But it feels a lot less 'epic' and immersive than Zul'Gurub did. ZG had a long and complicated questline (well, not really a proper questline, but a lot of quests touching the history of the Hakkari priests), and had quite an involved reputation plus token system on the Zandalari island. It also had a lot of optional/extra rewards and special tokens, like the Voodoo dolls, the Idols, the Edge of Madness or the crazy fishing stuff. There was a lot of Stuff To Do, and things to loot beyond just epics. I don't think Zul'Aman beats Zul'Gurub. The actual in-game lore is very meagre. The only motivation for Zul'Jin and Malacrass comes from a machinima, and Budd's camp is really just a totally unexplained random NPC camp. But Griftah's involvement makes up for a lot of that.
Agreed. I think the concept and bosses are good but they did a poor job of weaving it into the game. Who is Bud Redneck or whatever his name is supposed to be anyway? For something that has been over half a year in the making they could have delivered something a little more involved a la the Zand'alar trolls.
The way i see it, the ZA lore is something like this:
Great empire has fallen, their chief is seriously injured, their gods left them and there are people who want to take their epics while they are down.Which kinda explains why the hell the whole ZA has less than 100 trolls, that's even less than most discussion boards have :p
We have only got to Hex lord so far, but the bosses i have seen are quite entertaining even as a ranged dps. In most fights, all i get is watching my castbar and DoT timers, which isn't really exciting unless you couple it with damage meters.One of the more fun things in boss fight is a way to avoid his deadly abilities, which is represented in both Eagle and Dragonhawk avatars. And the zerg of numbers you get while killing various AoE packs is also quite refreshing, but that might be because we had a prot paladin with us.
Did you mean just for the annoying trash mobs or the instance as a whole? I'd like to see the pre-t6 group that can do Malacrass without a priest for fort/shadow prot AND a paladin for conc aura.
We just did Hexlord with 2xShaman, and full holy Priest as healers, no paladins. We are currently on KT so that counts as pre-T6.
Did you mean just for the annoying trash mobs or the instance as a whole? I'd like to see the pre-t6 group that can do Malacrass without a priest for fort/shadow prot AND a paladin for conc aura.
While shadow protection helps a bit, it (and fort) only really matters if your raid lacks a "stamina" set for the fight. Concentration aura doesnt matter for shamans (just have them cast eartshield on themselves) and druids. Just have your raid group up and chain heal and hots will do just fine in healing the shadow aoe.
Did you mean just for the annoying trash mobs or the instance as a whole? I'd like to see the pre-t6 group that can do Malacrass without a priest for fort/shadow prot AND a paladin for conc aura.
We killed Malacrass on our second attempt ever with 9 T4/T5 geared people and one random PUG healing shaman in blues. I was the only paladin, retribution so no conc aura. We had one shadow priest for the buffs, and could only CC 2 adds (mage sheep and shadowpriest shackle). We had 3 healers, all shamans, and the rest of the group were melee-heavy (2 warrior tanks, rogue, enh shaman, and me). We were surprised at how easily he dropped. As long as you know how to deal with the class abilities he steals, there really is no big obstacle in this fight.
We finally cleared ZA the other day and have almost gotten 2 timed kills down but all it takes is one mistake to cripple your timer. Got eagle to 20% before we ran out of time. It does help speed up the loot discussion however.
Overall, I like ZA. Bosses are more interesting, less trash, and nice loot. There are a few things that could use some tuning to a T4.5 level (dragonhawk) and healer intensity. As a healer, I don't mind those "get that clutch heal off" type fights but several encounters seem to force paladins to cast max rank holy lights to keep targets alive. (Zul'jin phase 3 and 4) Even with a shadow priest I was abusing mana pots which is something I dislike seeing as a requirement to a farmed kill. I really don't see the last boss going down without your healers using 2-3 pots each minimum. I guess that is my pet peeve with the fights.
I spec-ed Prot for the start of the instance and it made several parts of the aspect boss clears easier. AoE tanking by a paladin really keeps the healers alive on those 6-8 pack pulls or that timed gauntlet clear. For those waving around the idea that "any 10 can do ZA", I have to say that it is not the norm. I wouldn't want to do ZA without A) A geared DPS/OT - usually a feral druid but prot Paladin works great overall as well B) Holy Priest - AoE healing for Hex, MC or Extra MC w/ shadow priest, and key HoT/sheild/chain heal and C) Warlock and/or Mage for CC during Hex and to keep your trash clear on time. i'm sure after you have failed the timed event or cleared it to Hex you could change up your party composition to whatever you feel like. The goal would be a consistent 10 for the whole clear i would expect.
For push back on Hex, you have Retro shaman and Holy Paladins in the mix. I'm not sure if earth shield on a holy priest would be 100% reduction or not. SR seems to cheese it fairly well also if you are at the T6 level.
