Nefarian 10 Man brickwall

[Richmond]

My guild has hit a brickwall on Nefarian, we've tried the main tactics and watched various tutorials on Youtube and tried alot of different set ups between our core raid team and we dont seem to be getting anywhere.

We had a fairly late start to Cata raiding and managed to get the first few bosses in BoT down (Brickwall again on the council) and we've managed to get the bosses before Nef down on farm now. But we can't nail Nef. Now my RL is on about extending this weeks raid so that we can concentrate on getting him down. But i really dont want to start on him again on Thursday to keep wiping. We literally had about 25 attempts on him the other night.

Our set up is

Tanks: Druid (Can heal or DPS) / Warrior (Can DPS)
Healers: Pala (Can DPS), Shaman (Can DPS), Priest (OS not so good)
DPS: Priest, Boomkin(Can Tank), Hunter, Feral Druid, Warlock or Mage

Things we are struggling on:

Positioning in general, i am the Druid tank and it took awhile to figure out the "Sweet spot" on how far Nef and Ony need to be apart. The rest of the time people are dying to lightning from Ony (even though the other tank has got the turning tactic down to a tea) or they are dying to adds not being rounded up very well.
Tank damage - I have the mastery trinket that has the Resistance on use (from TB quarter master) and i use it accordingly on the breaths from Nef (i rotate between that and Barkskin) And i pop survival instincts and Frenzied Regen (glyphed) on each electrocute. The Ony tank doesn't seem to have too many problems, but there are a few hairy moments at times (he doesnt have the trinket).
Healers being too spread out to be effective - Either they can reach 1 tank or the other on occasions, the DPS or Add kiter is out of range etc etc. Is there a sweet spot?

Tactic that seems to be working best for us ATM:

Druid (usually boomkin) starts the fight and tanks Ony, takes her to the right of the room towards the edge, i DPS for about 15-20 seconds and then get ready for Nef landing. I usually start running and plant a Mangle on Nef whilst kiting him to the opposite side of the room to Ony. The adds are being picked up by our Warrior, which is at the minute in Prot spec, mainly for his Shockwave ability, it seems to control the adds very well. The mage and hunter usually use frost traps to help also. We position the ranged in pretty much the centre of the room and the add kiter kites them up and down the room (north to south). Healers - The Paladin comes with my to Nef whilst leaving beacon on the Ony tank, the Priest stays on the Ony tank and the raid and the shaman (atm at least) is running between both tanks and healing them both up (not ideal).

We DPS Ony down to 20% with fairly little problems, switch to Nef and DPS him til 91%, Pop personaly damage reduction and heal like mofo's, DPS down to 81% and attempt the same, but thats when we usually all die... We have no CD's up for damage reduction and the Ony tank is usually taking a breath at or around the same time... Towards the last few attempts we had the warrior in DPS spec whilst kiting the adds, although this wasn't as controlled as when he was Prot, the DPS he brings (Usually at least 13k) makes light work of the bosses HP.

Can anyone offer any advice? Getting really frustrated with it all at the minute and dont seem to be getting past this phase at all. Any options on the kiters and / or tank changes? The hunter would probably be a good kiter, but he had a pretty bad connection of late.

Thanks again (armory in sig if ppl need it)

[Deleted]

Well our guild has him downed 2 times now and we basicly keep 1 dps, a healer and a tank at Ony in P1 and the rest pretty much stack at Nef when he lands, apart from kiter who kites adds with my help (Hunter = Trap and MD) And we try to get 3 electrocutes before Onyxia is dead and usually a bit into p1 another dps switches to Ony and should she be alive after 3 elecs we all just nuke the final %'s.

[Breyers]

My guild has hit a brickwall on Nefarian, we've tried the main tactics and watched various tutorials on Youtube and tried alot of different set ups between our core raid team and we dont seem to be getting anywhere.

We had a fairly late start to Cata raiding and managed to get the first few bosses in BoT down (Brickwall again on the council) and we've managed to get the bosses before Nef down on farm now. But we can't nail Nef. Now my RL is on about extending this weeks raid so that we can concentrate on getting him down. But i really dont want to start on him again on Thursday to keep wiping. We literally had about 25 attempts on him the other night.

