I'd say the dragonhawk trash is the most difficult part of the timed run. We've had 30sec-2min short runs with 2-3 healers before. This time we did it with 2 healers and a shadow priest. On the dragonhawk we kill the hatchlings as they spawn. This seems to be easiest way to go, atleast for us.
We started ZA for mounts at the end of Feburary and have 4 mounts. We've probably got a 50% success rate on mount including our 2 failed learning attempts. The main reason for this, irregular attendance. If you can bring the same group every time you will have much better chances. Below are my comments in blue.
Originally Posted by Blacksen
1) In several locations I've read that a key element to getting the 4th chest was dropping a healer and picking up a DPS, preferably a shadow priest. While this seems like an okay idea, I can't imagine really pulling off much of what we do in these situations. Are there any healer tricks to helping drop a healer and pickup a shadow priest?
I would disagree with this. I've done both 3 heal and 2 heal setups. I prefer 3 healers for new/learning attempts due to the HPS that an additional healer brings. However, I may be spoiled by the dps I bring. We've been killing Illidan since early January.
Unless you can be sure that there will be no mistakes that cause additional raid dps, 3 healers will prevent deaths and eliminate any noticeable healer drink time. The big healer stress tests are uncontrolled flame casters, dragonhawk egg spawns, and the random untanked mob.
I suspect people in T5 gear will disagree with my 3 healer comment, but I'd be willing to say that when they run it successfully with the 'required' 2 healers, their clears are nearly flawless with no mistakes.
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2) How EXACTLY do you do Jan'Alai? We do him a lot, and usually it's a 1 or 2-shot, but it's consistently chaotic and hell. We used to spawn half, half, half, and half (4 hatchers total), but we don't think that's practical if we're actually going to try the chest. Now, we spawn the entire side, but that usually involves all hell breaking loose.
I've read something about having all your dps standing on top of the eggs, but I don't really understand it. Is there a strategy here for it?
We kill one hatcher and let the other hatcher spawn one whole side - after he is done we kill him. We have ALL dps move to the hatchlings as they spawn - then use a BoP and AoE. Make sure to kill the hatcher as he walks to the other side - or be prepared for a lot more birds. In a 2 healer setup I'd strongly recommend a shadowpriest, and for this suggest they drop shadowform and heal unless you can control this phase easily. His DPS will not be missed as you should be approaching the 35% all spawn point anyway. Also note that you can let the hatcher run to the other side and 'instahatch' - we let him slip by us once. It was very hectic, but 2 locks and a mage cleaned up the hatchlings quickly with some nice taunting and BoPs. I suspect this is what #4 is suggesting.
3) Are there any other tricks or tips that you can give to helping clear trash faster?
A shadowpriest will virtually eliminate any extended drinking. Typically I squeeze out a few seconds of drink time between every few pulls and never have problems with mana. I prefer spirit consumables over mp5, as I'm out of the five second rule quite a bit while mounted/walking etc.
We use waterwalking/levitate/aquatic after the first two lynx trash packs. We walk through the water to skip the patrol. I don't know if it saves much time, but gives us a little mental break to prepare for the final push.
Also, spending the time to rez a dead player will almost always be faster than them running back.
4) (Jan'Alai) Some websites suggest that we should not kill birds and only dps the boss. How exactly does this work? With Bloodlust and all focus on boss (still 3 healers), we can knock out 30% of his health easily.
This is doable, but I would say risky without enough AoE dps and AoE tanking in the raid. I suspect this is suggesting killing both hatchers and letting the boss @35% spawn the hatchlings.
5) Why exactly do you always veer left on Jan'Alai trash? The "hatcher packs" on the right seem easier and could be blown through faster.Never tried this.
6) How exactly reliable is Mind Control for the packs leading to Jan'Alai?
We find it to be very helpful. Typically the shadowpriest does it, but if we're running sans spriest - I'll do it. Sure an early break can get hectic, but that's why you're bringing three healers.
Be aware, he casts a haste buff that should be dispelled(spellstolen? - we rarely run with mages) immediately upon cast, this will allow for his aoe to be easily interrupted. I haven't seen this noted in this thread yet.
