Another Challenge Tank

Anubarak, at 30%, begins to assault the whole raid with a Leeching Swarm. This affects everyone in the raid, and must be healed through to keep them from dying. This includes the tank, who must be spam-healed more than usual lest he get eaten alive by the swarm.

Pets are immune to this aura.

Discuss.

He doesn't hit as hard as some of the brutal bosses hit-per-hit (at least not on 10-man), but those hard hits might be a bit too fast to make it a possibility. He has a three second stun attack that does frost damage. And the biggest issue I see: he has a fairly short enrage timer, which means a high nuke, particularly at 30%, when the raid is being drained to death.

My theorycrafting isn't good enough to be able to test this out in numbers, and while I can handle Naxx by this point, I doubt my gear's going to be up to doing this bad boy, so active testing isn't an option. Therefore, I'm holding this up for folks who might want to consider the facts and chew through a few numbers.

As for me, I've still got my eye on Vezax. Few more HP....

Mostly brainstorming, the way I did for Malygos. After all, how else can we figure out how high we can push that envelope?

Anub'arak seems pretty ideal to me because you don't have to move him around at all.

As I recall, our guild tanks were talking about him hitting for 18k to 20k. That means to get 3-hit safe, you'd need around 41k HP (easily achieved I think, specially with the new stamina scroll). With a 50k HP pet, I could see this being straight forward to handle.

I think the most painful thing is probably the stacking debuff from the little bugs when he burrows. I think that ticks along for something like 5-9k per tick (depending how many stacks) even with Aspect of the Wild. So when he comes back up, you have to over-heal until the debuffs fade (unless he doesn't have the debuffs stacked on him). One trick might be to have one of the off-tanks do all the agro collection during burrow (just pet pet on passive). Keeping the debuffs off the pet might be the answer here. Now that I think of it, that could be a good trick for any MT, not just a pet.

Ground

PS: Anub'arak....A New Barack? Was WoW in cahoots? I'm seeing a new concocted TV thriller here. Where are all the flat earth folks, Elvis is alive believers, and JFK conspiracy theorists? This one is RIPE!

Ground-DH wrote:I think the most painful thing is probably the stacking debuff from the little bugs when he burrows. I think that ticks along for something like 5-9k per tick (depending how many stacks) even with Aspect of the Wild. So when he comes back up, you have to over-heal until the debuffs fade (unless he doesn't have the debuffs stacked on him). One trick might be to have one of the off-tanks do all the agro collection during burrow (just pet pet on passive). Keeping the debuffs off the pet might be the answer here. Now that I think of it, that could be a good trick for any MT, not just a pet.

When these bugs surface, they have a high amount of threat on one random person in the raid. They can be taunted, outaggroed, et cetera, but they will go for that person first. Pets are immune to this 'burst of aggro', so yes. if the pet is on passive, it won't pull a bit of aggro from those little bugs. A normal MT won't be so lucky; they've got a chance to be a random target from these bugs. Aggro-collection is the tactic our raid usually goes with, too; get OTs to grab the bugs and work them to where some AOE can be employed to hurry things up.

And yes, while we haven't got enough hunters to make a 'tank the bugs with pets' a viable choice, I do often let my DPS pet eat some of the bug debuffs (Intimidation and full-out DPS will pull aggro) if he can rather than letting the clothies get chewed on. That acid stacks quite high if you're not careful.