Naxxramas Instructor Razuvious

Click here to watch the Instructor Razuvious movie guides!

25-Man Notes
Razuvious has four adds at the beginning of the encounter in the 25-man encounter and they must be Mind Controlled by Priests (ideally with some Hit). Use Mind Sooth on the closest two and Mind Control them. Have tanks ready for the adds (taunts and quick aggro are good, but turn off auto attack if you're tanking these).


Other Notes
One thing I fail to mention in this video is why we use Understudies to tank Razuvious. Long and short of it: He hits royally hard and has an ability called Unbalancing Strike which will destroy tanks.

For tanks in particular, you'll notice the other mind controller had some serious issues which caused my own Understudy to take damage for too long. After mine dies and when Razuvious gets loose, I Taunt from a distance and move him back away from the healers and hit Shield Wall. You probably won't survive an Unbalancing Strike but you can certainly save a raid from a wipe in a bad scenario.

This movie is available for direct download for Donors. Click here to learn more!




Lower Resolution (Low Bandwidth)

in case you, for some obscure reason, don't have a pet frame, you can just type any kind of emote like /dance to break mind control.

You also don't have to break off every rotation, since it lasts for 1:20 if I recall correctly, you can easily do 2 rotations of 40 secs, and then break. we even did it with 3, but you have to be quick with recontrolling.

When you run with 3 healers, I suggest putting one healer and your offtank on the orbs, this way you have more dps, and you can debuff him to decrease his dmg and taunt+shield wall in case something goes wrong.

Since our healers had mana issues on our first kill, we had them rotate on one orb, so one could regen mana while the other 2 kept the raid up.

I'm doing 2 rounds before breaking.
Had problems breaking first time - so now I press commanding shout to break, prolly doesnt matter what ability, but it worked so ^^

Added 25-man notes.

Hello Cider,

I wanted to add a few notes on the 10 men encounter. I went into this fight totally unprepared, nobody among us knew naxx or has seen this boss before. After some wipes we determined what you said to be the exact time between the taunts (which again, is midway on the Bone shield cooldown, and btw having OmniCC helps a lot with Vent coordination since the taunt from the other "tank" has to happen exactly when Bone Shield's CD is @ 15 secs).

Now to the math of why that has to happen:

1) Mind control lasts 90 seconds.
2) Bone Shield's optimal duration for shifting: 15 (x6 = 90 seconds), versus the 20 it lasts.

The 15 seconds per BS is key for a rotation because:

When the first mind controlled unit runs out of his MC timer the second one must have just began tanking with his BS up, thus giving time to the raid to MC the first one again without the remaining understudy taking massive damage due to tanking without BS up.

Now to the rotation on the crystals:

We made sure there was always one of our two tanks free to pick up one of the understudies when MC breaks, to avoid getting ppl one-shotted (especially clothies). And we determined that a 4 players rotation was the best for this task, also to make sure 1 of the tanks was always dealing DPS through one of the understudies, making the dpsing pool effectively 6 people instead of 5, leaving 2 healers on the understudy tanking and one on the raid (we did it with 2 priests and a holadin). I'm going to post here the first 120 seconds of the fight in chronological order, so it's a bit easier to understand.

Check this legend out then read the sequence of what happens:

P1: Crystal pillar 1
P2: Crystal pillar 2

CT1: Crystal MC by raid tank 1
CT2: Crystal MC by raid tank 2
C3: Crystal MC by raid DPS (ranged preferably, melee have to move to reach the crystal and lose dps)
C4: Crystal MC by raid DPS (same as above)

First of all, since it can get messy, make sure you raid mark both understudies, so to help the off-tanks know in every moment which is which to off-tank. In red, the critical moments of the fight:

0 sec) into the fight - Pull: CT1 on P1 (Second tank goes and picks up the free understudy)
15 sec) C3 on P2 clicks the crystal, casts BS and taunts (off-tank can move in and dps the boss)
30 sec) CT1 BS + Taunt
45 sec) C3 BS + Taunt
60 sec) CT1 BS + Taunt
75 sec) C3 Bs + Taunt
80 sec) CT1 calls CT2 to off-tank his understudy, calls for C4 on P1, dismisses and C4 picks up the MC. CT2 moves to P2, CT1 goes dps the boss.
90 sec) C4 BS + Taunt
100 sec) C3 Calls CT1 to off-tank on his understudy, calls for CT2 on P2, dismisses, CT2 picks up MC. CT1 goes back to dps.
105 sec) CT2 BS + Taunt
120 sec) C4 BS + Taunt

And it goes on like this. If executed timely this allows for a flawless fight, no casualties. The reason we approached this was because we initially feared some sort of cooldown on the usage of the pyllar by the same person, we then realized that the failing MCs were due to a line of sight issue between the crystal user and the understudy (sometimes it happens, might it be a bug or something) to make sure and avoid these, keep the fight at the center of the pit (for possible distance issues) and make sure that those who use the crystals are not behind, but on the side of the pyllar, with clear LOS towards the understudy they are going to MC.

