• Latito

Make the feral MT and take a dps warrior instead of the Prot warrior. DPS warrior tosses on some tankish gear and a shield for the 2 fights where that is required. Best of both worlds.

 

Beardyhead

Our runs have typically consisted of:

Fury Warrior
Prot Paladin
Rogue
Shadow priest
Feral Druid

Affliction Warlock
Destruction Warlock
Holy Priest
Shadow Priest
Holy Paladin

And usually finish with 3-4 minutes left on the timer with a few deaths on trash. Our last run finished with 6 minutes left, where we changed MT healers from a holy paladin to resto druid, and the rogue wasn't around so we picked up an elemental shaman. Having the shaman in our group with tranquil air was great, and having the resto druid in the MT group with an spriest as well meant he didn't have mana issues as well. G2's Spriest, me and destrolock were able to go all out without aggro issues especially during heroism.

Before we were doing bear runs and just learning ZA, seeing the OT die from stupidity at 95% on the Lynx boss, and seeing the feral druid tank both the boss and kitty with 23,000 hp, get smacked for 13k and still swiping for more til it was dead was quite the sight.

 

Taddeo

We've gotten 4 bear mounts so far, at our first run we managed to clear with 3 minutes to spare. Our second run was quite the improvement where we finished with 6 minutes, our third and fourth left us with 7 minutes to spare. We're hoping to hit the 10 minute mark but as of now it simply seems to be more of a gear thing to do so than anything else.

Our two groups are made up of the following classes

< Melee Group >
Enhancement Shaman
Protection Warrior
Combat Rogue
Beast master Hunter
Feral Druid

< Caster Group >
Destruction Warlock
Restoration Shaman
Shadow Priest
Holy Paladin
Deep Frost Mage

 

Shadowwjack

We are an alliance T4/Badge/Arena guild. I just recently made a push in the guild to try to get a member of our guild into the Bear Calvary. Our first run was last Saturday night and our hope was to rescue 3 prisoners. We had been in ZA before but had never beaten a timer.

We were happy to rescue 2 prisoners and with a bit more experience would have rescued 3. Our path was Eagle, Bear, Dragonhawk, and Lynx. We ended up making a mistake on the last pull before the Dragonhawk boss which cost us a wipe and our third prisoner. The timer was at 9 minutes on the last pull before the wipe.

We ended up spending the rest of the raid trying to get the Dragonhawk boss down, but found we were a bit short on healing and experience. We learned a lot and this Thursday I feel we would be able to get the Dragonhawk boss down in the time limit.

Our groups were Group 1 - Prot Pally, Bear/cat Druid, DPS Warrior, Ret Pally, and Rogue.
Group 2 was - Resto Druid, Holy Pally, Shadow Priest, Frost mage, and Affliction lock.
We were running with full buffs, food buffs, flasks/dual elixirs, scroll buffs, Oils, and 2 sets of Drums of Battle (bear druid and rogue were leather workers)

Some of the issues are.
A) The suggestion has been made that doing Bear, Eagle, and Lynx would be a safer bet to rescue 3 prisoners. Since it has been suggested that the Lynx boss and trash are easier than the Dragonhawk boss and trash.
B) At our gear level is it necessary to bring a third healer. I have available an elemental shaman or a shadow priest for the 3rd position in group 2, but if we need a third healer I will replace that 3rd spot with a holy priest. Also I am concerned that bringing in a 3 healer will slow us down to much, and we will not have enough DPS to beat the timers?
C) We are a Serious/Casual raiding guilds. Many of our members have families and can not raid every week. Unfortunately these members tend to be our best geared, best played, and have the best focus when they play. Go figure. On this Thursday's raid the DPS warrior, Affliction Lock, and shadow priest will probably not be able to make it. I am hoping to replace them with an Enhancement Shaman, Destro Lock, and holy priest. Any suggestions to a better configuration or stacking would be appreciated.

 

Mideci

My group does 3 healers and 3 times. We do bear, eagle, lynx for the reason that it's more repeatable than doing eagle, bear, dragonhawk for a less-than-elite group. Dragonhawk has a higher chaos factor. One truth is that the trash clear to lynx is a bit more time consuming so while your boss margin of error is higher (lynx is ridiculously easy) your trash clear margin of time wasting is lower if you go that route.

 

• Mjollnir

Arguable. After having attempted a first serious time run last Saturday, I would bet dollars for donuts dragonhawk trash > other 3 boss' trash in terms of time consumption. Lynx trash is a bunch (4?) of weak AoE packs, 1 or 2 beast tamer packs which are *easily* countered, and the 3 pulls in the Lynx's room which hold no mystery. It's quite the chain pull with little risk.
We were just slightly behind benchmark time (2-3min after bear down) entering the dragonhawk trash, and lost all hopes of a mount after 2 bad pulls with scouts doing their usual.
Assuming a team can tackle the bear trash without hiccup (a fair assumption, given everyone did bear first their first few times to the zone) and everyone is comfortable with boss strats, the make it or break it part of the run is the dragonhawk trash. Scouts to be specific.

