Heroic 25 Anub'Arak Defeated!
Posted by thideras | Filed under General Information
The strategy is now posted, click here to view it!
After 4 weeks of attempting to kill this ‘bug’, we have finally defeated him!
Overall, this fight requires perfection. Usually, if one person dies, the fight is over. This means that DPS, healing, tanking and the strategy itself has to be impeccable.
Now to cover healing. Ever since I was a little sapling, I was told to keep everyone at full health to win fights. The Anub’Arak encounter completely flips that teaching backwards due to his leeching swarm. In the Heroic 25 man version, it leeches 30% of their health every second on every raid member. Not only does it damage us, it heals the boss. If we were to keep the raid high in health, we couldn’t kill Anub’Arak within his enrage timer. We have to leave everyone around 1000-2500 health. That is easy to do, right?
There is another part of the fight I haven’t covered, [Penetrating Cold]. He casts this debuff on 5 raid members at a time and the spell does 6000 damage every 3 seconds. That means we have to get those 6 raid members from 1000-2500 health to more than 6000 health in less than 3 seconds. I initially thought that Nourish (or possibly Rejuvenation and Nourish) would heal for a lot and be do-able in 3 seconds. I was completely incorrect. With just over 500 haste, my initial Nourish cast is 1.27 seconds. Even with the 3 second window, I’m unable to keep one person from dying to Penetrating Cold.
Why Thideras? The healing lead uses an addon called Penetrator which gives marks to raid members with the debuff. It can only mark it as fast as his latency, which gives a very slight delay for it to be processed by his computer, sent to the server and sent to our systems. We then have to locate our specific mark (each of the 6 healers has their own mark to heal) out of 25 people and heal them. I found that the inherent latency with marking combined with my reaction time, people die.
I know that other guilds that killed him used Restoration Druids with a Healing Touch build combined with the Healing Touch glyph. At first, I rejected the idea as silly but quickly saw why it was being used. I incorrectly thought that the glyph reduced the casting speed of Healing Touch by half; which would have brought it from 2.1 seconds to 1.05 seconds. Another Druid corrected my mistake, telling me that it instead reduces the cast time by 1.5 seconds, regardless of haste. Using this build combined with the [Glyph of Healing Touch] brought my Healing Touch spell down to 0.87 seconds; much faster than Nourish. Even though this lowered my Healing Touch cast below the Global Cooldown, this allowed me to beat the 3 second limit by around 1.5 seconds. I use this build as my offspec to save re-speccing bills later.
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If you wish to download the video, click here!
If you wish to see the combat log for the kill:
My EHFS combat parse
World of Logs combat parse
As always, feel free to speak with me in-game (Thideras on Shadow Council) for questions regarding the fight or anything Druid.
The strategy is now posted, click here to view it!
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