Dead Men Walking

From those fantastic guides at tankspot.

http://www.tankspot.com/forums/f206/55020-coliseum-anub-arak.html

The majority of the fight is spent alternating between the surface and burrow phases. Making the most of the time he spends on the surface is crucial, as you'll only be able to go through 3 or 4 rotations before you risk running into his 10 minute enrage timer. To help maximize the amount of time spent DPS'ing Anub'arak, you can offtank one or both crypt fiends from the second wave and wait to finish them off until the boss submerges. If you do need to have melee DPS help out on the first wave of adds, at the very least you'll want to let classes with long ramp-up times on their DPS rotations (such as Feral Druids or Retribution Paladins) stay on the boss full time.


this might be worth doing for us as our overall dps is still quite low, save the ads from the 2nd wave and nuke them down when hes under:) if we can keep that up i think we can nuke him down:D

Note that the tankspot guide is a bit outdated seeing as patches have changed it so that there is only a limited number of Permafrost orbs available through the fight. This means P2 needs a different approach as we can't just consume every Patch we get. We basically need to have him use as little patches as possible during each burrow phase (burrow phase has a duration and isn't dependant on the ammount of stuns he gets or anything). It has also shown that we cannot really split off in P1 to kill the adds. At most we can kill just the 1st wave and OT the 2nd wave.

In HC the number is defintely limited, but in normal they are pretty much everywhere all the time.  However, the kiting is actually easier if you use less permafrost as it allows you to put greater distance between the kitee and the raid.  

The more often you dump Anub into permafrost the more often he changes target and kites someone else, which means more chances for someone to get it wrong.  So one control strategy is to actually minimise the number of permafrosts used, which is also what you end up having to do on heroic.  This is one way of doing it that uses 2 permafrosts per burrow phase:

(http://www.deadmen.co.uk/photopost/data/532/medium/anub-kite-positions.JPG)
Ignoring the phallic nature of the tanking positions, the steps are sort of in this order:

Green = tank
Small green = tank kite path
Red = Boss or big adds
Big Orange = collapse point
Small orange = slowing traps or earthbind totems
Pale blue = kite path
Pale Blue Square - BOP needed
White = Permafrost

• Pull and position boss
• Deathgrip and kill two permafrosts one either side of boss for OTs to use
• OTs pick up big adds and tank at about 45% angle to avoid stacking debuff on MT and to avoid boss cleave hitting OT
• Big adds positioned so that melee can be under boss tail and hit both boss and all adds at same time.  Rub-off damage should kill adds, focus boss, adds will die along the way.  Focus some to boss or adds as required to make sure you keep ahead of the adds.
• OTs use maximum block value & avoidance gear to minimise healing needed.  (one of Eluo's OTs is healed in Heroic by just a healing stream totem, a beacon and an earth shield for example).
• Interrupt using holy wrath - position one pala biased to one side or the other to make sure all adds are hit when casting.
• Make sure adds not too close together or they buff each other and instagib tanks
• 5 seconds before burrow MT kites boss off to side (green dot trail left in picture)
• Melee can follow boss and keep dpsing or stick on adds (you decide the balance you need)
• MT calls burrow - everyone bar the OTs sinks to the collapse point (orange)
• Boss focuses one person - that person kites to far SE corner
• During the kite hunters and shaman drop a protective semi-circle of slowing traps & earthbind totems
• During the first kite all melee dps goes back to finish the big adds
• During the first kite the ranged DPS is split into 2 groups (left & right) with an MA for each and single target focus dps down the small scarabs that spawn (they should all come via a trap or totem & be slowed).
• First kiter arrives at side of permafrost and just prior to boss reaching him receives a BOP from Pala1.  Kiter stands there until 3 seconds left on BOP then runs into and out the other side of the permafrost.  Boss will become frozen, kiter runs north to rejoin the group.
  
• Boss is unfrozen & focuses a 2nd person who runs south of the permafrost dropped on the left then up the side of it to north, ensuring that the kite path does not bring boss into the permafrost as you pass.
  
