H: Zon'ozz w/ Melee Heavy 10m --

[spookyz]

Hey all, quick question regarding H:Zon'ozz, we're currently working on him with the following comp:

Prot Pal

HPal
RDruid
RShaman

Ret Pal
UH DK
Combat Rogue
Arms Warrior
Fire Mage
SPriest


As you can see, we're running 4 melee dps and it seems like the black phase with melee heading out to kill the adds is causing far too much stress on the healers as opposed to a heavier ranged group just standing together from range and sitting in aoe heals. Is there anyway to tweak strats to favor a melee heavier group? Everything I'm reading is just saying bring a max of 2 melee dps. But, last night was a bit depressing, we'd get to black and melee would just start falling over to the damage.

Any help is appreciated.

[Deleted]

If your melee died to the damage in the black phase the problem is in the healing, not with bringing melee. your healers should each take 1/3 sections of the room to heal (essentially one section is 1/6th of the whole room as the tentacles spawn in fixed positions in a half-circle).

The issue with bringing 4 melee is that your dps will most likely not be enough to beat the enrage and not having 2 healers in the melee group makes normal phase tank healing a bit sketchy since you cannot rely on another healer to heal while you're running a debuff out (as an only healer in the melee group)

[Dorfie]

Not much you can do except heal through the damage and try to nuke down the adds asap. You really need to figure out the positioning so that the healers can focus on 3-4 people each and they can safely go after the eyes/flails.

Let the rogue blade flurry the claw and boss down and let the least mobile melee kill the middle eye. Break the other 4 DPS into 2 groups, each group needs to kill 1 flail and 2 eyes. If each group can get just 1 add down quickly the healing becomes a lot easier.

[Deleted]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HQhmdwuYuww

Our Zon'ozz first kill had just Moonkin + Elemental Shaman plus four melee (Rogue, DK, Enh Shaman, Kitty). If you imagine the tentacles to be spawning in a crescent moon shape - we start out in the centre of the moon so that everybody is in range of all three healers for the 'hard part' of the healing. Once a flailer and two eyes are down, we fan out - casters moving south and melee moving north with a healer following each team. The third healer stands and heals the MT and the combat rogue who's cleaving the claw.

We just made sure we has a tight CD rotation for the very start of the black phases to give a buffer for long enough for an eye or two to die such as Tree of Life, Tranquilities and Hymns.

[spookyz]

Thanks for the replies, I'll try to put those to use

Judging by another thread I was reading here, apparently the damage the beginning of the black phase might have been abnormal for this week, but I really have no frame of reference. Maybe we ran into something like that, maybe not.

Thanks again.

[rijn dael]

We have two different strats, depending on how many melee are in for the kill.

When running melee heavy, we start with ranged on one end, melee in the middle, and noone on the right of the spawns. The goal is to burn down a few of the lowest hp tentacles, as one-stack-per-tentacle makes healing hard - once a few are down, you can afford to move over the other side.

You will find it insanely hard to heal through if you try and spread completely with that much melee.

Our ranged stacking strat was our first kill though, it makes the tentacles significantly faster to be able to multidot everything at once, but is still harder on the healers than our melee strat.

[Balfous]

1 pc of advice is to make sure you utilize fire mage cauterize, shadowpriest dispersion and the unholy dk AMZ during the bounce phase.

You can do it 2 ways: either have them take the last three of the bounce phase (so the rest of your range can move to the side and especially the healers can be in range of EVERYONE including the tank). OR have them take the FIRST three of the bounce phase (for the bounce phases after the first dark phase) since that will give everyone 15 more seconds to get into position.

Other than that, We only use 2 melee and we leave them on the boss to cleave down the Claw during the black phase. I would send the ret paladin and dk out and leave the combat rogue and warrior on the boss. Rogue & warrior have best 2 person cleave, and paladin + dk have best survivability. Make sure the ret paladin remembers he has a heal for bad situations and the DK has AMS.

Most of the other advice seems right. Group up near the claw until you get 3 tentacles down (make sure everyone prios the claw last as it will get cleaved and does minimal damage). Then have set teams fan out.

Hope that helps.