Late Night ZA Tichondrius

***ALL INFORMATION HERE IS SUBJECT TO CHANGE***

Schedule

TBD

Loot rules

All loot from timed events will use greed/need to eliminate wasted time between bosses. All timed chest loot will be skipped till either the timed event is completed or failed. The NPC that spawns the chest does not despawn. A designated DE'er will always roll greed for boss loot.

Raid Preparation

Food and weapon buffs will be expected. Elixirs or flasks for timed portion of run is also expected. Elixirs may be favorable (cheaper) since any wipe will most likely result in failed timed run.

The Roster

Core Roster

ForumID	Character	Class	Role
			MT
			OT/DPS
			healer
			healer
			DPS
symog	symog	mage	DPS
			DPS
			DPS
			DPS
			DPS

Attendance

Please post here and pm the group if you will be unavailable for any raids.

Mailing list and calendar

TBD

Ingame chat channel

TBD

Availability

Please indicate your availability over the next couple of weeks (you won't be held to this as a strict signup, but if you are going to be on holiday or something, indicate it here so we can plan accordingly please.)

PLEASE TRY TO INDICATE YOUR COMMITMENT TO COME BY SUNDAY 9PM PST. IF YOU HAVEN'T DONE SO, YOU MAY BE CUT AND YOUR HOUSE MIGHT MYSTERIOUSLY CATCH ON FIRE. PUT "Y" IF YOU ARE COMING, AND "N" IF YOU CAN'T.

Date

Strategies

Humorous site with very good information on Zul'Aman

Ripped from EJ forum

Zul'Aman @ Wowhead

Zul'Aman @ WoWWiki

THE TIMED RUN

EJ thread on the Timed Run

The ZA timed run

Some days you get the bear, other days the bear gets you. This thread is aimed at helping people achieve the former more than the latter.

There is a thread about the ZA zone in general which contains useful advice about the timed run, but I thought it would be helpful to have a thread specifically for the timed run with a basic strategy plus hints and tips for beating the timer.

This thread assumes a working knowledge of the zone and bosses so doesn’t describe these in detail. The tactics and hints in this thread come from my guild’s experience with the timed run (after a lot of pain our first bear was this week!) plus reading of all the advice in the general ZA thread.

Basics

Killing the bear boss adds 15 minutes, killing the eagle boss adds 10 minutes. No extra time is added for the dragonhawk or lynx bosses.

Don't release any prisoners or loot any chests until the end - it just wastes time. If the boss is killed then the prisoners will not be harmed, even if you miss the overall timer. As soon as a boss dies, grab the badge and move on. I would recommend leaving group loot on and rolling need/greed as necessary – that way you can allocate loot while moving on to the next area. To be honest if you really need the boss loot then you probably aren’t going to get the bear mount anyway.

Keep moving - time standing around is time wasted. Don't need to wait for everyone to be full mana before pulling - pretty much chain pull and everyone needs to keep up, use mana pots if necessary. But be sensible about this – dying to a premature pull will probably fail the timer – occasionally waiting for 15 seconds won’t unless it becomes a habit.

Consumables are good! Dual elixirs will probably work as well as a flask, because if people die then the timer will probably be missed anyway. Oils and food are cheap and useful.

The whole raid needs to know what they are expected to do before the run starts. Giving strat talks while on the timer is pretty much a guaranteed fail.

Group makup

How you play is much more important than what group you enter the zone with. That said there are a few (hopefully helpful) words of advice.

The instance is very much easier with a paladin tank and at least 2 AEers. There are a lot of places where mobs can be AEd to save time. However the timer can be certainly beaten without a paladin tank, but it’s that little bit harder.

A second tank is required (warrior or druid is fine). A dps specced tank can fill the role of the second tank.

Two healers are required, and preferably no more than 2. Adding a third healer probably slows you down by about 4-7 minutes so unless you are cruising through with 10 minutes to spare (in which case you don’t need to be reading this!) it will probably cause you to fail.

Heavy dps is required. There’s a lot of killing to be done between you and that bear of your dreams and T4 gear isn’t really going to get the job done, no matter how hard you try.

A shadowpriest is good for mana regain and VE to help with healing (and for fortitude), although unless you have a paladin for salvation, they may need to watch their threat to some extent.

Kill order

The best order is bear, dragonhawk, eagle, lynx. The main disadvantage of this order is that if you don’t get it right then you could easily only get 2 chests by failing to kill the eagle in time.

A very good alternative order is eagle, bear, dragonhawk, lynx which should guarantee 3 chests with reasonable play, although it probably wastes about a minute compared to the ideal order.

Edit: At least that's my experience of the zone. Others feel that the alternative eagle, bear, dragonhawk, lynx route is better - some of the Lynx trash can be skipped by this route as well by hugging the wall near the Hex Lord entrance. See posts below for more details and decide which route is best for you.

