[Mert]

Last night we spent the entire evening wiping on Anub'arak - we can comfortably down all the other bosses in TotGC-10 but we're facing something of a brick wall with the final encounter.

We use the strategy of nuking him prior to the second burrow phase - we practiced kiting him but found that we simply didn't have enough Iceblocks, HoPs, whatevers to keep people alive with fewer than four patches of Perma Frost. We used three healers, two tanks, two melee and five DPS and by burning Heroism with 35 seconds left before the second burrow we were able to consistently get him into Phase 3.

However, this is where it kind of fell apart. In order to get enough DPS on him to brute force our way to Phase 3 this way, we had to leave two adds up. Two more join the fight shortly afterward which I can't honestly live through even with my block set. We tried getting the DPS to do a huge focussed burn on the adds as soon as Phase 3 started but Anub ended up at 36% HP and people still died a bit to Shadowstrikes etc (Holy Wrath is on the GCD and I can't usually catch it in time with that many adds).

So I'm in need of ideas for how to more smoothly make the transition to Phase 3. Our main healer, a Resto Shammy, says he doesn't feel that we can make it through Phase 3 with only two healers though I will suggest trying again and ensuring we have JoL, two Healing Streams, Vampiric Embrace, etc. We could then probably spare a DPS to get one or both of the pre-Phase 3 adds down but it would still be tight.

I've also seen some stuff about letting the adds burrow and just cycling them - how often do they come back up? Am I likely to get four (or more) re-emerge at once during this phase or is it possible to be cycling them so there's only two up at any given time?

I'm going to invest in some Frost Resist Pots, Resist Flasks and the like for my raid for next time to help mitigate some of the healing / damage but does anyone have any recommendations for getting to Phase 3 a bit more cleanly? It's the adds, rather than the boss or the healing, that is causing the trouble.

In case you need it, I'll list our raid from last night:

MT - Prot Warrior (Mixture of 232/245 EH gear)
OT - Prot Paladin (Block set)

Healer - Resto Shammy (almost full 245)
Healer - Holy Priest (almost full 245)
Healer - Resto Druid (almost full 245, some 232)

DPS - Blood Death Knight (almost full 245)
DPS - Blood Death Knight (mostly 226/232)
DPS - Destro Warlock (232/245)
DPS - Fire Mage (232/245)
DPS - Ele Shammy (232/245)


Obviously we sorely lack a Mortal Strike - ordinarily we'd have a Rogue with Wound Poison in place of one of the DKs. So aside from that, I'm willing to hear any and all advice - mainly about how best to manage the adds going into Phase 3 as this was the only place we were going wrong at all last night.

[Akeber]

Have one healer respec DPS, two healing is the key if your dps can't get him finished off before the second set of adds spawn.

After Anub returns from the first burrow are you killing the first two adds that spawn, or are you picking them up and letting them burrow?

The strat that worked for us was not to DPS the adds at all after the second burrow, all dps on anub to force him into phase 3, popping heroism as soon as phase three starts, and kill him off before the first set of adds come back up and the second set spawn.

[Kavtor]

Two healers is huge. As is MS.
Is there any way to get the resto druid to tank so the prot warrior can go arms?
Having healed anub as well, I know healers instinctively panic seeing everyone taking so much damage. But if you can accept keeping everyone low and just healing the tanks and dots it makes a big difference. A Holy pally is pretty OP in 10 mans with beacon and a soak.

Basically, you need to have enough DPS to save bloodlust for phase 3.
Ideally, you want to have the second set of adds dead just as you push him over the health threshold before he burrows. We've had some patched up groups lately, and have had adds at low health going into phase 3, which makes things a little more hectic than it should be.

We usually let the second set of adds submerge in phase 3.

[luv2tank]

So, we ran with a lot of ideas for 2 weeks b4 making it trivial now. 2 tanks 2 heals the rest dps. So the making it trivial part was having a holy paladin heal both tanks in p3 and having most of our raid stack on anubs behind as close as possible. Our second healer was a shaman, the resto druid goes boomer for the fight for us. P3 make sure you either have a nature resist totem down or a hunter to do his aspect. I believe the holy paladin has a glyphed talent that heals targets w/ in 5-8 yards, kind of like a splash effect from his main heal. He has done this w/ great success, as well as in all 200 iLevel gear for the most part.

