Yes, it’s finally happened, my curse has been lifted, my crocodile tears were worth it, the loot gods were gentle with me. In a way. The beauty gods laugh at my foolishness as I am permanently forced to /chicken now.
But let’s start at the beginning of my weekend tale. Saturday we set out to mess with the animal bosses and get the first timer. At my side as off-tank was my partner, who so far had only warlocked it up in there. She’s an excellent tank though. We started plodding through trash, pulls were alright, but mobs took a long time to die. I grumbled about lack of focus fire, which is like group play 101. We had 7 minutes left on the timer when we pulled Nalorakk. However, big problem. I had assumed the other half had been here often enough to know how tanking this works, but I guess you don’t look at the specifics when your job is to pew-pew hard. So from the get-go we had positioning problems. When we finally stood correctly on top of each other, he did his first charge. Unfortunately, that was about the time he started charging someone in the raid. Not remembering that part of the fight, the druid feral charged after him, I flailed about trying to get back to them, and in all that moving around, threat wasn’t built as fast as we normally do. Long story, short end: DPS aggros Nalorakk, he one-shots a mage and a rogue, and we 8-man him for the rest of the fight. Which made this our slowest ever Nalorakk kill and no chest for us. Imagine colorful cussing. Nothing ticks me off like DPS not looking at their threatmeter or ignoring it. Gah.
Akil’zon went better than the last time, but Halazzi was problematic. We had no hunter, so the Frenzy usually ate me alive. We replaced the mage who had never recovered from her Nalorakk booboo, and got a hunter instead. I died just about the same time as Halazzi did, but that’s alright.
Afterwards we went on to Jan’alai. The soft enrage was a bit rough on our druid who is not quite at my gear level, though not bad. We decided to have me tank Jan’alai, which was a first. It’s certainly not the adrenaline pumping frustration of a pre-3.0 dragonhawk tank. I don’t know how they did it, but the two platforms were cleared in no time, despite the other half telling me she ran around like an idiot chasing dragonhawks and not really tanking much. Whatever, it worked.
This took a long time for us, all in all, DPS is really still an issue. We have a raid DPS of 3500 according to WWS, which is not that much for ZA. We called it, to continue with Hex-Lord and ZJ the next day.
Hex-Lord we needed a couple of tries. It seems impossible to keep the ogre sheeped, so we had three adds killed again (ogre, wight, dragon) and then killed Hex-Lord. I was pretty excited that he dropped my Battleworn Tuskguard. It’s so ridiculous looking, yet has such wonderful stats. I really liked the T4 hat, which I used to switch out for Eternium Greathelm for mitigation, but the Tuskguard will cover both nicely, methinks. 
This time I barely managed to remember in time to take picture proof of the kill. 
The rest of the day was spent wiping on Zul’jin at 46%. This seems to be the magic mark for us, by that time most people are dead. Frustrating. 
In our last two tries, we got to Lynx phase, in our best try we had him at 36%. Which is progress! However, we had so much healer death in the Eagle phase, I don’t see how we could possibly survive Lynx phase with a healer down. We tried having the druid roll lifeblooms on the healers, which worked a lot better, but eventually the druid bit it. As melee, it’s super frustrating. I dual-wielded and kept sunders up for the feral druid, rogue and hunter, but you just fly around a lot, despite trying to stay away from tornadoes coming to the center. I will be happy to see this phase a lot shorter after the patch.
I had two embarrassing tank moments: first time we actually got to Lynx phase, I was just slapping the board back on, but Lynx just decided to hit me for 7.5k while I was doing so, one-shotting me as I hadn’t been at full health in the first place. The second embarrassing moment is that I was so exhausted on the last try of the day that I didn’t look at my own threat, neither did the other half who was in bear form to avoid dying from the whirlwind in phase 1, and bam, she stole aggro, and I never gained it back in that phase. So much for being proud of building threat fast. Bah!
And that’s it. I keep dreaming the dream that ZJ will be dead before Nov 13, arrrr.
October 13th, 2008 at 7:45 pm
I share your dream. Closest my guild ever got was 3%. A bit a fluke though, as our average is dying to tornados/linx.
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October 13th, 2008 at 9:17 pm
Well congratulations on the nice piece of loot, and glad you had another good try at it. By chance, I also went round ZA this weekend with a warrior & a druid for tanks. We managed 3 chests just fine, and it proved we could have easily have done 4, with a a bit more practice over a few gos with the same group. So I dont feel so bad I dont know any pallies to run this instance with - its quite possible to succeed if your players know what to do.
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admin Reply:
October 13th, 2008 at 9:38 pm
Yeah, it can be done just fine, it’s just a bit more challenging. I am glad we did it without easy mode. The chests however… *sighs*
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October 13th, 2008 at 10:23 pm
Grats! It’s better than T6!
Welcome to the Chicken Club
Veneretio´s last blog post..My 3.0 Level 70 Spec
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October 13th, 2008 at 11:27 pm
Gratz on the helm! I still haven’t had one drop and we’ve been clearing ZA for about six months now.
Durnic´s last blog post..Tank Gemming in Wrath, some Speculation
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October 14th, 2008 at 12:40 am
Don’t feel bad, mate. Another thing to look forward to when you do down Zul’jin, and you’ll be better equipped. During the 3rd phase, I find it easiest to throw on regrowth if you have a resto druid. If you have a priest, Prayer of Mending helps a ton and the classic Greater Heals. When ZJ transitions to the lynx phase, retain a full rage bar, pop that avoidance trinket (if you’re low on hp), and dump all that rage into him. Quick at weapon switching and want more aggro? When he claw rages the random raid member switch to dual wield devastate then back to sword and board when he loses the fixates. Hope that helps, and happy patch day!
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October 14th, 2008 at 11:00 pm
eagle phase: dots, hots and wands. avoid the whirlwinds. it’s counter-intuitive. the more people try to out dps the eagle, the faster they die. ideally, everyone should be coming out of that phase mana’d-up and full health and you should have a full rage bar ready to dump on the lynx.
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admin Reply:
October 14th, 2008 at 11:07 pm
I actually don’t know, but do casters get damaged per DoT tick? Healers per HoT tick? I was advised to have everyone dump every single DoT they have, including Curse of Doom, at about 61-62%, so that they tick the full duration in Eagle phase.
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kahalm Reply:
October 15th, 2008 at 12:16 am
*grml* long text written but forgotten to fill out mail so my suggestions will be lost to you
but:
No damage from hots/dots just when casting spells (which cost mana, gift of the naruu for example will no longer trigger the bold neither does watershield)
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admin Reply:
October 15th, 2008 at 4:25 pm
I appreciate the response anyway! Taking notes of all of this, so we can kick his butt next time.
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October 15th, 2008 at 6:00 am
Casters and healers don’t get damaged per DoT or HoT tick; it’s just damage for each application. Before the tornadoes appear, there should be a full roll of renewed DoT’s (including CoDoom) and a few HoTs. And Jl’s right - everyone should be full health and mana by the time the eagle phase is up: ready to kick ZJ’s arse.
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October 16th, 2008 at 11:57 pm
Grats on the helm! I’ve always had to pug dps for our ZA runs but it is a killer when dps a.) doesn’t know how to stay alive and b.) aggros the boss due to stupidity. Note that b leads to a many a time.
I’d like to try to clear ZA by the time wrath rolls out, but our GM just quit the game so I’m going to be a free agent soon. Well i’ll keep trying and hopefully i’ll get a chance to see zuljin dead.
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