ZA bear mount timed runs

[Sir_Die_alot]

Nope. No crushes at all from him. He uses bleeds in bear form, however, and bleeds ignore armor -- which makes a druid a poor choice for the bear form.
SDA, I just don't see the point in trying to kill something 3 seconds faster when you risk corpse-running.:)

After we ran back in (no wipe protection up, ankhs down, etc), we chain pulled up to chicken-hawk (as we call him) and pulled him with maybe 5 minutes on the clock. He died about (not kidding) 3 seconds after the timer expired.

You seriously lose so little when you shift stances. Besides the threat gen, it is so so so very little. Most of your mitigation comes from your parry, dodge, and armor. Not the measly 10% from defensive stance. Also things like shield block and shield wall remain effective after you leave defensive stance, you just need to BE in defensive stance to cast them. If healing is good and healers are good on mana, but you have lost dps or need to squeeze a precious little extra out you might be surprised how often this wins it for you.

It's about making good decisions as a tank. This is not something for every fight but a good way to pull a win from a situation that looks to be losing.

[Mordekhuul]

Ugh, just did my first ZA run in like a month or two. Did a 2 hour run to do the timed event and try to get a shield upgrade for one of our tanks.

I forgot how much I hate the double-flame caster pull by the hut before chicken hawk. With no way to separate the sheeped flame casters from the guardian, they ate us alive as he spam cleansed them, resulting in a wipe that cost us a 3rd chest. The double-flame caster pull just by the steps leading up to him is so much nicer, where we can sheep pull and the guardians will be out of cleanse range.

[Pantalaimon]

Ugh, just did my first ZA run in like a month or two. Did a 2 hour run to do the timed event and try to get a shield upgrade for one of our tanks.

I forgot how much I hate the double-flame caster pull by the hut before chicken hawk. With no way to separate the sheeped flame casters from the guardian, they ate us alive as he spam cleansed them, resulting in a wipe that cost us a 3rd chest. The double-flame caster pull just by the steps leading up to him is so much nicer, where we can sheep pull and the guardians will be out of cleanse range.

Have you considered having your mage just spam sheep on a flame caster the whole fight? I can't recall ever having too much trouble with that, assuming purge/spellsteal/CoT/all of the above goes off in a timely fashion and he can't get a flame volley off in between the 1.5 second sheeps.

[Mordekhuul]

Have you considered having your mage just spam sheep on a flame caster the whole fight? I can't recall ever having too much trouble with that, assuming purge/spellsteal/CoT/all of the above goes off in a timely fashion and he can't get a flame volley off in between the 1.5 second sheeps.

We had both mages spam-sheeping both flame casters.

Both sheeps broke almost immediately after their application, and flame volleys went off, pushing back the next sheep spellcasts. One of the mages died almost right off.

[Tuftears]

A useful trick for us on guardian/flamecaster packs is to separate the guardians from the flamecasters being sheeped. A tank will charge and pull them back, a mage sheeps the flamecaster in place. If you have two flamecasters, then CS the skull'd flamecaster to ensure that he comes along with the rest, and kill him first. (we don't normally run more than one mage)

[Mordekhuul]

A useful trick for us on guardian/flamecaster packs is to separate the guardians from the flamecasters being sheeped. A tank will charge and pull them back, a mage sheeps the flamecaster in place. If you have two flamecasters, then CS the skull'd flamecaster to ensure that he comes along with the rest, and kill him first. (we don't normally run more than one mage)

We don't either. We do separate the flame casters from the guardians on the last pull just before dragonhawk, but have never done it by the last hut. Typically we are worried about getting everyone onto the stairs so we might avoid being seen by any of the various scouts that like to wander past that hut.

Perhaps we should worry less about scouts, and focus on getting the first flame casters and guardians separated there too. Only thing I wonder is what exactly the range is on the Guardians' cleanse ability. If we pull the guardians back too far along the wall, we'll be close to the 2nd to last hut, which would have us near 2 huts and be quite bad.

[Taelas]

You seriously lose so little when you shift stances. Besides the threat gen, it is so so so very little. Most of your mitigation comes from your parry, dodge, and armor. Not the measly 10% from defensive stance. Also things like shield block and shield wall remain effective after you leave defensive stance, you just need to BE in defensive stance to cast them. If healing is good and healers are good on mana, but you have lost dps or need to squeeze a precious little extra out you might be surprised how often this wins it for you.

