mobs CCed and when the aoe came, CC broke and casts were pushed back so some not controlled mobs raped our healers. Went easily down after that when we killed the BE lady and that thaddius-wannabe undead mob and slept/banished two others. It seemed like it's possible to kill all four if you want to as well and have appropiate dps for the boss.
Overall it seems to me the trash is more annoying then some of the bosses, those scouts have a really fast respawn, which can easily wreck you if you do not have high dps. The pulls with two flamecasters are also kinda annoying, dunno if they are sheepable as we did not have a mage, but with the fast cast buff they give themself their fire aoe is hardly interruptable, even with CoT on, and deals a shitload of damage.
Other then the bear (which is the most boring boss ever, stand still dps him, have two tanks, one taunts at each phase switch. And it took us 7-8 minutes to kill it, yawn.) the encounters are kinda funny, some are obviously copies/near copies from previous bosses but there's lots of stuff going on, I found it rather enjoyable.
Phase 3 of the last boss is the only thing that seemed that it can wipe you if you know what's going on, sometimes those hurricanes can push people into a corner and then just kill them there. Also if you do not have at least one healer with hots, that fight is going to suck big times. Getting of cast time spells is hard already. Getting them off right there when you need to save someone can be impossible. We had a holy priest and a resto druid and still lost too many people in that phase three times so that P5 wiped us then.
On another note, did anyone complete a full timed run yet? We tried to keep up on our 2nd raid, the first three bosses were no big deal but then the timer went down to 12 minutes and we took a bad path, so we had to run 2-3 minutes to the other side of the instance and then there was no way we could do both trash and boss on time.
Maybe it's just me, but Lynx seems to have quite the combo, that could be considered instant kill, with 6k Earth Shock and a totem right after. Considering that totems sometimes seem to fire before they even appear, it did over 11k in 1 second. I guess ES is 20 yards, since I didn't get it on later try, but he still was shocking melee - so unless totems have minimal range or start targeting at max range, that combo is still there.
Not to mention, shifting on some weird % instead of 0/25 or whatever it is supposed to be. And despawning for good, when he agro'd with trash for some weird reason.
The timed challenge is an amazing stroke of genius. From what I can perceive, the trash clears + boss on each successive time trial gets more tedious/longer, while each completion yields a flat 20 more minutes (as in, your timer has 20 minutes added to it, stacking up). This setup seriously does cater to many different tiers of guilds.
Take for example, if the trash and bosses were tuned so that the clears for a top tier guild were 10 minutes for first, 15m for 2nd, 20m for 3rd and 30m for the the fourth. This means that with excellent play, the top tier guild would make it to the fourth chest with 5 minutes to spare, and get four extra epics.
Then take the bare-minimum geared out raid. 20 minutes is still an extremely lenient timer for the first chest, assuming people know how to control the trash pulls and have knowledge on how to beat the boss. That's one extra epic to reward good play for that level of gear... and the progression for that raid would be to shrink the clear time for the bear boss to 15 minutes, so that 25 minutes allow them to clear the 2nd boss and the 2nd chest, as well.
This gives a reason for all levels of raids to maximize efficiency for the first bosses. Merely getting the chest isn't good enough - you need to push the clear to as short a time as possible so that you have more leeway on the next few chests.
This, along with how the Bear gear check was implemented, really really makes me vote for ZA as the most well-thought out instance tuning-wise in the entireity of TBC. (Not that that says much, but you get what I mean...)
Edit: Also, just to clarify a little on timers - You have 20 minutes of time, flat, to -kill- the boss. This means if you pull at 5 minutes, and the boss is at 2% hp when time runs out, you still lose. On the flip side, you -CAN- wipe, recover, and pull again, and still get the chest as long as you drop him before time is up. MMO-Champion's write up is wrong in this regard. (Though there seems to be an issue with the boss respawn timers, seemingly random from 1 to 10 minutes, so I guess that's where the idea may have come from)
In fact, there's so much misinformation floating around. Taunt the Bear Form and position to avoid cleave? There's no cleave in the Bear phase, and furthermore, if it's a mistake and the write up was meant to say avoid the cleave in Humanoid phase, that's the exact thing you don't want to do because it's a Saber Lash type effect, not a cleave.
According to mmo-champ, For The Horde got the Bear mount from the 4th chest (as I understand it, blue posts said that it was supposed to be from the Bear boss?) which may point to bonus loot working in a way other than what's expected... Time for someone to go pester them on EU PTR's as to what kind of drops they get from each chest. :P
I like how you listed every single hybrid spec - except the Paladin. With you being one to beat :-)
Are nonhealing Paladins still performing so horribly in raids? I Only got to raid on Holy so far.
According to mmo-champ, For The Horde got the Bear mount from the 4th chest (as I understand it, blue posts said that it was supposed to be from the Bear boss?) which may point to bonus loot working in a way other than what's expected... Time for someone to go pester them on EU PTR's as to what kind of drops they get from each chest. :P
I knew this would come up. Sadly i neither run a DKP Addon to store loot-allocations on PTR nor do i have a good long-term memory. I recall we managed to reach Zul'Jin within our flask timer around 20min and we used a highly stacked raid (Grp1 3x Rogue, 1x Off-Warrior, 1x Shaman, Grp2 1x Prot-Warrior, 2x Warlocks, 1x Holy Priest, 1x Holy Paladin) to cut down the downtimes on Trash and having high single target DPS aswell as good AoE-DPS.