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Group we plan on taking for our attempt:
Group 1:
- Protection Warrior (me)
- Retribution Paladin (1100+ dps)
- Holy Priest (Circle of Healing)
- Restoration Shaman
- Shadow Priest (800-900 dps)
Group 2:
- Feral Druid
- Beast-Mastery Hunter (1200-1600 dps)
- Destruction Warlock (top dps in guild)
- Destruction Warlock (2nd top dps in guild)
- Boomkin (1100-1400)
The best group I've run it with was the following:
Feral MT
Fury OT
Enhancement
Rogue
Rogue
Destruction
Spriest
Holy Pally
Resto Shaman
CoH Priest (me)
The Feral tank was new. Our dps hit 35% on Dragonhawk before the second hatcher came. The new tank AoE taunted the hatchlings and wiped us, however we still were able to recover from one of the worst places to wipe and finish with a minute left. If he hadn't taunted we were on schedule for our fastest clear - 29 minutes left when the Bear went down.
We go Eagle-Bear-Dragonhawk-Lynx. I very strongly recommend watching a speed clear video. Gurgthock's was very helpful.
1/ I can attest that you can do the entire zone with any 2 healing class characters at a full T6 gear level and no Shadow Priest.
Just want to chime in and say that you can probably do this with any 2 healers, period.
We're equipped in strictly in KZ/ZA/badge gear, and while we're still a bit off on making the 4th chest, we can make the 3rd one (going bear -> eagle -> lynx until we're ready to try for all 4). We run 2 healers every week, and wipes are very rare on the first 4 bosses and trash (Hex Lord and ZJ still give us some trouble, but they're not part of the timed event anyway). Usually druid/paladin, but we've done most other combos as well without issues.
With some better gear on our DPSers, I have no doubt that we could do all 4 chests. But healing is definitely not an issue, even at Tier 4.5 gear levels with only 2 healers.
I'd have to agree with the "2-healers is just fine" side of things here. At a T4.5 type level, 2 healers is all but required to make the dps requirement of a bear mount. Considering people in T4.5 healing gear and at that level of progression are able to clear the zone, anyone complaining about needing a 3rd healer at a T6 level of gear is just plain bad or lazy. Does it make the fights safer? Maybe.. but why waste an entire raid slot just to cover up the inabilities of the other 2 healers and/or the general incompetence of the raid members? My guild is in essentially end-game gear, but we've done bear-mount with a group containing 2 shadow priests with 11 minutes left on the timer. We frequently do alt/friend runs with people geared mostly in T4/ZA/S3 type gear and still make the timer with 5-7 minutes to spare. I'm not talking "1 guy had T4, the rest had warglaives and 4/5 T6 Desto locks" stuff.. I mean a tank in T4, dps in S3 and Kara/ZA gear with a healer in T6. Might save a minute on needing to drink less, but that should be more than covered by the amount of slack left on those runs.
Smart play will go a lot further than trying to cover up the problems with an extra "support" healer. If you're at a T6 gear level you honestly should be capable of 9-manning the bear mount with 2 healers, 2 tanks and 5 dps. I'll try and fraps tonight's run and post it - a picture is worth a thousand words, right?
Just want to chime in and say that you can probably do this with any 2 healers, period.
We're equipped in strictly in KZ/ZA/badge gear, and while we're still a bit off on making the 4th chest, we can make the 3rd one (going bear -> eagle -> lynx until we're ready to try for all 4). We run 2 healers every week, and wipes are very rare on the first 4 bosses and trash (Hex Lord and ZJ still give us some trouble, but they're not part of the timed event anyway). Usually druid/paladin, but we've done most other combos as well without issues.
With some better gear on our DPSers, I have no doubt that we could do all 4 chests. But healing is definitely not an issue, even at Tier 4.5 gear levels with only 2 healers.
If you have good raid make-up for DPS it's very possible for you guys to go for 4th chest. Before we knew of bear mount in 4th chest we did Bear > Eagle > Lynx and would finish with like 5-8 minutes left. We changed our group a little; switching the resto shaman to an element shaman and went Bear > Eagle > Lynx > Dragonhawk, and now finish the event with 8 minutes left.(we also learned ways of dealing with some of the trash quicker)
Our group is usually:
Prot Pally
MS warrior(Arena Spec OT's in s3)
Rogue
Hunter
Resto Druid
Shadow Priest(me)
Destruction Lock
Mage
Ele Shaman
Holy Paladin
The healers, hunter, lock, and mage are in 4pcT6.
