So we just downed Faerlina this past week in about 5 hrs of attempts on our first night. We have 2 shotted Anub and Razuvious on our last couple of kills of them, but wouldn't quiet call them farm status yet. Now we know that Maexxna is more difficult of an encounter than Noth is. However, Maexxna does drop some very very nice pieces that are close to best or best in slot. My question was is it better at this point to go for Maexxna or just kill Noth and start getting one more source of tier3 under farm? How big is the difficulty difference between these two fights?

Thanks in advance.

I'd highly recommend Maexxna before Noth. My guild found Maexxna to be much easier. The DPS and coordination needed for Noth is greater than that needed for Maexxna. A few good wall healers and a good supply of Nature Protection potions negates most of the danger in the encounter. Its also technically the simplest encounter in the wing and Maexxna drops some great items. I'd estimate Noth took my guild twice as long to learn as Maexxna.

Good question. The trash I find is a lot more tedious to Maexxna, but I find it is on the whole a far less consumable intensive fight, at least as a hunter. While I go all out on Noth with most conceivable dps and mana consumables, for Maexxna I pop a NR pot before the fight, a greater agility and a NR pot whenever I get flung onto the wall.

That said, I find Maexnna to be more of a test on your healers, while Noth is a more dps-intensive fight. If you're more confident in your guild's healing abilities, I'd say Maexxna, if massive and disciplined dps is your speciality, Noth may be more to your flavour. Our guild has always excelled at dps, so we tackled Noth first, and he's still my favourite Naxx fight.

I think Noth as a whole is a much simpler fight. There's a lot less going on and as long as you have the dps for the fight it's pretty straight forward. It will probably take a few tries to manage splitting dps between him and the corners, but other than that there isn't too much that can go wrong. Two full prot warriors are a big bonus for the fight, shield slam makes Noth a lot easier to control after blinks, and from there its just back to basics with decursing and taking care of the two sets of guardians before they can do too much damage.

Maexxna has a lot of different tasks that have to all come together pretty well for a good attempt. Cocoon healers have to be on the ball (especially if LoS issues weren't addressed in 1.12) and the rest of the healers have to do a good job of keeping abolish poison and HoTs on through the stun. At the same time you have to have enough dps burning the cocoons, enough AoE assigned to the spider spawns, and enough dps on Maexx to take her down once she enrages.

Given that though, you also have to take into account the loot difference. Maexxna drops much better gear.

I'd disagree with Noth being simpler. Maexxna is on the whole a big tank 'n spank, with a few random elements thrown in. Noth seems, to me, a lot more complicated.

I'd put them at a similar level of difficulty, and Maexxna drops a lot better loot. Definitely worth going for Maexxna first.

We did Noth first and are working on Maexxna now. In retrospect, Maexxna feels like it will take a lot less learning than Noth did.

Hmm, gotta be the dissenting voice here. If you can kill Anub and Razuvious pretty effortlessly, it should only take you an hour or two to learn Noth. Faerlina is a much more stringent DPS test than Noth from my experience; if you can kill her then Noth should be no trouble at all from that standpoint. The only difficulty should be appropriately assigning/dividing your damage classes.

You also probably want ~6-8 decurse types that have a brain at least the size of a peanut, and a really solid main tank.

Tangent: Noth is incredibly fun to main tank. Maexxna is stressful to main tank.

Maexxna has a much better loot table and drops 2 molds. It's pretty clear cut based on that. A week earlier on Maexxna is worth more than a week earlier on Noth.

That's a good point with Faerlina down you might as well hit Maexxna. Maexxna is much better from a progression standpoint, even though Noth is probably easier.

My problem is that when I think about Maexxna's loot table I also only think of those garbage mana/5s necklace and damage caster robe that we've gotten I think all but one kill. :p

And honestly, with all the strategies floating around the internets now, you can probably kill both in one night if your raid is good.

But go for Maexxna first. I was being stupid in my first post here.

The nice thing about Noth is you can learn the fight quick, it's just a matter of execution and then getting it down to being able to beat it fast enough.

Meax is a bitch because you learn the fight, you think you're doing well, and then the rape phase catches you with your pants down.

I'd say they're about equal in difficulty. The real difference is whether you want to farm the nr/ac pots for Maex or the dps pots for Noth.

