Scourging fun and musical disabilities in Zul’Aman
As we all know and have seen (some to their liking, others not so much): The scourge is rampaging throughout Azeroth & the Outlands. Better to stay fly-mounted if you don’t want to be zombified these days, but hey: Deep down in our hearts we all enjoy to be a reckless undead creature, feeding on the shiny-bright inhabitants of that weird and boring city that is, Shattrath.
Seriously, I wouldn’t want to invade Orgrimmar, Thunderbluff and I wouldn’t quite get the point of a zombie-invasion to Undercity. But Shattrath has always been a bit of a turndown, it’s nothing but a “functional thing”, stuffed with portals, without any flair and with horde & alliance all of a sudden seeming to get along just fine (or have to, rather). Not a good place. So yes, I like the zombie-thing and will do my Shattrath-killings over and over. Damn you, hardcore-raiders “you interrupt my daily deeds” guys.
Some can’t seem to be happy about new things, and hey: This is one frickin’ cool world event to take part in, not to mention the extra boss, the bonus quests and all that great stuff that brings new content even now.
Raiding: Zul’Aman, here we come (the gong-idiots, that is)
Now for some tanking / raidleading thingy. We had our first Zul’Aman attempt yesterday. With the nerf I was pretty sure we would be able to grab two chests, however since six out of ten raidmembers had never seen that instance before, things were going down a littly clumsy. I explained the first two fights (we did Bear / Hawk) plus the event on the way to Akil’Zon in advance, then we rushed in.
Well, not so much. Turns out we seem to have some serious issues with the gong. We smacked that thing for – and I’m not kidding – 20 minutes. We disbanded the raid and built it again, even wrote a ticket because I’m pretty damn sure that with 10 people hysterically clicking that thing, trying various methods of counting in and so on, at least we’d have had to got it open by plain accident. But as it suddenly worked eventually we’re left with only one conclusion: We’re seriously musically impaired. There you have it.
Just for the complete picture of our gear level: Our top-dpsers (and we had no less than 3 mages) did between 800-900 throughout the whole run, with some really undergeared people doing no more than 500. Actually I think we’re at a state where Zul Aman is, in it’s nerfed state, the perfect place to be. And it showed that, still, gear isn’t everything and with good players a lot can be compensated.
Time run, anyone?
The trashpacks were just little obstacles to step over, nothing that slowed us down really. But with most of the people being at or below kara-equip and a lack of raid-experience in general we had our challenges on the boss fights. We wiped on Nalorakk twice. The first one really was my fault when I didn’t give my OT enough time to build initial aggro, threw in a shield slam too early and bam – both of us had the debuff.
I forgot to mention the reset-mechanic prior to the fight (I didn’t think we’d have problems here) and in the chaos that resulted in the tanks going down people weren’t fast enough to follow the chat (we’re not using Teamspeak, still). On the second try somehow my OT got cracked down suddenly, the connection problems of one of our two healers didn’t make it easier.
The third try finally went down smoothly and we ended up with one chest. Needless to say, we didn’t get the second one because we’d also wipe on Akil’Zon. We had to get used to the storm and ended up spreading the raid only on the frontal part of the platform, then running under the lifted player. As we got that down the fight was pretty easy, and after some bad luck on the second try Akil’Zon was defeated on third.
Plenty of time
I hate to rush, especially if the content is new, but as I wanted to call off the timerun people wanted to try it, what didn’t really add to the atmosphere. We also had some quite RP-oriented people, who didn’t like “MT” and “OT” and too much RP-inapproriate chat talk at all, which didn’t work on the timerun because things had to be said & done fast.
Then, without that timer on our minds, we eventually fell back into smooth-mode. I slowed down before boss fights to iron out all questions and glinches, encouraged people to keep the chat more RP-fashioned, things were becoming better and we started to enjoy the ride. Good times.