Even though you guys are in worse gear then us, with the right comp I'm sure you guys can come close to getting that chest, and even if you don't get it, perfecting your timed Dragonhawk trash is important.(Also gives you an idea how much more time you need to shave off up to that point.)
At a T4.5 type level, 2 healers is all but required to make the dps requirement of a bear mount.
It's been quite a few pages so I guess it's worth reposting: this is entirely not the case. We've been clearing bear runs for a while now; obtained 10 bears out of the last 12 attempts, 2 failures due to spawned scout reinfs. with entirely ZA/kara/pvp gear and we now finish with ~5 minutes to spare on average . 0 people in our raid have gear from or even attended any 25 man content on this server (original post is #167 in this thread http://elitistjerks.com/623137-post167.html ).
We run 3 healers and have on every run. You don't NEED 3 healers, but you certainly don't need only 2 either. Our raid composition is typically:
Group1: Feral Druid, Protection Paladin, Arms Warrior, Enhancement Shaman, Retribution Paladin
Group2: Holy Priest, Holy Paladin, Resto Druid, Frost or Fire Mage (I just play whatever I'm spec'd for pvp), Shadow Priest
We swap out between 2 holy priests and between 2 shadow priests depending on who is on, and everyone else is usually the same. There are links to armory profiles in the original post for our regulars.
As far as damage goes, it is now usually #1 arms warrior ~18%, #2 mage (me) ~17.8%, #3/4 shm/pld ~16%, #5 spriest ~12%. In our first bear runs I only did ~14% due to having instance blues and greens to get hit capped from only having hit 70 a week or two prior. If malacrass ever drops his stupid caster helm again I should be beating the warrior regularly. I keep meaning to run combatlog and get a WWS of one of our runs; maybe I won't forget this week.
So to reiterate, it may be helpful for your raid to have only 2 healers, but it is far from necessary. I recommend trying both and go with what works best for your individual raid.
The group of people I run with is a mixture of people from various small guilds that have raided together since before the expansion and some great people I found pugging heroics. Most of us haven't raided 25 mans. I think half of today's group is from a T5 guild.
After many heartbreaking close calls (Lynx boss wipes the past few tries) we finally pulled it off. I think we did everything perfectly. No deaths. No reinforcements. No pulling unnesesary pats. Even had about 8 mins when we got to lynx so we had some time to go in at full mana and use 3 healers.
I'm very proud of this group. It's taken a lot of focus to get this done at our gear level. I'm so glad we got this in before the patch and the new badge gear.
We got a bear for this first time in our 3rd ZA T6 pug group, everyone was in tier 6 gear except me on my alt prot paly who has never set foot inside a 25 man. A combo of players from 5 different Illidan killing guilds.
We had 3 minutes left on the timer, with about 10 deaths over the run, but luckily 90% of them were able to ank, soulstone or have rebirth up. We also had about 8 reinforcements on the way to dragonhawk. 15 minutes left on the timer when DH died.
We smashed though the trash to lynx in about 7 minutes, with a few changes, Skipped the pat of 2 out the front of hex lord, went around behind the 6 tiger pull and grabbed them, jumped through the window when the pat of 2 dudes 2 tigers went away. mounted to the 2 croc + tamed dude, killed crocs first. pulled 2 pakcs of tigers at a time, and didnt bother with any sheeps on any flamecasters, just zerg them, they can be chain stunned and do basicly nothing.
This was the first week we tried 2 healers, which is what caused all the deaths, but the extra dps makes things die so much faster.
It's been quite a few pages so I guess it's worth reposting: this is entirely not the case. We've been clearing bear runs for a while now; obtained 10 bears out of the last 12 attempts, 2 failures due to spawned scout reinfs. with entirely ZA/kara/pvp gear and we now finish with ~5 minutes to spare on average . 0 people in our raid have gear from or even attended any 25 man content on this server (original post is #167 in this thread http://elitistjerks.com/623137-post167.html ).
