The ZA timed run - Page 17

drowsy · 03/31/08, 11:33 AM

The stairs on that side of dragonhawk are broken such that you can't climb them, only jump off. So no, you have to go through scout trash.

Nooblender · 03/31/08, 11:33 AM

My ZA group has been trying for the 4th chest timer for the past couple of runs, and barring any potential wipes I think we can make it.
Gear is a mix of T5/ZA/badge/early T6 (almost none of this), but we don't bring a shadow priest and our enhancement shaman isn't very synergistic with the melee group, so we are a little sub-optimal.

G1:
Prot Warrior
Feral Druid
Enh Shaman
Surv Hunter
Resto Druid

G2:
Ele Shaman
Destro Lock
Fire Mage
Holy Pally
CoH Priest

The enh shaman (me) twists Windfury and GoA for threat and to boost dps, unless our tank has a large threat lead (30k+) which doesn't usually happen, or if the feral druid only is tanking - then I keep down GoA.

It seems like we are spot-on with the timers barring any potential wipes, as we had 17 minutes left on the timer before the last MC pull before Dragonhawk broke way early and we weren't prepared for it. That made us end Dragonhawk with about 9 minutes left.

Eagle and Bear are fine, we ended Eagle with 22-23 minutes left and chain-pulled most of the Bear trash.

We have a somewhat funky way of killing Dragonhawk, but it works well - we kill one hatcher and assign one ranged DPS to watch the other, and the Holy pally stands near the pathway leading to the egg room with Righteous Fury and no Salv, healing himself and others. He also Consecrates to get a bit more aggro on the birds. We pull half and half and AoE them with the holy pally tanking, then at that point Jan'Alai is at 35% and the rest of the birds spawn. We have our prot warrior AoE taunt, then our feral druid switch to bear and AoE taunt, while everyone is doing massive AoE. We then simply finish him off.

For Lynx trash, we skip everything but the AoE pack on the left, then jump through the huts and run to the first croc/trainer pull. We haven't tried a serious speed-run of this trash yet as we haven't had enough time.

Since we run with no Shadow Priest, it seems like the healers get a bit low on mana chain-pulling trash. This could be partially do to random aggro pulls/etc since we have no prot pally, but we had to stop for about 20 seconds on the pull before Bear to drink up. Is it normal to sit and drink for this long? Any other hints/tricks that will help us get our bears? Thanks in advance.

Ja7us · 03/31/08, 11:45 AM

Originally Posted by Nooblender

Since we run with no Shadow Priest, it seems like the healers get a bit low on mana chain-pulling trash. This could be partially do to random aggro pulls/etc since we have no prot pally, but we had to stop for about 20 seconds on the pull before Bear to drink up. Is it normal to sit and drink for this long? Any other hints/tricks that will help us get our bears? Thanks in advance.

Obviously mana potions help; you can have each healer / mana user chug a pot before engaging each boss to get their MP up.

What we've found works well for the healers in particular is to have one healer heal for the start of the bossfight while the other healer(s) are drinking. We have our resto druid come out the gate with HoT stacks on the tank(s) on Eagle, Bear and Dragonhawk since those fights are for the most part trivially easy to heal early on. Once the other healers are full up they get in the action and start to heal as normal (and the resto has innervate as backup if he needs it). The key is that since healers don't contribute any DPS, they can be drinking while you're fighting as long as people aren't getting gibbed during their mana break.

Nooblender · 03/31/08, 12:05 PM

Alright, we can try that. Most of our healers were down to the 4-5k mana mark at that point, so we should be fine if we pull the last group then have 2 healers sit and drink while we engage the boss. The Eagle trash isn't quite as bad for our healers' mana, but that should help too. Thanks.

rudyrocky · 03/31/08, 2:04 PM

Thanks Drowsy. Well as a follow up, which way is the better way to go, to the left and into the numerous hut area or to the right through the packs of Dragonhawks and trainers?

