More Zul’Aman hints

• Badges of Justice: Nalorakk drops only one, but all the others dropped two badges each.
• Flamecasters: spellstealing. Run speed + spell haste = mach 10 mage.
• Jan’alai’s entrance: is in an unintuitive location. You can see him from the center, but you have to go back to the front of the instance and climb over Nalorakk’s platform to get to him.
• Amani Scouts: will spawn every few minutes in the huts in front of Jan’alai’s pyramid. If you can kill them before they reach a drum (not hard as they don’t have much health) , you won’t have to deal with the two adds they call. Once you reach the first set of steps, you shouldn’t aggro scouts anymore.
• Aman’ishi Warbringers: non CCable. Tank them. They demount at 20%, so their bears must be dealt with as well.
• Aman’ishi Bears: Vulnerable to Poly, trap, fear. They can be sheeped. If you choose to tank them, drag them away from each other as their debuff Armor Crunch (=25% armor) stacks. Keep an eye on the bear riders, who dismount at 20%. Not to be underestimated. Be ready to grab the mounts when the trolls dismount at 20%. Tank them at opposite corners of the platform to avoid the stacking debuff.
• Aman’ishi Tribesman: Vulnerable to Poly, mind control.
• Aman’ishi Medicine Man: Vulnerable to Polymorph, Snares, most CCs. Spawns an Invulnerability totem which makes nearby mobs invulnerable. So, it’s a good idea to kill this mob first in a pack, and kill the totem fast.
• Aman’ishi Guardians: Come in pairs. Non-CCable. Bring non-elite adds with them.
• Aman’ishi Savages: can be solo: AOEd by a mage etc.
• Aman’ishi Axe Thrower: Sap, Sheep, Fear
• Jan’alai’s Dragonhawk Hatchlings: are much weaker expected. A coordinated group should be able to take a dozen or so down.
• Amani Guardians dispel Crowd Controls such as Polymorph, so it’s crucial to keep reapplying the CC or tank the mobs further away.
• Sacrifice Timer: Once you talk to Harrison Jones to start the event, you’ll get a 20-minute sacrifice timer. Kill the bear boss within the timer, then you receive a chest containing an additional Badge of Justice & another piece of loot. Each kill within a timer gives you bonus time to get to the next boss plus whatever time you had remaining. The timers and bonus loot chests only exist for the four animal bosses, and if you go over the time limit on one boss, that’s it for that raid ID.
• Akil’zon’s Gauntlet: Update (Nov. 27, 2007 ) recently a hotfix was applied and now…. the Amani’shi Lookout will break sap and not able to be incapacitated once you cross a certain point. You can still sap him for the 5 seconds that it gives you. So….

Exploit to get past the guantlet: when you start up the ramp towards Akil’zon’s area, have a hunter go behind your party and wait for the mobs that come up behind the party. Have the Hunter distance himself from the main party & attack the mobs that come up behind you. The Hunter can then Feign Death after engaging the mobs behind the raid group, and the mobs will reset! They will not continue to come up behind the raid party while you ascend up the hills towards Akil’zon! How nice indeed. If you don’t have a hunter, a rogue can play this part as well. Have the rogue hang back, blind one of the mobs, then vanish. Easy as pie!

• Budd Nedreck in Hatchet Hills, where you can also find the ZA flight point, repair dude, and reagent vendor. He’ll give you a quest to retrieve a map from Nalorakk, which will give you a free 20-slot bag and open up two more quests.

Bear Avatar http://www.wowwiki.com/Nalorakk (video)

Trash is simple. CC the casters tank and spank the melee. Note that most humanoid mobs can be MCed so if you’re short on CC that is an alternative. The boss himself is simple, two tanks stacked on top of each other to split his cleave, melee behind, ranged somewhere else. Nalorakk charges around but doesn’t hit hard. Every now and then he will switch forms, other tank taunts, then tank’n spank. He switches back and the first tank needs to taunt back.

Patch 2.3 taunt changes make this fight very non-random. The DoTs on the bear form can get pretty painful on the tank so look out for that. In human form he’s not really a big issue (druid tank for human, War/Pal tank for bear). A Blessing of Protection can replace a taunt if required. Cast it on one tank and the boss will switch to the other. A Blessing of Protection will also remove Mangle, although this should never be required unless mistakes are made.

The encounter is resettable. If a tank dies, RUN.

And, if you are lucky and have a group skilled and geared and able to…. a bear mount can drop on the 20 minute timed quest.

