Wotlk - Azjol-Nerub (AN)

Hey all,

While working through the northrend content on my new team, I decided to stop at Azjol-Nerub at level 74 to try and take it down. The first boss was not a problem at all (I'm over 1200 dps on my ele shammis and I'm holding about the same dps on my druid), the second boss is what's giving me hell. I can always get to the second boss, Hadronox (sp? the spider with the poison clouds), and I can get the boss down to about 5-10% (3% on my best attempt, but typically between 5-10) health, but the damn poison clouds are whats killing me. I looked around (maybe not hard enough), but like in Hachoo's video, he simply dpses through the encounter before the poison clouds wipe him. I'm 100% sure that I could do this with lava burst (or maybe if I even picked up a couple more +spellpower items), but at 74, I'm not blessed with lava burst, and I really want to try and do this encounter at the appropriate level :) .

So my questions are - what would be the best strategy to deal with the poison clouds? I've attempted this with poison cleansing totems (which don't stop the cloud damage if you stand in it).

I was thinking of trying the following:

1 - manually backing my guys up with the s key once they start taking poison damage?

2 - grouping all of my toons under me during the entire fight and just moving - similar to how I did the 1st boss in the Underbog with the mushrooms that spawn all over. I found that in the Underbog, it was faster to just keep everyone on me and then move when I saw the clouds spawning. I'd imagine that I could do the same thing here, just running around like a chicken with my head cut off when the poison cloud lands at my feet.

Any other thoughts, tips or ideas would be appreciated.

My new team: 2 x Elemental Shaman, 1x Resto Shaman, 1 x Balance Druid, 1 x Prot Paladin

Thanks!

Elemental Shaman should drop poison cleansing totem and nature totems to make this a trivial fight, with that you should not have much of an issue really if your pushing 1200 SP and the poison is your only issue then nature and poison totems will make this fight easier, I had the same issue once I got past the first boss, the second boss would destroy me even with my tank being 80. I looked around and found that if I wanted to beat it poison and nature resistance totems would have to go down and this negated much of the poison damage I took even with my team standing in a poison cloud. Have fun and try it out and see what you think, you did not list weather you dropped those 2 totems so not sure if this will help you out.

bind a key to the strafes, you will need it later anyways. Then simply strafe out of the poisons -- going backwards is much slower than strafing.

For example I use wasdqe for movement on my tank (main), and they are not passed in keyclone/octopus/hkn. I also have shift-wasdqe bound to movement on my shamans, and these keys DO pass via keyclone/octopus/khn.

So if I need all my guys to strafe left, I just use shift-q and they all take a few steps left, or shift-e to strafe right.

btw if you have 3x healing stream totems (plus 1 poison) it should be eating up much of the damage you take anyways.

You can dance......

Or you can just spread out along the rim and let each shaman "eat" a spike solo - then chain heal up.

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Originally Posted by 'Hairball',index.php?page=Thread&postID=194959#pos t194959

You can dance......

Or you can just spread out along the rim and let each shaman "eat" a spike solo - then chain heal up.

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Bad idea since the poison coulds dont disapear before 3-4 mins have gone passed!

Nature resistance totem and poison cleansing totem is a must. (One of the poisons can be cleansed)

Be sure everyone is within range of both totems!!

I manually move the char/chars that get hit out of the poison cloud.

Its hard to see in my movie but you can see on my health bars that i move them around midfight.

Chain heal is bad when singel targets get hit.(but you need it since its a awsome tools vs aoe ofc) Bind a key for each slave that make all shamans spam lhw on that target, this is makes lots of fights alot easier since there often is no need to use chain heal wich is pure overhealing.

I frapsed the heroic fight but its pretty much the same fight: http://www.wegame.com/watch/AzjolNerubHeroicMultiboxed/

IMO Poison cleansing totem makes this fight trivial. Ran it a few times and never had an issue that poison cleansing plus chain heal can't solve. Just burn bloodlust right away also.

Awesome information, thank you everyone.

