I don't cheat at DDR, by the way, just Heigan

So it seems that the guide I posted yesterday for Heigan may be obsolete now (and even when I published it.) According to WoWWiki, the safe spot is no longer functional. However, due to the nature of wikis (and the fact that I've seen this warning before,) I hesitate to change any information until I can confirm personally that the information is out of date. If it is, I will update the post to reflect that. Unfortunately I won't know until Friday at the earliest.

Heigan the Unclean isn't the only four-area dance game I'm good at.

As of Patch 3.0.8 (yes the day I posted this,) this strategy is invalid. I'm keeping it up here for reference. If you would like to find a working strategy for Heigan, try Rochelle's post at Tank Hard!

Heigan the Unclean is a simple fight. Incredibly simple. So much so that I have trouble wrapping my mind around the fact that people die in it. Sure, lag could be to blame, but I think if people had just a little more awareness, they'd be able to get through it just fine. Savant had this problem the first time we fought Heigan. Our warrior tank, a priest, a hunter, and myself were living through the splash and showing off our dance moves while the rest of the raid lay dead on the floor. Fortunately, it was enough. Before our next encounter, a forum turned me on to different strategy. That strategy has since given us several clears of Heigan with no deaths in the raid. Here are the results from our last raid.

Entering the Room

Above is a picture of when you enter Heigan's room (click to enlarge.) You can see a spot on the left labeled "Safe Spot." Let's take a look at this spot from the front.

Here, you can see that the safe spot is a 135º corner on the right side of Heigan's platform. This is a spot where no splashes hit. So long as you are tightly in the corner, you will not take any damage from the splash. Let me say that once more. So long as you are in the corner, you will take no damage.

The Pull and Phase One


When everyone is ready, the main tank initiates the fight and moves Heigan to the spot where I am in the above picture (click to enlarge.) The ranged DPS and healers run past the tank to the safe spot, and ensure that they are as far in the corner as they can be. The ranged DPS then rotates to attack Heigan. Healers of course don't need to rotate at all. The positioning of the tank can be tricky to ensure that the healers have line of sight, and if there is a problem, the tank must move, rather than the healers. The same is for DPS, though they won't be taking direct damage, Heigan does have a disease that must be removed. Hunter pets remain on the platform with the other melee DPS.

Phase Two


When Heigan tires of uselessly beating on the tank, he will teleport about an inch away from where he was being tanked, put up an aura that does a 7.5k damage tick, and make the splash show go faster. Immediately when Heigan teleports (or a little before,) the melee and tanks retreat to the corner as shown above. Hunter pets stay in and fight. Why? Because pets with avoidance (should be all raid pets) will only take 1875 damage a tick. This is easily healed by the combined power of Mend Pet and one of your raid healers. The healers are going to be bored for this fight and full of mana, so you may as well give them something to do.

Note that it may be possible to keep some melee in during phase 2. I know last time, I was doing this fight, I was running in and out trying to squeeze out a little more damage. Check with your healers before doing so, though as they may be looking for a break before Loatheb.

When phase 2 is over, go back to phase 1 positions and restart the strategy. Good luck!

Greedy Goblin is probably the most riveting material I have read in months.

Last Friday, Savant cleared all of Naxxramas! I won the Staff of the Plaguehound off Kel'Thuzad. It's very shiny, but I can only really use it when DPSing (doesn't happen often,) or farming (which I'm doing more of thanks to Greedy Goblin.)

I've been working on a guide for soloing Anzu, and as I'm reading other blogs more and more, I realize I also need to write a guide on how to beat Heigan. You know, the right way. I've already alluded to the fact that there is no dancing involved. I'll just have to put out the guide in a bit, probably after I get a version of Fraps that works with Vista.

Grr...! I'm gonna give you a Feral Staff... Infection!

After the post yesterday, I've been wondering: Do I need to spec for Infected Wounds? It would allow for me to tank AoE mobs a little easier, but will it be enough to tank the mobs that get past me on fights like Gothik?

There's a lot of conflicting information on whether Infected Wounds works on a raid boss, and I've been under the impression for a while that it didn't work. That's why I've really shied away from it. But tonight, before raid, I think I'm going to go spec into it and see how my damage stacks up using WWS. More information to come tomorrow.

Naxxramas a quatre ailes comme les chérubins.