• As 2nd kiter reaches north area he receives a BOP from Pala2 and then makes his way to north side of permafrost and stands there being hit by boss until 3 seconds left on BOP, then runs into and out the other side of the permafrost.  Boss becomes frozen.
• Boss becomes unfrozen and focuses a 3rd target.  Boss is kited all the way east.
• If you get the pathing correct you will have used up so much time on the first 2 kite paths that he will surface just east of the orange camp on the map, thus being right next to the permafrost patches for tanking him - and this is where the MT waits to pick him up as he surfaces again to go into the second P1.
• Boss surfaces, MT receives a HOF from a pala to assist in kiting him backwards through the permafrost into the P1 tanking position (no slowing component in Normal, so this step can be skipped)

That's 2 frosts per kite phase and no accidental risk of short kite phases as you only bring down 2 frosts in corner/side areas for the kiting.  The tanking frosts are left intact and ready to use again, in perfect position.  Note, at the burrow one person goes south to drop the permafrost there.  Only when the kite path has taken boss south does the second permafrost get dropped in the west, you want to avoid dropping it too early or the boss may accidentally hit the west frost on the first kite phase.

In addition it is helpful for all healers & as many ranged as possible to sit under the tail of the boss, this makes sure that the big adds hit AOE before they instagib a healer or ranged dps.  Tanks also have more time to pick them up properly and build aggro as they are behind the backs now of all the dps who will not have the adds come into range until the tank has solid aggro on them.

For the second kite phase you do exactly the same (on heroic you would take the mirror image kite paths as you have already used the SE and NW frosts in first kite phase, so you would take the SW and NE frosts instead).


So the fight goes:

P1 - P2(kite) - P1 - P2(kite) - P1 for the 3rd and final time moving into P3 when you hit 30%.

In final P1 phase you continue as in a normal P1, and when you hit P3 you get the added pressure of leeching swarm which drains your HP and heals Anub.
-consider doing this fight with a low HP set - the lower your HP the less he self-heals.  We only stam buff tanks on this fight for example.
Assign someone to spot heal the Pentrating Cold debuff.
Avoid using big AOE heals and try to keep everyone's HP well under 50%, if your healers are quick you can keep people at very much lower health, just keep the tanks up at reasonable levels.  Do not overheal people!
Keep HP5 totems, shadow priests VE, ret paladin and DKs healing in the groups to minimise the number of 'big' heals healers need to use.  
Keep calm, continue dpsing the boss with rub-off dps killing the adds - but stay ahead on the adds.
Remember to stand under the bosses tail - it helps stop you getting instgibbed by newly spawned adds.
Consider using paladin splash healing to your advantage - you can dps/heal from within 8 yards of an OT to get extra healing from spalsh if needed.
If really panicking have some protection pots available to absorb some damage so it does not need healing.
Just keep it calm and under control until you collect purplz.

You can practice this positioning and movement in the Twins room before you break the floor.

Hope this helps.

hi this is the vid i found that i was on about http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5cL8zvbc020&feature=player_embedded##

bump aa

It's a pretty nice video (chinese farmers now going to do WoW guides? :') ) and we may be able to use 1 part of it.

It has shown that we cannot output the dps needed to kill the 1st wave of adds then switch to the boss, so we'll have to carry on doing that the way we were. The one option I do see though is that maybe we need to have another look at the seemingly "random scramble" method of dealing with P2.

Now, don't go forgetting all that we have practiced tonight because I'm convinced it can be very methodical if it actually works, but we may consider the following (since frost orbs are unlimited in normal mode it seems, contrary to what we thought before):

Everyone gets atop a frost patch (well in the middle of one) once P2 starts. Adds get killed off and then on to the little scarabs. 1 or 2 ranged dps go orb hunting in order to drop as many as they can. People being chased need to avoid the patches the Big add tanks are standing on to avoid it being consumed and adds burrowing.

Disadvantages:
- It may bit harder to control where Anub is coming up. Then again we're not being very methodical about it right now either.
- Little adds aren't bunched so not very susceptible to mass AoE. Then again the idea was to single target them down in the first place.

Worth keeping in mind if we really can't get TL's method to work.

Quote from: Azunai;292474Worth keeping in mind if we really can't get TL's method to work.

Which bit are you struggling with?  Happy to spend some time on TS discussing...

Quote from: TeaLeaf;292477Which bit are you struggling with?  Happy to spend some time on TS discussing...

Co-ordination. We get the first stage and first movement perfect, it's after he resurfaces that people just seem to either stand still or scatter and it all goes out the window.

This is one of those fights that needs everybody to think on their feet, you cannot rely on being told what to do or where to go other than the basic tactics as its a fight that is very fluid. A patch may not land exactly where we want it so we have to adjust. The boss may come up at a different part of the room, so we have to adjust.

Personally, I love this kind of fight as you have to think and stay alert all the time. You need excellent spacial awareness for it. You cannot just stare at your button bar and cooldowns for this fight!

We will continue with the tactics we were trying as they do work, and work well as we got him to 50% by the second burrow so it's the way to kill him.

