Timed CoS and Spider Wing down

A few of us were on early on Friday night and for a challenge we tried to do a timed CoS run. This involves getting to an optional boss within 25 minutes of starting the event at Arthas. We took a def tank (moi), bear druid, pally healer, rogue and enhancement shammy. Not really the ideal group as we were without aoe dps but that never matters to us. For the most part the bear druid tanked, simply because he could get to the mobs in the first section of the run faster than I could.

For those who've never done The Culling of Stratholme the first part involves waves of mobs that spawn in different areas of Strat. The direction appears as an arrow on the minimap and you go where the spawn is and you get groups of elites to kill. On the way there are lots of non-elites that you can pretty much ignore until you get to the big pulls where they can be aoe'd down even by pally consecrate. The hard part of a timed run is moving swiftly through this bit to give yourself plenty of time for the rest. You can try to keep the pulls moving back towards the central area all the time but that makes dps a little tougher. For the most part we fought them when we found them.

The first boss is Meathook, an annoying abomination that occasionally hits the lowest person on the threat list. The easiest way to do this is for someone to sit out the fight as otherwise the healer tends to take the hits and they are stunned for a few seconds after so no healing. I sat the fight out after dropping a set of devestates on him, annoying the pally a bit as he took the first hit. I then moved back out to stand behind him and did nothing else until looting my badge.

The elite spawns get a bit tougher until you get the second boss, a necromancer who is pretty easy to tear down with the high melee dps we have. We then made sure we spoke to Arthas to get him moving. This is one of the keys to a fast run, ensuring you talk to Arthas every time you need to move him on because failing to do so costs you time. We got to the building where you start to fight the dragons and sped through the first couple of sections fairly quickly until we were on the third boss. At this point we were well over halfway through the time and I really didn't think we were going to make it. Having cleared the building we were on to the final gauntlet. This is where having two tanks really helped speed things up. I ran through marking what elites I could, pulling four and then letting the bear move on to pull in some more. This allowed us to move very quickly through the gauntlet, though we did have two very good dps to burn down the elites quickly. We didn't stop in the middle, just carried on past, pulling as quickly as we could until we reached the end with a little over 3 minutes left. Ignoring Arthas we ran past and on to the optional boss, who is to the left of where Arthas stops. The timer was on 3 minutes when we started the fight, me tanking, them spanking. It was a hard, fast fight, and the timer was on 1 minute when the boss dropped and we got the chance to loot the bronze drake. Grats go to the rogue who got it on that run. We were all very pleased with how we'd done it, no deaths and within the time limit. Moved swiftly on to Mal'ganis, killed him with ease and the Royal Crest of Lordaeron dropped. Cue happy tank! Lovely looking shield and a decent upgrade for me once I got a +20 defense enchant put on it.

By this time the guild were starting to get online. It didn't take much longer before we had 2 tanks, 2 healers and 4 other dps and decided to drop into Obsidian Sanctum. Cakewalk. Even with 8 we can do this pretty easily now. We don't even bother with going through the portal on the second boss to worry about his drakes, we let them come through and kill them outside. When it comes to the final boss I've got the hang of moving my mouse around and positioning properly so I didn't get hit by a single wave which makes me absurdly proud of myself. No drops for me but a couple of happy people which is great. We didn't have Wintergrasp so we decided to do Spider Wing in Naxx again.

Cleared our way through the trash easily and took Anub'rekhan down first time, druid tank on him, me on the adds again. Swiftly moving on through the next sets of trash we got to Grand Widow Faerlina. Used our normal tactic of burning down the adds during the enrage phase and we one shotted her which was pretty impressive. Didn't hang around we just moved on to Maexxna where we'd had some problems before. This time we got her steadily down to 33% and I called a halt to dps while we waited out the next web wrap. It went off and we hammered into her but wiped when she was about 18%. Quite rightly the other tank asked me why I hadn't positioned her very well, and I'll explain that a little later on.

At this point we had Wintergrasp and people wanted to go do VoA so reluctantly the two tanks agreed. Both of us wanted to feel the achievement of Maexxna down and the other tank was encouraging people to believe we could do it. Anyway we went to VoA and died on the second trash pull when we got the wanderer. Luckily enough when we tried to go back in Wintergrasp was contested so it wouldn't let us so we went straight back to Naxx and onto Maexxna.

Now positioning Maexxna takes a bit of work if you're fairly new to tanking. She has a huge hitbox which means you can run and strafe and she just doesn't follow you. Trying to get her to the best position is pretty tricky, so for the second attempt, this is what I did. Moved to stand against the left hand wall, where she webs people. This means melee dps can help break them out without having to move too far, which is obviously very useful from their point of view as we're a very heavy melee dps guild at the moment. I then moved forward until I was in range and pulled, before moving back to the wall as she came in. Then I moved through her until she turned. Now this is a bit tricky, as you don't start with a lot of rage without charging, but it seemed to work pretty well. I had her back to the rest of the party and I could concentrate on hitting her as hard as I could. The other key thing to remember in this fight is to time shield block to start just as she web wraps. This helps you take less damage while everyone is webbed.

Again I called a halt to dps at 33% and waited out the web wrap before telling everyone to go as hard as they could. This is because she enrages at 30% and does a fair amount more damage. This time we took her down and got the achievement for finishing Spider Quarter. With 8 people we cleared the easiest wing of Naxx. That was a fine feeling. No drops for me but nice to see others getting some good purples.

It's moments like this that I love. When a group of people, good friends rather than expert raiders, comes together to take down a raid boss. That moment when you want to punch the air and take the credit for good tanking, good healing and good dps. It's what keeps me interested in WoW long after I would have moved on from another game.