[25] Nefarian Add Kiting

[Kihra]

I am looking for advice on Nefarian add kiting in 25-man specifically. For those who have successfully killed it, I am curious about the following:

(1) How long are you having to sustain the kite in P3 (from the time the first ball drops resurrecting the adds to Nefarian dropping dead)? On our attempts I'm managing to last ~3 minutes before I finally get wrecked, and I'm hoping that's in the ballpark.

(2) How do you deal with staggered adds? I'm on Onyxia in P1, and we have another OT getting the adds collected and dead in P1. Sometimes even when they all look like they died in a nice pile, the ball just doesn't rez all of them. You end up with some stragglers who don't get up until the fire reaches them (sometimes as much as 10 seconds later). Should I be trying to deliberately park all the adds in fire initially to try to sync them all up? There are so many that they spread out all around me, and the fire patch starts out small, so this seems problematic to do.

If I just collect them even though they got up later, what happens when I kite around the edge is the earlier ones dies first and then the later ones, so they're kind of spread out in an arc around the edge. Then you have adds just rezzing at unpredictable times, and I've had to move away to continue kiting the pile once it gets up.

(3) Where do you prefer Nefarian to be tanked and why? Everyone else in my guild favors putting him on the edge, but I would prefer him to be tanked in the center. I'm kiting the adds around the grating at the edge, and eventually I start coming up on the dragon who is also on the edge. My only options are to double back (difficult when the fire spreads to such a large radius behind me) or to try to run across the room to the clear area beyond the dragon.

I'd prefer he be in the center so that I can just keep moving around the grating, but I have seen kill videos done both ways. I'm curious what kite path / positioning people who have killed him here prefer.

[inthedrops]

Our P3 add tank very much preferred Nef to be tanked in the center. We tried both ways and he liked the center much better. I don't recall why or if he even stated why. But I'm 99% certain if had to do with feeling less trapped.

Kill video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q3fbYIFggek

We do it with 3 tanks. To help with the issue of the adds spawning unevenly, I help pick up any loose ones and bring them over to the tank.

Do not be concerned about the fact that they spawn unevenly and are hitting the fire. They already have 100 energy so there's nothing you can do to change that. All you can do is get them out of the fire as quick as you can. Typically they're going to run towards some healer. When Nef is in the center of the room, so are the healers. Which means the late spawning adds run out of the fire all by themselves.

The more critical aspect is that they get pulled OUT of the center as quickly as possible so that Nef doesn't throw a meteor there, forcing the raid to make large movements.

The add tank and the Nef tank communicate when to turn Nef, or not. Sometimes the Nef tank has to move due to fire. And sometimes the add tank tells the Nef tank to move due to adds. They both decide when to move Nef.

With Nef in the center, whenever we needed to move due to adds, it was always a 180 degree change. In this way, the raid itself doesn't need to move at all. Just the Nef tank. This in my opinion is the biggest benefit to tanking in the center. I realize you can do the same thing with Nef on an edge, but visibility and awareness seem easier on the raid while in the center.

Hope this helps. I didn't actually kite the adds so I can't comment.

[Brutalus]

(1) How long are you having to sustain the kite in P3 (from the time the first ball drops resurrecting the adds to Nefarian dropping dead)? On our attempts I'm managing to last ~3 minutes before I finally get wrecked, and I'm hoping that's in the ballpark.

That sounds about right, I suppose you could extend it a little longer by kiting slower immediately after a fire is spawned, but that can get complicated and somewhat risky. I recorded our kill a while ago while I kite the adds in phase 3, and I die about 3 minutes after the adds get initally spawned:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wTlZyZBVaOI

(2) How do you deal with staggered adds? I'm on Onyxia in P1, and we have another OT getting the adds collected and dead in P1. Sometimes even when they all look like they died in a nice pile, the ball just doesn't rez all of them. You end up with some stragglers who don't get up until the fire reaches them (sometimes as much as 10 seconds later). Should I be trying to deliberately park all the adds in fire initially to try to sync them all up? There are so many that they spread out all around me, and the fire patch starts out small, so this seems problematic to do.

