1. #1

    Need help on Zon'ozz 10 HC

    First time poster, so sorry I can't post links.

    www(dot)worldoflogs(dot)com/reports/rt-t6fa1behsmtsn0v5/

    As a guild, we are currently 4/8 hc, with morchok, yor'sahj, hagara, and ultraxion down. None of these bosses took many serious attempts with our group, but we've wiped well over 200x on zon'ozz overall, most of which are ~2 minute attempts. Everyone in the raid group is getting frustrated, and it really feels like we're just missing some basic mechanic of the fight. In all of our pulls, we've had one attempt make it to enrage, and the boss was still at 30%, but that was one out of ~220-230.

    Raid members for possible comp are as follows:
    Warrior (prot/arms)
    Hunter (any spec)
    2x Paladin, one ret and one holy
    Shaman (ele, but can go resto if required)
    2x Priest, 1 is disc/holy 1 is shadow
    2x Druid, 1 resto 1 boomkin
    Mage (arcane or fire)
    DK (blood or frost)
    Rogue(can go any spec, but combat for zon'ozz for obvious reasons)

    Usually have a holy priest/holy paladin/resto druid combination with the warrior tanking, but can switch to the dk if it'd make the fight smoother. No dps HAS to be in for the kill, we just want the boss down at this point.

    We've tried just about every strat you can google. We have 5 people at max range (4 dps and the resto druid) with one standing slightly in front to aim the ball. We have 4 in melee with 2 heals (holy paladin focusing the tank). When we try doing 7 bounces on the first orb, it seems like about half the time we get a set of disrupting shadows going out right before the ball hits the boss. If it only hits one person its not a big deal, but when we get 3 people hit with it going into black its pretty much an instant wipe. We've tried shortening the range between bounces, dragging it out, regardless it seems like half the time we get the debuff. Help here would be huge.

    Once in the dark phase, assuming we make it there smoothly, We usually have one group go left and one group go right. We'll send 3 ranged with the resto druid to dps down 2 eyes and a flail, and send 2 dps with the priest to burn the adds on the other side. Combat rogue cleaves the claw, gg. We usually pop shield wall at the start of it, and have the druid pop tranq (priest will pop hymn if necessary). We leave the eye closest to the claw alive through all of p1 since we found out it greatly reduces future damage (rumors of this being stealth fixed, and sure felt like it tonight, but it was a bad night. Confirmation?) We were doing each set like this, but tonight we had planned on having the boomkin solo one side of adds and have the spriest solo the other for the 2nd/3rd black phases, since raid damage was much lower. We never had a clean attempt make it there, but I digress. Feels like we're missing something obvious here as well, as if we kill all the adds but one we barely make it back to catch the ball as its spawning.

    We've tried stacking up on the claw and killing everything in range then moving out, but it feels like we lose too much dps time on the boss. Again, maybe we're missing something with this strat. The whole tier seems relatively easy, and while we aren't world class raiders, we like to at least think we're halfway capable. This boss has been a complete brickwall for us though.

    Any help/suggestions/whatever would be greatly appreciated. The whole raid team is frustrated with the fight, and we're out of ideas on how to fix it. We've even considered just skipping it for Warmaster Blackhorn, regardless of the giant ramp-up in difficulty. Hopefully someone here can help us get past it without skipping it.

    TLDR; 10 man guild stuck on Zon'ozz, no idea why. Brickwalled... Hard.

    Thanks! Sorry for the long post, just wanted to include everything that might help you help us. Feel free to ask about/post any armory links or whatever. Digging at the bottom of the barrel, so anything is appreciated.

  2. #2
    We do 9-7-9-1

    Going to 9 I think you avoid the debuffs + black transition overlap, obviously it will happen on the 2nd black phase but we manage to deal with it somehow, not sure what to say about that specifically.

    We originially had a fire mage cauterize the final bounce of each phase, but we killed one week without doing that, and our most recent kill used a spriest to solo soak with dispersion on the 9th bounces. Tank damage is big but as long as you're smart with using cooldowns for drains, and especially drain + orb diffusion in melee its not too bad.