Our set up is

Tanks: Druid (Can heal or DPS) / Warrior (Can DPS)
Healers: Pala (Can DPS), Shaman (Can DPS), Priest (OS not so good)
DPS: Priest, Boomkin(Can Tank), Hunter, Feral Druid, Warlock or Mage

Things we are struggling on:

Positioning in general, i am the Druid tank and it took awhile to figure out the "Sweet spot" on how far Nef and Ony need to be apart. The rest of the time people are dying to lightning from Ony (even though the other tank has got the turning tactic down to a tea) or they are dying to adds not being rounded up very well.
Tank damage - I have the mastery trinket that has the Resistance on use (from TB quarter master) and i use it accordingly on the breaths from Nef (i rotate between that and Barkskin) And i pop survival instincts and Frenzied Regen (glyphed) on each electrocute. The Ony tank doesn't seem to have too many problems, but there are a few hairy moments at times (he doesnt have the trinket).
Healers being too spread out to be effective - Either they can reach 1 tank or the other on occasions, the DPS or Add kiter is out of range etc etc. Is there a sweet spot?

Tactic that seems to be working best for us ATM:

Druid (usually boomkin) starts the fight and tanks Ony, takes her to the right of the room towards the edge, i DPS for about 15-20 seconds and then get ready for Nef landing. I usually start running and plant a Mangle on Nef whilst kiting him to the opposite side of the room to Ony. The adds are being picked up by our Warrior, which is at the minute in Prot spec, mainly for his Shockwave ability, it seems to control the adds very well. The mage and hunter usually use frost traps to help also. We position the ranged in pretty much the centre of the room and the add kiter kites them up and down the room (north to south). Healers - The Paladin comes with my to Nef whilst leaving beacon on the Ony tank, the Priest stays on the Ony tank and the raid and the shaman (atm at least) is running between both tanks and healing them both up (not ideal).

We DPS Ony down to 20% with fairly little problems, switch to Nef and DPS him til 91%, Pop personaly damage reduction and heal like mofo's, DPS down to 81% and attempt the same, but thats when we usually all die... We have no CD's up for damage reduction and the Ony tank is usually taking a breath at or around the same time... Towards the last few attempts we had the warrior in DPS spec whilst kiting the adds, although this wasn't as controlled as when he was Prot, the DPS he brings (Usually at least 13k) makes light work of the bosses HP.

Can anyone offer any advice? Getting really frustrated with it all at the minute and dont seem to be getting past this phase at all. Any options on the kiters and / or tank changes? The hunter would probably be a good kiter, but he had a pretty bad connection of late.

Thanks again (armory in sig if ppl need it)

First question, why is your Boomkin tanking?

Also, as to your healers range problems. What you'll want, is 1 healer near the Nefarien Tank, and 1 healer near the Onyxia Tank, and 1 Raid healer in the middle of the room, healing the raid and add-kiter.

For kiting, I used to personally do it as a Frost Death Knight, and the lack of DPS while I kited them didn't present to much of a problem.

As well, Electrocute is unable to 1-shot any raider, and what I fear you're running into, is getting Tail-whipped (40k damage I believe?) just as an Electrocute goes out.

My suggestion is to get Nef 2% or so from Electrocuting, and waiting until JUST after Onyxia's lightning phase ends, before you push the Electrocute, in order to avoid Tail-whips.

[Jinto]

Honestly I am not really understanding exactly what you are trying to do. It would be easier to just tell you what to do with your raid comp.

I am going to assume you have a mage.

For tanking and adds in p1:

Have bear tank on Ony or Nef, does not matter.
Have warrior on Ony or Nef, does not matter.
Have the kitty go bear form, grab all the adds and tank them towards the outside of the area.
The mage can throw in a ring of frost and the kitty pop cooldowns until the adds all die in a neat pile.

