I dunno, my guild only does 10 mans and arena and we killed Zul'Jin on our 3rd 4hr run. Sure we had to stack raids a bit and maybe over-organize on some fights but gear wasn't a problem. It definitely would have helped because nearly all our wipes were from our tank dieing super fast and we probably had to use more mana pots than a T5/T6 guild but in the end it came down to execution. When 2 of your 5 dps is wearing blues on Hex Lord we even had to bring back the healing rotation to make sure the priests had enough mana to last through a longer than normal fight. By the third reset we were able to start getting some timed loot and it probably won't be much longer before we can get enough gear and practice to get all the timed loots.

Overall it is a great instance, I was really pleased with the lack of trash and the overall time required.

A big problem with the instance is the boss with frenzy; why on earth would you make a class requirement for a TEN MAN instance? What is next, 5-man instances requiring hunters?

The allotted time for the event is spot on though.

That's the whole point. Sure there may be better pieces in BT/MH but they may never drop. The reward for the effort involved makes ZA a very appealing instance. When you have BT clear and you have 10 people online wanting to do something, what do you do? A quick raid with a chance of useable loot has to be at least a good possible choice.

I think the biggest difference is that ZG was 20 man, ZA is 10 man and ZG had far more trash. I'm also not sure the ZG trinkets compare favourably to the ZA trinkets. The ZG trinkets, for the most part, were PvP novelties and wasn't a great increase in PvE progression.

In a guild like yours, you are going to find the best available set of gear for every person and farm the required instances until you either get it or the time demands of new progression content force you to stop farming. That's the way it is.

Would you rather farm a 1-hour 10-man instance every 3 days, or be forced to keep farming a 4-hour 25 man instance every 7 days for Madness of the Betrayer and Skull of Gul'dan, respectively?

Zul'aman can be run 2.333 times in an average raiding week (since the reset is 3 days long.) Thus:

Zul'aman: 2 trinket chances per 10 raider-hours per 3 days; ~4.666 chances at one of two trinkets per week per raid group. If you run just two Z'A groups then that's ~9.333 chances per week for your raid group, at a cost of 10*2.333*2 = ~46.666 hours per week. That means it's an investment of 5 hours per chance-at-trinket per raiding week.

Black Temple: 2 trinket chances per 100 raider-hours (a 4-hour BT clear) per 7 days; 2 chances at once of two trinkets per week per raid group. That means it's an investment of 50 hours per chance-at-trinket per raiding week.

Why on Earth would you prefer the conditions available in BT, where you raid a total of twice as many hours for almost a fifth of the potential "awesome end-game trinket" drops?

Because a trinket is only one piece of gear? BT gear on average is far better than ZA gear. Sure there are some slots that have best or second best in game there. But that is the carrot on the stick to get those people in late T5 and T6 to come there.

Did that actually trouble you? Our first za clear was without a hunter and I hardly noticed it. Maybe it's gear, but I am doubtful if it's a real concern even for lesser geared raids, I didn't see our tanks anywhere near close to dying during that boss, I actually thought it was a pushover compared to pretty much anything else in the instance.

Which boss? I have to say I've never really noticed anything thats like 'oh shit' enough to even require a Hunter.. even if they somewhat out-gear it a tad (some full T6, others with a touch of BT/MH gear), perhaps the Dragonhawk aspect?


I personally thought we would have alot more interest in ZA, however we struggle to even get people to do a 2nd group per reset since our first guild clearing in 3 groups. Theres a few pieces of loot that are quite handy but nothing nearly as bad as the RJ/NT/DFT of BWL.

I dont like how ZA feels either, ZG was much more of a 'proper' instance in my eyes and I would much prefer that style of zone to ZA, however this seems to be the way of TBC and no doubt WoTLK, lots of smaller quicker instances in an attempt to make things more available to the masses.

Oh well, hopefully my belt will drop soon (I was stupid and didn't want to waste badges on something that could drop... /wrist) and I can step back from trying to run ZA every reset.

I thought my question was pretty obvious. We finally get an instance that's aimed towards all sorts of people who play this game - ranging from casuals to the hardcore. All content gets boring eventually, that has nothing to do with a specific zone, but i'm just saying that ZA is the first of it's kind in that it appeals to most people regardless of their progression (and for the most part does give incentive for them to do it as well), and hopefully this is not the last of it's kind. Guilds on the high end of the raiding totem pole enjoy challenges like the timed event I would say. Like I stated in my first post, the bear mount was suppose to be a icon thing that you get, but obviously that's out of the window now due to Blizzard.