I think we have the big picture working well, but it's always one little thing going wrong.

- We've had an attempt where a frost patch was placed in the middle of the kite path beforehand.
- We've had adds killing off some people before being picked up
- We've had a mage trying to iceblock out of spikes  (which makes him go to another target it seems)
- We've had the boss just off position so that he would go through the raid on his first kiting length
- Leftover scarabs slowly eating their way through the MT and not being killed in time
- Several other 'minor' things

Always the big picture was going good. It's always just one of the above going wrong per attempt, but they screw up the whole picture if they do occur.

Well the good news is that all those little things are easy to control, fix or avoid, but as you said they wreck the whole attempt if they happen.  These 'little things' are sorted by the individuals in the raid, it's down to each and every raider to not make those basic errors that cause the wipes.

iv been thinking about last night and tbh i think it was crap spent way to much time wiping trying a tac that aint gunu work with are 25 man group set ups when we can get a 25 man group that is, and yes fair enough we had a good go at it but not everyone no's what to do and were to stand , so why don't we drop 25 man all together and focus on 10 man cuz we can clear all 10 man content like uld and toc so why not start trying for uld 10 hard modes cuz i no loads of people that what to and also start on toc 10 heroic get that cleared, because you and i no there is always enough online for 10 man groups and maybe do the odd 25 man here and there but mainly concentrate on 10 mans

thanks

roary aka balmius

DMR is primarily a 25man raiding guild and alot has to happen before we drop that format in favor of 10mans.

I would not agree in saying that last night was a waste of time. Wipe nights happen, I suggest you get used to it. We've had far worse wipenights than last night. We have made progress, people will learn where to stand and learn what pitfalls to avoid. If last night is still the way it goes after 3 weeks of wiping, then yes, we may need to rethink our approach, but there's no need to let heads hang after 1 night of tries.

we may have had worse night than last night but i dont see the point it trying eluo tacs for it cuz we are nothing like eluo and never will be we need to find a way that suites are 25 man raid group set up or it will be wipeing every night cuz as you said last night how do eluo do it umm cuz its eluo and they have way more pallys that raid, and im am used to wipeing but its getting stupid trying to be like a  guild we wont ever be like

It's not the pretention that we are Eluo, this tactic just happened to come from them. Granted the BoP is likely to become a problem and an adjustment might be in order in the way we handle the spike path. I'm thinking the tactic in Dil's vid is a good one, the more or less random usage of frost patches like we did in 10man.

But that's no reason to say that we shouldn't raid 25man. That's got nothing to do with it.

EDIT: Merging this with Anub'arak thread since they both deal with tactics pretty much.

what im trying to say is there is allways the right amount of people for a 10 man but not all ways for 25 remeber the time a raid was cancel'd  because there wasnet the right amount of people online and it was a idea and wasnt getting at any one just the fact of trying that eluo tac 11 times and failing every time did get stupid tbh after the 5 try i would of tryed it differently but thats not my choice its up to the officers,


i watched the vid gandy posted with the purma frost placed in a sort of ring around the boss and not aoeing then mini adds down just single target them,  because when we aoe'd them every one was getting the debuff witch started to killl us off, and from what i seen it looked like the 2 add tanks tanked them on the same patch of purma frost

If you read the opening paragraphs of what I posted Roary I gave the info as a suggestion to aid control of the encounter, which DMR were struggling with.  I even mentioned it as being just one example of a strategy, not *the* way to do it.  As Az says, it has nothing to do with it coming from Eluo or that fact that this is DMR not Eluo, nothing in there requires you to be in Eluo before being able to actually implement that strategy.  If you read around the encounter you will find others have found similar paths, each with their own tweaks, but in a very similar vein.  The principle is the important bit, not necessarily the detail of the strategy.  The point is work out how to kite the adds and control P2, not that you have to kite them that way.  People should look at an encounter and then work out how the control aspects work best for your own raid.


Roary, just for info Eluo are still working on HC Anub and not killed him yet, but we know the tactic is sound and are now refining our P3 strategy.  It has taken us about 100 wipes so far, so doing 5 and wanting to change is probably not giving the strategy a fair chance.  5 is usually just enough time to work out if people understood what you said, not if the strategy works or not.

What I've been thinking of changing based on the tactics we used last night is this:

P1 either remains the same OR me and Hal tank the 2 adds right next to eachother. Experience from P2 yesterday shows that we can handle 2 adds hitting 1 tank, so 2 adds hitting 2 tanks should be managable. Advantage: They both get hit by ricochet dmg initially. Once 2nd wave comes we split them back up because 4 adds is too complex.

