Help with HC Zono'zz 10

[continuousbeing]

Hi folks, we have been having some trouble with H zon'ozz as of late, and I am worried that we have hit a wall, specifically with regard to raw output. After doing morchok-yorsahj-ultraxion, I chose to bring us to Zon'ozz over Hagara. However, based on what I've seen, this might have been a mistake.

The scoop:

http://worldoflogs.com/reports/rt-i326m547wxsqtkrb/

Logs from our most recent. This is about our third night of the same. Some pulls go through until the third black phase, sometimes we get wrecked something fierce in the first. I can potentially swap out one of our melee for a shadow priest, but I'd prefer not to as it would mean snagging one from the second raid team.

Our general strat is 7-7-7-5 bounces, with the fire mage eating the 7th for each one. We put the boss where the claw spawns, and put the ranged group over near where the middle Flail pops out on the side closest to the entry portal. We kill the first eye, and then the ranged focus the two eyes going out away from the boss, while the ranged work towards the boss. We have one ranged, our warlock, heading over to the far side to take down the eye there, and the ranged from the other side come over when that is clear. We all burn the last flail down, and then form up to take the bounces. We then do pretty much the mirror of that for the next phase.

I know we had some issues tonight with people getting hit by the ball at the wrong time, but I'll chalk that up to missing a week of progression last week and people being rusty. However, I am more concerned with out ability to survive the black phases. Any help, even if it's "you're boned, try hagara" would be amazing.

Thanks folks.

[Simca]

Free bump due to spam filter. Also, fixed your link.

[MirielTheMage]

Why aren't you surviving the black phases is a good question to ask yourselves. Are healers not properly timing cd's? Are the adds not coming down fast enough? You need to isolate an issue before you can fix it.

Anyway, dps looks a little low across the board. In particular, why does your frost dk do less damage than your tank? Swapping him for a ranged class would probably help.

Your resto shaman's healing is already plenty. However, he can help your others healers out by speccing into telluric currents, burning through his mana faster and then recouping with lightning bolt spam right after black phase ends. Tank damage at that point is negligible and as the debuff stacks on the boss it will increase his mana returns.

Just some thoughts, anyway good luck.

[Deleted]

Ok step one... your rogue is not Combat? Combat is by far the best spec in the game on this fight due to cleaving the claw+boss, our Combat rogue in less gear handily outDPSes all the rest of the raid by a wide margin. I'm sure I don't have to tell you what needs to change here.

Use the cauterize trick to make healing a bit easier. On the 5th (or 3rd on last phase) bounce all the ranged except mage follow the ball to melee and the mage takes it solo with cauterize, it removes a ton of damage and saves healers mana and headaches.

What are your DPS assignments? Having the right ones makes ALL the difference, I literally can't emphasize how important a tiny change on who attacks what can be. With your comp I'd do the following:
1) 2 melee kill the eye close to the claw, then go on claw cleaving it and the boss (you have an arms warrior and combat rogue = ez mode cleave).
2) 2 ranged kill a flail and two eyes off to the left of claw
3) 2 ranged kill a flail and two eyes off to the right of claw
4) Split your healers to go one left, one right and one center so you have overlapping areas of healing

Alternate CDs for black phase, that includes personal CDs such as tree form, shaman 4pc and Pally personals. Something like tranq+aura mastery+pally personals should work for 1st black phase, then tank 4pc+druid personals+shaman personal for the 2nd black phase and then just rotate between these two.

Edit: if your Shaman isn't speced into Telluric Currents on a fight where he can LB for ~40k then he needs to fix that asap. That's boatloads of free mana waiting to be abused that he's just not taking advantage of. And if he uses the "I don't have time to DPS" excuse then your other healers need to pick up slack better and/or DPS need to kill tentacles faster so that there is time.

[continuousbeing]

First of all, thanks for taking the time to lend a hand.

Our rogue usually plays combat, but we were struggling so much with the aoe in the black phase that he went sub to try and alleviate some of the pressure off of the healers. It did not really work, leading me to believe that the problem lays somewhere else. During the black phase we are getting our blood dk to pop vamp blood every time, with a tranq and aura mastery for the first one, and then with spirit link for the next one. Or at least that was the plan going in.

I think you're right, and we just haven't been able to figure out a proper way to burn down those adds fast enough. We were doing three ranged on the two flail and the eyes to the leftmost of the claw, with the melee on the flail closest. We were sending one ranged over to the right side immediately to burn down the flail over there, then start to get down the eyes, with the rest of the ranged moving over to help clean up the last one. Our thinking was that if we can clear the entire left side, and all but one eye on the right side, before the black phase ends we should be ok. However, we have such varying degrees of success its nuts. SOmetimes the phase goes off without a hitch, sometimes it just wrecks 3-4 people almost immediately. This outcome made me think we were somehow missing something vital.

Our shaman is definitely spec'd into telluric currents, we just haven't had many tries where we survive long enough to take advantage of it.

Part of me is worried that we have a slacking healer somewhere that I can't see. We do often lean a little on our shaman to pick up the slack of heals, maybe the spreading out all over the place is finally exposing this weakness.

[damz2969]

Just stick to Zon'ozz. Hagara is very similar in difficulty, depends a bit on the group, but generally if you managed Yor'sahj and Ultraxion you should manage Zon'ozz too.

Anyway, check out the guide I wrote a while back ago: http://www.mmo-champion.com/threads/...-ozz-10-Heroic hopefully it'll be of help.