afia

Quick couple of questions:

Do you have to down the first boss in 20 minutes or can you tag him before the timer runs out and get him down on that attempt to collect the extra loot?


The Lynx boss.
I've heard conflicting reports on who to focus on when he splits...Ive had teams nuke the troll while the cat was offtanked...and I've had teams focus on the cat form while keeping the troll form at bay. Does it really matter which form you focus on?

Thanks for the help.

 

◊ vorpalblade

The boss must die before the time lapses. If time expires during the fight, you've failed the timed run for that instance ID, and have to wait until the next reset before beginning the time trial again.

I'm fairly certain from our run last night that that the Lynx boss has substantially more HP in shaman form than the summoned cat does. Assuming that to be the case, it's a compelling reason to just dps the cat down rather than the troll.

This is just based on a quick glance I had using mob health while tanking last night, so I could be mistaken... but my impression was that the boss has around 600k, and when he splits at 75%/50%/25%, he becomes a 400k Shaman form + 200k cat add. Totems are 5k or 6k hp.

 

afia

Thanks for the info....I'm getting conflicting reports on who to focus on from every site. Even Zulaman.com sais to focus on the troll and offtank the cat form. If the sprit/cat form has less health then it makes much more sense to take him down first like you said.

 

Fuseflower

Can anyone else confirm this?

I regularly run "AOE Heroic SH runs" and wanna know if anyone else felt that a paladin really could shine here.

I have not had the opportunity to do ZA yet but I am really looking forward to it and I dont wanna get my expectations too high off just one post =P

 

◊ vorpalblade

Haven't tried it with a Prot pally, but I'd be inclined to agree that statement. Three of the four Aspect Bosses (Eagle, Dragonhawk, and Lynx) all have AoE packs leading up to them that would likely go down faster and easier with a Pally AoE tanking. The Dragonhawk boss himself has a substantial AoE component in the fight itself which would lend itself well to Pally tanking (or off-tanking, as it were).

All things considered, I don't see a lot of tanking restrictions in the entire instance. Some of the bosses do quite a bit of raid damage, so your tanks have to be well geared... but there's no reason ZA couldn't be entirely MTed and OTed by any combination of Pally, Bear, and Warrior.

I think certain fights obviously convey advantages for certain tank classes, but nothing so substantial that you wouldn't be able to do a fight without a particular class of tank, as long as your tanks are properly geared and skilled. All things considered, I've found ZA to be reasonably tolerant of a wide variety of group compositions.

 

Eir

Like others, I don't find that any of the bosses are geared towards any specific class of tank. Some have small advantages and disadvantages, but they're pretty minor.

A Paladin MT or OT definitely makes some of the trash pulls easier.

I have solo tanked Dragonhawk before(boss and all adds), but that's a really messy way to do the fight and you're at pretty high risk of getting burst down because of the debuff stack. Paladin OT'ing adds while someone else tanks the boss is a much cleaner way to do it.

 

Jebraltar

I think the bear boss is once of the best examples of a fight where there are advantages for all tank classes. Paladins get fantastic threat from his fast attack speed (and good mitigation from the blocks as well) and have BoP/Divine Shield to deal with taunt resists. Bears and Warriors have the AOE taunt to help out in case of a normal taunt resist, and they also tend to have a bit more HP to help with tanking bear phase, or the ability to contribute more DPS during the bear phase than other tanks would.

For such a simple fight, it's extremely well-designed.

 

rbbrdckybk

Anyone try running with only 2 healers? Or 2.5 (2 healers + a shadow priest)?

I run a small guild, and our Karazhan group brings only 2 healers every week (tree druid + holy paladin). They're both fully Karazhan-geared now, and both of them tend to end even the longest Karazhan fights with significant mana left, even without a shadow priest.

Even starting out in Karazhan a couple months ago in blues (we all learned it together; nobody had any gear beyond 5-mans), only having 2 healers never seemed like a handicap.