@ Marious & Hachoo - I need to stagger the poison cleaning totems right? I vaguely remember trying this with 3x Poison cleansing totems at the same time and I still died (it was late though)

@ puppychow - thanks for the strafing tip, I'm going to add that in to my mix :)

@ Dominian - great video, thanks!

Poison cleansing totem should last you the whole fight. It has a 5min timer like all the others, or am I wrong? Thought really the only ones that had a timer shorter than 5 where the grounding, tremor and some of the fire totems other than wrath. No need to stagger them one should be sufficient, like one of the other posters said if it is really an issue then spread them around a bit further so that they dont get all hit by the poison but still use the poison and nature totems on this fight it is a must.

i chain heal / rape my way through this fight without moving also, just get the totems down an pew pew! xD

So gonna rez this post from a while back. I have tried this instance and have a question.
On the second boss, should I be clearing all the guys before the boss ASAP or just wait till they come to me? I have only tried this boss a couple of times and wiped each time, 2nd try I got over ran before the boss for some reason.
Hints and tips very much appreciated, I think this fight should be easy considering how my toons are geared but both this and the Old Kingdom cause me a ton of issues.

I pull them as I'm ready. You're in combat for the entire time anyway, so can't drink between pulls.

If you wait for autopulls, you will probably get some adds with the boss which could why you're having problems. If done correctly, the boss will come alone.

I am surprised you're having problems with that level of gear. What's causing you to wipe? (oom, can't keep up with dmg, etc).

Actually the first time was the poision cloud and the second time some adds got away and killed my healer lol.
I will have to try this again, this one comes up a lot in the random dungeons and it was be some extra badges if I could clear it. :)

Kill the groups by each set of stairs and the ones that randomly run for you. Let the rest run down and engage the boss. Once the boss is up top, dont start fighting untill he kills all the mobs on him. After that its DPS untill he spits poison on a guy. when that happens, I run around him in a big circle because he pukes out the poison fire on the ground. By the time that lands the heal boss poison on your guy should be gone and its back to DPS. Rinse and repeat till he is dead.

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Originally Posted by crowdx

Actually the first time was the poision cloud and the second time some adds got away and killed my healer lol.
I will have to try this again, this one comes up a lot in the random dungeons and it was be some extra badges if I could clear it. :)

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I was wondering about the clouds. Yeah, it's definitely important to get out of them asap. One thing that helps me a lot is that I run decursive on my main. Whenever anybody in the group gets poisoned, decursive does this really ominous sounding GONG so I know to move immediately. Or maybe it's DBM. It's one of those. :)

Also, if you have a shaman, drop a NR totem and a cleansing totem.

The peel off on the healer thing: yeah, just need to take it slow and get some agro. There is a ton of time to kill these adds so don't feel rushed. With your gear, you'll be sitting around waiting for him anyway.

There is a trick you can do on the second spider boss.. Park everyone on the ramp going down then if you have a mage, hunter, or rogue you can jump down with him to aggro the mobs then invis, feign death or vanish and they all disappear. Then you can jump down and run to the boss. Kill him loot fast and jump down the hole so you avoid all the little spider adds that come.

As has been said, just bind an alternate set of strafe/movement keys so you can move alts out of stuff like that. Hadronox's poison is rather weak overall -- now is a good time to learn to move out of that stuff. ;)

And just drop 1 poison cleanse with the other totems at the start of the fight. It'll last you the whole pull.

I have keys bound for moving toons (essential for Garfrost :) ) and unfortunately my current group does not have a shaman, I am warlock, hunter, mage, druid and pally (varying mixes with Pally always tank and Druid for heals).
I will have to give this another try and see how it goes :)

What I do:

Crucial buff: Aspect of the Wild (nature resist)
I park the team next to the top of the ramp and pull the 1st group all the way back to avoid aggroing the 2 other groups that spawn. Pull the groups 1 by 1. Watch for the little spider adds. I like to keep a consecration close to the group so all melee mobs are automatically picked up and I try and hit the ranged adds with an Avenger's Shield or move the Pally close enough to them so they get hit by the hammer.