Still have yet to do a full week of raiding, and we're up to having cleared all the wings in 10-man Naxx! Yay! I'm trying to find a good source to track our raid progress against the server. WoWJutsu is simply inaccurate, and WoWProgress only tracks 25-man raids. Ideally, it would use achievements to track the dates and segregate the 25 man guilds from the 10 man guilds. Bosses without achievements associated would probably have to be tracked with gear. Or, you know, that

One thing I noticed during our most recent encounter with Gothik, was just how much harder it is for Druids during that fight. To start out, I was on the undead side with the ret pally, death knight, resto Druid, and shadow priest. Warrior was on the living side with warlock, discipline priest, and two hunters. During the course of the battle, everyone on his side lives. Everyone on my side dies. Okay, let's swap tanks this time. Now I'm on the living side and the warrior's on the undead side. No one else changed sides. Everyone on the undead side lives. The warlock dies on my side. It was a successful fight, but it still bugs me that Swipe is such a narrow attack. And that I still have to mash it every cooldown, despite the threat buff. I just wish we had something else we could mash. Or not mash, as it were. It should be called "Bear Smash!" and function similarly to Thunderclap, only without the speed reduction and with more damage.

On a final note, I took a suggestion from Matticus and raised the funds for a public bank tab. So far I haven't heard much about it from the player base in my guild, except for my wife, who thinks it's pretty cool. We may start sticking overflow materials in there.

Turning "The Safety Dance" Into "The Safety Stand There Not Really Watching The Fight And Spamming All Your Nukes... Thing"

Raid progress is going slow but the raid nights themselves are going fast. Last night we cleared Archavon and got 2 Abyss Shards. Then we went over to Sartharion. We attempted the fight with one drake up, but the adds were too heavy. I also think we left the wrong drake up. However, our DPS isn't quite up to snuff, so we downed the drake and then took on Sartharion. On to Naxx, we cleared the Spider Wing and did the Plague Wing again.

On Heigan we used the safe spot cheese, which made the fight go much faster and the achievement trivial. On Loatheb, Falcon was specced Circle of Healing and it made the fight stupid easy. Circle of Healing should be nerfed. Oh wait...

We finally defeated Patchwerk, even though he enraged. Our Warrior was MTing and he was able to absorb the full brunt of the attack for the 20 seconds or so of enrage he had to endure. Patchwerk dropped total crap.

On to Grobbulus, we got several good attempts in, but didn't quite down him. There seems to be a communication breakdown somewhere in where the injected players should drop the poison clouds. Once we get that down, the fight should be easy. I have confidence we will down it the next night we try it.

I got a couple of upgrades from Naxx last night, by the way. Amulet of Autopsy replacing Amulet of Wills, and Leggings of Discord replacing Chain Gang Legguards. Dropping a bit of Stamina for Agility, but when you have 40k health raid buffed you can pretty easily afford to do so.

@Kralnor: My staff is a good one, too

So the other night we go into Naxx, ready to tear up. Oddly enough, the trash on the Military Quarter respawned even though we downed Razuvious. Oh well, we were headed to the Plague Quarter anyway to get to Noth. But those gargoyles were tough! We could do the other pulls fine, but the gargoyles were crazy! Somewhere in the middle of it, Ousted Bead Necklace dropped, which went to our priest healer. We decided to give up on the gargoyles after several attempts so we went to the Abomination Quarter to try our hand at Patchwerk. The first pull seemed a little off... we wiped on it once, then downed it and pulled some slime. About this point, our Druid healer says "It's on heroic!" Clearing heroic Naxx trash isn't too bad for our first week in Naxx. Ah well. Out we go and into normal Naxx.

The trash became a breeze. We got to Noth and one-shot him on our first time seeing him, and then Heigan... was a little different. We got him down, just a little after our normal stop time. He dropped Staff of the Plague Beast for me, so I was pretty pleased. It's actually the first bit of tank gear that dropped for our guild out of Naxx.

I've been picking up on tanking in 5 mans. You can't just go in tanking like you did in BC, not as a Druid anyway. You have to pretty much spam Maul and Swipe. That's really all you need, but you need to pick up aggro on all the mobs pretty quickly. Bosses are pretty much the same as before.

