Editor’s note: If you are lucky enough to win the key to the focusing iris from Sapphiron even after you repeatedly murder that ugly cat in cold blood (and everyone knows that killing that cat guarantees a /roll of below 10 for the key), don’t forget to start the quest before you have your guild first Malygos kill. Even going back to Dragonblight to pass in said quest will not allow you to finish the follow up. You have to have it in your log at the time of the Malygos kill. The more you know.
Well, here comes another delay in my series about trap dancing. Nobody can procrastinate like a hunter.
Today I’m going to write about one fight in Naxxramas: Gluth. Why am I writing about one fight among the many end game encounters? Because this one will tell the people you run with whether you’re a button mashing, key turning huntard or a hunter extraordinaire.
As I mentioned in my last post about how to trap dance on this fight, there’s a fairly strong chance that hunters will be called on to perform kiting duties. I’m going to assume you’ve read my fight summary in the above linked post. If not, go do it now. Done? Good.
Let’s start at the beginning:
- You run into the boss room through a pipe with an AOE poison. Aspect of the pack will cause everyone to be stunned by this damage.
- There’s a hole on the left hand side that you are supposed to fall through.
- Once you fall through the hole, you need to die on the frogger hallway, and then get lock summoned back to the entrance of the pipe.
Ok, now that we have that our of our system, you’re back in front of the tunnel leading to Gluth. Normally you will need to dismiss your pet- mine always bugs out after I jump down. The idea would be to drop into the room just after the tank, summon your pet, ensure he’s on passive, and then sic him on the boss. He won’t pull agro while the tank is pulling him into position, and it’s a little more dps throughout the fight.
Next up- if you have any classes with AOE slow abilities, you need their help:
- Other hunters should be placing their frost traps somewhere you can use them.
- Shamans should be dropping and keeping up an earthbind totem.
- Mages should be positioned somewhere that they can frost nova adds that get out of hand.
When you are kiting the zombie chows, you need to know a few things about their mechanics. Every time they hit anyone, they apply a stacking debuff called infected wound. This makes every hit you take hurt a little more than the last one. Your healer is going to have a limit of how many stacks they can heal you through. If you have 30 stacks, every time you get hit, you will see an additional 3000 damage. This is a good incentive to not run through a pack of these unless it can’t be avoided.
While it’s perfectly ok to have them wail on healers or ranged dps for a few seconds before you can pick them up, if you let this happen more than once or twice, you’ll be looking at a wipe.
Every few seconds a chow will spawn and you need to get its attention. Once you have it, you need to keep it. Your healer is going to pull large groups of the little blighters, so I use distracting shot in emergencies, and explosive or aimed shot to pull. Every so often, I’ll pump a multi-shot into the group following me to reduce the chance that someone pulls one off of me. The ideal healer is one with something like fade who can heal while running. If your healer owes you money, feel free to feign death just to remind him who’s boss.
Now, how to actually kite them! You will have your frost trap, and the AOE snares of anyone else who can do it. You don’t want these to overlap, and you don’t want anyone to forget to renew theirs. Every time you hit a chow, try to get an aoe snare between it and you. This will allow you to group it with the others. Keep an eye on your timers, and try to ensure that the chow pack is as far away from the boss as possible right before decimate.
Many guides draw out a map and talk about running a figure eight around the traps- I find that the randomness of the spawns prevents any plan from going unspoiled. I just try to pick everything up, try to run them through as many frost traps and shaman totems as possible, and try to avoid getting hit. If I have to run around the group because I’m out of room, I’ll reposition myself once the group is all firmly in a frost trap. If I don’t have that option, I’ll turn my back to them and disengage (also known as “hunter reverse blinking” or “the huntard launcher”). This will usually shoot me past them fast enough that I can avoid taking too many more stacks of the debuff.
A quick note here- frost mages are just as well suited to this task as we are- in fact, I believe they’re better at it. They can actually stop the chows in place with their AOE root, and while they don’t have a personal AOE snare, we borrow from other hunters and shamans, so they can too. On top of that, they can blink past a group instead of trying to find a way to get on the other side of them without taking and hits.
Right now, frost mages are rare in serious raiding guilds. They can’t compete in terms of dps with other mage builds. Soon though, we’re going to have dual specs. Once that happens, I expect our mage friends to start pulling their weight ;)
There you have it. This is how I kite on Gluth. As always, please be unmerciful in the comments- if I’m missing anything, my reader(s?) will want to know.
