It Belongs in a Museum!

Saturday's Zul'Aman run came and went.

We survived. Barely.

It was not a pleasant experience, that's for certain.

***

Okay, I should clarify things a bit. 

We had enough people sign up that we were able to field two Zul'Aman teams, and how the teams broke down the three remaining Monday raid lead team people were on Team 1, and I found myself riding solo as Raid Lead on Team 2.

I saw that and cursed; I knew I was going to have to put in some extra time studying the entire ZA raid if I was going to be going live without backup.

So, most of my free time on Friday and Saturday was spent reviewing videos and walkthroughs, making notes, and then comparing those notes with the "official" ZA raid guide assembled by the "other" progression raid lead team, as they'd gone into the PTR and run it a couple of times beforehand.*

Saturday evening arrived, we assembled, and then we were off.

"Greetings, Doctor Jones...."

 

***

For those who haven't a clue about Zul'Aman --such as me-- it is what is known as a "catch up" raid. Supposedly, Zul'Aman allows a player to gear a toon quickly so they can then jump into the current "main" raids without having to spend all sorts of time running the four previous raids. The raid operates on a completely different lockout than the "main" raids, 3 days per lockout rather than 7 days, so it allows a player to run Zul'Aman multiple times per week.

Sounds great in theory, right?

Well, in practice Zul'Aman is harder than it looks.

Part of that is the main reason why progression raiders want to run Z'A: the warbear mount timed event.

It's less a Warbear and more of a Tank.
Put a gun turret on top and you'd have your
own personal Sherman tank.
(From Wowhead.)

 

Akin to the timed events in Stratholme and Shattered Halls, a captured person is going to be executed by the Big Bad if you don't engage a specific boss before the timer runs out. Unlike the other two events, the Zul'Aman version actually has a bit of flexibility built in, because of the following conditions:

• You have to defeat the first four of six bosses, not the last one, to finish the event.
• Two of the four bosses you defeat in the event will actually add time to your timer.

However, completing a "Bear Run" as it's known means avoiding trash where you can, moving and deafeating trash and bosses quickly, and one more thing:

DON'T GET LOST

And yes, in case you're wondering. We got lost. Or rather, the main tank and I BOTH got lost.

It's not very difficult to get lost in Zul'Aman, especially if you're running it for the first time, but that was not a warm fuzzy feeling when running around and the main tank is going "I thought it was this way."

"Yeah," I replied, "I thought it was too."

"It's over here," the Hunter spoke up. "I thought we were running the wrong way, but...."

"Dude," I said, "if you want to say something don't hesitate to say it. I'm not gonna be offended or anything."

In spite of all that, we actually got really close to making it on time to the last boss. Alas that we accidentally pulled the last two groups at once and wiped, causing us to miss the timer by 1-2 minutes.

Oh, and just so you know, part of the Bear Run strategy is to leave some of the chests behind for you to pick up afterward, and, well.....

I GOT LOST RUNNING BACK TO GET THOSE TOO

***

But I'm not here to discuss my map reading foibles, but rather the misadventures after the Bear Run portion of Zul'Aman.

You'd think that with the Bear Run finished --one way or another-- the next two bosses wouldn't be that hard.

Well....

Let me introduce you to Hex Lord Malacrass.

The Hex Lord has four mini-bosses with him, supposedly people he's hexxed into being his slaves, and he has a very annoying mechanic: the longer you fight him, the harder it is to do damage against him and the harder he hits you.

Yes, you read that right. The longer the fight goes on, he puts a stacking buff/debuff out that mitigates damage against him and amplifies damage against you. 

So you have to kill him off as quickly as you can, and those four mini bosses stand in the way.

Oh, and to make things even more fun, he'll steal the abilities of a class that's attacking him (it's a random selection) and use those abilities against the raid. So he could steal a healer's abilities and constantly heal himself, which is bad enough, but if he steals a Paladin's DPS abilities he gets to use such abilities as Consecrate against all the melee.

And guess who kept dying to Consecrate because he couldn't see it being laid down because the main tank --a Protection Paladin-- was also using Consecrate?

I just realized that my gear hasn't
changed since before the New Year,
over three full months ago. /sigh

Yeah, this woman.

The first couple of wipes things would start out well and then the main tank would bite it, and that was pretty much that.

So after the second wipe the off tank (also a Prot Pally) decided to step back and heal, since they weren't really adding DPS value to the fight.

