According to WoWProgress.com, only 4% of guilds in the world (that’s roughly 1,391) have downed 25 man Heroic Anub’arak.  As of this posting, 22% of all guilds (approximately 7,681) have downed the first four bosses in 25 man Icecrown Citadel.  Now assuming that Blizzard is sticking with their 4 weeks of waiting between each wing of Icecrown being released, those 22% of guilds will have some free time on their hands.  Guilds are reporting getting through the first wing of Icecrown within a night or two of attempts and depending on your raid schedule, that still leaves plenty of time to see about getting your guild into that super elite group who have completed 25 man ToGC.

Phase 1 for resto druids in the Heroic Anub’arak encounter is pretty cut and dry.  Keep a Regrowth and a Rejuvenation on the main tank and the add tank at all times.  Anub’arak will choose 5 targets for a DoT called Penetrating Cold.  Your raid frames or user interface should have a way of marking those targets and DBM calls it out, too.  Place a Regrowth on all 5 of the targets and possibly even a Rejuvenation on them, depending on how much you see them taking.  Regrowth should have a high enough crit chance, where you will eventually proc Nature’s Grace – so casting it on 5 targets shouldn’t take too long. 

The reason why I find Regrowth to be better for the PC is because of how long the DoT lasts.  You can put the HoT on the 5 targets and refresh your HoTs that you initially put on the tanks and keep it all going. 

Once Anub’arak burrows, then comes the scarab phase.  Regrowth is also going to be a big help here.  Players who are killing the adds are bound to get hit by a scarab and they leave a DoT on targets that also hits very hard.  Unlike PT, this DoT can stack and even a short stack can be rough to heal through.  If you see a target with the debuff, place a Regrowth on them, both for the initial heal and the lasting HoT.  Keep an eye out for people that may have missed their spike duties and keep a few HoTs on yourself, just in case you end up being that person.  You can possibly survive one hit from a spike, with a HoT or two on and a Swiftmend to burn.  Obviously, it’s not something you want to try and test out, but I have seen it done.

Rinse and repeat the above until Phase 3 happens and Anub’arak begins his Leeching Swarm effect.  The rest of the fight is going to take you drastically outside of your comfort zone.  It’s going to be up to Healing Stream totems, Judgement of Light and other passive forms of heals to keep the raid alive.  You will be doing very little direct healing and if you do, it’s going to be with one spell:  Healing Touch.  Dig deep in your spellbook, dust off the tooltip and put it back on your action bars – if you don’t have it there already.  Healing Touch will work best if glyphed and you will most likely have to perform a slight re-spec to get the most out of this, making sure you have  points in Empowered Touch and Naturalist.

The reason why this spell is best is because you are going to be assigned to heal the Penetrating Cold targets and the damage from that plus the Leeching Swarm ability is going to be too much for any other heal you have to cover it.  Even with a good amount of haste, Nourish still won’t be fast enough to keep up.  You have to do enough healing to keep the targets up, but not so much that Anub’arak is getting too much health back from the debuff.  Talented and glyphed, Healing Touch is the perfect solution to this.

In my experience, guilds usually assign one healer to cover each PT target and sometimes they get assigned two.  This is your focus – nothing else.  No tank healing, no self healing, just your target or targets.  Using only Healing Touch.  Pop Barkskin when it’s on cooldown to mitigate some of the Leeching Swarm damage or to help out if you end up being a PT cold target 

Do this until Anub’arak is dead and then celebrate your victory!

Tagged as anub'arak, Druid, Empowered Touch, healing touch, Naturalist, Regrowth, Swiftmend, ToGC + Categorized as Druid, General