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In our efforts to bring you the latest content from the recent 2.3 patch, tonight I’m reporting live from Zul’Aman. For those of you who aren’t in the know, Zul’Aman is a new 10-player raid dungeon added in patch 2.3 and intended as a continuation, in difficulty, from Karazhan. In order to give you an early glance at the zone on the live realms (for those of you who haven’t had time to make it out there yourselves), I’m going through with a guild group tonight and reporting to you live with screenshots and first-hand information on the zone. My guild hasn’t tried Zul’Aman on the PTRs and we don’t know all of the details on the bosses we’re about to encounter… and though we may not have much success, we’re eager to dive head first into new content and we’re bringing you along for the ride.

Raid time starts at 8:45 EST, so check back with us throughout the evening for new screenshots and notes on what we’re running into! Keep reading after the jump for full run details.

8:30 — Our raid group is just starting to log on and hop on to Teamspeak for the evening’s festivities. A few of us are in front of Silvermoon City, waiting for the rest of the raid to group up.

8:45 — We’re riding through the Ghostlands to Zul’Aman now. The raid group is two priests (healers both), one shaman (healer), one shaman (DPS), one paladin (tank), one warrior (tank), two warlocks, one rogue, and one hunter. I’ll be healing the off-tank while our healy shaman keeps the main tank up and the second priest is on holy DPS duty until we need the extra healing. My healing target complains that his life, once again, is in my hands. (Bwahaha.)

8:55 — We zone in and everyone gets buffed. The warlocks hand out candy (aka healthstones) to everyone.

8:58 — We meet up with NPC Harrison Jones who says to open the gates of Zul’Aman we must bang a gong together. Be bang the gong… the ground shakes! We follow Harrison to the huge gates of Zul’Aman which slowly swing open for us.

In Patch 2.3, the reputation needed to enter heroic dungeons has been lowered to Honored. As a result, players who have up to now been limited in the heroic dungeons they can run (if they can run any of them) will now be likely to be able to go into just about any heroic dungeon. This has its up sides (easier to get a heroic group) and its down sides (players who are not as geared or experienced with the dungeons will now be running them), which leads me to wonder: what dungeon would be the best ’starter’ heroic?

I personally like the Coilfang dungeons on heroic. In addition to running Steam Vaults fairly often, I recently had a great deal of fun running heroic Slave Pens, in a two warrior run the other day. I’m not as enamored of heroic Old Hillsbrad, and I’ve yet to run heroic Shattered Halls which I think would be grueling. I generally like the Auchindoun heroics with the exception of Auchenai Crypts, which I dislike.

What would you tell a player new to heroics? Where should they go first?

While I’m sure we’ve all had the experience where a crucial group member went away from their keyboard at a bad time, a whole different type of disastrous AFK was brought up on the WoW forums the other day. An earthquake in the San Francisco area was cause for a lot of sudden AFKs for many posters, including Delthen who started the thread. It seems that many of the posters actually told their group that they were going away from the keyboard. Apparently they failed to read the recent article on the subject by our own Robin Torres.

Nethaera chimed in with her own story of a group member needing to leave the game due to a tornado warning, one which I’ve seen occur in-game myself. Personally, the worst thing that’s suddenly taken my attention from the game is my dog getting sick or maybe a desperate cry for me to kill a spider that’s harassing my wife. What’s the worst thing that’s caused you to go AFK?