Bula · 03/31/08, 2:14 PM

I've always had more success going left and just being attentive to scouts. As an added bonus by going left you can potentially skip another patrol pack if your timing works out.

rudyrocky · 03/31/08, 4:08 PM

Thanks Bula. We will go left this time.

gnoop · 04/01/08, 1:28 PM

Originally Posted by Nooblender

My ZA group has been trying for the 4th chest timer for the past couple of runs, and barring any potential wipes I think we can make it.
Gear is a mix of T5/ZA/badge/early T6 (almost none of this), but we don't bring a shadow priest and our enhancement shaman isn't very synergistic with the melee group, so we are a little sub-optimal.

G1:
Prot Warrior
Feral Druid
Enh Shaman
Surv Hunter
Resto Druid

G2:
Ele Shaman
Destro Lock
Fire Mage
Holy Pally
CoH Priest

The enh shaman (me) twists Windfury and GoA for threat and to boost dps, unless our tank has a large threat lead (30k+) which doesn't usually happen, or if the feral druid only is tanking - then I keep down GoA.

It seems like we are spot-on with the timers barring any potential wipes, as we had 17 minutes left on the timer before the last MC pull before Dragonhawk broke way early and we weren't prepared for it. That made us end Dragonhawk with about 9 minutes left.

Eagle and Bear are fine, we ended Eagle with 22-23 minutes left and chain-pulled most of the Bear trash.

We have a somewhat funky way of killing Dragonhawk, but it works well - we kill one hatcher and assign one ranged DPS to watch the other, and the Holy pally stands near the pathway leading to the egg room with Righteous Fury and no Salv, healing himself and others. He also Consecrates to get a bit more aggro on the birds. We pull half and half and AoE them with the holy pally tanking, then at that point Jan'Alai is at 35% and the rest of the birds spawn. We have our prot warrior AoE taunt, then our feral druid switch to bear and AoE taunt, while everyone is doing massive AoE. We then simply finish him off.

For Lynx trash, we skip everything but the AoE pack on the left, then jump through the huts and run to the first croc/trainer pull. We haven't tried a serious speed-run of this trash yet as we haven't had enough time.

Since we run with no Shadow Priest, it seems like the healers get a bit low on mana chain-pulling trash. This could be partially do to random aggro pulls/etc since we have no prot pally, but we had to stop for about 20 seconds on the pull before Bear to drink up. Is it normal to sit and drink for this long? Any other hints/tricks that will help us get our bears? Thanks in advance.

With 3 healers, I'm surprised you're having mana issues. What you may want to do is rotate drinking. Basically, get out of combat for maybe a second to allow one of you to drink. Let the other 2 healers carry on. After the next pack, someone else drinks. That's basically what we'd do when trying the timed run.

If you're really trying to push time, consider, as the Shammy, dropping the mana regen totem (the name eludes me right now). Another possibility is just letting one healer not heal for a bit to regen mana if you don't want to drop out of combat for a second to keep the chain pulls going.

galzohar · 04/03/08, 3:48 PM

Damage you take depends a lot on group quality - both their DPS and their ability to actually stun/interrupt when needed. This is especially noticeable on flamecasters, which is why people even think about going the much longer route just for not needing to clear flamecasters and not needing to coordinate scout clearing and knowing their paths.

Boomkings, retadins and arms warriors don't really have a place in 10-mans imo - at least if you're trying to optimize. No matter how you look at it, your raid will gain more by having a non-hybrid caster/dpser. The moonkin will pretty much never be with more than 2 DPS casters (SP doesn't count as 5% crit for a SP is not very helpful, yet they pretty much require a SP). The ret paladin will not have a lot of people benefiting from judgements which is one of the things that makes him viable - at least it won't be enough of a raid DPS increase to make him more worthwhile than a rogue. Arms warriors, even if specced blood frenzy, simply don't prvide enough personal DPS combined with raid DPS increase to out-do a fury warrior (that can also be your offtank for bear/lynx if he has gear while DPSing much better than a feral druid for the rest of the run - making your MT work harder but you have an extra DPSer).

