I think that World of Logs - Real Time Raid Analysis would be the kill.
As you see the dps is not really high, but the heals on the raid are kept at a minimum. Anub was healed by 8.2 Mio.

Seeing as the block OTs have quite low HP I'm not sure would have mattered. Not to mention a single freezing slash would mean a dead tank from lack of blocking.

They may or may not have intended for Block to be "the" way, however the mechanics themselves are not particularly different or broken--it's just that we have very limited exposure to physical damage debuffs.

Basically, "all school" damage multipliers (e.g. Defensive Stance and the like) are done first--along with Armor--followed by Block, followed by school-specific damage multipliers, followed by absorbs.

School-specific damage multipliers have come toward the end many times in the past, but since most of them are magical we have a) not seen the interaction with block and b) not much cared about the order since all magical calculations are multiplicative until it reaches absorbs at the end and thus the particular order matters very little. The difference here is that a static reduction is being placed in the middle of the process (Block.)

They could always change it so that school-specific multipliers were multiplied with the generic damage multipliers early on--which would put Block before Absorb but after the multipliers. However, they could also accomplish this by letting the adds buff themselves instead of debuff the player--single tanking really wouldn't be on the table, either, since the add damage would be quite hard to manage without being able to abuse Block's peculiar mechanics. I'd think they are most likely to do the latter option rather than fussing with the mechanical order of multipliers--since there's no telling what obscure mechanics could break due to changing how those multipliers are applied.

My strict 10-man guild is working on heroic Anub now, and I'm looking for a little raid (specifically healing) setup advice. Last night we got our kiting down so we were only using two permafrosts per submerge, leaving us with an extra in case of emergency plus the one needed to tank phase 3 adds on. Phase 1/2 execution is excellent, but I'm trying to figure out how to handle phase three.

We have two options:
1) 2 Healers: Using only 2 healers, we can just make it into phase 3 before the 3rd submerge without Bloodlust. Depending on who shows up that night, our two healers are either two priests (one holy, one disc) or a priest (typically the holy one) and myself. With the two priests last night, it didn't seem like they were able to keep everyone up, but I'm not sure if it was lack of proper strategy, or just a gear/skill thing. Would it be doable with 2, having one (disc priest or myself) on tanks and the holy priest solo managing the raid? If so, we can save BL for phase 3.

2) 3 Healers: Healing setup for this will be either H.Priest, D.Priest, Paladin or H.Priest, Paladin, me, depending on who shows up. (In the two healer strategy, the paladin goes Ret.) With only 5 DPS, I'm pretty sure we're going to need Bloodlust to get to phase 3 before the 3rd submerge, and we also have more problems with scarabs eating people during submerges when we drop a DPS.

(Side note: For the two healer strategy, I feel like it makes more technical sense to have one of the priests go shadow when it's a Pr/Pr/Pa night, due to Paladin Beacon healing the tanks and sticking a shadow priest in one group and a healing stream totem in the second to help with Swarm healing. The reason we've been doing it this way is that I'm our highest DPS healer and the paladin is next; neither priest really knows or likes shadow.)

I guess the short version of my question is: Do people normally use 2 or 3 healers on this fight (keeping in mind strictly 10-man gear on heals and DPS), and if 2, what would a two-priest healing strategy look like?

In our 10-man groups (which have gotten 50/50 kills a number of times) we typically use 2 1/2 healers--e.g. 1 MT healer, 1 raid healer, and some hybrid which helps out on the initial Penetrating Cold casts if needed. This takes away a lot of the uncertainty.

If you have decent DPS, almost always the deaths in P3 will come from Penetrating Cold or the MT. People dying due to Leeching Swarm is really uncommon. So, with that in mind, healers should always focus on handling Penetrating Cold successfully without deaths. If you get to a point where people are always surviving PC and dying to Leech, then you may need to focus on that but 99% of the time that will not be the case in my experience.

Additionally, you can often outheal Leech in 10-man simply with Healing Stream totems, a couple of HoTs, and JoL for your direct DPS. Using more passive healing for handling this takes the pressure off the raid healer and lets them focus on what will actually wipe you: people dying from Penetrating Cold.