For healing:

Have the paladin on the kitty, he can stun the adds if you do not have a mage
Have the shaman with Nef, reason being that it is more damage mitigation to have him with the raid (resist).
Have the priest with Ony.
The healer on Nef should be in melee range. After an electrocute heal the tank first.

For dps:

Do what you are doing now basically. Everyone stack in melee when dpsing Nef.

P2: You probably want your resto shaman, holy paladin and bear tank do the interrupts.

P3. Tank nef in the middle. Have the hpally follow the warrior around. Warrior tank the adds until roughly 2-3s till Shadowflame goes out, then move the adds. Go in a circle until Nef dies.

[Chiasmus]

P2: You probably want your resto shaman, holy paladin and warrior tank do the interrupts. Not sure if warrior can get all the interrupts.

You really don't, unless you plan on hit capping as a healer.

[Focault]

If you are dying on the 2nd electrocute you have some major issues overall. I'm guessing your shaman has resistance totem down in middle of room so everyone is covered?

Honestly it seems like maybe you should go with a 4 healer strat if you are having that much trouble.

2 tanks for dragons
4 healers
4 dps

Have paladin healer tank the adds via righteous fury and once all 5 adds are on him can shackle one and freezing trap another so he's only getting hit by 3. This way you'll have an extra healer for the entire fight. The only downside is it puts pressure on your add tank in P3 to successfully get all the adds down twice to give your dps enough time to kill off Nef. But with you having healing issues on the 2nd electrocute while still in P1 I don't know what else to suggest.

Edit: And doesn't 4.1 make all interrupts hit? With this around the corner it will make P2 easier for you when you are working on it.

[njd.aitken]

You really don't, unless you plan on hit capping as a healer.

Holy paladins should be hit capped.

[arindam]

Our guild has a plate DPS kite the adds (for us it's a frost DK, hungering cold makes it really easy to stack them while they're dying). Having 3 tanks is probably too much of a DPS loss on phase 1 (and especially later in phase 3, when you only need 2). Your warrior might be able to do it in DPS spec, I've read in other places that a mage can also kite the adds very easily, I can see that being possible with Cone of Cold/Frost Nova/etc. I know Phase 1 is really frustrating right now and getting through it is the big focus, but it is super important that the adds die clumped up in one spot for Phase 3, so that should be a strong consideration in who you choose to kite the adds.

For positioning, we have Nef and Ony as far apart possible. If you picture the room as a circle, I try to position Nef so that his body is as close to a tangent line to that circle as possible. This means running him straight out to the edge, then turning him 90 degrees. At the start we burn Ony really hard, once Nef is down we split DPS and have our hunter go back and forth depending on which boss is ahead or behind. The people who are DPSing Nef and the healers on me and our frost DK stand on Nef's side to avoid getting tail lashed. Our frost DK gets the adds to die near Nef's tail, as trying to get them to die near Ony is risky due to tail lash + lightning, and directly in between the two is out of range of our healers. I'm not too sure what the people on Ony do unfortunately, since I just tank Nef, but to the best of my knowledge they spread out and try to stay out of tail lash range, as tail lash+crackle = death for a non tank.

Crackles hit hard, but as long as everyone is topped off and not getting hit by tail lashes, everyone should be able to survive a crackle even without personal CDs up (except tanks of course). Our hunter for example has no damage reducing CDs, so after every crackle he is ~10-15%, but he never dies. I (prot pally tank) have a CD rotation worked out for the crackles - I pop shield wall on the first crackle, glyphed DP on the second, TB trinket on-use on the third (we push the third crackle right after Ony dies). TB trinket is amazing on this fight, I strongly recommend your tanks should have it at a very minimum.


