I assume you are Off-tanking the second set of adds each wave. Are you sure nobody is trying to pad DPS meters by AOE'ing the second set of adds, instead of single target zerging the boss? Are your melee following Anub, until the very last second, as your MT drags him off the ice patch in preparation for the burrow? Is everyone DPS'ing until the very last second before he burrows, or do they start running off prematurely in anticipation that they might get Pursued? Have you tried having several healers (especially healing priests, with mind sear) AOE/DPS during up-phases, and only switch to healing for phase 3? Remind people to use their 3 minute CD's during the second set of adds, as they single target zerg the boss during the initial phase 1.

When many guilds first try Anub'arak, it's a struggle to get to phase 3 in time, but after just a small amount of practise (little to no gear upgrades) it becomes easy to consistently get him to transition up to 30+ seconds before the third burrow phase. Little factors like the aforementioned are some of the things which help facilitate that.

I've actually told them to keep AoEing the second set of adds, even though a submerge is coming because a)if the adds don't die quickly enough, then we don't have time to start killing the scarabs and b) if the add tank (we're using a single block tank) gets chased, we're in trouble. We don't kill them before submerge, but when we're doing well they die shortly after submerge, right as the first scarab spawns - how do you handle them if you've still got a bunch of adds up and the tank gets targetted?

At least based on WoL parses, it seems we can clearly do a ton more AoE damage with the same gear we've got - which in turn will allow us to take people with bad AoE off of the adds and back on the boss.

We have never had Anub chasing our single (blockset) offtank as long as he was still tanking adds. Having seen about 150 of these kite phases now, I'm fairly sure he never will.

The trick is to AoE away the first set of adds and completely ignore the second set until Anub burrows. You then proceed to AoE the adds while performing the kite. This simply maximizes your DPS by increasing your DPS uptime. Your tank getting targeted by scarabs is pretty much a non-issue as those will die in seconds in the AoE you're doing. And even then, the offtank gets spamhealed hard enough to not even notice a few stacks of acid ticking during P1. DPS-wise, we aim for 70% after the first P1 and 45% after the second. This gives ample time to have a clean start in phase 3. Most video's I have seen have Anub anywhere between 45% and 40% when he burrows for the second time, so it's reasonable to assume that's the DPS benchmark you should be looking at.

What we found crucial to a succesfull swap between the third P1 and P3 is to make sure people are not getting hit by scarabs after Anub has popped back up. You can then let it tick out before pushing Anub to 30% without the danger of him submerging again.

And while I'm at it, we have been consistently wiping in phase 3 on the second wave of adds in that phase. In all cases, both the healing paladins we had pulled aggro from an add. This is not a problem in P1, but when sitting at 500 health, this is obviously fatal. We are using an MD for one add and ToT the second one. ToT seems not to generate enough aggro to get past the healers (but the paladins specifically, an no they're not using RF). We have the healers stacked near the offtank, making sure the OT is between them and the adds and this works fine for the first wave. I just find it odd this always happens on the second wave. We ran out of tries for this week so we can't try a new position or just pre-emptive bubbles for this particular wave, but I wondered if anyone had experienced similar issues and if so, how did you fix them?

Try single target zerging the boss, and ignore the second set of adds completely until he burrows. You don't want to AOE the second set of adds until the burrow phase. We also aim for the ~70% first burrow, ~40-45% second burrow benchmarks.

The scarabs don't spawn en masse immediately upon entering the burrow phase, and they only have a low health value. You don't need to have the Burrower adds dead/near-dead in preparation for them. Correct use of kiting, snares, ice patches, stuns will also help control the Acid Dot. The Acid dot itself taken from the first burrow phase, will never carry through to phase 3 - because you will have to go through two burrow phases. Even the Acid Dots from the second burrow phase will likely run out before/just as phase 3 starts (assuming you transition him very close to the third burrow time).

We also use a single block tank, and I can't honestly remember the last time the Burrower OT has been pursued. I seem to recall originally believing the OT is immune to being Pursued actually - because it's just so rare and nobody has seen or can remember it happening. This would be after ~150+ attempts, most with multiple burrow phases, and not one memory of the OT getting chased initially on the burrow phase.

