Instances in WotLK Expansion: Azjol Nerub

First a couple of words on the status of Deathknigts and tanking. In recent patchest DK's damage, and particularly aoe damage, has been severely nerfed. Overall aoe damage is down by 60-70%, and main skills (Blood strike, Scourge Strike, Obliterate etc) have been nerfed as well. It's a good change, but right now the DK feels alittle underpowered. Frost aura have been buffed though and you get a nice 10% hp bonus as well now. Right now my DK is level 79, and has 20.000 hp and just over 18.000 armor unbuffed. Gonna start checking out heroics alittle later, but I don't have much time to play beta at the moment.

Right. Azjol Nerub aka "The Spiderkingdom", home of the Nerubians. This is a huge underground complex, and the first instance is only part of the experience this world has to offer. None of the thrash mobs are anything to talk about, although some spiders will web one character, and you have to "kill" the web to free the trapped character. This first instance, which is suitable for characters of level 73-75, has 3 bosses. One of them our good-old friend from Warcraft 3: Anub'arak.

The first boss is called Krik'thir the Gatewatcher, and has 3 groups of guardians before him, which when aggroed, will come at the party one group at a time. No need to pull anything beyond the first pack you wish to kill, since this initiates an event, and the 2 remaining waves will come at you, one by one, after the first one is dead. One of the 3 thrash mobs in the packs have an annoying aoe-fear/horror spell, but most boxers should be well trained in dealing with fear effects. The boss itself is a straight forward tank & spank fight, with alot of small bugadds coming in waves. Consecrate, death and decay, or even holy nova will take care of those adds fast, and they're mainly designed to annoy your healer. An easy fight for most groups once you got the sequence of events sorted out.

The second boss is a huge spider called Hadronox. This boss also has an event to it. 3 packs of thrash needs to be killed, and each pack has 3 mobs. 2 weak spiders and 1 stronger unit. The large unit can knock the tank into the air, but it's nothing serious as long as you have disengaged follow on your tank (if you have one). You will have to deal with some more adds that continue to come at you, while killing these 3 packs, but they are easy. After they are dead the main boss will come up, while a number of smaller spiders will try to kill the boss (civil war inside Azjol-Nerub?). The boss will need to kill all the smaller spiders before you engage it, since it will heal itself whenever one of the smaller spiders die. If you pull the boss and get the adds as well, you're in for a long fight. First time I was there I just steamrolled down and aggroed everything (hey...DK's were supermen back then). We managed to hold out for about 10 minutes while the boss just kept healing itself when the smaller adds died, but then the healer was out of mana and we wiped. Lately they have reduced the amount of adds in the fight, so you can engage the boss much faster. Once again, a simple tank & spank fight.

Anub'arak is the 3rd and final boss of this instance. He is the hardest challenge, and the encounter will probably be tough for new and/or poorly geared boxers. This could be a very hard fight as well in heroic. The encounter is split in 2 phases. A tank & spank phase, with some movement, and an add-killing phase with Anub'arak burrowed underground. Throughout the encounter you will sometimes see the ground ripple, and then an impale type attack will come on that area, throwing any caught characters into the air and doing decent damage. Movement will be important, or the healers mana will be drained fast. When the boss burrows different types of adds will spawn, some ranged, some melee. This makes it hard to gather and tank all of them, while having to dodge impale attacks. The adds should just be nuked down as fast as possible, to prevent being overwhelmed when the boss resurfaces.

Overall multiboxing rating: Medium (Mainly because of Anub'arak).