There seems to be a lot of complaints that X mob or boss is harder without Y class. I don't find it too much of a stretch that blizzard assumes you will have 1 of each class in a 10 man instance. I don't really have a problem with it either. Not to mention, most of the complaints are unfounded. We 2 shot the Lynx boss our first time in the instance with no hunter. The flame casters can be Mind Controlled, and even without a mage or priest you can silence/interrupt their casting.
Even though you can still complete it while missing a certain class, is it really that big of a deal to find 1 member of each class that can effectively fill a role in your 10 man group?
Now I may be mistaken, but wasn't part of the purpose of this instance to fill certain gear gaps that were particularly large for "Hybrid" classes??
As such, I'm not shocked to see this instance tuned the way it is. Yes you need a good class blend, but it's still doable with various mixes.
I think the set up is just fine on all the bosses. The only groups that will struggle are ones that don't understand their classes and all the options available to them. I know my priests LOVE when we have them mindcontrol a target... it adds a certain spice to the usual boring mix. As long as people are flexible and listen to instructions, every boss is well scripted and quick to learn.
There seems to be a lot of complaints that X mob or boss is harder without Y class. I don't find it too much of a stretch that blizzard assumes you will have 1 of each class in a 10 man instance. I don't really have a problem with it either. Not to mention, most of the complaints are unfounded. We 2 shot the Lynx boss our first time in the instance with no hunter. The flame casters can be Mind Controlled, and even without a mage or priest you can silence/interrupt their casting.
Even though you can still complete it while missing a certain class, is it really that big of a deal to find 1 member of each class that can effectively fill a role in your 10 man group?
I think this opens a different debate about roles vs class comp. Do you need 2 tanks or a warrior and feral druid? I think in general no one has a huge problem with an instance being based on a "1 of each class" design until that design seems to punish them when they can't find a priest one night. There are situations where you want HoTs during raids and if you fill your 7 healer slots with all holy paladins your raid is going to suffer with a suboptimal healing team. We had a few of our members try to throw together a ZA raid where they could only get holy paladins to heal. They couldn't down the bear boss due the silences along with an OT that was under geared. If they had either a better geared OT OR HoTs, they would have been fine. I recommended a gimmicky divine shield rotation for them but i'm not sure if it worked. I was off to bed.
Anyway, I think some players would prefer a role based design so they could grab "3 healers" instead of Priest/Shaman or Paladin / Druid to satisfy the design for example. I think it is a different debate since ZA can be done with a variety of class comps just with some obvious choices that are more optimal than others.
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.
We've killed him without any issues last night.
Though we *cough* wiped once because the offtank forgot to stack onto the main tank, the second time he went down without mush trouble.
No hunter in the raid all day. It just means you'll need a bit more healing.
If you're a guild that just came from KZ you might want to consider the hunter, but if you're from SSC / TK and bring 3 healers they should in theory be able to keep up just fine.
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What is the best order to kill the bosses on "timed"?
Normally we do Nalorakk (Bear), Akil'zon (Eagle) and at third Halazzi (Lynx) we run into problems with time during the trash at the lake. I can't even imagine the fourth Jan'alai (Dragonhawk) on time.
What do we do wrong, any shortcuts?
Eagle - Bear - Dragonhawk - Lynx seems like the most effecient use of time in terms of not having to back-track on the map.
I was also wondering, has any group completed the full timed event for the 4th chest with 3 healers and no prot paladin? Seems to be nearly impossible with 3 healers and no prot paladin. Then again we probally just aren't taking it seriously enough but we get the 3rd chest but no 4th yet. If you did it with 3 healers and no prot paladin please post your raid comp here, inquiring minds would like to know.
Edit: Whoops thought this was the EJ ZA Testing thread, if this isn't relevant to this topic just delete it.
To add my 2c to the thread, I think that the pacing of ZA is excellent. The gauntlet style trash adds a cool feel to the instance and the fact it's a ~2 hour clear means it's quick and easy to clear.
I've got to say though I can feel for people who are just finishing up in Karazhan wanting to get into ZA. We took a full crew of alts into ZA to see how we did, some of us were in full karazhan/crafted epics, others were in 5 man blues/kara epics, and we had one or two green machines present. We did bear and eagle fine but Lynx just repeatedly handed us our asses over and over, was a pretty big wake up call to how challenging this zone is to guilds just coming out of Kara.
Eagle - Bear - Dragonhawk - Lynx seems like the most effecient use of time in terms of not having to back-track on the map.
I was also wondering, has any group completed the full timed event for the 4th chest with 3 healers and no prot paladin? Seems to be nearly impossible with 3 healers and no prot paladin. Then again we probally just aren't taking it seriously enough but we get the 3rd chest but no 4th yet. If you did it with 3 healers and no prot paladin please post your raid comp here, inquiring minds would like to know.