ZA is quick too, and on a 3 day timer. What more could you want really from an instance?

I'm not sure if I agree that ZA is good for 'everyone'. It's a logical extension to Karazhan and as such fills an important function in the game. But I can't really see T5/T6 groups maintaining a sustained interest in it beyond the first few weeks. Farming for some rings or a mount won't really work, I believe. Instead, it is more likely our alts who would want to do 10 mans and there the gear level issue might become a problem, assuming the alts aren't farming Karazhan every week. Therefore, I would think ZA is of interest mainly to the 10-man community or early T5 groups.


A bit off topic, but I never quite understood why Huhuran was percieved as a cockblock. As soon as the TAQ loot tables were out, it was quite obvious nature resistance would be required in TAQ. At that point, it became a test of raid group management to meet the requirements. We organized Mauraudon and Stratholme farm runs during the weeks leading up to the gate event and had everyone in "decent" NR gear before going into TAQ. It also payed off, we downed Huhuran at the start of our second save in TAQ. I thought the term "cockblock" would more commonly be used in reference to bosses where you have to farm the actual raid instance to get the required gear (FR for Ragnaros, FrR for Sapphiron and SR for Shahraz to name a few) rather than something like the NR grind for TAQ where lazyness was the only real blocking factor.

Of course it doesn't trouble me or my guild, we have full T6. (It did however, trouble our alts in karazhan gear...) But I don't see the reason of putting a frenzy effect on a boss in a 10 man zone; Hunters should be invited to raids based on real reasons, not because Blizzard can't figure out what to do with them (are they a DPS class or not....?)

I think you severely underestimate what an exclusive item like the bear mount means, even for t6 guilds. Sure not everyone will like it, but there's a reason there are a ton of others like it in game. The only reason no one cares about it now would be cause just about everyone got one over the last 3 resets.

For those who are overgeared for the instance, the main challenge of the Lynx boss is that he hits a Karazhan-geared tank really hard. He also has a few trivial fight mechanics such as "kill the totem" and "tank the add when it spawns", but the main challenge of the fight for a Karazhan-geared raid group is the spike damage he deals to the tank with a well timed Saber Lash + Frenzy (he hit our tank for 22k damage over 3 seconds on one of our wipes). Throwing a hunter tranq-able frenzy into a 10-man encounter like this probably isn't fair to those lower geared guilds who don't have reliable hunters showing up to their ZA raids.

On another note, I'm kind of disappointed that Blizzard put so few non-gear rewards in this instance. ZG had the head enchants and AQ20 had the class skill books which kept 40-man raid guilds running the instances. ZG and AQ20 also had several recipes and patterns for a broad variety of professions. From what I've seen, ZA only has a bear mount and one enchanting recipe.

It didn't work for Kael'Thas for sure, and I'd give my toons left eye to have a phoenix

Ugh, I have to disagree in regards to the skill books. Those things were terrible in how random they were. But you had to farm AQ20 because getting one was a significant boost to your DPS. It was just a pain in the end.

For reference, we're only as far as clearing Kara, Gruul, Lurker, VoidReaver; typical progression for a guild that prefers the term "semi-casual".

I'm impressed with Zul'Aman for catering to such a wide range of guilds at varying levels of pve progress. I like the timed run concept, the lack of trash compared to most instances when theyre released and even the hex sticks. The cash from the trash and bosses alike is a really nice change and helps cover costs rather than adding to weekly farming requirements to raid. We had expected ZA to follow in the footsteps of ZG, primarily as a helping hand to the lower end guild as a gear boost. Thats not to say that its a problem being a challenging instance for us, as we definitely enjoy the challenge and more content to work at and im happy it reaches such a wide range of players too.

So far though, its fairly discouraging and isnt finding much/any space in our raid schedule. We have a large pool of players who play varying amounts in varying kit, with varying levels of skill/awakeness on raids. If we could guarantee raids of our regular best geared raiders all the time, we'd be a lot further forward in the game, but we work with what we have. Only recently has our 25man raiding really been moving forwards and find it hard to form 2 good ZA groups out of one of our 25 man raids, so we either take 2 lesser groups and struggle to progress there at all, or we take 1 good group and get a bit further, while leaving the other 20ish players who turned up out of a raid. As someone else mentioned, some classes/setups make things a lot easier, where as others such as rogues who we may have 4 or 5 on a 25man, will be fighting over a single spot. Also the loot, and hence the rate we "kit up" the guild is fairly poor. So far we've only downed the bear boss, 3 times i believe. Currently that only gives us 1 epic item, which given that 30+ people may have been ready to raid, isnt overly productive use of our time/members.

