Bad news and good news…
The bad news is that our third straight 25-man raid fell short due to low attendance. The beginning of the school year and the end of the summer are killing our raids. We keep hoping it is temporary. The people who were not online were all regular attendees who gave us no indication that they were cutting down their play time or leaving. Maybe it was just because of the holiday weekend 😦
The good news is that we put together a good 10-man ZA team from the raiders who were online. Keep in mind that this was only our third time ever in ZA.
We really wanted to try a timed run to see how hard they were. We new the Nalorakk fight best, so did that first. We got to him and one-shotted him with 2 minutes left on the timer. Woot! Feeling good about ourselves, we decided to brave the gauntlet and try the Eagle boss, Akil’zon. We had several deaths in the gauntlet but no wipes, and we made good progress through it. We got to Akil’zon and one-shotted him too with about 30 seconds remaining on the timer.
Two timed chests on our third time in ZA… I can’t express how excited we were. The Pauldrons of Stone Resolve dropped as an off-spec item for our pally, and the Staff of Dark Mending went to our holy priest. (if Rage had dropped, I might have considered trying a fist weapons build since I have the Big Bad Wolf’s Paw sitting in my bank… maybe next time!) The loot was almost irrelevant, though, compared to our sense of accomplishment.
We took a break at this point to decide where to go. We elected to try the lynx boss, Halazzi. We had seen him once before, but didn’t get close to killing him on that try. This time, we cleared to him and went in without getting fully buffed since we expected a few learning attempts. Not so! One-shotted! Easily, in fact.
He dropped The Savage’s Choker. That’s a dps neck piece, and I rolled on it, but a druid beat me. He offered to pass the item to me but I didn’t take him up on it, because I wasn’t 100% sure that this was an upgrade over the Shattered Sun Pendant of Might. Haste and AP are hard to compare. How much haste do you have to stack before it becomes worth the loss of AP? I’ll have to think on that so that I know for the next time it drops.
Before the end of the evening, I switched out to my paladin so that we could kill Jan’alai, the dragonhawk boss. We are now 4/6 in ZA. More importantly, our guild is actually getting gear upgrades from that instance, rather than just badge farming from Kara. I’m hoping we make ZA a regular part of our raiding, and get some shots at Malacrass soon.
Forever a Noob - A WoW Rogue Blog 
Congratulations with your new downs! 😀
I think you should keep the pendant. 84AP + 0.46% crit + 200AP for 10 seconds (boiles down to 33AP continuously) OR 350 arcane damage every minute is way better than 50AP and a 1.59% speed-increase on your white-damage and a slight improvement for combat potency.
In my opinion, the savage’s choker is a piece that noone should use as a primarily, but as filler to reach a certain Healthpool and still maintain some sort of DPS or something…
Hey there, just a quick suggestion to check out DrDamage mod (http://wow.curse.com/downloads/details/6491/), it gives the amount of hit/ap/haste/etc needed to increase dps by 1%, among other things. Could help out in the future!
Yeah, I’d say keep the SSO neck unless that thing was getting DEed. At some point, you might wanna try out a haste set or stam set or something, but the SSO neck is quite a bit superior, pure DPSwise, especially if you’re exalted with the respective faction.
Congrats on what sounds like a successful run through Z’A – two timed chests is a definite bonus! Halazzi is a tough fight to get right, in my experience, with a lot hinging on getting those totems down quickly. Nice work one-shotting him!
Regarding the neck item, the SSO neck item is definitely better than the Savage’s Choker. As a rule of thumb, at your gear level, 1 Haste Rating is roughly equivalent to 2 AP, meaning the SSO item is better DPS even before you include the Agility and the proc.
I look forward to hearing more of your exploits in ZA. My Guild too has started running it regularly recently, and I’m trying to get at least 1-2 bosses down in every 3-day reset. We had an excellent run in our second attempt, getting 4/6 on the Friday night and downing Hex and Zul’jin on the Saturday. Not bad for a Guild that is only 1 boss into TK. Sadly, no mage drops for me, but it was a real achievement to see them dead. Incidentally, Hex is the challenge – Zul’jin is easy in comparison. Notably, both are healing intensive, but if your healers are good enough for Hex they’re definitely going to be capable of supporting you through Zul’jin.
In retrospect I am glad that I kept the SSO neck. Normally I have a list of potential upgrades when I go into an instance. I didn’t go into ZA that night expecting to get 4 bosses, so – as Illidan might say – I was not prepared. Now I know. 🙂