P2: Instead of the BoP/fixed path we just drop down as many orbs as we can since they seem to be indefinite on normal. Someone who is kiting should opt for a patch as far away from the boss as possible to 'use up' as much of P2 time as possible. BoPs are optional but given our usual setup and specs we will not be able to maintain this throughout the entire encounter. Melee who are being pursued by spikes while they are killing big adds should clear away from the add patch asap so as to not consume it and cause the adds to burrow. Once adds are down we proceed to single target down scarabs. Everyone who is not kiting should be standing on a frost patch to avoid getting hit by the spikes if they happen to pass by.

This method relies less on strict kite paths that are prone to screw-ups.

Thoughts?

fair enoght TL but what im trying to say is even after 5 wipes it was still the sam thing happening people not placeing them self in the right place boss not being in the right place and yh i wasent in the right place at 1 point but thats because of not being able to hear things being said on ts because the coms arnt being cleard, maybe you should come along for a run and you can see what im trying to say and maybe point out where we could do some thing different,

like not aoe'ing them mini bug things because of that debuff or try and get as many pura frost down and as fast as pos little bits like that is were we how can i put it ummm fail.... and we defo need to sort the hop out with only 3 pallys in the raid just wasnt working

Point is Roary that it's not right to dismiss a tactic after only a few messups. Only if something consistenly goes wrong can you dismiss it as not working. Like for instance killing the 1st wave of adds. After a few tries it showed us that we didn't have enough dps to bring down the boss enough in hp.

The rest of the tactic however had something differently going wrong every time. It's not the same thing going wrong, hence we can't conclude the tactic isn't working. It is, we just need to finetune the execution to erase the little errors that we encountered. And if they keep occuring then we can make changes as I posted below. But there's no point in dismissing a tactic if we haven't been able to fully test it yet.

It's like saying there's no black swans after seeing 5 white swans in nature. You can't conclude that on the basis of just 5 white swans.

Nice anology!

One thing that did spring out from your previous post (#19) was that you said you are not getting the adds down before the next lot arrive.  That's the thing I would work on first, you need to stay ahead of the adds or the problems back up through the fight and eventually become insurmountable.  You need to aim to kill the first wave of adds before the next lot spawn.

ok fair enough and i agree now and see the point and apologize


but what im thinking is them little scarb things need to be single targeted and not aoe'd cuz that debuff is a ass to heal agenst  

im gunu do something on paint to show what i mean later see if it helps me to explain better

Quote from: TeaLeaf;292557Nice anology!

One thing that did spring out from your previous post (#19) was that you said you are not getting the adds down before the next lot arrive.  That's the thing I would work on first, you need to stay ahead of the adds or the problems back up through the fight and eventually become insurmountable.  You need to aim to kill the first wave of adds before the next lot spawn.

It was our original plan, but we were literally 100% off the enrage timer. He was 55% when enrage hit. What we did next was ignore the adds and go all out on boss in P1, and instead we let the adds take as much ricochet dmg as possible by positioning them close enough for melee multitarget damage to bounce off. This way we were getting into P2 with 1 add on roughly 30-50% health constantly. We then proceed to kill these adds followed by the scarabs and so far we have managed to do that whilst keeping tanks and raid up. Upon wipes he would be at roughly 50% hp with less than half of the enrage timer having ticked away.

I haven't paid much attention to scarab kills but I believe these keep spawning if killed during P2. So in theory it wouldn't matter if you killed some of them during P2, as long as you can manage to clear them right before/during/after transition back to P1. What I'm trying to say is you do not need full time on scarab killing in P2 so you do have time to hit the adds. The only downside is healers having a bit harder job since tanks are taking more damage. But on the upside, killing the boss becomes a realistic goal, which it was faaaaaar from when we killed adds upon spawn.

Point is that you even things out again by killing big adds in P2.

yh but the thing with them scarabs is the debuff that stacks on who ever they hit and they tend to hit healers and that aint good tbh and with the dbuff stacking on others makes mine and the other healers job ridiculously hard

love the swan analogy...let me add ... not trying to feather my own nest...

Some of the ugly ducklings in the raid (I'm ONE) need time to grow into the fight eventually we will spread our wings and fly through it.

I cannot see the problem because if the game was too easy no one would bother playing it, last night was great fun comms and banter were also good.

