The Ironsong Tribe

Well, Bloodbound downed two bosses (bear and eagle) last night and almost got a third (lynx), so I figured I'd toss out some random observations that might help other groups. Please do the same as your groups get in there, and we can all edumacate each other and stuff.

One thing to note - for the gear-hungry, ZA is really not for you, imo. Each early boss drops one piece of loot, two if you beat the timer, and a badge or two. This isn't the place to gear up, use Kara and heroics for that. This is where you go for fun when you've got the gear

General: Bring LOTS of consumables - boss fights so far are all quite long. Any mana user will go through super mana potions like they were water, and everyone should have buff food and elixirs. ZA does /not/ mess around, and it's a rough place right from the first boss. In my rarely-humble opinion, you cannot afford to have anyone be undergeared for ZA, it's just too hard. Kara was a lot about strategy in many fights, but so far ZA seems to be more about raw character power - the fights aren't terribly complicated (for bear, eagle, and lynx boss at least), you just need everyone able to fulfill their role very well. DPS needs their attack cycles figured out already, healers should be top notch, and if your tanks aren't mountains of purple gear, you'll wipe.

Bear Trash: Easy. I think if this stuff gives the raid trouble for more than a few pulls, it's time to pack up and go back to Kara. Pull the bears apart so both tanks don't get the Demoralizing Roar debuff from both bears (+25% damage taken, and it stacks)

Nalorakk: Big gear check for everyone. Tanks need to be able to take some big hits, healers need excellent healing and regeneration (it's a long fight), and DPS needs to pour it on to keep the fight manageable for time. +hit for the two tanks is really, really useful, since a resist is likely to result in a wipe, since he'll stay on the tank that's been Mangled. It's not a complicated fight, so just be well-geared and awake, and you'll be fine.

Eagle Trash: Ouch. The eagle gauntlet ramp is pretty damn brutal. We wiped on it until we had our holy paladin tank the adds using Consecrate, and our elemental shaman heal. The key is to keep moving, and then keep moving. The two adds that come in from behind are pretty weak, and your off-tank (or pally) should be picking those up asap. Multi-tanking is absolutely required here, since there's just a crap-ton of mobs to deal with. Good AOE will make this area much, much easier.

Eagle Boss: Pretty rough, but not terrible. Need to ensure people aren't spread out too much to get under the lightning cloud, but far apart enough that not a lot of folks are taking the 3500 lightning zaps. Killing the swooping birds is a PITA, having curses and instant-cast spells really helps here. For my elemental shaman, I set up a macro that targetted a bird, cast chain lightning, and then targetted the boss. This let me keep up DPS as well as hitting birds. I used a lot of flame shock on them as well.

Lynx Trash: These are some fun fights. Having a third tank to pick up some of the lynx packs would be good, we used my elemental shaman to help with it. AoE is really useful again here, but the lynx will rip apart a clothy pretty fast. The two trolls that patrol come on their own, so they're much easier than the lynx groups.

Lynx Boss: We didn't get him down, but got close. The totems need to die REALLY fast, and it looks like that's about it to this fight for heavy strategy. It's another long one.

Logros Wrote:...and if your tanks aren't mountains of purple gear, you'll wipe.

Always the plugs for paladin tanks. Its not my fault warriors don't get nasty purple jumpsuits for gear!

Well, it is possible to tank stuff without mountains of purples as a druid, but it is a bit iffy. My druid still has half or more blues and was able to tank the bear boss, but it did take several tries due to premature death (and the success was due to a combat ress, thank god for a tauntable boss). I think Kwahue's gear is probably the "bear" minimum for tanking ZA though. I love the new badge loot.

Efluvious Wrote:Always the plugs for paladin tanks. Its not my fault warriors don't get nasty purple jumpsuits for gear!

Actually, paladin gear doesn't need to be epic, it just needs to be colour-coordinated, and we're unstoppable fashion machines.

SnG tackled ZA last night as well. We had an 'issue' with our first pull of Nalorakk, so didn't end up beating the timer when we downed him the second time in just over 6 minutes.

The gauntlet is crazy, stressful, but hectic fun too. No wipes on that, live or test for us, but casters went through pots as soon as they were up.

Our first two attempts on the eagle god weren't the greatest -- positioning, lag, etc. We WOULD have had a third attempt, but as we were setting up eagle macros on the stairs just below him, the ENTIRE gauntlet respawned (ie. trolls ran up from the bottom and brought EVERYONE). So the gauntlet is on about a 20 minute respawn from what we could figure. Perhaps a bit longer.

Oh yes, if you get the hex sticks, or whatever they're called, at some point (in between bosses if you've failed the timer), go use them on the Level 1 Humanoid frogs. They turn into npcs that thank you by dropping a chest of gold, or a 'buff' item ala Karazhan.


Fun, challenging, but ROUGH.

Apparently the frog-guys will also reward you with craft patterns. Folks are reporting getting BOE epic patterns from them.

I think they drop sometthing that lets you polymorph yourself as well or some such.

SnG re-visited ZA last night after the moot.