The only pros for having a ret pally is if he gets windfury, you run with only 2 healers and has tanking(+fr) gear to aoe tank the hatchlings on dragonhawk so you can take a whole side down at a time - but if you run with 3 healers your holy pally can do it just as well if not better. Same goes for the eagle aoe trash - that is much easier to do without any kind of tanking but it does make it easier/safer/faster.

Keep in mind that while a lot of things can help a little with your run, the most important thing is to get 10 good players. There's a reason people with various gear levels and composition optimization levels succeed and fail this run. While some would say WoW takes no skill, a lot of people don't even have that. Almost none of anything posted here is actually required to completel the run as long as your raid is good enough. However where skill fails slightly, sometimes gear and raid optimization just barely makes up for it.

bimmian · 04/04/08, 1:02 AM

Had our second all out attempt at the timed run tonight. Our timer ran out trash inside lynx boss room. We had one wipe on dragonhawk trash due to my stupidity, although that cost us 2 minutes max. We killed lynx boss in 2m 55s, so I think w/o the one wipe we still would have been ~2 minutes shy. My personal DPS was also low on dragonhawk, I think I was too worried about getting everyone prepared for an entire side hatching since thats where we wiped on our last attempt. Im not our 25man raid leader, and haven't led a raid in ~6 months, so im sure having to call out stuff and watch everyone more closely detracted from my dps a little bit.

Our group setup was:

G1:
Prot Pally (MT; No 25man gear, best of kara/za/badge gear)
Tree Druid
Ele Shaman
Fire Mage
Spriest

BM hunter
Spriest
Destro Lock
Holy Priest
Feral Druid (OT)

Our DPS was a little low on eagle boss, not sure why, but putting out a little more dps would save us 20-30 seconds. We chain pulled trash with only a couple stops for our pally to drink.

Here is the WWS: Wow Web Stats
See anything that we could improve upon? This was the first run for this group, and our first run without a melee group (no rogues/ehn shaman were on, so I decided to go with a mostly ranged group). I am having the same group run again on saturday, so I think we should get it just by having a full "almost" timed-run under our belt and people knowing a bit better whats going on.

rudyrocky · 04/04/08, 8:27 AM

So we went left through the huts on the 3rd boss, and it was much easier then going through all the dragonhawks. Unfortunately, we could not get the 3rd boss down. We have been successful with the 1,2, and 4th bosses. But the dragonhawk seems to be the toughest fight.

We used a pally to collect the birds and hatched one complete side. This was not a problem, and we usually were successful in cleaning them up. But it seemed the bosses fire breath was taking people out (especially clothies, i.e. mages). With the loss of dps we just could not get enough damage on the boss.

How do you get the boss's health down if you have the bulk of the dps in the group focusing on the birds? I have read through a bunch of the strategies here, but we tried them and had no luck. I think there is something I am missing. We had no problem avoiding the fire bombs (used aerial view). It just seemed as though the boss was targeting the mages and taking them out to fast. Should we be taken fire pots, or is there a special position for the tank to pull the boss in?

Thanks for any help.

This was not a speed run, we are just trying to get him down.

Teez · 04/04/08, 8:43 AM

People are probably stacking up by accident when they're panicking and scramming to kill the hatchlings. Have melee, healers and the tank try and stand on the opposite side of where you're about to kill the birds to make sure they don't cause breaths on your aoe classes & the paladin. Have the paladin stand by the little bridge to the platform, with the person that's going to kill the hatcher, and have your other aoe classes stand off to the sides so you minimize the risk of them chaining breaths on eachother. Also, during critical moments, if you can spare the gcd, dispelling flame buffets can come in handy to reduce damage taken.

Obviously, make sure your raid members are spread out in a circular fashion around the boss (meaning, don't stand behind people either, if they get targeted for a breath, it'll hit you too) and have them NOT move when they are targeted with a breath. This fight's really just about minimizing damage taken during the first two spawns (or possibly the first spawn if you let them spawn both sides at once, which works too if your raid can deal with it), after that it becomes laughable at best provided your tank isn't getting slapped around.

