Traveller's Guide to Zul'Aman

Zul'aman is my favorite raid instance of all time, and shares that spot only with Karazhan. They're both incidentally the first two raids I seriously raided. In fact I think there is no coincidence about that at all. I had just started raiding and exploring my preistlyness, I felt like I had everything left to learn and experience. There is no doubt something very charming about being a noob. The bosses of Zul'aman were well designed and fun, the only drawback of the raid instance were the tedious trash (especially those blasted Scouts). Malacrass is still on top of my Worst bosses ever- list in terms of difficulty and challenge. Because he adapted with the group setup, he was truly never the same from one try to the next. Throw in a random setup of four adds that he had and you could have some truly hellish fights. Because of him I only ever got to kill Zul'jin twice or so, we always got stuck on that bass turd Malacrass *shake fist*. Those are really fond memories however, so when Love asked me if I wanted to do a run through Zul'aman just for fun, I immediately said "YES!". Also as a chance to see the instance one last time before it is revamped. Running in there with a handful of level 85 players doesn't do the instance much justice. most bosses lived for some 5-10 seconds, which didn't allow them much time to get the fight into the difficult parts. If I had the possibility I'd easily get in there with a proper level 70 raid.

Running up to the instance through Ghostlands, in which you still can't fly by the way. I know they'll fix this, it's just funny they didn't implement it from the start.

I love the design of this place.

This is the first time we got to meet Harrison Jones, and even though he meets a rather nasty fate in here, he returns in both Wrath and Cataclysm and turns into a rather prominent feature in Azeroth. Time to gong the gong!

Most of the bosses had some sort of gauntlet event leading up to their platform, only exceptions are Malacrass and Zul'jin. Nalorakk the bear lord, was usually the first boss one killed, seeing as he was the easiest. As I was in a swedish guild back then we called Nalorakk "Nalle", which is swedish for "bear".

The gauntlet usually meant alot of ccing. I remember you had to tank switch when he changed forms, and we usually used bear on bear here.

Another gauntlet. You had to work your way up with mobs spawning from both ends of the gauntlet. We usually had our raid split in two, with one half dealing with the front mobs and one half dealing with the back mobs.

On our way to Akil'zon, the eagle lord. He had a nasty thunderstorm under which you had to gather and also summoned loads of eagle adds that we had locks and hunters shoot down.

The worst gauntlet was the one leading to Jan'alai, it had scouts that called for help and Fire Breathers that dealt big damage. You had to advance in a steady pace and make sure to kill all scouts you saw asap, much like in Stonecore. I don't know how many times we wiped in this gauntlet.

Jan'alai the dragonhawk lord, was a really funny boss to do. In the background you can see a group of eggs, he had another group of them on the opposite side. After a while he would call on trolls to open up the eggs, which would then spawn buttloads of dragonhawks. It was managing the dragonhawks that was the real challenge of this fight, all the while he threw out fire balls that looked like popcorn on the ground and which of course had to be avoided at all costs.

Next gauntlet! Many lynx, handle them.

Halazzi the lynx lord was definitely one of the tougher bosses in ZA. He hit like a truck and you basically had to have a hunter for tranquilizing shot back then, because when he enraged, people died.

Malacrass... my nemesis. Malacrass was a fun boss to do as lock, because you could be put on banish, fear and seduce duty if you were unlucky. I regularly had to shackle on this fight when healing.

Malacrass took on skills depending on which classes you had in the raid. I remember paladin being among the worst because it made him Consecrate, use Retribution Aura (which did alot of damage) and use Avenging Wrath (which had to be dispelled asap). Priest was pretty annoying too with the fearing.

Due to a trigger happy priest in our group I didn't get to join in on this fight. I remember the cyclone phase being the worst one, where you had to constantly move from cyclones that moved around in the room. We wiped once due to Love forgetting to re-equip his staff from a previous wipe, and he was critted because without the staff he wasn't crit immune. This is at least the third time I tell that story on this blog alone. He will never stop hearing it.

Victory!
I got 7 sticks to try my luck with getting Mojo, but alas. I did get an epic blacksmithing pattern however!

Good bye Zul'aman. It will be interesting to see how the 5 man instance version will turn out. If it is half as fun as the raid, I'm happy.