azjol nerub - anub'arak - head gonna asplode

[jimbobobb]

Ok, first boss, no problem. Second boss, manage your mana, again no problem. Third boss, seriously wth?

My team:
protection pally
resto druid
2 X arcane pom pyro mages
1 X elemental shaman

Here's what i do, and it seems to work pretty well:
First off you can run into the arena and to the halfway point on either side of him w/out aggroing him. Go in any further (like to the back pylon) and he'll aggro you. Standing under the pylons will indeed keep you from getting knocked wayyyyy up and taking fall damage - you'll only take the 7kish from his impale.

I run in and position my guys, put up totems. First part is basically tank and spank. He'll do an aoe that does minimal damage, just heal through it. However just like the last guy in Utgarde, he has a 3 second cast time frontal aoeish type thing called 'pound'. When you see him casting this, run through him (and always keep him facing away from your group). It seems to be buggy right now, cause he definitely turned on me a few times - it hits for around 15-20k, and stuns you for a good bit. Basically a hit on your team will be a wipe most likely. after 25% he'll dig under ground, and this is when I hit my autofollow key. I run around picking up the mobs (all the while keeping hots up on my pally). I basically go in a big circle around the arena. While I'm running my mages and shaman just do their instants. As soon as I see him surface somewhere, I stop and dps for about 6 seconds, then start running, and repeat until the mobs are dead and he resurfaces (first wave is simply 2 elites and 2 non-elites spawn on a timer it seems). He'll resurface in the middle, so make sure your guys are not in the middle when you're about to kill the last elite. When he resurfaces it's the same deal for 25% more - just dps him.

My problem is the second wave (which appears to consist of 2 of the warrior type elites, and two of the venomancers). The venomancers. NO MATTER what I do, they always simply chain poison bolt my druid until he's dead. I have nature resist totem and poison cleansing totems down - learned THAT lesson super fast, but I can stand on top of them spamming my tank and taunt keys, and they will not target my tank. Are they like skirmishers, and just target a random group member, and I've just gotten very unlucky? I seriously just spent the last 3 hours wiping on this wave to the venomancers killing my druid and I would still be there if heroics hadn't reset. Does their poison bolt have a range? I tied grounding totems into my shaman dps macro, but it didn't seem to help. Does anyone have any kind of trick for this? Or any success boxing anub'arak with 5? Any advice would be greatly appreciated, cause I think my girlfriend is going to kill me if I am up till 1am again because I'm trying to kill a bug in a video game.

[jimbobobb]

Why do you need to move your toons during the phase when he's up? Also, I have no trouble avoiding the spikes - that was never a concern. My problem was the venomancers not aggroing my tank and simply killing my druid almost immediately, even when I keep a consecrate down right in the path they come in and spam my tank key on them - I take it you have no problems keeping them aggro'd on your tank? Do you use a pally tank, DK, warrior, druid?

[TheBigBB]

I downed him eating fall damage and poison and it was a nightmare. The poison is the hardest thing in the encounter. I would have a poison cleansing totem down and heal like a madman during that part. I don't see the benefit of running around for the add phase. Standing in there and DPSing those adds down makes it go more quickly.

By the way, are you referring to normal or heroic? I'm referring to heroic; I think it was really simple on normal and if you are on normal then just stand there and DPS as I said for a nearly guaranteed win.

[Hachoo]

Nature resist totem + 2 or more staggered poison totems seems like it would help even more.

I think the pulse on a poison totem is 5s, if you could stagger 2 or 3 you'd only have to wait 1-2s before the poison was cleansed. Seems like it would make that part of the encounter much easier. Anyone tried this on heroic? I did this instance on regular and it made me not want to come back on heroic ever, even though I beat it it would be a nightmare.

But, if there are enough tweaks/tricks to make it doable without TOO much of a headache I might actually try to box this on heroic.

[Creazil]

Poisons? I've only got that on the first 'try'! Groundings eat them :) If you're not playings shamans, CLEANSE!

[nomenquis]

Since I've now got a few more kills of this guy (finally got the belt!) some more notes:

During burry phases the adds that spawen will destroy totems fairly often. For some reason they like to eat poison cleaning totem the best.
So i started to simply drop one every time a venomacer spit. Otherwise it happened quite a lot of times that i thought one was up but it really already got destroyed by some random mob.

Now, i could not imagine to do burry phases the way you do them (with people on follow) and running around. Key for me is to get things over with as fast as possible.
My tactic thus is to just run with tank and healer (healing aggro makes sure mobs come near the tank and into consecration) and let the dd pew pew all the time, no matter what. I just heal through the impales.
Also as soon as venomacers spawn i switch all dmg to them and try to get them down as fast as possible.

I usually bloodlust and put down fire elementals in the third burry phase.

[Cash]

You have 2 mages. Why exactly don't you counterspell the first volley? 8 seconds of the venomancers just meleeing should give you enough time to tank and burn them down.