As for the adds, we burn them down a little w/ aoe from the second group while we enter p3 then once leeching swarm hits we nuke them then back on boss full time w/ BL/heroism.
this is my group:

tanks- anub-warrior-adds-paladin
healers-holy pally/resto shaman
dps-2 mages(both arcane)
1 unholy dk
1 hunter
1 boomer
1 rogue

Honestly we bring in other ppl every week now and have no issues for dps. I dont believe anyone is below 5k dps, highest being 7-10k sometimes. The above list was just the one we first downed anub w/. Good luck!

[vine]

As said you need to have enough dps to save heroism for P3 - that's when everything falls apart as it becomes a race against healer mana. Try two-healing it.

I'm a Holy Pally and I solo heal up until P3, with the resto druid doing dps. We pop heroism at 35%, druid goes back to healing, and I pop Divine Sacrifice. If the adds are up the OT drags them off the ice and lets them to burrow, this allows dps to concentrate on Anub, but you have to burn fast or the second set of adds will pop and the OT will get one-shot.

In the interest of raid comp I'd swap one of the DK's for a rogue or warrior, or even get him to swap specs to Unholy of Frost to bring more raid synergy.

[Belak]

I was tanking the adds last night and during phase 3 I had a very odd discovery:

I couldn't seem to get them to submerge, even when I had them in open ground.

Any idea what was going on? I was trying to only use shockwave to stun them when I saw a shadowstrike warning. Regardless, I would end up with 4 on me at once (which I could usually survive for a little bit), but if they slid too far to the side or when 5 or 6 got there, it was instantly game over.

Any help here would be greatly appreciated. We're so close! Got him to 8% a few times last night!

[Risky]

Source: Belak I was tanking the adds last night and during phase 3 I had a very odd discovery: I couldn't seem to get them to submerge, even when I had them in open ground. Any idea what was going on? I was trying to only use shockwave to stun them when I saw a shadowstrike warning. Regardless, I would end up with 4 on me at once (which I could usually survive for a little bit), but if they slid too far to the side or when 5 or 6 got there, it was instantly game over. Any help here would be greatly appreciated. We're so close! Got him to 8% a few times last night!

I had a similar experience on our 25m ToGC kill last week, couldn't get the 2nd to last wave to submerge and ended up tanking 6 adds for about 15 seconds before dying. We did get our kill, but maybe the p3 submerge was hot-fixed?

Oh, and on a sidenote- I'd try to stun before you get the warning

[vine]

AFAIK they only submerge once they have been injured, not sure what level their health needs to be.

[Belak]

I'm a warrior with damage shield and tclapping, so by definition they are getting damaged. If there's a particular trigger health that does it, that may be it, then, because while I may be technically damaging them, I'm certainly not putting them in any mortal peril.

I'd love to know the answer to this, though. It's going to help us decide if we burn a few more down during phase 3 or not.

Thanks again!

[Xianth]

- You need to do it with 2 healers, 3 healers just means more healing for the boss and it's completely unnecessary. It is a bit of a backwards fight for healers because they see health bars at 5% hp and they really want to heal them but it is not needed and it just makes things worse. The raid is very unlikely to die if you have some passive healing stuff like healing stream totems, lotp, jol or ve. Check the other thread in here that's about the leeching swarm where i've posted towards the end of the thread. The raid healer will basically heal the PC as much possible and the tank healer will just hammer the tank. Most of our previous kills before we used the "no heals" tactic had just a druid on the raid and he would put down wild growth inbetween keeping up the PC targets. This was unnecessary extra healing but it's a decent beffore because it's spread across many targets and it ticks so it effectively dulls the health drain instead.

- Adds should be dpsed directly by melee (eg. your DKs, putting diseases on everything) with them putting down cleave damage to hit the boss and other add, and casters should do direct damage to the boss with cleaves on the adds (chain lightning, living bomb refreshed on adds). This should be enough damage but may require tweeking depending on your setup.

- So, given that you have 2 healers, your DPS should be enough to bring in to 30% around the same time the first set of adds after the burrow die. If the adds are still fairly high when anub is at 40%, make DPs switch to get them down and then return to the boss. If you are behind and say, have the adds down but the next set are coming and it's 40% still then don't worry, just have the tank (ie you) grab them and push him through to 30% with people still dropping cleaves to push the adds to burrow by making them take damage (once they have lost like 25%). Ideally you will get them to burrow when anub is ~20% if you have decent DPS. The next set will come when anub is close to death so you can just keep them busy by pulling them over the ice patches or stunning them or just tanking them with any cooldowns you've got spare. I generally find i;ve got my SW left at this point because i;ve SB and block trinketed the adds at the start of the leech phase and that's been just about enough to force a burrow.

