Ulduar testing - General Vezax

Synopsis
Ulduar is fun!

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2 days ago I went to Ulduar on PTR to test General Vezax. Finally there was hard trash!
It was really fun to do a boss/trash of which you know virtually nothing.

First of all there are no glyphs in PTR testing. They disappear when you zone. So there was no glyph of maul. If you have that glyph (and you should, there is a good chance you are tanking 2 mobs, like I did), you need to make sure you don't hit a cc-ed target. Yes you hear it. You need to cc trash!

In the rest of the post you will find some description of the fight, a bit on tactics and how druids are good with that. Also at the end there is some remark of awesome druid dps.

The trash before the boss consists of 4 packs. They are all level 82 (heroic 5-man boss level). The pack consists of about 9 or 10 mobs. You have to work with corner pulls and MD to tanks so the mobs will come closer before you attack. You need 2 tanks minimum, but with the great thing called dual spec you can have a couple of melee dps convert to tank for the trash if you want. You'll need to cc 4 or 5 mobs. Some mobs fear, others stun. Fear will wipe you if you run into a second group.
So tactics is back. Now we are finally getting a buff to swipe we might not even want it because you have to be away from cc-ed mobs instead of standing with your ass to them.

After killing 2 of the 4 groups (in our case the 1st and 3rd group) a sort of miniboss (hard mob) is set loose. It will patrol and you will agro it. You need to pick it up and tank. It will shoot out some kind or shadow thing which you can easily walk away from if you watch for it. At 25% intervals there will be an add spawning and the boss will become immune untill the add is down.

We did the trash with 3 tanks, me being one of them, tanking 2 melee adds. I felt safer using cooldowns on them once in a while. That is how hard they are. I have no real testing information on the tanking though.

I didn't get too much info on the boss. After 5 tries Ulduar shut down. Some things I know of, the boss itself hits very hard and there is no mana regen for mana users. Max int gear is needed. You need to stand in green stuff to regen mana, but for each mana regenerated you loose life. So melee; never go into it! The boss needs to be kited. I myself am thinking of a tactic where the MT healers are constantly in the green shit and a couple of raidhealers that heal the healers and rest of the raid.

A few more tips:

1. Everyone should be down from the platforms when you enter the room. If not the raid gets massive damage.
2. When you wipe on the patrolling add, stay away from the edge of the platform. It will deathgrip people from the platform and kill them instantly.

As far as cat dps goes (I dpssed on the boss) it is HUGE. My dps was always on top or near (only to be passed by some elemental shaman that had a 50% dps buff). Even when I totally screwed up my rotation I was at nr 5. The damage done varied. Once the MT dies (moving healers forgetting to heal the tank... you can't always count on the best healers when pugging on PTR) the boss will pick up the raid one by one and oneshotting them.
Also I finally had some other (decent/good geared) cats with me in the raid. I did more dps then they did, so that is some sort of confirmation that I don't totally suck on dps.

Found out that TellMeWhen is a bit bugged on PTR (I think). Whenever my Rake was finished, I then saw it up again with 2 seconds left or so, which was probably the rake cast by someone else. That was very confusing making me not as efficient in dps as I could be. Also a note for self; don't change the setup of TellMeWhen on PTR compared to live. It confuses!