After you finish all the bosses in ToC, Arthas himself drops you down into a cavern beneath where you have to face Anub’arak to get out. One of my guild’s DKs cast path of frost on me while I was falling, resulting in the frozen lake critting me for, like, a billion. I am going to take this as a sign that he likes the challenge of being misdirected to when he’s least expecting it.
Anyways, despite a rocky start, we learned and killed this boss in under 15 minutes and you can too!
First up, you’ll notice a bunch of yellow bugs skittering around. We didn’t bother them and they didn’t bother us. Until their assigned place in the encounter, at least. When you engage Anub’arak, your tank needs to face him away from the raid to avoid a frontal cleave one shotting the melee. There are floating frost orbs drifting about that need to be killed as they will spawn an area of permafrost. This is important for several reasons, and your raid leader will probably assign someone to bring these down.
Phase 1
During phase 1, he spawns Nerubian Burrowers fairly quickly, and these have to be tanked on an area of permafrost to prevent them from burrowing and healing to full by two tanks (on 25 man), and they have the highest priority. They stack an armor debuff, and it gets worse the more of them there are on a tank. The ranged DPS needs to focus fire them down. At the end of this phase, he’ll burrow and let you finish off the remaining burrowers.
Phase 2
While you’re finishing off the burrowers, tons of creepy little Swarm Scarabs will spawn. These things are nasty little critters and they’re everywhere. They can be kited, but there’s too many to tank as they debuff their target. Just AOE when you can, and kite when you can’t. Pull them off healers liberally. While this is going on, Anub’arak is busy following people and trying to poke holes in them. This never happened to me, but I think I saw the hunter’s mark sticking out of the ground allowing the player he was chasing to see how much room he had. If you’re being pursued, you need to run him over some permafrost and make sure when he spikes, he’s not right under you. He has to hit his head on permafrost a few times before he comes back up. [ed: Thanks Kat!]
He also throws spikes at people- these move slowly at first but speed up. They have to be kited into a permafrost, which will despawn on impact. This is partly why it’s important to have someone bringing down more orbs. During this phase, he alternates between burrowing and being tanked. Luckily, it’s not a threat reset when he burrows. You need to make sure that you have most of the adds cleared before you get him below 30% though, because:
Phase 3
This is the money phase, and it starts when he’s at 30%. Save your heroism/bloodlust, and blow your speed potion here. He starts dealing massive amounts of raid damage with leeching swarm, which heals him. You need to have finished most of the adds at this point, and do nothing but execute Anub. Your healers will be trying to keep you in the 5000 range of health so as little healing as possible is done to Anub (who is taking a percent of your health). This very quickly becomes unhealable, but with enough alive DPS, you’ll get it.
Summary
So, as a hunter, what are the takeaways here? You need to:
- Focus fire the Nerubian Burrowers while they’re up
- AOE, kite, and peel swarm scarabs from healers while they’re up
- Kite spikes to permafrost
- If you get followed, make sure you’re standing on a permafrost when he catches you
- Maybe shoot down permafrost orbs if you’re assigned to it
- Save cooldowns for phase three
- Have some emergency heals ready if your healers get overwhelmed at 1%
Sounds hard, but it’s not.
Posted in Hunter, Resources, World of Warcraft Tagged: Anub'arak, boss guide, Hunter, impale, leeching swarm, nerubian burrower, permafrost, pve, raiding, spikes, submerge, swarming scarab, toc, trial of the crusader