Anub'arak likely has an exclusion rule that stops him Pursuing players who have Expose Weakness.

Where do you tank Anub'arak roughly in the room? I assume that your healers are standing behind a Ice Patch? Such that any adds who try to get past the OT have to move at -80% speed to try and reach them? The only times we have healer-death agro issues from adds, is when a healer was out of position, and the adds didnt have to run over an ice-patch to reach them. Simply standing 'near the ot' was not enough, using the Ice Patch was the other important factor. Tell your Paladins to get rid of Glypth of Holy Light as well, assuming you have Leeching Healing covered already. It's just extra unnecessary healing for Anub to leech, and more threat for your Paladins.

Whether your Ice Patches work effectivey to do this, depends a little on where you tank Anub'arak (aka where you drop the initial patch). This will determine the angles the Nerubian Burrowers will come in from. We tank Anub'arak close to the far side of the room, no-where near the middle. It helps narrow the angle-cone adds can come in from to reach healers. The smaller the cone, the better the chance that all adds would have to go over the patch to reach healers (Who will subsequently be protected via the snare the patch gives, giving your OT more time to attack them as they attempt to move across it).

I've seen videos of Anub'arak tanked successfully in several positions throughout the room. From our experience, however, its much safer and more reliable to tank him closer to the far side for the aforementioned reasons.

If your AoE DPS is killing the adds before the second-wave spawns during the first couple of up-phases, you can single-target Anub (with ranged DPS) during the second waves. You should have the DPS for phase three. I've also found that the biggest thing to increase phase three DPS is minimizing the passive healing.

I'm a little surprised at everyone saying "kill the first wave and ignore the second till he burrows". My guild's DPS is usually pretty modest and we never see the record-breaking numbers the ranked guilds put up, but we still easily pushed Anub every decent attempt last week (this past Tuesday was our first kill), while killing every wave of adds as they spawn.

We do usually have 2 hunters single-targetting the boss the entire fight though even while everyone AoEs, do other guilds not do something like this? We started that our first week of wiping because we were behind on DPS, but DPS has gone up in a lot of other ways since then too. Our reasoning was that our hunters generally do significantly better single-target DPS than say our Death Knights, but those Deathknights also do better AoE dps than our hunters - making the former do decent AoE to reduce the time the DKs do stellar AoE and increase the time the DKs do merely decent single-target DPS seems worse than just letting the DKs do excellent AoE longer and letting the hunters do excellent single-target the whole time.

In absolute terms, this means hunters look like shit when the total damage done for the fight is posted, but the adds all die quickly and the boss gets pushed easily (and I don't need to make odd ArPless-high-haste sets to maximize Volley DPS) so it seems satisfactory for us.

Another way to improve your dps on the way to Phase 3, is to make your healers help dps too. Our healing setup here is normally 1 holy paladin, 1 resto druid, 3 disc priests, and 2 resto shamans. We have the priests keep up SWP and Devouring Plague, and both shamans nuking constantly, until Phase 3. Healing before then is trivial, so you might as well give them something to do. The extra dps really makes a big difference.

I can also confirm that in probably 400 burrows, Anub has never chased our offtank.

This really is the most exciting discussion to be had regarding Anub'arak 25 heroic: How to minimise the healing Leeching Swarm does to Anub'arak, whilst still keeping control of Phase 3. As many others will have concluded, minimising Leech healing is often the best answer to the question, "How do we improve DPS in phase 3?".

Lots of creative techniques can be used. People can certainly still kill Anub'arak without giving this *too* much thought, but it's very impressive to observe guilds kill Anub whilst handling the Leech with elegance - instead of brute force - and it can make a huge difference. Little changes, such as using [Lesser Flask of Resistance] and [Arcanum of Toxic Warding] on the tanks ([Pattern: Fur Lining - Nature Resist] if possible) , better setup and thought put into available passive healing mechanics and group setup for phase 3, considering various downranking options, stop healing on the OT between add waves completely - can add up to a world of difference.

This tool, http://gcbirzan.appspot.com/leech is very underrated! It's invaluable to help you optimise your passive P3 healing and make decisions such as whether you really need LOTP, Glpyh of Holy Light and tangibly see how much 'extra help' your Elemental Shaman's group will need with just their HS totem.

