• Daboran

How the do you manage to get over 11 minutes to spare with 3 healers? Do you pull multiple trash packs? The only thing I can see different from our setup is that we don't have an Enh Shaman therefore take a Resto Shaman/Holy Pali/Resto Druid for healing.

 

Vaccine

11 minutes is pretty impressive. I've found it hard to drum up interest for these runs in the last few months since we got our first two but finally managed it last night. On all three runs we've got to the last room with about 9 minutes to go, pulled boss on about 7 mins and collected mount at about 4-5. The only mistake we made last nigth was losing 3 casters on eagle trash as they nuked the wrong target. Last nights group only had 1 melee too so I think we did quite well considering.

 

cowfields

http://www.cowfields.com/11mins.jpg is the 'proof' if anyone needed it. I had assumed lots of people were on that kind of time, but you can see my damage meters then to see how the classes' damage is broken down.

You can see our priest does a fair bit of damage, think he just spams holy nova and smite a lot, I know he wears haste gear too.

I don't know how much buffing up the rest of the team does, but I use an agility elixir, armour elixir (as I wear some dps gear rather than max out armour) and an agility foodbuff, and on bosses (though not on trash) I use drums of battle on each cooldown. We've been farming Illidan pretty much weekly since we killed him in December so I guess you could say we're all 'done' with our gearing up. I often get a few scrolls cast on me but I wouldn't say we go all out consumables, I really do think it's only me that bothers

It's Eagle - Bear - Dragonhawk - Lynx. We've gotten better and better at chain pulling and I think having 3 healers allows this since they have very little downtime with a shadowpriest. A hunter helps, for example I always get the tempest before the eagle misdirected to me, while the previous pair of mobs are on low health.

Improved Bash is actually a useful talent here. When there's one mob left in a pack, I'll stun it on low health so that dps can continue to burn it down while I'm off building threat on the next pack. So there's an overlap between each pack which has saved us time overall.

 

• Latito

Looking at your damage meters, I think there are a few things which lead to you have *so* much time left considering a 3-healer setup. First, you only really bring one tank. I assume the dps warrior slaps on a shield for Bear and Lynx (well, looking at the screenshot, I know he does). Doing a run without a Prot-anything will certainly up your overall dps. As mentioned, your holy priest does a decent bit of dps - nearly half that of some of your lower dps'ers. While some groups may see "3-healer" and think that means "3 healer, 2 tank, 5 dps".. your group is essentially "2.5 healer, 0.5 tank, 7 dps". The feral tank and holy priest sort of combine to be an extra dps. Also, using drums on trash probably isn't too common.

On the topic of selling bears - my guild is already doing that. We have roughly 20-25 bears in the guild. For selling, we'll get the buyer to log out (or just stand around) on the steps outside ZA. Then have 10 of our guys do the first 3 bosses, after Dragonhawk, one dps logs out, the buyer zones in and helps us do Lynx trash + Lynx. Make sure the buyer is aware of the timeline - preferably have them pay before you start the run so they are more inclined to be punctual with logging on and zoning in. Don't assume they can heal or tank - just pretend you are doing Lynx 9-man.

My guild is in a similar position to yours - we've done Lynx with a good 10 minutes (ticked to 10 min with about 10-15% left on Lynx) and lately have just run with whoever is on. Originally we stacked the groups as much as was reasonable, but now theres 2 groups going and often alts coming along. We run 2-healer and just pull a little more leisurely. Last night I was in a semi-pug (guild + guild alts + friends) group with maybe 2-3 T6 geared players, a few alts and some pvp-geared friends.. got a bear with like 7-8 minutes left.

 

Lokar

I just wanted to pipe in 11 min with 3 healers is impressive. Our best is 10 minutes with 2 healers (although 0 shamans). Very nice

 

galzohar

Most people seem to be running with 2 tanking classes, which seems quite unnescessary. Like in the video, you can see 1 prot tank and a DPS warrior that puts on tank gear for the 2 bosses that actually require it seem a lot more effective. Then again you need a DPS warrior that actually took the time to get his tanking gear, which unfortunately isn't something you find too often.

 

Natureseer

We bring 1 prot warrior, 1 feral druid.

 

galzohar

Feral is probably the simple solution, at least if he has some reasonable dps gear. Fury warriors seem to put out a lot more DPS, though, and with enough gear should be find standing up to the bosses they'd be tanking. Having some kind of tanking capable (I.E. tank and/or FR gear with whatever spec) for dragonhawk is probably a noticeable time saver (although as said many times already isn't nearly nescessary).

 

Eylirria

Managed to finish a bear run today for the first time.

