Amonra

Some days you get the bear, other days the bear gets you. This thread is aimed at helping people achieve the former more than the latter.

There is a thread about the ZA zone in general which contains useful advice about the timed run, but I thought it would be helpful to have a thread specifically for the timed run with a basic strategy plus hints and tips for beating the timer.

This thread assumes a working knowledge of the zone and bosses so doesn’t describe these in detail. The tactics and hints in this thread come from my guild’s experience with the timed run (after a lot of pain our first bear was this week!) plus reading of all the advice in the general ZA thread.

Basics:

Killing the bear boss adds 15 minutes, killing the eagle boss adds 10 minutes. No extra time is added for the dragonhawk or lynx bosses.

Don't release any prisoners or loot any chests until the end - it just wastes time. If the boss is killed then the prisoners will not be harmed, even if you miss the overall timer. As soon as a boss dies, grab the badge and move on. I would recommend leaving group loot on and rolling need/greed as necessary – that way you can allocate loot while moving on to the next area.

Keep moving - time standing around is time wasted. Don't need to wait for everyone to be full mana before pulling - pretty much chain pull and everyone needs to keep up, use mana pots if necessary. But be sensible about this – dying to a premature pull will probably fail the timer – occasionally waiting for 15 seconds won’t unless it becomes a habit.

Consumables are good! Dual elixirs will probably work as well as a flask, because if people die then the timer will probably be missed anyway. Oils and food are cheap and useful.

The whole raid needs to know what they are expected to do before the run starts. Giving strat talks while on the timer is pretty much a guaranteed fail.


Group makup:

How you play is much more important than what group you enter the zone with. That said there are a few (hopefully helpful) words of advice.

The instance is very much easier with a paladin tank and at least 2 AEers. There are a lot of places where mobs can be AEd to save time. However the timer can be certainly beaten without a paladin tank, but it’s that little bit harder.

A second tank is required (warrior or druid is fine). A dps specced tank can fill the role of the second tank.

Two healers are required, and preferably no more than 2. Adding a third healer probably slows you down by about 4-7 minutes so unless you are cruising through with 10 minutes to spare (in which case you don’t need to be reading this!) it will probably cause you to fail.

Edit: Plenty of runs have been completed with 3 healers so it is a very viable alternative, although your dpsers will need to work a little harder to compensate.

Heavy dps is required. There’s a lot of killing to be done between you and that bear of your dreams and T4 gear isn’t really going to get the job done, no matter how hard you try.

A shadowpriest is good for mana regain and VE to help with healing (and for fortitude), although unless you have a paladin for salvation, they may need to watch their threat to some extent.

Although better gear obviously makes the run that bit easier, a number of guilds have obtained bear mounts with pre T5 gear. Good play is the most important attribute to bring to the raid.


Kill order:

The best order is bear, dragonhawk, eagle, lynx. The main disadvantage of this order is that if you don’t get it right then you could easily only get 2 chests by failing to kill the eagle in time.

A very good alternative order is eagle, bear, dragonhawk, lynx which should guarantee 3 chests with reasonable play, although it probably wastes about a minute compared to the ideal order.

Edit: At least that's my experience of the zone. Others feel that the alternative eagle, bear, dragonhawk, lynx route is better - some of the Lynx trash can be skipped by this route as well by hugging the wall near the Hex Lord entrance. See posts below for more details and decide which route is best for you.

Including clearing trash, the bear should take about 10 minutes, dragonhawk 12 minutes, Eagle 8 minutes, Lynx 15 minutes (this can be tight for Lynx so ideally you want to pick some extra time on previous bosses). These times aren’t set in stone, but are good targets to aim for.


The kills:

Bear Trash:

There is a pack of 2 roamers before you really start the bear trash. These can be avoided, but there is a definite risk of them aggroing as you fight the trash. Probably it is safer to kill these.

Once you move up, the bear avatar will run off and send some trash towards you. Kill these and pull the first pack of bears. Avoid the other packs of bears by hugging the wall as you move onwards.

After that it is really just a matter of clearing the rest of the trash to the boss. Make sure to tank the bear riders apart from each other.

