With all the excitement about the 1.11 patch coming today, I thought I'd let you all know about my Adventures of Neriad: Anub'Rekhan journal that details a joint Tichondrius Horde raid on the first boss in the spider wing of Naxxramas. Hopefully, it'll whet your appetite for Naxxramas and give your raids a running start while tackling the instance. Enjoy!

(P.S. Yes, the raid used the test realm bug that despawned the initial two guards. I wish we hadn't done that, but I can't control what 39 other people want to do. Still, the journal shows what most of the fight is like at least as well as some of the new 1.11 UI improvements).

oh we beat him without exploiting him

Great. I hope we don't get a bunch of posts like this in the near future.

I know this post was probably made in good faith, but we tested the Anub'rekhan encounter as well, we've got our strategy for killing him pretty much down. And coming to give us handout "strategies" obtained as a result of a PuG exploiting the encounter is...well, questionable at best.

Didn't any of you guys read Neriad's Scholo and Onyxia journals during beta? I didn't play beta, but those write-ups were part of the reason I bought the game at release.

Thanks for posting this, I've always liked your stories, and the one about Lord Lakmaeran was probably the one to really get me into this game.

:)

Edit: vvv you're dumb

No, I didn't. Sounds tedious.

I'm sure you did. As I explained, I can't control what 39 other people want to do, especially in a raid made up of a mix of guilds. If you'd like to write up your experiences when you killed him without exploiting, please do. In the meantime, I hope that the journal helps those who haven't had a chance to experience Anub'Rekhan for themselves get an idea of what the encounter is like, despite the initial exploit.

They're actually quite good, and the Onyxia one is nothing short of classic. They remind me somewhat of the better-written Starcraft Battle Reports of yore, before the "instant replay" patch to that game.

I loved the Battle Reports site. Got me through many boring days at work.

Very nice write-up MongoJerry :)

Just wanted to say thanks for the great strat ideas for Anub, they helped our guild a lot.
We've had one problem though, the scarabs tend to go after our mt and/or the hunter giving him pack and daze them which basically wipes us.
Does anyone have any advice for how to control these scarabs better? We were thinking about having a mage camp each corpse and nova the second they spawn but haven't been able to put that to the test yet.

Yes, that's what we did on test. After the spider add dies, a mage stays there and frost novas the moment he or she sees the scarabs spawn out of the corpse. Then, the scarabs are aoe'd down. As far as scarabs going after the mt/hunter, that sounds like you're talking about scarabs who spawn after people die, which is the real problem. Nobody should be dying at all, and yeah if someone does die, you need to take care of the scarabs right away.

Impale does a fair bit more damage than it used to. It's the main threat in the fight now.

Impale is fun when you have 4080 hp with raid buffs. It might one-shot you or it might not, who really knows!

the slime around the edges also does vastly more damage in the case that your tank or kiting hunter missteps and so much as touches it.

You mean less damage? Its like 100 a tick instead of 1600 a tick on PTR.

Although, It rapes your stats, so its a give and take.

Yeah, it's not very damaging in itself, but -90% to all attributes (not just base stats now) is pretty brutal. If you're at full hp/mana and so much as dip your toe in it, you instantly end up at ~25% hp/mana.

Impale was a bit harsh on us since we didnt have any experience with the fight, but after slapping the squishies over 4k health we managed just fine. Full raid survived on our first kill just now :D

Got the Frost res neck, was kinda hoping for the bracers or cloak, oh well...

This is not really pertaining to the OP, but anyway, after naxx came up yesterday, we went in, and after a few got anub down, decided to poke at the plaguewing next, instead of going deeper into spider, so headed over there, and got pretty close on noth, but will have to wait with the cigar. However, when I poked my head in today, the gate after anub'rekhan, that had gotten unlocked yesterday (none of us actually opened it, but we saw the red Locked was gone) was now, once again locked, and I could find no way of opening it. Have anyone here experienced the same? Any suggestions? Remembering from BWL, I sort of doubt the GM's will be able/willing to open it for us, even with no anub'rekhan around, and people in the guild with items from him, so poke in other wings rest of week and try again next week is only option?

Ouch, we didn't click the gate to open it either, but haven't been back to the spider wing to see. If it stays closed, ah well, not like there aren't other things for us to work on this week.

I went back there last night Gurgthock, the Anub'rekhan gate was open and all the trash before Anub'rekhan was despawned. Nothing to worry about.

Gate was locked for us, which was quite disappointing after killing Anub and getting some good attempts on Faerlina the night before. Had all my stuff ready to go... only to have to redirect to Noth. Not the first time Blizzard has had problems with a gate......

Last night both our Noth and Anub'Rekan doors were closed.

So, we made a play-date with a certain someone.