Hard Mode Anub’Arak Strategy
Posted by thideras | Filed under General Information
With [A Tribute to Insanity] completed, I am now free to post our strategy and assist others.
I will try to provide numbers for both tanking and healing, but I have limited experience tanking wise as I was only tanking Anub’Arak for the first fifty or so attempts we did. Most of my experience comes with healing, and as such, a lot of the information will be centered on this topic.
Druid specific tips:
I use a very specialized talent build for this fight. It favors Healing Touch greatly. I do use the [Glyph of Healing Touch] as it greatly reduces the speed of the spell. Why do I use such a strange, not commonly used build? I need my target to live. I have 3 seconds to get my target above 6000 health. I’ve tried using Nourish with my normal build and it hits for around the same amount as Healing Touch, but it is slower, almost 2x slower. With that talent build, glyph and 541 haste, my initial cast of Healing Touch is 0.67 seconds (Nourish is ~1.2). Please see Phase 3 for a visual breakdown of Penetrating Cold.
Restoration Druid talent build
Terms:
Back of the room – Where you enter the area to fight Anub’Arak
Front of the room – Where Anub’Arak is standing before you start the fight
Left/right of the room – This assumes you are at the back of the room facing the front of the room
From a simplicity standpoint, the fight can be broke up into 3 phases.
Phase 1:
This phase is when Anub’Arak is above ground and Nerubian Burrowers spawn. When you enter the area, he will be at the back of the room, standing in a golden circle. There are also a total of six (6) frozen orbs floating around the room. Leave these until Phase 2. We tanked him directly on the edge of the circle itself; facing away from the door. Anub’Arak was hitting me for 14,000 damage every ~2 seconds, I had around 68% armor reduction. Once Anub’Arak is placed correctly, you want a Death Knight to pulled down one of the floating orbs and kill it; this will create a large area of [Permafrost]. It slows any mobs that walk across it (except Anub’Arak), but more importantly, it prevents the Nerubian Burrowers from burrowing. Shortly after Anub’Arak is placed correctly and a floating orb is broken, the Burrowers will spawn. There will be a total of four (4) adds that come out, two from each side of the room. We had a Warrior with an extremely high block value pick up all four adds. He runs out to grab two near him and has hunters and rogues misdirect the other two to him. After he grabs the two adds, he runs back to the ice. The reason we use a block set for this fight is that the adds hit every 0.25 seconds (quarter of a second) each. I don’t know the specifics on the gear the warrior used and I’m unfamiliar with the class, all I know is that it had a high block value. Once the adds are in place, everyone should AOE the adds to get them down as fast as possible. Obviously classes without AOE would be exempt and continue attacking Anub’Arak directly. As you can see in the video, we have two tank healers; a Holy Paladin and a Discipline Priest. They can keep the tanks up by themselves, so the other healers can AOE. This fight is simple for a Restoration Druid, just AOE the adds as they come in and assist with healing if necessary. At about 15 seconds left until Anub’Arak burrows, the tank will want to kite him away from the Permafrost that was initially brought out; you don’t want to ever hit this ice during Phase 2. When he burrows, be becomes un-targetable and immune to all damage.
Phase 2:
This phase starts when Anub’Arak goes below the ground. He will do so regardless if he is standing on Permafrost or not, it does not affect him. Most likely, adds will still be up at the beginning of this phase, kill them quickly but remember that you have a chance to be targeted. Anub’Arak will immediately “target” someone, denoted by the large arrow above their head, and will start chasing them. At that same time, we have ranged in the “back” of the room that shoot down a single floating orb. The first person that is chased will run to the Permafrost but will not run over it. Instead, we have a Paladin that will use [Blessing of Protection] on the targeted raid member when Anub’Arak gets to them. From the receiving standpoint, it can be unnerving as the first hit usually gets through; if you die, the Paladin is at fault.
After Anub’Arak passes the raid members, gather up on the left side of the room, slightly behind the Permafrost. Most of the adds will come towards this group, AOE/kill them.
There is an anomaly that can occur here, and it sometimes messes us up. He can target the same raid member twice. This means that the person that just received the BoP can not get it again because of the debuff, which is why anyone who was just targeted needs to start running towards the next Permafrost in case it happens. If someone is targeted twice (or possibly a third time), they will need to break the next Permafrost immediately. Also, if someone is targeted twice, you will need to use 3 floating orbs for that phase.
Once the first person receives their BoP, the next floating orb is broken at the front right of the room. The next person that is targeted will need to move to the next Permafrost, doing exactly what was done the first time. You will need to roll Paladins for this phase as it does have a cooldown.
During all of phase 2, Swarm Scarabs will come out from the left and right side of the room. They don’t hit hard, but they apply a debuff called Acid-Drenched Mandibles that ticks for 1800 damage every 3 seconds. It can stack extremely high (I’ve personally had 22 stack in 10 man HM, 26k a tick) and you don’t want more than one or two stacks. Make sure to let healers know who has stacks and how many. Once you hit Phase 3, a single tick with a single stack can kill you. They also have an ability called Determination that heals them to full and gives them a speed boost as well as immunity to stuns/snares. Hunters can Tranquilizing Shot it off them as it is considered a frenzy effect.