Lynx Avatar http://www.wowwiki.com/Halazzi

The trash is numerous, unintuitive, and annoying. The ambush mechanic is surprising if you didn’t read a guide and fun for the first pull, but then it becomes annoying, and soon it just becomes extra pulls to waste time for your timed attack quest.

The boss itself is straight forward. If you have a decently geared feral druid tank (our feral tank was 2 T5) the boss damage is mostly manageable. You do need another person with high armor values to help soak up the saber lashes & tank the lynx spirit when the boss splits. This person is more important that your MT because the #1 accident that result in wiping is probably when the boss splits every 25%, the off-tank fails at grabbing the spirit and it proceeds to waste your healers. If that is a problem, try having your main tank spam AE skills (cleave, swipe, consecration, whatever) to grab the lynx as it splits so that your off-tank has a little time to pick it up.

Healer assignment should be 2 on MT and 1 on OT who also does raid healing. The saber lash CD is really quick and he can do 2 saber lashes in quick succession which can kill your OT if he isn’t well geared enough and you healer didn’t land one heal on the OT. During the split phase the two MT healers can split to heal both tanks because the damage on the tanks is relatively low whilst the raid damage taken ranks up here with all the shocks flying around so your raid healer will need to be on the ball. People were spread out to avoid the chain lightning totem so chain heal was too slow and ineffective (unless melee was getting hit). Your DPS will need to help kill totems quickly or else raid damage will become unmanageable in this phase. Otherwise, this boss only requires a little practice and is more of a gear check rather than skill check.

Hexlord Malacrass http://www.wowwiki.com/Hex_Lord_Malacrass

Depending on your raid setup this can get a bit annoying. Seriously, he’s so random that the fight can either be relatively easy (depending on if you can deal with spirit bolts) to extremely hard, depending on the random adds, which people he decides to power drain, and your raid setup.

We had the following adds: Ogre, Snake, Elemental, Undead. We started off trying to perma-sheep the ogre and shackle the undead while we slept the snake and kill the elemental, then killed the snake thereafter. For some reason the ogre was breaking sheep frequently and therefore after killing the elemental (we didn’t have a warlock) we killed the ogre and the mage would then sheep the snake so the druid can be freed to continue healing. Sheep on the snake and shackle on the undead was relatively stable.

Spirit bolts is the ability that is always here and also the sole ability that will wipe your raid. Basically he spits out an area wide AE per second that hits for 300 a tick (mitigated by shadow resist but increased by his stacking power drain). The problem with this ability is casting push-back. Even with 75% push-back resistance, casting is barely possible in the 15 seconds this happens. Therefore depending on your healer setup this can mean an automatic wipe. Luckily, we had a CoH priest and a resto druid which can heal relatively well during spirit bolts note that spirit bolts do not cause the earth shield to heal you AT ALL. Ended up with 6 stacking power drains (+60% damage) and the spirit bolt phase got very messy on the try we killed the boss.

The third ability is another random … the class drain ability. We had two priests and one try he decided to drain either priest two times in a row and two members of the team perma-MCed was just unmanageable. You’ll need a rogue to keep wound poison on him or warrior to keep the MS debuff on him because his heals are non-trivial & according to raid member’s report is also uninterruptible. You should purge or have a mage spell steal (best choice) his life-bloom if he drains your druid. If he drains a shaman his heal seemed to be un-interruptible, but the chain lightning can be kicked and the totem only has 1 hp. We didn’t have Paladins or Warlocks to see the crazy consecration and rain of fire. He’s laughable during rogue phase (dispell the wound poison) and is manageable in warrior (he has MS so be careful).

All in all this fight is very challenging and depending on the combination of the insane amount of random factors in this fight he can become impossible.

Group setup :

• 2 Warriors (Prot, Fury)
• 2 Druids (Resto, Feral)
• 1 Rogue
• 1 Shaman
• 2 Priests (Shadow, 41Holy)
• 1 Mage
• 1 Hunter

Eagle Avatar http://www.wowwiki.com/Akil%27Zon (video)

The trash here is actually more challenging than the boss itself. It’s gauntlet style like Shattered Halls: 4 sets of 2 elites (windwalkers) on the road, every now and then non-elite eagles spawn from ahead and 2 elite reinforcements spawn from behind. Have a tank grab both windwalkers, kill them fast then move on to the next windwalkers, you don’t want to stay in the same spot for long. Reinforcements don’t hit for hard so just have another tank grab those and the eagles, AE down the eagles every 1-2 packs. Once you pull the tempest guy at the end spawns stop. I’m not sure if the gauntlet is supposed to respawn or not but we’ve cleared it once, it bugged out on us and spawned as we pulled the boss. We recleared the gauntlet, then after we wiped to the boss it didn’t re-spawn again.

