And now, on Zul'Aman

Having just logged off from my first run of Zul'Aman, I thought perhaps I'd post my thoughts about it.

Firstly, it's a great instance - if you haven't had the opportunity to experience yet, I'd suggest you do. Both the theme/feel of the zone and the actual encounters themselves (including trash) are thoroughly enjoyable.

Secondly - the trash. There's not much of it. This is good. What trash there is seems to be centered around mini-events - for instance, coming up to Nalorakk, the bear boss, he'll be standing on top of a ledge or a flight of stairs and send a group of trash mobs down to attack you. If you wipe, the whole pull respawns, if you clear it, he laughs and runs away, getting ready to send another, harder pull at you. While I haven't been able to experience the trash near the Dragonhawk boss, or near Hex Lord Malacrass and Zul'jin, about three-quarters of the trash I have done was in a mini-event.

Thirdly - the bosses themselves. Nalorakk was perfectly tuned, IMO - the first time we did him, we didn't know how his cleave worked, and our tank was oneshot. The second time, we didn't know he silenced during his bear phase, and our tank died from lack of heals. The third time, we had a perfect, clean kill. Akil'zon, the Eagle boss, took a bit longer than this. It took a couple of tries for us to set our strategy in stone, a couple more to get accustomed to it, and a couple more to realise that if you turned your ambient sounds on and listened for rain, you could completely predict when the lightning cloud would appear. Even though he was a relatively random, luck-based fight, while nowhere near the level of, say, Prince, he was still a well-balanced, enjoyable boss to learn.

Lastly, the people you can free from being frogs! A lot of trash mobs drop an [Amani Hex Stick], which is used to turn frogs (which hang out near the middle lake) into people, who stay in the middle for a moment, then head over to the instance entrance. Most of these people thank you and give you a box, which contains either a random green of the suffix, or a Zul'Aman only charm - these are similar to the books in Karazhan, consumables that do something useful, but not too powerful, and can only be used in their instance of origin. Occasionally they give you gold or potions, and sometimes they turn out to be vendors. Now we got two vendors in the course of our run, a food vendor and a reagents vendor. The food vendor sold some fairly useless food, yeah, but he also sold [Spicy Crawdad] and [Blackened Basilisk] in limited supplies - I probably picked up about 30 Crawdads and about 15 Basilisks over the course of the night. Pretty sweet! The reagent vendor sold, well, reagents (not Mage reagents, for some reason), and also had both healing and mana potions in limited supply. Considering I bought 38 [Crystal Mana Potions] from Ogri'la earlier that day, this wasn't of as much concern to me.

However, the really cool thing about the vendors-from-frogs, was the blue container they had for sale (a [Hollowed Bone Decanter] from the reagent vendor, and a [Sealed Scroll Case] from the food vendor). The decanter contained a couple of health pots; no biggie, gave them to the tank. The scroll case, on the other hand, contained the recipe for a Spellsurge enchant - woo!

Now that I've finsihed sort of aimlessly talking about ZA, I suppose I'll give a breakdown on how we killed the first two bosses, and the trash for the third.

Firstly, about midday a group of us (without a tank, no less) got together to go and explore the shiny new instance gifted upon us. So that was pretty cool. We zoned in and talked to Harrison Jones (who has a hat), and then we banged on a gong for a while. It didn't work at first, and then it did, and the doors opened, and our guide got happily impaled by some suprising trolls. Without a tank, these trolls killed us, we ran back, killed some non-elites, and decided to reconvene later. This means we missed out on our chance on trying the timed event, but, oh well, praps we'll do that next time.

So when we decided to properly go into the instance, we came in and wandered around a bit, afraid that we had broken it when we were fooling around earlier (since there was no trash around). We killed a few pats (the axe throwers throw axes, the windwalkers shoot lightning, the medicine men shoot lightning, drop totems that either heal them or make them immune to stuff, and chain heal. Everything's ccable). Next we found the Bear boss looking at us from his ledge. The encounter went something like this:

Paladin: Hey, what's over here?
Me: Isn't that Bear boss?
*entering combat*
MT: *frantically tries to mark stuff* Sheep that one, I'll tank this one!

Luckily for us, the pull went smoothly, Nalorakk laughed at us and ran away. Figures. The pull was just two trolls; I think it might have been an axe thrower and a windwalker? Either way, it was trivial.

Next up we had to fight some bears. They frenzy, which makes them attack faster but is dispellable by a hunter with Tranquilizing Shot, and are generally not very threatening.

Coming up onto a sort of ziggurat-temply-thing, we were once again thrown minions at by the Bear boss. This time it was trolls riding bears. (A kind of logical progression, if you think about it - trolls, bears, trolls riding bears). These guys were stronger than other trash mobs we'd fought so far. They have to be tanked apart, as we found - they do a roar that increases the damage of them and their friends nearby, and increases the damage that their nearby enemies take. So you separate them so their roars don't overlap. Easy. Once you get one down to about 30%, the troll will dismount and then you'll have a troll and a bear; we sheeped the bear and killed the troll, then killed the bear, we probably could have ignored the bear. It was pretty weak. The trolls are immune to cc, by the way, both when they're riding the bears and when not riding the bears.

Finally we came up to the top of the temple, where there was a last pull of four - two of which are the trolls-riding-bears, two of which are trolls-not-riding-bears. I believe it was an axe thrower and a medicine man. Either way, we ice trapped one troll, chain feared another, then killed the bear cavaliers one by one, sheeping the bear when they split. (We actually had to assign healers for this fight, however, as tanks kept dying when all the healers simultaneously decided to top up the hunter).