- A healing debuff is really really important. It means you have to do less dps which means less likely to get the next set of adds late in p3 or if you do get them, you don't have to tank them for long. Also, less time spent on p3 means less chance the adds you made burrow will come back up. Basically, p3 is more about stopping the healing to the boss in anyway you can.

- Mentioned in the other thread but i'll say it here too - resistance. PC is frost and leech is nature. More resisted leech damage = less damage needed to kill. More frost res = less danger from PC at low hp. Res flasks and one of each aura will do (totem, pala, hunter) to give you around ~170 base. On your first try you can pop the res flask only at 30%, but it's worth keeping thereafter if you wipe. Frost prot pots also help immensly in p3 because you're not that likely to get PC twice AND it's prempetive AND it's absorbtion so won't be leeched.


I think that's it for now, if you have any more questions I can happily answer them. It's a tough fight to balance and we've only just got a solid tactic for it, most of our previous kills involved lots of people dying in p3 and our first kill had one person left alive and dots killed him

Just a quick question, are you a 10 man guild or is this your hard mode side project from 25s?

[Xianth]

Source: Belak I'm a warrior with damage shield and tclapping, so by definition they are getting damaged. If there's a particular trigger health that does it, that may be it, then, because while I may be technically damaging them, I'm certainly not putting them in any mortal peril. I'd love to know the answer to this, though. It's going to help us decide if we burn a few more down during phase 3 or not. Thanks again!

Yeh they need a decent bit of damage before they begin burrow attempts, something like 20-25% which isn't damage a prot warrior can put out on his own (in the speed needed, of course).

[Mert]

Source: Xianth Just a quick question, are you a 10 man guild or is this your hard mode side project from 25s?

Firstly thanks a lot for the advice. Everyone in this thread has contributed immensely but your post was particularly useful, so thanks.

In response to your question above... well, in July a group of us broke away from our "social raiding" guild to form a more "hardcore" group. Our intention has always been to be a 25-man guild but we've gone through waves of getting them and then hardly getting the signups again. As a result, we only have Firefighter, Algalon, Yogg-0 and Heroic Anub left on 10-man and, for 10s, we're ranked highly on our server. On 25-man, we've cleared TotC Normal and all the Keepers bar Thorim, usually undermanned.

I've asked the guys to make an extra push for recruitment again in the face of a couple of leavers but it's hard to hold onto good members when you're not yet in a place to guarantee regular 25-man raids. I'm hopeful that the worst is over now and we're building our team as momentum and hype for ICC builds but I guess only time will tell. Wish me luck

Anyway, sorry for the long reply to your short question - probably just needed to get it off my chest, hehe

[Belak]

I'd just like to echo what Mert just said. Thanks to everyone, especially Xianth, in this thread for the excellent explanation. I really feel like that filled in some of the missing pieces we needed to finish this one off.

Will let you know how things go later this week!

We're a small 10 man guild, but have done some alliances with other 10 man guilds to run some semi-regular 25s. Nothing beyond normal TOC25 with them yet, though.

[vine]

We just missed an Insanity run tonight due to a graphical glitch not showing a frost patch. Our add tank, a paladin, was using a block set. I was a little sceptical healing it because his buffed health was only 34k, but he took 750k less damage than the week before using standard EH/Av gear.

Something to think about to minimise damage in P3.

[Xianth]

Yeh, the tanks are the main sources of healing on anub, so much so that the MT will probably heal him more than everyone else in the raid put together. Using a block tank on the adds is also crucial because in 10 man you can gear it enough to avoid taking any damage for that phase. The adds hit for about 2.5-3k unbuffed so if you have around 2500 BV and lavanthors you can pop shield block at the start of p3, then your trinket when it runs out and then shield block again (if you need it) to have 60 seconds of little/no melee dmg, resulting in much less healing on the boss and a quicker p3. This is from a warrior perspective ofc

[Fledern]

If you're really uncomfortable healing with 2 healers, this is what we do: One of our healers (a holy priest in this case) goes dps'ing till P3, starts helping with heals on p3 while keeping up SW:P on the boss. The difference this makes, while little, is you have somebody with low dps on getting orbs down, letting your high dps on the boss + some extra, however little, dps on the boss.

I know it sounds little but that little should enable you to get to p3 without burning your heroism.

