2.2 Grand Widow Faerlina


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Introduction

The door leading further into the Spider Wing will open when Anub’Rekhan is defeated. Going through and clearing more trash will eventually land you at the nefarious Grand Widow Faerlina, the second boss of the Spider Wing. Be on your guard as she is more difficult then Anub’Rekhan.

In this fight you will be racing against the clock to slay Faerlina while keeping her enrage soothed by sacrificing Naxxramas Worshippers through Mind Control. You have a little over five minutes to take her down and you must manage a total of seven NPCs who stand guard to prevent you to continue inward. Truly an epic encounter located within the halls of Naxxramas.

Set-Up!

The first thing you will need to do is organize your raid. A “perfect” raid group will need a total of seven tanks. If you can’t arrange this then you will need even more DPS then normal. You’re going to want to assign a main-tank with a full tanking group along with your two second best tanks off tanking Naxxramas Followers and the four other tanks tanking the Naxxramas Worshippers. They all need to be instructed that they should at no time do too much damage to the Naxxramas Worshippers.

You will want consumables for this fight as well. Just like Patchwerk you want as much DPS as possible. Potions are a good source of DPS to stack along with your gear and regular buffs. A Flask of the Titans will greatly aid your main-tank in staying alive the few seconds she is enraged. As a guild you may want to fund the purchase of various consumables to increase DPS along with plenty of Greater Fire/Nature Protection potions for key members of the raid.

Your healers will need to be set to heal people up in a quick manner before returning their healing back to the main-tank. Two of her skills are AoE attacks and you can’t have DPS dieing early. You also don’t want your DPS to be cut by unnecessary deaths.

To keep your melee in better shape you may want everyone to be in 150 Fire Resist with very good items. You don’t want items that cut your raids DPS at the cost of survivability because you will be lessening your chance to survive. You need to balance things out between defense and offense in this battle. Don’t sweat it to much since it isn’t as extreme as Patchwerk.

Skills

Enrage: Enrage offers a 75% attack speed bonus every minute into the fight. You need four tanks (Warriors are the best in this scenario, although a Druid could technically tank one) to tank the Naxxramas Worshippers. Then have a Priest mind control a Worshipper and use it’s sacrifice ability to stop Faerlina in the middle of her enrage. She will not enrage again for one minute. However! You can use it to prevent her from enraging. This will only give you an additional 30 seconds which is inadvisable. Sacrificing Worshippers also stops her Poison Bolt Volley for about thirty seconds.

Poison Bolt Volley: If you’ve fought Lord Kri then you know about this fun ability. She will hit 10 random people for 1400 damage that applies a very strong cleansable DoT. This should be healed up as fast as possible and the DoT removed by if at all possible. Anytime you sacrifice a Naxxramas Worshipper you will gain a 30 second immunity from this skill. Use of Greater Nature Protection Potions can be of great help along with a few NR pieces on key members (NR pieces that give good stats only though).

Rain of Fire: Your standard Rain of Fire with a lot more damage tacked on. This is countered in one of two ways. If it’s outside of melee range then everyone gets far away from it (without all bunching up). If it’s in melee range then the main-tank needs to drag her away and outside of the Rain of Fire while the melee flee from it in the direction the main-tank is dragging her. This is where the Greater Fire Protection Potions come in handy on your melee.

Tactics

The fight itself is pretty simple as long as everyone is paying attention. The entire raid needs to be spread out with the only concentration at Faerlina herself (your melee). If a Rain of Fire shows up then everyone needs to quickly run out of it. Healers need to focus their healing on the main-tank while unless she Poison Bolt Volleys in which case you need to get everyone healed up enough to survive another one.

You should start by allowing your main-tank to build aggro (3-5 sunders) while your tanks each pick up their respective add. If you do not have enough tanks then you will need to kill the Naxxramas Followers within 30 seconds in order to have a good chance at Faerlina. If you do have the tanks then just have the Followers off tanked for all of the fight. The Followers must be off tanked away from the raid as they have a very annoying AoE silence. They also can randomly charge people, so be sure they are under control!

The rest of the fight relies on people getting out of Raid of Fire, your healing and DPS being adequate, and a Priest mind controlling a Worshipper when she enrages and sacrificing it to stop it.

She will enrage every minute. Using this knowledge you can begin to mind control a Naxxramas Worshipper about ten seconds before each minute. If you’ve got some way to track the time into the fight then you could set it up to mind control an add 50 seconds in the fight, 1 minute and 50 seconds into the fight, etc. When she enrages then the Priest should use the sacrifice ability to stop the enrage before the damage becomes too much.

A pretty easy fight if your raid is well geared and you’ve mastered the tactics to take out most of the first tier bosses (we’ll exclude Patchwerk who will probably be more difficult then Faerlina).

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Last Updated: Mar 13, 2016

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