    During black phase the raid (excluding tank) move to the Flail closest to the Claw, we use healing cooldowns (rdruid tranq, boomkin tranq, rdruid tranq - I think is our order), meanwhile melee kill the Flail and 2 Eyes (nearest the Claw), 2 ranged move to kill Eyes on one side, 1 ranged + 1 melee do the opposite side. When Zon'ozz moves to the Claw our rogue gets on him.

    At the end of the Black phase there's ~10 seconds for people to reposition, we keep the boss at the Claw and the ranged group up in the middle of the room (reverse positions to how we start the fight). Usually we have an Eye and/or Flail still up at the end of the Black phase which is fine - they die to dots, and if not then they can be killed by ranged dps who get the debuff and have to run out for dispels.

    On the 3rd black phase we only kill the adds in range of the Claw, and the far Flail. I don't know if its necessary to kill the Flails but I recall during early attempts if we had a Flail up from an earlier black phase it would turn into a Claw. So, we leave 3-4 Eyes up.

    Ranged are in the middle again, we do a single bounce to force another black phase, raid stacks in the middle on the boss, we hero and burn the boss, tank is out at the Claw so it doesn't spit on everyone, Zon'ozz will run to the Claw and enrage soon after. You can survive the enrage with cooldowns on the tank and have basically until the first set of debuffs go out to kill the boss, the damage from the debuffs is increased due to hard enrage.

    On our earlier kills the boss would be ~45-50% and we would kill it 10-20 seconds into the enrage, our latest kill had an extra ranged DPS and the kill was 10 seconds ahead of enrage.



    Thats an earlier kill, we overkilled adds on the 3rd black phase, but it shows our general positioning

  3. #3
    We've managed 9 stacks at the start, but it seems like our tank (the warrior) always gets flattened if we go more than 7 after a dark phase. We might be able to fix that with having the fire mage do bounce 7, and the spriest doing bounce 9 though, and getting all 3 heals in range of the tank instead of having 1 heal on melee group and 1 on the tank. Definitely worth a shot anyways, especially since as you said it'll avoid the debuff overlap. Should be a huge boost to damage also, since the only way we've had a lengthy attempt was to do 5 bounces at the start . As long as the debuffs only overlap once, it shouldn't be too big an issue, especially with stacking up for aoe healing. Its been a couple weeks since we tried stacking on the claw, but I'd imagine that with a nice healer cd rotation (resto tranq + divine hymn for first, boomy tranq + aura mastery + tree for second, resto tranq/divine hymn for third) should be plenty and would let the warrior have his shield wall back.

    Definitely worth a shot next reset (we moved on this week since we'd only downed hagara once and it was quite sloppy, so didn't know how fast she'd go down).



    Pretty much exactly what I was looking for, many thanks. Any other suggestions in case we can't get this to work are still greatly appreciated.

  4. #4
    I'm the Prot Warrior tanking this, and once we hit 6+ stacks my survivability gets mighty shaky. I'm typically destroyed by a Psychic Drain + Melee hitting within a second of each other.

    I'm using Shield Block for the first Psychic Drain for the 20% reduction, Mirror of Broken Images for the second, then Shield Block again if it's up for the third. I played around with MoBI > SB > MoBI but it wasn't up for the third Drain.

    I'm not sure what more I can do, but I'm at my wit's end doing what I can to up my survivability on this.

    EDIT: I'm going under the assumption that you're the Prot Warrior in the video. Our gear is fairly similar. I reforged more mastery into avoidance, so I'm sitting at 19% dodge and 19.5% parry raid buffed with 60% block. Both use Soul Drinker. Both keep our Dodge/Parry appropriately reforged to avoid DR. I'll have to look at your guild's logs and see what you guys are doing different. At 150+ pulls and my still dying to high stacks of Focused Assault/Psychic Drain I feel like we're missing something simple.
    Last edited by Bethiana; 2012-01-05 at 06:48 AM.
    Evangelyna
    Maintankadin for SWARM

  5. #5
    Don't rely on Shield Wall to survive the Black phase, we didn't have 4p Shield Wall for our first or seconds kills. If you time it well during the bounce phases you can have it up for a ranged bounce, melee bounce + drain and possibly the ranged bounce afterwards, just depends how things line up.

