Third Timed Chest in ZA

We did it. We nailed the third timed chest in ZA last night. It was close, I mean real close. We had 60 seconds to spare, maybe less.

Now before I get into the nitty gritty details of it I have a caveat: Stoney wasn't on this run. In fact, there was no enhance shaman on this run. OK, I did bring in Stoney for the Hexx Lord kill, as that is extremely difficult to do without an Enhance Shaman. But as far as the timed loot is concerned I tanked it on my druid, Finnmaccool. I really owed a run to our of our raiding rogues, Zorren, and it does not make sense to have 2 melee dps in the 10 man run. So I gave him the melee spot and tanked it on Finn. Having put that caveat out there (this is after all an enhance shaman blog not a feral druid blog) let's get on with the details.

We do Bear, Eagle, Lynx as our kill order for timed chests. Bear and Eagle both went off without a hitch and we saved both Tanzar and Harkor, who is by no small coincidence a distant relative of our uber-hunter Farkor despite Farkor's protestations otherwise.

For the Lynx boss we cut across the top of the waterfall and go in from the backside, killing one AoE pack, jumping through a hut and in the end skipping 4 pulls versus going in from the main entrance. This takes us directly to the Tamer and his 2 crocolisks on patrol. I must confess at this point I did not think we would make it to the boss in time. Our previous best run was about 3 minutes short of killing Halazzi, and that was with a 7+ minute boss kill. We had a Warrior (our guild's MT) and a Druid (me) tanking this time, versus the Pally tank we had on our previous best attempt. I was not expecting to get there and clear it in time, but I kept quiet about it because I wanted to see how close we could get.

We got to the chamber and the patrol was coming around to the entrance right at that moment. We picked up the pat and the next two pulls, with our Shadow Priest surviving the Mind Controls of the Amani'shi Flame Casters. We got to the boss, assigned healers and tanks and had 6 minutes on the clock. And then the magic began.

We DPS'd him so fast that he only got Fenzy off twice--normally he does it four times, once each time in Phase 1 just before shifting out to Phase 2. We were absolutely crushing him. As he came out of Phase 2 the second time, meaning we were dpsing from 50% to 25%, I called for heroism and I think it was a good use there. We barely even touched that phase and he split out. In the split phase he only got 2 totems down before he was back in combined phase and ready for the final stretch. It was blazing fast DPS. In 5 minutes he was done, and we freed Ashli for the first time in our guild.

The other thing that I think helped us dps him down so hard was that we had 3 leatherworkers in the tank group. Why was that helpful? Drums of Battle rotation!! That means for 75% of the entire fight that group was hastened. Granted that group only had 2 dps'ers, but it was hunter Scuttle and rogue Zorren. However I do believe it helped me and the MT keep a generous threat lead allowing for all of the dps to go all out.

As for loot? Bah. Bear dropped Elunite Imbued Leggings, which were subsequently DE'd. Eagle dropped Tuskbreaker which was given for an off-set. And damned if Ashli didn't give us the crappiest ring ever: the Signet of Eternal Life, which went to our Shaman healer alt for his PvP set. I hate that we DE'd so much, but no worries the real accomplishment was in reaching the timed chest.

Now for the long hard crawl to the 4th chest and the Amani War Bear mount. In case you are not familiar with the timed run, you get 15 minutes added to the clock for killing the bear, 10 minutes for the Eagle, and that's it. You have 45 minutes to kill 4 bosses. As of last night it took 44 minutes for us to kill 3 bosses. Jeez.

My game plan is to keep running that same route and shave 2-4 minutes off the run each week. When we get to the point that we can do 3 bosses in 35 minutes on a consistent basis then I'll change our kill order and we'll start working our way towards MY mount!