Just wondering if that will work in ZA.

 

Jeffrey

I know for sure that Nalorakk/Bear is doable with 2.5. But it's NOT a pretty sight and pretty much relies on being somewhat lucky with silence and bleed timing. Beyond that you (assuming full Kara gear - it's probably doable but barely if you have a raid in full ZA/Badge gear) simply lack HPS, people die, wipe. Mana isn't as much of an issue but still a significant one to consider.

 

Endahl

I have no first-hand experience on Malacrass and Zul'jin yet, but the other four I never really felt I needed to do that on. Of the first four, it's only ever a real factor on Halazzi, where being in range to Mind Flay exposes you to Shocks and splash damage from lightning totems. However, our group was keeping the totems down pretty consistently before they dealt damage. Proper spreading out -- as well as HP gear -- can make standing in range a bit more comfortable if totems are going down a bit slower.

 

Tunch

My guild cleared ZA tonight, was a really fun place, very enjoyable, great atmosphere and everything.

I have a question regarding the timed event. I know it only involves the first four aspect bosses, but can anyone explain these points exactly?:

-How does the timer work, or how is it supposed to work? We seemed to get 20 minutes initial, +15 for dropping bear, and +10 for dropping Eagle. Timer UI was strange and semi-buggy with 2 numbers occasionally. Is there a specific amount you gain for specific bosses?

-How exactly does the loot reward work? We completed the first one, and got an epic from the prisoner up at Nalorakk. We completed the second at Akilzon, but the npc (some dwarf) just broke open a crate and some gold popped out /twirl. Are there not supposed to be epics every time?

 

Brute

Ok "interesting" mechanic to a couple of the bosses that we were having troubles with:

sweeping swipe off bear and sabre lash off lynx.... I understand how they work but as a feral druid with pretty high dodge we found that my avoidance was actually a pretty serious negative for these two bosses. Is it actually intended that tanks are meant to be punished for having high avoidance? What was happening was on bear I would dodge swipe and our other tank (not as well geared but still fully epic'd with kara gear) would take a massive burst. We were able to get around that pretty easily by just sticking another member in there as backup. No biggie. But Sabre Lash is top two aggro based, so when i dodged there was no way around it, the other tank would take a big burst. This was causing us more problems. Perhaps its just a case of the warrior not being geared as well (~16K health, 16k armor, 18% parry, 18% dodge) but It just struck me as fairly odd that the better a tank's avoidance was, in essence the riskier the mechanic became.

 

Dots

The damage from those effects is split up no matter if any of the offtanks avoid it. For example a 16k strike split on two targets would be 8k each, and they can both be dodged/parried/missed separately without affecting the damage done to the other tank.
That is how it worked on PTR and on Mother Shahraz anyways.

 

Brute

yes thats the way i thought it would be but we both checked our log. mine showed a dodge for the last sabre lash, his showed a hit for 13k.

 

• Falk

Well, something odd is going on there. That's not the way those things are supposed to work. You can find a million WWS parses of Shahraz, and even one of Nalorakk in this thread, where the behavior was as Dots described.

 

Sri

Got the same thing happening to us.
Druid and a Warrior tank - both with 18K+ hp
Starts -> all is well and we are burning him down and the incoming damage is honestly negligible. Even before the 2nd phase, the warrior gets, what looks like insta gibbd. We shift and have our pally sit in front and transforms once more,pally gets insta gibbd. Now did this 4 times last night with same results.
This is the interesting part - warrior gets hit for 19K dmg saberlash each time. Isn't the ability mitigated by armor? He has 65% reduction + the whole 10% in defensive stance.

hopefully this is a bug in the encounter.

 

◊ Vectivus

We were able to successfully complete the encounter with relative ease. We didn't get it done before the timer was up, but that's what we get for starting out with no off-tank (oops!).

We also killed the Eagle boss fairly easily, but got hung up on the Dragonhawk fight. Has this changed significantly since the PTR? If not, then we must have just been doing something wrong.

