If you have any warrior engineers, Recklessness+Sapper Charge can't be beat. Really though, you don't need any of that junk. Just give all your cloth casters Invuln pots, which are pretty cheap to make, and have them pop them as the zerg arrives. It all ends quickly.

We use alliance ez-mode and BoP as many mages as we can and let them go to town. A few warriors on each side SS / WW the mobs up and mages burn them down.

It takes about 30 seconds for us now. Even if we get unlucky and lose a lot of people its pretty easy to limp to the finish line although it takes a little while...:P

We just have the paladins pop off Holy Wrath before the mages deal significant damage, and by the time the skeletons make it to the mages/warlocks from the paladins they're mostly dead.

Holy Water is something that people can do on their own time that makes the fight go a little easier. It isn't required by any means, and certainly not as important as the FR buff on Vael. I take the time to make a few sapper charges for Nef every week, I wouldn't have to, but it's a easy contribution to the fight.

We use alliance ez-mode and BoP as many mages as we can and let them go to town. A few warriors on each side SS / WW the mobs up and mages burn them down.

It takes about 30 seconds for us now. Even if we get unlucky and lose a lot of people its pretty easy to limp to the finish line although it takes a little while...:P [/quote]
By "unlucky," Somn means having the MT forget his cloak and therefore losing 4-5 people right off the bat. Then at 6%, there was a bad string of fears, killing the tank and causing the whole raid to get shadowflamed, leaving about 12 people up and taking 10 minutes to burn that last 6% on my first night in the guild. That was quite the "welcome-to-failure" moment for me.

But yeah, in the 3 or 4 nef kills I've seen, a smooth stage one is really the key to the fight, since it's extremely easy to get into a rhythm during stage 2, and mana never really becomes an issue. The one thing that Nef lacks during Stage 2 is a way of consistently damaging the whole raid, making it smooth sailing once you learn how to deal with the class calls (which takes one attempt pretty much)

Because it's fun to see the big numbers on SCT, I do when I remember to take it.

I'm kind of dissapointed that I've never had a chance to use holy water or sapper charges on the drakonids. Using one on the entire fangkris bug tunnel was pretty sweet though.

Holy Wrath anyone?

There are three main keys to phase 1, assuming you use the AoE side + assist side (which we have been doing since day 1, regardless of colors).

- Containment of drakonids (especially important on AoE side, but still important on assist side)
- Quick and precise assists (on the assist side, obviously)
- Swift annihilation of the big guys

If those things work, that phase should be automatic. Consumables are of very low importance here compared to execution.

Being alliance, the fight ends there.

Why do people do the "One AE side, One Assist side" strategy anyways?

Why not just do both sides as a mixture of AE and assisting?

Assisting is a ton harder to do when AE graphics are flying all over the place, and the two sides have different preferences: The ST side wants few targets for maximum efficiency, the AE side wants more targets for maximum efficiency.

It also allows you to adjust to different color combinations. You don't want to be AoEing blue drakonids, for example.

We clear out after Chromaggus and have one person suicide to see which colors are on which side and we plan accordingly. By the time we get back in and buffed Nef is back up again anyway.

We use a focus fire main assist approach, with rogues/warlocks on one side, hunters/mages on the other. 3 warriors each side, all going 2-hander (DPS is key). We've basically done every single nef kill like this, and with enough practice your raid can blast through the spawns no matter what colour or which side. A couple weeks back we had rogues/warlocks on red and mages/hunters on blue and lost noone on the way. That said, it is, like so many other fights, all down to what works best for you.

Once you can control phase 1 consistently, the rest of the fight is pretty much on a platter. Even the zerg can't wipe you out unless you completely clusterfuck it, and even then, as pointed out earlier, you can crawl over the finish line with like 10 people.

And as Gurg mentioned, Warrior engineers absolutely dominate phase 3.

I said further up, I am not sure whether it is by luck or just the way it is, but we use the melee / AoE side strat and have not once wiped on Phase 1 since the first time we made it to Phase 2.

The mobs that are best killed by melee always spawn by the throne for us and the AoE friendly mobs by the door. We've only killed Nef. about 12 times or so now but in all 20 or so times we have gotten to him and worked on him it has always been this way.

Since our strategy works every time and our raid DPS is pretty high I would even be confident enough to say that if we did have spawns on the wrong side people could switch sides fast enough to prevent a wipe.

Also, I just want to ask if anyone else knows what the hell makes Nefarius chase one person around shadowbolting them?

Since the first time we have gotten to Nef. he has stuck to me through phase 1 every single time for all of phase 1. I take more damage than anyone else in phase 1 usually just from his stupid SB. Even when he teleports across the room he keeps firing the SB's across the room at me. When I am not there apparently he just follows a random targeting method of some sort and shoots at a number of different people.

Heal aggro. When you heal yourself up after being bolted you are just generating more and more.

For what it's worth, we've never used a single bit of AoE on phase 1, ever. I just evenly split most of the raid in half and assist/focus-fire everything that spawns. 16 on one side, 16 on the other, and a separate group of 8 that does nothing but kill chromatics in a separate spot. Lots of different ways of doing the fight.

I have asked other healers on our side to heal me instead of healing myself before to see if it would make a difference as healing aggro was my first thought but not really noticed he bolted me any less. Since its not much of a problem for me to heal myself through the bolts as well as others I stopped worrying about it and figured better me than a mage. :)

Thanks for the tip Gurg, I'll have to experiment with it some more.

Another question, what about group setup? Do you have one healer in a group that is responsible for that group? Do you max your shammies WF or GoA totems by putting them in all rogue/hunter groups?

Our officers seem to not worry too much about maxing the shammies totems in regards to the raid DPS. Not knocking them, just wondering if it is something we should put more emphasis on, I think we should.

Each side gets one Sham/War/Rogue/Rogue/[War OR Rogue] group, usually. Definitely make use of totems. I like Nef phase 1 because I get to MA and spam earth shock while hitting things with Sulfuras. And I'm a Resto shaman!

Nef's bolts are aggro based, Gurg is right.

I am sure it is, I just had not experimented with it enough to be sure of it myself, i.e. I am going to play around some more until I can figure out what exactly gets me aggro. and what does not.

Thanks for the information guys.

Oh yeah, we also have our druids go cat form in P1 so they don't pull mad healing aggro (serious :P). But we usually only field 3-4 druids a raid.

we actually warlock tank either side if it's bronze or green. hellfire helps take down everything that spawns really fast. last night we didn't have enough to go after ouro so we did BWL instead, and probably had our smoothest stage 1 ever. there wasn't a single drakonid skeleton farther than one step from the doorway. that sort of concentrated killing makes stage three MUCH easier, since all of the constructs spawn in one place and can be more readily contained. we generally just have our non-tanking warriors challenging shout/shield wall and let the AOE take care of it.