Monthly Archives: January 2008

Playstyle

Addon Recommendation: Talented

2 Comments

Having recently stumbled across a couple of very nifty addons, I thought I’d give some of them a plug here. First off the block is Talented, an ACE mod that helps with picking a talent spec, planning future specs, and respeccing. It’s particularly useful if you respec between a couple of ‘standard’ specs fairly regularly – for instance, if you spec tank or healer for raids and then back to DPS for your weekday soloing.

Talented is invoked by bringing up your normal talent window; it enhances and replaces it. Here it is in Normal mode:

In Normal mode it acts just like the normal Talent window, except that you can see all three of your trees side-by-side.

From the Mode menu, you can select Template mode to work with the other features of Talented:

Here you have the ability to create multiple talent templates; they don’t actually change your character in any way, they’re just a preset talent spec that lets you play around with your options. You can save each spec as a template (and for convenience’s sake, you can just copy your current spec to a template as well). For instance, I have a saved template called “40/21 Healer/OT” (which is my standard raid spec) and another called “49/12 Tankadin” (which is the spec I use on those rare occasions when I’m needed to change to Protection spec). The templates are available across multiple characters (and are coloured in the menu by class color, so they’re easy to tell apart), so you can see all your characters’ specs from any character.

In addition, you can set Talented to automatically spend all your talent points on a spec when you respec at a trainer, which is really handy for respeccing in a hurry. Ten minutes before the raid and one of our tanks hasn’t shown up? I can grab an benched healer to fill my raid slot and go respec to Protection with a minimum of fuss and bother. Not to mention it solves all those nasty problems where you lag or misclick, mis-assign a point and have to blow anywhere from 15 to 50 gold resetting everything back to zero again so you can get it right this time.

The Mode menu also allows you to export your template: to a chat window, worldofwarcraft.com talent calculator URL, or WoWhead talent calculator URL.

All very handy! I haven’t been using Talented long, but I am expecting it’s going to be rather useful, especially for characters I’m still levelling. Thumbs up.

Game Info

Zul’Aman: Jan’Alai the Dragonhawk Avatar

Leave a comment

My guild is coming to the end of our Christmas break period — wherein we restricted ourselves to more relaxed 10-mans, rather than full 25-man raids — and we’ve finished up with a bit of progression in Zul’Aman. Halazzi’s now solidly on farm, and we spent Monday night working on Jan’Alai, the Dragonhawk Avatar.

IMO the boss is substantially easier than the trash preceding him — which is a gauntlet with frankly annoying mechanics — and one of the most fun fights I’ve seen in a while.

The WoWwiki page on Jan’Alai covers most of his abilities and strat points, but I thought I’d elaborate a bit. There are two key things to consider when you’re working on Jan’Alai:

  1. He throws firebombs on a random timer, all around him. These explode for a lot of fire damage, but they have a very small AoE and you can fairly easily find a gap in between them all before they blow up. The video below shows this in action.
  2. His area has a platform either side, each with about 20 dragonhawk eggs. Every 90 seconds during the fight, two Amani Hatchers (trolls) spawn on the entry stairs and run to the egg platforms, one to the right and one to the left. They will break eggs and release the dragonhawks therein until they’re killed, and are fairly easy to kill. This affects the fight thusly:
    • At 35% of Jan’Alai’s health, all remaining eggs break and the dragonhawks swarm you.
    • Therefore, to avoid dying at this point (which is what you see in the video below), you need to allow the Hatchers to break a certain number of eggs each time they spawn.
    • The best way to do this is kill one Hatcher as soon as it spawns, and allow the other Hatcher to break the desired number of eggs, then stun and kill it.
    • You need to strike a balance between getting enough of the dragonhawks down before 35% that you don’t get mobbed and die when they all pop, and keeping the dragonhawk spawns under control so you don’t get mobbed and die before 35%.
    • Unless you have massive AoE to kill lots of dragonhawks at once, this means you need to slow the fight down, so that there’s a chance to have plenty of Hatcher spawns, letting a few dragonhawks out each time.

See the video below for Jan’alai in action, complete with some notes about what’s happening during the fight. (Apologies for the first bit being a little jerky; I had too many apps running in the background.)

(Or check the video out at imeem: Southern Wardens take on Jan’Alai)