After all 3 groups are dead I will move the team down slightly so I can strafe easily without bumping into the ramp killing the occasional spider add.

Note: You can drink between every 2 spider adds. Just watch for the "Leaving combat" message and drink immediately as you will be back in combat pretty soon. Need to kill those adds quickly though. When I was still early 80 gear and learning the instance I would drink in between the 3 packs as well, just need to time it right.

Wait for the boss to finish up the little spiders and be ready to taunt. Engage and watch for his poison spit on the group. Strafe the group immediately out of the poison spit. Aspect of the Wild will help negate some of the damage but it is not easy to heal through on the whole group. Don't need to worry about the tank much.



And once you get past this you get to fight Anub'arak which was a really difficult fight for me until I had the gear and a strategy that works for me.

Well as an update, I got this one again tonight. I tried the hunter trick and that got me a wipe lol. I then just followed some of the other advice, got the second boss down and then on the final boss I got the achievement for killing him in less than 4 minutes. I did notice that the spikes still hit toons even when they are on the rim, I presume this was nerfed at some point. Overall the second boss seemed the hardest but I think I will get the hang of it and soon be clearing it regularly :)
Thanks for all the help

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Originally Posted by crowdx

Well as an update, I got this one again tonight. I tried the hunter trick and that got me a wipe lol. I then just followed some of the other advice, got the second boss down and then on the final boss I got the achievement for killing him in less than 4 minutes. I did notice that the spikes still hit toons even when they are on the rim, I presume this was nerfed at some point. Overall the second boss seemed the hardest but I think I will get the hang of it and soon be clearing it regularly :)
Thanks for all the help

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What caused the wipe on the hunter trick? Did you not kill the spider quick enough?

I think the issue was that I was not entirely sure what I was doing, so I dropped the hunter down into the first group and then did feign death, then I went down to the very bottom where the boss was and engaged him, within 30 seconds a bunch of adds started coming and basically overwhelmed my team.
I think I was missing something in the plan lol

Unless you are trying for the heroic achievement, wait for him to kill all the extra spiders. The boss will then come to you and be a very easy fight.

I presume the issue with killing him with the extra spiders would be poision?

i know where your coming from:

this is my strategy:

for inchy wincy you need go in and take down the 3 guards and trash asap, longer you take the more annoying adds over run you.

second wait, she will come eventually...used to bug think its fixed now..

but anyway when she comes, make sure your shaman are spread out 2 spaces apart and tanks and spank. POISON, when the clouds hit the floor hit lesser healing waves and continue to dps you will find you will always survive and kill her long as you keep healing and dps balanced.

this method works better than wasting time moving (this is based on a ranged box team) melee is totally different which im making a team atm.

Here is how i do it, you can see positioning very clearly.