It's my humble opinion that we would have beaten the timer on the Bear boss except that on the initial pull our Hunter (me) was unable to get his target trapped. My target was one of the caster guys, so as I was running up to trap him, he dropped his totem which makes him invulnerable. Apparently, this also has the effect of rendering the trap useless, and by the time I had gotten him re-trapped he had dealt some fairly heavy damage. This is information that I will tuck away and remember for next time.

Also, we attempted the Lynx boss fight. The kitty packs on the way are not to terribly difficult, although one of them appeared to be hidden around a corner. Poor Zeengo found it. For hunters who may be interested, the Crocs in this area are non-agro, and tamable.

As far as the Lynx encounter goes, we felt we had the "dance" down, but we just couldnt heal through the 3rd stage. His Lightning Totem was just doing far to much damage on the raid. Then, somebody mentioned Nature resist totems or auras. This appeared to help by leaps and bounds. I noticed I was not taking nearly as much damage, and I believe our healers would agree that the difference was unmistakable. I was able to alternate between my mana regen aura and the nature resist aura easily between stages.

Im sure someone else can post better information about this fight, but these were just my observations from my perspective.

Nice work all!

Some random Lynx boss input:

As with the Bear boss, it is imperative that both tanks be in front of him to split the damage from the cleave, or you'll wipe quickly. In addition to the cleave, he can hit a tank easily for 9-10k, normal, non-crushing.

Healers: HoTs are godly, and expect additionally to be spamming direct heals on the tank. and by spamming, I mean chain casting and cursing profusely at your lack of 1432563 spell haste, because there will be times all of you are pouring out all the healing you have and the tank's health just freaking will not go up. If a priest/shaman could manage to get off their Greater Heal/Healing Wave, that would be ideal, because the hits are so huge and the fight so long... but I personally found that about half the time I stopped spamming Flash Heal and attempted a Greater, the tank died. It's a rough amount of damage to heal through, but doable. I would NOT try it without three healers. The AOE damage almost requires a shaman for chain heal or a priest with Circle (I dropped Circle temporarily in favor of DS, so omg <3 Jabadue for doing so much group healing).

He has a frenzy effect which can be removed with Tranquilizing Shot (le gasp). He hit several people for around 40,000 with this up. Yay.

Totems: We had melee taking out the totems as soon as they appeared, while ranged stayed on him. Totems = EVIL, by the way. That Corrupted Lightning totem that spits out superpowered Chain Lightning can rip your raid to tiny little fizzing pieces if you're not careful. BUT, when we thought to actually use Nature Resist Totems and the hunter Aspect, the damage decrease from the totem was drastic. I never took a full hit from it, and several times resisted it fully. I don't believe any further NR is necessary, as just the 70 on everyone took it down to very manageable levels.

Forms: An interesting quirk about his two forms is that each has a separate health pool, and when he switches forms, the health pool for his current form displays. They will vary a lot throughout the fight, and this caused some confusion at first (going from 50% to 75% etc). When he switches to one of the forms (I honestly can't remember which, was too busy wailing at the poor health bars) everyone takes AOE damage to the tune of about 4-5k.

Shocks: *$#^%@$%@. He will cast Shocks while in one of his forms (again, dun remember which :x). The Flame shock hit for around 4k, and ticked for around 3k. Think the Maiden of Virtue holy shock. It -must- be dispelled. He also Earth Shocks, which was perhaps my biggest source of frustration. 4k damage + being locked out of the school you were casting for 6 seconds. Yay.

Lynxes: What did we end up doing with the lynxes he spawns every so often? Just off-tanked them until they disappeared, or did we kill them? I really didn't notice. (This is why I don't SEE a zone until I go in as a non-healer, I swear >.> )

Great job, everyone, and congratulations Ghol on your ferocious shoulders.

His health bars work as follows: Lynx form will go from 100-75% then switch to troll form. Troll form from 100%-20% back to lynx form back at 75%-50% where he goes to troll form back at 100% - 20%, then back to Lynx form 50% -25% to troll form from 100% - 20% back to Lynx from 25% - death.

He only has totems up during troll form EXCEPT from 25% to death in lynx form.

Naruth Wrote:Shocks: *$#^%@$%@. He will cast Shocks while in one of his forms (again, dun remember which :x). The Flame shock hit for around 4k, and ticked for around 3k. Think the Maiden of Virtue holy shock. It -must- be dispelled. He also Earth Shocks, which was perhaps my biggest source of frustration. 4k damage + being locked out of the school you were casting for 6 seconds. Yay.

Are his shocks abilities or are they totems in his split phase? I was also too busy playing health-bar whack-a-mole to notice, but yes, flame shock needs to be dispelled a-la Maiden of Virtue. We didn't try the nature resist for chain lightning, so maybe that'll help us next week.

Yay! Hunters are useful in a fight!

For the eagle boss, I was thinking that volley might be a good way to help take out eagles. Not sure how effective it is, but it seems to get a lot of use. Multishot there would be awesome as well, Serpent Sting would be a good DoT.

Excellent info on Lynx, especially about the nature res!

I think tonight I'm going to recommend we set up totem-targeting macros for Halazzi. They're just vicious if they stay up.

"/target corrupted" seemed to work fine for us.