In short, ZA is showing some great concepts and appeals to a huge range of guilds. For the guild im in however, its not really working overly well for us, or offering us much incentive to go ZA over pushing forwards in SSC. Dont take this as a negative critic of ZA, as its more of an open insight to how it seems to the fairly casual Kara+ raider, initially. However i do expect that with some decent amount of time invested in it and arranging for it, itd probably become worthwhile, perhaps when our level of kit/raiding improves a little more.

I run ZA with a PvP-orienented guild (a number of gladiators/duelists amongst the ranks). We're another "intended audience" when blizzard highlighted the PvE-usefulness of S2 gear. So far it's quite fun for us, though not challenging due to a light spread of good PvE gear (our MT, one mage, and two healers ~T4.5 level) and exceptional player skill.

My main issue with Zul'Aman, as it fits in to Blizzard's larger raiding model, is with their division of resources. Seperate 10-man and 25-man streams would be fantastic, but huge delays have existed for both groups (BT -> Sunwell and Karazhan -> Z'A respectively) as a result of Blizzard trying to cater to both. Efforts need to be made such that "raid content" appeals to all sorts of players interested in raiding. The timed run is a start, but it appears in the context of an instance that is otherwise almost entirely useless to Tier 5 - Tier 6 players (aside from scarce items that fill itemisation holes).

Related to this issue is that once a non-25-man guild kills Zul'Jin, there is a certain element of 'well, what next?'. If you're killing Zul'jin, you've "won" 10-man pre-BC content until WoTLK. Illidan-farming guilds can relate to this malaise in the period before Sunwell was announced, I'm sure. 10-man players have no such incentive to continue raiding. I'm already rationalising continued raids in terms of moonkin gear for levelling up!

This once again intensifies the need to develop content for both streams simultaneously, or marry them somehow, such that content draughts aren't a problem for either camp of players in WoTLK.

In spite of these complaints, it's a fun instance and I look forward to logging on to do it for this reason alone. There's plenty of examples of 'best practice' encounter design going on, which is an area in which Blizzard has been continually improving from Day 1. The instances are extremely fun at a grass-roots level but once again efforts need to be made to fix conceptual issues in the 'raiding metagame'.

To be honest, I treat ZA as being designed specifically for me (or at least my guild). We purposely did not read any of the strats and entered "blind". That brought the WOW back to the game . Currently, we are at the "Clear Kz in a night" stage, but are too small to do 25mans on a regular basis (ongoing work regarding a raiding alliance). The short reset and quick movement inside the instance have IMO, turned it into a Super-UBRS, an instance that I still miss. The frog/vendors are icing too.

I know its not the usual techie rant that appears on this forum, but I truly feel that Blizz have done the right thing with this instance.

With regards to the badge loot - with 20 per Kz, then your getting the loot pretty fast - which is nice too

Despite what Kaplan may claim, public strats and PTRs are not necessarily good for the game - or rather, don't always work in their favor. Secrecy on the harder encounters is definitely helpful in making them more "fun". Definitely exceptions though.

Of course that ship has set sail I guess - minus the PTR. But if we're to choose between the disasters of BWL launch, 2.0 and SSC/TK25 launch, or having a well tested Naxx... I think the choice is to take Naxx any day of the week. Even though it would be nice, bugs and tuning are so critical that it is unlikely they will remove public testing of new 25 man raid zones.

As to ZA being the way of the future - I hope not if it means a lack of larger raids. If development for both types of raids can be parallelized, then fine, but not if it means excluding the large end content - but thats my point of view. The development and tuning seems good for ZA. But then again Karazhan was decently tuned, itemized, and bug-free when it launched. It was ultimately karazhaned though - massive nerfs, reitemization, so on, so on, so on. I'm guessing ZA will ultimately follow the same fate.

