◊ Malan

I'm not really sure what you mean when you say "when 100% has been dealt to both targets as a whole," 100% of what?

~Rocks, coming to a shaman near you in the next expansion~

 

Pyros

I assume 100% as in half of the two 100%bars those two have. Like, supposedly if you took down the lynx to 50% and the troll to 50%, they'd merge. I don't know if it is actually the case though, just that it sounded like the most logical explanation to this 100% thing.

 

Hegen

We tried this recommendation tonight, and for us the difference was even greater. The savings was about 7 minutes for us. We missed chest three by a mere 10 seconds. Since we had quite a lot of stupid mistakes during trash, I think we will be able to do chest 3 with time to spare in a few IDs.

 

Xrhino

We had our second attempt at this last night, missed out by less then 1 minute. That being said we know how we can save even more time and I have no doubt our trip to ZA on Monday will be our first bear.

Group setups
Fury warrior
Rogue
Feral Druid
Resto Shaman
Hunter

Mage
Des Lock
Spriest
Holy Priest
Prot Pally (the groups MT)

We keep the blessing by having the pally as tank while allowing us to use a shaman + priest in a 2 healer setup. These groups aren't ideal but its what we have to work with. This last attempt we pulled entire sides during Dragonhawk and found our prot paladins HP spiking like crazy. He has epic FR gear but was not using it. Do people recommend using FR for this, and if so how much FR?

 

Kaimani

Just throwing in my own anecdotes. The timed event is certainly not as aggressively tuned as many claim. The way I see it you need to meet half of the following criteria.

1) Be in full T6
2) Be completely consumabled up
3) Stack your groups aggressively
4) Bring only 2 healers.

Our guild's first honest attempt at the timed run was a success, and we brought a less than ideal group setup based on what I'm hearing in this thread. We had 3 healers, let a sentry call some guards during the dragonhawk trash, and also had a handful of deaths during lynx trash that slowed us up a bit and still beat the timer by somewhere between 1-2 minutes. It was a while ago, but I think the group composition was warrior/druid tank, shaman/priest/pally healing, rogue/mage/2xwarlock/something else for dps... maybe a ret pally, I can't remember. We didn't have a shadow priest I know for sure. We were an almost entirely T6 geared group with flasks though.

The key is really to keep everyone moving and focused. It's amazing how much time you waste just standing around looking at a bosses' corpse or drinking to full when you really don't have to.

 

constantius

Xrhino: was your paladin eating flame breaths from the boss? When you hit 50 stacks, any incoming fire damage is going to rock him, especially a 4500 (un-amplified) hit. One strat calls for pulling the boss slightly out of LoS of the tunnel so the paladin can avoid taking flame breaths while s/he has a massive stack of adds up. Not necessary, just an idea.

As far as holy priest goes, I'd love to say that we're useful / amazing / needed for a speed run, but I really can't. There's absolutely no way we can provide anything that comes close to 4x Bloodlust or Blessings. Fort is easily handled by a shadow priest, which leaves us in the unenviable position of bringing nothing powerful to the table.

In fact, ideally, you'd probably want 2 paladins and 2 shamans for a truly min/max'd speed clear. The benefit from the 2nd blessing is equally as powerful as the 1st, and 2 bloodlusts makes every boss a full 30+ seconds faster. You can obviously do it with 1-2 or 2-1, but 2-2 is the most powerful. Of course, if you really trust your tanks, the 2nd paladin is unnecessary (since Salv won't really factor in), so you can go 2 shamans, 1 paladin, and make sure you have a druid in the other spot for GotW.

I'd like to hear from anyone who (as a holy priest) has been an integral part of a speed clear. My guild has 2 people who typically take the healer slots first for "mains ZA" (i.e. let's get a bear), and they're shaman/paladin. The OT will be either druid or paladin for additional buffs. How did you work around the lack of synergy / group buffage that limits holy priests in ZA?