  6. #6
    My guild just did this last week for the first time, and 2shotted it this reset:
    Ball bouncing: 5 - 5 - 5 - 3 and on after the last bounching (3 bounces) we all stack at boss and pop heroism, pots, CD's etc. and just nuke the boss ignoring any adds.

  7. #7
    Very long detailed explanation of an alternative tac, with video:

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ulmr8...H8QaOAQl2df1vI

    EVERYONE is sharing the void diffusion bounce damage here, we basically bounce it between the tank and 2 ranged, who are within 20 yards of the melee group. We do not dispel the debuffs, we just heal through them. This simplifies the tactic to a matter of throughput, instead of timing (numerous wipes when all 3 debuffs landed in melee and then 1 guy is standing in melee to eat void diffusion alone pissed us off).

    This leaves one complication, however: You sometimes get a 2nd set of debuffs just before black phase started, so we have designated "run here" positions where people then get dispelled.

    Our healing setup was Holy pala (with 4 set), resto druid and resto shaman. We did 7-7-5-5, and killed it with a comfortable 12 secs to berserk I think (you can see it in the vid).

    Like you, we've tried many MANY things, and were enormously frustrated (we thought it was easier than yorsahj, so imagine our disappointment when we only killed morchok first 2 resets on heroic, and then discovered how easy yorsahj was in comparison to warlord in the third reset...). We didn't hit as many try's as you, but we were looking at other guilds on our "level" that we were friendly competitors with, killing the boss in less than 40 try's, so it felt astronomical how much we used (somewhere between 80 and 100 I think).

    To explain in details EXACTLY what we do, here goes:

    - We stand 8 ppl (2 healers, tank, and 5 dps) stacked up on the Claw-spawn position, and MD to the tank. Behind us, about 17-18 yards stands our fire mage and holy paladin.
    - Boss runs up to us, when void diffusion spawns, he's turned around, like normal.
    - Void diffusion at range is controlled by the mage (the paladin doesn't have to move, just heal). Mage stays within 20 yards of the group (and they have to be awake and move if needed if it gets too far away, or the mage dies/gets cauterize). In other words, the ball is bounced as soon as possible (it has about 5 seconds of being "unsolid"/unbouncable.
    - The second bounce hits the tank, but is shared by the 7 people in melee = very little actual damage on anyone
    - third bounce onto mage, and so on. Amid all this come the shadow debuffs. Noone runs out, holy paladin goes through his raid frames healing each of the 3 people in succession. This pattern continues in a 7-7-5-5 style.
    - On the 6th bounce, we call out to "run out and share" the 7th with the ranged group. The tank pulls the boss a bit in the opposite direction to have the ball hit the boss. Our resto shaman runs out to the side so as to stay in range of the tank and heals him. He has beacon on him too, obviously, but should be doable even without paladin (we did this with all our tacs even before we got our holy paladin back).
    - We stay clumped up for a few seconds on the 7th bounce position as the ball goes towards the boss, waiting to see if we get a 2nd set of debuffs.
    - IF we get a second set, we have 3 "collapse" points where people run to to get dispelled, 3 on each collapse points. Only the people with debuffs run over to collapse points, rest move to the area between the claw and an eye (easier to see in the vid how all this works, sounds messy reading it). NOTE: the people with debuffs have to be aware that they're not more than 1 running to each collapse points. You see me in the video running to an "I'm outside the raid now" position that I know is safe, and call for dispel instead of risking it.

    - By now we've just hit the first black phase. We found it to be imperative that everyone stay clumped up within healing rain range for as long as possible, to keep the raid alive. NOONE is running out. You see which eye melee kill in the vid, after that we're just on the boss, cleaving the claw down. The ranged are killing the nearby flail and the eye near that flail, as well as the other eye that's close to the claw.
    - After that we have 2 teams running out to kill the remaining tentacles, with designated healers. In the vid you can hear someone calling out in lovely Danish language "Koklock lober", it sounds like. That's the timing on when they run out. In other words, we've killed everything we possibly can to survive the beginning of black phase, and are close to the end.