I know it can sound complicated, but I found it to be the only way to have the situation under control at all times, and avoid lame wipes even if the raid has downed him multiple times. In this fight it's easy for something to go wrong and wipe out a healer or two, making it certain raid wipe for the rest.

Last note: when it's your turn to pick up the crystal, spamming right click on the pyllar can cause a MC and dismiss. If it happens just keep clicking till you get a solid MC going and move in. If you operate in cold blood, one click at the right time will do the trick, but if you panic, just keep clicking. The mob will go in and out of MC, and will be mostly harmless due to that and the fact that he'll have aggro on you (The crystal user), hence there's quite the distance to cover to reach you on the crystal, giving you time to MC and dismiss about 3 times before you're doomed or a tank picks it up for you.

@Malaphar

I fail to see the reasoning behind using 4 different people to use the MC Orbs in the 10 man version. Doing this with 2 people MCing, not only produces much better communication between the "tanks" about when to taunt and when MC is being released, but also alleviates the need for anyone to stop or slow DPS to do so.

In the 25 man version we used our Shadow Priest and a Holy priest to MC had 1 tank offtanking the 2 remaining Understudies while the other tank(s) were up debuffing Razuvious himself.

In the 10 man version we did use both tanks to do the MCing. We are better used to each other and communicating when to taunt off each other as we have been playing together as tanks for a very long time. We had tried to use a tank and a dps, but we decided that a Ret Pally or a DK could easily pick up the understudies before they get back to us after a dropped MC.

Using 4 people to do the work of 2 just is counterintuitive to me. It is a good idea to have a "back up" if something happens like happened in Cider's video (yes we noticed the understudy ganking your priest.) But its not necessary to have 4.

The fight is one of the easier encounters in Naxxramas. Unfortunately, it probably has the most trash in front of him than any other boss in the instance.

I agree on the fewer MCers, as I stated we operated under the assumption that we all had a cooldown on using the crystal (because of people reporting inability to pick up the MC, probably because of the LoS thing), though the bonus on this approach (for first timers) is that it creates less "panic moments", doesn't spam vent if not for taunts and crystal replacement, and ensures a better preservation of the understudies health (which comes from having BS up every time it's needed and not in the middle of an MC break).

Trust me on this one, not everybody has the dps to quickly dispatch of the fight like in Cider's movie, and those first times a clean execution pays off much better than anything else. Overkill at some point in time, yes.

I have absolutely no doubt that once people get used to the mechanics of the fight it can all be done with just 2 MCers (which I agree is better spent on tanks, to gain dps). Especially because those who use the crystal are also the recipients of Aggro when it breaks. It's much safer to have an understudy jump a tank when the timer is over.

It could be summed up that what is key to the fight is making sure that the MC which is going to break is not the one that's tanking at the moment, but watch out: accumulating delay on the MC re-taking will inevitably lead to a situation in which an understudy tanks without BS, especially on long fights. (that's what happened to us, and forced me to come up with something to make sure we trimmed every possible MC downtime). Hope this makes sense to the complicated strategy, might serve undergeared guilds when starting on the military wing.

Updated w/ a low resolution version and with embedded 25-man notes.

Only thing we did differently is had both MT & OT take the MCed Dks to tank.
Tanks had to make sure to break MC far enough from the raids Melee and casters that the DKs did not have enough time to reach the DPS or Healers prior to MCing.
The issue with this strat is it leaves very little room for error and the un-MCed DKs will hit healers for a far bit (which caused us the wipe on the first try).

We just did this, had a few panic moments due to a few issues not mentioned in the vid but the vid was very helpful.
First issue is the crystals appear to have a max range. if you keep the fight in the pit its no issue but one of our tanks backed the guy out of the pit before releasing and it was out of range. had a wipe due to panicked calls over vent when this happen, someone took over but unfortunately it was one of the healers.