We run 3 healers and have on every run. You don't NEED 3 healers, but you certainly don't need only 2 either. Our raid composition is typically:
Group1: Feral Druid(bear recipient), Protection Paladin, Arms Warrior, Enhancement Shaman, Retribution Paladin
Group2: Holy Priest, Holy Paladin, Resto Druid, Frost or Fire Mage (I just play whatever I'm spec'd for pvp), Shadow Priest
We swap out between 2 holy priests and between 2 shadow priests depending on who is on, and everyone else is usually the same. There are links to armory profiles in the original post for our regulars.
As far as damage goes, it is now usually #1 arms warrior ~18%, #2 mage (me) ~17.8%, #3/4 shm/pld ~16%, #5 spriest ~12%. In our first bear runs I only did ~14% due to having instance blues and greens to get hit capped from only having hit 70 a week or two prior. If malacrass ever drops his stupid caster helm again I should be beating the warrior regularly. I keep meaning to run combatlog and get a WWS of one of our runs; maybe I won't forget this week.
So to reiterate, it may be helpful for your raid to have only 2 healers, but it is far from necessary. I recommend trying both and go with what works best for your individual raid.
Fair enough, and I gotta say - well done on getting bear mounts with T4/ZA/S3 gear using 3 healers. Pretty damn remarkable I think actually. I think the last sentence is more-or-less the overriding truth to this "debate" as it were. 2 or 3 healers - both will work at (apparently) any gear level.
On a side note about my suggestion at posting a video of tonights run - apparently the DivX encoder I was using can't accept 1680x1050 as an input side. After some testing I found that recording at half-size works just fine for later encoding. I should have a video ready sometime after Thursday's run, baring a 2.4 release tomorrow. I'll try and get a commentary as well, see how that goes.
If I were going to overhaul our raid at this point and try to minmax it to increase our timer buffer, I would probably go with 2 healers. But an extra buffer doesn't necessarily mean an increased chance to successfully complete the 4th chest under the timer. Obviously a 5% failure rate due to wipes with 1-2 minutes to spare would be better than a 10% failure rate due to wipes with 8 minutes to spare. It only really becomes worth it if the time you gain from dps makes up more than the time loss due to instability.
I didn't finish leveling on this server until these guys were almost done with ZA gear (hence my abysmal gear for the first bears), but I'm told that the reason they always ran with 3 healers was because in some of the earlier ZA runs the healer gear just couldn't cut it with 2, and now they probably could, but it hasn't been changed because "if it's not broken, don't try to fix it". We completed the bear timer on our first flasked attempt, so there was never really any reason for us to try to minmax dps output to the fullest.
I'd say if you have sufficiently geared healers that are outstanding players, go ahead and swap to a 2 healer setup. But I'd go ahead and stick with the 3 healers if the 1 dps you're swapping in is either A. significantly less geared B. significantly less skilled or C. does not mesh well with your class composition (i.e. an extra mage that won't fit in the shadow priest group, crippling his mana, or a rogue that has to go into a caster group without even a battle shout). I'd rather have 3 amazing healers that give more stability and allow people to be a little more aggressive with dps (this is why our arms warrior is so high - he pulls aggro a LOT and almost never holds back, allowing him to top out damage output even though he wears almost the exact same gear that he pvp's in).
Also a little bit of an aside: we don't do dragonhawk adds in 4 waves anymore, we switched to 1 pull per side. I think 4 pulls is easier to learn, but 2 pulls is a lot easier on my mana from AEing as a mage and gives us more of a buffer as long as people don't die from it. I'd definitely be leery of switching to a 2 healer setup if we continued the 2 pull strategy though, but it can be done if your AEers are good and your paladins time BOPs properly. I also noticed I took a lot less damage when I ran as fire instead of frost on the dhawk adds due to having dbreath at my disposal. I really just went frost early on due to the +3% "bonus" bugged elemental precision on frostbolt due to my gear, and because I didn't have to waste money on respecs.
I'd definitely be leery of switching to a 2 healer setup if we continued the 2 pull strategy though, but it can be done if your AEers are good and your paladins time BOPs properly
Running a paladin tank makes this rather trivial aswell.
Running a paladin tank makes this rather trivial aswell.
What he said. Running with an without a protadin is as night and day. It trivializes Dragonhawk (both trash and boss) and is a nice buffer generally. Druid/protadin would probably be my preffered tanking duo, allowing the feral to go dps when not offtanking, making for that much faster run. Downside is no sunders for physical dps classes, but is offset by an additional blessing, and a lot steadier aoe aggro.
