Neriad and The Core earns a Tichondrius server first by killing Chromaggus, and then Neriad and crew take their first look at the Nefarius event.

CHROMAGGUS AND A FIRST SHOT AT NEFARIUS

On Thursday evening (October 7th), The Core gathered to take on Chromaggus, the large and nasty demon dog that is the second to last boss in Blackwing Lair.  Two nights previously, The Core had taken down Ebonroc in a Tichondrius all-server first.  However, Easy Company, an Alliance guild, took down Ebonroc an hour later and quickly followed up with a server first kill of Flamegor.  The next evening, The Core returned to Blackwing Lair, took down Flamegor, and made a few modest attempts on Chromaggus, getting him to a whopping 95% health, before calling it a night.  The race to be the first guild on the server to kill Chromaggus was on.

After watching videos of other guilds killing Chromaggus, we chose to pull him all the way back to the stairs leading up to the suppressor room.  This is quite a long way back in the instance, but it's a place that provides a lot of corners to hide behind or dive behind when needed.

There's a lot going on in a fight with Chromaggus, as you'll see, so we wiped three times, while trying to get it right.  On one wipe, Natural, our main tank, missed all three of his opening hits.  His combat log read like this:

Your Sunder Armor misses Chromaggus
Your Sunder Armor misses Chromaggus
Your Sunder Armor misses Chromaggus
Neriad dies

(I swear!  I didn't do anything!)  Chromaggus walked right down to the main party and killed everyone. (Let's see... 1/20th chance cubed = 1 in 8000 chance of that happening).  But once we got everyone's roles settled and rehearsed, the fight turned out to be incredibly simple.

The first step in killing Chromaggus is to set up the tanking and healing groups and their positions.  Unlike every other Blackwing Lair boss, Chromaggus can be consistently tanked by one tank for the entire fight.  If that tank dies or loses aggro during the fight, it's game over, but the fact that you don't have to deal with arranging and healing multiple tanks simplifies things greatly.

Natural, The Core's main tank, locked Chromaggus down about halfway down the top ramp.  Meanwhile, two teams of five healers each were assigned to be main tank healers.  Each team consisted of two priests, two druids, and one mana tide spec'd shaman.  These main tank healers stood on a line that would enable them to be in line of sight of Natural but yet be out of line of sight of Chromaggus's area of effect attacks.  These healers never had to move at all and never took damage from Chromaggus except from debuffs (described below).  The two healing teams rotated approximately every thirty seconds for the sake of mana regeneration and to prevent any possible problems with healing aggro.  Chromaggus doesn't really do all that much damage to the main tank, so the rotation combined with Innervate and Mana Tide totems every few minutes were more than enough to keep the main healing battery going indefinitely.

The second step in killing Chromaggus is to make sure all the dps characters know how and when to dodge in and out of line of sight with Chromaggus.  Chromaggus's area-of-effect attacks occur on timers, and RaidAssist already has built into it an eight second warning before the area-of-effect attacks go off.  So all dps players have to do is run in, dps, run out when the 8 second warning comes up, wait for the area of effect attack to go off, and then run back in again.  As you can see in this screenshot, two mages have stepped out of hiding to shoot at Chromaggus.  Most of the raid's dps was upstairs behind Chromaggus to maximize their dps, though.

It's important that the dps players get this process down, because as you can see in the second screenshot above, one of Chromaggus's area-of-effect attacks is called Ignite Flesh, which is an undispellable debuff that causes 657-843 damage every three seconds for over 45 seconds (longer?).  That's the long way of saying, "You die."

(By the way, there's some confusion about whether using line-of-sight is considered an exploit.  As explained by a GM who is in our guild, the line of sight exploit involved placing Chromaggus in a special bugged location where the main tank and the dps could hit Chromaggus somehow remain out of line of sight of Chromaggus's attacks.  In other words, the tank and dps could just stand there hitting Chromaggus and never take any damage from him.  That's different from the technique described here where people have to constantly run in and out of line of sight to avoid the aoe attacks.  Doing this is considered fair game).