Once the second Permafrost is broken, he will target the last raid member and you should have 15 seconds or less until Phase 1. Do not break a floating orb for this member. Either have them use a speed boost (Dash, rocket boots, etc) or use another BoP. If the tank is not targeted last, have them stand in front of the Permafrost that is never broken, Anub’Arak does not do an aggro wipe when phases change.
Phase 3:
Ok, now it is time for the fun part; it is extremely intense and stressful for healers, so please be patient while they learn this phase. This phase is reached when Anub’Arak hits 30% health. Immediately upon entering this phase, he casts Leeching Swarm. This ability is not resistible and spells that make you immune will not help. Once Leeching Swarm is cast, it persists until either the raid wipes or until Anub’Arak dies. The swarm will remove 30% health per second from every raid member or 250 health, which ever is greater. Please note that the health removed heals Anub’Arak. There will be massive damage until it stats to level out and everyone reaches low health. The swarm is able to be partially resisted, and thus, I used [Lesser Flask of Resistance] when I was tanking Anub’Arak; it helped mitigate the massive incoming damage from being at full health.
To help visualize and quantify how many seconds you have for someone to die, I created a spreadsheet when we first started this fight. You can download it here, make sure that you either have Excel or Open Office to read it.
The optimal health for non-tanks is 1000 health. That seems low, but you want to minimize the healing done to Anub’Arak as it will speed up the kill and reduce chances of deaths. The goal is to have 300 hps to each raid member, this will keep them around 1000 health. The raid healers do not heal the raid unless that member has Penetrating Cold. You will use passive healing to keep the raid up. Shaman’s Healing Stream Totem when properly specced/glyphed, can keep a group up by itself. Shadow Priest’s Vampiric Embrace combined with a Shaman that does not have a specced/glyphed Healing Stream Totem can keep a group up together. Have a Paladin keep Judgement of Light on Anub’arak and the melee will literally heal themselves through it. With all that combined, that means the raid healers can solely focus on healing Penetrating Colds.
Penetrating Cold does 6000 damage every 3 seconds for 18 seconds (6 ticks). The spell can be partially and full resisted; you can also use abilities like Iceblock or Cloak of Shadows to remove the debuff. We also used Since the raid members should be at 1000 health, they can not take a single tick without dying. Here is the biggest issue the healers have. We have 3 seconds to get 5 people above 6000 health. We have the raid DPS to sacrifice two DPS for two healers, giving us a total of 7 healers. Two tank healers, 5 raid healers. There are quite a few obstacles in ensuring that every last person lives through each Penetrating Cold.
The main addon you want is either Deus Vox, DBM or Penetrator. Any addon that will give consistent marks to all people that have Penetrating Cold will work. I would suggest that multiple people have the same addon installed, but only one person (that doesn’t have a history of disconnecting) should have it actually marking. You can do this by demoting anyone else so that there is no chance of marks getting mixed up or switching. The version of Penetrator that is out there will NOT work, do not use it. We had to heavily modify the addon so that it doesn’t fail to mark, like it had been doing for us a few times. I do not, at this time, have a copy of the addon. Of the 5 marks going out, you want to assign a healer to each one. For example, I’ve been the orange circle on every attempt. This makes it extremely easy to locate my mark instead of worrying about remembering which icon I need to look for.
Healer specific addons are more common. All healers run Grid and most likely Clique. There are reasons that we require Grid; there are no other addons that can displays debuffs like it does. It also allows us to have consistency. I don’t need to learn Vuhdo or Healbot and worry about getting them configured. Two addons are essential, GridStatusRaidIcons and GridStatusRaidDebuff. Regarding the raid icons, you don’t want to download the addon from Curse, with the version they have, the marks are 70% transparent, making them difficult to see. We have a modified version that you can download from me and the raid debuff addon can be had from Curse:
GridStatusRaidIcons
GridStatusRaidDebuff
I set up both of these addons to use the Center Icon (Frame<Center Icon). The raid icons have a priority of 99 and the raid debuffs have a priority of 98. There are two reasons why I do this, first, if a raid mark does not go out (it happens) and that person still has the debuff, the healers know that person needs heals. The other is so that the raid icons do not get overwritten by any other Grid addons, ensuring that is is always visible. With these addons combined, Penetrating Cold will always be seen and deaths will be minimized.
To take Grid another step further, I made my raid icons more visible. I didn’t modify any addons or use anything special, all I did was disable coloring. If you watch the video, you will see that my Grid looks completely black. If you look closer, you will see their health is visible, just difficult to see. I can’t distinguish between classes since I don’t need to for this fight. I disabled “Use class color” for current health, missing health and player name. With the dark background, you can see how prominent the raid markings are and it improves my reaction time.
Click here to download the video of our kill
Click here to see the EHFS combat log of our kill
Click here to see the World of Logs combat log of our kill
As always, feel free to ask me questions in game or on the forums; I’m always happy to help out.
Thideras
Exodus
US – Shadow Council
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