We run 2-3 groups a week and have always seen the same trend consistantly: the difference between a wipe and an easy kill on Anub-10 (Heroic) is often a matter of surviving the first 2 Penetrating Cold casts without anyone dying.

Any healer can be used for raid healing, really, although we typically use Druids or Priests. We usually have our Resto Shaman (if present in the group) go Elemental to be our .5 support healer, leaving Paladin/Priest, Priest/Druid, or Paladin/Druid as the primary healing setups. But, really, any setup works fine.

We are a strict 10man Raid (in the "guildox"-sense), too. We use 2 healers on anub on heroic and we get him under 30% just before his second burrow (though we sometimes have to use BL about 10 seconds before he is going to submerge again).

Make sure you kill the second spawn of adds after he has burrowed and the fourth spawn of adds after you got him under 30%. This should give you some valuable dps on Anub. We also let the fifth set of adds burrow in order to decrease incoming damage on the OT, which in turn decreases healing done on Anub.

I am usually one of the two healers on Anub and I can only say that Beacon of Light feels very strong, if not even imbalanced. We even had a kill were the 2nd healer died around 20%. There are some important things to remember for healing P3, though:

You don't need a specific raid healer. If your raid is down to about 1k HP, the damage from Leeching Swarm will be 250HP per second. This will nearly be outhealed by spells like vampiric embrace, leader of the pack, healing stream totem etc. You do want to sit the raid at those low numbers to minimize healing done to anub. You should therefore only explicitly heal LS damage if you have few or none of those spells present. An occasional chainheal, circle of healing or wild growth is nearly enough for that. Just don't be scared when the raid stays at 1k HP.

The critical healing in P3 is the PC-debuff. When applied, it ticks for 6k every 3 seconds. Mind that it does NOT tick when applied. So from the moment you see the debuff icon to the first damage tick you have full 3 seconds to land a heal (or a shield). We assigned one debuff to one healer (the grid sorting was identical, so one would take the person in group 1 or the rightmost if both debuffs were in the same group).

Obviously, having a paladin with beacon makes tank healing nearly trivial. I beacon the Anub tank and throw HL either on the OT or my PC target. If you have 2 non-paladin healers my guess would be to assign a tank to each healer.

If you need further thoughts specific to your raid composition you can PM me if you want, because I am not too sure how much of detailed posts like this are allowed here.

We (ToC 25 man geared with some 25 heroic stuff) use 2 healers. Best combo for us was pala (on tanks, doh) and druid. Did it relatively fine with disc priest and the same druid. Tanks must burn their cooldowns in P3 as it feels way too risky without it. Though a lot of P3 deaths were due to stupid, avoidable things for us. Like Shockwave hitting only one add during Shadowstrike, leading to a screwed Madness achievement...

We also have a spriest and ele shaman for party wide healing. Totem does negligible healing while spriest does 2-3k in P3. In comparison, druid did 15-18k and disc priest did 6-7k in P3. Anub died at 5.982.267 damage taken. I don't know if that's horrible overhealing or not.

One of the particular frustrations of ToC for my guild is deciding what is an exploit and what isn't. We don't want to exploit encounters to beat then, but In previous tiers, it feels like the dividing line was more obvious. Is there a blue post we've missed? Failing that, a community consensus?

In particular:

Levitate on Gormokk -- we've not used this, but it's so widespread now, even showing up on major strategy guides. There's also a "flavor" reason for it to work.. is it intended as a subtle mechanic like being able to tranq shot a missed crash?

The previously discussed champions mechanics. We're likely going forward with the "tanking" of mobs with a low HP tank, especially as it seems that it has more to do with focusing on low HP targets and not much to do with applying debuffs. Use hidden target preferences to force boss attention is pretty much a staple of raiding (think nature disruption on steelbreaker) and is behavior consistent with a really stupid arena team's tunnel vision. On the other hand, we've restrained from focusing pets to focus healer attention on them, which seems a little bizarre.

The door strat doesn't seem to be an exploit to us. There are tradeoffs and you've basically powering through instead of finessing. Other people disagree of course.

Finally, using block tanks on anub feels exploitive and strange, but we're going to do it anyway when we get there. It's clear Blizzard is aware of it and it's such a huge advantage it's hard to ignore. Because this strat seems endorsed but is so unintuitive, it makes me question our stance on Levitate. Are we just ignoring an advantage here?

