Hi everyone,

Our raid has been working on Anub for a couple of days now with reasonable progress. Our tanks have gotten very good at the kiting (90% success rate) and our mages have gotten very good at AoEing down the corpse scarabs. The healers are still getting used to a healing scheme and there is still some kinks as far as people dying due to bad luck or silly mistakes (a trickle of 4-5 but not all at once so wastes a lot of time). One of the questions that came up was the safety of using melee dps on Anub. We dont really have any DPS warriors so this is mainly rogues.

The concern was that if a rogue happens to die near the MT, the corpse scarabs go straight for the tank or the MT healers which leads to a daze and a wipe if LS hits before the little buggers are dead. So suggestion was made to keep melee exclusively on the guards after the first two guards are down and keep ranged dps focused on Anub. Can people who have more experience with the fight please share their views on the pros and cons here? Any elucidation of the impale mechanic is especially appreciated. (the only thing we've figured out so far is that it seems to have a max range of about 50 yrds).

Thanks in advance.

Make sure the mellees get healed to full, should a impale hit them.
Dont cluster in one place when Meleeing Anub. Spreading helps a little (IMHO)
And watch the clock between locust swarm casts - you'll realize there is minimum period of time between 2 consecutive casts. Make sure to withdraw all your mellees in time.

If a melee dies and bugs spawn shortly before a cast, remind your tank to use a swiftness potion.

regards

Impale has a max range of 35 yards. It's a tight conal attack. It can target people outside the Impale range, but they won't get hit by it.

If someone can die from the Impale, they simply don't have enough hit points for this fight. The damage on it is reduced by armor and a fair chunk of it comes from the falling damage, so feather fall, levitation, safe fall, and shift-to-cat form are all useful tricks.

The key things on this fight are the kiting and making sure the guards die and are fought outside of impale range. Our ranged DPSes on the guards until Anub is in position, then they're supposed to move to Anub. Some are lazy and don't, but it's not a big deal, the guards die. We also have our Rogues be in control of stunning guards post-Enrage. Our rogues and warriors have the La Vendetta Naxx mod that allows them to see the timing on the poison cloud, so they get out of there with time to spare. I think they also run out if they get hit by impale to bandage out of range.

For this fight we use Melee DPS on adds and ranged on Anub'rehkan.

For the impale, you need to make sure that everyone has enough hitpoints to survive the hit + fall damage. If they don't, have them swap in some HP gear. Also we tend to have a few healers who will stay back out of impale range to heal the priests / ranged that get impaled. As a paladin, I can sometimes land a flash heal (or a holy shock / Blessing of Protection) while a low HP clothie is still airborne. Light feathers also help a ton for Mages / Priests.

Once you get the mechanics of the fight down, you should be able to sustain your raid indefinately. I know us (and many other guilds) have killed much more than 100% of Anub's life due to evade bugs.

Concentrate on perfecting that 1min and 30 seconds between locust swarms: the tank move, the add management and corpse scarab management. The DPS will fall into place after that.

You are setting yourself up for a much longer fight than needed if the rogues aren't going in to melee anub. I'm not sure how long you've lasted into the fight, but the nature of the fight is that attrition will basically wipe you. The longer the fight lasts, the less mana healers have, the less they have, the more they try to conserve, the more they conserve, the more people die from unlucky hits.. And 1 unlucky death quickly leads to 5 which leads to 40.

Here's what happens in our guild, from a rogue's perspective:

• Kill first 2 guards
• Start melee on anub (usually get about 15 seconds in on anub before the first transition)
• Move out of swarm (everyone DOES have Natur's Enemy castbar, right? I completely ignore all raid warnings on swarm, and ONLY move when I see him actually casting it.. There are times where there will literally be another 20 seconds of DPS between the raid warning, and when he actually casts)
• fight spawned guard, stay until the first net is cast
• move out and DPS anub as soon as the first net wears out (bandage/pot/tuber before going into impale range)
• move out of swarm
• repeat

Basically, the warriors, locks, hunters take care of the rest of the guard's life, mages deal w/ bugs and help w/ guard.. But a big chunk of anub DPS comes directly from rogues. Just make sure they are at max range, and run when they see the cast starting.

Our first Anub death this past week was done without any melee dps on Anub and 5 deaths total. It was a long fight, but it's not impossible.

Unless your rogues are taking 3 impales I don't see why any of them are dying. I will usually take 1 impale, 2 if I'm unlucky and I'll still live. The only reason any rogue could die is if they get caught by the Locust swarm and even then 1 small nature pot will mitigate the 1 tick they catch. I do suggest having them spread out a bit on his side and behind to mitigate the damage.

ALL your melee do need to have Spell Alert or any variant....this isn't an option.

thanks for the great input so far guys. As far as our progress, our best attempt we lasted thru 5 full kiting cycles with about 6-10 deaths. We got him down to about 60%ish. We really could not get too much DPS time on Anub mostly due to people dying due to one reason or another. One person would die then we'd AoE down the scarabs then the guard's body would despawn and there'd be more adds and we'd AoE those down etc etc and when all the mess was sorted out we were only left with about 10-15 secs of DPS time on Anub per kite cycle.

