Dragon Soul - Warlord Zon'ozz (Normal)

[Lore]

Welcome to the Tankspot Dragon Soul raid guide. My name is Lore, and in this video we'll be showing you the Warlord Zon'ozz encounter. You'll need a single tank for this encounter, 6 or 7 healers, and a good mix of melee and ranged dps. This is a two-phase encounter that requires solid execution to pull off, but shouldn't pose too much of a problem once you've gotten the hang of things. So, lets get started.

Phase 1 - Abilities

The first and simplest ability in Zon'ozz's bag of tricks is Focused Anger. This is a stacking buff that increases the damage he does to the tank by 5% every 5 seconds.

He'll also use an ability called Psychic Drain. This is a frontal cone attack that deals a large amount of shadow damage to anyone standing in front of him, and heals him for 10 times the total amount of damage.

He'll also periodically debuff a random target with Disrupting Shadows, a damage over time effect. When this debuff runs out, or is dispelled, it will deal a large amount of shadow damage to the player it was on, and knock them back.

The most important ability in Phase 1 is his Void of the Unmaking. This is a large floating purple ball that will travel in one direction until it collides with someone. When it hits a player, it deals a chunk of shadow damage that gets split between everyone nearby, gains a stack of Void Diffusion, and bounces back in the other direction and. If it runs into Zon'ozz, it removes his stacks of Focused Anger, causes him to take 5% increased damage for each stack of Void Diffusion, and begins phase 2. If it gets away from you and runs into the wall, well... everyone dies, so don't let that happen.

Phase 1 - Strategy

The goal of phase 1 is to manage the Void of the Unmaking and keep it bouncing back and forth between two groups of players until you're ready for it to hit Zon'ozz. To do that, you'll need a ranged group and a melee group, with healers split between the two. The boss should be kept at the center of the pool in the middle of the room, with the melee group right behind him and the ranged group standing at the pool's edge. Now, he spawns the Void directly in front of him, so to start off, the tank should point the boss directly at the ranged group. As soon as the Void spawns, you'll need to swing him around quickly to avoid hitting everyone with Psychic Drain. From here, the ranged and melee group should start ping ponging the Void back and forth.

Meanwhile, you'll need to be dispelling Disrupting Shadows. The timing is important here. If you dispel it off someone whose group was just hit by the Void of the Unmaking, the extra damage will probably kill him. Dispel it just before the Void hits, and the knockback will either throw him out of the group, which means everyone else takes more damage, or worse, it will throw him into the Void by himself, killing him instantly and bouncing the Void off in who knows what direction. So, it's best to assign one person to dispel duty and dispel after the Void hits and that player has been topped off. It's not a bad idea to have them step to the side either to help make sure they don't get knocked into the Void.

Phase 2 - Abilities & Strategy

Now, you can technically stay in phase 1 as long as you like, but eventually his stacks of Focused Anger will start to get out of hand and you'll need to have the melee group step out of the way and let the Void hit him. This will most likely happen around the 6th bounce, but feel free to experiment a little. That starts Phase 2. He'll run to the center of the room and start channeling an ability called Black Blood of Go'rath. This causes everyone in the raid to take a fairly substantial amount of damage every second. Meanwhile he'll be taking increased damage himself, depending on how many times the Void bounced before you let it hit him.

To deal with this phase, have everyone stack up on the boss immediately to make healing easier. Now is a good time to use raid cooldowns, such as Power Word Barrier or Tranquility, and personal defensive cooldowns such as Feint or Divine Protection. However, you'll also want to be dealing as much DPS as possible during this phase, so avoid using abilities such as Ice Block or Dispersion unless absolutely necessary.

After 30 seconds, he'll stop channeling Black Blood of Go'rath and Phase 1 will begin again. Proceed exactly how you did at the start of the fight, with ranged grouped up at the edge of the pool and the tank pointing the boss directly at them until he summons a new Void of the Unmaking. Then turn him away, and fire up a new game of Pong.

This fight is heavily focused on your execution and your ability to work as a team. It may be tricky to get the hang of, but once you've got it, he'll go down in no time.

If you'd like more information on this or any other Dragon Soul encounter, head over to Tankspot.com and click the Movies link at the top of the page. Thanks for watching, and good luck.

[Draegus]

A couple of things not mentioned in the video.

1. If you dont let the orb bounce often enough (around 5-6 times) then the next orb will take LONGER to come out once the next phase 1 starts (there is an internal cooldown on Void of the Unmaking). This can cause Furious Anger to stack too high and result in tank death.

2. The stacks of the debuff Zon'ozz gets from being hit by the sphere last for a LONG time, and if you let it hit him again after around 5-6 stacks they will continue to stack. This means he DOES continue to take the increased damage during the 2nd phase 1 and there after, and if executed properly, will continue to take ever increasing damage throughout the fight!