(side note: I think that for Hex Lord and Malacress, not having a holy priest hurts you rather than helps you. PoH or CoH are awesome for topping up the spirit bolts, and Binding Heal, as said above, rocks P3 ZJ)

Stupidity cannot be cured with money, or through education, or by legislation. Stupidity is not a sin, the victim can't help being stupid. - R.A. Heinlein

Anyone who cannot cope with mathematics is not fully human. At best he is a tolerable subhuman who has learned to wear shoes, bathe, and not make messes in the house. - R.A. Heinlein

 

Pyros

Being a druid, I somewhat feel the same way, I manage just fine when we do normal runs, or speed runs that don't go to the end, but for a full speed run, I don't see where I'd fit compared to a shaman or a paladin. Again, same as holy priests, I own at malacrass(lifebloom rotations starting from lowest hp to highest, starting a tad before he starts draining), I own at eagle phase(lifebloom self, then I can lifebloom 3people and I'll bloom which brings me back to full, unless I ate some tornados, and those 3people get 4kheals over 7secs). MoTW is nice but a feral can do it just fine, innervates are mostly useless if your gear is good and you're using consumables, combat rez can be done by feral if he's OT, or can be ignored totally.

I guess it all boils down to having enough of the "good" classes doing something else than healing(prot paladin+elem sham for example), where then you could fit a shaman or paladin as your first healer and take any other healer for last spot without hurting the performance too much. But well I'm not too worried, the bear looks sick, but I look terrible(tauren+cloth=bad) so I'd still look bad anyway ^^.

P.S: We're not really to the point where we do more than 3chests on speedruns, we're not geared enough or don't care enough really, I'm just extrapoling from my ZA experiences. Maybe a better geared druid could comment if I'm wrong somewhere or missed something.

 

KrinKer

Just want to add my 2cents to this post.

I got my bear mount yesterday night ( rolled 98, pretty happy with it ) (bear on a bear mount ... omg ). Anyways, our set-up was

Group 1
Prot pally (t5 geared)
prot warr
Hunter
Rogue
Tree druid

Group 2
Fire Mage
Shadow Priest
Ele Shaman
Holy Pally
Destro Lock

We actually f*ed up pretty bad going to dragonhawk AND on dragonhawk. Got three packs of reinforcements (stupid roots being resisted) . The best thing for this trash is to Mind control the casters, they RAPE through the other mobs of a pack. We almost wiped to dragonhawk, f*ed on the second wave of adds (pushed him through 35 % quicker than expected) so there was 4 deaths there. We also had some weird Sh!t happening on Lynx, mainly the tank getting the full "saber lash" even though the other tank was directly on him. Bresed the Mt and finished with probably 15 seconds left.

Just goes to show that when u know what you're doing you probably have a 3-4 minutes to spare.

All in all pretty nice event. Very well done by Blizz's part

 

Vorex

As far as I know, my guild is the only guild successfully clearing the timed event with the following group composition:

G1
MT: Prot Warrior
OT: Arms/Fury Warrior
Rogue
Enhancement Shaman
Resto Druid

G2:
Holy Paladin
Shadow Priest
Fire Mage
Destro Lock
Elemental Shaman

We are 5/5 9/9, but our healers are by no means wearing T6 gear (in fact, our holy paladin wears full s3/pvp gear). The first time we seriously attempted completed the event, we did it with just under 5 minutes left. We didn't loot any badges or release any prisoners, but we did manage to do the Dragonhawk boss by hatching all the eggs at once. We do take advantage of the shortcut through the lynx trash via the hut windows. Last ZA reset we completed the timed event with just under 6 minutes left, and we will shave more time off as we continue to farm T6 content.

 

galzohar

While we hadn't done 3 chests successfully yet, the boss corpses seem to be lasting long enough for until we fail the 3rd one to go back and loot the first 2 after we fail the timer. Is this a safe thing to do or if you go all the way until the timer actually runs out you may be short of the timer?

 

brunnor

We've only done it with 3 healers each time. Resto sham, resto druid and holy pally. We also use a prot warrior with feral ot'ing. It gets the job done but we do have under 5min when we finish. Can be pushing it but its not that bad.

 

Vorex

We usually set it to group loot and have a designated person loot the corpse. Our enchanter greeds all boss drops, and if someone needs a piece of loot, they simply roll need. We also do not loot any badges from any of the bosses, because this can be rather time consuming. This way, we spend as little time as possible looting bosses.

By the time we finish the timed event, we go back, release all the prisoners and get the chest loot. Only the Dragonhawk boss still has a corpse that can be looted for badges by this time (for us, at least).

 

Vhad

If you have T6 gear, you barely have to stack the group to get it done, the first non-alt non-awful setup run we did for the bear we got it and we even wiped on trash. It was close but we still did it with a very suboptimal raid. If I remember correctly the group setup was:

Prot War
MS War
Rogue
Ret Paladin
Resto Shaman

Fire Mage
Destro Lock
Moonkin
Holy Paladin
Survival Hunter

We had about 45 seconds or so left when Lynx died. When we went with a "better" setup we had 8mins59-x seconds left when we engaged the Lynx. It almost felt too easy compared to our first run, 2 shaman and a spriest made chain pulling easier and regardless of what people say the mana regen helped quite alot.

