How to Tank Hatchlings on Jan’alai
The Jan’alai fight in Zul’aman poses a bit of a challenge for an inexperienced group. As a Paladin, you’ve got one important job - tank the hatchlings and keep them from killing the healers. Some AoE will help you, a healer will keep you alive, but it’s your job to not screw up.
This can be chaotic and disastrous if you and your support aren’t communicating properly. With a bit of pre-planning, though, tanking the hatchlings on Jan’alai can be a piece of cake. You can do your job, and the rest of the raid can take care of Jan’alai after two hatching phases.
The Basics of the Jan’alai Fight
If you’re unfamiliar with the Jan’alai fight, here are the basic mechanics.
Jan’alai lives on a square platform. On the East and West side are two smaller platforms, each housing a number of eggs. During the fight, Jan’alai will spawn two Hatchers to start… hatching eggs. The Hatchers can be killed easily, so an organized raid can control how many Hatchlings spawn at a time.
However, once Jan’alai hits 35% health, all of the Hatchlings spawn anyway. So control must be balanced with speed, if you’re going to kill Jan’alai within his 10 minute berserk timer.
The other component of the fight is the teleport and bombs. Every 30-60 seconds, Jan’alai teleports the raid to the center of the platform. He then starts throwing bombs around the platform - represented by small firey circles. You need to find an empty spot, or take ~10k fire damage. For non tanks, this is usually lethal.
This can be particularly troublesome if you just start hatching eggs, and Jan’alai decides to teleport you all and start throwing bombs. For this reason, I prefer the all-out zergfest on the hatchlings, and a little pre-planning can make this go smoothly.
How to Properly Tank the Hatchlings
The first step is for you to learn how to properly tank the hatchlings. Once they hatch, they make a beeline for people on the main platform. They move pretty fast, and there’s a chance that they’ll run right through your consecrate and miss the tick.
For this reason, you want to stand directly in the middle of the eggs. In this center point, your consecrate should cover every egg on the platform. The hatchlings pause for a moment before they take off, and that almost always gives you time to catch them in the consecrate.
You should also be spamming Holy Shield. You’ll be tanking a good number of hatchlings, and it’s likely the charges will get used up, but at least it’s a bit of extra threat and some extra mitigation.
When the fight begins, run straight for your designated platform. The first hatchers will appear after 10-15 seconds, so there’s no reason to try and DPS Jan’alai. Get situated and start consecrating as soon as the Hatcher gets to the ramp.
At this point, just tank and do your thing. Catch all the hatchlings, let the AoE do their thing, and hopefully all of them die. And hopefully you don’t.
Omg… Teleports!
Unfortunately, this can be thrown awry by an untimely teleport. More than once, I had just started tanking the hatchlings and the entire raid got teleported. The Hatcher let out another 5-10 hatchlings, on whom I had absolutely no aggro, and it was quite chaotic to try and keep healers/AoE DPS from dying.
Solution? Find one spot where you can always run to. Every healer and all of the AoE DPS run to that spot. You run there and Consecrate. All of the Hatchlings should end up on you, and the AoE DPS can finish the job.
To do this, you need a “safe spot” where the bombs never spawn. As it turns out, the corner to the left of Jan’alai at the beginning is just such a spot.
On the Northwest corner of the platform, there is a large pile of bones. These don’t do anything - but they’re a good landmark. If you stand in the corner behind them (shown in the screenshot here), you will never be hit with the bombs. Therefore, as soon as you are teleported, you should run to that spot immediately.
If you don’t run to the same spot, people end up spreading out to avoid the bombs. This makes it virtually impossible to gather up 20-30 Hatchlings in a Consecrate and hope that the AoE can finish them off.
Unfortunately, in that screenshot, I didn’t follow my own advice. I stood on the bone pile, rather than in the corner, and I got plastered by a bomb.
Fortunately, we killed all of the adds… so I became kind of useless anyway. Easier to die and watch everyone else do the work…!
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