Trying to get together the loot we had, dont nail me on sources though.
Dory's Embrace (Bear Avatar), Signet of the Last Defender (bonus chest), Bear Mount (chest 4), Loop of Cursed Bones (Zul Jin), the voodoo gnome trinket from the Warlock (5th boss) ... and there i am lost :/
But a general assumption can be done. Ilvl141 loot (e.g. the rings) is definitly from the in-time quest bonus heaps.
The timed challenge is an amazing stroke of genius. From what I can perceive, the trash clears + boss on each successive time trial gets more tedious/longer, while each completion yields a flat 20 more minutes (as in, your timer has 20 minutes added to it, stacking up). This setup seriously does cater to many different tiers of guilds.
We got only 10 minutes bonus, after we killed the Dragonhawk-boss as the 3rd in the timed event, thus didnt have enough time to get to Lynx. If I recall correctly, we had 2 pulls left when the gnum got executed.
About the actually encounters:
Raidsetup:
2 Holy Pala's
2 Shadowpriests
1 Warlock
1 Prot Warrior
1 Fury Warrior
1 Alt rogue (Kara quality gear)
1 Enhance Shaman
1 Mage
Outgeared Bear, so hard to say anything about it, but didnt have problems to survive as fury offtanking in bearphase, tho with 21k hp thats easy said.
Falcon Avatar:
Easily doable with any kind of gear really. Spread out in not a too huge radius, get closer in the last couple of seconds till the Storm comes, move below the cloud and thats it basically.
Sidenote: You can cleave / WW / Bladeflury the falcons when they dive down.
Dragonhawk:
Actually a fight i would say gets harder the better your dps is. 2 Dots from the lock was too much to hatch enough eggs. Not sure about the tank damage, might be a problem, but with good spreading there is not alot of damage going around, beside from the hawks on the aoe.
Lynx:
*cough* dont test taunt from behind (19k sabrelash + hit = dead offtank)
Moroes Pocketwatch and the trinket from Shadow Lab served me well in the sabrelash phase.
I'm actually not sure how the 2nd phase works, the lynx despawned all the time at around 20% health (might be more) and the next phase then started. Having melee instantly attacking totems + announce on vent never let the totem charge any lightnings. Flameshock gibbed our Spellfire mage atleast once .
Hex:
Well now that i read you can outrange the drain that makes the fight easier for sure, otherwise it would be a retarded overtuned fight.
If you got a Priest in the raid you'll have fearward, make use of it!
If he drains a warrior: WW => Spellreflect => WW => Spellreflect. he always did it for us in that combination atleast.
Overall its a well thought out fight I think and you want quite a balanced raid I guess.
Zul'Jin:
Retarded fight. Tank and spank until phase3 and then see the priest getting instagibbed by 4 of those small tornados charging him.
Earth Elemental is a winner in this phase! Immune to nature.
Had some aggro issues in the forth phase, but nothing to awefull to handle.
Phase5 is just a dont stand in fires, pop Heroism/Bloodlust and nuke as hard as you can.
Overall I enjoyed the Instance and some of the loot is really sick. I'd love to test this with a t4 quality alt group and I'm sure if propperly specced and gemmed it should be doable to clear up to Zul'Jin.
Ah before I forget it:
Clearing to the Dragonhawk guy and the trash to him:
Have casters channel up their spells at the same time, charge and harmstring and the scouts arent any problem.
The meleeguys have a shout which dispells friendly targets and it ignores LOS.
The Casters need to be spam purged/spellstolen and then interupted properly to take away all their harm.
Does anyone know if the chest loot table is different as you advance, or is it simply an extra opertunity to get another item from the same loot table?
Perhaps not a simple answer (since gear will have a pretty big impact on the answer), does the timed event allow for any breaks at all assuming you get to certain bosses on time/don't get wiped so much your time runs out?
I have a few in my guild who *have* to take smoke breaks after bosses (a source of much of my frustration since "brbqs (quick smoke)" would often turn into 30 minutes at least twice in a night), and god knows the last thing we need are rogues sprinting around and jumping in circles and accidently pulling trash.
No, the timed event is basically a timer that goes off when you talk to the Indiana Jones guy and start the instance (which also saves you, beware if you've planned a raid and poked in in advance - being saved to different raid IDs before the raid starts is a complete pita)
When the timer starts, you get 20 minutes. From here, 2 things can happen:
1) You kill the next boss before the timer runs out. This gives you a set amount of bonus time on top of your remaining time, to go on to the next boss
2) The timer runs out before you kill the next boss. Game over, the timer is gone forever for that raid ID.
Think of it as those Time Trial modes in car racing games (Remember Outrun on the Sega Master System anyone? :U). It's almost exactly like that. You pass a checkpoint, you get x amount of extra time on top of whatever's left.
Edit: Okay, not 20 minutes bonus throughout - I've apparently been also spreading misinformation
10/15/07, 4:27 PM
(19k sabrelash + hit = dead offtank)
.
Similar Threads