I'm not real sure how any of them fall into the "exploit" category. There are some historical favorites where Blizzard clamped down on exploits. In AQ40, a guild removed a wall from the game files client side to save having the clear an instance notorious for brutal -- and boring -- trash. In Ulduar, obviously much more reasonably, a guild made the mobs in Yogg bug out in a clearly unintended way preventing them from doing much of anything.

What you list, while a series of things that might not be fully intended, falls much closer to fighting Archimonde "on the hill". They are nifty tips and tricks that help make your life easier. They don't involve casting any unreasonable spells (can anyone say DI Razorgore -- the boss mod you are supposed to be killing?). The doorway is part of the room. Using silly terrain was common to beat at least bosses in BWL (more for some guilds), one boss in old Naxx, who knows what else I'm missing. When Blizzard decided the hill was too much of a terrain advantage in Archimonde, they pushed people off the hill with a wall.

Block tanking is no more absurd an advantage than druids -- or of course Death Knights -- had in Sarth 3D. Or DKs in Vezax hard mode.

The faction champions fight almost certainly can be "tanked" because of the low HP and not any "exploit" around demo shout. But if demo shout contributes, so what? It's not shocking the mobs don't want their AP lowered. And I'm not super convinced that strat is repeatable anyway unless you main a low HP person for them to keep "training".

So what of levitate? Well, the fire is thrown at the ground beneath you or at you in the air. Is it shocking when it's thrown in the air at a levitated person? No. Is it probably not what was supposed to happen? Who knows. But that "strategy" of levitating some of your ranged is about as important to beating the fight as whether or not you had a good meal at Taco Bell the afternoon before your raid. I mean it's nice to have people not find themselves in fire. But it's not really important. You can always move if you are at ranged. It's not the fire is an instant "gib" of the player who gets hit by it.

I'm certainly hoping you're right, and I'm hoping I don't veer too far from the thread topic. Still, I think there's quite a bit of grey area here. I'm not trying to be argumentative here, but I thought it might be useful to give some more historical examples.

But there was also prince's doorway in karazan, and the oft patched safe spots on heigen. Both of these exploits tried to ignore AoE damage by clever positioning--on the other hand, I think the doorway is acceptable since it only minimizes rather than ignores the orbs (and also amplifies the main mechanic of the specials).

Here, the ambiguity is in the nature of the mechanic, where blocks are amplified (but feral pseudo-blocks aren't). I don't think this was at all intended, but was an oversight in development that was de facto accepted by blizzard. I think the closest parallel is in the old shield block pushing crushing blows off the combat table--you have a technical bug that becomes widely exploited, then accepted and balanced around. Since this is apparently embraced by blizzard now, I don't see a problem with it.

Well, you keep a tank low on HP via careful healing. Similar strats in the past included using battleshout in pet-laden groups for AoE threat in p2 nef, blessing of wisdom threat in the same, and battleshout threat on twin emps. Was also pretty non intuitive and eventually patched out.

It's not a big expoit or strategy certainly, but it is an advantage. I honestly wonder if it's intentionally coded that way--I can't think of any other targeted spells that interact like that with levitate. I hope it's not an exploit, honestly.

Blizzard has historically either fixed or strongly warned against commonly used exploits. They closed Prince's door in Kara, fixed the spots on Heigan, etc. When they find out about something that's not a quick and easy fix, there's generally a blue post saying, "We're watching. Don't do it." (Unless they think that not enough people know about it for it to be an issue, and would rather keep quiet until it's fixed, but considering how fast information travels these days, this is unlikely to be true for encounter mechanics.)

My point is that some of these things are easily fixable. Even (especially?) with programming experience, I try not to speculate on what is an "easy fix" and what isn't, but in some cases it seems pretty cut and dry. For example, using Levitate to "skip" a fire on Gormok could be easily hotfixed by changing the targeting to a ground-targeted effect exactly like multiple other existing spells and effects.