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Our 3rd time to ZA this week got us through the trial with about 60-45 seconds to spare using 3 healers. Our holy paladin put on a mix of badge FR and assorted prot pieces to tank the dragonhawks for the boss though. We had planned on hatching a side at a time, but just forgot to kill one of the hatchers and ended up with nearly all of them dead after one bomb phase. An actually prot specced paladin who heals when nessecary would probably speed things up, but we managed to make it with the reverse.
There seems to be a lot of complaints that X mob or boss is harder without Y class. I don't find it too much of a stretch that blizzard assumes you will have 1 of each class in a 10 man instance. I don't really have a problem with it either. Not to mention, most of the complaints are unfounded. We 2 shot the Lynx boss our first time in the instance with no hunter. The flame casters can be Mind Controlled, and even without a mage or priest you can silence/interrupt their casting.
Even though you can still complete it while missing a certain class, is it really that big of a deal to find 1 member of each class that can effectively fill a role in your 10 man group?
I think classes being required or preferred is generally okay, but doesn't really work for where ZA sits in the raid game. For T4 guilds, it's a bonus, helping them gear up to press in to TK and SSC. For T5 and T6 guilds, it fills itemization holes and provides upgrades for those who the RNG hates. But it's not progression. Being able to log on and say "Hey, we've got a couple tanks, a few healers, and some dps. Let's go kill some trolls" works for where ZA is placed in the raid structure.
Maybe I'm mistaken here but I thought ZA was supposed to be a progression zone for T4 guilds?
And I don't think it's a coincidence that guilds who can't kill Vashj or Kael sometimes struggle with Hex Lord and Zul'jin. There's a reason all those bosses drop similar ilvl items.
I just mean it's not a major stop in the progression path. It's certainly a progression from T4. But you don't need ZA to do T5 as much as you needed T4 to do it, as much as you need T5 to do T6. If you're a guild with the tier 4 stuff on farm, you're setting your sights on TK/SSC. ZA will help you along the path, but it's not the destination.
To use my guild as an example, we're certainly going to head in to ZA. But it will probably be mostly the core group, the ones who are already geared and are just waiting for the average raider to be geared enough to move on in the content. I really doubt that with Mag/Gruul/Kara done we'd spend a whole lot of time getting everyone ZA-geared before moving into TK/SSC.
I dislike this zone for many reasons. Trash is too hard compared to the almost trivial bosses. No, not hard, just annoying and stupid.
I think Zul'Gurub was both easier to do and more enjoyable. Zul'aman also seems to have no draw at all for someone who outgears it, since there are very few items (a trinket maybe) that people want from there, whereas in ZG you had shoulder enchants, head/leg enchants and charms that were all pretty unique and (at least sort of) useful.
If the zone had had reputation and an enchant reward at exalted, I would have liked it a lot more, but now it's just another useless dungeon that has as much appeal as any random heroic.
I dislike this zone for many reasons. Trash is too hard compared to the almost trivial bosses. No, not hard, just annoying and stupid.
I think Zul'Gurub was both easier to do and more enjoyable. Zul'aman also seems to have no draw at all for someone who outgears it, since there are very few items (a trinket maybe) that people want from there, whereas in ZG you had shoulder enchants, head/leg enchants and charms that were all pretty unique and (at least sort of) useful.
If the zone had had reputation and an enchant reward at exalted, I would have liked it a lot more, but now it's just another useless dungeon that has as much appeal as any random heroic.
ZG, when it came out was harder in comparison to ZA. Raids that where in BWL, but did not yet clear it completely, took a whole night and maybe managed to get down one to three bosses. Raids that where at the end of content managed maybe to clear it in one night.
Now in ZA, many many raids that aren't top end content (ie. not in MH/BT yet) have cleared ZA on release day.
Also, ZG was changed several times, especially I remember rep gains being increased dramatically and lots of trash groups removed.
I personally like the fact there isn't that much trash in ZA. Still quite much if you are on the time trial but overall there isn't even half as much as you had in ZG on release. You had stretches of 30-45 minutes of trash clears to the next boss. Now in ZA we have timers ranging from 20 to 10 minutes boss to boss and it's doable.
For people who outgear it, there's always badges and the time trial which is absolutely not trivial, even for Illidan farming guilds. ZG became easy about 1 month after AQ, with new gear and spell ranks you started to rush trough, but I definitly remember the time where you had multi-day instances and you went in finishing bosses x to Hakkar because you couldn't do it on the first day due to time constraints, not incapability to down bosses.
Now you might not like ZA, which is fine and all, but your facts that ZG was easier is simply wrong. It wasn't. It became easer at some point, but at release time, it wasn't and clearing it took more time than ZA, no matter if you were end of content at that time or if you were a raid in the middle of content. You couldn't PuG ZG in the beginning, just as you couldn't PuG MC or BWL when it was relatively fresh. At least, that's my experience and memory from my realm. Your mileage may vary.
