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Loatheb 10-man Boss Strategy Guide
December 22, 2008 by Zuggy
Make sure to check out the complete Naxxramas 10-Man Instance and Boss Strategy Guide.
Loatheb is the 3rd and final boss of the plague wing in Naxxramas. Loatheb is a unique encounter that features a healing mechanic unlike any other. This mechanic, which we’ll discuss below, is intended to force healers to be more than just a “healbot”…note Healbot is an anagram of Loatheb, an intentional joke on the part of the original Naxxramas developers.
Loatheb Abilities
- Necrotic Aura – Every 20 seconds Loatheb will cast this on the entire raid. It’s a debuff that reduces healing by 100% for 17 seconds. This means your healers only get 3 seconds to heal the entire raid back up.
- Deathbloom – Every 30 seconds Loatheb will cast this on the entire raid. It deals 200 damage per second followed by a 1200 damage “bloom” at the end.
- Inevidble Doom – Deals 4000 damage after 10 seconds. Loatheb won’t start casting this until the 2 minute mark of the fight, at which point it will only be every 30 seconds. After 5 minutes he will cast this ever 15 seconds.
- Fungal Creep – Increases critical strike by 50% and reduces threat by 100%. Applied when you’re in range of the spores upon their death, lasts 90 seconds. A maximum of 5 players can get the buff from a single spore.
Loatheb Boss Strategy
Starting the Encounter
First, you’ll want to setup the raid so that your best DPS are all in group 1. Everyone needs to know which group they are in, as we’re going to use these for the spore rotation (discussed below). The tank will want to hold Loatheb in the middle of the room, with melee players stacking near the tank and all ranged healers / DPS stacked up together in front of Loatheb. It’s important to stay close together so your AoE heals will have maximum effectiveness.
Spore Rotation
Almost immediately orange spores will start spawning randomly around the room. If you’re nearby when these spores die you’ll get a buff that increases critical strike chance by 50% and reduces threat by 100%. These buffs are crucial to your success during the fight, so it’s important the entire raid always have this buff. Generally you’ll want to have group 1 get the first spore and group 2 get the second (excluding the tank of course).
Understanding the Healing Debuff
Necrotic aura will be applied to the entire raid for 17 out of every 20 seconds. This will leave us with a 3 second window to heal the entire raid. So right away we need to get a little help from the rest of the raid in the way of staying close together. If the raid is too spread out you will likely have trouble getting the entire raid healed up before the next round of necrotic aura is applied. If you’re healing this fight you’ll want to be watching the debuff tick down, when it hits 1 second go ahead and queue your heal and select your second target for heal number 2.
Generally you can get 2 AoE heals and 1 instant cast heal during the 3 seconds (depends on your class). Don’t bother casting any HoTs during this time as they will have little effect. Just get as much healing out in the 3 seconds as you can. Here are some possible healing rotations you could use (and the one I use as a shaman).
- Shaman – Chain heal, Chain heal, Riptide
- Priest – Circle of healing, Circle of healing, Circle of healing
- Paladin – Holy Light, Flash of Light, Holy Shock
- Druid – Regrowth, Nourish, Nourish
Let the DPS Race Commence!
When it gets right down to the bottom line this fight is a DPS race. For this reason it’s extremely important you always keep the spore buff up on you, otherwise you simply aren’t going to have the damage necessary to kill him before 1) your healers run out of mana or 2) he starts inevidble doom every 15 seconds. Healing on Loatheb isn’t all that difficult, it’s just a matter of timing your first heal to go off the moment necrotic aura lifts and spaming during the 3 second healing period.
Once you’ve mastered these basic mechanics you’ll be well on your way to your first Loatheb kill!
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Well layed out, easily useable guide. I noticed though that you suggested druids use regrowth nourish nourish. due to the amount of time needed to cast this, it would be almost impossible unless a nature’s swiftness was used prior to it.
Well, you are correct, but considering bloodlust / wrath of air totem / other haste modifiers you’ll probably have the cast low enough to get all 3 off. If you can’t better to just pre-queue the nourish and follow it up a second nourish.
Additionally, you could toss a rejuv on your MT or other raid member that’s low life and swiftmend this as your 3rd heal.
Another very effective tactic for druids (If they are halfway intelligent) is to precast a couple of lifeblooms 8-9 seconds before the healing debuff wears off. This will cause the heal to “bloom”, healing for 2.5-3k on that target. This also allows for the druid to cast a couple of regrowths/nourishes/swiftmends during the window, as well as the lifebloom heals.