Just FYI, the focusing iris key drops from Sapphiron, not Kel’Thuzad. :)
Woops- yep
Excellent write-up. I also find that ‘figure 8’ guides are more of a ‘if you can’t figure this out’ type guide. You really have to find your groove, so kiting mobs in the real world (especially in enclosed/small areas) around your frost traps really helps.
Just as an aside, I find one of the things that REALLY helps me if I’m getting overwhelmed or need to get to the other side of a pack of Zombie Chow is to pop deterrance and run straight through, then jump-turn disengage. Especially if they accidentally run over the boundaries of your frost-trap, this can be a good way to pull them back through it and get a bit of distance so you can get them back in order. :)
Hope this helps!
Thanks! That’s a good tip- I’ll have to try that next time.
Nice write ups on the bosses, I’ve enjoyed them all (although I’m onhly a recent discoverer of your blog)!
I was trying this the other week in a 10 man run.
There was me (survival hunter) and a shaman, so we had a totem and trap. I was given the kiting job, but because of the multiple spawn points it quickly became impossible to pull them through the snares accurately.
I think that accurate initial placement as you hint at, is critical to getting the kiting down, as having more than 1 spawning point means its not like kiting a single mob outside. Then a further problem is of course, where you end up when your trap cooldown is up, because if you are not near to the spawn point, the zombies are gonna head straight for the healers, this frequently means a painful gauntlet of getting whacked while you try to get the trap back to the correct spot.
Plus you can be trying to kite 5-6 mobs at a time. With your instant shots like explosive and aimed being on cooldowns (6 and 10 seconds respectively) and multi shot sharing the same 10 second cooldown as aimed, it all added up for me to be a very frustrating experience. As the kiting itself got messy, and multiple mmobs meant that I had to stand still and shoot rather than jump shotting them like I’m used to. Even using disengage, which helps occasionally has too long a cooldown to be of real use.
Maybe I have to relearn how to kite, maybe this is more of a how ‘not to do it’, maybe hunters need quite a bit of support from others to kite effectively in there, maybe just get a frost mage of a pally to do it :)
Just sharing my own experience of kiting in Gluth, it wasn’t particularly effective and although we didnt wipe, I wasnt happy with my contribution.
If you got the boss down, you did fine. You’ll learn from your mistakes, and be better for it. One quick tip- if you’re out of instants to pull (and this includes distracting shot, btw), you can fire an autoshot by letting go of the movement button for a fraction of a second.
I’ve used a Gorriladin to tank zombie chow very successfully. It requires frost trapping and keeping the monkey on passive. I run around the outside of the zombie spawn area, send him in to attack a new zombie (which also causes the aoe stomp to fire), and immediately pull him back to me. This collects new spawns and keeps the current mob aggrod on him. As long as he has a good healer and you keep him out of the zombies, he should do just fine.
Do you DPS the boss while doing this? If so, then this could be a viable tactic. I’m interested in how you minimize the stacking debuff though- I know that pet heals are “cheaper” than player heals (properly specced, pets get a bonus to heals received from all sources, and hunters can mend pet fairly cheaply), but if your anything gets a sustained period of zombie chow hits, it is hard to keep them up.
This is an interesting tactic though, and I’ll have to give it a try some time :)
edit: post 3.1, all tank pets will be getting thunderstomp. I’m planning a comprehensive 3.1 guide post once we know more about what it will look like for hunters, but this for sure will be relevant.
I personally refuse to do this grunt work. Blizz says that hunters are supposed to be top DPS – so WHY on Gods green earth would we waste that DPS when a mage, off tank or pally can do the job just as well?
Pre-Expac i had no issues being a CC & DPS combo.. but tanking 10-20 mobs, no thank you.
Then again, i suppose we dont have enough smart Shaman’s and Mages helping us out in our runs and i’m stuck using only my own frost trap to slow my ‘fans’ down.
I.e – you cant do it….
I was in a 25 man the other night and the raid leader repeatedly ignored the frost mage, who offered 3 or 4 times, to kite the little bastiches. He was determined to keep the hunters (only 3 of us) off DPS duty to handle the chow. I’m quite, quite sure the mage would have been a key to sucess, but as it was, we wiped.
Send him to this page. I know a mage that paid for dual spec, and uses the second one for kiting chows. He can solo kite the 25 man better than 3 hunters (assuming he gets a little support)
I never stop to leave comments on peoples sites but I just felt I had to stop and tell you that I love your site. Love your design and I love reading your posts. Keep up the good work. :)