So now we were staring down the big guy. We buffed up, explained the strategy, and pulled. A few attempts later, we were enjoying our loot ([Robes of Heavenly Purpose], which actually would have been an upgrade for me =.=, but which I passed to our holy priest).

The basic thing about Nalorakk is that he has two phases, switching between them every 30 seconds or so, and you need different tanks for each phase. In his troll, or humanoid phase, he has a random charge - sometimes he autoattacks after the charge, but anyone should live through it fine enough. He also cleaves, the damage of which divides itself equally between any targets it hits (we believe it can't hit more than two), and uses mangle, which makes the target take double damage from bleeds. In his bear phase, he uses bleeds. He also periodically silences, which only lasts a few seconds but can be long enough for him to burst the tank down. So you have two tanks - we used a prot-warrior and a bear. In the humanoid phase, one tank tanks him while the other tank stands next to the first tank, eating cleaves. Melee stay the hell out of his frontal arc. Heal the tank, dps the boss, and bandage up if his charge hurts you too bad.

When he changes phases, you switch tanks - he's tauntable, so your second tank taunts him. His bear phase is remarkably similar to his humanoid phase, except he has a silence instead of a charge, and instead of cleaving, deals more damage to the primary tank.

When he changes phases again, switch tanks again. Repeat. Collect loots.

Easymode.

So with Nalorakk down, we headed on over to the Eagle quarter of ZA. The trash here was much more interesting - we killed a couple of the same pats on the way through, but when we actually got into the meat of the trash we were confronted with an interesting suprise.

The first mob in the Eagle section is a lookout. When you aggro him, he yells something to the effect of, 'The living are here!' and runs off to alert someone. Suprisingly enough, the trolls he runs past ignore him and continue their rigorous schedule of standing in place. So now you have four groups of two trolls, none of which are really dangerous, to clear through, and then a single-pull of an Aman'shi Tempest, who thunderclaps for about 3.2k. Oh, and none of these mobs were ccable.

The thing about this bit is, though, while you clear, there are groups of about six eagles spawning from in front of you, and less frequently, groups of two elite trolls spawning behind you. While none of these hit very hard, they can build up if people are oom, dead, or drinking, and can take people out shortly if they're not receiving heals. The eagles and trolls that spawn are all ccable, but with all the aoe that's getting thrown about on the eagles, it's fairly hard to get a good sheep on one of the trolls.

To make this trash a lot easier on us, we had one of our paladin healers just use Consecration + Righteous Fury to hold onto the eagles, and using Concentration Aura so he could keep healing while being beaten on by a miniature tornado of brown feathers.

Once you pull the Tempest, both the eagles and the trolls stop spawning, finishing the short and fun gauntlet you have to run before fighting the Eagle boss.

The Eagle boss himself took us a while, as I said before. He has a few abilities - the most major of which are Static Discharge, and Electrical Storm. Static Discharge causes the person he targets (RSTS) to take about 3.5k damage, and anyone within about 8 yards will also take the 3.5k damage. Anyone damaged by this gets a debuff that makes them take 25% extra nature damage (and I believe stacks).

His second ability, Electrical Storm, he uses about every 40 seconds. One person, who may be randomly selected but I believe is the person who is furthest away from everyone else in the raid, is thrown into the air for a while. While in the air, they shoot lightning at people who aren't underneath them. This does a lot of damage. Solution? Stand underneath them. Right after the storm, he summons a flock of eagles, who swoop and fly around the platform, being generally annoying, and attacking people for about 1.5k on cloth. These need to be killed by ranged DPS (we had a hunter and a mage - me - killing them, and we would just about get them all down by the time the next storm came). While these eagles look cool, DAMN are they a bitch to cast on, even with 41 yard range. They can easy fly out of your range or behind you in the 3 seconds it takes to hurl a fireball.

Akil'zon also occasionally throws people into the air, making them fall and take fall damage, and I think shoots lightning at the tank.

Anyway, the key to this fight is being able to spread out and collapse fast. When the fight starts, you want everyone to run and find a good spot, far away from everyone else so if one person gets Static Discharge'd, only one person gets Static Discharge'd. Simple enough. However, when he's about to cast his Electrical Storm, you want everyone to run to the tank, so whoever gets thrown into the air, everyone else will already be underneath them, meaning that nobody gets killed by the lightning. So every 40 seconds or so, you're collapsing, waiting out the storm, them running back out to continue the fight.

The real trick to this fight, and the boltalics emphasise how much of a real trick it is, is to go into your Sound & Voice options, and turn off everything except ambient sound, and turn that way up. About five seconds before he begins to cast his cloud (this is 100% reliable, unlike bossmod timers), the ambient sounds will change to rain. When you hear rain (and you should, or your raid leader should, call it out on vent), the raid collapses to a point, waits out the storm, runs out and continues. While you might get a Static Discharge to hit the whole raid when collapsing, it doesn't happen very often, and can be healed through easy enough.

Our loot was [Brooch of Nature's Mercy] - once again, healer loot that would be a slight upgrade for me. Hooray. If only Prince would drop his damn necklace for me.

Anyway, I've just realised how much I've written and that it's five past four in the morning. So, it's sleep time for me and I hope you find this useful/interesting/whatever. I may write more on ZA when I experience more on ZA.