Just a small question, but one I am not 100% sure on and have been unable to find anything in search or on tactics pages.

After the first night of attempts, we ended with Maexxna just starting enrage. ~30%. We found our tank (2 dreadnaught, 6 Wrath, remorse and BQB, 9600 buffed HP), to be taking just TOO much damage during the spray. He would usually come out of the spray timer at around 500 hp or so, and if an NS heal was just a little late, we would have a splattered tank. On occasion, the tank would die in the last second before spray ended, leaving us no way to heal him.

We found that if the tank was at ~1000hp post spray, we could Swiftmend him and be fine, but if he was below that 500hp barrier it was too close for comfort.

Quick combat log analysis showed most of the damage coming from physical sources (~70% if memory serves), and the tank being healed to full pre-spray. Abolish/GHrenew/Renew/Reguv/Regrowth were on the tank at nearly every (85%) web, as well as NR totem and Poison Clearing Totem. The crushing rate was fairly high, 2k poison shock, 2.5k crushing, 2.5k crushing 3 seconds into spray was the most common source of instagib.

Now here are my questions:

1: What debuffs are "critical" for decreasing her melee output? I'm assuming (I know I know), that she is effected by imp. demo shout (similar to broodlord), Curse of Weakness, and Insect Swarm. Are there any other noticable ways to drop her damage output?

2: MT potions. GNPP to absorb the shocks and spray damage prior to spray? or Stoneshield? We attempted both with no discernable difference, however we were pre-enrage.

3: Totems? NR or imp. GoA. ~3 dodge, or +23 NR?

Any ideas would be wonderful. as I said, it was only day one of attempts. Healer mana seemed fine, DPS was ok, and wall healing/dps was tolerable. The only issue is a tank getting too low during spray.

Thanks everyone.

1) Demo shout and TClap/Thunderfury
2) You pretty much want stoneshield up the whole time. NR pots really aren't worth the 2min timer for the main tank. Flask is almost required on this fight.
3) I'd say GoA. Much of a muchness really.

Wait, are you saying that your tank wasn't able to survive the web spray during enrage?

Assuming this is your problem, you need him to Shield wall on the first spray, then all your tanks(or if you use KLH, your next agro'd tank) shield wall on the second spray(or just before of course).

After the second spray she should die(Last night she died just before the first spray for us. Yay for MT repair)

Grace of Air is 3% dodge and another 150ish armor, which is pretty amazing.

You could also use Last Stand + Lifegiving right before an enraged spray. Not sure if that would provide enough to cover the second spin or not, but if you are going to die go out in a blaze of glory with 0/15,000 heath :P

Ideally you should be looking to go through one enraged spray. Bring Maexxna down to 31%, stop DPS til web spray occurs, then go all out. Shield Wall can be used for the enraged spray, pretty much making it moot.

I can only comment from an alliance POV, but our tank chainchugs stoneshields, only taking a nat prot potion before the fight to make a safer pull. If the tank is kept topped up before the webspray and our assigned hot crew dump their hots on the MT as well as the poison remove debuff from the druids (abolish poison IIRC). Our experience was that stoneshields greatly helped to reduce the damage taken by the MT.
Since we have less nature swiftness heals availible a paladin is on emergency loh duty (mostly not needed). I might add, that we have only one priest with inspiration, which means we forfeit the potential armor bonus, alliance might have due to the paladin aura and our MT has 8/8 wrath, so no dreadnought stuff. If you don't have a TF you might try to thunderclap maexxna as well (don't know if it works, we were lucky to get a second TF finally just before naxx - first went to a pally :-().

Oh and of course try to time the enrage appropriately, which means take her below 31 % just after a webspray.

Yes, it is. But if you think about using pvp insignia or so, I guess it won't work since even divine shield doesn't work. Think Lethon and there you go.

Can't dodge when stunned. If the hard part of the fight (and to my understanding, this is the hard part) is the tank living through the spray, the 3% dodge from GoA is meaningless, you're only benefiting from the ~150-160 armor.

I once got flamed on our server forums for claiming tanks can help the healers in mitigating damage.

At the time almost no one out there used very standard techniques... The ones listed above.

This stuff will cut off absurd amount of healing damage.

I'd organize it this way however:

1. Shield block... - turning a crushing into a block shaves off more than 50% of the damage. SPAM THIS
2. Improved demo shout... lasts through stun, and is tremendous... amazes me when I see alliance killing Loatheb with this down.
2.5. Stoneshields... almost a requirement now adays - coupled with AH/Inspiration its very powerful.
3. Tclap (5 set)/Tfury... works through stun, 15 and 20% slow respectively, and is a lifesaver on her... KEEP IT UP!
4. I like windfury/SoE on her... you can't dodge during stuns anyway - but our crafty shamans generally change to GoA as the fight goes on for the MT.
5. Make sure you have 440 defense.
6. Don't worry about insect swarm and all those stoneskin type nonsense... they don't rarely add up.

And here's a big one:

You mentioned the enrage.

If she enrages with CoR up, she can do 12,000 damage in 2 seconds...
Without it up, its like 8,000.

CoR is amplified during the enrage, and you need to be exceptionally careful with using it under 30%. It is a massive DPS boon to both the MT and your raid, but you need to basically not use it unless the DPS requirements are becoming critical - and in that case, overheal like mad.

I would venture a guess that CoR could be the crux of your problems.

