A protadin who knows what he's doing and has good communication with his OT should never have to drink, shadow priest or no. Judge righteousness and consecrate the first mob, just the second mob with righteousness a few times, and then do nothing but auto-attack the remaining mobs with wisdom judged and seal of wisdom up (consecrate damage from when the first two were being killed should keep aggro for you). And you can always just use stuns and taunt to keep a mob under control if you don't want to spend the mana to hold threat.

This does require a different mindset from the usual "maximize threat." Instead you have to think in terms of "expend the minimum amount of mana I need to in order to keep everything on me long enough that no one dies."

The basic method we employed was that the feral would grab the kill target (unless it was a flame caster in which case a DPS warrior would "tank" it) and I (the protadin) would grab everything else. I usually took enough damage to be at a reasonable amount of mana by the time the incoming damage started to drop (i.e., when half the pull was dead) and at that point I'm just regenning mana with JoW/SoW.

The only times I sat down to drink were before the bosses when others were also drinking.

Just adding to the voices of those recent Bear achievements:

Wow Web Stats

Prot Warr MT
Prot Warr OT
Enh Sham
Fury Warr
Dest Lock
---
Spriest
Spriest
Holy Pal
Resto Sham
Fire Mage

This project started for us about a month and a half ago, and taking place only on weekends to not interfere with our weekday schedules of 25mans. All in all I think we have spent either 6 or 7 weeks with tonight being our first bear. We have been farming Illidan for 3 weeks now, but many of this group are not/ were not part of the raiding core.
As can be seen, we lack perfect synergy with dual Prots (meaning lost DPS), the lock being pushed into g1 so as to accomodate the mage in g2. g2 never had any mana issues the whole run in the slightest, and hindsight being 20/20 we could probably drop 1 of the spriests and bring another melee to provide significantly more synergy for both groups.
We usually run with 3 healers but made a switch at the last minute for the 2nd spriest. We were pretty cautious with pulls being as how we didn't have AoE tanks (feral swipe / pally pwnage) and only 2 healers. Lynx down with about 40sec left on the clock.
Control >>> Speed. Know the pulls, invest in learning them and setting a pace, but focus on control. In no way shape or form did we rush through things.

As the leader of a 2-healer setup (resto shaman, resto druid) I feel your pain here. We normally run with a ret paladin and a heavy melee group but this week the ret paladin was late so we ended up taking a prot paladin and going caster heavy (2 mages, 2 locks, protadin instead of 2 locks, hunter, ret pally, feral druid).

I don't agree with what you say about caster-heavy being bad though. With a shadow priest in the group mana isn't really an issue and with 4 AoE classes (5 with a prot paladin) we absolutely destroyed the eagle gauntlet, dragonhawk boss and lynx trash, finishing with plenty of time remaining on the timer.

Overall the thing this thread reinforces more and more is that there *isn't* a right or wrong group setup, just go with what suits your group the best.

We have 5 bears now, and only our first 2 clears failed. It's a pretty balanced group overall.

Prot Warrior
Feral Druid
Holy/Prot Paladin (hybrid spec, 28-33-0)
Rogue
BM Hunter

Resto Shaman
Destruction Warlock
Fire Mage
Shadow Priest
Holy Priest

Our paladin and shaman just adjust roles continuosly through the run, with the paladin tanking where AoE is desirable (eagle gauntlet, lynx trash, dragonhawk boss) and the shaman heals then. Otherwise (bear trash, most of dragonhawk trash) the paladin heals and our shaman nukes. We could easily just have the paladin go full prot and replace the druid with another dpser (enhancement shaman or an AoEr) or have our shaman spec elemental as well, but we focus more on control than raw dps and always have at least 3 minutes left at the end.

This depends on your level of gear. With T6 gear we got our first 3 bear mounts without a paladin and honestly I only notice the difference on bosses.

We got our first bear today after a number of heartbreaking near misses and a fair chunk of straight up screw ups on our part. To the best of my knowledge, it is among the first few on our server.

