We chose to kill all of Hex's adds.
He actually has a somewhat enrage timer. As soon as we killed the last add I think we hit his timer. He started enraging slowly. Got a 1 debuff that he hits 10% harder. Then he got a 2 debuff saying he hits 20% harder. Then 3 saying he hits 30% harder. It really didn't matter much. At the begining he hits very soft and as he enraged more the hits were a bit harder but not much. The hits I was taking at 30% were 4k dmg. I am in FULL hyjal/BT gear though. I could see this being a problem for someone in t4 gear perhaps or your healers oom.
They can still choose to not kill all the adds so they don't hit this enrage timer though.

We cleared the instance the 1st day and we have tried each day since but the PTR Us-Pvp server is just not stable and crashes nonstop. Its really too bad. We would like a chance to test the time trials as you all are doing.

From how I understood it, that's not an enrage, it's him soul-draining your raid or something.

I have no idea, I can't get my toon transfered to the PTR.

I may have missed this being mentioned, but the frenzy on the lynx form lynx boss is tranqable.

His ability during the fight is called soul siphon and it steals a class's abilities. This is what you are talking about. Not his soft enrage. There is a difference.

Drain Power - Spells - World of Warcraft
Drain Power - Spells - World of Warcraft

Cast every minute.

The bear boss was doable with a Paladin tank for bear phase in t4/t5 - only dropped below 10% once, although I did start taking ironshields eventually. The other Paladin was mostly in T4/blues. I think the gear requirement has been overstated.

However, he does actually have 1.68 million HP and an enrage timer. We wiped at 1% when we tried to nine-man him. (People in blues, etc.)

Paladin tanks are amazing for this boss. They're the best suited for dealing with taunt resists, they have respectable HP, ardent defender affects a ton of the damage, Holy Shield cuts down significantly on incoming damage...

We just got a mage in, so we're getting ready for another attempt.

krinker, not bad. Been going in with raidgroup groups of "whatever made it trough the transfer" so we had arespecced resto druid as second tank and an alt resto shaman healer in not very impressive kit last night and no sensible raid balance at all and it was still fine. wiping a lot, but we were not wiping to gear deficiencies, but to execution. do the fights right, and the damage output and dps requirements are are not a problem for any fight I have seen so far.

The egg spawn boss is the first where 'casuals' should run into issues imo. His bomb mini game seems on an internal CD and calling the hatchers to spawn the eggs dealys that CD but he very much likes to use it right after hatchers are dead when there are still lots of spawns flying around. Those are then usually getting healer aggro with the tanks not being able to run around freely due to the bomb game.
I suppose you could just do the fight very slow, just allow each hatcher to spawn only 2 eggs so you always have control over the spawns. But in this case you would die of boredom. We let each spawn about 10-12 adds and we still had to stop dps and wait for hatcher phases to get down enough eggs. If you have a paladin tank and a priest dispelling the debuff on him, I suppose you can just let a gazillion spawn at once and just wait 30s or something until the tank has very good aggro on them and then aoe them.
Our first attempt ever we rushed it to 35% and we had so many spawns that my seed of corruption was down to about 50% dmg due to aoe malus hitting to many targets.

The warlock dude's life drain should be fairly rough for people without serious gear, although pvp gear helps a lot. I was on my (holy) priest in one run there, had about 9500 hp buffed with a few pvp epics and the aoe could have easily killed me. It even dealt quite serious damage when I had about 230 SR on. We had a paladin so he gave me conc aura and I used PoH, which makes that np. But without the conc aura that won't work very well either. If he changes into a priest the instnat fear is also somewhat annoying. At least having a priest in the raid means you have FW now and he seems to use the fear only once per call. So you can block at least 2 fears on the tank with FW. The other class calls seemed rather easy so far. Mage can do a really big nuke, which can be problematic if he does his aoe right after, healers have to watch for that.
We also tried what someone suggested here and outrange the aoe, did not work for us at all. I was on 38-40y to our tank, the boss a bit further away and aoe hit me easily. I dunno if someone was out of LOS when he actually started it, but I doubt that helps. If it does, it's probably not intended as there is no warning that would allow you to get out of LOS other then a bossmod timer. And I am sure they do not build fights around boss mod timers these days, there would be a warning emote if you are supposed to LOS it pre cast.

