Rise of the Zandalari

Since the recent valor to justice point conversion, dungeons have gotten much easier. Before Patch 4.2, I tried the Zandalari dungeons once, and swore I'd never go back in there until it was nerfed to wrath level.

I beat each dungeon exactly once just to get the damn achievement and stayed far, far away from them since. Every time I even thought about queuing up for one, I recalled the nightmarish run of Zul'Gurub I did with 4 people from the same guild who were constantly laughing at me over my numerous deaths (although they weren't jerks to me nor did they kick me - they just lol'ed at me a lot).

It was a really, really horrible run. I had read up on the encounters and came prepared with potions and foods and whatnot, but I was far from ready for this place. The damage output was off the charts - most special abilities were simply one-shot mechanics where if you don't move a split second fast enough, you will die. I mean, there is just no way to survive a ~40k damage tick without moving out of the fire pre-emptively.

All in all, I think I died around ~20 times or so. Thank god there was a repair NPC right at the entrance. Every single boss fight I got 2 b-rezzes - one from the druid then another from the DK. I managed to stay alive for a whole whopping 30 seconds on the panther boss but on all the other ones I was pretty much dead as soon as the fight started. The fights were lightning fast-paced, the damage was practically unhealable, and the mechanics were unforgiving and relentlessly brutal.

Zul'Aman wasn't nearly as bad, but we did go through about 4 different tanks and healers just to clear it. After spending 2 hours in that place I also had no desire to go back in there.

Besides, I didn't need the extra valor points anyhow - my guild was clearing enough raid content for me to cap out my VP every week, and my gear was already full 359. The only use I had for VP was to buy the BoE boots and give them to my paladin, or sell them. Heck, towards the end I was trading them in for conquest points to buy epic PvP gear.

With the new patch came the conversion, and everyone could now buy tier 11 gear with justice points. It also brought tier 12 gear which I desperately wanted, and in order to buy them I knew I would have to repeat the gruelling dungeon crawls to cap out my VP every week. But I did notice everyone's ilvl was generally higher than they had been pre-patch, and heroic dungeons were getting noticeably easier. People weren't CC'ing meticulously like they used to, and more often than not a beast tank would come in and chain-pull an instance in about 30 minutes.

I figured I'd stick to regular heroics, but in the end I wasn't happy with earning half the VP cap for the week and decided to give the Zandalar dungeons one more try. My first attempt went badly when I died during the boulder toss gauntlet. In fact, I kept dying to it and finally left out of frustration and embarrassment. I mean, come on, what kind of bullshit mechanic is that? Is this frogger or is this WoW?

My next attempt went quite smoothly, however. I managed to get dropped in right at the Bloodlord Mandokir fight, thankfully having skipped the dreaded venomancer (in my opinion he's there to weed out people right at the start) and the stupid boulder toss. One person died here and there but overall no wipes occurred for the rest of the fight. With the help of DBM screaming at me and telling me where to go, and by watching what everyone else was doing, I managed to stumble my way through all the encounters and even put out some decent damage.

I marveled at the fact that as long as you just avoid that single one-shot mechanic every boss has, the rest of the fight becomes more or less trivial (with the exception of the venomancer). For instance with the Bloodlord, as long as you avoid the devastating slam rupture lines, you're fine. the bloodletting mechanic ticks off a lot of hp, but it's unavoidable and it CAN be healed through, whereas the slam damage is a bona-fide one-shot. For the Zanzil encounter, as long as you grab the poison resist buff cauldron before he does the poison spray, you're good to go - the rest of the phases are easily healable.

As I mentioned, the venomancer is an exception - you need to avoid ALL his abilities because all of them are more or less one-shot killers. Everything is poison-based, so if you get hit you'll be taking a few ticks which can be lethal. The toxic link can certainly be a one-shotter if you're unlucky and get linked with another melee right next to you. His breath is particularly dangerous in that he can cast it in any direction, not necessarily at the tank. Combine that with the fact that stepping in any of the myriad of poison pools on the ground which start exploding throughout the fight - you'd better have a hair trigger on your mouse.

Anyways, I gained some confidence from clearing ZG relatively easy. Zul'Aman was also much easier with everyone having better gear and better knowledge of the encounters. There also aren't quite as many one-shot mechanics in ZA - mainly the ones to watch out for are the flame breath during the dragonhawk encounter (you can survive one or two ticks, or three with a great healer who's on the ball), and getting the proper charge order set up during the bear encounter. Other than that the only part of ZA that might be tricky is if the final boss Daakara decides to shapeshift into the Lynx. But as long as the tank knows when to taunt it's not a big deal.

Now I know I can cap my VP each week running a combination of ZG/ZA and a few heroics (maybe toss in a couple raid bosses too). But it still has me missing the good old days of wrath when a dungeon would take 15 min from start to finish...