 

Cormack

I had the same question. Went in last night with a random group of people before my main raid does it later in the week. On average we were end of Kara level gear, with stronger tanks and healers and weaker dps. Our group composition was a bit funky, with two hunters, a lock, an elemental shaman, and a rogue for dps, only about half of whom regularly raid 25 mans. The first few pulls we died once or twice since none of us had been in there and we were figuring things out. Then we got to the pack before bear boss.

That damn pull kicked our ass for what must have been forty minutes. We finally gave up and swapped a mage for a hunter, and were able to down the pack, but geez was it a pain.

 

Jebraltar

From going through about half of Zul'aman yesterday:

Bear boss is just like he was on the PTR. Simple, simple, simple, hits like a truck attached to rockets. With two tanks over 20k HP buffed and some good healers, the fight's a joke.

Eagle boss was again the same as on the PTR, but our strategy was better now. We spread out pretty far, then collapsed to a smaller spread 5-10 seconds before electrical storm. As a result, we didn't take much damage from the chain attack between storms or from the storms themselves. A Survival Hunter was full-time on the birds, and he did pretty well at it. (No Warlock.) Gauntlet wasn't a problem, even with just a mage and the Protection Paladin for AOE.

After that, we took a break and came back in after the raid. The group was a bit less focused than the one that had been clearing bear/eagle.

Lynx boss trash was pretty much a complete joke. Beast-Tamers were a bit annoying with Domination, but even that wasn't too bad - we pulled a croc pack and a lynx pack, with their associative two tamers, by accident at one point and made it through. The pulls around the boss itself get a little more tricky, though, with a really easy to nab pat in the room itself and a mob pack close to the doorway on either side. We ended up taking an embarassingly long time to not screw up the pull on either one.

The boss himself was bizarrely simple. He doesn't really do anything besides the phase changes. As long as your tanks are ridiculously well-geared - I strongly recommend a Druid on the Lynx form - and either your healers can heal a long time or your DPS can take him down quickly, you win. Complete tank and spank with totems and a flame shock.

Edit: With Lynx, the Saber Lash mechanic does seem to have some troubles. (Although it may just be strange bear hitboxes?) I tanked the first few attempts, but I kept getting gibbed by what seemed to be full-damage saber lashes, in spite of the bear directly on top of me.

Dragonhawk went okay. The majority of the fight seems to be condensed into the retard check that is the bomb phase and the decisions about how many eggs to let them hatch. We let them hatch about three eggs per phase, hit 35% just after the soft enrage...then all of the healers got targeted and killed by dragonhawks. The Dragonhawks don't hit hard at all, a Protection Paladin should be able to tank a pretty massive zerg if it comes to that.

 

• Gwaihir

The only problem with popping all the eggs and just letting your prot paladin tank it all comes when the boss targets said paladin with his flame breath ability- That many hatchlings stack massive amounts of flame buffet, to the point where the flame breath will hit for 10, 15k easily.

 

• Falk

I thought the Dragonhawks stacked Flame Buffet, making it pretty dangerous to tank a huge bunch of them regardless of class/gear level.

Edit: Leaving windows open for a while = bad.

 

tritus

How important is boss order for the timed event? I've read that in order to do the timed event, you must do Bear-Eagle-Dragonhawk-Lynx, but that seems like it would be the worst for travel time between bosses (Bear-Dragonhawk-Lynx-Eagle seems like it'd be fastest).

 

◊ Zeln

One of our raids they had the warrior and the feral in different groups, once they put them in the same group no problems.

 

Jebraltar

Seemed to cap at 10 when I was doing it. I would cleanse at 10 and it would stack back to 10 almost instantly, but it didn't go above that, as far as I could see.

I wasn't trying to advocate leaving all of the eggs unpopped, though, just saying that it's possible to deal with a pretty massive number.

Same group.