There is also one other gimmick to Chromaggus that the dps classes can pay attention to, a gimmick that partly gives Chromaggus his name.  Every once in a while, an emote pops up that says, "Chromaggus flinches as its skin shimmers."  This indicates that Chromaggus's resists have changed.  At any given time, Chromaggus will be particularly susceptible to damage in one school of magic, taking four times the normal amount of damage from spells in this school of magic, while simultaneously being very resistant to all other forms of magic, taking one-fourth the normal amount of damage.  So after Chromaggus's skin shimmers like this, the spellcasters tested out to see what school of magic Chromaggus is susceptible to and fired appropriately.  Of course, there is a danger in this of pulling aggro.  Some screenshots posted on the Blizzard forums showed people getting 10k fireball crits.  If a mage got too many of those in a row, he or she could disastrously pull aggro off the main tank.  So one has to be cautious especially in the early stages of the battle to not nuke too much using spells in the school of magic Chromaggus is susceptible to.  It may be exciting to see big numbers pop up on your screen, but since the main tank healers can hold up the main tank indefinitely, there's no time crunch involved with this fight.  It's better to under dps and have a longer fight than to over dps and pull aggro and wipe the entire raid.  Still, late in the fight when it was clear that Natural had Chromaggus permanently locked down, the spellcasters had fun dishing out the damage.  In addition, whenever Chromaggus became susceptible to arcane, mages who had talent points in Arcane Subtlety (-40% aggro generation when casting arcane spells) had a field day.

The third step in killing Chromaggus is also shown in the screenshot above.  Like Magmadar, Chromaggus "goes into a killing frenzy" occasionally, so the hunters need to Tranq Shot him to neutralize him.

And finally, there are the debuffs.  All those wonderful debuffs.  Everyone gets hit with the debuffs, whether they are in line-of-sight or not, so a complex system of dispelling and curing has to be set up.

Brood Affliction: Bronze -- The first debuff everyone gets hit with is Brood Affliction: Bronze which periodically stuns you for four seconds.  It cannot be dispelled by any normal player ability, but there is this material called "Hourglass Sand" that can be found on the corpses of goblins leading up to Chromaggus's chamber that can cure this debuff.  However, you won't find enough of it to allow everyone to be cured, so we only gave it out to our main tank and the main tank healing rotation.  Chromaggus recasts this debuff frequently, so you have to give the people you never want stunned bunches of it.  However, our main tank healing rotation stopped using the sand about halfway through the fight and we kept Natural up just fine.  I think the only ones who really need the sand are the main tank (who also stopped using it about halfway through the fight, since he'd built up so much aggro by then anyway) and the hunters who need to be able to Tranq shot Chromaggus reliably.  Everyone else can be stunned periodically with little effect on the fight.

There is one consequence to this debuff for the dps classes, however.  It's the reason why RaidAssist warns people at 8 seconds before Chromaggus's aoe attacks go off.  It it imperative for all of the dps characters to immediately move once they get the eight second warning.  Don't finish a cast on a spell or wait for an aimed shot to finish or anything like that.  Move immediately.  You don't want to get the warning, stand still for a couple seconds while finishing your spell cast, then get stunned for four seconds, and then find that you're in line of sight when Chromaggus's aoe attacks go off.

Brood Affliction: Red -- The Red debuff is a disease that deals 50 damage every three seconds and heals Chromaggus if the player dies.  Since players rarely if ever die in this fight, this isn't a big deal, although it should still be cured.

Brood Affliction: Green -- The Green debuff is a poison that deals 250 damage every 5 seconds and reduces healing effects by 50%.

Brood Affliction: Black -- The Black debuff is a curse that increases the fire damage taken by 100%.  Obviously, this curse needs to be quickly removed from the main tank.  However, when I complained that our healing teams weren't getting their curses removed in a timely fashion, Yilona, one of our other priests, pointed out that we're not taking any fire damage anyway, so it really doesn't matter.  Good point.

Brood Affliction: Blue -- The Blue debuff is a magic debuff that acts as a mana burn.  I didn't get a screenshot of it, because every time it was cast, I and others would dispel it as fast as possible.  I don't recall what its exact effects where, but it did something like eat up 250 mana every couple of seconds.  This is the one debuff that absolutely has to be dispelled as quickly as possible.