Anyway, and this is the key point in my opinion, the instance has been out for quite a while, and most of these strategies have been public and widespread for a long time. I wouldn't worry. The time to be worried is in the first couple weeks of an encounter when people are still figuring things out, and Blizzard is still deciding whether or not Strategy X is a big deal or not, and if so, how they plan to handle it. Even then, if you're caught doing something that's borderline (borderline = Levitate; over the line = bugging Yogg+0) before they come out against it, it's unlikely to have any real repercussions.

We decided to go for 2 healers and zerging him down once we had tried the fight a few times. It honestly feels more stable than trying to control p3 to just burn it before you get a second set of adds. We do it with one burrow, kill adds if they spawn before 30%, tank otherwise. Both our insanity kills have been stable, with the first one having anubs tank die at 1%.

We have a druid/dpriest healing team though, so can't help on that side.

Regarding whether using levitate is an exploit or not, there was a blue post in the German World of Warcraft forum some time ago stating that it is NOT an exploit:

World of Warcraft (de) Foren -> Gormok levitieren Exploit ja/nein?
Which translated into English means as much as:

I think your DPS might be the issue. We only just got Anub down in heroic 10 man last night, we went with 2 healers and burned him into phase 3 before the second burrow consistently in our attempts (without bloodlust, which we saved for phase 3). If it's taking you until just before the 3rd burrow, that's taking you about 50% longer, putting your DPS at about 2/3 of what we had. I don't know if that will be enough for phase 3...that phase may just be taking too long for the healers.

What is your strategy for DPSing the adds? The first set of each phase is largely taken care of with melee AoE (ret pally, dps warrior, and rogue), allowing us to keep dps focused on anub for the most part, with the second set in phase 1 being focused on by the melee while ranged stay on Anub until he burrows. The second set of adds is ignored during the second Anub phase, just brought near the melee (though not on the ice) so melee AoE can do some damage to get them to submerge. This maximizes dps on Anub.

This is probably why it's taking us so long to get to Phase 3. We were actually switching all but the two melee (off-spec ret and DK) to actively killing the first set of adds in each phase instead of letting them die eventually to incidental AoE. We're heading back in tonight, so we'll try just semi-ignoring them aside from Living Bomb/Chain Lightning/Multi-Shot type damage.

Like Katria says right above me: your dps is way too low. Anub'arak feels tuned for one submerge phase in 10 man because you can't guarantee excellent kiting with HoP and Gripped patches. The goal of the fight is to get him low enough before his second submerge timer comes up. That is possible in a 2/3/5 set-up in pure 10 man gear and without blowing Bloodlust early if your group has enough synergy.

You need to find out why your dps is lacking. If you are able to kill the previous bosses your raid should have enough dps to -at the very least- get close to the goal. So we must assume something is wrong with the strategy. These points might help:

-Have your melee run in together with the tank on the pull, not 5 seconds afterwards and 20 yards behind. The boss doesn't cleave so they can run through him safely. The occasional parry on the pull won't kill the tank either.
-How many dps switch to the first pair of adds? We have 2 melee focus on them with additional "free" AoE from those on the boss, like Whirlwind/Cleave/... Using more than 2 will lower your dps on Anub too much.
-Don't have anyone switch to the second pair. You want to get Anub as low as possible and those adds will never Shadow Strike due to timers and mechanics.
-Our melee runs south during submerge to be quick on the small spawns. Ranged finish off the 2 big adds if they aren't being followed. The last few scarabs should die just when Anub comes up again. Kiting is really easy cause we can use up to 5 patches.
-Pair 3 is like pair 1. Blade Flurry from our rogue is back up, so the adds die fast.
-Ignore pair 4 again like pair 2 until Anub goes into phase 3. All dps switch to the adds at once and kill them.
(-Bloodlust time is now if you didn't need it before)
-We kill the 5th pair, again with all dps.
-We ignore the 6th pair and tank them off the patch, but close to Anub for a /focus kick, pummel or shock if needed. They will submerge and release a burden off your healers.
-The boss should be dead by now.

We use dedicated interrupters for Shadow Strike. I use a mouseover macro that puts one of them as my focus and gives it a mark. That gives me another precious second of boss dps time compared to target switching.

You can opt to kill the 6th pair off adds and ignore the 7th if you are a bit behind on schedule. You'll get the feel for when you need to burn the boss after a while.