I don't know if its worth it, but depending on if you run that heavy of a physical dps setup, you could even have an arms or fury warrior slap up a few sunders once the prot pally has a generous lead.
Edit: This assumes of course you even bring a warrior period.
I am currently raiding as retribution, but I have a set of tanking gear (mostly Kara plus a couple of MH/BT pieces) and I'm occasionally switching to prot for brief periods. I'm thinking of going prot for one of our timed ZA runs to push for that 4th chest. How hard would you say tanking ZA is with relatively little experience? So far I've tanked Kara, Maulgar, and the Morogrim murlocs when we were learning that.
I succesfully tanked a timed ZA from my first run as prot with only heroics/kara experience (but BT quality tank gear). Lets admit it, for anyone worth his salt, pala tanking is rather easy. (then again, the same could be said from WoW in general)
I do have been reading the prot warrior/pala topics since the day they got created and did alot of preparing work on ZA speedruns in general. If you'r new to tanking, those 2 topics help alot. But for someone with Kara and Maulgar experience, there isnt anything different in ZA as long as you know what kind of trash you'r getting.
Just wanted to thank everyone for the helpful comments. We tried it for the first time tonight and got it with 12 seconds left, including a total party wipeout on Jan'Alai. Was extremely exciting and easily one of the most fun moments I've ever had in WoW. Was also a server first, and I won the Bear Mount :-D
Switched Shadow priest and Circle of Healing priest for Ret Paladin / Enhancement Shaman for bloodlusts.
For people who read this thread in the future, I have to say dropping that 3rd healer for another dps seems to really pay off. Mana issues become obsolete as your dps powers through the trash and bosses. And with the new spirit changes, those spirit-regening classes will be in heaven. Also, mind-control was extremely helpful.
What he said. Running with an without a protadin is as night and day. It trivializes Dragonhawk (both trash and boss) and is a nice buffer generally. Druid/protadin would probably be my preffered tanking duo, allowing the feral to go dps when not offtanking, making for that much faster run. Downside is no sunders for physical dps classes, but is offset by an additional blessing, and a lot steadier aoe aggro.
Our guild is trying the timed run for the first times as well and we were having problems with Jan'alai. We usually run with a group makeup consisting of something similar to:
Rogue
Rogue
Enhancement Shaman
Feral Druid
Hunter
Shadow Priest
Resto Shaman
CoH Priest
Prot Pally
Mage or Ele Shaman
I ended up just tanking both Jan'alai AND the adds (1 side at a time) and we one-shotted the boss rather easily when we tried this. This allowed our feral druid to just stay on DPSing the boss the whole time and led to better DPS overall. Come to think about it, I just had the feral druid go to bear and pick up the second set of adds (Along with the rest of DPS) but we only hatched half of the remaining side. Jan'alai then hit 35% soon afterwards and hatched the rest but by then my debuffs were cleared so I picked them up. Is this a common tactic for the prot pally to AOE tank the adds AND the boss?
Also, I had a question about MC's: The flamecaster trash before Jan'alai was rough at first but all of our DPS that have interrupts just cycled through interrupting the flamecasters and they barely got a single volley off, even on two flame-caster pulls. I just AOE tanked everything and AOE went nuts. We did not seem to have any problems. I've never heard of anybody mentioning that you can completely lock down the flamecasters with interrupts so I thought that I would throw it out there. Is this also a somewhat common tactic?
No, the common thing is for the druid to tank the boss and prot pally to take the adds, a lot easier if they're geared enough for it (my alt druid is in t4/badge/za, pretty much all there is and the prot pally was somewhere kara level geared - around 16k hp buffed). We don't make 4 bosses in that alt/pug group but we do make 3 and the healers ... I've tanked Eagle boss in dps gear with 14k hp and crittable so they're ok).
Also, I had a question about MC's: The flamecaster trash before Jan'alai was rough at first but all of our DPS that have interrupts just cycled through interrupting the flamecasters and they barely got a single volley off, even on two flame-caster pulls. I just AOE tanked everything and AOE went nuts. We did not seem to have any problems. I've never heard of anybody mentioning that you can completely lock down the flamecasters with interrupts so I thought that I would throw it out there. Is this also a somewhat common tactic?