Last boss had a nice bug in p3 when one of his hurricanes moving around knocked me through the fire gate locking the fighting area. Some hurricanes even chased me out there up to the bridge over the lake and in p5 one of the void zones spawned on me there. I could still use PoH to heal through the barrier though.
In general p3 is somewhat fucked up, sometimes you get pushed in a corner by one hurricane and another comes from a different direction and they just instantly kill you. Plus a 1200 dmg hit for each heal you cast does not help healing up the damage. The hurricanes also chase people but they are not that easy to spot between all the lightning going around. Feels like this could use some tuning, at least sometimes it seemed people jsut couldn't do anything but dieing. The area is rather small, you get a 10y knockback, another hurricane comes from another direction and follow you against a wall and that's that.
The dmg on spellcast is also linked to those hurricanes, if you are far enough away from any, you won't get the lightning bolt. But as I said the area is rather small and having no hurricane in 15-20 yards or so is pretty unlikely.
To me that phase seems somewhat over tuned compared to the other four phases of the fight, which are all a total joke. Would be better to make that easier and add some spice to the other four phases, especially p1 and p3. P2 is the dispelling thing and if you slack with the dispel, it does not really punish you. I think there should be another short silence after the clock runs our. Right now if I do not dispel anyone and the tank is topped before it happens, it doesn't matter at all.
I guess if you would do that, you would be kinda screwed if your only healers are shamans. But that's a pretty unhealthy class setup anyway. Otherwise paladin/priest can dispel and druids can just hot the tank up to kingdom come during the 5s 'warning' dot and nothing will happen either.

How is the timer loot dealt with?

Does the boss just drop an extra item if killed within the time limit?

Do you get like a bonus chest at the instance start or something when the timer runs out? So if you'd killed 2 bosses it would have 2 items in, if you had 6 bosses it would have 6 in etc...


Also a question about Zul'jin for those who have killed him.

He drops a blood vial. Is this lootable by all players or just one? Also is it a repeatable quest? (guess you won't know that if its just one person can loot). Would be a nice addition to have it as repeatable to encourage people to still run it once they had their gear.

In the same group as Lavode - not quite as convinced. He wouldn't recognise an overtuned fight if it bit him on the bum.

The bear boss is not a problem for us. For reference, our group is 5/6 and 3/4, so we're about half T4, half T5-quality gear. The bear is, however, a very boring fight that takes too long. IMO (and I put feedback accordingly), they should either shorten it by about a third, or give him some other ability below 20% just to maintain interest. Don't really mind what, but it's just a stodgy lump of yawn at the moment.

The lynx boss was definitely execution - by the end of last night we had things sorted and (I think) would have got him down even with our respecced-resto offtank and our alt shammy healer.

Eagle boss, we've not got past the trash gauntlet yet. On our first evening we got a couple of test pulls with *lots* of AoE (two T5ish mages and a T5ish warlock), but failed basically due to not having a clue what or how many to expect. Last night we had one AoEer, and it just wasn't feasible. When we have a better class balance, we'll know whether it's appropriately tuned.

Where I'm most concerned about tuning is on the DPS front - while we're operating with a very ad-hoc set of tanks and healers at the moment, by and large all the DPS we're running with is substantially better geared than you would expect from a Kara-farming guild. If (for example) the bear boss still feels long and tedious, I can imagine it'll be much more of a trouble for those fresh from Kara. Likewise the eagle gauntlet. Although I'm sure we can get through it with some more practice and a balanced group combo, I'm not convinced it'll be reasonable for T4 guilds unless they stack AoE stupidly heavily.

"How is the timer loot dealt with?

Does the boss just drop an extra item if killed within the time limit?"


There's a chest after you kill the boss, and NPC opens it - taking ages to do so, with timer for next boss ticking all the time.

the trash is the entire point of ZA - Zul aman trash is basically the boss that drops timer chest loot destroying it quickly and efficiently is the key to making the timers, and its tuned accordingly. Guardians do a dispelling shout - and flamethrowers have a 500% spell haste buff which is spellstealable. It's great trash really. have your tanks grab the guardians and pull them back (building as much threat as at all possiblee while doing this.) while your mage spamsheeps the flamethrower, when the guardians are out of shout range of the sheep your mage spellsteels the buff, turns around, and lays down The Hammer of Pain. pyroblast being limited by the global cooldiwn is funny as hell, if rather hard to tank against

I had alot of problem when I was there, it was a PUG, so not the best coodenation but anyway, those scouts are a really pain if you don't completly outgear the place and can just put 7k damage in 3 seconds in mid combat wit 4 other elites that are doing aoe and breaking cc.

Anyway, we just ended avoiding them, you can go behind the huts, and follow a the longer path were the dragonhawk eggs are (bellow the building on the right), you will have more pulls, but very easy pulls. So i guess the path in middle of huts is for the people that are doing the timed quest and need to be quick, and the path behind the huts are for less geared raid or raids that are learning the instance, since you can avoid most of the 4 elites + scouts pulls.