Healing debuff is EXTREMELY important. It's the difference between a wipe and a walk in the park easy kill.

As a general idea of what sort of dps to expect:

We get the boss to about 59% before the first burrow with our good group, to about 62% with our second group. Second group hasnt managed to kill him yet but that was more due to other mistakes than lack of dps. 62% before burrow is managable - barely.
If you do your positioning correctly, the second set of adds should die and you should get a second pair just before he goes to p3. If your times are about those marks and you have a healing debuff, you should be able to get him down reliably. Sometimes we have our pally tank die to adds (4 of them) just miliseconds before the boss goes down :P

On another note, we've wiped horribly every time we had a burrowing add. I'm very much against it now. Not only is the extra damage a nuisance, they can do uncontrolled shadowstrikes.

As the tank on the boss himself, i found saving my cooldowns to somewhat late into p3 a more reliable approach, i'm guessing the same would be true of the add tank. Healers do well throughout heroism but start getting strained when anub has around 900K left on him.

[Belicia]

Have your off-tank farm H VH for Lavanthor's Talisman, if he doesn't have it already. The on-use is ridiculous for tanking the adds. It basically guarantees 40 seconds of incredibly low damage, even in a non-Block set.

As far as timing/healers, we do what others have suggested: 2 healers, 2 tanks, 6 dps

1. AddSet1 - kill
2. AddSet2 - off-tank
3. Burrow1 - kite spikes and kill AddSet2
4. AddSet3 - kill
5. Prior to AddSet4, we stop DPS on Anub at around 34%, as long as there's enough time to kill AddSet4 and get him into Phase 3.
6. AddSet4 - kill
7. Burn Anub to 30%, blow Heroism, off-tank any remaining adds. If DPS is slow or healing is too high, there may be another set of Adds. Just off-tank them or, if timing looks really bad, have DPS kill the first set of adds that popped up. This shouldn't be a problem, however.

The advantage of waiting until just after AddSet4 dies to send Anub into phase 3 is that you don't have to heal the off-tank for a large part of Phase 3. This speeds up the kill nicely. We've been one-shotting him this way.

[Vern]

Like you, I'm a protection warrior who tanks ToGC with a Paladin. But because we don't have a rogue or a dps warrior to apply a healing debuff, I go fury (with Furious Attacks for -50% healing) for the fight and let one of our Death Knights who normally dpses tank Anub. Myself and a feral druid will simply cleave each wave of adds dead, allowing everyone else to focus entirely on Anub - this makes it easy to get him down in one burrow phase (assuming all of your dps is over 5k), and it lets me top the meters each week, a treat for someone who's normally a protection warrior.

We use two healers, a paladin and a shaman, and I make flasks of lesser resistance for the two tanks to use every week. Everyone groups up inside of Anub and all of raid healing is done by passive heals: the paladin's glyph of holy light, the shaman's healing totem, judgment of light, LotP, etc. The Paladin heals the tanks with beacon of light and the shaman focuses on those with the DoT, dropping a nature resist totem and popping heroism as soon as we get into P3.

Regarding your specific group, if you're popping heroism and ignoring adds and only barely getting him into P3 before he burrows again, I'm not sure you have the dps needed to pull the encounter off. We kill every set of adds (with the exception of the 2nd, which we OT until his first burrow) and save heroism for P3, and even then its usually a pretty close call with us starting to lose people around the 5% mark each week.

[Sinister6]

2 weeks ago on our first down we did it with 2 healers and 2 tanks. DK as MT and Warrior as OT.
before entering P3 the adds (should be 7th and 8th) should appear anywhere (around 35% of boss health) kill 1 and drag the other out of ice. and let it burrow. then back to max damage to boss and enter P3. When it re-appear just tank it, if lucky the 9th and 10th add wont be out too long and boss should be dead before the add kill your OT and everyone else... but of coz if they do, OT need to use everything to kite them around. its important to save all your OT's stun skills and shieldwall. and try not blow LS and trinket unless you know youre going to fall...

Anyway, we are still trying to find a better way to do it...

[Xianth]

You are better off killing anything that's up just before the 30%, then making anythign new burrow. That way you have a lot more time without add overload in p3 and you'll kill him around the time they come out of burrow.

To make this fight ideal time-wise, you want to be getting to 30% around with adds 5 and 6 dead, but before 7 and 8 have reached the raid. Make 7 and 8 burrow and you'll be killing anub by the time 9 + 10 spawn and 7 + 8 come back up.