Heroic AN is pretty easy and after being gone for awhile it seems even easier now when I hit it on random dungeon mode. The best thing to do with any of these fights is to have the best gear you can have to make them all trivial. One thing about wow is that it is a bore to do the same stuff all the time but you have to in order to progress. Now that you can do normal mode instances in ICC for epics and triumph badges all day long makes this extra fast gearing possible. Do all the heroics you can easily do over and over equip all the best gear you can buy with basges and slot them all with epic gems. Once you have this done everything becomes a breeze. If you are trying to do the more movement intensive fights without a tank and healer that can take punishment and deal healing you are really setting yourself up for wasted gold on repair bills. That being said the first boss in AN is simple. The skirmishers dont even agg the healer anymore enough said about that tank and spank. Hadronoxx is simple the acid cloud deals nature damage its a cloud which means it has aoe characteristics I use one formation for all my fights and have really not encountered one that I need to change it yet. I use a + (cross formation). spread the guys out a bit the poison can be cleansed with a totem and the acid cloud will only ever affect one guy if they are not standing to close to one another. Tank and spank hadronox and heal through through the cloud damage. My druid ticks at only 2100 on a rejuv and the acid aoe does 1150ish per tick easy enough this fight is over. Anub arak seems to have been nerfed heavily the aoe spikes dont even come close to killing me and now i dont even really care if my whole team is popped in the air wildgrowth brings them back no problems. I don't sit at all with this boss unless he is up the ground pound shit is insta death for everyone in my group if they get caught in it so when he pops I hit my cross formation which stops follow i then dps while I just spin him around away from my group using aoe heals and rejuves when he is down i have my whole team on foloow and constantly move which keeps me out of the spikes 80% of the time. The adds are pretty easy and fire elementals help kill them quick enough. The hardest thing about boxing is positioning and worrying about it. WHen I approach a fight my first objective is to not have to worry about my slaves so I approach every fight with my prime objective being to do as little with them as possible and if that means park them or have them all follwing. I have never used a strafe key because my whole objective is to not really do anything with the slaves movement wise. Aoe healing is your friend my team runs the standard pally tank 3 ele shams and a druid healer. I would imagine if you are running 4 shamans that are all ele it would be a bit tougher as you have no insta heals and healing uses dps mana for movement intensive fights this causes a problem which is why i don't run teams like this because I like to keep things easy. My next thing to overcome is the boredom of farming h PoS for my battered hilts and currently after 8 hours of soft resets on 27 trash mobs inside the instance I have yet to see one drop. Lets hope I get one tonight.

Idk, on this one I get slapped around on the trash pulls before the first boss. Really seems my healer gets 2 shotted (alot).

I tried several times to take skirmisher first because it darts around at will. The watcher(?) pisses on me or something and wipes me pretty fast too. I'm sure a shaman would make this alot easier, but 3 locks, priest and paladin I'm finding pretty hard.

Velassra, are you doing this in heroic or are you leveling and doing it in normal?
I originally had some issues with this one but after some advice here, it becomes are really easy badge run.
A point on the last boss, if you stand around the edge with your toons spread out, it make the fight very easy. I ignore the spikes and just heal through the damage, my very first try on him got me the achievement for under 4 minutes, only thing that slows this fight is the burrowing, otherwise pretty simple.

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Originally Posted by crowdx

Velassra, are you doing this in heroic or are you leveling and doing it in normal?
I originally had some issues with this one but after some advice here, it becomes are really easy badge run.
A point on the last boss, if you stand around the edge with your toons spread out, it make the fight very easy. I ignore the spikes and just heal through the damage, my very first try on him got me the achievement for under 4 minutes, only thing that slows this fight is the burrowing, otherwise pretty simple.

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Heroic actually, had some trouble w/ it while leveling but completed it in high 70's.

I can't get past the trash pulls before the first boss. (Also where I had the most trouble in normal while leveling interestingly enough.)

I run on my main team, 2 destro warlocks, bm hunter, druid (heals) and pally (tank) and the first Boss is never an issue. I sometime use stun on the guys that weave the webs but mostly I just kill the Skirmishers first and then the rest of the adds. The boss himself is pretty much tank and spank, ignoring the little spider adds until after the boss is down.
Is your priest holy? From reading here, Discipline might be worth a shot for the extra survivability, nothing worse than losing the healer early in the fight :(

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Originally Posted by crowdx

I run on my main team, 2 destro warlocks, bm hunter, druid (heals) and pally (tank) and the first Boss is never an issue. I sometime use stun on the guys that weave the webs but mostly I just kill the Skirmishers first and then the rest of the adds. The boss himself is pretty much tank and spank, ignoring the little spider adds until after the boss is down.
Is your priest holy? From reading here, Discipline might be worth a shot for the extra survivability, nothing worse than losing the healer early in the fight :(

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Yeah, my priest is Holy. That's where most of my problems come, when the Healer drops almost instantly. (Some CoS pulls, 3 shot from an enraged ghoul, drops my healer... happens almost every 5 man pull, canb't get all of them fast enough.)

