Any good Hardmode Anub'Arak 25 man guides? Or some helpful tips?

[Leipäkone]

http://lotto-guild.com/forums/thread/443

Raid setup:
3 Tanks
15 DPS
7 Healers
of which atleast 2 DKs, 4 paladins.

Video link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fuo1gNnNyFw
im leaving out my awesome paint pictures from this guide as we have great video you can use for clarification.

WoL: http://worldoflogs.com/reports/4MT8L...?s=8822&e=9364

Phase 1:
Pull the boss, position him and use 2 DKs to deathgrip frost spheres on both sides of Anub. There should be 2 ranged dps assisting both DKs with killing the sphere. Also if you have 3. DK its good idea to have him on standby incase the grip bugs and other sphere only drops halfway down. These 2 frosts should not be destroyed at any point of the fight.

Use 2 Offtanks. (I suggest using paladins and warriors as blockvalue reduces damagetaken a lot.. and holy wrath / shockwave can be used to interrupt ) One on both side ready to pick up the Nerubian Burrowers and to take them on top of the freshly dropped frosts, as close to Anub'arak as possible, but still keeping (12yard?) distance between addpacks so they wouldnt get 3 stacks of haste increase.
Offtanks have to be ready to interrupt shadow strike with aoe stun/silence as soon as its cast. All burrowers cast it at the same time.

Challenge of the first phase is having enough AoE dps to take Burrowers down way before next wave of them spawns, so tanks have time to drop their debuffs and go pick up the next wave. For the AoE to be effective enough all 4 adds have to be close enough for every spell to hit everyone of them, yet keeping them far enough so you dont have to deal with 1 second shadow strike casts. How to reach that necessary AoE is all about the people you have available. Unholy DKs, frostfire mages, rogues and fury warriors are somewhat awesome.

10 second before Anub burrows our maintank moves him to the left side of the room, preferably a bit to the south so he wont go through the frost paths we use for tanking the adds.

Phase 2:
P2 begins when Anub burrows. He will target a random player in the raid and that player has to immedialitely start running towards south. Especially melee dps has to be awake at this point as we dont wanna lose those 2 death gripped frosts. Second wave of Nerubian Burrowers are still up at this point and DPS has to finish them up.

Like said the kiting begins by first target running to south. When he's far enough he stops running and waits for the spikes to reach him. You should have BoP rotation ready from your paladins, so the paladins whos turn to BoP is there in range ready to BoP the kite target. At the same time some of your ranged dps should be dropping down 2 frosts on the ground. Burrow target will run to either of these to reset the spikes. When its reset anub will pick up new target and that target has to run south, wait for BoP and run to frost. There will be 3. kite target after this, but if you've done the kiting right with first 2 he only has to kite for 10 seconds or less and doesnt need to use BoP or ice. His job is basicly to start kiting the boss towards the tanking spot. ( just dont destroy tanking frosts )

Meanwhile rest of your raid is watching out they arent in the kiters way and are killing Nerubian Swarmers that spawn all around the room. These adds target someone in the raid and try to reach him. If they do they start stacking a nasty debuff that ticks 1.5k for each stack every 3 seconds and lasts 1 minute. Don't let them hit anyone. You can use stuns and slows on them unless they enrage which gives them immunity. (tranq shot should remove the enrage)

Challenge of this phase: Kiting long enough. You may not use more than 2 frosts for this phase, otherwise you will run out for next time. So wait for your BoPs to be nearly over before you go reset. Make sure you only drop 2 frosts, and that both of them are used in this phase. If not next time you enter phase 1 the adds will be harder to pick up as one of them is most likely slowed somewhere.

After being 3 times in P1 and twice in P2 you should hit P3.

Phase 3:
P3 begins when Anub hits 30% hp and starts casting leeching swarm, its clearly the hardest phase of the fight. Simply for this phase you have those 7 healers in the raid. Your DPS and Tanks will keep on doing what they were doing p1. Dont panic.

What makes it hard? Due the nature of leeching swarm everyone in your raid, except tanks, has to be kept at around 1k HP. No more, no less or the boss starts healing too much. Low health combined with Penetrating Cold debuff is pretty tough shit.

Penetrating Cold is a dot-debuff that Anub casts on 5 raid members. It lasts 18 seconds, ticks every 3 seconds for 6k frost damage.
So when a new wave of Penetrating Cold debuffs are being cast you have 5 people in 1k hp that need to be get to that 6k+ health in a few seconds. This debuff is there also in P1, but its wasnt worth mentioning as its harmless when people have full hp.