We're a 7/9, 4/5 guild that's been running in the general direction of a bear for a while now. We have about 12-14 people that often make our ZA runs, but a core of 9 or so that have been on most of them...

Tonight we ran with:

Prot Warrior
Prot Pally
BM Hunter
Shadow Priest
Destro Lock

Destro Lock
Shadow Priest
Fire Mage
Holy Pally
CoH Priest

We ended up with about 5 minutes left, which we took as indicator of the fact that we should have been getting bears for a bit now.

This happened to be the first run I logged, so maybe the key was a parse.

Thank you to all the posters in this thread. It was truly the inspiration for starting our attempts and contained the advice that helped get us a member of the bear calvary.

We don't skip it when it would make us wait for it but if it just left when we arrive there, we always skip it.

It also never ever agro'd during the boss, but I can imagine the chances of us skipping the pack and getting it walk over right as hatchers spawn are pretty small.

You should really combatlog your timed runs, a combatlog could easily answer this question.

Thanks for the advice. What do you mean by Combatlog? I tried to get WWS working but I think that Vista is causing me problems because I cannot seem to launch the WWS Client (Just mentioning that, not asking for assistance on that issue... I'll get that one figured out eventually).

I was referring to WWS yes, but as it is /combatlog that actually gathers the data, I found it more suitable to use that as a verb.

This happened to us, assuming I am thinking of the same pat. We are pretty sure that it was totems that dragged the pat up, fortunately we didn't wipe however. I think you can see it on this video here. The shaman insist it wasn't totems, but it probably was.

I wish we wouldn't have wiped... We had the worst luck. I got slept, it killed a healer, the tank died. Wipe.

I am downloading your vid now to take a look at it. The shaman that it targeted for us is a server transfer that has pretty much all T4 level gear and went into ZA for the first time on one of our timed run attempts and pretty much never made a single mistake. We run with 2 healers so that's saying a lot. He's otherwise been great so I am hesitant to blame him for the wipe.

We just had another shot at the bear mount, and I believe we were within about 1 minute or so of getting the mount. We had 2 mistakes during the run, once on Akilzon where our lock didn't run into the middle in time (causing 2 dps deaths), and once where we had a semi wipe on the last trash pull to halazzi.

Wow Web Stats

Group 1:

Enh Shaman
Rogue
Rogue
Hunter
Prot warrior

Group 2:

Prot paladin
Shadow priest
Holy paladin
Resto Shaman
Destruction Warlock

Is there anything that stands out with the WWS performance wise which could be improved?

Thanks for the help.

First of all I would not use 2 rogues, they provide 0 raid buffs and in a 10 man like that more then 1 is a waste. Your raid dps seems REALLY low, and i think is may be partially do to the 2 rogues. Also, does your prot warrior battleshout or commanding shout, that would change group 1's dps significantly. I don't have a wws for our lynx kill, but I remember everyone was over 1.5k dps, with our arms warrior and desto lock above 2k. No one had any t6 level gear at the time, so its not really too much of a gear issue, but a raid composition/stacking issue.

This is speculation.

We bring 2 rogues to our runs and they consistently are 1 and 2 on the meters when they have an enhancement shaman.

Your composition is not perfect, but it's good enough if you're that close. The speed clear is about not making mistakes and efficiency. If you eliminate those mistakes and optimize your clear the dps should come naturally. This thread has loads of info about optimizing.

In my personal experience, bringing the same 10 people will yield a higher chance at the mount compared to a few new people but a more 'stacked' group.

Our run has found this to be the case as well. We also suffered from a number of near makes before breaking through. In my opinion, it's about working toward it to earn the near misses and gain experience with both the instance and working with a relatively static group, then you break through and it just snaps together.

One of our raid members thought we were putting too much stress on our selves and we needed to relax...we did and it led to a clean run. When everyone is stressed you're bound to make mistakes, which will slow you down more than if you can take a step back and run clean...