Agree with Cad here. ZG war definitely harder when it came out. I remember wiping on the spider quite often in the beginning, not to mention the tiger boss. Those fights required a lot of coordination that was unheard before. ZA has some new gimmicks like the hatcher spawn on the dragonhawk avatar, but in the end its not a huge jump from what we know from other instances we raid. And if you aren't on the ball the bosses will hand your backside on a silver plate (as we saw yesterday when we were too careless - probably due to the fact that we still had other things in mind :P).
I like all the bosses, but echoing others within this thread they REALLY should have implemented more "side bosses" (Hi Hexxer), Reputation as a reward/reason to continue to go back, long/hard class quests (ala ZG Class Trinkets), more options/choices for Shoulder Enchants or Metas that only drop via bosses or events.
They could have gone alot of ways, but chose not to. Now the ZA raids are all starting to become eerily similar.... like 5 DPS Casters all chasing the Trinket, an alt tank or two, healers who don't really want to go outside of Tree Druids for the trinket, etc.
The loot seems too damn repetitive - oh boy another enh shm or moonkin item, with the good stuff being limited to the last two bosses basically, and some classes getting hosed altogether on loot options from the entire zone.
Personally I'm very happy with the instance itself. It's FUN. That's the big thing. It's quick, challenging, but still requires some skill and attentiveness. The rewards for speed are a GREAT new gimmick that I think we'll see lots more of. I'm still unsure about the 3 day reset though, as I feel this will lead to a short shelf life and excessive gear for the time investment.
Where I find myself let down is with the quality of drops. Did we really need to trivialize SSC and TK?? Sadly since the expansion the loot distribution has gone turbo. Remember how ZG only gave a few epics with mostly blues?? But those blues were still upgrades.
It seems we are doomed to the recent trend of nerfing things for the sake of casual players and the whole "make epics available to everyone". What is often lost in the casual vs hardcore debate is that there is a large population in the middle. For those people who were pushing through SSC and TK, you have essentially provided a disincentive to progress in 25 man content.
I would agree with this, particularly in terms of the loot [including the new badge rewards] being better in some cases than their SSC/TK equivalents. I found that a bit of a rude shock personally. We are progressing through these instances at the moment and, at this stage, should be looking to continue that as the main focus .
ZA is a nicely done instance in my opinion, I'd just prefer to get through to BT personally with ZA for a bit of fun and something different on the side.
ZA could be fun, except that some of the trash is very, very annoying in my opinion. It's not hard or anything but it needs more focus and coordination than BT trash I have seen so far, and honsetly, if I do ZA on an offnight I don't really want to focus 100% on trash, but just to have some laid back fun. Not to mention the scout wing is just retarded without certain classes, and even when you have those classes, unlucky spawns can wipe you. Also I had a very bad experience with no priest in raid at hex lord last night. It is certainly managable without priest, but just too much pain.
Of course we cleared it every reset so far, but in the end I never felt like "man that was fun", but more like "thank you god it ended".
Our 3rd time to ZA this week got us through the trial with about 60-45 seconds to spare using 3 healers. Our holy paladin put on a mix of badge FR and assorted prot pieces to tank the dragonhawks for the boss though. We had planned on hatching a side at a time, but just forgot to kill one of the hatchers and ended up with nearly all of them dead after one bomb phase. An actually prot specced paladin who heals when nessecary would probably speed things up, but we managed to make it with the reverse.
I'm curious, if you don't mind; how much time did you have left on the clock after killing the 3rd boss? I'm just wondering how far off we are - our last clear left 6 minutes after Dragonhawk with a number of places we can improve time.
The other question is how do folk going for the timer handle loot? I've tried a couple of things but invariably there's some problem with it. I had loot on group loot so that we could loot while clearing, leaving one person behind to open the chest. But after we killed the Bear, and folk were working on the dragonhawk trash, we found the loot popup didn't show for the folk clearing - just for the person in range opening the box.
I tried FFA with the idea that the person winning the item would run back and pick it up, but then on the dragonhawk timed box, the rogue ring dropped and the rogue in question got MCd on a trash pack and lost loot rights to the box. Just to be absolutely clear, we knew we were missing the 4th timer so we all hung around and he had a gear icon on the box. Then we cleared a pack, he got MCd and then when he returned to pick up his ring he could no longer open it. Other players could.
Granted some of this stuff is just bugs, but I'm curious how other folk are handling loot efficiently (and reliably) because standing around and waiting for the box wastes at least 3 minutes (one per boss).
Once the boss dies, one person peels off directly and hits the guy with the chest. We find out that item and the winner goes back for it. We try to have someone stationed there during the boss fight so that we can just walk a few paces for it.
11/24/07, 12:49 PM
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