If you use the DPS and burn method on Razorgore, if you had no trouble single assist and burn on phase 1 Nef, and generally do well at fights managing large numbers of adds, then do Noth. It's very straight-forward, and you'll fine tune it to the class makeup and strengths of your guild.

Honestly, Maexxna's easier, I think. Noth is a "simple" concept, and fairly simple execution, but it seems to me there's more ways someone can fuck things up. (Or at least, we've found more ways to fuck it up.) There's also fewer gargoyle pulls Faerlina->Maexxna than there are Entry->Noth, and anything that minimises exposure to those stupid beasties gets my vote.

Besides, Kiss of the Spider is just good, good fun. Your rogues will thank you for access to that and the Fang.


Re: Noth adds, corners seems to work well for us, then again, we're habitually very, very dps-heavy. Your mileage may vary.

I think Noth is a rediculously easy fight, and would suggest killing him prior to Grand Widow, however he's one of those fights where timing can make of break the fight early on due to inconsistant spawns. But he's really not difficult if, as someone else mentioned, you are used to having your ranged DPS single-target multiple mobs. It also helps if your priests aren't clueless. I really can't imagine this fight without 4 shackles and 5 warriors. One other nice thing about Noth is that you can pretty much drop 3 of your healers for more DPS without issue. I usually put on my "I have +400 healing, it just happens to also be +damage" gear and Starfire away, innervate a priest, combat rez a stupid rogue, and mash decursive when needed.

However, the week my guild killed Grand Widow, we went on to Maexxna that night and got her to 35% in a few attempts. We came back the next day, and she was dead after a few hours. If you're already past Widow, getting an extra t3 per week is going to make the difference when you get past Patchwerk. It's a fight that I believe is very gear intensive, just not in the usual way. We have yet to kill Maexxna without a druid in 8/8 Stormrage and 2 priests in 8/8 Trans. The extra HoTs make an immense difference during spins.

We killed Maexxna last night for the first time. It only took us about three hours of training and none of us had any experience of the encounter. It starts out really chaotic and seems like there is no way to master it but the pieces soon fall into place as people realise what hey have to do.

Noth on the other hand is an encounter that we have already spent many hours training on but have still not killed him. In my opinion it's more chaotic, the pace is not under your control and the raid just has to keep up or die. We are going back for more training on Noth tonight so hopefully all of you who say it's easy are onto something. If we can down him it will be our third first kill this week!

We have neither of theese and we made it. However I found Maexxna killing/nearly killing our MT while the webspin if CoR was up, after a spin or two when the CoR ticked off and the lock forgot to renew it - it looked like it was easier to keep the MT up during the spins. We stoped using CoR and we didnt have any problems after that(with keeping MT up while the spin). Any one else noticed problems concerning CoR and Maexxna?

The fights work in different way. Yet, both fights are doable pretty easily if you have beaten the old faerlina. For reasons, xarg mentioned I recommend maexxna, some of the set gloves are pretty amazing and most nonset loots are very good as well.

So that extra tick while everyone is stunned isn't helpful?

Both fights require quite a bit of DPS (as does all of Naxx) I'd mainly think of the required DPS as a gear check. Maexenna requires more consumables by far in comparison to Noth. You need a balance of ranged and melee DPS for both encounters, while you only need 1 MT on Maexenna, you'll need 4(possibly 5 depending on strategy / execution) on Noth (even though the offtanks equipment can be far from extraordinary). I'd say if your at a point where your choosing between the two, go for Maexenna she drops alot of nice equipment and as an above poster mentioned, you get two T3 gloves, rather than 1 T3 belt. Once you've killed Maexenna (should only take ~2 nights tops) Noth should be a one nighter if your raid is balanced for it. Not to mention the fact that strategies for both of these encounters are all over the internet, leaving actual learning to be done.

Web spray is only 8 seconds, so I guess technically if you're always very very good at timing it, it might not help anymore than a regular rejuv would. Personally, I use it on Maex because I'm not that precise with the timing, and I want to have Rejuv still up after the stun is over so I can Swiftmend it.

Oh I agree. Thunderbluff is just being stupid.

If you start at the 5 second warning, you can get off a regrowth and a rejuv that will last the entire web spray. I even have enough time to swiftmend the rejuv coming out of the web spray.

With seeing the BigWigs bars counting down to when the next webspray will hit I found it rather easy to regrowth+rejun 'just in time' and I wouldn't want to sacrifice +heal for an extra tick that will never come since I'll swiftmend after the stun.