Except for the first couple of runs we didn't sheep much and think I only saw MC once. It's not worth the time wasted, they should just die first, interrupted as much as possible and dispelled/spellstolen.
I'd just like to say how much practice and a relatively consistent group is. Of course, our gear has improved since we started trying to get bears, but we got our first bear last Friday with seconds to spare(our rogue dc'd on lynx pull, out for the whole fight), and yesterday we finished with 8 minutes to spare. We ran with one of each spec of shaman, and dps was quite ridiculous.
A tip for prot pally tank groups having issues with mana. We use prot pally/feral druid as out tank team. On trash groups, We always kill the druids target first which lets him go kitty for the rest of the pull. I use sow/jow to keep mana up, while spamming max rank consecrate. Aggro is not a concern because of the druid buffer time. I also end up doing about 600 dps at the same time because of this.
If you're looking to improve your time with this group, I would recommend a slight change: switch the prot pallie and the resto druid.
While I had very little time lately, some feedback on this advice: we tried that on our last run, and I can confirm this to be good advice. While - as expected - I missed the tree buff in my group when healing through flamecasters, the overall benefit for the raid by better paladin tanking was noticable. This may be less so for prot pallies with better equipment.
Our guild finally became a two-bear-group guild yesterday when my group got our first bear. The two groups have very different philosophies but we've proven now that both are possible.
3 healers, one holy paladin switching to tank gear for the AoE tanking bits, everyone in full T6 or equivalent, with 3 leatherworkers for drums.
Group 2: Prot Warrior, Feral Druid, Rogue, Ret Paladin, Resto Shaman / Resto Druid, Shadow Priest, Destro Warlock, Affliction Warlock, Mage
2 healers, most of the group in half T5, half T6 gear, no leatherworkers
WWS Parse for Group 2's first bear is here: Wow Web Stats The timer was on about 45 secs when Lynx died, but we lost 2 mins ressing and rebuffing after Dragonhawk due to a MT death at 20% (we zerged him down but had to res a few people).
The key things that made us finally get there were:
1) Realising that healing is trivial here - drop to 2 healers, take the imp out of the MT group and stack for dps, tell the MT to Battle Shout instead of Commanding Shout.
2) Finally working out how to handle the Dragonhawk Gauntlet - in our case I used an interrupt focus macro to lock down one of the flamecasters while the other is bursted down.
3) Getting everyone used to the pressure of "go fast but don't panic".
Our guild is trying the timed run for the first times as well and we were having problems with Jan'alai. We usually run with a group makeup consisting of something similar to:
Rogue
Rogue
Enhancement Shaman
Feral Druid
Hunter
Shadow Priest
Resto Shaman
CoH Priest
Prot Pally
Mage or Ele Shaman
I ended up just tanking both Jan'alai AND the adds (1 side at a time) and we one-shotted the boss rather easily when we tried this. This allowed our feral druid to just stay on DPSing the boss the whole time and led to better DPS overall. Come to think about it, I just had the feral druid go to bear and pick up the second set of adds (Along with the rest of DPS) but we only hatched half of the remaining side. Jan'alai then hit 35% soon afterwards and hatched the rest but by then my debuffs were cleared so I picked them up. Is this a common tactic for the prot pally to AOE tank the adds AND the boss?
Usually get it done with 4-6 minutes left on the timer, even running essentially 4 healers on Eagle boss since the prot paladin can't do anything else on that fight unless he's tanking the boss himself. The first couple runs we had a feral in there instead, which overall is way better for DPS. But the prot paladin is ridiculous for dragonhawk boss, especially since he's one of our tanks for P2 Illidan, and throwing on a couple pieces of fully enchanted FR gear completely trivializes the aoe tanking aspect of that fight. Don't think we even kill both hatchers, just pop one soon as it spawns, let the other one hatch an entire side and destroy it as they come out, then let the same hatcher repeat on the other side and boss dies in around 3 minutes.
My guild has taken down the Bear, the Eagle, and the Lynx. We are trying to get the strategy down for the Dragonhawk. Is it possible to go directly to the Dragonhawk without clearing through the Bear? We want to get practice on the Dragonhawk fight and go directly to him.
For example, can you go straight down from the entrance steps across to the steps of the 5th boss and make a right to the Dragonhawk boss or do you have to go around the Bear boss through the area with the scouts?