Went on the PTR yesterday and it was pretty nice.
Most of the things are already said here, but i got a little something that worked really well.
On the Hex Lord if you dampen magic your raid (or not the MT, you decide) it reduces every tick from the Spirit Bolts by the full 120 (or more if you got magic attunement).
SR buff + dampen magic made it pretty easy.
We only got owned by a fire nova totem.. did 6.2k dmg to everyone twice in a row before we noticed what happened.

They are stunnable... Your paladins don't need T6 gear to stun a mob, right ?

Thats an incredible reduction in the damage it deals. If this is intended, than I guarentee they wanted you to bring a mage to do that, especially for groups straight out of Kara.

We did it with a fairly Ad-Hoc guild group which was only those who'd managed to transfer over and a random rogue pug we got in to fill the space. As such group was a bit weird with 2 prots, 1 feral, 2 rogues, 2 shadow priests, 2 pallies and a holy priest...0 AoE (but rather nice mana regen for the casters). Tried a couple of different ways but then we tried it basically with me moving in front grabbing both the mobs from each trash pull and tanking those while dps nuked those down. Other prot warrior basically grabbed all the warriors which were spawning behind and OT'd them, any eagles were just ganked. We had no AoE at all and breezed through that time though it did get a bit chaotic towards the end due to the sheer number of warriors being OT'd. The eagles and warriors stop spawning as soon as you aggro the Tempest at the top of the stairs so you just need to keep the pace up else get overwhelmed.

Side effect was we were too melee heavy for the eagle boss himself and ended up having the 2nd prot just stand back and use his gun, downed him no real problem that go effectively with 9 people.

As i've said before, and no one seemed to have noticed it, the dragonhawk boss has a 10 minutes berserk timer. Believe me on that one, first time i've killed him he one shoted our tank with a 25k hit. and then went around to 1 shot pretty much everybody ( hit me for a whoping 45698)

15 seems to be the sweet spot for the number of hatchlings to hatch... by the time the last 5 come out, the first 6 are dead, so that leaves ~9 simultaneous birds up to deal with... very survivable with 2 AOE's and an offtank grabbing as many as possible.

I don't think that the fight should take that long - my group's kill on him was right at the 6 minute mark. The pacing mechanic of the fight controls the difficulty - you make the fight harder or easier depending on how you pace your egg pops. Finding the sweet spot that works for your group is the key.

Question in regards to Akil'zon trash.

Having read this thread, I have seen no mention of Akil'zon trash (i.e. the gauntlet similar to SH gauntlet) which leads me to believe the group I was in just wasn't doing something right. What methods are being used to clear these trash without wiping? Also, I'm assuming the adds quit spawning when you get to the 71 elite on the stairs?

In the group I was in, we had a t4/t5 Warrior and similarly equipped Druid tank who are both good at holding agro on multiple mobs. We lacked a lot of AoE (mage - kara/t4, rogue, hunter, spriest, rogue).

We tried a few methods of killing them (4 pairs of trackers/protectors before the 71 elite on the stairs) -

1. Kill Tracker -> Protector then move to next pair. Try to keep pace with adds as they come. DPS wasn't fast enough for this approach. Is it feasable to just kill the Tracker/Protector combo then burn down with AoE the warriors/birds?

2. Kill Tracker then move to next pair. Kill Tracker and move to next pair. Keep tanking the Protectors and the adds. Used this method to have fewer adds to deal with. Ended up pulling the last two trackers at the same time and with fewer interrupts per Tracker, they quickly lightning bolted/healed us into wipe.

In summary, we were being overwhelmed each time.

Any help is appreciated. Thanks in advance.

Well, I believe the gauntlet changed when they pushed S3 gear out. At least, there were no warriors mobs continually spawning both times I killed Akil'zon over the weekend. So it very easy and not worth mentioning before the change.

We just had one tank on the protector and windwalker (tracker? whichever caster mob it was) and the second tank just off tanked all the warriors that came. We would kill the windwalker and then the protector and move on to the next pull. We had one aoe who would take care of the eagles. Once you kill the last single mob on the stairs before the boss the warriors stop spawning. We didn't kill any warriors until we had reached the end of the gaunlet. Think we had our off tank holding like 10 mobs by the time they stopped spawning. We had well geared tanks and dps, but a pug few healers that were probably about what you'd intend for ZA (kara/t4/early ssctk gear).

Group was the usual 2 tank, 5 dps, 3 healer set-up.