Frost Burn -- The frost burn attack is one of Chromaggus's aoe attacks that in addition to dealing damage also slows down a person's attack speed by 80%.  It is not dispellable.  In a properly functioning group, the only person who would be affected by this attack is the main tank.  This might cause worries about how well the main tank can hold aggro, but remember that most of the dps people are dodging in and out and also are being periodically stunned.  Having the main tank's attack speed slowed for about 10 seconds isn't going to have a big effect on the fight.

There's a last debuff that I'm sorry I didn't get screenshot of.  When a person gets all of the Brood Affliction debuffs cast on them all at once, he or she turns into a drakonid, which basically acts like a Mind Control on the person and it isn't dispellable.  Again, this only happens if the person has all of the Brood Affliction debuffs on them, so if someone gets this, things have already likely broken down for your group as it is.  It's still funny to see, though.

To counter the dispellable debuffs, a complex dispelling system was created.  First, an extra priest, shaman, and mage was placed in the main tank group.  Their primary jobs were to dispel first the main tank and then the main tank healing groups.  In addition, the main tank healing groups helped with dispells somewhat.  The shamans in those groups dropped poison or disease cleansing totems when needed, and when the mana burn debuff came up, the priests in those parties sometimes threw out a couple of quick dispells before going right back to healing the main tank.  However, we tried as much as possible to have the main tank healing groups focused as much as possible on healing the main tank and as little as possible on dispelling.

These three groups were completely self sufficient.  In fact, I'm firmly convinced that one could kill Chromaggus with fifteen people -- a main tank, two hunters firing Tranq shots, a shaman, a priest, and two healing parties as described above (insert paladins for the shamans if you're playing Alliance).  Of course, the fight would take all day, since you wouldn't have any dps, but still, it would be possible to do it.

We didn't have enough spare shamans or priests to have one in each of the dps parties, so the ones we did have often had to dispel two full parties.  Shamans would drop poison or disease cleansing totems to cure their own parties and then single target cure members of the other party. Mages and druids were told to remove curses on their own parties.  The spare priests also often had to double up and dispel the mana burn debuff of players in multiple parties.  This was a little rough on them, but if it only meant that a few mages or hunters had a little less mana to work with, it wasn't a big deal.  The hunters could feign death drink in combat at least.

Placement of the dps dispellers was easy.  They could hang out around the corner out of line of sight from Chromaggus the entire time and dispel from there.  If everything's going right, nobody will be taking any damage, since the damaging debuffs are getting dispelled promptly and everyone is running out of the way before Chromaggus uses his aoe attacks.  If the image is forming in your head that you could get one of those dippy birds to repeatedly press your Decursive key while you go make yourself a sandwich is coming to mind, then you're starting to get the idea.

So there's a lot going on in this fight with people running in and out and people dispelling all kinds of debuffs, but in the end the individual jobs for individual people are simple.  To summarize:

Main Tank -- Use your normal aggro generating attacks to lock down Chromaggus in a spot that allows people to periodically get out of line of sight.

Main Tank Healers -- Get in a spot that's in line of sight with the main tank but out of the line of sight of Chromaggus and stay there.  Heal when it's your turn in the rotation.

DPSers -- Run in, hit Chromaggus, run out when the eight second warning pops up, wait for the aoe attack to cast, run back in.

Hunters -- Same as DPSers with the addition that they should fire a Tranq shot when Chromaggus goes into a frenzy.  I assume that there was a hunter rotation for this, but I wasn't involved with this part of the fight, so I'm not 100% sure.

Dispellers -- Watch for the debuff icons of the appropriate color and dispel them.  Stay out of line of sight of Chromaggus.

And with that recipe, Chromaggus was taken down without a single death.

Chromaggus dropped the Pauldrons of Transcendence, the Taut Dragonhide Gloves, Angelista's Grasp, and the Bloodfang Spaulders, the latter of which was picked up so fast by Syren that I didn't even realize that they'd dropped until looking at my screenshots later that night.

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