Min/Maxing is only needed if you're undergeared as I see it, so granted you have the gear to do it you barely need any real stacking unless you want to trivialize it.

What!?

 

• Snowy

The point of this thread is to help groups who HAVEN'T done the timed run yet, but are close. There's really 2 ways that you can fail. One is that you wipe and lack control. You have to fix that issue first before you can worry about the second way, which is insufficient DPS. This thead lately is more about the second way, and optimizing things like bloodlust are absolutey relevant to the topic. Take for example our group -- I'm in a group with a resto shaman, holy pally, destro or aff lock (depending on who is running that day) and a resto druid. To use the bloodlust on that group would be silly if you're looking to speed up your run and it absolutely can make the difference. Bloodlust on the druid/pally is wasted, and it's less than ideal for myself and the aff lock. T6 melee DPS in the other group is going to benefit a lot more. That could end up shaving 15-20 seconds off a boss fight, for example. Repeat that 4 times and guess what? You've gained at least a minute on your timer. These things add up.

Lets try to keep the tone civil though, there seems to be a little too much epeening here. GENERALLY speaking, your skill level is going to matter more than your group composition, but there are some fairly evident truths such as melee dps >> caster dps for this, outside of your one AOE. It doesn't mean that casters are useless and should never be brought. It doesn't mean that holy priests are useless. It just means that other combinations do bring a little more extra to the table and that could mean the difference between missing it by a minute and making it. If your ONLY concern is min/maxing your clear time, then a resto shaman is going to provide a little more benefit than a holy priest. It does not mean you couldn't do it with the holy priest, just the resto shaman is going to help you do it slightly faster with the extra tools they bring to the table.

Benefactors' Bar, where you get free English lessons:

 

Anedris

Newsflash:

- You can beat the timed event with more or less any class composition (yes, you can even bring priests! Or mages, or whatever else people have been bashing, I skimmed this last page because it was so fascinating), as long as you stack your groups intelligently and you have the right number of tanks (i.e., a MT and someone to take saber lashes) and enough healing for people to not die)
- Bring people who know the fights and know what they're doing. You can class-stack to the moon and if someone messes up badly you'll still fail. You can go with a typical 10-person raid and if everyone has the gear and plays well you'll win.

Not using heroism in a group with three healers seems blatantly obvious... switch the resto shaman with the tank (who is presumably in the other group), pop bloodlust, switch back, continue.

 

Lansky

These runs are heavily skewed towards execution over "ideal" set up from what I've experienced. I run these for my guild and our last run was so far from ideal it had us giggling-

G1
Prot Paladin
MS Warrior
Rogue
Imp DS Holy Prist
Resto Druid

G2
2x Spriest
2x Fire Mage
1x Resto Shaman

Sure the mana let the mages AE a lot but we had no warlock for curses, no shaman for the melee group so they lacked WF. I could keep going, but we ran the instance without major mistakes (one death on gauntlet, and one death during Dragonhawk trash) and succeeded with ~3 minutes left on the timer anyway. I'm sure this has been stated previously, however using consumables, stacking groups as best you can, and playing smart will offset any "non ideal" group set ups.

 

Nuveena

I wonder if someone who isn't running the timed event in "gear cap" gear could post a WWS log? Especially those who say they do it in T5 / badge reward level gear. As much as I like watching big numbers, the other end of the spectrum would be interesting from the point of view "when could I start thinking of doing this?".

 

Liryn

So Imperatoris, how did you decide the order of Cool Points?

Being the holy priest he mentioned (and not even CoH specced) I just wanted to add that if healers can safely do a bit of DPS, that can help speed things up as well. As you can see in Gurgthock's video, a resto shaman can cast some Lightning Bolts, holy priests can Smite, etc. I imagine it's much harder for a druid or paladin to do. Obviously my 90k damage done was not amazing or anything but given that we finished with less than 2 minutes left on the timer, 90k is better than nothing.

Edit: I was thinking a druid in tree form, of course if you drop tree you can nuke too

 

deep

This talk about "ideal dps groups" is irritating. More interesting would be talk about setups that cannot work or how robust setups are to taking inexperienced players to ZA.

