The View From Down Here

Return to Zul’Aman

I’ll admit that my first experiences of Zul’Aman were less than complimentary. Like many people, I was on a raid into the place on the first night it came out and got no futher than the Bear Aspect, Nalorakk’s trash. However since that inauspicious start I’ve come to enjoy the place more, even though I’ve only had the opportunity to go there half a dozen times, the most recent before today over a month ago.

Today, however, renewed my interest in the place enormously. And I saw all of the instance for the first time - previously having wiped repeatedly on the fourth boss, Jan’Alai. Armed with a different strategy to how we’d downed him the first time, we wiped a few times and down he went. He wasn’t feeling in a good enough mood to drop the [item]Bulwark of the Amani Empire[/item] though.

And so on to Hex Lord Malacrass, who is more or less Moroes Redux. He comes with four friends who need to be killed or controlled. He presented far less of a problem than I’d have expected, in fact the second ever attempt was enough to down him. We were probably lucky, in that all of the adds were easily crowd controlled and our offtank wasn’t over burdened with chasing people around. Also, given we are building shadow resistance sets for BT and Mount Hyjal helped a great deal with the mass shadowbolt style attack.

He dropped three badges, nice enough, plus the five from the aptly-named “Hex Lord? Hah!” quest is a nice bonus (though the amount of badge gear I can currently use is verging on the minimal).

And so to Zul’Jin. We had some amusement when I ran in to pull the last wave of trash mobs, only to realise that they weren’t trash! So the gnome soloed the last boss of the instance, and lasted all of about six seconds. It isn’t so much of a single boss fight as a set of five fights, one after the other, without a break. His abilities change completely every 20% and he drops aggro then so careful timing of DoTs is needed.

Before I had to leave, I saw as far as phase 4, which seems to revolve around ridiculous amounts of healing against a random target. Phases 1 and 2 were relatively easy. Phase 3 was the real kicker - no tanking happens, there’s just loads of DPS, with the added kicker that random knockbacks happen from whirlwinds and every spell cast deals 1250 damage to the caster. Ouch. Eventually we got through that phase and into the next, which isn’t too bad if healers are awake. And at that point I had to leave. No doubt by now the rest of the raid will have brought him down, and not before time.

Soon we’ll be ready for a full [item]Amani War bear[/item] run. That’ll be fun.