Also, we generally burn cooldowns (including heroism) during, or just before the first set of dragonhawks to hatch, to trivialize that wave.

Narishma · 04/04/08, 9:42 AM

Originally Posted by Teez

Also, during critical moments, if you can spare the gcd, dispelling flame buffets can come in handy to reduce damage taken.

We always run with 2 healers, and I have never had any problems with dispelling on this fight. The damage isn't -that- spiky. The flame breath on raid happens with regular intervals, so it's np waiting a second or two to heal that up, and if you're going for timed, your tank is geared and can easily survive a few seconds of beating, certainly long enough to get some dispels going.

rudyrocky · 04/04/08, 2:26 PM

Thanks for the responses, we will have to try to keep our spacing to avoid the flame breath.

Grayson Carlyle · 04/04/08, 3:39 PM

Originally Posted by galzohar

arms warriors don't really have a place in 10-mans imo

I don't think you realize how much DPS an Arms warrior is capable of on trash. Every run I've been in I've done the most total damage simply because I'm doing 1800-2400 DPS on trash. Bosses? Yah, I drop down as low as 1100 on Nalorakk where a Fury would be 1300+ at least, but the bosses are a small part of the whole 40-47 minutes.

Thanahtos · 04/04/08, 7:40 PM

Originally Posted by Grayson Carlyle

I don't think you realize how much DPS an Arms warrior is capable of on trash. Every run I've been in I've done the most total damage simply because I'm doing 1800-2400 DPS on trash. Bosses? Yah, I drop down as low as 1100 on Nalorakk where a Fury would be 1300+ at least, but the bosses are a small part of the whole 40-47 minutes.

We bring an Arms warrior, and he puts out a huge amount of DPS, keeping up with me, and our Enhancement Shaman and Balance Druid very nicely.

Lumb · 04/05/08, 9:22 AM

Our guild just had its first real try on getting the 4th timed loot, and I think it went pretty well. It ended with us loosing out on the timed loot as we were killing Halazzi, it took us 3 minutes 48 seconds to down him and I think we missed out by about 1 and a half minutes. We are around tier 5 level gear. Our group setup was as follows:-

Group 1

Rogue
Rogue
Enhancement Shaman (me)
Feral druid
Survival Hunter

Group 2

Holy priest
Resto Shaman
Shadow Priest
Afflication Warlock
Prot Pala

We had one or two total deaths throughout the whole run, which I think could easily have counted towards one minute or so.

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated

Oh, and we were all flasked / foodbuffed

Jezz · 04/05/08, 9:33 AM

Originally Posted by Lumb

Our guild just had its first real try on getting the 4th timed loot, and I think it went pretty well. It ended with us loosing out on the timed loot as we were killing Halazzi, it took us 3 minutes 48 seconds to down him and I think we missed out by about 1 and a half minutes. We are around tier 5 level gear. Our group setup was as follows:-

Group 1

Rogue
Rogue
Enhancement Shaman (me)
Feral druid
Survival Hunter

Group 2

Holy priest
Resto Shaman
Shadow Priest
Afflication Warlock
Prot Pala

We had one or two total deaths throughout the whole run, which I think could easily have counted towards one minute or so.

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated

Oh, and we were all flasked / foodbuffed

Yeah, just to continue on from this post. We were flasked/elixired and using food buffs but did not use haste potions or drums. We did still loot the chests, which I am sure might have contributed to some of the loss of time but a few still need loot from there. Next time we will skip them, can they be looted at the end?

Here are the armorys of the players if it is any help:

The World of Warcraft Armory
The World of Warcraft Armory
The World of Warcraft Armory
The World of Warcraft Armory
The World of Warcraft Armory

The World of Warcraft Armory
The World of Warcraft Armory
The World of Warcraft Armory
The World of Warcraft Armory
The World of Warcraft Armory

Elerion · 04/05/08, 9:46 AM

For what it's worth, your shadow priest has made very good gearing decisions and is well above T5 gear level.

