Tuesday, 2 December 2008

Naxx 10 Man Cleared! Kel'Thuzad Explained.

So as the title suggests we cleared Kel'thuzad in Naxx last night in 10 man.

It felt really good to defeat a proper challenge again after the level 70 stuff was nerfed.

I know its not the 25 man content, but its still an achievement in itself for a casual raid guild.

The fight itself is a really interesting one, but very straight forward.

Phase 1 - The group run into the centre of the room and the fight starts. The room itself is a large circular room with seven or eight alcoves dug out into the walls with portals in the ends of them.
In these alcoves undead mobs spawn:
Skeletons - these have really low health and can be one-shotted with any of my abilities
Abominations - these need to be tanked and nuked down.
Soul Reavers - these banshee's move really really slowly towards the raid and do 8k damage to anyone who gets into melee range. These need to be nuked down by that ranged DPS classes.

These mobs will come randomly and attack the group - its not hard - you should not be wiping in phase one!

Phase 2 - After 2/3 mins of the undead mobs attacking Kel'thuzad stops channelling his portals and the undeads stop spawning and he joins the fight.

At this point the raid should spread out - and be more than 10 yards apart if possible. This is a MUST!

Kel'thuzad has 3 abilities during this phase:
1 - single shot shadow bolt - hits 1 random target for a reasonable amount of damage.

2 - Multi shot shadow bolt - his most, if not all, of the raid for a few thousand health.

3 - Iceblock thing - This will wipe the raid if you're not careful and is the single most important reason why the raid need to spread out. The affected target will be encased in a tomb of ice which will do 105% of the players health as damage over 3/4 seconds. It cannot be bubbled out of, or ice-blocked out of. Anyone who is with 10 yards of the affected player will ALSO get this. So its really bad if you have your healers all stood together and all 3 of them are affected - Yep thats a wipe!

Your healers really need to be on-top of their game to keep the affected player alive. As a ret-paladin I was helping out a lot with the healing where i could - if I got an instant cast heal i would top up the health of anyone who had low health - bearing in mind that my Flash of Light can crit for 3/4k while raid buffed. So that's quite a lot of healing for a dps to do. It really helped us out last night.

Phase 3 - at 40% Kel'Thuzad will cry out for help from the Lich King who kindly obliges the lich with 2 big nasty bugs. Each of these should be tanked by the off tank. You cannot kill these dudes as they have the same health as Kel'Thuzad. (2.5 million if I remember correctly)
These guys have a buff that increases there damage by 15% each stack - this can stack 99 times.
Both our tanks last night were Paladins, so when Kel was down to about 5/10% our off tank went down as he just couldn't stand up to the damage those things were putting out.
When phase 3 starts - its a dps race - pure and simple. Kill Kel'thuzad as quick as you can or your tanks are going to get killed by the bugs.

Phase 3 isn't all that difficult - we had more problems getting through phase 2 without loosing a healer from the ice-block.

Prior to the Naxx raid we went and helped out in Wintergrasp so we could do the 10-man boss in there Archavon. Wow is he easy in 10 man. Having seen the 25-man and that being one shotted - its really free epixx!! If you've not been yet i suggest you group up and go there as soon as you can - its really fun.

Anyway here are a couple pics from after we owned Kel'Thuzad!