Naxxramas

[Morfiend]

So, for the people here in end game raiding guilds. How are you doing in Nax so far? My guild was the first Horde guild on the server to kill Anub'Rakahn. We did it last night, and it probably took us about 15 attempts in total. Fun fight, little stressful, but fun.

Also, if anyone has had success in the Plague wing, how do you handle the 2 Gargoyle pulls before Noth? Also, how do you handle the Naxxramas Accolyts right before Grand Widow Feralina?

[Zane0]

Still working on Anub; best is 60%. :[

All sorts of problems- tank doesn't seem to always be fast enough; corpse scarabs escape and run over to MT healers; impale generally fucks shit up.  But then, things have been a tad laggy on our server for the past few days, so I think we'll be making progress on our next raid night if conditions improve.

We did some initial deathknight wing pulls as well, I think.  They seem to be fairly simple.  Whirlwinds to get out of; spirits with cone ae shadowbolts; other misc nonsense.  You can get some frost resist recipies not too far along.

Looks fairly polished overall, and I'm liking the reduced run times already.

[bhodi]

We're doing the DK wing first, just played around on trash so far..

[SurfD]

We do our first real attempts this weekend.  We are expecting to have Anub down in short order, and then try messign around with either the Instructor or Noth.

[Morfiend]

Still working on Anub; best is 60%. :[

All sorts of problems- tank doesn't seem to always be fast enough; corpse scarabs escape and run over to MT healers; impale generally fucks shit up.  But then, things have been a tad laggy on our server for the past few days, so I think we'll be making progress on our next raid night if conditions improve.

We did some initial deathknight wing pulls as well, I think.  They seem to be fairly simple.  Whirlwinds to get out of; spirits with cone ae shadowbolts; other misc nonsense.  You can get some frost resist recipies not too far along.

Looks fairly polished overall, and I'm liking the reduced run times already.

A few things that REALLY make the encounter easer. Make sure your MT has Spell Alert, it warns when he is about to cast locus swarm. Also, keep your healers and mages very bunched up, so when scrabs spawn, they charge the healers, and they are clumped together for easy AE. As for Impale, no one should be getting hit with this except the MT healers. Make sure they have feathers so they can levatate when they get knocked up in the air. Once we got the rythem down, it was smooth sailing. I would say about 60-70% of the damage on Anub was done by ranged. After the innitial 2 crypt guards, ranaged would switch off the crypt guard at 50% to focus more on anub.

[SurfD]

Well, we messed around in there for about 5 horus today.  Anub down after about 6 or 7 attempts, once we got the hang of timing the locus swarm run away rotations and worked out picking up the corpse scarabs, things went pretty smoothly.  Made a shot at the instructor (Death knight wing).  trash mobs were fairly simple, boss fight is a WHOLE nother mater entirely.  This thing is a total execution fight.  Someone misses a mindcontroll or you dont get the instructor under controll immediately, and he just chews a raid up.  Pretty fun fight though.

[Threash]

Well, we messed around in there for about 5 horus today.  Anub down after about 6 or 7 attempts, once we got the hang of timing the locus swarm run away rotations and worked out picking up the corpse scarabs, things went pretty smoothly.  Made a shot at the instructor (Death knight wing).  trash mobs were fairly simple, boss fight is a WHOLE nother mater entirely.  This thing is a total execution fight.  Someone misses a mindcontroll or you dont get the instructor under controll immediately, and he just chews a raid up.  Pretty fun fight though.

I hear that having the mind controlers have 3% to hit on spells helps a lot on this,  apparently theres a 4% chance of mc breaking every few seconds that can be cut down to 1% with spell hit.

[SurfD]

Yeah, one of our priests did extensive testing on some normal world mobs with 0 shadow resistance.  having a bunch of +hit gear reduced the chances of MC breaking early by quite a lot.

[Zane0]

Killed Anub!  The fight essentially "clicked" after a few small changes.

We're trying to get that Naxx quest finished now.  Abom wing is definitely the hardest, and I hear the first boss there puts damage out to the point where he's essentially a gear cockblock.

We're looking at Razuvious as the next one up?  Sounds like an awesome fight- with priests having to "tank" by MCing stuff, traditional class roles are getting a refreshing change.

[Morfiend]

We're looking at Razuvious as the next one up?  Sounds like an awesome fight- with priests having to "tank" by MCing stuff, traditional class roles are getting a refreshing change.

We qorked on Instructor Raz tonight. Not so much a fun fight. Once you have position down, its all about the priests, and prety much every other class is at their mercy. If you do good, you can do good, if not, you wipe, and wipe and wipe. Its a very helpless feeling fight as a rogue.

