I recommend using the modded version of GridStatusRaidIcons which can be found here, this version was modified to increase visibility of raid markings when used in the center icon position in grid – the normal version has rather translucent icons which can be hard to see on top of certain class colours.

You end up with something like this in grid when the raid gets penetrating cold, along with the rather pleasing whisper from whoever is running the addon

I’m not sure how useful this is for any of Anub’s versions other than 25man hardmode, as with the other 3 versions you can pretty much just have a normal raid healing strat of ‘heal ppl when they go low’ and just win. But since the idea behind 25man hardmode is to keep the whole raid hovering on as low hp as possible – the healer assignment needs to be refined so that the 5 penetrating cold targets get a 6k+ heal (or bubble) each, in under 2 seconds. We tend to run 4 healers – either 2 druids and 2 priests or 3 priests and 1 druid.  In the latter example each priest is assigned 1 raid marker to heal and keep alive, and the resto druid (in this case me) takes 2 due to max hasted, glyphed and specced healing touch being a super-fucking-fast 7-10k heal. The priests also have the secondary task of throwing a bubble at the druid’s 2nd target just to help with the first tick as that can sometimes come faster than 2 seconds and thus cause a death.

This certainly is a very nice addon, every now and then you notice it fails to put a marker on someone but this is not often and usually not a problem as the person who’s marker failed to appear just heals the unmarked guy who should have had it.

Just to confirm, only 1 person in the raid needs to have the Penetrator addon installed and activated. And this person must have assistant so they can mark – it should also ideally be the person with the least latency in the raid as this can make the difference between having marks placed instantly or after a delay.  All the penetrating cold healers should then have Grid StatusRaidIcons installed to allow them to see the markers in grid. It should also be noted that the addon only uses the markers you see in the screenshot – namely: moon, triangle, circle, star and diamond.  The only downside to this addon that we noticed when using it to kill anub last night was that it seems to wipe all other markers off whenever it sets new ones. By this I mean that even markers that it doesn’t use (cross, skull) appear to be removed from whatever they are assigned to as soon as a new batch of dots have their markers applied. This means you cannot use markers to identify between burrower adds for interruption and have to use positional based targeting instead – although this didn’t seem to be much of a problem for us.

The phase 3 healing in this fight is still very stressful, but this addon at least takes a small part of that away.

External link in case you want to watch it in a larger window / fullscreen:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1DkfSRd04pA

Full video will be up soon but until then here is a short clip of the boss’ death. Since the video below has full Ventrilo sound, as you can imagine we were slightly happy with our kill so don’t play the video with speakers on in a library or something – there are a lot of loud swearwords

EDIT: This video has been removed, instead please see the full fight embedded youtube in this post.

And here’s a high quality picture of the kill:

Pretty good night for me as I also managed to grab the heroic version of [Suffering's End] which apparently isn’t on Wowhead yet so you’ll have to make do with my stats screen shot instead of the mouse hover Wowhead one.

Note the number of tries left too, damn that was annoying – I know my focus bar doesn’t show it but this was around a 7% wipe.  Suffice to say we didn’t get it down in a few more tries and then someone had to go (yes this shit happens to hardcore guilds too) and we couldn’t continue.

Ah well, Barring great catastrophe we should have at least the 25+ tries kill within this reset which isn’t too bad I guess.  It’s just very annoying to have a working tactic and as yet be unable to execute it due to stupid mistakes being made that shouldn’t be being made.  I’m frapsing every attempt so should get a video from resto druid perspective (with full vent sounds) up pretty quickly once it does finally die.

Here are a few random copter pics for maximum epeenage, and a random pic of Riha being an RP fag in Anub’s room.

Just about fits in this tunnel

Can't fit it in here though

Hlep!

RP FAG ALERT!

So when 3.2 first hit I was running 3 different level 80 characters through the daily heroic minefield.  When it first started it wasn’t so bad because I actually hadn’t done any heroics for a very very long time and so, while they weren’t exactly new content, I had forgotten bits and bobs so it wasn’t totally mind numbing.  However that quickly changed, mainly due to the almighty random number generator’s persistence in choosing the same fucking dungeons over and over on consecutive days as if encouraged by some kind of malevolent force.  Not that anyone really minds when it picks Azjol’Nerub 5 times in a row though, rogues and hunters sure are popular dps on the days when it does!  But when you’ve just completed your 3rd gundrak in almost as many days, it starts to grate.

I pretty much can’t be fucked to do the daily heroic on most of my characters now and this is for other reasons than just that the content is boring as hell.  Mainly that the end is already in sight – triumph badge wise – for both Cows and Deathcow, that and I don’t really give a shit about Bullshot.  Cows is currently getting 61 badges a week just from raids alone, while Deathcow is getting around 49 (no hardmode 25).  I only now need another 70 badges in order to have enough to upgrade my last piece of 232 t9 to 245, once I win a trophy.  Trophies are coming thick and fast since we now get 4x between 10 guys on 10 man hardmode, and then another 9x between 25 guys on both 25mans (soon to be 10x hopefully).  In fact as I mentioned a while back we’re getting even more trophies due to splitting up the mains into 2x 25 man groups and filling the rest of those groups with alts, and giving trophies to mains.  As a result, the motivation to actually run through many more heroics is rapidly evaporating.

I wouldn’t give it much more than 2 weeks before you stop seeing any Apex mains doing the daily heroic any more, and so I guess no more 3am crew for me either which definitely isn’t a bad thing

Just to add, I recently had an argument on some forum somewhere (I would link it but I totally forgot which of the many forums I frequent it was on) about which meta is best for resto druids.  Of course as most druids know this is the Insightful Earthsiege Diamond, which is always better unless you massively out-gear the content you are running. I found a great post here which explains why in more detail.

As many of you know Paragon killed Anub’arak 25man hardmode 2 days ago, a lot of us were wondering how in hell they did it, and it looks like we now know.  So I guess the trend that everyone thought was over, that of buffing hard bosses after they’ve been killed by 1 guild, is something that Blizzard are quite happy to continue doing.  Oh but lets make sure that we nerf the bosses we actually want players to kill right now yeah?  I mean sure, beasts were a little overpowered given that the first fight in the instance was the hardest of the first 3.  I guess we’ll just be glad they didn’t ‘pull a mimiron hardmode’ and nerf the fight into a pulp during a lockout AFTER guilds had already been saved to an instance where they might have failed to defeat him.

I wonder how long the top guilds will put up with this kind of bullshit, with the number that have folded recently I think a lot of the old top 100 have already answered that question.

Edit: As for the Stars kill, they didn’t yet have the hotfix.