Note to Paladin tanks trying Zul'aman since they changed the mechanics on the bombing sequence:

Don't forget that there's a 2500 damage / tick firewall at the entrance to the bridge leading to the egg spawns...


Yeah, we would have had our second bear (timer died with Lynx at 25%) if I hadn't been so distracted by how amazing my flame-tanking set was for this boss. "Wow, these guys do like no damage! WHAT JUST HIT ME?"


Having tried a few group compositions, I've got to chime in very adamantly about the fact that group composition honestly doesn't matter much. We switched from a caster-heavy group to a melee-heavy group. Some AOE pulls took a little longer, but things like Flame Casters simply exploded and bosses died ludicrously quickly. You will gain enough time on the parts your group is good at that you will always make up for the ones your group is bad at, unless you knowingly created a terrible group for yourself.


As far as the WWS analysis goes, I don't see anything horribly wrong. The only thing I'd mention would be that a one minute wipe means that you'll have it the first time you do a run without any mistakes.

We've been getting bear for about 6 weeks now, farming Illidan since January.
Yesterday we had our best run ever with 11 mins left on the clock. I was pretty amazed myself as we didn't plan to get a record or anything, it just turned out that way.

Group composition was:

Prot Warrior
Prot Pala
Shadow Priest
Ret Pala
Resto Shaman

Fire Mage
Destr Warlock
Shadow Priest
Elemental Shaman
Resto Shaman

The protection paladin had only ZA and badge gear and the elemental shaman only has a few T6 equivalent parts.

Basically we never stopped to drink. We didn't manage cooldowns the best we could tho, since we used Fire Elementals on Eagle and the cooldown still had 5 minutes left when we engaged Dragonhawk boss.

As I said we didn't try to stack up the raid, but since we had done another run earlier that day this is what we had available.

Thinking about it now, I'm not sure what else you could change to optimize even more and get it done even faster, apart for some gear upgrades.

As everyone says it's all about focus. Even 30 seconds delays (ressing, etc) or resting breaks will add up and eventually affect your time.

I must say I do enjoy the rush and I think I'll be pretty disappointed when we will all have mounts and people will lose the will and determination to continue doing it.

How in the world? Very impressive. You did this with 2 Resto Shamans? What--did your tank Shield Wall through the Bear silences? Do both of your Shamans have Vial of the Sunwell or something? My goodness. I had to do a double-take on your healer selection.

I don't doubt that many raids would be capable of a time like this if they were willing to use Mana Potions, etc. on the go. Once guilds find that "safe zone" for completing a full Timed ZA they don't really attempt to outdo themselves. They don't bother using Drums on trash, they don't bother having their healers DPS when they don't need to heal, etc. They just farm like zombies.

I guess the same goes for many instances, like Hyjal and Black Temple.

Our group had cleared ZA timed for a second successive run now. We've only done the zone once a week, but went from mere seconds to well over 4min to spare at Lynx downing.
Just want to emphasize: learn the pulls. Never push dps, but push control. It's easy to apply dps if tanks have solid aggro, healers have enough mana, etc.
All it takes is people willing to put in the time and willing to put forth effort. I'm sure this thread has beaten this to death.
Best of luck to those still getting bears to drop. Just get the first one, then it's all downhill from there.

Our guild got out first bear mount and only 9 people with T6 gloves we are 4/5 and 4/9 progression

As I said that's who we had on. I didn't use a single mana potion. ES ticks for about 1k and silence is short enough to make sure tank doesn't get dangerously low. Actually the warrior did use SW on Bear boss because the paladin taunt got bugged again and it just wouldn't work, so he had to use shieldwall while having the dots + debuff.

We've completed it quite a few times with only 2 shamans as healers and never had any problems. Chain heal scales so good that even at the Flame Caster pulls, 2 chain heals top everyone after a voley.

I think our setup just enabled us to not waste any time on drinking, since even the pala tank had enough to keep chain pulling.

Our normal composition is 2 resto shamans as the healers, with a shadow priest in their group. Elemental shaman as well for 3x bloodlusts.