Resto Nation

Anub’arak. No boss in all of Wrath has troubled me more than the Nerubian Traitor King. He has been a stumbling block that refuses to go away for almost all of the expansion so far. This has earned the giant Crypt Lord the distinction on being my own personal nemesis.

A long time ago when I had been a fairly fresh 80 Heroic Azjol-Nerub was a place to be avoided. You would think that an instance filled with poisonous undead would be a Holy Paladin’s cup of tea but it was not so. Vemonmancers and the big guy’s Pound always gave me fits.

As we progressed through Naxx and into Uludar and Heroics became easier and then trivial I thought that the days of the big blue bug were behind me. This was not to be. Apparently being the final boss in a five man dungeon was not good enough for a major lore figure like Anub’arak. When Blizzard announced that the King was coming back as the final boss in the Trial of the Crusade I knew we were in trouble.

I could not have been more right. Armed with a new bag of tricks, Anub’arak continues to be a weekly point of frustration for me and my guild. While our 25 man group has downed him on normal mode, we are not consistent. When we have done it is usually at the cost of quite a few toons.

My 10-man has normal mode on farm. One-shots are the norm. Heroic is another story. Last night we put about 20 attempts in. The closest we got was 16%. Where as 25-man normal can be sloppy and still be a win, Heroic 10-man requires perfection. One major mistake or death and it’s a wipe.

Short of random complete fuck ups, our issue is phase two. We have a solid plan for using 3 ice patches per burrow phase. However short or ill timed spike kites due to misplaced ice orbs and the Acid-Drenched Mandibles debuff from the Scarabs prove to be our downfall.

We have tried to mitigate the scarabs by stacking Nature Resistance and this seems to be working well, except when the stacks get over 5 on multiple toons. Fixing the kiting is just a matter of execution by both the kiter and the ranged dps pulling down the orbs. What is commonly referred to as “bad rng” I think can be overcome by tighter play.

I’d like to see us try and skip the second burrow all together with a better DPS burn. I think we are nerfing ourselves with a suboptimal raid composition. Fixing the comp would give us more wiggle room in what is otherwise a very tight encounter.Anub’arak is not a full-on DPS race, but the burn phases are and we seem to be a little behind.

In these last few weeks before patch 3.3 and Icecrown Citadel we really need to buckle down and finish off what I think is one of the hardest encounters on the game. Anub needs to die not just for the achievement and team morale but my personal sanity as well.

Stay tuned. We’ve killed one Big Blue Fail before, this one is just a matter of time.

The difficulty of raiding in Wrath of the Lich King has been the subject of widespread discussion since very soon after its release a year ago. Most folks say it is too easy. I agree to a point with that statement, but it think it needs to be further clarified.

I judge the difficulty level of an encounter based on two things:

1. How it is tuned versus appropriate gear iLevel
2. The level of coordinated execution required

Tuning is all about the math. The idea is that given a certain level of encounter there is a DPS floor. If you exceed that floor you will win. As that floor raises it becomes more difficult. The inverse is also true with a DTPS (damage taken per second) ceiling and the required healing. It is my opinion that post 3.1 Normal Mode encounter and under-tuned and Hard Modes are slightly over tuned.

What this means is that all things being equal given appropriate gear it should not be difficult to clear Normal content. Once the raid exceeds that gear level the content becomes trivial. Hard modes do fix some of this issue (ignoring the argument about repetitive content).

Hard modes at the appropriate gear level are extremely difficult from a math perspective. They are doable, but just barely so. As gear level increases the math becomes easier but still is a few tiers away from trivial.

I think this system works and the developers have done a decent job.

At this point I agree with the masses that the content is easy, if you disregard the second point. What almost all of these encounters come down to is a matter of execution.

Execution is important, sometimes more than others. Once the math is on your side it is all about how you perform the mechanics of the fight. Again there is separation in Normal and Hard modes. Hard mode encounters are much less forgiving of failure. If you do these well, loot rains from the heavens. If you do not, you wipe. Execution is 100% a matter of player skill. And yes, not standing in fire IS a skill.

This is why I respect anyone who has killed Yogg, Algalon, and any of the Trail of the Grand Crusader (bonus points for Anub’arak). These fights are “hard” because they require execution. You can be the “second best geared insert class here on the server” and if you keep standing in green clouds you fail. What makes someone a Raider (and not everyone who raids is…) is the ability to perform your role in killing the boss while also performing the obstacle course dance that Blizz tells you to do.

As with anything else, practice makes perfect. Learning from wipes and fixing mistakes makes the encounters easier as long as you have the basic situational awareness to understand what is going on. I believe you can teach what is happening, you can’t teach awareness. As long as players stand in fire guilds will wipe on farm content and bash their heads’ against progression kills.

People often wonder what the je ne sais quoi that top raid guilds have is. Quite simply it the ability of the members to execute the encounters flawlessly. They practice and learn on progression wipes and once they have it, they have it.

The current level of Normal mode content is forgiving enough to allow sloppy execution which can lead to lazy play and bad habits. Essentially it leads to wipes because it so easy. Only by tightening execution will clearing content become quick and smooth, leaving you time to practice the real skills you’ve learned on the Hard modes.