10-man Heroic Nefarian: 500 Wipes and 100 Tips

Heroic Nefarian represents one of the harder fights in this expansion so far.  The only one that represents a harder challenge is Sinestra which as of posting this only two guilds have killed.  Heroic Nefarian is a three phase fight that will require some unique raid composition to kill.  Unlike most heroics you can’t just bring your ten best players (yet) and if you do you will find you probably just will not kill this boss.  In most of my strategies I discuss raid composition at the very beginning and break down roles that these people will do throughout the fight.  In this guide I will instead start with laying down how the fight goes and I will conclude with what you’ll want to bring to this fight.

Phase 1 – Onyxia and Nefarian

Similar to your normal attempts you will need two tanks in this phase one per dragon.  The major different in this aspect of the fight is that tanks get stomped.  In our first pull of this boss our tank just died.  The breaths hit really hard and so healers will want to top up tanks before every single breath.

This means being cautious of tail whips.  Theres a 5 degree angle a tank can position Onyxia so that you are not electrocuting the raid but you are not tail whipping the raid either.  This is something that is worth while practicing on normal mode and should be mastered.  It’s obviously not undo-able without it however it will make your kill easier.  As of a recent (March 3rd) hotfix the tail whip isn’t so wide so it opens this room for not getting tailwhipped.

As well on this phase you have the regular kiting of ads by some DPS.  A fire mage is very good for this as he can use multiple CC cooldowns to keep the ads under control, scorch on the move to pick up ads and ring of frost when all CDs have been exhausted so that the other ones will refresh.

A frost DK or a hunter will also be able to pick up ads.  Ads need to be positioned as far to the edges of the circle as possible and stacked as closely as possible.

If you do not phase 3 will be hard if not impossible.

New to this phase is Stolen Power.  Stolen Power increases your healing and damage dealt by 5% per stack with a maximum of 150 stacks.  Two people will randomly get selected for mind control and they will both get a unique bar which will have these two icons:

So how this works is every time you click the button #2 you will gain 9 stacks of stolen power.  This means if you click it 17 times you will gain the maximum effectiveness of Stolen Power.  Stolen Power lasts 8 seconds total and if you have 150 stacks obviously you are going to be doing 750% more damage for that 8 second period.

As a DPS you should save your CDs for when this comes up and then just pop them all at once as soon as you get it.

The 1 key will break the mind control.  You need to break this effect before you touch a portal that spawns.  If you touch the portal you just instantly die.  While mind controlled your character will slowly move towards the portal.

So you will want people in your raid snaring the person who gets it.  Using earth bind totems and freezing traps are great for this.  I personally used Shadowflame Snare so that it would 70% snare these people as I would use it on CD in phase 3 and use it on them in Phase 1.

Healers can use this effect to make healing easier and more mana efficient.  How much of this you take depends on your situation.  If you feel people are not going to die you can take on more stacks of it.  In later phases you will require a lot of healing and will run OOM.  The down time on healing plus the extra effectiveness of your heals will save you manas.

If you are close to an Electrocute break the mind control immediately.  Client side lag makes it so that your buffs do not get reapplied immediately and so you are likely to die to an Electrocute (crackle) if you do not cancel it in time.

Mmm kay so we’ve covered tanks taking stupid amounts of damage, kiting ads, stolen power, what else is missing…. ELECTROCUTE!

Electrocutes (also known as crackles) do very much one-shot damage in heroic mode.  If you get hit with a tail with an electrocute someone will die.  This means that for every single Electrocute in the entire fight you will need to have some sort of raid wide cooldown to save you.  Viable cooldowns include:

1. Tranquility: Any spec druid**
2. Divine Guardian: Protection Paladin
3. Power Word Barrier: Discipline Priest*
4. Anti-Magic Zone: Unholy Death Knight
5. Spirit Link Totem (available in Patch 4.1): Resto Shaman
6. Rallying Cry (available in 4.1): Any spec warrior
7. Everyone in the raid using this trinket (alliance version)***

* Discipline priests in general are great at this fight.  If they can pre-shield everyone before a crackle that can also act as a cooldown for crackle.

** If you are using tranquility as a cooldown for electrocutes tranquility will need to be popped just before an electrocute so that people will top off fully before it’s done and get healed up after the fact.  It’s delicate timing.

** This trinket acts as a substitute for certain classes that will be able to do without any raid wide CDs (destruction warlocks, frost mages, rogues, and death knights).

Your raid will require 3-4 of these options available to you.  Keep in mind it doesn’t actually have to hit the entire raid, just most of it.  Obviously the totally raid wide options are going to be more powerful.  The people outside the sphere of influence of CDs will just need to be healed immediately after every crackle or pop some CD specific to their class.

For example paladins and druids can glyph their shield walls to reduce magic damage instead of physical damage.

Bad news is that you can only absorb a single electrocute in phase 1.  Onyxia charges up slightly faster and each boss has more HP.  So you take one crackle and you kill off Onyxia.  Once you do this, you will start Phase 2.

