How to Wipe on Elder Nadox in Heroic Old Kingdom

I’ve been running with the same warrior tank, and mage for the past two weeks. We’ve had some great dungeon runs together, including finally getting around to clearing heroic Halls of Lightning, but we’ve also been in a few complete disasters for groups.

This particular Old Kingdom run was of the “disaster” variety.

All of our problems were in fighting the first boss, Older Nadox. He’s the first boss, a huge Nerubian undead spider. To sum it up, the fight goes like this:

After about 20 seconds of tank-and-spanking he spawns waves of non-elite adds. Every 45 seconds or so he (and the non-elite adds) go immune and a “Guardian” spider is hatched and makes its way towards the party. In order to make the boss attackable again, the Guardian has to be burned down. Rinse and repeat until the boss keels over.

The problems lie entirely in the fact that the spiders are constantly aggroed by the healer, and when they go immune they cannot be attacked, thus AOE tank damage tools do NOTHING to pull threat back onto the tank.

Our strategy as I’ve done it before was to have me (the priest) stand right next to the tank so that I’m in Thunderclap range. This worked ok…until the Guardian appeared. I was able to survive maybe two Guardian spawns but always died before the third. The swarms of insects were too much and I was unable to get a cast off. After the fourth wipe I threw on arena gear to buff my stamina as well as reduce the CD on my Psycic Scream spell by 3 seconds. I went PvP mode with bubbles, and fears, while using Fade whenever possible. It still wasn’t enough.

The three of us who started the group talked over voice chat trying to figure out what the problems were. We deduced that there isn’t enough dps to burn the Guardians down fast enough. Of course it’s easy to blame others but we couldn’t figure out any other explanation. The faster the Guardian dies, the quicker the tank can Thunderclap/Shockwave and pick up the adds again. The longer the Guardian is up, the more spider adds spawn, and the more cooldowns I have to blow to try to stay alive.

Our tank inspected the rogue in the group and said: “The rogue has great gear”. I wanted to see how “great” it was and inspected him myself.  Sure, he was in purples..LEVEL 70 purples! He was rolling in almost complete Merciless Gladiator’s gear, which explains why he was getting out-DPSed by the tank. The hunter was in only slightly better gear and was only doing slightly more damage than the tank.

In a way I blame Blizzard for things like this. I liked that in Burning Crusade we had to do a little bit of dungeon grinding in order to earn our heroic keys. Not only did it force people to learn the dungeon fights , but it also passively upgraded their gear since they picked up regular level 70 dungeon gear while grinding. In Wrath, people were doing heroics a week after launch. There’s almost no purpose of going into regular 80 dungeons if you can PuG a group that’ll carry you through heroics. Thus you’re stuck getting random dps in greens.

Edit (3/26/2009): An alternate strategy that I tried later with success (and different dps) is for the healer to stand further way from the boss, directly next to a mage or other dps class capable of AOE. This way a) the spider spawns have to walk all the way over to me which buys time, and b) a mage can one shot them with a single Arcane Explosion.  During the “normal” phase, the mage will AOE all adds off of the healer, and let out one more explosion just before the Guardian hatches.  When the Guardian is up, the mage dps’es the hell out of it since he can’t do anything about the adds while they’re immune. Then, the second they are attackable again, he does the explosion to kill the few that spawned.