For the first time in too long, my guild have taken down a new boss - or at least new for me :) I think the guild did manage to take him down once a long while ago, but since then we've been pretty slack about even trying ZA, and when we did, it was usually with some weak people/alts.
It started with our GM posting a ZA raid on GC for last night, after an officers meeting where we talked about starting official 10-man raids (pretty much given up on 25man raids, at least for now).
I logged in early in order to be prepared. A few minutes after invites were scheduled to start, the GM still had not logged on so after a quick word with the other officers I started invites.
Fairly soon we had a full party: 2 mages (myself on Solidstate and another), 3 healers, 2 tanks, and 3 other DPS - a warlock, a hunter and a druid (acting as both DPS and OT where needed). We had to wait for a while as one of the healers had a RL problem but eventually, although late, we got started. Our goal was to get 2 bosses in time for the timed event, and see how well we do on the others.
We tried going according to the order most likely to allow you to do the entire event, as we need the practise and this is the order we'll be using eventually. So first up was the Eagle boss. I think we cleared the trash up to him fairly okay and pretty soon we were at the boss. Here in the past we usually wiped due to people not all converging in time on the boss but this time luck or skill was with us and we 1-shotted him and got the chest.
Second up was the Bear boss, he was not hard but we had taken some time on the trash leading up to him and the fight itself was a bit long, so the timer was almost up by the time we downed him. Still we got the chest and the very nice Amani Divining Staff dropped from it which I won (more on my mage gear in a seperate post coming soon :)).
From there on we knew we could not beat the timer so we took it easy. As the Lynx boss is the easier boss we went to him first and 1-shotted him as well without mishap.
Next up was the Dragonhawk boss. The gauntlet leading up to him is, in my humble opinion, the hardest part of the entire instance (at least that I have seen), including some of the bosses (I think the first 2 are easier!). Both the Scouts and the Flame Casters are the real pain here, we usually get at least one or two Scouts that manage to call for help, leading to extra mobs. The Flame Casters require continual sheeping meaning much lower raid DPS (2 mages busy) and even then they sometimes get loose, so that the raid takes massive fire damage continually. All in all a frustrating experience, and I think we were pretty lucky to have passes that last night without multiple wipes (having the druid shift to bear and OT a loose mob or two really saved the day several times).
The Dragonhawk boss himself was relatively easy, with the paladin tank in full FR gear he could release half of the eggs of a side at a time, so in relatively short time all the eggs were cleared and we could concentrate on nuking the boss.
After the 4th boss down we were a bit tired and it was getting a bit late but also we had had such a good night, no one wanted to stop, we all wanted to see if we could down Malacrass. After clearing the trash to him our paladin put on his healing gear and so with 3.5 healers :) we started the fight.
This time, unlike a previous attempt a few weeks ago (on which we wiped) we first cleared all the adds before attempting to nuke the boss. Clearing the adds went amazingly smooth, tank (the druid) managed to hold agro and the add didn't run around. Healers managed to keep everyone up and in short order, all 4 adds were down. The boss was still effectively at full health due to healing himself (I guess this is where the lack of a rogue in the party was felt the hardest) but everyone just gave their 100%, I guess healers were chaining mana pots like crazy :) I managed to spellsteal lifebloom and Avenging Wrath from the boss which was a hoot (mage with wings :)) Basically after the adds were down it was a race to see if the healers would OOM first or the boss would go down, luckily he went down! The only death was... yours truely, luckily when the boss was at 4% so I didn't lose a lot of DPS time :)
It was really a sweet ending to a great night, felt really good to finally take down a boss for the first time. I hope we can repeat the experience with Zul'jin :)
1 comment:
Tip for dealing with the flamecasters - It's the Guardians who unsheep them, if you can get the guardians tanked a good distance away from the casters you won't have many sheep-break problems. When we come to kill the flamecasters I tend to do no dps on them, just watch for two things: Fireball Volley and their self-buff. You counterspell the first and spellsteal the second. The 300% spell haste buff will leave a smile on your face a mile wide.
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