Bear:

Pretty easy tank'n'spank. Killing the boss adds 15 minutes to the timer. With the added time, you should have 25 minutes left after the boss dies.


Dragonhawk trash:

Make sure to kill the scouts before they reach the drums – having adds summoned wastes a lot of time. Don’t engage them when they are close to the drums.

Kill flamecasters first as they do a lot of damage. Make sure to interrupt them and either spellsteal or dispel their haste buff.

If there is more than one flamecaster in a pack then it can be a good idea to mind control one. This helps reduce raid damage, and also kill the adds a lot faster. Somewhat risky however as an early MC break can get messy. Whether you want to take this risk will probably depend how close you expect to be on the overall timer.

Avoid aggroing the pack set back on the right (near the start), and avoid aggroing any on the stairs. The last dragonhawk pack can be avoided by waiting until they roam out of the way. This is generally better than killing them. The very last pack of mobs should be fought on the stairs to avoid aggroing the roamers.


Dragonhawk:

The standard strategy is to let the hatchers fully open one side, paladin tank + AE the adds down. Rise and repeat for the other side then spank down the boss. A non-tank paladin can tank the adds okay. It can be done fairly well with a non-paladin tank as well, it’s just that bit more difficult. If you have a shadow priest then he should stay on the boss, but all other dps should help on adds.

An alternative option is to leave both hatchers alive and kill them after they each hatch 2-3 eggs. This should help to spread out the adds more.

Try not to all stand in one place as this will mean that flame breath hits the whole raid.

You should have 13 minutes left when the boss dies. After the dragonhawk, jump down and then head left through the water to the outside of the bear area and then right to the eagle area. Basically don’t aggro the 2 roamers outside the Hex Lord’s area.

Eagle trash:

The aim here is to pull the tempest as soon as you can manage it without dying because pulling the tempest stops adds being generated.

Just keep moving as fast as you can (without dying), and as soon as you have a clear shot to the tempest, pull him.

Eagle: Spread out most of the time to minimise chain lightning damage.

Group up on the tank before the storm to ensure that the melees can continue to dps during the storm. You might take a bit of extra chain lightning damage doing this, but it shouldn’t be fatal.

Generally it is easier to simply ignore the adds and continue to dps the boss. If you have enough dps to have a chance of clearing the instance within the timer, then you should be able to kill the boss before the adds get out of hand.

With the extra time you should have 15 minutes left when the boss dies.


Lynx Trash

Several packs of trash on the Lynx boss can be avoided by chosing a cunning route. From outside the eagle boss, run along the top of the waterfall towards the Lynx area.

You will come across a static pack of cats (including an elder Lynx) which need to be cleared. After they are dead, make sure the roamers ahead are out of the way and then run along to the side of the hut on your left. There is a window on the hut – jump through this into the hut and then jump out of the window on the other side of the hut. From there run behind the hut ahead of you and then head right (you will be going along the bottom of the stairs which exit the Lynx boss room).

Keep going until you get to the winding path along the river - kill the troll with the 2 croc pets (don’t aggro the neutral crocs) and proceed onwards. By doing this you have skipped 2-3 packs which helps a lot with the timer.

The rest of the clear is pretty straightforward, although there is quite a bit to clear. Make sure to dispel any of your raid who get mind controlled because a dps class can kill people pretty quickly.

Lynx boss: Every 25% the boss splits into a full heath boss and full health spirit cat. When either of these reach 20% health they merge together into the boss again.

When he splits, it is better to kill the spirit cat rather than the main boss. This is because the cat has about half the health of the main boss.

Edit: With hindsight I agree with later posters that it is better to stay on the main boss than to kill the cat. The boss stays debuffed and there is always something of a delay in switching before you can target the cat. These disadvantages outweigh the fact that the cat has less health.

You will need to have 4-5 minutes on the timer to kill the boss before the prisoner is killed.

Other Notes

Laugh and cry as the gnome you just rescued runs around like a buzzing bee and produces a bear mount from a tiny bag.

It has been said that the bear is fat and ugly, has a stupid mask and its legs are on fire.