You might be surprised at how often it adds nothing.:)You can get maybe two Executes off before you have to switch back to Defensive and get Shield Block up, considering that you have only maximum 10 rage when you shift stances (unless for some reason you have points in TM).

It's about making good decisions as a tank. This is not something for every fight but a good way to pull a win from a situation that looks to be losing.

And it's not something I'd do except perhaps under extreme circumstances. I can't Shield Wall in Battle Stance, I can't Shield Block -- and I do not have enough confirmation that it actually adds enough that it's worth the risk. On bosses where the risk is less, for instance bosses that do not crush, I might change my mind and do it more often, but not when I risk a parry-gibbed double-crush.

[Sir_Die_alot]

I didn't say I actualy swapped in and out of def stance to SB, I was just pointing out you can leave it with 2 charges.:)

As I said though you don't want to do this with a boss that can 2 shot you, but most can't. There are really 2 main types of bosses I can discern: gimmick and smashing. The smashing bosses are the ones all the healers go "WTF your health bar just dropped" to when you die, the gimmik ones that require some kind of positioning, kill order, CC, all of the above, whatever. Gimmick bosses are best suited for executes, and then only to pull out the win from something that is starting to crumble. NORMALLY a raid can do without execute spam dps, but for instance you're trying to get a chest in ZA and the clock says you have 10 or fewer seconds left and 3% boss health, that would be a good time in my opinion. This isn't a 20-0% thing you want to do and if I gave you that impression, well... no don't do that.:P

[Mordekhuul]

Perhaps we should worry less about scouts, and focus on getting the first flame casters and guardians separated there too. Only thing I wonder is what exactly the range is on the Guardians' cleanse ability. If we pull the guardians back too far along the wall, we'll be close to the 2nd to last hut, which would have us near 2 huts and be quite bad.

I take back this advice. By far the best strat we have gone with on double flamecaster pulls is to use zero CC. We assign two interrupts, one to each flamecaster (elemental shaman, enh shaman, rogue, warrior, etc). Our warlock drops CoT on each. Our mage spellsteals their self buff or our shaman purge it.

They die much faster than CC options permit and no one ever comes remotely close to dying anymore.

As long as the players present are solid, I can't recommend this strategy enough.

I hope for a real update to this thread soon, btw. With a less optimal group than we planned (our fury warrior had to end up taking his shadowpriest since the planned one didn't show, and a shadowpriest is ESSENTIAL), we missed the 4th chest by 2 minutes last night. If we hadn't thought "eh, we'll take it easy and not use consumables since our line-up isn't as optimal as planned, so we won't make 4 chests anyway", we would have nailed it.

Shoulda, woulda, coulda...someday.

[Mordekhuul]

Just posting to say that when I do get a bear mount for my team, I might hate the damn thing by then.

We missed the 4th chest by 3 seconds last night. Seconds....three. Zul'jin yells that the prisoner will die, then if you count 1-1000, 2-1000, 3-1000, the boss dies.

If we ever suck less, we'll get a first one. We wiped on Dragonhawk and had to run back in, had about 5-7 deaths spread out among the other trash/boss pulls, and still came that close. Oh, and the Eagle fight took about forever because we lost 3 people to random crap and finished about 40% of the fight down 2 of our strongest dps.

[Mordekhuul]

Final, happy update for everyone.

7/31/2008 - after countless 2-hour speed runs, led by Keldor, we beat the timer for the first time tonight, by a good 3+ minutes!

<span style="color:#FFFF00">Line-up:
Myndle - Main Tankadin
Radiator - Off-tank/DPS

Keldor - Chain Healer
Junahu - Druish Princess Healer

Gargle - DPS (warlock)
Johndoe - DPS (warlock)
Higler - DPS (mage)
Fineillheal - DPS (shadowpriest)
Scyklin - DPS (enh shaman)
Zarianna - DPS (rogue)



I picked it up (Myndle) with a roll of 88. I had to promise that I would keep going back for the rest of The Burning Crusade to get other KotD members bears, though =)

[Jester]

Congratulations!

But it will be mighty tempting, whenever someone else wants to try for one, to just say "too busy riding my awesome bear" and run away at full speed.

:lol:

-Jester

[Mordekhuul]

Congratulations!

But it will be mighty tempting, whenever someone else wants to try for one, to just say "too busy riding my awesome bear" and run away at full speed.