Group set-up:

Group 1:

Prot.Warrior(MT - No raid gear, pure Kara/ZA/Badges)
Feral.Druid(OT - No raid gear, pure Kara/ZA/Badges)
Rogue (No raid gear, pure Kara/ZA/Badges)
BM.Hunter (No raid gear, pure Kara/ZA/Badges)
Disc.Priest (2/5 T6)

Group 2:

Elem.Shaman (No raid gear...)
Elem.Shaman (2/5 T5)
Fire.Mage (2/6 T6)
Destro.Lock (1/6 T6)
Holy.Paladin (2/5 T5)


Timer was tight, we killed Halazzi just as the timer ticked down to 1 minute remaining, though it was far from a perfect run, as we had some accident deaths on trash that resulted from latency issues on the tanks. We just recently moved from a pure no raid gear group (that was about 4mins short for a mount) into having some new DPSers in with a bit of raid gear.

The real time saver for us was to downsize from 2.5 healers to 2 (We used to run with Paladin/Shaman/Moonkin.Druid), into (Priest/Paladin).

We realize we had to do some massive stacking there on group2, but it's worked wonders for us, double totem of wrath, both WoA/Tranquil and double heroism for the caster group made an insane DPS difference, which allowed us to brute-force shave the last few minutes off of boss fights.

This is the strategy we used for every boss fight:

Akil'zon: Full-DPS on the boss until the first storm. After first storm, Hunter works on birds, Rogue is quickly swapped with the paladin and we burn heroism #1. After heroism #1 has faded, we wait until the next storm, and again do the switcharoo and burn heroism #2. (for the record, we always swap the rogue for heroism buffage)

Nalorakk: Full-out DPS on the boss with heroism #1 going off when he returns into troll phase for the 1st time, and heroism #2 goes off at the end of the next bear phase (we were going to do another heroism as he switched back into troll, but it turns out he was already at 25% halfway through the 2nd bear stage.

Jan'alai: Single target DPS focuses on the boss exclusively, and we hatch sides like this: First time we hatch half of one side. Imediatelly after, we pop heroism #1, and get a nice clean burn on the boss which pushes him down to about 40-45% as the second set of adds come up, we let them hatch the remaining half side, kill the hawks, and proceed to push him down to 35%. We do the second side in one go, since they are all spawned at once, and considering our group composition, we have 2 earthbinds and a frost trap to keep the hawks snared 100% of the time in one tight pack. We pop both fire elementals for this, and for insurance, the feral druid pops AOE taunt in his cat gear once the hawks get close to people, and I pop shield wall to make sure the healers can forget about me for the next 15 seconds and just keep the AOE/Druid up as they finish off the hawks. Once they're down, we pop heroism #2 which takes Jan'alai from 30%ish to dead.

Halazzi: MD Pull, I pop all threat CDs I have and a haste potion, about 10 seconds later we pop the first heroism for the casters, and they take Halazzi all the way through nearly 2 full transitions. Heroism #2 goes up about as soon as heroism #1 fades, and it took him down to about 17% or so... with the timer showing 2 minutes left, sealed the deal by hitting a nightmare seed/last stand/ironshield and an armor trinket. Kill time on this boss was 2mins 47seconds IIRC.

 

Natureseer

Our usual group comp is:

Group 1:
Prot Warrior
Feral Druid
Fury Warrior
Rogue
Enh Shaman

Group 2:
Resto Shaman
Holy Paladin
Shadow Priest
Shadow Priest
Destr Warlock (me)

We bring this same group twice a week (for the most part, sometimes we switch 1-2 spots up if people can't make it), and this next run that we're doing on Monday we'll finally get the 10th person their mount. I usually bring my alt lock, but when I got my mount we just had the resto shaman spec elemental and I came on my druid.

When we first started, we always brought the 2 shadowpriests cause we were nervous about 2 healers, but it's not really necessary.

 

Vandermonde

Wait, do multiple copies of totem of wrath actually stack?

 

vorda

edit: sorry, I need to learn to read better.

 

Myul

Yes it does. But for an equal geared raid it's allmost all the time better to devide the shamans, worse geared one putting melee totems down and swapping the best damage dealers in for heroism.

I wonder what raiddps your group is managing to put out. You got an wws or something like that running?
If i'm not mistaken, it should be :
1190 rogue
1090 fury
1057 warlock
0944 hunter
0875 shaman
0820 shadow
0656 feral
0307 holy priest

That's around 7.000 raiddps. Well i wonder about that because we regulary manage to pull a litte more rdps (only two healer and two heroism) but have less minutes to spare :/

 

Joy

Seems surprising that it's the fastest time SS'ed on here.

