Chromaggus and A First Shot at Nefarius

[MongoJerry]

And finally, there are the debuffs. All those wonderful debuffs. Everyone gets hit with the debuffs, whether they are in line-of-sight or not, so a complex system of dispelling and curing has to be set up.



Brood Affliction: Bronze -- The first debuff everyone gets hit with is Brood Affliction: Bronze which periodically stuns you for four seconds. It cannot be dispelled by any normal player ability, but there is this material called "Hourglass Sand" that can be found on the corpses of goblins leading up to Chromaggus's chamber that can cure this debuff. However, you won't find enough of it to allow everyone to be cured, so we only gave it out to our main tank and the main tank healing rotation. Chromaggus recasts this debuff frequently, so you have to give the people you never want stunned bunches of it. However, our main tank healing rotation stopped using the sand about halfway through the fight and we kept Natural up just fine. I think the only ones who really need the sand are the main tank (who also stopped using it about halfway through the fight, since he'd built up so much aggro by then anyway) and the hunters who need to be able to Tranq shot Chromaggus reliably. Everyone else can be stunned periodically with little effect on the fight.

There is one consequence to this debuff for the dps classes, however. It's the reason why RaidAssist warns people at 8 seconds before Chromaggus's aoe attacks go off. It it imperative for all of the dps characters to immediately move once they get the eight second warning. Don't finish a cast on a spell or wait for an aimed shot to finish or anything like that. Move immediately. You don't want to get the warning, stand still for a couple seconds while finishing your spell cast, then get stunned for four seconds, and then find that you're in line of sight when Chromaggus's aoe attacks go off.



Brood Affliction: Red -- The Red debuff is a disease that deals 50 damage every three seconds and heals Chromaggus if the player dies. Since players rarely if ever die in this fight, this isn't a big deal, although it should still be cured.



Brood Affliction: Green -- The Green debuff is a poison that deals 250 damage every 5 seconds and reduces healing effects by 50%.



Brood Affliction: Black -- The Black debuff is a curse that increases the fire damage taken by 100%. Obviously, this curse needs to be quickly removed from the main tank. However, when I complained that our healing teams weren't getting their curses removed in a timely fashion, Yilona, one of our other priests, pointed out that we're not taking any fire damage anyway, so it really doesn't matter. Good point.

Brood Affliction: Blue -- The Blue debuff is a magic debuff that acts as a mana burn. I didn't get a screenshot of it, because every time it was cast, I and others would dispel it as fast as possible. I don't recall what its exact effects where, but it did something like eat up 250 mana every couple of seconds. This is the one debuff that absolutely has to be dispelled as quickly as possible.



Frost Burn -- The frost burn attack is one of Chromaggus's aoe attacks that in addition to dealing damage also slows down a person's attack speed by 80%. It is not dispellable. In a properly functioning group, the only person who would be affected by this attack is the main tank. This might cause worries about how well the main tank can hold aggro, but remember that most of the dps people are dodging in and out and also are being periodically stunned. Having the main tank's attack speed slowed for about 10 seconds isn't going to have a big effect on the fight.

There's a last debuff that I'm sorry I didn't get screenshot of. When a person gets all of the Brood Affliction debuffs cast on them all at once, he or she turns into a drakonid, which basically acts like a Mind Control on the person and it isn't dispellable. Again, this only happens if the person has all of the Brood Affliction debuffs on them, so if someone gets this, things have already likely broken down for your group as it is. It's still funny to see, though.

To counter the dispellable debuffs, a complex dispelling system was created. First, an extra priest, shaman, and mage was placed in the main tank group. Their primary jobs were to dispel first the main tank and then the main tank healing groups. In addition, the main tank healing groups helped with dispells somewhat. The shamans in those groups dropped poison or disease cleansing totems when needed, and when the mana burn debuff came up, the priests in those parties sometimes threw out a couple of quick dispells before going right back to healing the main tank. However, we tried as much as possible to have the main tank healing groups focused as much as possible on healing the main tank and as little as possible on dispelling.

These three groups were completely self sufficient. In fact, I'm firmly convinced that one could kill Chromaggus with fifteen people -- a main tank, two hunters firing Tranq shots, a shaman, a priest, and two healing parties as described above (insert paladins for the shamans if you're playing Alliance). Of course, the fight would take all day, since you wouldn't have any dps, but still, it would be possible to do it.

We didn't have enough spare shamans or priests to have one in each of the dps parties, so the ones we did have often had to dispel two full parties. Shamans would drop poison or disease cleansing totems to cure their own parties and then single target cure members of the other party. Mages and druids were told to remove curses on their own parties. The spare priests also often had to double up and dispel the mana burn debuff of players in multiple parties. This was a little rough on them, but if it only meant that a few mages or hunters had a little less mana to work with, it wasn't a big deal. The hunters could feign death drink in combat at least.

Placement of the dps dispellers was easy. They could hang out around the corner out of line of sight from Chromaggus the entire time and dispel from there. If everything's going right, nobody will be taking any damage, since the damaging debuffs are getting dispelled promptly and everyone is running out of the way before Chromaggus uses his aoe attacks. If the image is forming in your head that you could get one of those dippy birds to repeatedly press your Decursive key while you go make yourself a sandwich is coming to mind, then you're starting to get the idea.



So there's a lot going on in this fight with people running in and out and people dispelling all kinds of debuffs, but in the end the individual jobs for individual people are simple. To summarize:

Main Tank -- Use your normal aggro generating attacks to lock down Chromaggus in a spot that allows people to periodically get out of line of sight.

Main Tank Healers -- Get in a spot that's in line of sight with the main tank but out of the line of sight of Chromaggus and stay there. Heal when it's your turn in the rotation.

DPSers -- Run in, hit Chromaggus, run out when the eight second warning pops up, wait for the aoe attack to cast, run back in.

Hunters -- Same as DPSers with the addition that they should fire a Tranq shot when Chromaggus goes into a frenzy. I assume that there was a hunter rotation for this, but I wasn't involved with this part of the fight, so I'm not 100% sure.

Dispellers -- Watch for the debuff icons of the appropriate color and dispel them. Stay out of line of sight of Chromaggus.



And with that recipe, Chromaggus was taken down without a single death.



Chromaggus dropped the Pauldrons of Transcendence, the Taut Dragonhide Gloves, Angelista's Grasp, and the Bloodfang Spaulders, the latter of which was picked up so fast by Syren that I didn't even realize that they'd dropped until looking at my screenshots later that night.

Up Next: Nefarius