However this is only said by jealous, bearless people. The bear is in fact muscular, threatening, outfitted in exquisitely crafted armor and walking with the fire of the gods.

You can bash the gong at the start pretty fast in skeleton form!

If anyone has other ideas and strategies for getting the bear, then this thread is the place for them.

 

◊ Praetorian

If you want a bear, starting at eagle is the only sensible order.

Hijacking this thread for a not-so-sneak preview:
EJZASpeed.wmv - FileFront.com

(This is an admittedly large file, but it is a video of a full Z'A bear run with ~5 minutes remaining, narrated by yours truly. At some point I hope to re-encode the whole thing to reduce the filesize, but if you don't mind downloading a few hundred extra megs, this should be helpful.)

Edit:
This is also false. The humanoid also stays fully dotted and debuffed, and will go down much faster.

 

Beatus

Out guild started a set of raids this week to get people a bear mount, and succeeded on the first go, with a wipe even I believe.
Strategy used on Lynx was as followed:

Group setup:

 

Ticia

Praetorian mentioned it already, but I'm just curious what your reasoning is for claiming that the "best" order is Bear->Dragonhawk->Eagle->Lynx. You claim that you waste a minute by doing the standard start at Eagle method, but it seems to me that you would waste a lot more than a minute by doing the right side of the instance first and then the left.

When you start at Bear then Dragonhawk, you have to run all the way back to the beginning of the instance to do Eagle, then after you kill Eagle you have to run all the way to the back of the instance again to get to Lynx. This seems like it wastes a lot more time than going from Eagle to Bear to Dragonhawk to Lynx in a circle.

 

◊ Malan

No, this is why he says to start at Bear and do Eagle last -
His rationale was just further in the post.

Here there be dual wieldin' cows

 

Happee

Probably due the the 2-3 trash pulls you get to skip by doing eagle -> lynx

 

Jebraltar

Good timing for this topic popping up - we just did a three chest timed run last night. There were a few mistakes, but we still were just about at Lynx before the timer died. Avoiding the one reset we ended up doing on Dragonhawk and a few more trash packs from Lynx seems like it would be enough to make all the difference.

That said, what's the best route for heading from Dragonhawk to Lynx? I don't know if we can get the four chests yet, so I want to play it safe. (We're 3/5 and 4/9, not exactly decked out in T6.) Would it be best to Crusader Aura back to Eagle and take the waterfall? Is there some other way of skipping some packs?

I was surprised by how thoroughly we spanked the timer on the first three last night, and I sure would love to get my bear.

(We do have a Protection Paladin, as well, if there are any general tips on speeding up the clear involving him.)

 

◊ Praetorian

You just hop off the Dragonhawk temple and walk across the path to the lynx area. You can skip a patrol and another pack as well. You may kill a total of at most one extra pack vs. the "waterfall" route outlined above, but you also save a fair bit of travel time that more than makes up for it. (I'd recommend checking out the video I linked in the second post as it shows both the exact route and various paladin tanking uses.)

 

• Leica

We've gotten our fair share of practice at the the timed event, and have a fair share of War Bears. We've been running 2 ZA groups each cooldown,, and since December 20th both have been achieving the timer. Our first kill beat the timer with seconds remaining, by our third we had several minutes left, and our kills now typically have 6 to 8 minutes remaining. The main requirement to get a bear is that all your players are smart and focused, you can recover from small mistakes, so don't get discouraged and give up if you're a minute behind, but large mistakes can and will cost you.

We typically run our bear groups with Warrior and Feral Tanks, some weeks we'll run one with Warrior and Protection Paladin. We also typically run three healers. The remainder of the group is filled with DPS, typically we'll run one, sometimes two AoE. I'm certain we could stack our groups for faster clears, but we realized from the start that beating the timer requires no stacking, so long as you're playing smart and hard.

Our kill order is Eagle, Bear, Dragonhawk, Lynx. I believe this is the fastest kill order, even with the waterfall route from Eagle to Lynx. Obviously, the timer can be done with both paths, so choose the one you prefer.

Buff & Start:

Prior to speaking with Harrison Jones buff up, eat consumables, and run a final ready check. We run full consumables: They're cheap and they help improve our time buffer at the end in case of disconnects or mistakes.