Obviously when they initally spawn you can afford to wait around a bit while kiting slowly, I just backpeddle a bit away and toss an avenger's shield on any stragglers with specced judgement available as well. I've heard about using the breath to activate them all at the start, but we don't personally do it. Normally I can kill them off close to right on top of each other so that they almost all spawn at the same time. We do have hunters and another tank ready to misdirect and ferry any loose adds to me should I miss them.

(3) Where do you prefer Nefarian to be tanked and why? Everyone else in my guild favors putting him on the edge, but I would prefer him to be tanked in the center. I'm kiting the adds around the grating at the edge, and eventually I start coming up on the dragon who is also on the edge. My only options are to double back (difficult when the fire spreads to such a large radius behind me) or to try to run across the room to the clear area beyond the dragon.

We have him in the center so that I can kite around the grate endlessly without concern of reaching the boss and having to turn around or something of the likes. Having the main-tank turn the boss 180 degrees whenever I get near the face helps a lot, but the tail can get very dangerous. Another benefit of having him in the center is the raid should never really have to move (other than from one side of the boss to the other) since fires will only spawn on the outer grate.

[inthedrops]

We have him in the center so that I can kite around the grate endlessly without concern of reaching the boss and having to turn around or something of the likes. Having the main-tank turn the boss 180 degrees whenever I get near the face helps a lot, but the tail can get very dangerous. Another benefit of having him in the center is the raid should never really have to move (other than from one side of the boss to the other) since fires will only spawn on the outer grate.

Awesome post. I think this summarizes P3 position reasoning. BTW wanted to thank you for your video as it helped is a bit too.

The mistake that people make is in thinking that because Nef is against the edge, they'll be further from the fire because the add tank can be further out. When in fact that's a fallacy. The add tank is just as restricted by the fire as everyone else. The add tank is eventually forced to get closer and closer to the raid, which ends up putting the fire closer and/or more randomly than if Nef was just in the center.

Hard to explain but this is what our add tank realized after a few attempts with Nef on the outer edge.

[inthedrops]

Picture is worth a thousand words. Do you want fires that are potentially more randomly placed like "A". Or where they can just barely reach the center of the room like "B"? We like "B". As Brutalus said, you can literally just swap sides when it gets close.

[Arianne]

Do any of you have a log that you can share of how much damage you're taking?
Do any of you use slows? We've been using some (piercing howl, frost trap) and the adds haven't been 'dying' in phase 3 at all. I'm pretty sure that having them slowed is making them clip the fire. However, when we don't slow them, the healers complain that we're taking too much damage and that they're OOM.

[inthedrops]

Yeah we actually stopped slows and stuns as much as possible. Rely on only the tanking choosing when to do it since everyone else can just make matters worse.

Add tank takes tremendous damage and is the cause for most of our wipes. Took him some practice to get things down.

Log (Ji is the Warrior tank on adds):

http://www.worldoflogs.com/reports/03e957m0lrhwu1m7/sum/damageTaken/?s=7061&e=7572

Phase 3 only: http://www.worldoflogs.com/reports/03e957m0lrhwu1m7/sum/damageTaken/?s=7347&e=7574

If I remember correctly, two healers were dedicated to him. A druid and a shaman.

[Brutalus]

Do any of you use slows? We've been using some (piercing howl, frost trap) and the adds haven't been 'dying' in phase 3 at all. I'm pretty sure that having them slowed is making them clip the fire. However, when we don't slow them, the healers complain that we're taking too much damage and that they're OOM.

We initally had our warrior get piercing howl glyph and kite them, but it turned out to be too much of a pain and we just stopped bothering. By we, do you mean you're having 2 different kiters? We tried that too and it didn't go well; one of us would often lag slightly behind the other and then clip fire. We find the damage to be pretty mild for most of the the last phase, but as they get close to 0 energy they hit like trucks, and that's when I usually come close to dying.

