I was wondering if any guilds moved from being a "1 bear per reset" guild to a "2 bear per reset" guild and how they accomplished it.

For background information, we have 5 bears in guild, and usually finish with between 2 and 4 minutes on the timer. However, we bring a pretty static group, and some people were feeling left out. The group consisted of the so called "elite" members of our guild. So anyway, last night we tried to do two separate runs, both which failed by 1-4 minutes. Both groups afterwards (that I talked with) said that they felt the groups were stacked against them, and some members were really mad that we wasted a reset and didn't get any bears.

I think the statement "A bird in the bag is worth more than two in the tree" or something... meaning that the guaranteed 1 bear is better than a chance at two bears. But despite this, we want to try to move two bears a week.

The problem each group faced were pretty much based on the group split. One group brought 3 healers, and was lacking DPS as the main cause of failure. The other group has 2 healers, but those two had never done a timed run together and didn't work well together resulting in tank deaths.

I assume some guilds have faced this, or similar challenges with moving from one ZG to two ZGs or one kara to two karas, etc... Is there any helpful hints about how to keep people's tempers in check about "stacked groups" and hard feelings over failure, and how to move towards succeeding at getting two bears each reset?

For guild info, we've had Illidan on farm for about a month, and our gear is good enough I believe. We've just moved into the stage of wanting to get everyone bear mounts before 2.4 hits, and 2 bears a week would really help that goal.

Well don't think there's a magical solution but simply balancing the group. What I'd do is maybe have one or 2 people that are not from the static group into your normal clearing group(exchange class for class), so they can see how it's done, without causing you to fail, guaranteeing one bear. Then you could have everyone else who's interested, with the 2 people you replaced(that'd be bear people that feel like helping) try to make a speed run, as fast as possible, even if it fails. The 2 experienced people show what to do and when. That group doesn't have to be stacked to win, just need to have as many people that are geared enough for a real speed run, and interested in it.

Do this for like, 2weeks, then just remake groups entirely, but this time balance them both perfectly so they have good chances at getting a bear. Now you have 4 people who've seen successful runs and ~8-10 that have done a ZA under speed run conditions, with someone showing them what to skip and how to do pulls. Mixing them with the static experienced group shouldn't be an issue anymore. Try to spread the "average" players and the "good" players around, so the "good" support the "average".

If both groups still fail, tell the "average" to go fuck themselves because they don't deserve a bear, and it's mostly worthless anyway, and if they're not happy they're free to go farm zg raptor. Well that's probably a bit harsh, but the timed run isn't THAT hard really, so if they can't manage even with good group setups, it's their own fault. Make a queue in the perfect group and just farm one bear a week.

The single most important aspect of any successful guild/raid is leadership, just schedule the second run immediately after the first one and have your raid leader go on an alt or someone else's character. That's what I did to get our second group setup. Rotating in one new person a week can also help in the long run but it's not worth putting off a few resets of a second group for. The sooner you start farming 2 per reset the more you will get in the long run, period.

My experience on seeing a second group succeed was that practice is everything. The first time we tried, we were about 14 minutes late. The second time, we got it down to 4 minutes late. Third time we beat it. Now we usually make it with 1-4 minutes to spare, despite having a somewhat irregular attendance.

The first group never changed, so nobody from the second group got to see a speed run with them. We did however share as much info as possible and I personally read this thread very thoroughly for all the hints I could get. After that, it was just practice makes perfect and making sure the group composition was not too bad. We now have 25+ players who would do fine in any given speed run.

Well the same thing kinda happened in my guild, you know we got the first 10 people in and they got a bear, but obviously the other 20 people who wanted a bear couldn't join. Well i decided one day lets try and do a main/alt run see how it goes, now i think the raid com was 6 mains 4 alts and well the whole purpose of this was to see how we could do if i was running it like a timed event. well turned out we got 3 chest with about 7 mins left so next run I got nothing but main and 1 alt, the OT, and again did the same thing, not really aiming for a bear but in the mind set to get one. well we ended with bout 13 min after DH. Next run same group nothing change and we got one with 3 mins left.

Now what this really is, even though we don't have an ideal raid comp, as you can see on the previous page, we work around what is best for us. Also the main thing that gets a bear is the people in the group actually wanting to get the bear and be able to show up for every run. The last thing that i think is important is having someone reliable enough to take lead of the raid to make sure people know about it and are able to show up. In my guild I'm just a normal raider, but for ZA i decided to step up and be the leader got the people, got the composition, and got another bear every reset. Even if your normal raid leader isn't in the raid doesn't stop someone, or even half the group from stepping up and make sure everyone is doing what they are suppose to do.