Second issue was there appeared to be a 3s CD after releasing before you could MC again. As long as the fight is on the far side of the pit he wont reach you before you can MC but it can lead to repeat clicks that could cause problems if you are not aware of it.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by merendel

Second issue was there appeared to be a 3s CD after releasing before you could MC again. As long as the fight is on the far side of the pit he wont reach you before you can MC but it can lead to repeat clicks that could cause problems if you are not aware of it.

---

This is not the problem, there isn't a cooldown on the MC. However, the MC-pillar targets the closest understudy, which means that it will bug if the closest understudy is already MCed. We had some problems with this, until we made our tanks pull the understudies towards the pillars when they ran out.

For guilds still working on leveling or 10 mans, its important to note that you'll want the guild priests to be keeping any hit gear the get or even taking it instead of it being disenchanted from instances specifically for this fight. If you get there and dont have shadow priests in raid, your holy/disc priests just got promoted to temporary tanks.

we attempted this on 25 man last week, and we a major problem we faced was the priests were having MC broken because of the massive amounts of damage the understudies were taking.

Did this fight sunday, easy peasy once you get the taunt/bone armor rotation :-)

Anyone else having problems with the pet bar not appearing. We were not able to down this boss last week because our paladin was not recieving the pet cast bar. And our second player was unable to dismiss his understudy from the pet bar. We got around that by having him simply click the buff, but still our paladin didn't recieve a pet bar. Anyone seen this and have a suggestion as to a solution. (Paladin uses generic game action bars)

Today i ran 25 man down this guy with 2 mages spell stealing a bone shield from the trash mobs (was being off tanked) and the shadow priest MC.
Hope to have a video soon to show everyone you do not need 2 priest! :D

For some reason I have a terrible time with this fight. The orbs do not like to let me MC the understudies reliably, and I'm not sure what I'm doing wrong. I release my understudy, then right-click the orb and typically get "Target cannot be charmed". So I click again...and keep getting the same thing.

By the time it does start working, I usually lose it because I click twice rapidly (because I'm in a panic by now, my other tank is calling out for my taunt) and I see the mc take effect and then immediately go away.

We've downed him a couple times now, but I feel it is more in spite of me rather than because of me. This is really frustrating to have trouble with a fight because of a dumb technical issue that has nothing to do with my normal class skills.

So, any suggestions? How do I make the orb reliably MC my understudy each time I have to drop him and switch?

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Paliee

Today i ran 25 man down this guy with 2 mages spell stealing a bone shield from the trash mobs (was being off tanked) and the shadow priest MC.
Hope to have a video soon to show everyone you do not need 2 priest! :D

---

My guild has downed Raz in 25man three times now without having more than 1 priest in that raid (with hit gear). We've used some "unique" strategies.

Our first 2 Kills, we had 3 hunters stand in a triangle and work out a distracting shot rotation. Basically one hunter would distracting shot Raz as he was aggroed on the previous hunter, then the 3rd hunter would distracting shot off him, repeat. We just killed the adds, and kited Raz around, it takes much longer to kill, and is kind of scary, but it was fun :)

Earlier today, we actually had a priest with hit gear (and only 2 hunters), so we changed our strategy a little. We had our priest MC and use bone shield, then 1 hunter would distracting shot him right before boneshield wore off. The 2nd hunter would then distracting shot Raz, and fiegn death right before Raz got to melee range of him. While the hunters had control of Raz for that short time, our priest MC'd a different understudy, then picked Raz back up as soon as the 2nd hunter lost agro.

Obviously, the 2 priest strategy is the easiest, but there are alternatives ^^

Here's a video of our 3 Hunter strategy:
(High Quality Download) - [ame="http://files.filefront.com/sa+razuviouswmv/;12739834;/fileinfo.html"]sa_razuvious.wmv - FileFront.com[/ame]

(Low Quality Stream) - [ame="http://www.veoh.com/videos/v16982735EazXEN5F"]Razuvious 25 - Situational Awareness | Veoh Video Network[/ame]

The issue i'm having as of lately is that when i originally MC my understudy it goes fine but after i release him then retarget him then right click on the crystal my target changes to the crystal and nothing happens so i click back on him then right click the crystal and again it target's the crystal and does not channel MC. This does not happen evey time but it does seems to happen enough that it makes for a interesting fight at times. I position my understudy so he is closer to me and my crystal then the other crystal and usally wait about 2 seconds after targeting him before right clicking on the crystal.