I do often wonder if the PTR actually helps very much with testing anything. It seems like a lot of major bugs (especially in raid content) pass by unnoticed on the PTR and a portion of what is noticed is never changed (infamously, TBC beta testing). I would think an 'invitations only + non-disclosure agreement slapped in your hand' approach to select raid groups to test raid content would work better both at catching bugs, tuning the encounters to 'real' players as well as preserve the mystery of the encounters until the content goes live. As it is, it would seem to me like PTR is mostly there for the already far advanced groups to get a head start, rather than any real testing, though I could be too cynical :P

I know for a fact that T6 content has felt like a huge let down for me personally at least. We weren't in the first wave (about to reach Illidan now) thanks to the new way of releasing content so everything has been spoiled for us ages ago. Playing a game with the manual in your left hand isn't much fun at all So I'd vote for anything that preserves the content as unknown up until public release. Not sure if there would be some way to create incentives for people -not- to post their kill videos & strategies on the web as soon as they kill something... Would be nice though. And I would like to agree with the poster a few spaces above, we also went into ZA blind, and it was the best raid experience for a long while for me, even though with our gear we basically just zerged through it, but it was FRESH, unlike most else in TBC.

As one of the casual/raidguild crowd, I'm loving it. We schedule three 25 man raid days per week (for 3.5-4.0h) and are currently 2/6 SSC, 0/4 TK, with the 4 off-raiddays used for whatever our members like, which has typically been 2-3 Karazhan raids/week, PvP, heroics, the lot.

As such Zul'Aman fits us perfectly. Let me expand on that.

It doesn't touch our 25 man raid days at all, it just means that we have an alternative place to go visit with 10 man than Karazhan, with bosses that are, for our gear and skill levels, considerably more challenging than anything else available on off-raid days (which also means, since we don't go there with truly organized teams, that our progress is haphazard and slow, but who cares so long as we are having fun, picking up a few pieces of loot and badges on the way, and are generally improving anyhow?)

Zul'Aman's loot table certainly isn't "off-spec" friendly as many of us expected - most items are solidly directed towards standard healing, cloth magic dps, rogue melee leather, plate tanking, with the usual large number of melee weapons thrown in, but the heroic badge loot is, meaning that even those of our members who look at the loot tables and see exceedingly few upgrades (where one would expect a lot, due to our T4 gearing level), know they'll be able to pick up some items via the badges anyhow, though Karazhan farming is arguably better for that purpose.

As we also have a great number of alts and an unfortunately less stable base of players than I'd truly prefer leading to frequent recruitment and the need to gear up/round up gear for new players, there's no doubt that Zul'Aman will remain part of our off-raid day activities for a long, long time in the future, slowly phasing out Karazhan for that purpose, and the occasional extremely good item will ensure that even those few of us who outgear the instance will revisit it occasionally for the fun, to help others, ... and for that slight chance to get that elusive item. The timer adds extra incentive. We've only managed Bear on timer until now, but that extra jolt of adrenaline when everybody goes all-out from the moment the doors open and until you fail is great fun, and I am sure that once we've started clearing the instance, we'll do runs specifically with the goal of beating the timer.

Finally, it is a Troll instance, and Blizzard does great Troll instances. Whether it be Zul'Farrak, Sunken Temple, or Zul'Gurub - the visuals, mood, and voice acting beats most other instances, and Zul'Aman is no letdown in that regard. Plus, it is just plain fun to bash Voodoo Trolls. I do not know why this is so, but it is. Bashing Trolls is just plain funnier than bashing undead or, say, bugs.

So non-interference with 25 man raids, scheduling left up to the members rather than officers, a bit of challenge (and the timed mode certainly more of a challenge), instance longevity for us as a guild, some quite decent loot upgrades that will help us in the 25 man raids, while not making 25 man obsolete due to the gear we acquire since it covers far from all slots and is differently itemized anyhow, and all in an instance that has a good mood to it, is fairly short, and is on a 3 day timer meaning less of the "damn it, half of those online are already locked!!" problem that Karazhan occasionally presented. What more could we reasonably desire?


While there'll always be gripes about any instance, it is hard to see how Zul'Aman could have been better designed for guilds in our position.

The only thing that bugs me about Zul'Aman is lore. I remember we discussed what will be the reason to kill Zul'jin. Well, yes, amani trolls may become threat to Silvermoon, but its not even possible for them to reach alliance lands. I feel guilty to kill mighty warlord for "Shinies". Yes, Budd's quests are fun and i appreciate developer's sense of humor, but i'd prefer real lore.

Well, he is kidnapping members of the Alliance and Horde and burning them inside small cages unless you can free them in 45 minutes, so there's that.