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Zul’Aman: Jan’Alai the Dragonhawk Avatar

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My guild is coming to the end of our Christmas break period — wherein we restricted ourselves to more relaxed 10-mans, rather than full 25-man raids — and we’ve finished up with a bit of progression in Zul’Aman. Halazzi’s now solidly on farm, and we spent Monday night working on Jan’Alai, the Dragonhawk Avatar.

IMO the boss is substantially easier than the trash preceding him — which is a gauntlet with frankly annoying mechanics — and one of the most fun fights I’ve seen in a while.

The WoWwiki page on Jan’Alai covers most of his abilities and strat points, but I thought I’d elaborate a bit. There are two key things to consider when you’re working on Jan’Alai:

  1. He throws firebombs on a random timer, all around him. These explode for a lot of fire damage, but they have a very small AoE and you can fairly easily find a gap in between them all before they blow up. The video below shows this in action.
  2. His area has a platform either side, each with about 20 dragonhawk eggs. Every 90 seconds during the fight, two Amani Hatchers (trolls) spawn on the entry stairs and run to the egg platforms, one to the right and one to the left. They will break eggs and release the dragonhawks therein until they’re killed, and are fairly easy to kill. This affects the fight thusly:
    • At 35% of Jan’Alai’s health, all remaining eggs break and the dragonhawks swarm you.
    • Therefore, to avoid dying at this point (which is what you see in the video below), you need to allow the Hatchers to break a certain number of eggs each time they spawn.
    • The best way to do this is kill one Hatcher as soon as it spawns, and allow the other Hatcher to break the desired number of eggs, then stun and kill it.
    • You need to strike a balance between getting enough of the dragonhawks down before 35% that you don’t get mobbed and die when they all pop, and keeping the dragonhawk spawns under control so you don’t get mobbed and die before 35%.
    • Unless you have massive AoE to kill lots of dragonhawks at once, this means you need to slow the fight down, so that there’s a chance to have plenty of Hatcher spawns, letting a few dragonhawks out each time.

See the video below for Jan’alai in action, complete with some notes about what’s happening during the fight. (Apologies for the first bit being a little jerky; I had too many apps running in the background.)

(Or check the video out at imeem: Southern Wardens take on Jan’Alai)

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Zul'Aman

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Coming up in patch 2.3, as most people would be aware, is a new 10-man raid instance to follow on from Karazhan: Zul’Aman. It’s another troll instance, in the fine tradition of Zul’Farrak and Zul’Gurub, populated by animal god bosses (the loas) and their worshippers. It’s meant to be a fast, fun instance for reasonably advanced casual guilds: it can be cleared in a few hours, there’s extra quest rewards for clearing it within a set timespan (think of the old 45-minute Strat Dead runs; same sort of deal) and it resets every three days.

To get a bit of an idea of what’s required, my guild went and gave it a bash on the Public Test Realm last weekend. It was certainly… educational. And bloody.

Very bloody.

This charming chap is Nalorakk the Bear God, the first boss of Zul’Aman. He alternates between his troll form (seen here) and a giant bear form, switching multiple times throughout the fight.

He’s a pretty tough boss, and needs two tanks to fight him. The tanks taunt him betwen them – one for troll phase, one for bear phase – and while he’s busy tearing new holes in them, the DPS kill him. He does some nasty DoT bleeds during bear form, and a silence, and a charge, and a two-target cleave, but he’s fairly simple. From a raid coordination perspective, he’s probably closest to Attumen in complexity; he’s certainly easier, strategy-wise, than Netherspite or Aran or the like. Gear-wise is a different story; he’s got about 1.7 million health and does high DPS, especially to the tank for the bear form phase. Our raid team was pretty much fully Kara-geared, but I suspect you wouldn’t need to be quite that well-geared; a cohesive team that can reliably do Illhoof-level bosses can probably do him, provided one tank is very well geared. A team with undergeared tanks is going to be in serious trouble, simply because Nalorakk puts out so much damage, particularly in the bear phase*.

(You can find more details about the strategy for fighting Nalorakk here at WoWwiki.)

And here you can see his inevitable death scene: we killed him on our second night, when we had a more suitable raid composition. It’s a fun and relatively easy boss fight, and certainly a good introduction to the zone; we didn’t have time to try the next boss, but word has it that the difficulty level on boss fights ramps up very quickly.

* Also, on a specific strategy note, Nalorakk does a 2-second silence during his bear phase, which can often lead to tank deaths, so having your healers maximise their HoTs during this period is a good idea.