That got us farther, but after a certain point I would die and without the interrupts I'd provide as an Enhancement Shaman the raid would eventually wipe by slow attrition.

After that happening about 3 more times, the main tank asked me what I was dying to. 

"I'm dying to.... Consecrate??"

"Aha! It thought it might be that."

I should have known better. I mean, 30% of the raid were Paladins, so it was highly likely that the Hex Lord was going to steal a Pally's abilities. "Okay, I'm going to stay back and just pretend I'm elemental. That should keep me alive."

We made that switch just as one of the raid team spoke up and said that they were going to have to leave soon. "I wasn't expecting this to take more than 2 hours," he admitted. 

"Neither did I," I added. "We'll have about 1-2 more pulls with you around, and we'll see if we can pull this off."

The first attempt with only the main tank in melee ended in a wipe, but we got much farther than we had before, so I felt confident on the very next pull.

It was going to be the last pull with our off tank around, so we had to make it count.

And, wonder of wonders, it did. In gymnastics slang, we stuck the landing and got the Hex Lord down.

"That had to be the hardest boss here," the main tank said after the cheering had died down.

"I agree," I replied. "That was nuts."

***

After the Hex Lord, Zul'Jin was a walk in the park.

Well, relatively speaking.

We did wipe once or twice, and our Mage announced that he had another raid in about 10 minutes so he was going to have to leave, so we managed to get Zul'Jin down with 9 raiders at the very last possible moment before the Time and Date Boss got us.

Team 2 finished Zul'Aman by the skin of our teeth.

***

Throughout the whole raid, I was receiving updates from my questing buddy. She was originally supposed to be on my raid team, but because of a last minute swap she got pulled into Team 1. Right about the point where we were about to engage the last boss in the Bear Run, Halazzi, she began whispering me about how they kept dying to trash.

It was really discouraging, she admitted, that they weren't going to finish the Bear Run.

And then, while we were busy keeping everybody's bank accounts low by wiping on the Hex Lord, she was telling me about a whole lot of other wipes they were having. In the end, Team 1 ran out of time before people had to leave for other commitments, and they only got down 4 of the 6 bosses.

That kind of weighed on me, because if you'd have asked me which raid would have had an easier time of it, it was Team 1. It certainly wasn't due to my brilliance, but afterward when people congregated into the same Discord channel we felt that the presence of a Priest on Team 2 helped us considerably, given that Team 1 didn't have a Priest at all. 

But that didn't help the Monday's overall raid lead, who was crushed by her team's inability to finish the raid.

I spent some time in a side channel consoling her, because it's one of those things that just happens. Some of it is being new to the raid, some of it is composition, and some of it is thinking that we can steamroll through content that turned out to be harder than we thought.

And in my heart, I knew that gear definitely played a part in this.

The Monday raid had been falling farther and farther behind in gear compared to the 2x/week raid, and this was the most obvious manifestation of the gear discrepancy.

I mentioned that I didn't expect this raid to be this hard, and our main tank pointed out that "In the videos it's easy to steamroll it when you're in Black Temple BiS gear."

As for this raid being a "catch up raid", I have to wonder if a raid team composed of people who are fresh L70 toons could complete Zul'Aman, never mind the Bear Run, without fine tuning the raid's composition and having plenty of experience. If you've got your critical pieces to the raid in at least some Serpentshrine Cavern/Tempest Keep pieces, yes you can do this. After all, Team 2 did. Even then, you probably have to give up the Bear Run until you get plenty of experience running ZA. 

***

I want to keep running Zul'Aman, because I think that the raid composition can be fine tuned to a significant degree, and once we get used to the raid itself we'll be that much better of a team for it. Gear can hide a lot of significant problems, and it's better that we as a team without all that gear learn how the raid runs and what strategies work so that as raiders come and go we will be better off to handle them.

As long as we don't end up like this...

 

 

*This is the 2x/week team. They'd also run ZA on Thursday with two teams of their own, so they all had a lot more experience in ZA than I had. And if you're wondering why I didn't get into the PTR myself to check out the raid beforehand, there are two reasons: I didn't have the time, and even if I did have the time I'm not a fan of PTR environments in general. I'd rather not have the story and/or raid spoiled just so I could speed run something. That second piece is kind of at odds with my raid lead position, but I've also found it easier to take notes while examining videos rather than trying to stop and take notes while actually running it myself.