Boss was simple enough once we got our strat down. Our strategy is as follows: 2 markers are placed on 2 ranged (ideally 2 people with better awareness and playskill), have them stand in separate spots and assign the ranged to be split into 2 groups and stacked on top of either marker (3-4 per stack) the two ranged groups stands in a “triangle” formation with the melee, 20 yards apart, that way only 3-4 people are hit by the lightning ball at the same time, nothing chain heal can’t remedy. A hunter and mage were assigned to kill the birds in the sky. The triangle formation makes it really easy to see where the storm is forming and everyone can easily run to the spot without many mistakes. The boss will run into the group so the two people with markers will have to reposition themselves and the people assigned to the markers will have to follow. If everyone can get that routine this boss is easy.

Dragonhawk Avatar http://www.wowwiki.com/Jan%27Alai (video)

Fun. I’m sure there’s a way of skipping all the trash by abusing his mini-game ability. The trash packs are relatively easy but for the scout mechanic. Managed to be killing 10 or so mobs at the same time just because of these scouts. What happens is that you’ll notice there are drums around the area and scouts patrolling the vicinity. If they aggro they will run straight for a drum, if they get one (yes one) successful bang on the drum 2 elites will spawn. They can be rooted, stunned, and slowed (at least via frost shock) and only have 6k HP so kill them before they reach a drum. They will spawn behind you so rogues & druids need to be aware and react accordingly. Note that they will run STRAIGHT for the drums, so becareful when there are pulls with scouts.

Boss has 3 abilities: flamebreath, the mini-game, and hatcher spawn. Flame breath is a narrow but long cone AE, just make sure ppl don’t stand on the same straight line with the boss, especially behind the tank. The mini-game he will close the 4 “exits”, then start throwing balls of fire on the ground. After a few secs they all explode and you’ll take 5-7k damage per exploding ball that hits you. You have plenty of free time to find the free space (there is plenty of room) to stand. The explosion is slightly bigger than the ball graphic so don’t risk it and find somewhere where there is actually some room between you and any ball.

Every now and then two hatchers will spawn, and run to the two extensions on the altar to hatch eggs. There are 18-19 eggs on eggs on each platform. Each hatcher will run to either platform and start hatching eggs, each time they cast hatching they will hatch one more until they are killed (1 egg first cast, 2 eggs 2nd, 3 eggs 3rd, etc). Our strat was to have our druid charge and stun kill one, and let the other hatch 10 eggs (4 casts), stun and kill him, then deal with the adds. You may need to adjust according to your raid set up how many eggs you can handle at a time (10 was ok for us with only 1 mage AE). Occasionally the add spawn will overlap his fireballing mini-game and ranged will need to react and kill the hatchers from inside the game area before they spawn too much and wipe your raid. The boss has a 5 minute enrage timer and a 10 minute berserk (wipe) timer. After enrage he does hit quite hard on the tank so healers need to be aware of that.

The two elements of this fight which must be emphasised to the raid are the flame bombs and the hatchers. When he teleports the raid into the center (every 30 seconds), everyone must move to a safe spot so they don’t get blown up. When the hatchers spawn, DPS should quickly dispatch one of them and DPS down the other to 20% or so.

At 35% he’ll hatch all unhatched eggs, so you want to be cleared or near clear both egg platforms (3-4 add spawns if you hatch 10 at a time). You’ll only be left with his mini-game and dragon breath to deal with. His dragon breath has a long cooldown and as long as people are topped off and nobody get hit by a fireball in the mini-game, this boss is fun and easy.

You can reset this boss by running off the platform (unless the mini-game is in progress), but make sure you run off the correct side because the stairs are broken behind the boss and you need to run all the way around to get back to the boss.

Credits: http://wow.warcry.com, http://girlmeetswow.blogspot.com/, http://moliu.wordpress.com/2007/11/18/zulaman-lynx-hexlord/#comment-121, http://moliu.wordpress.com/2007/11/17/zulaman-bear-eagle-dragonhawk/, http://wowzulaman.blogspot.com/