Edit: If all bosses and trash are on farm, then yes, Lynx trash is the longest due to the quantity of pulls. Difficulty-wise it is the easiest and most straight-forward.

 

vorda

You're going from a 2 healer setup to a 3 healer setup here though (probably because your 2 healers cant manage without a spriest). Unless you suffered a lot of deaths last time (ignoring the wipe), you're probably going to be short on dps.

On the other hand, you are gaining a bloodlust and a much much better g1 synergy (a ret pala really needs WF).

As for your original group setup, you lacked a strong group heal. As you have a prot pala and a bear druid, it doesn't matter that much if you replace the holy pala or the resto druid (though I'd rate another CR higher than a second blessing) but be sure to take a CoH priest or a resto shaman next time.

 

Mideci

Feel free to argue it if you want. But it takes more minutes of clock to clear the lynx trash than the dragonhawk trash. At least it does for every group in my guild. And the difference is not small.

 

• Mjollnir

I thought my edit would prevent this sort of response? I'm agreeing that in terms of sheer minutes on the clock, Lynx trash takes the longest of the 4. What I'm saying is for a perfect clear this is the case, however I've yet to complete a run with zero scout hiccups, and they always happen on the 5 pull. This, in turn, takes a buttload of time to deal with.
Anyhow, this is a moot point so I'll leave things there.

 

Mideci

I replied because I guess I felt your edit was sufficiently opaque that it wasn't going to entirely help with the above poster's question fof which way was more repeatable to get 3 chests. I will say this: We very rarey get reinforcements. We sometimes get a single pair. We still clear the d-hawk trash in less time than the lynx trash.

While I do agree that the degree of difficulty on the lynx trash is awfully low, we periodically lose someone due to the AoE packs having the "which one are we killing issue" as we speed through. Perhaps we need our main tank to select a target there instead of me, but it's the one issue I note. So basically we are in agreement, I'm just trying to illuminate the issue for the guy because he and my group are in the same boat I believe -- we are trying to get some (more) rings right now.

 

Narishma

Completed ours last night, after getting enough non saved people ready for it more than anything else.

Prot warrior, feral druid, Enhancement shaman, rogue, arms warrior
Holy Priest, Shadow Priest, Moonkin (in za, badge gear), mage and holy paladin.

Had a few hickups along the way. 1 death on dragonhawk trash, 2 on dragonhawk, 2-3 on lynx trash and 2 again on the lynx.

For us, having 2 healers only made all the difference in the world. Things died extremely fast, and we were left with ~4 mins on the clock.

 

Yaelle

When we were trying the run, we ran 2 healers first, but it turned out to be too wacky for us and we really did not notice that we went any slower (Maybe we're just bad players in good gear).

We completed some runs now after learning/optimizing for a while.
The group setup was made of:

- Feral Druid
- Protection Warrior (He's an Off Warrior in our 25 man's, so his gear was not the best our raid has to offer)
- Warlock
- Mage
- Enhancement Shaman
- Fury Warrior
- Rogue
- Restoration Shaman
- Holy Priest
- Holy Paladin

Our route was E B D L and we usually have 5 minutes left.
Optimizing many, little things (a few hints taken from here) and eliminating minor errors, was our key to success.
With a little practice and determination, it should not be a problem to complete the run in time for players on our gear level. Not sure, if it was here, that I read about a mainly T4 geared group, that managed 4 chests in time. I think that's really an accomplishment.

 

• Mjollnir

It would be great if those posting here offered a WWS of their [successful] timed runs. Namely the 1min-4min remaining crowd. I know where the weak spots are in my own group, but having multiple comparisons would further scrutiny on performance.

 

kaat

Wow Web Stats

Thats the WWS report from our 1st attempt for the ZA timed run narishma mentioned before. I think we had ~4minutes left on the timer. Unfortunately the WWS is a bit broken, Alcestes is a feral druid tanking and is unfortunately displayed as a mob.

 

Narishma

OT Kaat, but just reassign the actor to the right class in the client before hosting it.

 

Braque

Sure, why not:

3 healers:
Thursday, March 6th - Wow Web Stats

2 healers:
Saturday, March 8th - WWS Loading...

3 healers:
Tuesday, March 11th - WWS Loading...

I hope that's useful and/or interesting!

 

Redcape

My guild downed Illidan 3 weeks ago for the first time and we set up a bear run today. This was our first serious shot at it.

Prot paladin
Feral druid
Fury warrior
Arms (33/28) warrior
Enhancement shaman

Destro lock
Elemental shaman
Shadow priest
Holy priest
Holy paladin

We beat the clock by 6 minutes. We were planning on running a rogue instead of the Fury warrior, but swapped due to RL concerns. We had a few random deaths on trash, one on eagle boss (feral druid overaggroed due to not having salv) and two on dragonhawk. (bad teleport timing blew up our lock and fury warrior) The prot paladin (me) also tried to tank all of the lynx trash with no Righteous Fury and in FR gear from offtanking Dragonhawk. In my defence, the Fury got purged during a random MC, but the FR gear was all me. Overall it didn't seem very hard. We were a little sloppy in a few places and took a few deaths but with 6 minutes as our first try I have no doubt we can push it to 10 minutes with a little more practice. Even if we had one full wipe it would have been recoverable.