Like its say on other post there are 2 /4 thing required for a bear
-full t6
-full consumables
-completely stacked groups
-2 healers
-or 5 destruction lock

last one is made up but i think it would work, and 2 shammies is alway a huge boast.

hoped any of this helped and GL on more bears.

We just got our second bear and the reason we have so few is that we actually haven't tried it before last week.

The first run had a good setup and it was:

Prot Paladin
Prot Warrior
Enhance Shaman
Combat Rogue
Destro Warlock

Resto Shaman
CoH Priest
Holy Paladin
Fire Mage
Shadow Priest

All but the Prot warrior had T6 gear (mostly 4/5 with). The Prot warrior was an alt (me) and his gear is best bagdes/Kara/ZA with th T5 helm and first MH ring.

We did it with about 30 secs to spare with one death on the Dragonhawk.

Second time we wanted to go with same group but the enhance shaman and shadow priest couldn't make it. So we got a Surv Hunter and another Destro Warlock.
Not having the SP and Enhance shaman made a lot of difference but in the end we did it with about 10 secs to spare.
I was skeptical about our success seeing as we lost WF and improved totems for the melee, mana regen for the healers, SP debuffs for warlock/casters, a second BL and Fire elemental while we won only 1 extra curse and ~250 AP to melee DPS...

I don't get it why people keep insisting you can only do it with 2 healers...

You're right, thanks for the tip.

As I already said the second time we didn't have any SP and the healers still managed to do it, so if we do get one I'll make sure the lock or other mana DPS will get it.
As for healer DPS, I guess the shaman could do that as long as he can keep an eye on healing required and assist when needed.

Depends on the classes and how many healers you run, but yeah I manage just fine as resto druid without a SP and only 2 healers, sharing healing 50/50 with the other healer. However we often put the resto shaman(if we take one) with our sp, simply because they can chain heal more, making it more efficient. I certainly don't have the mana to be DPSing when we go with 2healers and I don't have a SP though, but then again, that might be because I'm too cheap to use consumables even on speed runs. I feel you need too much healing mana regen consumables to compensate for the lack of treeform if you try to dps, and if I don't dps I can full heal just fine without using them so well.

So yeah assuming that group composition, I'd definitely switch the lock with the priest, doubt he'd need it. I'd also switch the shaman for trash with the prot paladin, we found it's better to have the healers drink when next pull is incoming/being seperated/CCed than wait for the paladins to have enough mana until we start pulling.

We run 3 healers (Pala/Druid/Priest) normally, I throw off Drums every cd to help and we always use a Feral so we get 2 Innervates that get thrown around too between pulls and bosses - we rarely run with a SP which I think is ignorance about the trinket being so good for them so they "cba" =(

With 2 healers ofcourse its not optimal to have one DPSing that often xD

Anyone uses the ankh / DI tactic on the dragonhawk trash, which means run in till the tree (safespot) die and ress up fast, which saves up alot of time on clearing the scouts and the patrol packs?

No one is saying this, they are saying that if you don't meet certain other criteria (in your case, a T6 geared raid) then running with 2 healers can help compensate.

We just finished our first attempt on the timed run and finished the fourth boss with one minute left over. Would have been around 8-9 minutes without disconnecting healers on the way to the Dragonhawk Boss.

Group Composition:
Feral (Off Tank)
Arms Warrior
Enhancement Shaman
BM Hunter
Combat Rogue

Protection Paladin (Maintank)
Shadowpriest
Fire Mage
Resto Shaman
Resto Druid

Our setup ist pretty DPS heavy and with some more practice i think it is possible to have 10+ minutes left on the clock. The whole group is full T6 equipped (19 Illidan kills).

Edit: Many thanks to EJ for their ZA video. We were able to flesh out our tactic with your help.

How do you figure? Lots of guilds kill Halazzi consistently 1-2 minutes short of a bear for a few weeks due to various issues; saving a few minutes on the trash would mean the difference between just barely missing the timer and your bear, no?

I don't know where that tree/safespot is, but I think the point is that if you have the dps and coordination required to do the bear run, you really have to be skipping a lot of trash for it to be faster than ressing/rebuffing everyone.

Ressing everyone by itself will take a about 1 minute, most likely more especially with drinking/healing/rebuffing. Plus there's the time to run through the mobs. I hadn't seen how much trash it skips to compare but I wouldn't be surprised if it's not worth doing (with a group that has the DPS to even have a chance in the firstplace).