Our 4th Kill (months ago) we had 10 minutes left running with 3 healers a Prot Warrior and a Feral.

2 Holy Pallies
1 Resto Druid
1 Prot War
1 Feral
2 MM/BM Hunters(I think they were both BM)
1 Enhance Shaman
1 SP
1 Destro Lock.

I'd be interested in seeing what Vis Maior or Disbanded (2 top guilds on WWS for Teron) could do with 2 or 3 healer (or 1 / 2 tank) set ups.

Surely a solid 14+ minutes is achievable with 3 healers?

 

koaschten

Guess i follow Praetorian a little on the video part. On March 1st we had a Timed Battle organized by the community of Allvatar.com. Game-TV.com streamed the event live, showing the guilds Numen and For the Horde doing a Head-to-Head Run for all 6 bosses. Some days ago, game-tv.com made a Video-on-Demand Stream available and i thought i would link it.

clicky

For the Horde ended a little ahead of Numen after the 6 bosses with a time of roughly 46min 50sec with our major drawback being the stupid rogue dying of bladeflurry on Halazzi when the add spawned and pulled aggro in the first transition... stupid me.

Lineup:
Warrior (prot)
Druid (feral)
Shaman(enh)
Hunter (bm)
Rogue (sword)

Priest (holy)
Paladin (holy)
Warlock (nuke)
Warlock (nuke)
Mage (fire)

Yes, probably would have been cleverer to take a Shadowpriest but well, the mage was the person over at the game-tv studio

 

Myul

It tooks you about 35 minutes (start ~ 1:40 kill ~ 36:26) to kill the lynx according to your video.

Begin: 20 minutes
Killing eagle: +10 minutes
Killing bear: +15 minutes

Total of 45 minutes. "Record" with 11 minutes left, so 34 minutes to beat. You are actually close or on par to it, like we are all. But 11 or even 14 minutes like Joy mentioned two posts early is very, very tough in my opinion - especially with three healer instead of two.

 

Kitachi

Did a ZA Bear run earlier today with 10mins spare. Funny thing is we actually made a slight mistake on the pull before the second boss and had our pala tank and 2/3 other people die. I dont think it cost us too much time but I think we could do a 11min if totally focused, possibly even 12mins but your talking about almost flawless execution then on trash and bosses.

Raid setup was as follows

Resto Shammy
Prot Tank
Enchance Shammy
DPS Warrior
Rogue

Prot Pala
Destro Lock
Holy Pala
Spriest
Ele Shammy

The extra shammys definitely helped boost the dps with double bloodlusts and some totem twisting. We didn't really stop to drink much, chain pulling throughout and drank with we had to, often running with pulls and dpsing on the move. I guess thats one of the joys the prot palas bring in ZA.

 

• Latito

Not sure about VM, but we've pretty much gotten really lax on ZA clears lately. Most of the "original" group who ran it (and got a few 10-min-remaining) don't go at all anymore, the 2nd group of 10 all have bears as well, we've started selling bears (getting someone to zone in after dragonhawk).. no real urge to go nuts and try and finish with 15 min left or something. I REALLY doubt we'd go with 3 healers.. we never did from day one and it would seem like "whats the point, if we're trying to set a record?". Perhaps we'll try and go for a super-fast 2-healer clear at some point. I would assume Resto Sham + Holy Pally (for bloodlust and blessings), a fairly melee-heavy (to chain pull trash) group and some heavy consumables.. drums on trash for instance.. could get us a 15-min-left bear. Then again, it would be difficult to convince everyone to clear to the bear, spending money on consumables.. and then let the bear rot. Would be neat to do it in 25 min or so though - try for Zul'Jin down in 45 min from zone-in.

 

khel

Our first successful attempt we completed with this setup:

Prot Paladin
Feral Druid
BM Hunter
Combat Rogue
Resto Shaman

Shadow Priest
Elemental Shaman
Frost Mage (should have been fire really)
Destruction Warlock
Holy Priest

Our normal setup though is:
Prot Warrior
Feral Druid
BM Hunter
Combat Rogue
Holy/Prot Paladin (hybrid spec for tanking trash healing bosses)

Resto Shaman (nuking a lot)
Shadow Priest
Holy Priest
Fire Mage
Destruction Warlock


With both groups, we put salv on the aoers and tranquil air so they can aoe down most of the trash while the rogue, shadowpriest, and I burn down single targets (+ blade flurry, multishot).

 

Amonra

I'm curious as to whether anyone has obtained a bear without killing the Lynx last? With a good group it should easily be possible to kill the Dragonhawk last, although there would be a lot of extra running involved.

With a really good group and good run I'm thinking it should be possible to kill the eagle last as well, but this would be really hard.