Our raid set-up for today's kill was:
2 Paladins // Holy Priest, Disc Priest, Druid // Enhancement Shaman, Warrior, Death Knight, Rogue, Warlock. Fairly melee stacked, but having a Holydin might give you an extra dps spot. We only raid 10s, but there are probably 2-3 25 man pieces in the raid from trade pugs.

Now, it gets absurd. Block pushing crushing off the hit table was never regarded as a bug. It falls in line with the known priority list a hit table is constructed with.

Not to beat a dead horse, but more guilds have killed Anub HC without using block tanks than guilds killed Sarth3D without a druid/DK when it mattered. This is nothing more than the usual disparities in the tanking classes.
Besides the gear needed for effective block tanking is neither that low level (yes one blue trinket, we all know how a blue trinket once in a while shines, and 2 iLvL 213 items IIRC) nor that hard to collect. It's no more absurd than using mauradon gear at Huhuran, or green arcane resist gear on Solarian (remember that one?).
Four tanks in our guild meet the criteria to effectively block tank the adds. We might be lucky, but on the other hand we had no DK to tank Vezzax hard mode (or other hard modes in Ulduar) for us. You win some, you lose some.

I can't see a reason to bring a third healer for Anub-10. They'd be worthless for phases one and two, and counterproductive in phase 3. I did (try) to heal on some of our early attempts so I know how stressful phase 3 can get. It's gotten dramatically easier for us since those attempts, and the two things that did it are:

1. Making sure we had a holy paladin.
2. Stacking as much nature resist as possible.

One is obvious and may not always be possible, but I think a lot of 10-mans underestimate the value of nature resist. We make sure our hunter switches to aspect of the wild, flask both tanks with lesser resistance, I use the 10 and 25-man Onyxia resist rings, and the LW nature resist bracer enchant. As we added more our phase 3 became dramatically more reliable.

If you really need a third healer for phase 3, it's probably best to do a .5 healer to make phase 1 and 2 go more smoothly.

I would question the use of NR in the 10-man Anub encounter. Why use it? Leeching Swarm at 10-man values is not a significant problem and will rarely--if ever--be the cause of death. JoL/Totems/VE can easily outheal the swarm damage. Almost all deaths will be from Penetrating Cold in the raid, so you may as well just wear proper DPS gear to burn him down faster.

Using Auras and stuff, sure, but I can't really see that swapping on NR gear/enchants would do much in 10-man, realistically. It pretty much just comes down to:
a) Don't let your MT die (time heals correctly with Freezing Slash timer)
b) Don't let Penetrating Cold targets die (have clear assignments, use the correct heals quickly)

If you have solid enough DPS to get Anub down in 1 P2 phase (which is ideal) then you will only need to survive 2 or (maybe) 3 Penetrating Cold cast phases before the fight is more or less over. You can even lose someone on the 3rd PC cast (provided it isn't a healer) and still limp to a kill easily. Surviving the first two PC cast phases without a death is basically the key to P3--after that it's smooth sailing provided the MT stays alive.

Another thing to note is that if adds spawn late in P3, you may as well tank them on melee AoE DPS away from a frost patch to force them to burrow. Due to the speed of the 10-man P3, it's easy to simply burrow them for the majority of the phase.

Due to our DPS, my general rule of thumb is: if adds spawn more than 8-10 seconds into P3, I burrow them. If they are up on the transition or spawn within the first 4-6 seconds of the phase we kill them, then burrow the next wave if it actually spawns before the end of the fight. The validity of this approach depends heavily on your DPS, though. This does have the effect of putting more DPS on Anub (and thus shortening of the phase) as well as lowering the healing needed on the OT significantly.

I have some questions regarding the anub25man hc encounter. We usually reach anub with around 47 tries left, which makes be bealive there are some skill involved :P.

However, at anub we really have a big problem in phase 3. We use the "2 tank" strategy running with 6 healers.
The problems are as follows:

1. The adds that comes in phase3 all of a sudden takes longer to kill (and we even pop BL as soon as the boss reaches 30%). Even asking the raid why adds are taking longer, everyone answers "I am doing the exact same thing as during the first phases. Is there something we have missed here? Have others noticed that adds take longer to die during phase3? Or is this simply a classic case of "OMG I have BL so I must pew pew boss"?