In terms of logs, here are the two logs from our two kills, if there's something you want to make from them:

http://www.worldoflogs.com/reports/o2y6 ... 31&e=10240

http://www.worldoflogs.com/reports/rt-j ... 878&e=6407

[Kerriodos]

Just killed him on 25 man last night, using the strategy where Nefarian is tanked on the outer edge. The majority of our wipes were from me screwing up kiting in some form or another--stopping too long after a spark, thinking I had more time before the next (I now know from the 10 man thread that each successive spark comes faster); trying to kite through a small gap in a last-ditch to avoid a spark; things of that nature. We had been working under the impression that proper execution could keep that phase going forever and I was just playing poorly: thankfully I know now that's not the entire truth.

It definitely felt as though around 3 minutes (not an accurate measurement, however) is where things would fall apart though. I'd run out of room to move or be too slow moving and they'd get hit and we'd die. Even on our kill I died and we only burned the last 6 or 7% by popping armies and having out DK tank--whose healing aggro had picked up most of them after my death run them to the other side of the room before dying. In short, it wasn't clean, but I feel as though tanking in the middle will minimize mistakes happening due to having to double-back or cut through the middle with adds which could prolong the time until I die. Assuming I can convince the raid it's a good idea.

Logs for all 15 attempts plus the kill are here: http://www.worldoflogs.com/reports/pzbn764ginhande6/

Many of the attempts are sloppy on my part, but they make give you some indication of the expected damage intake.

[ryL]

I just want to emphasise how important it is, to understand that the adds don't have to be realy kited the whole time.
You won't die due to normal melee hits, even if an add is close to dying and has like 12 stacks. In the first 90 seconds you want to avoid the fires at all costs and after a few trys I realized, that its way easier to only move the adds, when a new fire is about to spawn (Bigwigs has a timer for that, I started moving at ~5seconds on the timer).

A few tips:

- You want the first shadowblaze in p3 to resurrect every single skeleton. That means, positioning in phase 1 is quite important. If you just stand still and let the adds die, they lay down in a semicircle and with a bit misfortune only half of the adds will be hit by the initial shadowblaze fire. I started to keep moving in phase 1, to stack them in one place. It's a bit tricky, an efficient stategy is to move around them or simply run through them all the time (and probably stun them occasionaly).

- In p3: move them out of the first shadowblaze and wait (the fire grows, so keep distance). Shortly before the second fire spawns, start moving again and wait for the purple point on the ground, which indicates the position, shadowblaze will land, keep distance and wait etc.

- Slows or CC in general doesn't help, your priority is to avoid fires

- Ideally, all adds die in the same position (just like in phase 1) and will be resurrected all at once

- Now you start really kiting them, because the time between two fires is to short to stop moving. It may get a bit messy, but the boss should be down before to even come in danger of dying. Just try to keep them out of the fire and consider using CC (such as frost nova)

[Kerriodos]

One thing I'm concerned about with tanking Nefarian in the middle of the room is how to deal with the tail. That is, if I'm moving behind him, say 2 minutes in when fire comes every 10 seconds, and get tail-swiped, chances are pretty high that adds are going to get hit by fire and I'm likely going to die if they were at 8+ stacks or so already. Similarly, I'm concerned that turning the boss is going to make healing even more stressful than it already is, since there's the chance the raid could be tail-swiped. Are there any particular measures you guys take to avoid these problems, or is it more of a "go for it and hope for the best" kind of deal--which is admittedly probably still better than tanking him on the edge and running out of kiting room faster.

[Rhiannon]

Just have your Nefarian tank move him a bit off-centre so his head's closer to one wall and tail's further away from the other. He'll still be pretty much in the middle but you should have enough room to get past without being swiped.

[Treck]

Bring 11 druids.

[Kerriodos]

I have to admit I'm slightly baffled as to how 11 druids made that fight so much easier for them. Admittedly I know nothing about the heroic version of the fight, but applied to the regular version all I can think of is bearform+barkskin for Electrocutes, maybe? In Wrath I would have been convinced it was for the battle rezzes, but, well....

Is there some mechanic or magical druid trick I'm missing here? Lots of stampeding roars for add movement?

[Chicken]

Entangling roots?