Idk about switching to Disc at this point....I'm still learning what bosses I can take/which ones I can't (I have about 8 I can do reliably well, and improving even on them as I go,)... so switching at this point while I learn how to blend Disc in w/ what I've been doing as Holy, may put me back and put some of thos bosses I have gotten back out of reach.

(I don't doubt it's good advice, but I'm a slow learner so I'd prefer to make major changes if I have no other choice.)

Well I had trouble with this instance as well at 74. I got my @ss wooped on the first boss... and gave up the instance and have thinking about returning as its a fairly short instance while leveling. Anyway, are you having trouble keeping aggro with your tank? It sound like you do to me.

You healer shouldn't get hammered other than the occasional AOE from a boss.

Valassra:

You have a paladin tank. They are amazing here and TONS of places in northrend. Abuse your aoe undead stun. Here and cos and icc are like paladin eazymode.

With avenger's shield and gluesecrate, your healer should never ever ever ever have aggro. Double check some posts here for tank rotations, and make sure you have your righteous fury and such up on your paladin.

In AN:
All the mobs are undead. So use your aoe stun. Basically every trash pull at the start should go like this:


Avenger's shield, targeting the skirmisher. Honestly just this should be enough aggro to make sure your healer never gets aggro. Run in and drop consecrate. Blast the crap out of the skirmisher. Use your aoe stun. Use your single target stun if you have to as well. Kill the others.

Pull the left group with avenger's shield. Kill the skirmisher, then the caster, use your aoe stun and your single target stun. Kill the main guy - make a line in your dps macro that say /tar web wrap (I think that's it) to free your guys from the wraps.

Wait for the next group. Soon as it starts going towards you, avenger's shield. consecrate, aoe stun, repeat. use IWT to realign your guys if they get messed up from the 'confuse' type thing the guy does.

Third group, same deal.

Boss: keep consecration up, ignore adds, tank, spank, collect loot.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by kac

heroic an is pretty easy and after being gone for awhile it seems even easier now when i hit it on random dungeon mode. The best thing to do with any of these fights is to have the best gear you can have to make them all trivial. One thing about wow is that it is a bore to do the same stuff all the time but you have to in order to progress. Now that you can do normal mode instances in icc for epics and triumph badges all day long makes this extra fast gearing possible. Do all the heroics you can easily do over and over equip all the best gear you can buy with basges and slot them all with epic gems. Once you have this done everything becomes a breeze. If you are trying to do the more movement intensive fights without a tank and healer that can take punishment and deal healing you are really setting yourself up for wasted gold on repair bills. That being said the first boss in an is simple. The skirmishers dont even agg the healer anymore enough said about that tank and spank. Hadronoxx is simple the acid cloud deals nature damage its a cloud which means it has aoe characteristics i use one formation for all my fights and have really not encountered one that i need to change it yet. I use a + (cross formation). Spread the guys out a bit the poison can be cleansed with a totem and the acid cloud will only ever affect one guy if they are not standing to close to one another. Tank and spank hadronox and heal through through the cloud damage. My druid ticks at only 2100 on a rejuv and the acid aoe does 1150ish per tick easy enough this fight is over. Anub arak seems to have been nerfed heavily the aoe spikes dont even come close to killing me and now i dont even really care if my whole team is popped in the air wildgrowth brings them back no problems. I don't sit at all with this boss unless he is up the ground pound shit is insta death for everyone in my group if they get caught in it so when he pops i hit my cross formation which stops follow i then dps while i just spin him around away from my group using aoe heals and rejuves when he is down i have my whole team on foloow and constantly move which keeps me out of the spikes 80% of the time. The adds are pretty easy and fire elementals help kill them quick enough. The hardest thing about boxing is positioning and worrying about it. When i approach a fight my first objective is to not have to worry about my slaves so i approach every fight with my prime objective being to do as little with them as possible and if that means park them or have them all follwing. I have never used a strafe key because my whole objective is to not really do anything with the slaves movement wise. Aoe healing is your friend my team runs the standard pally tank 3 ele shams and a druid healer. I would imagine if you are running 4 shamans that are all ele it would be a bit tougher as you have no insta heals and healing uses dps mana for movement intensive fights this causes a problem which is why i don't run teams like this because i like to keep things easy. My next thing to overcome is the boredom of farming h pos for my battered hilts and currently after 8 hours of soft resets on 27 trash mobs inside the instance i have yet to see one drop. Lets hope i get one tonight.