The most important things to getting through this phase are:
1) Tanks have CDs worked out for the crackles so they don't get gibbed
2) Positioning the raid properly to avoid getting gibbed by tail lash + crackle - unfortunately as the Nef tank I can't comment too much on this, other than to say that about half of our raid is stacked on Nef's side once he comes down, so they never get tail lashed
3) Having everyone topped off before the crackle hits - there is no raid damage other than crackle and tail lash for Phase 1.
4) Add control/dying in one spot - ideally you want 1 or 2 DPS doing this, bringing a 3rd tank is too much DPS loss


Hopefully there's something useful in there for you

[Richmond]

@Breyers - Our boomkin ended up tanking because we were really struggling on the control of the adds. Like i said, the hunter had a bad connection, the Mage actually never got brought into the equation (kinda stupid now i think about it) and the feral druid didnt kite them very well, he took far too much damage. The warrior on the other hand (our OT) is very good at kiting. Plus the Boomkin has a good tank OS

@Jinto - We do have a mage (like i said). And our interupters are Druid tank x 2, Feral Druid, Warrior. Although we haven't really seen a lot of this phase, there seems to be a lot of damage going around for the healers to worry about rather than concentrating on interrupts as well

Just to clarify. I'm after some pointers on Damage mitigation (raid wide) on the Electocutes - which seem to be killing us the most. And if anyone has an suggestions on altering our raid set up to make it alot easier for the whole raid

[Jinto]

You really don't, unless you plan on hit capping as a healer.

Both resto shaman and hpally are easily hit capped through talents.

@Richmond, 3 tanking it is rather pointless when you have a kitty. If you take away a bear though you have to make the kitty interrupt which may not be possible as the interrupt is (AFAIK) on a long cd. If you are 2 tanking it, a warrior is infinitely better than a druid in p3 for the adds.

[Hejoro]

^^^^ H pally's spirit is all hit too.

[Deleted]

this video sums it up to be honest

[Focault]

Damage mitigation on electrocutes was covered by people previously but can consist of bubblewall, PWB and things like this and also you should have shaman's elemental resistance totem down to help too.

Other things you can use are the TB trinket, hunters can glyph for 6% damage reduction, pre-shielding by priests etc. If your raid is at 100% before electrocute and you have elemental resistance down no one should be dying though.

And with the issues they're having I'd go 4healing over 3tanking. In the beginning when we first killed Nef we 4healed (1 was trade channel pug though) the fight and then moved to more standard raid setup with 3 healers and having dps warrior sword and board the adds in P1 and just use shackle and freezing trap to help him out. Also pally AoE undead stun right before Ony tail whip can help too if you're getting gibbed by that combo.

[Fenlnir]

On 10 man, why not just CC the adds? That's what my guild does on Nef and we usually have no issues.

[Judgejoebrwn]

Trying to navigate through all the potential offspec usage you claim to have to figure out what the standard 10-man comp you use is. If I read it correctly, you're a Feral tank, you have a Prot warrior, and another Feral druid dps. With this comp, you could have the Feral dps tank Onyxia, Warrior on the adds, you on Nefarian. Make use of Ring of Frost when the adds start getting large and ensure the Warrior is tanking them out the outer edge of the room to the north. This will be key for Phase 3. When the adds collapse, have the Warrior pick up Ony and let the Feral go back to DPS. The other option is to have the Warrior tank Ony the whole time and use your Hunter with a tanking pet and Glyph of MD to handle the adds.

With the adds out of the way, we have our Pally healer with the Onyxia tank alone and all 8 other raid members stacked as close to Nef as possible to heal the raid/Nef tank. If you're in melee range of Nef, Onyxia's tail whip won't hit you so the only damage the raid takes is the electrocute. With the shammy totem or Hunter aura, it'll typically hit for around 85-90k which is easily managable without personal CD's. Only push two crackles in Phase 1 until you get the hang of the later phases. Kill Onyxia, Nef should be around 75%, then make it to your platforms and interrupt.

We wiped over 80 times on this boss before we killed it, very few of those wipes coming from Phase 1. Most were due to horrible interrupt skills, then a portion were due to learning the kiting path in Phase 3. You'll probably wipe a lot more on this fight, just do your best not to get discouraged and keep pushing.