This really showcases Leeching Swarm as a great mechanic for World of Warcraft. You can overcome it by brute force, but there really are more elegant and effective ways to manage it, should you wish to utilise them. And it will require employing a healthy combination of other game mechanics to do so (Glpyhs, Flasks, Arcanums, Downranking, Talents, Class abilities/spells).

I saw earlier that there was a bit of discussion on Anub randomly dropping aggro from targets he is chasing, most particularly shamans. In our attempts, every time Anub has selected one of our Shamans to chase, approximately 5 seconds later, he completely switches targets. Our shamans are not specced into any reduced threat, they are not dropping any totems that would taunt or reduce threat. This is really driving us crazy since it makes controlling where Anub goes pretty difficult if the Shaman gets targeted first. Has anyone found anything conclusive on why this happens and in particular why to Shamans?

My guild also uses one MD and one ToT for the furthest adds (our paladin offtank grabs the two closest to the raid by himself). I'm the rogue who does the ToT, and we had the exact same problem.

Don't try a new position or bubbles or anything like that. It's the rogue's responsibility to fix this. Healers simply generate a lot more threat in P3. I made a point of watching Omen for my target a few times, and found that untouched incoming adds typically have a few hundred threat points on their targets in P1. This figure balloons to several thousand in P3.

If your ToT rogue is like me, he/she has developed habits during P1 learning wipes which maximize time hitting the boss because it's so trivial to misdirect in P1. I was moving away from Anub at the last possible moment to get one or two ToT hits on the incoming add (usually using FoK rather than explicitly targeting it). After realizing why that was failing in P3, I began running out early and far enough to unload a full energy bar (single target) into the mob before it reaches the raid. This is enough threat to misdirect it to the tank very reliably.

You will need to make special healing arrangements. Melee are usually kept up by JoL ticks in P3, and when I started succeeding at misdirect I also started dying from Leeching Swarm because I wasn't getting JoL when I ran out. I now get put in a caster party which has the Healing Stream totem, but if you can't do that, a single HoT would probably work.

Personally, I hope they do not re-use Leeching Swarm. If it's put into an encounter hard enough where you can't brute force it, it becomes class stacking to the absolute extreme, far worse than Sunwell ever was with Shaman.

So many DPS classes/specs are actively terrible if the encounter has a Leeching Swarm. Warlocks cannot life tap and run out of mana. Ret Paladins, Feral Druids, Blood DKs, and Enhancement Shaman all become terrible due to unavoidable healing effects on DPS abilities. Shadow Priests can provide passive healing for a group but the uneven nature of VE means you have to sacrifice a lot of DPS relative to a "real" DPS in that slot. Other DPS are disadvantaged due to needing extra passive healing. Mages do great DPS, but unlike Hunters, Warriors, DKs, and Rogues, JoL alone will not keep them alive, they need additional passive heals. A high-difficulty Leeching Swarm encounter is going to come down to stacking as many of those four classes as possible in your DPS crew, and if there's no AE involved in the encounter you'll be sitting most of the DKs as well.

It's a huge amount of DPS specs sidelined if the encounter requires high efficiency, and completely excludes the majority of DPS classes from even joining the encounter unless they have a healing or tank offset.

I'm not sure it's that simple. AoEing groups of adds sucks Warlock mana fast. Our biggest problem with Anub at this point is we have a Warlock-heavy raid that gets him to 10% and then the Warlocks all run out of mana.

You're missing the point. Judgment of Light is sufficient healing for all melee DPS. LotP only procs off melee hits, not spells, so it's just extra unneeded healing for the boss to suck up. Multiplied by all the melee in the raid this means the feral is likely doing negative DPS.

Except to give them a healing stream, you need a Resto shaman in their group, because Ele/Enh totems are not sufficient. The by far worst healer for this encounter. You'll already want a resto shaman in the healer group to give them their passive healing, so that means adding another one just for the Mages?

Highly unreliable random healing in P3 is simply bad. It's not going to reliably keep people up from swarm, and it's certainly not going to cover Penetrating Cold. It simply heals the boss for more and makes everything harder. Holy Paladins take their Glyph of HL out for this fight for exactly this reason. Is it possible to win with a bunch of random healing? Of course. But if they make a truly difficult fight with the swarm mechanic on the lines of pre-nerf Yogg-0, massive class stacking will be required.