We're in the process of doing runs with the following twelve characters: 2x Feral Druid, 1x Resto Druid, 2x Resto Shaman, 1x Holy Paladin, 2x BM Hunter, 2x Destruction Warlock, 1x Fire Mage, 1x Shadow Priest. Everyone is in full T6 and uses elixirs and buff food.

So far, we have done four runs (all successful) with one of these two setups:

G1:
Feral Druid
Feral Druid
BM Hunter
BM Hunter
Resto Shaman

G2:
Destro Lock
Destro Lock
Shadow Priest
Resto Druid
Holy Paladin

===============
G1:
Feral Druid
Feral Druid
BM Hunter
Resto Druid
Resto Shaman

G2:
Destro Lock
Destro Lock
Fire Mage
Shadow Priest
Resto Shaman

The warlocks, mage and priest have problems with threat. On Eagle, Bear and Lynx Boss we would lose a lot of time without a paladin for BoS or a shaman for the tranquil air totem. Additionally in our second setup without the paladin, the shadow priest was the only dispeller at the lynx boss which destroys his dps there (can that be healed instead of dispelled?). The two shamans used their earth elementals for the eggs at the dragonhawk boss, the week the paladin was not available for tanking them.

On trash one feral wears cat gear and sets the focus, while the other feral holds the rest of the mobs in tank gear. Most trash is focused down except lynxes, one dragonhawk pack, and half of the eagle trash mobs. We do not use mind-control. If nothing goes wrong we seem to finish with about five minutes left. If we're being stupid, we have three combat rezzes and innervates. :P

We originally started with ten people and had to replace two missing guys one week. The new players both knew basically nothing about the bosses and trash. With three healers there is no problem using one inexperienced healer. And T6 equipped dps classes seem to output more than enough dps to go with one new dpser and with three healers instead of two.

 

Pyros

It's easy for a druid too, actually I can easily pull ~550dps in healing gear. I have 13points in balance, 5 of which reduce wrath casting time to 1.5secs. Wrath hits for 750 or so in healing gear, and has a 20%crit rate. I use a bit of my pvp gear for trash anyway, because I tend to pull aggro every now and then, and it has spellhit on it, so I'm around 4% hit too, which is decent for trash. The only thing that sucks is I'm not in treeform so not getting the bonuses, but it's somewhat better than ending all the fights at 90%mana, or 100% if I have a spriest. I do it everywhere really, from ZA to BT, and I sometimes even do it on bosses(supremus is the most obvious one).

 

◊ Praetorian

I just removed all the posts that made this thread suck (and guess what, the damn thread is about three pages shorter now!). Kindly shut the fuck up about which classes/specs are useless/amazing and discuss the ZA timed run.

 

• Sebudai

I'm wondering how well the "let the first hatcher break every egg" tactic works with a feral druid doing the add tanking. Currently we just go through several waves of hatchers during the fight. We're going to be running with 3 healers, including a holy paladin, so we might just copy the strat you guys were using in your video. I think I'd prefer to use our feral druid over the holy paladin in that role though, if it's possible. He gets an AE taunt, and we'll also have an additional AE taunt from our fury warrior for the opposite side if necessary.

 

◊ Praetorian

It might be best to let the hatcher break one side, kill him, then let the next break the other in that cast.

Feral druids would be great at picking them up when they come out 1-->2-->4-->etc. Where paladins are superior is when the first hatcher heads over and literally hatches the entire other side at once (because he's already reached the cap hatching rate on the first side).

Either can definitely work. Ultimately it depends on how much time you have coming into the dragonhawk boss. If you have 20 minutes when you pull him, then you just need to be reasonably quick and you really need to not wipe. If you have 16 minutes left, then you want to be very very aggressive and very fast. That, to an extent, dictates the appropriate strat.

 

Atep

what helped us doing the timed run was an alternate strategy for the eagle boss. Instead of spreading out we form three camps near the boss - this way the chain lightning hits only a few people each time and nobody will ever have to move during a storm.
Today I took a screenshot of our positioning. You do not want to have more than 4 people per camp, so spread accordingly.

[img=http://img155.imageshack.us/img155/5661/zaboss1ug5.th.jpg]

Also, on the dragonhawk boss, all but one healer and the tank move into the egg-areas. If you move far enough you will not get a flame breath and it is easier to control the adds on one spot this way. If you get an early port, have one of your tanks use mass taunt.