Hope this helps! (Not that help is really needed, this boss is ridiculously easy if you have decent healers and can manage the ball)

[avh]

We let the orb hit the boss after 5-7 bounces and found it easier to stack healers on melee stack so their healing didn't suffer from almost constant movement of ranged group. If healing in P2 is your problem, ask shamans and druids to use their tranq and HR (enhancement shamans 5 stack MW -> HR for example) to help out the healers.

[ulyssez]

"damage he does to the tank by 5% every 5 seconds"
This isn't accurate for focused anger, it does 10% phys dmg and 10% attack speed once per 6 seconds

"debuff a random target with Disrupting Shadows"
he debuffs multiple people at once if you care to be correct with wording

Successive bounces of the orb do 20% more dmg, this isn't mentioned in your fight description.

[Ryukasan]

"Use your raid cooldowns such as divine protection" I think you mistake it with divine guardian!

[Evassara]

Not sure if anyone else are having issues similar to ours but we had all kinds of bugs on this fight.

One time we had the Boss facing towards the raid, and when he did void of unmaking where he summons the ball it appeared directly to the left of him past the water.

Another time the ball model appears to not hit, or hit someone and does the opposite. For example there was one time where the ball clearly missed the boss by the model, but we got lucky and it hit him.

Also I'm noticing an issue with DBM, or perhaps the fight, where it isn't calling out the first Psychic Drain the second time phase 1 starts and the ball forms. I pretty much have to guess and use Anti Magic Shell and hope for the best.

[Talonin]

ive had the same bugs. where the ball spawned way off to one side. it made it a nightmare to try and corral it because it would get about halfway to the boss and then for some unknown reason it would stop and go back in the direction it came from.

also on LFR it seems like if you have the heals to keep the tanks alive it looks like he will eventually eat the ball after a period of time. i dont know if this is a bug or "feature" but ive done it twice where the group had no idea what to do so the first time we never got the ball to the boss and he eventually went into phase 2 anyway. i dont know how many stacks of the debuff for increased damage he had because i forgot to look.

[Fetzie]

Ball management in the LFR is vastly different to normal and heroic mode. In LFR you do not need to touch the ball at any point in time. It will float around, gather 10 or so stacks, and go to the boss and triggering the phase change. You will probably have noticed that the debuff on the boss that increases his damage taken has a duration. The ball will automatically move to the boss about 5-10 seconds before this debuff expires.

[woodyman]

Last night in normal mode it seemed the ball had a CD where after being bounced off a group it could not be bounced again for a certain amount of time.
i only mention this because the ball bounced off of our shadow priests add and then proceeded to travel right through the melee group into the boss

[Fetzie]

It takes 5 seconds for the orb to become kickable again, similar to the meteors at Ragnaros in P3.

[Talonin]

you are correct about the LFR. on regular it took us quite a few tries to get the orb management down (i know a hunter that wont ever try to run over and kick the orb by himself anymore) but on LFR we tried a few times and ended up wiping twice because we were so concerned with the orb that we were spreading out and dying or not keeping healing up because we were moving to the orb. i did notice that about 10 seconds after the 10th stack the boss absorbs the orb and we go directly into phase 2. during the next phase 1 i instructed to just ignore the orb altogether and focus on the boss and healing and it went much better. being able to do it in LFR is a good way to practice managing movement and orb management however.

[mekell]

We found that the orb can bounce off totems and potentially pets (or its collision radius is kinda rediculous compared to what looked like was around it). We had some issues with this causing an extra bounce cycle when it clearly looked like no players were in its path.

To correct this, we made sure our totems were behind the ranged group or behind the tank and that pets were positioned in such a way that they shouldnt be in the way (i think to the side).

[Quinafoi]

Actually it isn't an issue with pets or totems. It's more an issue with the radius it hits. If a player is in range to be hit by it, which is a very generous range of like 8-12 yards, then it bounces off the player instead of hitting the boss. More likely the issue you are having is simply that players in melee aren't moving enough out of the way so that it is a clean hit on the boss alone.

I raided and killed this guy on an alt with two hunters last night who had their pets on the bosses back the entire time which was in the path of the orb. Additionally, all of the totems from the one Restoration Shaman were also between the boss and the ranged group right behind the boss.

You're overcompensating and assigning blame incorrectly. What is probably happening is your people simply got better at moving out of the way and it just started coming together for you. It had nothing to do with the position of the pets or the totems.