Throughout the run, we're killing the warrior's mob first, followed by the feral druid's. From a threat perspective, it makes sense to kill the druid's first, but to maximize damage we prefer to be on the sundered mob as soon as possible. If you are close to the threat cap, simply switch to the druid's mob. Our current target is typically judged with wisdom if possible to keep hunter and caster mana up on trash.

We kill the batch that spawn at the door and drag the elite down the stairs towards the next roaming pack as we finish it off. If the roaming pack is near the bottom of the stairs we'll move onto that, if not, we head immediately for the eagle gauntlet.

Eagle:

For the eagle gauntlet we kill the caster from each pair and offtank the warrior mobs. We'll kill eagles as they spawn, and offtank the warrior spawns. When we reach the top we'll pull the tempest to stop spawns, and while our tank builds aggro on that we'll AE down the offtanked warrior mobs.

Finish tempest and move up to the eagle boss.

We simply tank the eagle boss in the middle, and spread out along the edge of the raised rectangle in the center of his platform. When his storm cooldown has 3-5 seconds on it we collapse beneath him and continue dps throughout the storm phase. After the storm phase when he spawns adds we continue to dps the boss, we'll typically seed the boss to kill off the adds, or just keep full dps on him. Either way he typically dies shortly after the second add phase.

When the eagle boss dies everyone loots badges, mounts up, and heads to bear boss. We kill the patrol at the bottom of the stairs now if we did not kill it before.

Bear:

Killing the bear boss trash is just a matter of moving up towards the boss, it essentially pulls itself. One pack of bears will come as you hug around the corner, so it's best to just pull that pack as you're finishing off the first set of trash. Bear Riders are tanked apart from each other to prevent stacking auras. We'll kill the caster mob first to eliminate totems, the axe throwers to eliminate their damage, then warriors or bear riders depending on the pack we're on.

The bear fight is very straightforward, it's a tank and spank, end it as fast as you can. Loot your badges, mount up, and head to dragonhawk trash.

Dragonhawk:

For the dragonhawk trash we have one person assigned to countdown on the scouts. We queue up long/damaging casts during the countdown and blow them up. They can be stunned, rooted, and slowed if needed. When bursting scouts it typically only takes 1-2 dps, but your healers shouldn't be afraid of tossing nukes they have to help out, no healing is necessary on scouts really.

We progress through the trash, flame casters are priority 1 followed by anything else. When we reach the final hut we check the status of the patrol. If it's far, we skip it, move up and kill the 4 pack by Mind Controlling the close flame caster then moving to the bottom of the boss' staircase to finish off the rest. If the patrol is on the stairs, we move up and kill it, then do the 4 pack.

For the dragonhawk boss we kill one hatcher, and let the other hatch his full set. Ranged DPS is helping with the dragonhawks as they're spawning, even if it's single target. Once the wave is fully hatched what hasn't been killed by single target is AE'd down. While we don't typically run a paladin tank a ret or holy paladin can help hold things in place and off your AE, frost traps and earthbind totems at the bridge's bottleneck is also helpful. We repeat the same process on the second round of hatchers. Once both sides are clear of eggs we burn the boss down. On our early mount runs we didn't kill entire sides at a time, choose what you're comfortable with, it's more important not to wipe. That doesn't mean you can kill 2-3 hatchlings at a time, but doing 15 of 20 eggs on each side, then dealing with the final 10 when you bring him to 35% works just as well and is a bit more conservative.

You can skip looting dragonhawk's badges, his corpse will still be up when you go back to do the chest event. Immediately head across to the Lynx's area, killing the patrol of 2 trolls as you pass them.

Lynx:

Pull and kill the static lynx pack. Single target down the elder lynx while the small adds are picked up, and swap to AE as soon as it's safe.

Move against the ruins to your right and hug the wall, if the patrol is in a safe spot, just skip him and move to and kill the Lynx/Trainer pack, if the patrol is in your way, you can kill it or wait, use your judgment to determine which will be faster. Around the corner you'll kill the pack with the trainers and lynxes, then mount up and head along the shore of the pond. Stay behind your tank, you'll want him to pick up the alligator pack, kill that pack and continue with the lynx trash. It's all pretty straightforward trash, one thing some people don't know is that the mind control can be removed with purge and arcane shot in addition to dispel.

