ZG & ZA
I had a chance to do (although not complete) both dungeons last night and I wanted to share my perspective on each.
Zul'Aman
I enjoyed this, although not much has changed. A few of the boss mechanics are less punishing now, and you can subtly feel the Cataclysm design philosophy that cooldowns are not just for Raids now. I mean this sincerely - if you are a tank who doesn't use CDs, you will probably make the Bear Boss a lot harder than he has to be. Trash has been reduced a lot and there's a lot of subtle reward in time savings for people who properly use CC. Compared to other Cata Heroics, the number and difficulty of trash pulls seems way lower, and bosses don't have MORE mechanics than they had as a raid.
I would say you could probably do the whole place in less than an hour once you know all the fights, I would guess an average time of around 45 minutes. We didn't make it all the way througth due to the instance booting me out to Orgrimmar where I (and my drake) fell out of the sky like a stone. Having never taken falling damage on a flyer before, I found it charming :-)
Zul'Gurub
Ah ZG, one of my all time favorite places (sincerely) and now back for Cataclsym. Just on the topic of feel, I love that the city is all fucked up and that it is full of non-hostile gurubashi trying to rebuild it. So, ZG is now full to the gills with mini-bosses who generally seem to have one mechanic each. That said 80% or more of the mini-bosses are skippable, and the rewards for doing them are significant (bags of loot, bags of rare cooking stuff, and a straight up maelstrom crystal drop). I would say that 90% of the general trash is skippable, but the trash that isn't can be challenging because most CC doesn't work in here. Instead there are different types of cauldrons you can interact with for different types of abilities, and I have to say it's genuinely pretty fun. I also really enjoy the new terrain obstacles like poison clouds, rolling rocks, etc
The bosses. Compared to the rest of the bosses in Cata, I found them much easier. Fewer, more manageable mechanics that generally have more to do with the surroundings than the boss. The snake boss breath attack hits like a truck, but I didn't get to experiment much to see if I could get behind. His poison maze is cool but manageable and he doesn't have enough HP to get in to a second breath phase. The raptor riding boss is more or less the same, but now when he jumps off his raptor you have to kill it, or it starts happily murdering the ghosts around the room. He also has a huge "Get Out Of The Fire" attack which is new. Overall, challenging, fun, and nice additions to what was there before without being terrible.
The panther. We couldn't get by her BUT I suspect we had distracted healer. Its mostly about manageing her while killing her adds. I'd be curious to see how having 1-2 non tank classes with interrupts kite her around the back of the room interrupting shadow bolts and running away from blood tears while the tank and a DPS dealt with the cats would work. The hexxer dude, we also didn't down him, but it's obvious we could have - it was getting late though. He has 3 cauldrons, and basically the whole fight is making sure you are drinking from the right one and dealing with the BS related to it. I really liked this fight, it's something new.
Overall, I suspect ZG will end up being like HoO - time consuming but not terribly hard. Once everyone is on the same page it will be a joyous stomp for phat loots and maelstrom crystals. I'd guess an hour for a full clear by an experienced group.
The Bottom Line, TL;DR
Overall this is a gentle back down. Difficulty is a lot lower than what I've seen in the rest of Cata, even the totally redesigned and new encounters in ZG have less mechanics to manage than, say, Throngus. Gear is better and it really felt like free-loot time with all the minibosses and stuff. What's more is even I, on my mountain of excellent gear (j/k) found an upgrade in there. Small but meaningful and when all was reforged and done, one item meant about a 1.8% increase in straight mitigation and a 1% increase in both block chance and critical block chance. If everyone is wearing this stuff when we raid, it's going to be noticeably easier.
So, backdown on difficulty. Backdown on gear. Not budging on dungeon length. I can live with that.
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Oh yeah
On an unrelated note, they aren't trying to resurrect Hakkar. They appear to be trying to consume him, Gods of Zul'Drak style
I generally subscribe to the
I generally subscribe to the Terry Pratchett-ish notion of gods, which is that they can only by "killed" by losing all their worshippers. It's a bit of a shame that the WoW designers don't seem to feel the same way.
Neil Gaiman agrees
Neil Gaiman agrees
If someone asks if you are a
If someone asks if you are a god, you say YES!!!!
Have to disagree a bit
I think the difficulty is significantly harder than Cata dungeons so far, especially since the loot is a step below raid gear, which should be expected (i353 as opposed to i359). If your not familar with the older fights then it can be some what difficult, especially considering some of the fights they changed quite a bit. If you don't have a decent group, then organising on some fights will be a PITA. Yes, these fights actually NEED people to do or not do certain things and sucks with PUGS, mostly because I hate typing.
In ZA The Dragonhawk boss with the eggs and fire trail, felt JUST like Maliorak to me. You have to let some adds out, but not too many or else you get swarmed at 30-35% and becareful you dont kill the adds to release the other adds, when there's a constant stream of other adds..... The bird boss picks someone up and you HAVE to kill the bird, then the stacking thing or die, run in run out...just like Lich King. Bear one I think was pretty much a tank and spank along with the other boss (not sure of the form) with the Ghost and Snake add, just kill adds then boss.
