Zul'Aman

Patch 2.3 introduced many interesting things for my mage, so last evening when I had a chance to login early I took it and instead of logging in to my hunter (who is very close to 64 :)) I decided to let him rest, while I sample the new 2.3 content with my mage.
Then, while I'm doing a daily quest, out of the blue, I get a whisper from one of the raid leaders organizing the two Zul'Aman groups, asking me if I want to join. Do I ever! I thought I'd get to see Zul'Aman maybe in a couple of months, certainly not now. Luckily for me, my wife's sister was staying with us for the night and helping my wife with the baby, and this left me free to raid!

So after getting summoned to Zul'Aman and taking the flight-point and the quest from the guy outside, we went in. I was the only mage but thanks to the new Manna Biscuits I had no trouble feeding and watering all 10 of us :)
The only problem was, the spell uses the same reagent as Arcane Brilliance and needs 2 of them, so as the only mage, I was running very low by the time the raid was over. Note to self, bring more of that powder...

Anyway, trash was not hard, we had me to sheep and a Shadow Priest to MC, a hunter to freeze and of course fear from several classes. I think we wiped only once on trash.

The Bear Boss went down for us in one try which was awesome. The other group had a strange problem where the adds before the boss kept respawning in waves, probably a bug. We just had 1 group per ramp on the way to the boss and the fight itself was pretty much an endurance fight, for both healers and mages/locks. I think actually that this was pretty much true for all the boss fights in ZA that we did (three), they were all pretty long fights, certainly much longer than any of the fights in e.g. ZG (for comparison), except Hakkar.

Eagle boss gave us a few wipes due to us mis-understanding the tactic, people were not running in time to the storm target, but finally we got it right.

I think the longest fight was the Lynx Boss. He has only a 600k health, but you need to "kill" him again and again - once at 75%, once at 50% and again at 25%, plus the "real" health pool he has (so 4x600k). Each time, he resets to 100% health and a spirit lynx appears which you need to OT. After you DPS him down to zero, he resets back to the health he had just before the spirit lynx stage (e.g. 74%) and you need to continue DPS-ing him down to the next stage. All the while, you need to kill totems that he casts ASAP or they wipe the raid, AND he's wailing away on 2 (one is not enough) tanks, doing massive damage to them.
I spent most of the last fight (when we got him down) face down, after a totem decided it didn't like me and 2-shotted me, but the other 9 were able to carry on and win the fight.

There were some very nice touches in ZA, like frogs that you un-hex with sticks from mobs, they turn into people that either give you gifts or are vendors - we had a reagent vendor (no mage reagents alas), a food vendor (I bought over 20 of +23 spell damage food from him and 5 of the +30 sta food that I gave to our MT) and a vendor that sold in limited supply super health and mana pots - sweet! Even better, if you go straight from the entrance and after the river with the small pyramid in the middle turn right into some hut and kill all the mobs there, an NPC troll will suddednly thank you for saving him and turn into a vendor that repairs armor - way cool! :)

Overall I'd rate ZA a 9/10. Fun instance, good boss fights, hard but doable for a guild that has Kara on farm, with special touches that really make the instance stand out. Even if you don't get any loot from bosses, you get Heroic Badges, so no one comes out empty handed.

Thumbs up Blizzard :)