Including clearing trash, the bear should take about 10 minutes, dragonhawk 12 minutes, Eagle 8 minutes, Lynx 15 minutes (this can be tight for Lynx so ideally you want to pick some extra time on previous bosses). These times aren’t set in stone, but are good targets to aim for.

Bear Trash

There is a pack of 2 roamers before you really start the bear trash. These can be avoided, but there is a definite risk of them aggroing as you fight the trash. Probably it is safer to kill these.

Once you move up, the bear avatar will run off and send some trash towards you. Kill these and pull the first pack of bears. Avoid the other packs of bears by hugging the wall as you move onwards.

After that it is really just a matter of clearing the rest of the trash to the boss. Make sure to tank the bear riders apart from each other.

Bear

Pretty easy tank'n'spank. Killing the boss adds 15 minutes to the timer. With the added time, you should have 25 minutes left after the boss dies.

Dragonhawk trash

Make sure to kill the scouts before they reach the drums – having adds summoned wastes a lot of time. Don’t engage them when they are close to the drums.

Kill flamecasters first as they do a lot of damage. Make sure to interrupt them and either spellsteal or dispel their haste buff.

If there is more than one flamecaster in a pack then it can be a good idea to mind control one. This helps reduce raid damage, and also kill the adds a lot faster. Somewhat risky however as an early MC break can get messy. Whether you want to take this risk will probably depend how close you expect to be on the overall timer.

Avoid aggroing the pack set back on the right (near the start), and avoid aggroing any on the stairs. The last dragonhawk pack can be avoided by waiting until they roam out of the way. This is generally better than killing them. The very last pack of mobs should be fought on the stairs to avoid aggroing the roamers.

Dragonhawk

The standard strategy is to let the hatchers fully open one side, paladin tank + AE the adds down. Rise and repeat for the other side then spank down the boss. A non-tank paladin can tank the adds okay. It can be done fairly well with a non-paladin tank as well, it’s just that bit more difficult. If you have a shadow priest then he should stay on the boss, but all other dps should help on adds.

An alternative option is to leave both hatchers alive and kill them after they each hatch 2-3 eggs. This should generate less adds overall.

Try not to all stand in one place as this will mean that flame breath hits the whole raid.

You should have 13 minutes left when the boss dies. After the dragonhawk, jump down and then head left through the water to the outside of the bear area and then right to the eagle area. Basically don’t aggro the 2 roamers outside the Hex Lord’s area.

Eagle trash

The aim here is to pull the tempest as soon as you can manage it without dying because pulling the tempest stops adds being generated.

Just keep moving as fast as you can (without dying), and as soon as you have a clear shot to the tempest, pull him.

Eagle

Spread out most of the time to minimise chain lightning damage.

Group up on the tank before the storm to ensure that the melees can continue to dps during the storm. You might take a bit of extra chain lightning damage doing this, but it shouldn’t be fatal.

Generally it is easier to simply ignore the adds and continue to dps the boss. If you have enough dps to have a chance of clearing the instance within the timer, then you should be able to kill the boss before the adds get out of hand.

With the extra time you should have 15 minutes left when the boss dies.

Lynx Trash

Several packs of trash on the Lynx boss can be avoided by chosing a cunning route. From outside the eagle boss, run along the top of the waterfall towards the Lynx area.

You will come across a static pack of cats (including an elder Lynx) which need to be cleared. After they are dead, make sure the roamers ahead are out of the way and then run along to the side of the hut on your left. There is a window on the hut – jump through this into the hut and then jump out of the window on the other side of the hut. From there run behind the hut ahead of you and then head right (you will be going along the bottom of the stairs which exit the Lynx boss room).

Keep going until you get to the winding path along the river - kill the troll with the 2 croc pets (don’t aggro the neutral crocs) and proceed onwards. By doing this you have skipped 2-3 packs which helps a lot with the timer.

The rest of the clear is pretty straightforward, although there is quite a bit to clear. Make sure to dispel any of your raid who get mind controlled because a dps class can kill people pretty quickly.

Lynx boss

Every 25% the boss splits into a full heath boss and full health spirit cat. When either of these reach 20% health they merge together into the boss again.

When he splits, it is better to kill the spirit cat rather than the main boss. This is because the cat has about half the health of the main boss.

You will need to have 4-5 minutes on the timer to kill the boss before the prisoner is killed.

Other Notes

Laugh and cry as the gnome you just rescued runs around like a buzzing bee and produces a bear mount from a tiny bag.

It has been said that the bear is fat and ugly, has a stupid mask and its legs are on fire.

However this is only said by jealous, bearless people. The bear is in fact muscular, threatening, outfitted in exquisitely crafted armor and walking with the fire of the gods.

You can bash the gong at the start pretty fast in skeleton form!

If anyone has other ideas and strategies for getting the bear, then this thread is the place for them.