Quote from: Roary;292562yh but the thing with them scarabs is the debuff that stacks on who ever they hit

^^^ this kills healing.  Spot on.  The debuff is seriously nasty to have to heal in addition to everything else.  Single target is the way forward.  People need to step up their personal dps and deliver what is needed.

ya, this was a problem last night, some people were stacking 25+ of those debuffs, i was hitting 12-13k heals on them, with others landing as well and struggling to keep them up.  we defo need those scarabs single targeted down rather than mass AOE on them like last night

And if people notice these scarabs being close by then enter the PvP mentality: Stun it, slow it the whole shebang. Survive.

Quote from: Fatdog;292593ya, this was a problem last night, some people were stacking 25+ of those debuffs, i was hitting 12-13k heals on them, with others landing as well and struggling to keep them up.  we defo need those scarabs single targeted down rather than mass AOE on them like last night

As a comparison, the worst I see is 11-12 stacks and typically that's on only one person in the raid.  25 sounds like it comes from a tank in an AOE strategy.  Typically I would see maybe 8 people in a 25 person raid with the debuff, most with only 1 stack and maybe a couple with 5-6 stacks and maybe one the one person with 11-12 stacks.  The multiple stacks all come from enraged adds (nothing you can do to avoid them), so it's a measure of how poor the dps on them is.

The adds have something like a 20k threat focus on a target.  This means you can approach them and they will ignore you until you pull aggro by exceeding this threat value.  In essence this means you can attack any scarab that is not targeting you and so long as there are a few of you attacking at the same time you then the scarab will die well before any of you pull aggro.

unfort on this example it was dps with the stacks

That is a combination of failing to move and failing to set single target MAs to dps stuff down.  You can escape them if they are not enraged and by the time they enrage they should be dead.

Just to add to this thread.  When you get into P3 we found the below addons absolutely totally invaluable.  They pushed us from the 20% wipes in P3 to a server first 'A Tribute to Skill' kill on Anub last night.

Penetrator (http://wow.curse.com/downloads/wow-addons/details/penetrator.aspx)
Grid plugin: GridStatusRaidIcons_mod_by_Colraw (http://wow.curse.com/downloads/wow-addons/details/penetrator/download/385669.aspx)

1. Make sure all other promoted people are not assigning icons (we just demoted everyone but me)
2. Turn OFF bossmod icon assignment on Penetrating Cold (the new addons will handle it)
3. In Grid go to Grid>Status and RaidTargetIcon:Player - select Enable
4. In Grid go to Grid>Frame>CenterIcon - select RaidTargetIcon:Player

Make sure your LOWEST latency member is the one running this mod.

What the addons do is search for the PC debuff, then assign a raid icon (one of 5 fixed icons) to each member with the PC debuff.  This allows you to assign 5 healers to handle:

- one group in the raid, and
- one specific PC debuff icon

For example last night I looked after group 3 and also healed the orange circle PC victim.  It made the mess that P3 can be significantly easier and I highly recommend it.

Other healers handle the tanks.

I have been working on a passive unhittable set for tanking adds on Anub, Still missing some parts though.
But that would also require me to specc different, and therefor loose some of my prot-dps, but guess that's the minor thing. Unless i loose my dps specc all over, but that would be a loss overall i guess.
The specc i'm thinking about using is this, with imp. demo shout.
http://www.wowhead.com/?talent#LVZhicZVItrx0didczsGo:dMizMm (http://www.wowhead.com/?talent#LVZhicZVItrx0didczsGo:dMizMm)

Would like to get some comments on this issue, and what you're thinking about it.

As far as I am aware our warrior tanks use their standard block & glyph talent build with their block value gear set.  

Latven is our usual OT for Anub and he single tanks the adds, so you can take a peek at his armory for the talent build.  Historically latven has always been more of an avoidance tank than EHP tank, but I do not believe he respecs for Anub, he just equips his block value gear.

When the BV gear is in place the single tank works incredibly well, to the extent that my 8 charge earth shield often has only had to proc & heal once or twice during an entire P1 (pre-burrow).  If it gives any idea of how little healing is needed, Latven is usually healed in Anub25 heroic by a beacon and earth shield only.

Couple of provisos:
-you need to be a little more careful with where the rest of the raid stands when you single tank the adds, healers in particular are common targets for the adds, but if they stand tight up under the back end of Anub then the tank has plentyof time to pick them up before the squishy gets splatted.  MDs from hunters as they spawn and rogues once they get into melee range help massively here obviously.

only reason really for the respecc, is for better threat on aoe tanking. I am although not completely satisfied with my block kit yet, since i'm only at 89.01%, so currently missing 11% still, to reach the limit, although it helps good on normal, i never see that many big hits coming through