With people enjoying what they did we also improved, got Jan’Alai down on 2nd try (first time the egg-hatching didn’t work all that well), Halazzi was a clean one-shot without anyone dying throughout the whole fight. Malacrass ate dirt on the second attempt as well, which was surprisingly good because with only two healers and a significantly undergeared group (= not really lots of big health pools there) plus non-nerfed magical AoE I expected us to have a lot more trouble here.
The showdown
Finally, Zul’Jin. With the phases, the high spike-dmg in lynx form and our stronger healer going all weird on connection problems we had a tough time on the first attempt. We got him to hawk, but due to a caster-heavy group had serious problems keeping people alive. When he switched to lynx there was only one healer left with the remaining 6 people, so everytime he charged his target would inevitable go down.
On the second attempt things went smooth. Our healers did one hell of a great job, we got through hawk with a full 10-man raid, however lost two people in lynx again. Nonetheless he went down eventually.
Now what did I learn out of all that?
First things first: Our guild is a bunch of fast learners, which is really really good. Everyone did an awesome job yesterday. I’m proud of the outcome. I’ve had ZA raids, even after the patch, with overgeared groups who had it on farm before 3.0.2, with people repeatedly dying or messing up on boss abilities. With all kinds of wipes, too.
Our little gang managed to get absolutely everything right after seeing each fight once. No one died to Jan’Alais bombs on try two. Everyone had Akil’Zons storm down after the first wipe. Halazzi’s totem I never even got to see because they’d nuke it almost before it even spawned.
It was a great evening for us, with a total clear in three hours, significant improvement gear-wise and a lot of new experiences made. I’m really, really looking forward to next sunday, when we’ll be there again.
Wow, that’s some dedicated RPers there!
I’ve never been in a raid with folks who insisted people engage in ‘RP-appropriate talk.’ Not my style at all, but could be fun. ;)
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Talldar Reply:
October 27th, 2008 at 7:19 pm
Well to be fair, they didn’t “insist” on it. It was just obvious how they didn’t participate in chat and the more RP-appropriate thingy helped (I just asked people to use character’s names instead of ‘the rogue’ and tried to keep the all-too-non-rp-fitting words, like abbreviations and stat-talk, at a minimum. Little gestures go a long way and it really doesn’t hurt to type “Congratulations!” instead of “Gz!”).
After all it really added to the atmosphere and helped to remind us that we’re playing characters in a fantasy world, not only smash buttons on an arcade machine :)
Oh, and I guess for a real RP-fan Zul’Aman is pretty boring. If I come to think of it, most of BC-content doesn’t really provide much atmosphere. Pre-BC content did a much better job on that (I hated Silithus too, but the whole thing just made a lot of sense story-wise and “worked” as a themed area – BC is pretty much just an assemblance of stuff without much flair to it).
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Grats for clearing ZA! We hit three chests this week, but failed on the fourth. Reading your gong story makes me feel better, because we ‘wiped’ on the gong boss twice as well. Just as I had opened the ticket, it worked. Bizarre!
I love the atmosphere of ZA and Karazhan both. I think Zul’Gurub had a little more flair, but Zul’Aman is a very gorgeous instance, IMHO.
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I have yet to get past Hex lord. Mostly due to the fact i raid LATE at night so by the time we get there its near 2 am and everyone is NOT at the top of there game…albeit i have not been in there since the nerf so i would love to do it now and see how it goes
That dang Gong though is the longest fight in the place. if ANYthing needs to be nerfed its that stupid gong…lol
Great job and clearing the place.I love to read a good story about what happened to you all. The RP done i think is just fun. harder to do when you are all in vent. But its fun to actually think as your character and respond the way you imagine he would respond.. My rogue is extremely fond of your mom jokes in game. never misses an op to zing a fellow group member.He gets invited a lot to groups for comic re leaf some times.
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Well, the whole scourge thing was all rp lol!
ZA post-nerf is like most content now about a tier lower than it was before. My guild was 7/9 BT prior to the nerf, and have killed Kalec and Brut quickly on first night of attempts 3.0. So go for it!
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