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my eyes! The goggles do nothing!!!

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Originally Posted by jimbobobb

Valassra:

You have a paladin tank. They are amazing here and TONS of places in northrend. Abuse your aoe undead stun. Here and cos and icc are like paladin eazymode.

With avenger's shield and gluesecrate, your healer should never ever ever ever have aggro. Double check some posts here for tank rotations, and make sure you have your righteous fury and such up on your paladin.

In AN:
All the mobs are undead. So use your aoe stun. Basically every trash pull at the start should go like this:


Avenger's shield, targeting the skirmisher. Honestly just this should be enough aggro to make sure your healer never gets aggro. Run in and drop consecrate. Blast the crap out of the skirmisher. Use your aoe stun. Use your single target stun if you have to as well. Kill the others.

Pull the left group with avenger's shield. Kill the skirmisher, then the caster, use your aoe stun and your single target stun. Kill the main guy - make a line in your dps macro that say /tar web wrap (I think that's it) to free your guys from the wraps.

Wait for the next group. Soon as it starts going towards you, avenger's shield. consecrate, aoe stun, repeat. use IWT to realign your guys if they get messed up from the 'confuse' type thing the guy does.

Third group, same deal.

Boss: keep consecration up, ignore adds, tank, spank, collect loot.

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Aggro usually isn't a problem for me anywhere else ( less than 5 mobs anyway.) just in here. Something is heading right into the healer virtually everytime. Skirmisher is always my first target. I'll use the undead aoe stun abit more liberally tho too. Web wrap may be whats causing problems, idk. I'll be going back in once the Holiday crap is done...and I'm somewhat better geared (actually have a couple peices above ilvl200 now) than when I first tried it so we'll see.

Niley,
Looks like you are using pitbull unit frames. I cant ever get mine to show casting bars, any suggestions other then going to the website for the mod and asking. it seens to takes forever to get a reply and thats if they do reply.

And how are you showing the window that shows what loot each toon got and how many?

I watched in in 1080p. im impressed with the quality of it!

Finally finished this instance on Heroic for the first time last night.

Anub gave me all kinds of problems but it was more of a matter of not being a spaz and paying attention to a slave screen to see what was happening with the ground spike.

The part that keeps getting me are the spiders that spit the venom stuff. Grounding totems help for that. Mostly for me I know it's a matter of practice.

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Originally Posted by Gomotron

The part that keeps getting me are the spiders that spit the venom stuff. Grounding totems help for that. Mostly for me I know it's a matter of practice.

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I've never even thought about using grounding totems on those. I usually drop a cleansing totem prefight and a group heal when they're poisoned.

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Originally Posted by DrChaos

Niley,
Looks like you are using pitbull unit frames. I cant ever get mine to show casting bars, any suggestions other then going to the website for the mod and asking. it seens to takes forever to get a reply and thats if they do reply.

And how are you showing the window that shows what loot each toon got and how many?

I watched in in 1080p. im impressed with the quality of it!

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go to /pb and at layout section open up a party layout (your party layout name) and there are bar tabs. check the castbar and set your own settings there. You can even set it to show icon on castbar or spell name, i dont use them, but i use castbar. If you look my blog and screens there you should see the line there to, it is below manabar. It can be made a lot larger but i only need to see if my alts are casting, so i know its all fine with them.

Hi guys,

I am running a divers team, DK-tank + ranged DPS/Heal.

Any tactics for the last boss. He always rapes me with the spikes.... :(