When you reach the entrance to Halazzi's room, you'll want to see where the patrol is, if it's not in the right close corner of the room, you may as well pull a static pack. We mind control the flame caster for its dps, if the patrol was close and is near the doorway with your flame caster still MC's, you can use him on the patrol as well. Once that room is clear, it's time for the boss. He only takes 3-4 minutes or so to kill, so if your timer is above that, you're in good shape.

For this boss we never take DPS off Halazzi. The lynx may have slightly less HP, but all of your debuffs, and all of your tank's aggro, are already on the boss, and if you choose to dps the cat you have to rebuild that, only to rebuild it on the boss again when the cat dies. Chain lightning totems are killed as soon as they spawn, otherwise we simply offtank the cat and treat the boss like a tank and spank.

Bear Cavalry:

If you played smart, and did well, one of your players should now be a member of the Bear Cavalry.

 

Brodnax

If you do eagle bear, dragonhawk, then lynx, I dont think you end up doing any more pulls. After jumping off dragon hawks platform, go up towards the locked hex lords room, go to the edge of thel edge and jump down the wall, you will not pull the trash pack of cats. Pull the 1 static pull up front, dodge the patrol, then head down the water front and your 2nd pull is the alligator patrol if I recall correctly.

 

Lambach

Edit: Ok, upon further consideration, and comments below, its an exploit. I know that exploits aren't supposed to be part of these boards. Removed it becuase of that, and I hope people below me can do the same.

To make this posting space worth anything(although still not much):

I cannot wait to get home from work and check out that vid gurg. Thats a pretty badass idea to make, and I'm sure will help a lot of teams. Specially the voice over, very cool.

 

Tunch

You'd hardly consider it an exploit? That's textbook definition.

 

Denogran

You don't consider this an exploit because?....

A bug is when something happens that's not supposed to( Ony runs around not attacking anyone, yet still taking damage for example ). An exploit is taking a known bug( like figuring out how to make Ony do that every time ), and using it to "cheapen" the experience. I'm pretty sure MCing the warriors to turn off the gauntlet is most definitely an exploit.

 

ildon

I've noticed a lot of people seem to think the word exploit means "Blizzard will ban me for doing this" rather than its literal meaning.

 

Davidson

It seems that most people think "exploit" and "cheat" are the same thing, which is kind of odd. Almost anything beneficial to yourself that you do is an "exploit", such as kiting, or using your abilities. In gaming most people use the word in place of the full "exploiting a bug" which can be much more towards cheating depending on the nature of the bug.

 

Denogran

Ahh, but in the gaming world( and more accurately the computing world), the semantics on exploit don't entirely match those of the real world. Just like a tank in WoW isn't a "large, often metallic container for holding or storing liquids or gases" or an "enclosed, heavily armored combat vehicle that is armed with cannon and machine guns and moves on continuous tracks." (American Heritage Dictionary), in the gaming world an exploit isn't to fully make use of one's resources. (See Wikipedia-Gaming and Wikipedia-Computer Security).

 

◊ Praetorian

Do we really need to discuss semantics? Don't derail the thread before it's even gone half a page.

 

NateDawg1021

I assume they'll crack down on this because eventually people will be selling/buying the mounts.

We currently have 14 bear mounts I think. When people ask them how they got them/where it came from, they said they got a "Bear Trap" drop and then used it to catch and then tame a bear which makes it a mount. *Shrugs* We've also had a few people ask if our GM gave us the "Champion of the Naruu" title, and if he would give it to them.

MadskhealsUI v2: http://www.curse.com/downloads/details/11286/
Madskheals - Priest - Retired

 

xyruul

I only bring one aoe class and I'm pretty confident that bringing two would significantly slow down our clears. There are a total of 4-5 trash pulls with more then 3 mobs and it only takes 4-5s for everyone to focus one down while I get agro on everything else and we aoe.