2. Penetrating Cold keeps killing people. We are using the addon that put raidmarks on people with the PC debuff, and everyone can see raidmarks on there Grid (and we have assigned healers to raidmarks), but still around 20% people starts dying (usually the healers). Is it better to use 7 healers maybe?

3. Tank is always at 50% and eventually he dies. Probably this could be solved using 7 healers, however, I have read about having 2 holy paladins gemming/glyphing for FoL spamming on the tank but our paladins are EXTREMLY skeptical as to it being effecient or not.

I would love to hear about the "problems" and "progress" paths from guilds that have downed him, be it here or as a PM.

Thank you.

The NR is meant for the tanks, not the entire raid. Going by logs of our first Tribute to Insanity (10) run (with 2/3/5 setup), about 60% of the damage I took as Anub-tank in phase 3 was from Leeching Swarm. This was with just a hunter aura as NR. Adding a helm-enchant, bracer-enchant (for leatherworkers) and a Mixology-buffed resistance flask, I can buff my average resist-percentage from 20% to 40%, which is a very good improvement at the expense of just a little bit of health (which in turn further reduces the damage from LS) and even less avoidance.

The main difference is psychological.

The only real change most DPS have for phase 3 is, to be prepared to use a Frost Pot or Frost Ward/Cloak/Ice Block etc if they get Penetrating Cold. Aside from that, for most DPS, nothing changes. The illusion of change comes from these factors:

- People are sitting at 5% health
- Vent discussion gets louder. People start yelling out things not usually said in Phase 1 more agressively (Like "Incoming PC switch, get ready guys! Any second now.. get ready...")
- People start getting excited/nervous/overwhelmed (and forget their job)

We noticed the exact same thing on recent attempts: DPS mysteriously drops off upon entering phase 3 when, ironically, there is no reason it should. Its understandable that people get nervous about being at such low health. It's how we've been trained to be for years (Low health = Your going to die!). You need to make people to realise how safe they are - and that Phase 3 for DPS is really just a glorified Phase 1 done at 5% health.

People will need to come to the realisation that Leeching swarm is a very safe mechanic, and they aren't going to die from it. Not to panic, not forget their job - and theres no reason to get overwhelmed listening to all the vent chatter. The Leech looks alot worse than it really is, with mimimal planning (JOL, LOTP, HS totem etc). You can use this amazing tool to visually show this: http://gcbirzan.appspot.com/leech . The truth is the PC + Leech interaction can kill people, but thats mostly in the hands of your healers to manage.

One way to help condition your DPS to the change in vent atmosphere for phase 3, is to do some attempts treating Phase 1 like Phase 3 with regards to PC. Make everyone listen to the healers announce PC, yell out who they are covering, yelling at people to pot etc. (Even if the whole raid is at 100% health. Its just to get people used to listening to how P3 is handled on vent.)

If you don't do this in Phase 1 ever, then it's going to feel odd for DPS when they hit phase 3 - and factors like this do contribute psychologically to making 'phase 3 feels different'. That in turn leads to nerves, apprehension and even worse - people getting overwhelmed and forgetting to do simple jobs. I went to good lengths to try and show our DPS why Phase 3 is nothing to be scared of, on our private forums. Increasing familiarity with the fight by educating your players on Leeching Swarm mechanics and Phase 3 in general, can help immensely to reduce any sort of psychological factors from creeping in.

Make sure your players understand how Anub'arak actually dies in Phase 3. The big changes to Anub'araks health in Phase 3 happen during the single target RDPS time between Add waves. Its important to kill said waves quickly, because typical AOE RDPS will barely beat the Leeching HPS - if at all. It might seem logical for DPS to assume they should all 'zerg the boss' in phase 3, but some DPS don't realise that the adds must die in a timely fashion as well - for solid single target RDPS uptime between waves - which is what really kills him. (Some comments in this paragraph will not apply equally to every strat.)

As a personal sidenote, the psychological challenges that Anub'arak brings for some players is a hallmark of good encounter design. It's reminiscent of Archimonde - who also challenged many players with a "Safety first, DPS second" mantra. These two fights are also very polarizing: People can absolutely love or hate them.