Tuesday, September 23, 2008

Nightbane

Yesterday our team went up against our final foe inside of Karazhan, Nightbane. Unfortunately, we have not been successful at defeating him yet. He keeps killing our healers which is a problem no matter how you slice it.

We tried a couple different strategies and at one point he only had a quarter of his life remaining. We are getting close just not making it all the way.

Some of the healer problem is their fault. For some reason our priest really likes standing too close to the dragon and then getting hit by his giant claws. But mostly it is the skeletons Nightbane calls to his aid while he is safely in the air.

If anyone has any tips as to how we can keep our healing team alive, I'm all ears! Our raid set up is a pally tank, druid off tank, a pally healer a priest healer, and the rest are assorted fighters.

5 comments:

T.J. said...

We had trouble with Nightbane just this last week, although I think it was more of a tank positioning problem. Here's what's worked for us in the past.

First of all, the only people that should be anywhere near Nightbane is the tank and Melee DPS. And only the tank should be facing Nightbane. The DPS should be attacking his back legs. The tank should position Nightbane with the dragon's tail in the wall of the dome, and his head facing out over the edge of the terrace.

The rest of the group, ranged dps AND healers, should be in one huddled group set back from the dragon at midway to near full range for healing/dpsing. Position the group right next the dome so that when a charred earth hits, EVERYONE can run to the other side and stay in a group, and avoid the charred earth. You may or may not already be doing this.

You said you have a pally main tank. That's the best tank for the skeleton phase. Some people use two tanks, and have one do the dragon and the pally tank do the skeletons. Some just let a Pally tank do it all.

So the way you do it is when the dragon takes off into the air at 75,50,25% health, EVERYONE runs to where the Paladin tank is standing. You can mark them with a star or something to make them visible. The pally tank is responsible for picking up the aggro on the skeletons with their mad multi mob tanking skills. Hopefully this means your healers aren't getting hit. DPS can then take out the skeletons and you start over, rinse and repeat.

That's how I've done it successfully, although we weren't able to get him down last week, mostly because our dragon tank didn't know how to position him with his tail in the mountain and such. Hope this helps!

Anonymous said...

GMAzeroth pretty much outlines it how it is: avoid Nightbane and stick with the paladin tank during the second phase.

There are a couple of other things to note. First off, your current raid composition is going to play havoc when Nightbane fears. Neither druids nor paladins have easily repeatable ways of avoiding that fear that he does -- at least not as easy as a warrior tank would. You'll need to keep Fear Ward up on the tank (a Fear Ward rotation if you have multiple priests will help) or Tremor Totems and be wary of when your tank does get feared; he'll move around, Nightbane will follow, and then you'll see some people probably get hurt by that awful tail swipe.

Second thing? When Nightbane enters his second phase and goes up into the air, he'll cast Smoking Blast on the person with the highest aggro. This will invariably be a healer since they're the only people who will be building aggro against Nightbane during this phase. Smoking Blast does physical damage which is typically not mitigated well by your cloth-wearing priestly types. The magical DoT that he applies can be removed by either Dispel or Cleanse, but it gets reapplied every second.

If you find your priest is dying during the second phase and not due to skeletons (a lot of people blame the skeletons, but don't note that Nightbane is attacking them), then you'll want to either find a better way of keeping that healer alive or having someone with higher armor snag the aggro. In the past when I was raiding on my hunter with an undergeared group, I'd specifically attack Nightbane while he was in the air and reachable for a few moments so that my hunter would get the Smoking Blast; her over 7,000 Armor allowed her to take the hits better than our priest, who had perhaps 3,000 armor with Inner Fire.

Here's hoping you down Nightbane in the future!

Anonymous said...

When Nightbane is in the air he "resets" aggro on all but the healers...

In the last 10 seconds he is up there, he is soaking up the healer threat ready to land and wipe the raid.

In that last 10 seconds... healers dont heal... but your Pally tank does...

Therefore Pally tank is building threat while nightbane is in the air, and healers get a bit of mana regen time

Anonymous said...

We did try having our hunters misdirect onto the tank before Nightbane landed to try to get aggro off the priest. The pally healer didn't seem to have the problem, it was always the priest.

Thank you for all the suggestions!

Anonymous said...

I have a suggestion for you! On Majesty, I stay alive by bubbling myself, casting renew and prayer of mending on myself. Then, if I take the Smoking Blast, which hurts, I have a buffer. Also, I'm pretty sure you can fade the Smoking Blast, or Skellies, off of you, so one in a while they should be able to fade. I've never been quite sure if I was fading off the Smoking Blast, or if it was just changing targets. lol.

Also, there's so much damage that there's no time for greater heals, unless your healers happen to have 4x t4 for the flexibility bonus. So, flash heals, are king, at least for me. I just flash heal the crap out of everyone, toss out a PoM when it's up, and the occasional renew, usually on myself.

Also, it's very important that your healers heal one another!! While a healer can heal themselves, the pushback from being hit by skellies and Smoking Blast, makes it really, really hard to live if you have to heal yourself and aren't getting heals from the other healers.

That's my experience. When I first started going to Nightbane on Majesty, I died... A LOT. I got so frustrated. Loveth helped me out, that was the advice he gave me. Though he didn't tell me to flash heal, that's from my experience.

Good luck!!