 

Gallener

We going for our 4th mount tonight. The past three weeks we've run with the same setup each time.

Prot Warrior
Feral Druid
Rogue
Rogue
Enhance Shaman

Shadow Priest
Mage
Resto Druid
Holy Pally
Resto Shaman

Our DPS is exceptionally high, so the 3rd healer is more of a safety net for Dragonhawk. We just have the resto shammy dps for the threee other bosses. Have had about 3 minutes left on the timer each week. Two Heroisms = win, and two b-rezes are quite handy in case of a mistake.

In regards to the posts about the trash, yes Linx takes a little longer, but dragonhawk trash has more room for error. And I dont know what path you take for Lynx, but killing the lynx pack on the far west side then jumping through the huts will save you a little bit of time. I believe it cuts down one pull. Plus avoiding the pat that goes along the center road.

Biggest key is that everyone knows what they are doing and when

 

vorda

We found out today that Lynx seems to be possible with just a paladin healing and a spriest shifting out of shadow form when the lynx is up.

 

Velmont

Our setup normally looks like that:

Prot Warrior
Feral Druid
Fury Warrior
Hunter
Destruction Warlock

Holy Paladin
Holy Priest
Shadow Priest
Frost Mage
Destruction Warlock


We managed around 10 1/2 minutes today with one dead player caused by the pat with the 2 crocodiles.
Where we can spare more time is Jan'Alai where we were waiting for the second Hatcher phase for reasons we don't know and the Lynx where we kill the totems what is not needed.
We could also spare time by using a Restoration Shaman instead of the Holy Priest and using an Enhancement Shaman instead of the Mage, switching the Destruction Lock from grp 1 into grp 2. But that would not be such a great bonus i think.
I think that we could reach around... 13-14 minutes fully buffed and chain potting. Maybe we'll try next time.

 

drowsy

Having just nailed it down, here's what we normally run:

Protection Warrior
Feral Druid
Rogue
Restoration Druid
Destruction Warlock

Elemental Shaman
Shadow Priest
Holy Paladin
Fire Mage
Beastmaster Hunter

First Bear (2 mintues left): Wow Web Stats

Second Bear (3 minutes left): Wow Web Stats

The near miss just before those two: Wow Web Stats
(would have missed by a minute or so even without a very late wipe in lynx trash)

The elemental shaman shifts to heal gear and heals whenever the paladin has to tank. There is also a lot of shuffling groups to take full advantage of heroism, and to spread the shadow priest love around when needed. Gear as a whole is probably about half hyjal/BT gear, and half from T5/ZA/badges etc. The rogue has four piece T6 but does not get windfury, which is something I wonder if we want to make happen, not that I really need to complain about a setup that does the job.

 

Iya

We are national/casual guild, killed 7 bosses in BT.
Gear level - beginning of BT.

Group composition:

Protection warrior
Combat rogue
Combat rogue
Beastmaster hunter
Affliction warlock

Protection paladin
Frost mage
Shadow priest
Holy paladin
Holy priest

Completed with 4 minutes left.
It was 5'th reset when we tried timed event.
Order: eagle->bear->dragonkin->lynx.
2 people died in whole run.

Before we tried stacked melee heavy group with dps warr and enh shaman, but only one caster (mage).
Melee works a little better. But it does not matter much.

Prot pala switched to healing on Eagle. Prot war tanked lynx and also taunted spirit. Before we had issues with paladin not being able grab spirit's agro.

Resto shaman is better than holy priest there, but imho not classes matter.

Screen (sadly I forgot take picture where you could see left minutes):
ImageShack - Hosting :: wowscrnshot031508222514hp2.jpg

 

thaddius

My guild have been 9/9 5/5 for 2 weeks now and have had about 4-5 goes at the bear mount with our best geared players.

Our group setup is:

Group 1
Prot warrior
Feral Druid
Rogue
Enh Shaman
Destruc Lock or Mage (Depending on availibility)

Group 2
Holy paladin
Resto Druid
Mage
Shadow priest
Shadow priest

For some reason we always end up falling well behind the timer, we have more than enough gear to do it we just dont know what is wrong.

I thought it might be the group set up, if anyone could also give us some feedback that would be great.

We chain pull pretty fast and have tried alot of different ways of doing it, we just end up losing minutes on boss fights and trash.

 

Vhex

Drop a shadow priest for a rogue or hunter. 1 shadow priest is nice. 2 is terrible dps.

 

• Chicken

You'd also probably be better off swapping the Destruction Warlock or Mage with either your Resto Druid or your Paladin. For an Illidan clearing guild your healers really should be fine in ZA without a Shadow Priest, while it's always a good DPS gain for warlocks or mages.

buff /bʌf/ Pronunciation[buhf]
–verb (used with object)