More on 2.3!

So a couple of nights ago, we headed back into ZA to make attempts on the Dragonhawk boss, having heard that he's significantly easier than the Lynx boss. This may or may not be true; we haven't had any proper attempts on Lynx to have a counterpoint for it. Anyway, he's a fairly complex fight, somewhat similar to Lurker.

The trash leading up to him was great fun. All the trash mobs there, we had already seen, except some dragonhawks (who breathed fire for about 2k damage), and the scouts. Oh the scouts.

There are four trash pulls you have to kill on the way to the Dragonhawk boss. (plus another which I managed to accidentally pull... three times, I think, over the course of the night - once I walked into it because I didn't know it was there, once I tab targetted, saw the mob's name was the same as the one we should've been killing, and promptly fireballed it, and once because I spellstole the superhaste buff from one of the flamecasters and jumped about sixty feet sideways into them). The first pull is three trolls, the second a troll and four dragonhawks, the third three trolls and a dragonhawk, and the fourth four trolls. Easy enough. The only mobs worth noting are the Flamecasters, which have a nasty fireball volley and an incredible haste buff (+300% cast speed +200% move speed) which can be spellstolen. If they decide to chaincast the volley while they have the haste buff... well, people are gonna die. Dispel/steal the buff asap (it looks like a foot on fire). Also the Guardians cleanse, specifically cleanse sheep from Flamecasters. At first we thought the Flamecasters cleansed themselves and I would pretty much spam my polymorph button on them, which worked, then we worked out that hey, if we pulled away the other guys, they stayed sheeped and I could actually dps! Speaking of dps, haste buff = 0.75 sec fireballs. Pew pew. Oh, and the dragonhawks breath fire - it's about 2k damage in a cone.

Now... the interesting thing about Dragonhawk trash.

The scouts. Interspersed throughout the Dragonhawk quarter are several Amani (possibly Amani'shi) Scouts. They themselves are not much of an issue - they have about 8k health and shoot people with their bow for a little bit of damage. Yawn. However, when you aggro them they immediately try to run to a nearby drum and bang it, which if they are allowed to do will summon two elites with swords. These elites are easy enough to deal with, but can spell doom if you're already fighting a group. The scouts can be stunned, snared, etc... so you stun them, you snare them, and you burst the fuck out of them until they're dead. The tricky part comes when they're attached to a pull, so you have to kill them while CCing and stuff, and dps have to run through the pull to get to them - while, hopefully, tanks and NOT squishies pick up the elites. The other tricky part is when they walk into your group, or your totems, from behind, sometimes in multiples.

Alright, so you've cleared up to the boss - he's on a stone platform, with two smaller stone platforms connected to it by wooden bridges. These smaller platforms are covered with small eggs - part of the encounter.

When you first engage Jan'alai, the first thing you'll notice is that he breathes fire. This does about 4.5k fire damage in a cone, however, he targets it differently from most breath weapons - he'll pick a random person in the raid and breathe towards them. It can be outranged, and it can also be healed through.

The second thing you'll notice is, about ten seconds into the fight, he'll summon two hatchers, who have about 6k hp, and who run to the egg platforms to hatch eggs. When they hatch an egg, a dragonhawk comes out. These dragonhawks hit me (cloth) for about 600, and also have about 6k hp. If the hatchers are allowed to keep hatching them, though, they'll quickly overrun the raid.

The thing about the hatchers is they don't hatch the hawks in a linear fashion. The first time they hatch an egg, they hatch one each. Next time, two each. Next time, three each, and so on. He also summons two new hatchers every 45 seconds or so.

The next thing he does is, he'll occasionally teleport everyone to him, block off the two exits to his platform and the two egg platforms with walls of fire (can be run through, but you will die), and vomit little orbs all over the area. These things are bombs, they explode, and deal about 8k damage in a small area (~5 yards) each. You just have to find a spot where there aren't any bombs and stand in it until they explode. If you're ranged, you can keep dpsing/killing hawks during this time. This seems to be a completely random occurrence - it may have a cooldown, I'm not entirely sure, and Deadly BossMods doesn't have a timer for it.

Sidenote: While he's throwing bombs, the lighting is sort of red. When he stops, it goes back to normal, and about two seconds after that, the bombs explode.

It's also really, really easy to not get killed by them.

Lastly, he has three 'enrages.' The first happens at 5 minutes or 25%, and increases his damage and attack speed by 50%. The second happens at 35%, and causes all the remaining dragonhawk eggs to immediately hatch. The third happens at 10 minutes (presumably, we never saw it) and is his berserk timer - it kills you.

So the strategy for this fight is pretty simple - ensure that the eggs are being hatched at a rate which is controllable, but fast enough, avoid the flame breath, don't get exploded by the mass exploding fire orb things, kill the dragonhawks, heal the tank more when he enrages, slow DPS before 35% until there's a managable amount of eggs remaining (say, four to five on each side tops), dps him down, kill all the hawks that spawn at 35%, then kill him.

Okay, so not that simple.

After trying a few ways of dealing with the hatchers, we eventually settled into a system where we would have two egg-killing groups - one of a rogue and a fury warrior, and one of a feral druid, a mage (hooray for me!) and an elemental shaman. The melee group would let the hatcher spawn two lots of eggs - three hawks total - and kill them. The other group would let three lots of eggs - six hawks - spawn, the druid would go bearform and pick them up, and then the casters would burn them down. Then we'd swap sides, ensuring a relatively even hatching rate. (We found once that if too many were hatched on one and not enough on the other, both hatchers would head to the side with a lot of eggs. As our main tank would say: Hilarity ensued. Followed by a wipe). We slowed DPS a lot to prevent him getting too low too fast - I stopped fireballing the boss, scorching instead, our feral druid switched to bear gear, and a lot of our dps started spending time jumping around instead of dpsing when he got to about 40% - and focused on control more than anything. Still, we didn't get him down; our tank kept dying during the +50%/+50% enrage. I think that it was more of a gear issue than anything else - he's still using [Crest of the Sha'tar], for instance, and [Dath'Remar's Ring of Defense], and [Merciless Gladiator's Plate Chestpiece] socketed with +12 stamina gems in his tank set. Our best attempt was probably between 40% and 35%, having whittled the eggs down to sixish overall, and our tank dying before we could hit the egg-breaking mark at 35%.

Anyway, hopefully Karazhan was kind to our MT last night, and he can pick up some badge gear with some badges, and we can head back to Jan'alai with a slighty tougher troll leading the way.

I couldn't make it to Karazhan last night, so I won't be able to finally pick up my Flametounge Seal /grumble. Maybe I'll run some heroics during the week - there's too much awesome badge gear to just rely on 10-mans for badges now. Unfortunately, not much of it has spellhit on it, which means I'll have to enchant and gem for spellhit even more than I do at the moment!

One last thing before I head off - I logged onto my druid for about three hours yesterday, running ZF and starting the Searing Gorge. And wow. I was slightly over halfway through 45, with rested almost all the way up to 46. I dinged handing in the first quest (I had all... seven? six? quests for ZF), and finished halfway through 46. 10300 exp from handing in Gahz'rilla! Finishing off Hinterlands for now and doing two or three quests in Searing Gorge, plus that quest from the message in a bottle in STV (used to be a 51 elite, is now a 42 nonelite), and I was 47. New exp is amazing.