Bear last seems out of the question, although full Sunwell gear might make this plausible.

Alternatively for amusement, killing Hexlord on the way to Lynx and still getting a bear seems as if it could be possible.

 

• Chicken

While I don't know about your other options, you'll have a hard time reaching Hex Lord without having killed Lynx, as the door to him is closed until the four avatars have died.

buff /bʌf/ Pronunciation[buhf]
–verb (used with object)
- to reduce or deaden the force of

 

Eylirria

I am baffled. We just pulled our first bear mount, with exactly 1 minute to spare (Boss died right as it changed from 2 to 1 minute remaining), and this is the RDPS for our bosses:

Akil'zon: 6 979 DPS (Kill time: 3mins 21 seconds)
Nalorakk: 7 759 DPS (Kill time: 3mins exactly)
Jan'alai: 5 260 DPS (Kill time: 4mins 14 seconds)
Halazzi: 7 361 DPS (Kill time: 2mins 59 seconds)
Full WWS: Wow Web Stats (Says Tempest Keep, mislabeled)


That's 13mins 34 seconds spent killing bosses. That gives us about 31m30s to handle trash, which we pull nonstop, and without any CC because we want people being able to CL/Multishot/everything to push for maximum DPS, yet, our trash RDPS seems really horrible from the looks of it, since our RDPS for bosses seems on par with 5+, 6+ minutes left runs.


I understand we could probably shave another minute of Jan'alai if we did full-side hatches, but our half/half + 35% hatch strategy seems chaotic already when the second side is fully hatched, even with them being tightly packed and heavily snared by totems/trap -- I'm not sure the risk vs benefit ratio here is reasonable.

 

dakalro

With a good mage and another AoE you don't actually even need a 2nd tank for more than keeping everything grouped until the first aoe is started. Just needs a bit of coordination and rest of dps picking off the first 10 or so spawns.
With an optimal group I'd say 15 minutes left is easilly possible (got 12 on 3rd run with something like that, 1 melee dps grp, tank + 2 healers + spriest + lock or mage in 2nd group, 2 shaman feeding hero to melee and ~6 on the first successful timed ZA runs that were plenty random and 3 healers).

 

Illundai

We were the competitors and we used a pretty different setup, clocking in at 35:48 on the bear timer I think. Can't quite remember.

Warrior (prot)
Paladin (prot)
Shaman (enh)
Hunter (bm)
Rogue (swords)

Priest (holy)
Shaman (resto)
Mage (fire)
Warlock (Destro)
Priest (Shadow)

Although we were quite unlucky with patrol timers the thing that did set us back the most is clearly Paladin mana, had quite some deaths due to it which cost us at 1,5 minutes on the timer since we didn't want to wait. I think it is possible to do a 32-33min or so run with a Paladin, but then he has to tank all the mobs, so that he gets hit enough and thus requires a lot more healing. The problem on trash was just that he went OOM due to not taking any damage even in the SP group, we kept him in there on trash.
I'd definitely say that Druid MT and DPS Warrior OT would net the best timer results, even if that means taking in a third healer.
As for tips on how we can improve:
- Don't try this without one druid. Combatresses are invaluable in saving time when you fuck up.
- Mind Soothe and Soothe Animal are your friends. We skipped a patrol with Mind Soothe, FTH skipped a bear pack with Soothe Animal
- A big timesaver is bringing a DPS warrior. We normally always take one, but we didn't have one available. Cleave and Whirlwind on trash is huge. Our Fury Warriors always stand high over everyone else on trash just because of it.

The rest is just overly mentioned in the thread, so I won't go there. As for the walljump posted a page or so back, I'm sure that's considered an exploit.

Yes, Death Knight tanks are/were too good in 3.0.x. Having 38k HP, 76.81% Avoidance (Miss incl.) and not gimping your threat in the first tier of gear is broken. (Yes this is clickable)

 

Myul

Tried it again today, couldn't believe that the descripancy is so high.

Prot
Feral
Hunter
Enhancer
Rogue

Holydin
Restosham
Mage
Warlock
Shadow

managed ~ 11(.9) minutes left on the timer with several (~5) deaths on different trashcamps (but awesome allmost perfect 2:30 minutes fight vs. Jan'alai). Well, have to agree that 14 minutes with drums on trash and dual warlock instead of warlock/mage should be possible for a dual healer setup. We'll try it again next cooldown.

I dislike having a dps warrior over a feral. LotP + battlerez and to tiny < 20% execute ranges will favor the feral for dps in my opinion, especially because i can drop grace of air, benefitting all of my group equally instead of pushing fury dps allmost only. Threat isn't an issue with some +aggro expertise gear on your warrior.