Loatheb for the Lazy

Wednesday night we successfully pulled off our warm-up Obsidian Sanctum (no drakes).

Most of the guild was present, even one of the guys that is *never* on but finally transferred an 80 priest so he wouldn’t have to get his warrior caught up with us.

We pulled in 3 people from our first alliance guild and lost one of our hunters in the middle due to internet issues (don’t worry, no hunter loot dropped).

Slightly rocky start, we were starting without one of our tanks (he was getting pwned by traffic and a hungry toddler), but overall, I think it was one of our best runs ever.

We got a very nice tanking ring upgrade for our pally tank (who needs some practice in keeping Sarth’s tail out of the raid). There was also a glove token piece of some sort. I finally got the Dragon Hide Bag, go me!

WWS at http://wowwebstats.com/2akq6rab3pbn3 for the next 15 days or so.

…

After OS 10 I got an invite into a Naxx 25 with a chunk of our second alliance guild.

There turned out to be a pretty good number from another guild that I don’t think I’ll be raiding with again any time soon. No real specific drama, just a lot more immaturity than I want running nonstop in a 25-man raid.

We didn’t quite drop KT so the other guild was kind enough to ninja the ID and kill him for us.

But I’m actually not going to talk about all that crap. I’m going to talk about a strategy that I really like for Loatheb.

In every PuG I’m in, there is a lot of talk about Loatheb being one of the easiest fights in Naxx. Well, there’s a way to make it even easier.

The standard strategy involves the tank keeping Loatheb in the green circle in the middle, melee behind him, ranged off to one side. Every time a spore spawns, a group of people run off to kill it and get the buff.

But here’s the problem: some people are too blasted lazy to move to get the spore and some people keep going to get the spore, even if they already have the buff, usually because no one else is going to get it. I’ve noticed that healers are the least likely to go get the spore, I guess an extra 50% crit doesn’t mean anything to them…

So we need a method that gets all the spores to all the people (except the tank).

No, it’s not abstract art. The large green circle is the center of the room. The small blue dots scattered in it are your non-tank raid members. All of them. The brown circle is Loatheb and the darker blue dot on the outside is the tank.

When a spore spawns, its position is called out to the tank, who then manuevers Loatheb to the side of the circle opposite the incoming spore.

The yellow circle is the spore if you couldn’t figure that out.

Spores are drawn to Loatheb so this will pull the spore directly through the raid and it can be destroyed in the middle of the circle. The tank should be far enough away to avoid gaining Fungal Creep. Once your tank has a firm threat lead, they may want to take a spore buff towards the end of the fight for damage increase and giggles.

Important: The spore buff will only affect a limited number of people at a time, 5 people within 10 yards. The way around this seems to be rotating the party that kills the spore – the buff has demonstrated an affinity for going to the party members of the spore-killer when it has so many options within the 10 yards. So a member of group 1 kills the first spore and a member of group 2 kills the second spore, continue down the line for 25-man. After each group had the spore once, we went to a free-for-all mode where you took out the spore if your buff was getting low and it didn’t seem to drop off anyone.

The massive benefit to this method is that the majority of your raid never needs to move (melee will have to shift slightly in response to Loatheb being moved away from spores) so you don’t lose DPS while chasing down spores. Secondly, healers are much more likely to gain Fungal Creep and everyone is within range for AoE heals.

I know two tanks that employ this method (one in my guild and one in our second alliance guild). After people see it in action they love it, but if I’m in a PuG and suggest it I get shut down faster than Archavon drops purplez. /sigh

So the next time you’re kicking it in Naxx and want to try something new, give this a shot and let me know how it turns out for you.