To keep raid up from leech everyone in the raid needs to be healed for atleast 250 hp / second. For melee this is easy as they will stay alive just by hitting Anub that should have Judgement of Light on him. JoL keeps the melee alive by itself. Ranged and healers need some real healing as they cant benefit from JoL with AoE or heals. You can use Healing Stream totems and Vampiric touch to keep one group alive and have a restodruid rolling rejuvenation on the rest. (rank 10 is enough)

Each of the Penetrating Cold targets needs to have his own personal healer that makes sure he stays alive for that 18 seconds. Addon called Penetrator helps a lot by marking each of the Penetrating Cold targets by a raidmark. ( X, Square, Moon, Diamond and Triangle ) Be shameless and just top your healing target. Yes it makes the boss heal a bit more, but as Penetrating Cold only has 16 second cooldown its possible you already have a new target to heal before previous ones debuff has ended. If you have the old target in high hp its more likely you have time to heal the new target and both targets will survive.

What every raid member should do is to help the healers. Your healer might be busy and not able to push enough HP to you before Penetrating Cold ticks for the first time, so all raid members should help out by popping Frost Res Potion when they are targetted by Penetrating Cold the first time. If they are targetted second time they should use Healthstone. Rogues, Mages and Paladins should use their personal cooldowns to remove the debuff.

Also note that tanks are taking brutal damage from the leech combined with melee hits. Holy Paladins are simply great for healing the tanks in last phase.

Tips that might help:
- Nature Resistance on MT drops his damagetaken considerably. Our MT was feral druid with LW/alchemy = 335 NR. He resisted 1103392 damage from the swarm. Its a lot less HP for the boss to heal from.
- Aura Mastery rotation from your paladins. (Frost Res Aura)
- Blockvalue tanks on adds reduce damagetaken by a lot. Ours took only 350k each from the adds in 9 minutes.
- Raid doesnt need Fortitude.
- If it feels your raid is in too low hp.. just heal more. Atleast we didnt have any issues with the enrage timer. Boss died the first time Penetrating Cold healing worked.

Here is our guide for that fight and its working well

P.S we used warrior and pala (me) tanks for adds and a druid tank as main tank. World 18 rank atm!

[Dvorjak99]

Awesome, keep the tips coming. If you could add class specif suggestions, that would be great.

[Weena2]

Theres lots of ways this can be done depending on what classes you have. Basically some key points that i think really help alot when learning/downing Anub are:

-Make sure your two offtanks on adds have high block

-Try get 4 pallies, 2 BOP every kite phase so that anub sits there and beats on them for an extra 10seconds or so before having to run over ice

-In phase 3 make sure all your healers have grid and they all align it alphabetically. Now say you have 3 healers on pen cold and 3 on the tank make sure the 3 on pen cold have selected people to heal on grid, say healer 1 gets people 1+2 on grid, healer 2 gets people 3+4 and healer 3 gets people 5+6. This is definatly one of the best ways to manage pen cold and its easy to see who keeps dieing to it and how to fix it (say the 4th person keeps dieing you obviously know healer 2 is having trouble and needs a hand or something has to change).

-In p3 try take classes so that you need NO raid healing. Example is 2 shammies with healing stream totem (with glyph) in groups 4 and 5, a ret so that your melee need no healing, and a shadowpriest for the casters not able to get into groups 4+5

[Varius]

Shammy with Healing stream glyphed will keep ranged groups alive from swarm so you just have to heal the cold.

Ret pallies for heals on a penetrating cold target and/or holy wrath to stun the adds so they don't cast shadowstrike.

http://www.wowhead.com/?item=44939 for healers.

But yeah phase 1-2 are fairly easy once you get enough attempts on it, the problem is phase 3 when penetrating cold is cast and the raid is sitting at 1k hp to not leech too much.

http://www.wowhead.com/?item=40215 for everyone, popping that for phase 3 gives your healers 6 seconds instead of 3 to save your ass.

[Dvorjak99]

Shammy with Healing stream glyphed will keep ranged groups alive from swarm so you just have to heal the cold.

Ret pallies for heals on a penetrating cold target and/or holy wrath to stun the adds so they don't cast shadowstrike.

http://www.wowhead.com/?item=44939 for healers.

But yeah phase 1-2 are fairly easy once you get enough attempts on it, the problem is phase 3 when penetrating cold is cast and the raid is sitting at 1k hp to not leech too much.

http://www.wowhead.com/?item=40215 for everyone, popping that for phase 3 gives your healers 6 seconds instead of 3 to save your ass.