    From there on out, it's simply a rinse repeat situation, 7-7-5-5, with designated cooldown usage (should be fairly clear what's going on in the vid).

    - On the third black phase, we leave the 2 eyes that are furthest away alive. We do kill all flails.
    - On the 4th black phase, we just all run in and nuke the boss, pop BL and heal like mad. The tank runs and attacks the claw (otherwise it ranged-nukes people), and pop tranquility.

    Then we kill the boss

    People do improvise as we go along, for example, our paladin does run out and dispel himself at one point. This is not a problem if your raiders know what they're doing

    It really really simplified the fight a lot for us, we were about ready to commit suicide with what felt was "random shit with debuffs" before we used this tactic.

    Gear really helps, especially DW healer mace and 4 sets on healers. The only 4 set healer in our group was the paladin, though.

    Log of our kill is here: http://www.worldoflogs.com/reports/r...?s=1714&e=2062

    I hope this has been helpful, just PM me if you have any questions.

    Good luck!

    Edit: Learned the hard way last night that this tactic really requires a resto druid, as the hots help top people up in a way that cast-time heals cannot achieve when healing through the debuffs, going into black phase, and particularly leaving black phase and running out to finish off the tentacles further away.
    Last edited by Bellante_mazrigos; 2012-01-09 at 10:14 AM. Reason: New learnings

  8. #8
    I can really understand you; we are wiping at zonozz all the time and were glad when saw second tentacles spawn -.-

    During black phase the raid (excluding tank) move to the Flail closest to the Claw, we use healing cooldowns (rdruid tranq, boomkin tranq, rdruid tranq - I think is our order), meanwhile melee kill the Flail and 2 Eyes (nearest the Claw),
    Melees can attack the flail tentacles? According to the dungeonjournal they knockback melees.

  9. #9
    Quote Originally Posted by Draeblin View Post
    Melees can attack the flail tentacles? According to the dungeonjournal they knockback melees.
    I'm the ele shaman on this fight - yes, they do knockback, but our melee have found it's easily worked around (a single stutter-step and you're back up)

  10. #10
    Follow this guide, http://www.mmo-champion.com/threads/...-ozz-10-Heroic and you will hopefully win. Just remember when stacking on blue, that your group doesn't spread to kill purple yellow guys until the dark phase is "over". And also remember that the range have to hurry to red to help with the first bounce after the first dark phase.
    Reasoning being, when you do 7 bounces, since his ball is on a timer you have a lil less time to kill purple/yellow area, but after the first time, when you do 5 bounces the range can have a lil more time.
    Also, if you have 3 melee like my raid group, the 1 who goes out to the flail on yellow side, have your healer who is in melee range stand between the boss at blue, and the flail so he can heal/cleanse if that melee gets it. Then get back in for the first ball bounce.

  11. #11
    Quote Originally Posted by Fimbulvetr View Post
    I'm the ele shaman on this fight - yes, they do knockback, but our melee have found it's easily worked around (a single stutter-step and you're back up)
    :>
    Well I thought it would be a knockback of maybe 20m or so; never tested that.

  12. #12
    To everyone who posted with tips - thank you so much! It helped tons. We got him down tonight We ended up going 9-7-7-8, letting the ball fly off into oblivion while we delivered a righteous smackdown >:U
    Last edited by Fimbulvetr; 2012-01-13 at 02:53 AM.

  13. #13
    Warheart, after following your advice this fight magically got easier, many thanks. Downed the boss tonight and getting a first look at warmaster tonight!

  14. #14
    Good to hear, either we did something wrong this week or it got buffed/fixed, the final black phase w/ 12 stacks for us did way more damage than usual, we hadn't thought of doing a few bounces and letting the orb go off towards a far wall though, will try that next week.

    GL with Warmaster, shouldn't be too hard as you have ample ranged dps

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