[Ishamaelazure]

Got a quick question is there any additional dam hitting tank in the 1st 10 secs after phase 2 ends and phase 1 begins again if our tank is going to die it seems its at that point and i thought his buff had reset at that point soz cat give more info and thx for any advice

[Quinafoi]

It isn't really additional damage, the damage that was AoE damage in phase two just shifts back to primarily tank damage of phase one. Healers need to understand fight flow to know when healing priorities shift. My guess would be your healers simply aren't shifting their priorities back to the tank quickly enough. The tank could also pop a defensive cooldown at the start of the phase though I'd personally recommend using those when the boss starts doing his drain again (when the ball is back out). One general observation I've seen between groups is in how and who the healers are healing, it's possible they may simply not dealing with phase two as effectively as they could be thus putting them further behind than they should be at the start of the next phase one. Combat logs may help indicate healing issues, however because there is a fair bit of movement and positioning involved they don't tell the whole story.

[Ishamaelazure]

Cool tyvm

[woodyman]

Im RL of a casual raid team and we are struggling with the enrage timer on this in 10MAN, we always let the ball hit him for 5 stacks, pop DPS CD's on first stacking phase and dps range from 30k-25k, The Ball hits him 4 times giving him a total debuff of 20 Stacks where we hero.
Been getting him to around 2M health but just cant get him down
am i missing anything or do we purely need more dps

[mekell]

Actually it isn't an issue with pets or totems. It's more an issue with the radius it hits. If a player is in range to be hit by it, which is a very generous range of like 8-12 yards, then it bounces off the player instead of hitting the boss. More likely the issue you are having is simply that players in melee aren't moving enough out of the way so that it is a clean hit on the boss alone.

I raided and killed this guy on an alt with two hunters last night who had their pets on the bosses back the entire time which was in the path of the orb. Additionally, all of the totems from the one Restoration Shaman were also between the boss and the ranged group right behind the boss.

You're overcompensating and assigning blame incorrectly. What is probably happening is your people simply got better at moving out of the way and it just started coming together for you. It had nothing to do with the position of the pets or the totems.

Thats exactly what i thought too until an orb seemingly went right by me and hit the boss. (We actually wanted it to bounce this time, it was too early to hit the boss).

I think in most cases though, you are correct. But in my opinion theres some screwy stuff with the orb on this boss. Sometimes the orb can travel right by you and not bounce and sometimes it seemingly will bounce off nothing.

[Quinafoi]

Im RL of a casual raid team and we are struggling with the enrage timer on this in 10MAN, we always let the ball hit him for 5 stacks, pop DPS CD's on first stacking phase and dps range from 30k-25k, The Ball hits him 4 times giving him a total debuff of 20 Stacks where we hero.
Been getting him to around 2M health but just cant get him down
am i missing anything or do we purely need more dps

It's entirely possible you simply don't have the DPS to beat the encounter, however, I've done the encounter twice now on an alt with a group that was borderline (in fact their kill this Tuesday was 8 seconds past the enrage). Some general tips to squeeze out a little bit more DPS.

If you're only bouncing the orb 5 times consistently (which seems to be the approach the masses are leaning towards) then there is a period of time after phase two before the orb spawns again which you may not be taking advantage of fully. Ranged DPS does need to get back at range before the orb spawns however, doesn't need to right away and can stay there a short while to soak up AoE healing and wait for a time in their rotation where it is better for them to move (i.e. when they are in an instant cast portion of their rotation). A lot of people will run out immediately at the end of phase two which doesn't help healing or DPS. You have like 10-15 seconds before the next orb spawns so move when it's convenent. When it comes to the enrage itself you can spread out ranged so it takes longer for him to kill you, however if he does a drain that hits more than one person it's likely a wipe cause he'll heal for too much. It won't be the cleanest kill but a kill is a kill. DPS will naturally improve as you get better gear and you become more experienced with the fight as well.

If your are struggling to beat the enrage on this guy though you will hit a brick wall when you reach Ultraxion for sure. When you are killing this boss about 30 seconds before his enrage, then you are probably going to be hitting the borderline point where Ultraxion becomes doable, so you may need a few weeks of farming the first four bosses before you get past Ultraxion if you're struggling on this boss today.

[Quinafoi]

Thats exactly what i thought too until an orb seemingly went right by me and hit the boss. (We actually wanted it to bounce this time, it was too early to hit the boss).

I think in most cases though, you are correct. But in my opinion theres some screwy stuff with the orb on this boss. Sometimes the orb can travel right by you and not bounce and sometimes it seemingly will bounce off nothing.

The orb can bug out on this encounter, yes. And it's likely a mechanic that Blizzard may have a bunch of micro fixes put in that the users are never made aware of to make these bugs less likely to occur. I have experienced many odd qwirks with the orb myself. For example, I've seen the orb spawn in melee once rather than at range where he was channeling. I've only ever seen this once. It's possible no one will ever see this again because it's possible for a micro fix to occur preventing it (Blizzard doesn't tell you about every little thing they fix).

I'm just saying you don't have to worry about totems or pets, just your characters. I can't promise a completely bug free encounter every pull, but I can say that these have not causes issues for groups I've done it with and should not cause an issue for you.