As for surviving the pre-enrage stuns.
Thats all in your healers. You want 8 set tier 2 priest... both renew/gheal, and rejuv/regrowth.
Have multiple druids at various times on abolish poison to try to get one at the last second (HoT's/Abolish is 90% of surviving that stun).

Bugs on you will also amazingly enough, get you under 10% quite a lot. Fear them off.

Yea SquattingCow hit it pretty bang on. You'll want Greater Stoneshield Potions and Elixirs of Superior Defense for your MT. Even your own reflective combat analysis hinted at this (you mentioned 70% of the damage taken was physical which seems about right.) In the absense of a Thunderfury, you should at least try and have a warrior with 5 piece Conquerors keeping TC up there. As far as totems go, because of the buff limit having a tendancy to knock the flask off, we usually limit our MT's totems to GoA and PC.

Using a backup shield wall tank presumes that a warrior is #2 on aggro -- typically we'll have other DPS classes up there, and I think that enraged Maexxna would kill even a shield-walled DPS warrior in a full DPS set. How does that work?

We just burn her down to low-30s, stop, use shield wall to survive one enrage-spray at 18% or so, and then ignore web wrapped people on the walls and just burn her down Huhuran-style. I don't think it's possible to survive an enrage spray without shield wall unless you get incredibly lucky. When we were learning the fight, we quickly discovered that a 15k hp gem+last stand HP pool was insufficient to last for the full duration. I guess you could use tricks like a soulstoned healer who dies intentionally, or a priest with SoR who makes sure to be <2k hp and near the tank going into the last spray....

Shield wall is the only reliable method.

We go 32 - 15ish - dead.

I know some guilds do double stun survivals under 30% but their techniques are insane... double tanks? 8 shamans ankhing and purposely dying? 8 Soulstoned priests?

I kid you not, these are all used on our server.... theres a few others I forgot also that were pretty crazy.

If you ignore the people on the wall under 32% its hard not to kill her... add in CoR and potion up and overheal if you can't make the budget.

Is this with or without having the CoR warlock switch before a spray?

On our early Maexxna kills we had an offtank who successfully got aggro during the enrage when the MT died. He claims he was able to stay on top of aggro because of shield slam. These days our MT doesn't die and we do it in one stun so we don't have to worry about it.

We overwrite CoR with another curse 5sec before Spray, at the HoT warning.

Farie Fire overwrites CoR if I remember right... you should be using that, not CoR. Stoneshield pot > Nature pot.

We've actually had successful Maexxna's where no one died, even the MT. He's geared to hell though and when learning Maexxna that would not have been even remotely possible. He managed to block/parry almost all of the enraged hits for 2 stuns after his SW stun, it was luck but still pretty cool.

We found when learning him if we didn't keep healing those on the wall we'd fast run out of DPS/Heals and just die before we could kill her. Enrage for us just means all the rogues vanish and go batshit, while we do our best to keep up exactly the same stuff we do all fight. We make sure our warriors are the highest on her aggro table (hence vanishing rogues). Our second war is in full prot tank gear, the third is fury but wears his dreadnaught, and the fourth is just in DPS gear (its rare but we've had the 4th have to take one, she usually dies coming out of stun though.)

That's basically our Huhuran strat as well (heal tank till tank bites it, heal tank 2.... etc.) Most guilds probably apply their huhu strats to her, the mechanic is similar. Try what you are familiar with.

Are you having your druids cast both regrowth and rejuv while keeping abolish up? This fight is almost tailor-made for switftmend.

That is some pretty crazy damage output, like 2400+ to tank health per second. Ouch.

Edit for Quigon as this doesn't deserve a post on its own: For the second spin (should there be one), Shield Wall for the first enraged spin.

Farie Fire and CoR stack, they are not overwiting debuffs.

Savos: They're probably shield walling...

Thanks for all the helpful responses.

We are thunderfury-less, and 5/5 conq-less unfortunately, so I'm assuming CoW and Insect Swarm might actually add up well. Our offtanks are actually in about the same level of gear as our MT (8/8 wrath, or 2 dreanaught), so would there be any benefit to actually having an off-tank just incase? as I heard mentioned. I'd assume rage, and therefore aggro generation might be an issue.

Another thing to add, and this is more of an issue. We had 0 priests with Inspiration and I was the only shaman with Ancestral Fort. I overheal-spammed LHW4 as much as possible to keep the proc up, but there were times it was down. I'm planning to request a few priests and shamans spec into it.

Am I to believe that with a single tank and no goofy rez tricks, is a 5/5 conq-less, Thunderfury-less, inspiration/AF-less tank is going to have unavoidable issues on this girl? Well all I know is im off to ZFK to farm a Hand of Antu'sul and slap +22 int on it. -10% attack speed hammers for me!


Edit: nice catch btw Kalman. I didnt think about the inability to dodge during the wrap.

0 priests with inspiration and 1 shaman with AH points to a much more serious problem than tanking or potions will ever compensate for. Unless of course you don't like 3000 armor on your main tank.

nope it doesen't. edit: bah double post.

a soulstoned priest is one solution if you can't manage to burn her down in just one spray but it's alot easier if you can do that. last time I think we actualy got 2 sprays due to some dps beeing dumb enough to die and if I remember right our mt survived the ordeal with lifegiving+last stand with a wooping 1k hp marginal :)


also, what Quigon said, make all of your shamans spec it for starters.