I think we'll get better at this since we are going to have people with low HP farm up some titan's or some HP gear. The issue with melee DPS arose when on one of our attempts that was going really well (75% with just 2 kite cycles and 0 deaths) the rogues got impaled while they were meleeing then the warning for LS was issued and when they were running out, they got impaled again and two of them died and the scarabs screwed the MT kite and the MT healers. So we decided on just having ranged DPS on Anub and try to assign the rogues to basically stunning/dpsing the guard spawns down.

Thanks for the info about impale. Is there any directionality or positioning of Anub that can help avoid imaples alltogather? On some videos I see maybe only one or two impales the entire 7-10 minute fight and we seem to get 1-2 impales per kite cycle usually. Is that just luck or is there something we could do better?

I'm not sure you can have the melee avoid it, but I'm reasonably sure this is the spell

http://www.thotbott.com/?sp=28783

Which means you can definitely outrange the physical damage and knockback components (45 yards) as people have mentioned.

stand out of range of the impale when you kill the adds, mt healers spread out, kill the add quick then all go in and dps, move out before he cast locus swarm. If my emergency monitor got 5 people on it that's at <80% for longer than 5 seconds then I know the fight isn't working, if they are topped off instantly then it is, this responsibility is shared between healers and the guy that took a hit (eg: drink a pot newb). That's it really, I'm sure with some practice you will get it.

Let your melees surround (well, halfway, only on the backside ;)) Anub, then only a few will get hit by the impale. Most times only one.

Would it make more sense to have the casters take down the adds, the rogues work on anub (and only leave to kill corpse scarabs as they spawn). My logic is ranged cant get hit by the adds cleave (which really isnt to bad, but could be followed by an impale) and the web means nothing to them over all. Finally when the add is dead it takes less time for ranged to transition to Anub himself than it did for the melee.

rogues should never get hit by the adds' cleave if the tanks position them correctly. rogues should also never die next to anub'rekhan for any reason whatsoever. tell them to bandage after impales, and get your healers to throw a hot or flash heal on them when possible. for our third anub'rekhan kill, i told the rogues to wait until after the first locust swarm to start dps on anub'rekhan. we usually had about 45 seconds when the spawned crypt guard died, which is 45 seconds' worth of 5-6 rogues' dps -- enough to cut down the transitions needed by a very noticeable amount.

I actually have yet to be impaled while meleeing him. Didn't even know it was possible. Only gotten it when running in or out. Weird.

You can get impaled while meleeing him.

As for melee DPS, definitely use it. It makes a long fight a little shorter. Just have them all back out at 15s to swarm. And none of them should die to impale if they're topped off, all rogues/warriors should have > 5k HP with buffs. And rogues have safe fall, which mitigates another 500 or so damage from that.

So the general consensus is that the mages/warlocks can burn down the adds while the rogues focus on anub (minus locust swarms and cursing corpse scarabs), or have the rogues run in after they kill an add for 10-25 seconds of dps.

No. That would seem to be a backwards way of doing it.
Rogues can DPS Anub, but should only be doing it after the spawned add is dead. Run in, get your shots, run out before locust swarm.

We have every DPS on the guards when they spawn, and then all DPS on the boss when the guard dies. At 15s the melee DPS runs out.

I think if this was a harder fighter(time limit or something), we could just have the melee DPS run out when he starts casting, but with how long you can last in this fight, that's not necessary.

I'm sure we all have stories of our tank getting impaled and him evade bugging to 100%, I know this week a guild on Mal'Ganis(Cadre Quietus) evaded him at 1% ;D

We do this, as well.

Well its not a hard fight at all. Just trying to figure out ways to speed it up!

The all dps on add/all on anub seems solid.

we have the rogues move out from the add after the first web, as long as the add is below 75%.. at that piont, the casters have more than enough time to kill it before the next transition, and we have enough warriors doing taunt rotation, that they're not taking much damage from the add anyways.

one really nice thing about having all the rogues on anub early on is, IF one of the scarab spawns pop up, and go on the MT, the rogues can burn it down almost instantly, where it may take longer for the ranged to even aquire the target.

thanks for the replies guys. Our original strat was to do all dps on guards then all on anub and melee back off at 15 secs till LS. However, on one of our best attempts we had two rogues get double implaed. They got impaled once while meleeing then LS 15 sec warning sounded so instead of bandaging they just decided to bail and got implaled again on their way out. The resulting corpse scarabs were all over the MT and MT healers and LS started and it was horrible from then on >.< We didn't see any way to prevent this "bad luck" issue so we decided to do something like the following:

1. For the first two spawns, all dps kills the first one, then burns down the 2nd one to 20-30%. Then ranged DPS moves on to Anub while rogues finish off the 20-30% left.

2. the hunters just stay on Anub from here on out and are responsible for keeping MT/MT healers scarab free.

3. on new guard spawns, mages/locks help the melee burn the guard till LS is over then immediately shift to Anub while rogues/warriors deal with the rest of it's hp.

This would give us lots of DPS on Anub and rogues wouldn't be twiddling their thumbs. Mainly because ranged dps can't get double implaled and even if they die an unfortunate death, the scarabs can be handled easily. We will try this out and I will post back with results Friday. Thanks for all the great input =)