I wonder how many guilds use this "little" wall jump to do those incredibly fast bear runs. Would this count as beneficial exploit, IE perma ban if you get caught?

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Yes, it's Rapidshare. Blame Stage6's death.

The group composition we usually win with is:

Feral Druid
Prot Pally
Holy Pally
Arms Warrior
Hunter/Rogue

Resto Shaman
Warlock
Warlock
Warlock
Mage

We have made the timed event 2 weeks in a row with this setup. Our kill order is Eagle, Bear, Dragonhawk, Lynx.

We've alot of Bear Mounts in our guild. We clear the 4th boss with an average of 8mins left each time LEGIT, setup:



Holy Paladin
Fire Mage
Protection Warrior
Feral Druid
Destruction Warlock
Restro Shaman
Rogue
Enh Shaman
Shadow Priest
Retri Paladin

As you can see we have an insane melee group though we still use bloodlust in the casters. We do it in this order:

Akil'zon (Eagle)
Nalorakk (Bear)
Jan'alai (Dragonhawk)
Halazzi (Lynx) - bear dropping gneum dude .

We run a very similar set, just a CoH Priest instead of a Resto Shaman. Shaman is definately a stronger choice, we just had a more consistent group with our CoH Priest. Our trick for one Bloodlust and a stacked melee group is to switch the Feral and the Prot Warrior with the Mage and Lock for BL, then switch them back. Threat should be solid enough with an Enhance Sham for the tanks full time that they don't need BL to keep up.

The real benefit to this setup however IMO is a Ret Pally who has a well geared Prot set for Dragonhawk and Lynx trash. Our Ret Pally does great DPS on all other Bosses/Trash, then tanks whole sides on Dragonhawk, allowing us to cut a few minutes off him, and the Lynx packs on Lynx trash. Having a flexible Ret Pally will help a lot in any setup IMO, while allowing you to retain Sunders and LoTP/Faerie Fire for your melee setup.

We run.

Feral Druid
Prot Warrior
Hunter
DPS Warrior
Shadow Priest

Shadowpriest
Destro Lock
Destro Lock
Holy Paladin
Resto Shaman

Honestly if your running dual-healer, the dps requirements aren't that high.
We tend to finish 6-8 minutes, running the standard Eagle-Bear-Dragonhawk-Lynx.

After trying the timed run for several weeks with a 2 healer + shadowpriest group, we always came a minute or two short. Granted, this was not a fully consumabled raid. Last night we went in with the following group:

Prot Pali
Prot Warrior
Enh Sham
Rogue
Resto Druid

Ele sham
Holy CoH Priest
Holy Priest
Fire Mage
Destro Lock

Completed with 4 minutes to spare. Our pulls were chained with one healer occasionally on rotation for drinks. Our two melee DPS locked down a flame caster while one priest MC'd. This setup would have been MUCH more ideal with a resto shaman in lieu of one of the priests, for the added lusts on bosses and greater ease of raid healing. I would estimate this would easily put us under the 40 minute mark.

Given these results, I strongly favor the flexibility that a 3 healer setup has to offer, especially when those healers know when to DPS appropriately. Magma totems, SW:P for example.

I agree, I also prefer 3 healers. We've always done it with 3 healers, despite musing about one going shadow or swapping for a dps just to break our own records, but with a 3-healer setup we've still done it with over 11 minutes to spare and haven't failed since we succeeded the first time, about 12 or so bears later.

And if nothing else, I definitely prefer 3 healers for farming the bear. If you don't care about breaking records you get a lot more leeway and space to 'enjoy' the run. Okay - what I really mean is more space to screwup because you were chatting: Last run we had scouts adding (had 6 reinforcements and a full trashpack at one point), a tank death on the bear boss - quite probably all would have been failures if not for the extra healing power, but the run still got completed with 7 minutes to spare.

Our setup is always feral tank (me) dps warrior to OT / DPS, and a healing team of paladin, priest and shaman. DPS is usually a shadowpriest and an enhance shaman, with the other spots a somewhat random mix of rogue / hunter / warlock. We are all in T6 though. I think I agree with the earlier post saying you needed some but not all of certain criteria (T6, Consumables, 2-healer setup or an aggressively stacked group; we do the first and last in that list, I suppose).

We've started wondering if we can 'sell' a bear. I think that we can certainly do it with 9 people as we got a bear with an undergeared rogue friend who did less damage than me, I'm just curious if anyone has actually sold a bear yet, what sort of price they got, and any problems that they came across trying to boost someone who might not have even been to ZA before, let alone was ready for a speedrun?