Force Recon’s ZA Team’s First Bear Mount!!

We started Zul’Aman runs months ago with stars in our eyes and dreams in our hearts. We wanted to do as well as we could, but we also held the impossible dream of one day achieving Bear Mounts. These mounts are only granted if you can kill all four animal bosses within a 45 minute timer.

Our first run gave us some success to definitely be proud of with the achievement of the death of the Bear Boss, but we knew we’d have a long way to go for mounts. The first time we killed the bear boss, it took us around 8 minutes, which we found later from the WoWWiki timeline to be well over twice the allocated time of 3 minutes on that boss to eventually do the 45 minute timer run.

So we worked on gear, worked on our strategies, worked on our group synergy, worked on farming and getting consumables, and just plain worked hard. We upped our DPS, upped our Healing, upped our stamina and tanking stats, pulled faster and cleaner, etc. In essence, we tried everything.

The first set of WowWebStats we have from March shows our group DPS of 2,979 for the run. This last run shows our DPS at 5,153, and if you just look at bosses, that number increases to 5,588! This include the decrease in DPS from the final two bosses where there is a lot of time we cannot do max dps due to the fights and boss abilities. We’ve definitely come a LONG way.

On September 5, 2008, all our efforts paid off. We achieved our impossible dream of a Bear Mount, with still 4 minutes on the timer! It wasn’t a flawless run, we still missed one scout getting a few extra adds and we had several deaths throughout the run, but it was a pretty close to perfect run! We had no wipes and 1-shot everything. With our 4th kill on Zul’Jin, we’ve even got him on farm status now!

Here are our boss times for the day:

Eagle – 2:58
Bear –3:04
Dragonhawk – 3:39 (new team record)
Lynx – 3:10 (new team record)

Non-timer
Hex Lord – 4:31
Zul'Jin – 7:31

Here is a shot of us around our lucky roller, Valasca, atop her new Bear Mount:

A big shout-out goes to the entire ZA Roster, who worked very hard over the last 2-9 months to make this moment possible:

Nestra
Koriander
Falarelle
Terreis/Ephany
Valasca
Nathelien
Sleepyeyed
Mixtel
Mightydre
Digren
LLiandra
Forgiven
Rainhammer
Telari
Brostin

Thanks to them, to everyone who’s come along the way, and to everyone who’s been cheering us on. We set out with a goal, and we did it!!!

Kori