Resto shamans with it glyphed? Or any shaman? Because resto talents make it heal for almost double what it is when i'm ele. My healing stream as ele heals about 254-284 in raid. As resto it's about 450+ in raid. Obviously the glyph will be helpful in both cases, but is it worth it for the ele or is it just calling for resto shamans to glyph it?


Also, wonderful guide Leipon.

Any other good suggestions?

[Weena2]

You need 250HPS to stay alive through leaching swarm; any more and your overhealing, any less and the group will die.

[Dvorjak99]

bump
"Resto shamans with it glyphed? Or any shaman? Because resto talents make it heal for almost double what it is when i'm ele. My healing stream as ele heals about 254-284 in raid. As resto it's about 450+ in raid. Obviously the glyph will be helpful in both cases, but is it worth it for the ele or is it just calling for resto shamans to glyph it?"

[exochaft]

Quick question about the Shadowstrike ability:

If you are using the 1 adds tank strat with unhittable, obviously the Shadowstrike cast time is gonna be quick. We have several ppl attempt to interrupt at once to make sure there's no interrupt misses. I've read through several posts that say when the adds cast Shadowstrike as being predictable, but what exactly is the cooldown/timing of it? Screw addon, I'm not a fan of em, and the tank complains that they timers are off on addons such as DBM/Bigwigs or the timers disappear on occasion. I've seen several posts saying they cast it every 30 seconds exactly from the aggroing of Anub, some say stuns that last thru the time they would cast resets the time starting at when the stun occured or when the stun wears off, etc.

What is the actual behavior of the adds with respect to them wanting to cast Shadowstrike?

Thanx much in advance =D

[Skarrd]

Deus Vox mod gives our tanks proper timers. We stun, though, not interrupt. Shockwave/HW.

[exochaft]

Thanx for the mod info. We tend to do SW/HW along with Arcane Torrent. However, I'm still looking for the actual behavoir, if someone has insight on the matter. I'm not much for addons personally, I like knowing how to do something w/o a blackbox telling me things that I take on faith, knowing the mechanic would make me feel better

Edit: Went to the Deus Vox forums and it seems people are still having issues with the timers, though they only go so far as to say the mod fails in telling them the correct time, not that they know when Shadowstrike will happen and the mod isn't lining up correctly. No help there with finding the actual mechanic >.<

[comablack]

The tactic that worked the best for us was to have a Frost DK tanking Anub, and a warrior in BV gear tanking all the 4 adds.
I'd say you need atleast 2 rogues that use TotT on one add each when they spawn, one of them should also use Mind-numbing poison. Have a warlock/warrior/paladin interrupt the Shadow Strikes, there are addons which have accurate timers for this. If you stun the adds before they start casting, they will start casting it earlier the next time. This means you have to wait for them to start casting, then use Shadowfury/Shockwave.

As for Phase 3, having Frost Protection Pots help alot, and one healing stream totem/Shadow priest for each group can usually outheal the swarm, having a feral druid with Imp. Leader of the pack can be good to have aswell.

Bleh... Good luck.

have fun using an aoe stun on the gcd to stun a 1 or .5 sec cast (forgot its speed with 3 stacks of the buff)

[TomM]

Does anyone have a good tactic that doesnt evolve around death gripping spheres? We're wanting to try anub tonight but our DK's are not able to attend though we still wanted to have a crack

[ewhenn]

Do you have 4 paladins?

If so you can jsut knock down two spheres (one in front and one in back). Tank the adds on Anub with a block tank. Then run back and forth and camp the ice patches with a bop.

Kinda like this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Ic6Wq-KxvQ

[sicness]

Thou shall L2P on thy own!

And it's this attitude that's ruining the game, not the normal/hard modes. You take the time to comment but can't say anything useful, it's just like people in game you'd rather make fun of people than offer them help.

[Smashfist]

We do it like this:

1x Warrior MT
1x Prot Pally add tank, full BV/BR/Def gear (about 100.2% avoidance)
4x pallys total (our tank/me ret/2xholy)

Pally stacks the adds up and we aoe the shit out of them. I solo interrupts with glyphed Holy Wrath. To do this I pop HW at about -2sec on the timer for shadow strike, allowing for latency and the cast it hits at about -1.2sec and the stun runs through the cast. In our attempts I found it EXTREMELY important that a) the other pallys don't use HW and b) nobody else stuns adds, otherwise stun might be on diminishing returns and my HW stun won't last the full duration, this might result in adds getting the cast off.

Each burrow phase gets 2 pallys to bop and 2 ice phases, make sure these are assigned so you don't run out of bop's later.

Now to perfect ph3...