Phase 2 – Chromatic Prototype and Nefarian

So much like in normal you will want to split your raid make up into three groups.  However the complexity of these groups is going to change.

The major change in this fight is Nefarian will place a debuff on a target for 8 seconds.  At the end of 8 seconds he will do a knock back on anyone within 10 yards of that person.

So in order to neutralize this the person who gets the debuff will jump in the lava and get clear away from the group.  Afterwards the person is going to swim back.  Keep in mind the normal stacking debuff that increases lava damage will still apply.

As you can probably imagine this is going to create some increasing complexity for your platforms which used to require one interrupter and one healer.

Basically every platform has to be able to do without the regular interrupter or regular healer for 4-5 seconds.

This means every platform will require a secondary interrupt.  If you have two 10-second CD interrupters per platform that’s great and you’re good.  However if you find in balancing your group that you cannot make do realistically the secondary interrupter’s CD can be a 24-second interrupt.

Primary Interrupters (10 second CD or less):
Protection Paladin
Retribution Paladin
Blood Death Knight
Frost Death Knight
Unholy Death Knight
Mutilate Rogue
Combat Rogue
Subtlety Rogue
Feral Druid
Enhancement Shaman
Elemental Shaman
Arms Warrior
Fury Warrior
Protection Warrior

Secondary Interrupters (Under 24 seconds):
Affliction Warlock
Destruction Warlock (with Fel Hunter)
Demonology Warlock (with Fel Hunter)
Restoration Shaman
Restoration Druid
Moonkin Druid
Marksman Hunter
Arcane Mage
Frost Mage
Fire Mage
Holy Paladin

So yeah you have tones of options here.  Just make sure on every platform you have one of each from the two piles or two from the first pile.  If you do this you will have your interrupts covered for when your interrupter friend has to jump off the platform.

Okay, now the harder problem to deal with… losing your healer.

Every platform needs to be able to survive on it’s own for up to 5 seconds. Your healer will be able to heal from within the lava  However there will obviously be some down time so people will need something.  As an example a platform with a ret paladin or a prot paladin could be fine because of lay on hands and word of glory.  An enhancement shaman can maelstrom a chain heal.  Shadow priest can shield people.  Moonkin can pop out and drop some hots.  You get the idea, people with hybrid heals are great.

As well people with damage mitigation cooldowns are going to do well too.  The goal of these DPS is to reduce incoming damage as much as possible so that your healer does not fall behind on healing.

You should make sure everyone in the raid can jump back up on the platforms in good time, especially your healers.  Imagine losing an extra 5 seconds of healing time to a bad healer.

So when balancing each platform keep in mind primary and secondary interrupter per platform and make sure that your weakest link healers have high survivability specs on his/her platform.

You are going to want to burn your Blood Lust/Heroism at the beginning of this phase.  It’s mostly for healers to get everyone topped up.  Don’t worry it’s not wasted.  If you get out of this phase faster you have more time for Phase 3.  The enrage timer is no joke (unlike in most other fights).

This phase will end once one of the ads is dead.  Yes, as soon as the first one dies.  This will retract the lava slowly and anyone left on the platforms once there is no more lava will die.  So you want all ads to be near death before you kill one.  This way you can kill them all pretty fast once the first one dies and and not wipe before you finish the fight.

Phase 3 – Nefarian and the Ring of Fire

In the heroic mode Nefarian must be tanked in the middle of the room.  It is possible to tank Nefarian off to the side however guilds that have done this successfully have since switched to tanking Nefarian in the middle of the room.

Your tanks will need to communicate with each other on the direction Nefarian’s head is facing.  This is because when Nefarian breaths on the ads he refreshes the duration on their timer and thus will increase their damage over time.  The goal is so that the side of Nefarian is always going to be facing the off tank.  This will mean an almost constant rotation of the boss in a circle so your off tank doesn’t get tail whipped or breathed on.  After so many attempts your tanks will just be able to judge it on their own.

You are still dealing with phase 1 junk.  That is Stolen Power stacking, electrocutes and high tank damage.  So you will need to rotate cooldowns for every single electrocute.  As well you’ll want to deploy your normal AoE snares so that you can get 150 stolen power as often as humanly possible.  One modification is that you should break Stolen Power if you are moving towards the face of Nefarian or fire.  However remember to break it immediately if you are getting close to Electrocute.

From here it’s just a burn.  Ads can never reset their stacks or it’s a wipe.

Another thing to note is be careful with pets, especially fire elementals and infernals.  These pets are great DPS however if you get mind controlled they will do friendly fire damage.  As you increase your stacks of stolen power the damage of these pets steadily increase.  I can remember on one occasion that my imp and infernal combined with my 150 stack of stolen power 2-shot a raid member.

You may end up finding this to be the easiest phase to deal with on heroic.  If you can consistently get out of phase 2 and you’ve already done the kiting setup on normal than you should have no problems getting this kill.  The hardest part may just be getting a geared group that can meet your platform requirements.

Best of luck on getting this kill.

Edit:

April 11, 2011: Removed aura mastery as an electrocute cooldown. Added a note on tranquility.