You can use downranked rejuvenation and ferals can spec out of improved leader of the pack. Still, the encounter does require an uncomfortable amount of respeccing (and reglyphing) for a lot of players, definitely something you wouldn't want to be doing regularly.

Xequecal is describing a hypothetical situation.

The current incarnation of Anub'arak 25 HM implements Leeching Swarm beautifully. Just because Divine Storm does some healing, or LOTP is present - doesn't make raids fail. It doesn't render Ret Pallys or Feral Druids bad to bring. If however the Swarm was tuned extraordinarily tight (say you needed 18 people taking no more than 250 ticks, or he'd heal for too much) then all those issues would most certainly arise.

Could Leeching Swarm be a disastrous mechanic if mistuned? Absolutely. But the current Leech tuning of Anub 25 HM strikes a great balance - between a push-over mechanic you just ignore (like you do on normal mode) and a horrific mechanic, which would lead to the problems Xequecal described.

I'm a bit embarrassed to bring this up, but this week we've been having trouble with FC10 Heroic. We've been clearing up to Anub with over 46 tries for the last 3-4 weeks or so with basically the same team, and I'm really scratching my head at the problems we've been facing, having wiped to them around 5 times.

The Faction Champions we came up against were as follows.
Warrior
Ret Pally
Resto Druid
Resto Shaman
Shadow Priest
Warlock

Our own group setup is 2x Hunters, Holy Paladin, Prot Warrior, Disc(Holy OS) Priest, Resto(Enh OS) Shaman, Mage, Rogue, Feral Druid. Atm, we've been burning the Warrior ASAP and he goes down fairly fast while being conscious of offensive dispelling both the Warrior's HoTs as well as other critical spells such as Ret's Wings and Bloodlust. The CC we've been using is our Feral Druid CCing the Ret Pally, with our Prot Warrior interupting the Shaman as best he can. Our problem comes from what seems to be amazing burst, and here's the kicker, *after* the Warrior dies. One fear or silence/repentance/fear on our holy paladin and the Ret Pally seems to be able to burst a clothie down in 1-2 GCDs - with only a little help from the other casters. The clothies aren't standing adjacent to the Ret Pally but his attacks do come at range and when it coincides with cc on a healer, I don't know what to think.

Any ideas? We have tried burning the Shaman first, but it seems like killing a DPS is our best option as the damage is what we've been having trouble with.

Anything with the Ret Paladin is basically "hard hard mode" Faction Champions. First, the Ret Paladin is extremely lethal, far more so than any of the other DPS champions, because he doesn't obey the global cooldown rules, so if you have him CCed for 10 seconds and then he gets loose and nails someone, that person is going to eat melee + SoComm + Crusader Strike + Divine Storm simultaneously. This is a 100-20% drop for casters, usually leading to death a second after. Also, the other melee are generally very easy to sit on a Frost trap and just kited, but he will Freedom up every 20 seconds and go explode someone. Or stun them and walk up and explode them. Second, the Holy Paladin healer is incredibly useless, but if you have the Ret Paladin you don't have the Holy Paladin so you basically have to deal with two real healers.

You're basically going to want to focus a lot of effort on keeping the Ret Paladin controlled and keeping people away from him, if you can do that the other champs aren't near as much of a threat.

Well, if ret pala is giving you problems, kill him first. Your setup is not good for CCing him (no DK, your Warrior must CC healers, too many magic dispelling NPCs) anyway.

Also, if your holy pala getting CCed is such a problem, tell him to put on the PvP trinket/use human racial. Personally, I don't see holy paladin as the critical point of failure. Quick reactive heals aren't something that paladins do better than other healers, so our gets the cleansebot duty.

We also religiously do them in this order, even with Ret Paladin: shaman -> healers -> lock -> random. A link to the kill with ret paladin (for what it's worth).

There's another helpful rule of thumb to keep in mind when the Ret Paladin is one the Champions. I can't say it's a 100% set in stone law of how it operates, but it's a good enough trend in my experience to use it to your advantage.