:lol:

-Jester

With Crusader Aura on. Zooooom

[Tal]

I picked it up (Myndle) with a roll of 88. I had to promise that I would keep going back for the rest of The Burning Crusade to get other KotD members bears, though =)

Congrats!

[Taelas]

Congratulations.:)

[Swiss Mercenary]

A few tips I haven't seen mentioned here yet...

1. The flamecasters are the easiest mobs in the instance, with an appropriate group setup. Their fireball volley may be damaging, but it's only got a 25 yard range... And they have ~4k mana. With three or four mana burner classes (Warlocks, Hunters, Shadow Priests), they can drain their mana down within ~10 seconds - only leaving them enough time to cast one volley, that can easily be interrupted. Once their mana is drained, they are completely inconsequential - kill the other mobs.

2. Mind Soothe is amazing for handling scouts in the Dragonhawk gauntlet.

3. You can skip three pulls on the way to Lynx. At the start of his trash, head left, kill the cat pack, then wait for the 2 cat, 2 tamer pat to move away... And jump through the window into the leftmost hut. Jump out of the window to its left - this will take you to the area in front of the temple. Move past the front when the pat moves away, and you've saved yourself 2 pulls.

Immediately after this, have shamans buff Water Walking, and instead of going along the coast of the lake, run over the water - this lets you skip the other 2-tamer, 2-cat pack.

For the record, my guild does this with a prot paladin, another tank, two warlocks, a mage, a hunter, an enhancement shaman, a resto shaman, a shadow priest, and a holy paladin. The shadow priest goes in the prot paladin's group, to speed up trash pulls.

[Mordekhuul]

For the record, my guild does this with a prot paladin, another tank, two warlocks, a mage, a hunter, an enhancement shaman, a resto shaman, a shadow priest, and a holy paladin. The shadow priest goes in the prot paladin's group, to speed up trash pulls.

That's exactly what we do with a similar comp. One of our warlocks swaps himself out of the SP group during trash pulls so I can get mana, then swaps himself back in when I pull a boss.

I've always heard about skipping through the hut window like that. I had thought it was something more natural for groups that did eagle first then lynx 2nd, but sounds like we could be doing that now if we wanted.

We beat the timer by over 7 minutes last night though, so I guess we won't mess with a winning formula for now, though. If I ever tank a ZA that isn't going for bear, I'll play with the hut window strategy to see how it fits. Thanks!

[Tuftears]

We just managed 4-timer last week even with Blizzard handing us a lag-spike wipe on the first boss. Woohoo! We had tried the hut window strategy before, but it seemed prone to error. This was the second week we tried just cutting across the front lynx area, fighting just the lynx pack and the 2-tamer bunch-of-cubs pack, avoiding the patrol that goes through the middle.

Group was 2 feral druids (one healing for Dragonhawk), CoH priest, resto shaman, fury warrior, enhance shaman, combat rogue, destro warlock, fire mage, and elemental shaman.

[Mordekhuul]

We just managed 4-timer last week even with Blizzard handing us a lag-spike wipe on the first boss. Woohoo! We had tried the hut window strategy before, but it seemed prone to error. This was the second week we tried just cutting across the front lynx area, fighting just the lynx pack and the 2-tamer bunch-of-cubs pack, avoiding the patrol that goes through the middle.

Group was 2 feral druids (one healing for Dragonhawk), CoH priest, resto shaman, fury warrior, enhance shaman, combat rogue, destro warlock, fire mage, and elemental shaman.

Grats!

I'm curious, how do you handle Dragonhawk without a prot pally on a speed run? I know plenty of groups do it, but since I only raid my prot pally, I obviously haven't seen it up close =)

We always let an entire side spawn and I AOE tank them all, with some messiness as we get ported mid-killing, but still super fast.

[Tuftears]

Normally the strategy is:

MT tanking DH in center (move him north until after the hatchlings are completely dealt with), OT (me) healing.

Left side had the melee DPS and one of the healers (the resto shaman). Right side had the caster DPS and the other healer (the CoH priest). This makes buffs more efficient since those were their parties anyway.

Each side kills 3 waves of hatchlings before finishing off the hatcher. Well, that was the theory. In this case, the caster side forgot to kill the hatcher until all but 5 eggs had hatched on the right side, but we held it up and I rezzed the mage. It worked out all right, and led me to think about just having the AOE killing all of one side if two healers might be enough to keep the mage/warlock alive.

Anyway, this strategy does work if you don't have a prot paladin tank to make it 'ez-mode'.