Force Recon Defeats All the Bosses in Naxx!

Force Recon has been continuing its successful set team runs within Naxxramas. On Sunday, Jan 4, 2009, Force Recon and a few friends continued to work on new content within Naxx and were able to clear a 3rd wing. 4 new bosses were killed this day, after defeating all previous bosses the day before.

We first started out the day by returning to the Military Quarter, where we claimed victory over both Gothik the Harvester and The Four Horsemen. Each took only 2 attempts. The Four Horsemen is an interesting encounter. It includes 4 mobs, including Baron Rivendare who is making an appearance outside of Strat. Each of the Horsemen has close to 800k hit points.

One thing that happens in this fight is that each of the Horseman casts their own Mark. All the marks will stack infinitely and as they stack, they do increasing amounts of shadow damage. Each mark will last 25 seconds and will be cast on everyone within 45 yards. If there is no one within range to get one of the marks, everyone in the raid gets hit by a high damage AOE. This is quite a tough fight and takes a bit of maneuvering, but we were able to successfully defeat them to receive access to a chest with our loot. With the clearing of the Four Horsemen, we successfully cleared our 3rd quarter of Naxx.

To see our progression pages, including screenshots, on them, go to http://www.forcereconguild.com/boss_progression/show/121188 and http://www.forcereconguild.com/boss_progression/show/121189, respectively.

The last quarter to be visited for us was the Plague Quarter. We headed into there and 1-shot Noth the Plaguebringer. Here’s a picture of us over his body:

Heigan the Unclean, otherwise known as the dancing boss, took us the most attempts of any boss that day. We successfully killed him on our 3rd attempt. He has 2 different phases, in which either part or all of the raid must move between the 3 sections in the room to avoid Eruption damage, which does 6650 to 7350 Nature damage. At any time, 3 of the 4 sections get hit with the Eruption and you must be standing in the safe zone. You generally must move very quickly because once you fall behind, you generally cannot catch up to the proper sequence before you die.

Here is a picture of us once we finally defeated him:

We finished up the day with Heigan, and put to a close a wonderful weekend for progression. Thanks to our team for the 4th, which included Nestra, Sleepyeyes, Nathelien, Falarelle, Mixtel, Narlexia, Forgiven, Brostin, Haazda, and me.

The following weekend, we made even further progress by successfully clearing all of Naxxramas! Between the 10th and 11th, we once again cleared all previous bosses. On the 11th, we started the day by killing both Noth and then Heigan.

Then, next up on the docket, was the last boss of the 4 quarters that we had yet to clear, Loatheb. We managed to 1-shot him, and here we are over his body:

Clearing the 4 wings, opens up the portal to the last area of Naxxramas, the Frostwyrm Lair. First up was Sapphiron, who is an undead dragon with over 4 million hit points. He has 2 separate, repeating phases which do quite a bit of damage to the entire raid. In the first phase, there is a dispellable curse which does shadow damage and moving ice storms that do frost damage. On top of that, he has a frost aura that deals approximately 1200 frost damage to the entire raid. This damage, luckily for us, is partially resistible with gear.

In phase 2, he will ice bolt 2 party members, as well as do a frost breath to everyone in line of sight for well over 100k damage. You must be out of LoS to survive this.

He was certainly a tough fight, and it took us 7 attempts to kill him, but our team was tenacious and kept trying until he was down. You can still see his sizable form in this picture of us with him:

Last within Naxx is Kel’Thuzad, who is the chief lieutenant to Arthas, the Lich King. He was actually an easier fight than Sapphiron, and we defeated him on our 2nd attempt. I got a lot of jokes that my explanation of this fight took way more time than the actual fight itself.  (I guess I can be long winded.)

He also has 3 phases. In the first phase, we work on killing some of his various minions, but he is not yet targetable. Phase 2 begins approximately 4 minutes into the fight, and we take on Kel’Thuzad himself. He has about 5,660,000 hit points. He has a variety of spells that do arcane, frost, and shadow damage.

In Phase 3, at 45% health, he calls in 2 Guardians of Icecrown to help him attack the raid. These start slowly, but ramp up on the damage they are dealing, so it’s important to end the encounter as quickly as possible.

At approximately 6:40-6:50, we defeated Kel’Thuzad, the final boss in Naxxramas!

The attendees for this momentous weekend for Force Recon include Nestra, Sleepyeyes, Nathelien, Falarelle, Mixtel, Terreis, Narlexia, Haazda Agarosi, Valasca, and me.

Loot for the ongoing Naxxramas and Obsidian Sanctum runs can be seen at http://www.forcereconguild.com/raids. All DE’ed loot is assigned to Nestra.

According to our original post on Wrath Raiding, posted at the end of Oct, we were set to beginning raiding Naxx in the middle of January. Instead, due to the hard work of the various people coming, not only did we get geared up and raiding Naxx sooner, but we fully cleared it by the time we originally thought we’d start it. Great Job to all those coming and working on these goals!

Kori