• Mjollnir · 04/05/08, 11:00 AM

Originally Posted by Jezz

can they be looted at the end?

Yes. Leave 1 person (mana based dps- allows some recovery time) to free the prisoner while the other 9 move swiftly [mounted] to the next step in a long series of chain pulling.

Fandoth · 04/05/08, 11:32 AM

I just wanted to add input in on other group make-ups.

(gp1)

Druid (Feral)
Shaman(Resto)
Rogue
Rogue
Warrior (Fury)

(grp 2)

Priest (Holy)
Paladin (Tank)
Priest (Shadow)
Shaman (Elemental)
Mage

• Chicken · 04/05/08, 11:41 AM

Originally Posted by Mjollnir

Yes. Leave 1 person (mana based dps- allows some recovery time) to free the prisoner while the other 9 move swiftly [mounted] to the next step in a long series of chain pulling.

No need to do that even. Even if the time runs out any prisoners of the bosses you've killed will remain there for you to free until the instance soft resets, so just don't bother with them until you're done.

• tdx · 04/05/08, 1:21 PM

Originally Posted by Lumb

Our guild just had its first real try on getting the 4th timed loot, and I think it went pretty well. It ended with us loosing out on the timed loot as we were killing Halazzi, it took us 3 minutes 48 seconds to down him and I think we missed out by about 1 and a half minutes. We are around tier 5 level gear. Our group setup was as follows:-

Can you give more information about the run? When did people die? A link to a WWS report would be particularly helpful.

Your group composition is certainly sufficient.

Saburo · 04/06/08, 10:21 AM

My raid just finished with ~4.5 min to spare. This was actually quite impressive for us considering the circumstances. We cleared the traditional 4 chest order, Eagle->Bear->Dragonhawk->Lynx.

The errors that set us back:
-Our warlock was a little over zealous on the eagle trash and died near the end of the gauntlet, causing him and our shadow priest to get killed stalling us slightly.
-Our main flaw was when the raid wiped on the last pull of the bear trash due to lag + double roar on me. Half of the raid ran back and got stuck behind the pat before we could clear the last pack.
-We where a little slow getting to Dragonhawk because of awkward scouts .
-A miss-communication on Dragonhawk caused the mobs to spawn too slowly, and our dps warrior to die early as a result.

Our group 1 composition was:
-Me (prot warrior)
-Ret Pally
-Feral Druid (dps'd most of time, only tanked eagle trash, amani bears, bear boss, and lynx)
-Dps warrior (33/28, mostly pvp gear, an alt of a holy pally)
-Resto sham (I swaped him for mana tide and the other shamans BL)

Group 2:
-Circle of Healing priest
-Shadow Blot lock
-Ele Sham
-BM hunter
-Shadow priest (friend from another guild, mostly t6 gear, little t5)

I have done successful bear runs for a while, but I think that this composition has a great deal of potential. Most of the time I have done the run has been with caster based dps crew with a few melee and me with the healers (pally priest). We have gotten the 4th chest but it was with no wipes (more single deaths though) and ~2 min or less on the clock.

The placement of the shamans is a little awkward, but that was because our enhancement shaman didn't show and we replaced him with an elemental shaman that was online at the time. I think that with an Ench shaman in group 1 and resto in group 2 we could safely obliterate the zone. I can't even imagine if we had a rogue...

Probably the most tricky thing I have seen with group composition so far is that you NEED a pally for salv, but thier single target heals makes running 2 healers tricky if you group is in mostly t5 and badge loot. You can use a pally tank, but mana for him can be an issue, and he doesn't synergies well with anything but casters, which a lot of can be bad in the first place. Using a ret pally worked very well in group 1, and with the buffs going around he did alot of damage (giving him double bloodlust as a BE pally is quite powerful).

With the Ideal group, no wipes, and more polished trash I am sure we can do it with 10+ min to spare, considering each of us h