The Ret has two ways to "CC" someone: Repentance and Hammer of Justice. However, he tends to use them for two different purposes. Repentance he will typically use to actually CC someone who is not the DPS target--a healer, a dispeller, maybe a DPS he's trying to get off his back, etc. This person is generally not in danger of being creamed in the assist train, and the Repent will often go to duration. However, when HoJ is up, that he tends to use to stop a player from running away and give himself (and the other melee) time to close in. My guild has mostly stopped trinketing out of most forms of CC when the ret paladin is around, saving our Medallions for HoJ.

It's also worth letting your mage know that the ret paladin and the shadow priest tend to "coordinate" a little here, and the HoJ'd target will often be silenced by the Shadow Priest, making Get Out of Jail Free spells like Blink useless. The other way we help mitigate this is by sticking our rogue on the shadow priest once all the healers are dead. (We also kill healers first, leaving even the ret and warrior/rogue/enhance up. It seems to work for us.)

Again, it's not a hard and fast rule, but we found it extremely helpful in surviving the Ret's (attempted) burst. Wait out Repentance and get the hell out of HoJ.

I've seen the opposite from my experiences. The ret paladin is nasty, but in my opinion is one of the easier npcs to deal with.

We don't use any timed cc on him, we simply stick a dk or someone on him to keep him slowed, dispel freedom immediately, and stun him if he closes in on his target. The important thing is to make sure people are aware of his (And the other melee) position and to proactively move away so that he doesn't do a quick switch and gib someone.


Also in regards to a previous post of yours exclaiming ele shaman as a bad source of leech raid healing, you seem to be forgetting the healing stream totem glyph. We've found ele shaman to be the best source of raid healing, since their totem is generally just sufficient enough to keep a group up (provided they have enough spell power).

I agree about the shaman comment. Elemental Shamans with a glyphed healing stream are the perfect tool to keep a single group safe from leeching swarm while absolutely minimizing the healing done to Anub.

Also, a resto shaman's healing stream is probably the second best source as it heals just a bit too much when not glyphed and for way more than needed when glyphed. Since the healing outside of phase 3 is pretty trivial we found shamans *excellent* healers for this fight. We generally run 3 shamans (1 elemental, 2 resto) in our raids and not having to worry about leeching swarm on three groups is an awesome benefit.

After many attempts on Anub'arak I've come to the following conclusions about how his Phase 2 kiting works. A lot of this is known but I'm summarizing it here along with my deductions about how the mechanic is coded and why it is buggy.

When he submerges at the start of a kiting phase, he wipes raid threat and gains a new threat table. Then, he chooses a fixate target at random and seems to assign them an arbitrary high threat value, and begins pursuit. But he does continue to record threat on this phase, which is entirely healing threat since he can't be DPSed.

If he hits an ice patch he sets all targets' threat to zero and chooses a new fixate. If his current target gains an immunity effect, he immediately aggros the second highest on the table which is usually the top healer. This is the only way I can explain how he chooses the same targets again and again after an iceblock or feign death.

Finally at the end of Phase 2 he appears to regain his original threat table since he will return immediately to the MT.

The bug in this encounter is, when anyone in the raid uses a threat reduction ability (not an immunity), instead of lowering the caster's threat it actually wipes all raid threat - including the fixate target. This is known to happen for at least Fade or Nature's Guardian, and possibly other threat drops. For the remaining period of his timer he'll then rapidly chase several healers in succession as they succeed each other on the threat table.

Does anyone have observations that don't fit with the above theories? The main lesson is (other than don't use Fade) is that you might be able to improve kiting by having a healer with high threat, such as a paladin with RF, run the opposite way as your mage or hunter to help ping pong Anub during phase 2.

We have DD casters, hunters, melee DDs and tanks regularly be targets of Anub midway in the burrow phase (read: they can either be 1st , 2nd or 3rd target or all of the above). These are all people who build no threat on him in this phase. We once even had someone being targeted by the spikes who was AFK'ing outside the room.
For me it's obvious that his spike target is completely random.

EDIT: Rereading your post I think I misunderstood you. If all you are saying is that Anub targets by threat *in the case* when some aggro drop ability is used, then I cannot comment on this as I see no point in using such abilities and we have long ceased to use them.