ZA continued
Yesterday we continued trying our luck in ZA, and it went quite nicely (from a very super-casual raiding standpoint). On our third try we got Halazzi down, and there was much cheering. I am so proud of my girls. For a bunch of girls who only raid every other weekend we’re pretty good, if you ask me.
Our problem in previous attempts had been that DPS went down very quickly in phase 2, due to range problems. Once we made all DPS hang out in the back where the lynx was tanked as well, maximum zappage from the totems was avoided, the healers rejoiced, and Halazzi went down. My tanking must have been a bit sloppy as I ate 8 crushes, but other than that, I was pretty happy with my avoidance on this fight.
We then moved on to Jan’alai, tried him over and over again, and got him to like…75% in our best attempt? Something like that. Our raid composition is not ideal for Jan’alai as we currently have no paladin tank. Tank-wise our tanking corps for raids is four protection warriors and one feral druid, and only two tanks are ZA-ready, protection warriors. Our lone raiding paladin is holy-spec, an amazing healer with a decent tank set, but we really need her heals. We did try to have her put her tank set on and tank the dragonhawks, but then there was not enough raid healing. I think next time we might consider it again, but swap me out for my druid so I can provide healing instead of lame DPS. It just sucks that we’ll have to stack the raid differently for one specific boss, but that’s the world of raiding, I guess.
The biggest problem I had while tanking the dragonhawks was that I was completely unable to see the fire bombs. When you have the huge blob of angry dragonhawks on you, it’s really hard to see the ground. Tricky. Anyone here a prot warrior who has successfully tanked the dragonhawks? I used Stormchops and Darkmoon Card: Vengeance but I am not sure it made a difference. I certainly was completely unable to hold the dragonhawks against AoE damage, despite tab-Devastating like crazy.
In other news, I managed to complete part one of my rogue’s honor grind for Merciless Gladiator’s Slicer. The next project is to get the honor for Merciless Gladiator’s Quickblade. It’s half the honor of the main hand, so it shouldn’t take me too long. I respec’d to a Shadowstep build, which is ridiculous amounts of fun, both for farming and PvP (if you can call the later fun). I am excited about the prospect of taking her to Karazhan very soon.
In yet more news, my guild lost our two best-geared mages in one fell swoop. The first one transferred off, the second one decided to switch her focus to her newly 70 resto shaman on another server, to raid there. I am disappointed, especially about the departure of the latter mage, as I was very fond of her, and she was the most-skilled frost mage I ever had the pleasure of playing with.
We could use more druid mains, more mage mains. We haven’t got a single raiding druid main, they’re all alts of raiders whose mains we need. We have one mage who will start raiding soon, and that’s it so far. Strangely enough, our alliance sister-guild (they’re 5/6 in ZA) has tons of druid mains, also a lot more mages than we have.
July 14th, 2008 at 6:35 pm
Gratz on Halazzi! You must have had a good time with 2 new bosses down on the same weekend.
We are in the same predicament in ZA. We haven’t attempted the Dragonhawk boss because we have no pally tank. We may try it with a druid tank and see how that goes. Unfortunately we haven’t been able to organize a ZA run in a couple weeks.
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July 14th, 2008 at 7:46 pm
I wouldn’t worry too much about crushes on Halazzi. He swings so fast that both of your Shield Block charges are getting consumed opening you up to the possibility of getting Crushed.
As to Dragonhawk tanking… it’s simply tough for a Warrior. You can try using the Sporegorr reputation shield as well with a Shield Spike.
Anyway Gratz on Halazzi, he’s always a scary experience!
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July 14th, 2008 at 8:14 pm
We’ve only done Dragonhawk without a Paladin once… I think we used… two feral druids XD Both of them swiped like crazy and it helped a lot. It was also helpful since dps on the actual boss isn’t that important, since his enrage timer is pretty long. That’s the only time we’ve managed to get it done without a paladin though, I think.
A strategy that uses line of sight to keep people from getting fire breath might help, then you could do single target DPS on the hawks and it wouldn’t matter that all the melee is bunched up?
Also apparently there is a safe spot that is never hit by bombs somewhere in the pile of bones. I dislike telling anyone about it (last time I went with my boyfriend’s guild, we told people about it, and they died because they wasted so much time running across the area getting to the “safe” spot… definitely was not annoying at all) but it might help you with the dragonhawks
DotA has always been drowning in druids… especially feral. I’m the only lonely resto druid *tears* As far as mages, until recently we really only had 1 mage at any given time (it used to be Hixxy, then she disappeared/transferred, then it was Cerith.. and we’ve finally gotten some others too). That’s too bad about the two that are gone now in DotH
Also, Shaeldre tanked Prince last night. It was the single most terrifying thing in my life! I ate 17 crushes but for whatever reason never noticed my health being too spiky. We got it on our 2nd try (first one had a bad infernal and very oom healers since one of the 3 healers died from a shadow nova phase 1). I absolutely could not stay alive against Nightbane, but I’m beginning to think there were other issues there, because we swapped in Kurai and still couldn’t get it (tank death)
Wow I blabbed waay too much.
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July 14th, 2008 at 8:30 pm
You should be able to tank the dragonhawks. You just need to have your dps single target them down instead of AOEing. As long as you can keep enough threat on them to keep them off the healers you should be fine. As far as seeing the bombs when tanking the dragonhawks, you just need to look closer. You might want to turn off any scrolling combat text during that fight, because when you’re being pinged by lots of little damage it can create a lot of noise on your screen. I’m a pally tank and I usually tank a whole side at once and can see the bombs. You should only be taking a couple of hatches so it shouldn’t be a problem.