-Judge

[Breyers]

@Breyers - Our boomkin ended up tanking because we were really struggling on the control of the adds. Like i said, the hunter had a bad connection, the Mage actually never got brought into the equation (kinda stupid now i think about it) and the feral druid didnt kite them very well, he took far too much damage. The warrior on the other hand (our OT) is very good at kiting. Plus the Boomkin has a good tank OS

@Jinto - We do have a mage (like i said). And our interupters are Druid tank x 2, Feral Druid, Warrior. Although we haven't really seen a lot of this phase, there seems to be a lot of damage going around for the healers to worry about rather than concentrating on interrupts as well

Just to clarify. I'm after some pointers on Damage mitigation (raid wide) on the Electocutes - which seem to be killing us the most. And if anyone has an suggestions on altering our raid set up to make it alot easier for the whole raid

That might explain why your Tank keeps dying?

Also, to make it easier, get more people with Personal defensive cooldowns.
As well, 4healing it with a Disc priest (to bubble before Crackles) can alleviate some pressure.

[Zeta333]

First of all if people are still getting hit by onys lightning thats your raid failing to not stack up when she gets turned, the only time someone should ever get hit is say the add kiter has to run out of the safe zone real fast and thats it. You should be able to push nef twice in p1 and then an additional 2 times in p2 and the rest in p3. In p2 its best if 2 pillars kill off their adds them swim from their platform to the main one with an add still up, this way the raid can stack for crackle and everything will be good. And yes you can survive, its very easy.

[Dr420]

Ok having your dps warrior in dps gear and going sword and board till the adds go down is key. Kiting them back and forth from north to south is a bad thing. Have Ony and Nef facing north or south and the add tank using your slow traps, ring of frost, earthbind totem, or just the pillars to get space and dmg reduction from the adds. As for healing, Nef and Ony need to be 60 yds apart. Thats 30 yards from the middle where your raid AND healers should be standing. If your pally cant keep a tank up by himself hes doing something wrong, bottom line. Tell him to spam so that the tank doesnt die and you have 2 innervates to give him if he needs going into P2. As far as your raid dmg for crackles, your raid should all be in the middle, popping CD.s at the first crackle and then the healers take care of the 2nd one. Healing raid + priest circle ( not sure what thats called right off hand) plus a couple PoF, CoH, chain healz should more then take care of the dmg, just make sure your raid is topped off before you push one. That takes controll from your dps in your raid and you will have to call ppl out for not stopping to get them to comply. Padding the dps meeters means nothing in a wipe, thats a good line.

In P2 my guild never pushed crackles since its not necesary in 10 man, that ofcourse puts more pressure on your add tank in P3 to not get the adds in fire, so let him know that and tell him to suck it up and find a way. 3 tanks will cripple you in your initial attemts untill your group gets a good grasp on the fight so your healers need to keep the dps warrior up untill the ads die off in P1 and like it. Other then that id say you should clear what you have on farm a couple more times before you start extending lockouts. Council is a dps race in P3 and if you cant do that then Cho'gall will never happen, and if your pushing nef so you can do heroics faster, stop now. If you cant down normal nef or council then you have no shot at any heroics barring H Halfus if your healers are gods ( which reading your entire post im gonna assume they are not). So cool your jets, get some more ear, and then do things when everyone is pulling the 12-13k dps they should be in 10 mans.

[Zeta333]

get some more ear, and then do things when everyone is pulling the 12-13k dps they should be in 10 mans.

I dont think gear is gona fix this as our dps in blues were pulling more than this, if this is the case they need to step it up ALOT, becuase 12-13k is unacceptable imo.

[Bordon0702]

This is how my raid does nef.

-Holy paly with righteous fury, and mage kite the adds around. Holy paly fears one of the adds, and since you have a priest you can keep one perma shackled. This leaves you with only 4 adds to deal with assuming they stay cc'ed. Have paly get threat on all of them you take a few hits as a holy paly at first. To kite use holy wrath to stun, then mage can do frost novas, and ring of frost. Usually by the time they are out of ring of frost holy wrath and frost novas will be up again to cc. That should pretty much give you enough time to get them down.

- When nef lands we have all dps except for a shadow priest switch to nef and dps. Get at least past 80% then if you need to switch back to ony do so either way pushing into phase 2 after 80 is ideal