Pre-lifeblooming makes this fight extremely trivial with druid healers, but the druid has to pay attention to timers or else it won’t work correctly.
I two-heal 10 man Naxx with a resto druid. Especially with the upcoming CoH nerf, with a priest as a healer, I suggest having the tank and melee dps in one group with the priest. Using a mod such as DBM, you can watch the time on the aura more closely and precast a Prayer of Healing to go off right as the aura ends (start casting with 2.8 seconds left in my case). This ensures that the tank and one group gets at least 4.5-5k healing, overheal at the beginning but more important as the fight goes on. You then have time for 2-3 more CoH on the range group. This leaves your healing partner free to precast a big heal on the tank if he needs it and focus on whatever range is low.
you make a great point, Vexin. As a priest if you can land a PoH you’ll be in great shape on that fight.
Just for reference sake here’s the download for DBM..aka Deadly Boss Mods.
http://www.deadlybossmods.com/downloads.php
thanks for pointing this out for all the priests out there.
Another very effective method to healing this fight as a resto druid is to have improved tranquility, make sure you are placed in the same group as the best DPS and perhaps the MT, heal as you normally would but when you notice that everyone in your group can use a large top off, hit tranquility right before the aura goes down, this will guarantee at least 2 and maybe more ticks of tranquility on the entire group. With only a 4 minute cooldown, I find that I can hit this towards the beginning of the fight and also towards the end when people are eating more of the Inevidble doom casts. Announce to the raid that you are going to use tranquility and then your other healers can focus on healing the other group for the duration the aura is down. Due to the large mana cost of tranquility, you may need to self-innervate during the fight to keep your mana up, or if you are like myself you will have lots of mana regen on your gear and wont have any issues. Also I find that stacking 3 lifeblooms on as many people as possible before the aura goes down is a decent way to heal as well, 3 stacks of lifebloom for me will heal for about 1100+ per tick, over 3 seconds this is about 3.5k health. Which is better than allowing a lifebloom to pop while the aura is down. Just my two cents on healing this as a resto druid.
My guild just started doing this fight. We downed him last night (our DK DPS and DK tank were the only 2 left alive at about 50k health. the dps died and was rezed as a ghoul, and the tank went down at 5k life. You couldn’t hear anything except screaming & cheering over vent for a solid 20-30 sec after Loatheb fell over). It was our second night trying him.
With 2 resto druids, we actually spammed starfire at the beginning and hit wild growth in the 3 sec window until the counter got up to round 5 of damage, then we switched to full heals. we had a Holy priest as well who was working full heals through the first 5 rounds.
I saw a few places where i messed up, and after spending some time today researching, this is what i’ve come up with:
16 sec to aura fading, rejuv on dps 1 (someone who will need a good bit of life)
14 sec to aura fading, rejuv on dps 2 (someone who won’t need quite as much)
10 sec to aura fading, lifebloom on dps 3 or healer(someone who doesn’t need much and you just wanna keep topped off. usually me)
8.5sec to aura fading, lifebloom on dps 4 or healer (same story as 10sec)
7 sec to aura fade, lifebloom dps 5
5.5sec to aura fade, lifebloom dps 5
4 sec to aura fade, lifebloom dps 5
2.5 sec to aura fade, Healing Touch Tank, or someone who will need it (with my haste in raid buffs, i’m at a 2.5 sec cast time)
0 sec to fade, HT goes off, swiftmend dps 1
1.5 sec after fade, nourish dps 2 (rejuv hot gives 20% extra)
then… restart
so in the 0 sec window, you have
rejuv tick on dps1 and a swiftmend – 1.7k + 7-11k
rejuv tick on dps 2, and a nourish – 1.7k + 5.5k-8.5k
lifebloom pop on dps 3 or healer – (not sure what a lifeboom pop hits for. 2k-3k?)
lifebloom pop on dps 4 or healer
3 triple stack lifebloom ticks on dps 5 – 3k
HT on tank… or someone that needed it. – 10-16k or something like that
no idea how much mana this takes to pull off, but its awesome if you can get it to work every time. if both druids are on a roll with this, then the party should have no problem staying up, which gives you some leeway to let your guard down every once in a while. Of course its a whole lot easier the faster you dps him down.
seems to me like you are really over complicating a fight that is not difficult.