[Chenghiz]

Patchwork, the first boss of the Abom wing, has an attack called Hateful Strike that hits for around 20k and he does it every 2 seconds (supposedly). He also runs at 150% speed and cannot be snared. A few guilds have killed him but of course they aren't talking about it other than a few vague hints about him perhaps only attacking his top aggro target. A tank for one of the guilds that killed him mentioned he only got hit for 5-7k, which implies to me that they either found a way to weaken his Hateful Strike or keep him from using it.

I wish my guild would think about at least doing trash in naxx. =/

[Morfiend]

I wish my guild would think about at least doing trash in naxx. =/

At least for Spder and Deathknight wing, the trash is much easer than AQ40, and even easer than some of the BWL trash. At least the early trash is. Get your 40 raiders and do it. They will get confidence, the trash is not hard.

[Fabricated]

A few guilds have killed him but of course they aren't talking about it other than a few vague hints about him perhaps only attacking his top aggro target.

This part of raiding I've always found funny. oh noes, our l33t strats are stolen11!

[Merusk]

In EQ it made a bit of sense, since bosses weren't instanced and if every uberguild knew how to kill the boss, the competition would be ugly. (I recall GMs having to be called-in to settle more than one conflict on Tribunal)  In WoW it's just assbaggery and e-peen protection.

[Fabricated]

I never did get how that could be E-peen protection since the only guilds you would want not knowing your strats would be guilds better than yours.

You could write a detailed strategy guide with videos and high res maps and special UI mods that a child could understand and that still wouldn't mean any PUG could just waltz in and do it. You still need your shit together regardless if you know the easiest path to win.

[Merusk]

Not guilds better than yours, but guilds at the same level as yours. If there were folks above you, then no your strat didn't matter because they were the bleeding-edge guilds devising the strats.

Tribunal had 3 guilds all of equal strength and ability at one time, so as I understand it got very competitive.  Having an edge like knowing how to down one sub-boss while the other guilds were choking on it and wiping, thus stalling their progress meant you had the opportunity to snatch the end boss for the 2 bits of phat loot he may or may not drop, thus improving your guild over-all. 

Out of the madness came the days of kill-calendars and raid rotations. If your guild met the 'prereqs' set by lord knows who, you could sign-up for a rotation in Current_Phat_Loot_Place and you'd get to try for your little digital goodies every few weeks.  That is until one group or another would inevitably get full of themselves, say "Fuck you all we're going to kill it whenever we see it's up.  If you can't field a raid when Uber_zone/Boss has respawned you're just SOL."

Different times, different world than WoW.. Wow's much better.

[Ironwood]

But still not quite there.

[bhodi]

Out of curiosity, how are you pulling Raz? We've got 3 options:

Option #1:  Pull to top of ramp just past railing, Priests right up against railing on other side.  This will require rogue evasion tanking or the like while the hunters/tanks pull off the students and the first student is MC'd/raz is pulled into position.   --  We tried this unsuccessfully, but its still possible to execute on this much much better.

Option #2:  Priest wanders down ramp against wall, waits till Raz moves towards back, Mind Soothe the two students in front, Mind control student on right.   This has a huge advantage in terms of not having any of our players risk death early on if it works and gets the MC chain started and Raz positioned potentially the earliest of all options.   This is my current preference to give a shot to next.  Only downside of this strat is that you end up potentially having some melee out of res range/sight on a wipe so they would need to run back/be summoned.

Option #3:  We pull to stables and use the stable cubbies similar to how we use cubbies in BWL.  This is the most complex pull of them all and will probably take the most work to perfect, but might be the really good fight positioning when all is said and done.  Serious downsides include timing the pull right to not disrupting shout the raid while also keeping him occupied/busy until Students are MC'd and pull him into position.

[Zane0]

We use a Soothe-MC pull (option 2).  The second priest in the rotation is out of LOS and immediately MC's one when they come up, so that the first priest can run to safety before Raz's initial shout, which is early I believe- 15 seconds.  It may be good for the initial-pull priest to waste nearly all his mana so that he might stand some chance of surviving if he finds himself in the open.

The pull is the trickiest part, because one can easily run the pets outside of, or stress the MC range.  The server seems to have different ideas about distance than the client sometimes.  That is my theory for a couple otherwise-unexplainable breaks beyond pure bad luck, anyways.

[jpark]

Our guild is still doing BWL.  From a tanking prospective - dwarf warrior here - what are the resists required for Naxx?

[bhodi]

Our guild is still doing BWL.  From a tanking prospective - dwarf warrior here - what are the resists required for Naxx?

None, yet. A lot of us have done crafted gear, but so far frost hasn't come up. We know it's required for the frost wyrm and of course kel'thuzad.