Oh, and I finally got enough emblems for my T7 chestpiece, which is the first thing I saved up for. I might get the tanking necklace next. I'm not sure. I'll figure it out later, I guess...

Seriously. You'll get your loot eventually. Stop being a baby.

We did another raid last night. Spend a little bit on Obsidian Sanctum. Got Sartharion down in two tries. I was the only person in the raid to get the achievement for dodging the meteors. We got to Anub'Rekhan and downed him in one shot. Took down Faerlina in two tries. I think it took three tries to get Maexxna down, and that's where we stopped for the night.

Right before Maexxna, our resto shaman who was pugging with us decided to throw a fit over out loot rules, which were clearly stated at the beginning of the night. Because he "didn't have a chance" on Boots of the Follower. You know, because resto shamans are all about spirit. Anyway, he got all bitchy and left, which is good for us, we don't want loot whores. It's just the gall of it amazes me.

We replaced him with an elemental shaman and Aegis of Damnation dropped. Our new shaman was quite happy. Irony fills the air.

What I don't understand is, if you're pugging on someone else's guild run, do you expect to get loot over their guildies? Especially in the formative days of raiding where not everything is on farm. I sure don't. They're kind enough to include me on the run, I'll take my Emblems and thank them for the opportunity.

The other thing that bugged me about this guy is how he said he would have rather run with his guild where he "would have had a fair shot at loot." Well why the hell are you running with us? Are you intending to steal our instance ID from us when you get back to your guild?

We run again tonight, so there's probably not going to be any instance theft (we also run fairly early for the server.) But Monday is rather questionable. I think I might contact this guy's guild leader and mention his behavior in Naxx. We'll see if anything comes of it.

In other news, no tank loot has dropped. Go figure. Guess it's more heroics for me! I have a hunter who needs gearing, so I'll probably make him tag along with me as much as possible.

Ironically, the best way to survive was to ditch Survival

So yesterday I threw together a raid night on a whim. Luckily, one of our healers got on just in time that we only had to pug one healer. We tried Sartharion, got him down to about 1k health, and then respawns happened. We cried ourselves a long and swiftly-flowing river, then went over to Naxx, which one of our hunters was locked out of.

First, the WWS of the night. On the overall report, I am second on damage dealt. All the Hunters are Beast Mastery, except the top damage hunter, who was Survival until the last attempt on Anub'Rekhan. She's normally Beast Mastery, and it shows in the report. Suffice it to say, a lot of our problems went away when she specced back and gained about 350 DPS. Yes, in 10-mans, every person makes a difference, and every person needs to be putting out as much DPS/heals as possible.

Obsidian Sanctum was fun, except for the first pull where I incorrectly assumed that the mobs were vulnerable to CC. We got through the trash fairly easily, and the Drakes were pretty easy, except for Tenebron, who we had to make a couple of attempts on.

We get to Sartharion. I give an ever-so-brief account of what happens ("If it glows, stay away from it") and then off we go. First one goes pretty terribly, as is to be expected. But I think there's a lot to be said for actually experiencing the fight, as opposed to reading about it or watching a video. You just don't really comprehend what you're dealing with until you've tried to deal with it. As such, I usually want to give the briefest of explanations for the first attempt, and then go from there.

We adapted fairly quickly, refining our technique with every pull and learning what we need to communicate to get the raid moving appropriately. Our third attempt, we got him down to ~1000 health, and just couldn't do it. We got close on the next attempt, and then on the fifth one, we had trash respawns so we called it. We were going to call it for the night when I said "Why not try the first boss of Naxx?" Put it to a vote and it was unanimous.

The trash was stupid easy, I screwed up on the first pull and got an extra group and the raid wasn't adversely affected in the slightest. Trash out of the way, we attempted Anub'Rekhan. Again, first fight was a taster, second fight went a little better. It took us until the fourth attempt until we weren't dying, and then we died to the enrage timer. Same for the fifth attempt. It seemed like we didn't have enough DPS. When I asked the hunters what was going on (if you look, they are both below me on try 4, and try 5 doesn't look much better) the answer was that I had them using Aspect of the Wild, which was unnecessary. Also, the hunter that was Survival was still trying to DPS like a hunter who was BM. So we waited while she respecced back to BM. When she got back we made short work of the boss. Loot was distributed, and we ended the night late, but happy to have killed something.