I only saw the end boss in ZG, but that fight took awhile to figure out, since all I knew was 'Stand in the green bubble' when the fight started. It also really needs every role to do their job. First phase isnt bad, dps/healer stand in the green shield and tank can 'dip' him in and out of the shield for better DPS in between his buff (Just be under the shield when he does his cast, it reduces all damage taken by 90% and give a cast time buff I think). Phase 2 is at 70%...it's where the fun begins. The Tank needs to grab a big troll ghost add on the bottom level (There's one on either side of Hakkar), you always need one up if there's a pink bubble up. Everyone has to stand near a pink bubble, but dodge the shadow crashes from Hakkar (They're marked with purple smoke on the ground, think of the fireballs on Halfus), while killing small ghost adds and dodging body slam from the big troll (Body Slam target is marked with a purple triangle, DBM yells at you)...but body slam has to land near the pink bubble to break it or you can't kill the chains to kill the boss oh and every pink bubble you break causes more smaller ghost adds to spawn that need to be dps'd down quickly because the tank is running around with the troll.....please explain that to a pug. Hmmm, maybe I'll make a macro...
Again, I'm not complaining but there's no other Cata dungeon bosses with those kind of mechanics, close but not on the same level. These guys felt like mini raid bosses, they can be tough fights but I like the challenge and I love figuring out boss strats on the fly like that, may cost 200g for one dungeon but meh =P
Troll Lore
After doing ZG with a guild group last night, I'm wondering if the ultimate goal of this prophet Zul is to destroy the other troll races. He references what happened to the Drakkari, so he knows that fucking with your Gods too much is a bad plan. Here we see new ZG, where the Gurubashi have been encited in to gathering their Loa up and summoning Hakkar so that some dude can try to eat him? And when you free Hakkar he turns around and laughs and is all like "Remember the part of my name that says SOUL FLAYER?"
It just feels a little like Arthas' "I will carefully put just enough obstacles in your path to make you as strong as possible so I can raise you as the bestest undead"* Maybe Zul is going "Yeah, yeah, summon your Gods, bring all your people to one place. Try to eat malicious creatures of terrible and unknowable power. NOTHING CAN GO WRONG NOW!"
As a side note, ZG at least reminds me of Karazhan - full of NPCs busy doing their own shit, almost seeming surprised to see you there and certainly not letting you distract them from making dinner and adding a few more rushes to the roof.
*which I was bitter about, I was expecting the twist that the LK was using the Scourge as a foil to strengthen the world against an inevitable 3rd invasion by the Burning Legion, as he had plenty of reasons on both sides of the soul to hate them.
Agree on "the twist"
The whole thing with Arthas making us really strong seemed kinda lame. I didn't even believe it, it sounded made up on the spot. Seriously no better way to get 10 strong lieutenants? (or 25)?
But if he had been building the scourge to strengthen the world, and having the end twist be the realization that the players were thinking they were saving the world, but in fact may have just doomed it, with whispers of future expansions, would have been EPIC. Then there could have been people saying "that was all lies, he was just in it for his own power" and others going "we'll never know, hopefully." etc.
Twist that question in your head etc.
Ah well. It was still pretty awesome to kill him when the content was still legitimate.
So much lead up
Between Mal'Ganis hanging around looking shady just off the coast and Varimathras taking over Undercity and filling it with Legion, I thought there were a lot of nice little notes to say, "Hey, remember us? We're the Burning Fucking Legion and we are still here, and still looking to take over your world. Oooh, you killed a half breed night elf, a blood elf with big ideas, and the half-formed avatar of one of our leaders. Big deal. We're coming. Get READY suckers"
And then that never went anywhere.
I think it might be like how the Devs and Designers have said they didnt really communicate the relationship between Arthas and Yogg-Saron as well as they hoped to. It must be hard when looking at all the content in an expansion to make sure you are sending all the messages you want to send. Writers stuggle to do it with a handful of main characters, these guys have to use an entire world. I do love that they don't shy away from just making up lore on the spot if they think it's awesome; really every piece of Ashbringer lore came from WoW, and I think it came out pretty well.
Aside from the cougar boss in
Aside from the cougar boss in zg I find these dungeons extremely enjoyable for now at least. They are still very long but somthing about the outdoor troll setting has always appealed to me. I also really like the look of troll armor and have ever since the old za 10 man dropped. Looking forward ti running more of these with guildies in the coming weeks.
I will...
run trains on these bitches like Waka at a petting zoo!
Since you can random queue for JUST these two instances I can even do it on kib or fulgur. Now I just need to get my hunter up to the ilvl 346 gear mark. *sigh*
Same
Tanky tank tank.
Deepy Deeps Deeps