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July 14th, 2008 at 10:34 pm
@Alaphrei -
Melee being bunched up isn’t too big a problem for DotH, our raiding group tends to be ranged-heavy. we typically have just the 2 tanks, a rogue (me!), and some pets on melee. convenient at some times, irritating at others.
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July 15th, 2008 at 12:35 am
@Alaphrei - I hate Nightbane.
Sorry you couldn’t stay up, he does a lot of damage. That’s the one boss where I always chain-chugged Ironshield pots.
Your WWS looked good, you’re a heavy duty TPS tank.
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July 15th, 2008 at 8:55 am
Halazzi can’t crush. Bosses with a saber lash mechanic don’t, for the semi-obvious reason that a parry from your offtank(s) could kill the MT.
Another tip that our guid has for Halazzi is for the entire ranged dps+healers to stand on top of each other during phase 2, and a shaman to drop grounding totems. The chain lightning will go to those instead, and it’s much easier to deal with raidhealing.
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July 15th, 2008 at 1:41 pm
Congratulations on the downing! It’s always awesome to make headway on new and exciting bosses.
Regarding Jan’alai, we used a little trick to help down him in the days that our raid went without a Protection paladin. You see, we were still attempting those timers and didn’t want to take the time to single-target things down when AoE was infinitely quicker. So, we would perform the great tank swap! Throughout the fight, we’d have one tank on Jan’alai and the other handle adds. However, once all of those adds were down and the next Hatcher had started running through, we’d actually switch tanks. This allowed us to use two AoE taunts on a rotation, which helped us move things along a little faster.
The Shadow priest always seemed to end up dead during sometime during the ordeal, but I think she died almost every boss fight and it was expected of her anyways!
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July 15th, 2008 at 2:58 pm
Augh, don’t start with the guilt trips now, and I hope you know I’m not purposely trying to rid you of your mages in some evil plot. You have no idea how much I’ve spent the last couple weeks banging my head on the wall while trying to figure out what I wanted to do.
Though, grats on your recent awesomeness in ZA! And, no, I haven’t forgotten about that guide thing (I just take forever to accomplish things, which I should have warned you of).
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admin Reply:
July 15th, 2008 at 3:52 pm
@Vetiverr - It wasn’t supposed to be a guilt trip, Veti. I completely understand why you decided to do what you did, move on to a server where you actually get a shot at raiding. I am sure you will be just as awesome on your shaman as you were on your mage: the best frost mage I ever played with.
No rush on the guide, appreciate that you’re still thinking about completing it.
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July 15th, 2008 at 3:54 pm
@Cynra - That’s an interesting possibility, the tank swapping. I am definitely willing to try again soon. I think we let too many eggs hatch for warrior tanking, we’ll work on that.
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July 15th, 2008 at 9:14 pm
Tank swapping sounds intriguing. I’d be willing to try it on our next run.
I didn’t get a chance to really see what was going on outside of staring at the boss’s feet. (”Strategy on this fight is…I tank the boss and all you other people do stuff behind me where I can’t see!”)
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July 17th, 2008 at 8:28 pm
Grats on the kill ! We also had a guild first kill the other night on Halazzi after 3 attempts. And also gave up on the dragonhawk boss due to pally tank issues! Damn, I’m sure there’s a way to do it without a pally - tank swapping is an interesting plan - but with the CD on group taunt, you can only swap over once - ?
What a great fight tho! We did it with a prot warrior, and druid tank (myself). I dodged quite a few lashes, ate a few for 6-7k damage. But I had the most trouble initially picking up the lynx! He ran off into caster land quicker than I could react. So I created a target macro, followed by the taunt, which worked better.
Its the only fight I’ve done recently where I felt I really needed the 2 elixirs, scroll, food buff + warlock imp buff. It was a real thrill to suceed on a progression kill. We were all suitably chuffed at the end.
http://picasaweb.google.com/TBOSPhotos/TbosInZulAman/photo#5223618189936655058
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July 17th, 2008 at 11:56 pm
@ARA - Yeah, I was totally stoked as well. I tanked Halazzi himself and I did noticed that picking up the lynx is not as easy as it sounds in theory. It was a very exciting fight.
I have a couple ideas for our next Jan’alai tries, but let me know how you fare there when you try him again.
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July 18th, 2008 at 8:45 pm
We first downed Jan’alai about 3 week ago and we’ve never had a pally tank for the fight. We’re kind of just stuck with two warrior tanks for ZA and since downing him the first time we’ve never really had a problem.
For the fight we just have the other tank put on his dps gear to help kill the dragonhawks and then I stay on Jan’alai.
For the healers we just have one healer on the tank on Jan’alai and then the other two healing the raid (mainly the lock and mage aoeing).
We try to half about half a side at a time and as long as the mage or lock don’t die to the fireballs we have no problem.
Yeah we normally run into a period of about 20 seconds after the soft enrage but its not too much of a problem at that point.
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admin Reply:
July 19th, 2008 at 4:39 pm
@Blithlyle - That sounds like you have a lot of DPS, and we’re still somewhat low in that department, with mostly T4-level gear. Our AoErs got eaten alive pretty quickly without a dragonhawk tank.
But I am really happy to hear more incoming reports that it can be done, thank you!
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September 30th, 2008 at 2:04 pm
Try this method on dragon hawk.
Have dps kill one of the two spawners.
Let the other side go.
Have ALL dps (except a SP if you have one) focus on those birds one at a time as they come out. You can do each side all at once, or break it into two spawning trials for each side, depending really on the raid dps.
Save that aoe taunt as long as possible. Odds are you will end up using it on the first side. Then when only one side is left, you just have to make do. You’ll probably loose one person on the second side, but that wont be that big of a deal.
Our biggest problem on this boss, is burning the boss too quickly and having both sides pop all at once. No pally tank on that is not a pretty sight.
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