ANUB'REKHAN

On Sunday evening, a group of Tichondrius Horde players met on the PvP Test Realm to adventure into Naxxramas for the first time.  Most of the people were from the The Core and TAO, but players from other guilds and even a few Tichondrius alumni came along.

Since a few people in the raid had had some previous experience with the spider wing in pickup groups, we decided to try to tackle that first.

The trash mob pulls in this wing come in two varieties.  The first kind is composed of a group of large spiders like the one you see in the foreground in this screenshot.  The second variety is a group of numerous small spiders that you can see in the background.

One of the practical jokes people like to pull on mages is to tell them to run up an aoe the little spiders.  The little spiders do like 800-1000 damage to cloth wearers on every hit with fast attacks and there are a lot of spiders, so pretty much every mage who tries this dies in one second (except for cheaters like Vendetta who use limited invulnerability potions).  We nearly wiped on the first set of spider pulls because of this little joke.

This screenshot also shows one of the new interface improvements in 1.11.  The skull over the big spider and the crescent moon over one person's head were placed there by the raid leader.  This feature was added to make it easier for raid leaders to assign targets to raid members.  It's also a great way for a raid leader to taunt raid members, since the symbols can be placed on raid members heads as well.

After the first pull, the raid got serious and handled the spider trash mobs easily.  The only special tactic was that we made sure to kill the big green Venom Spiders first on each pull, since they have some kind of nasty poison attack.

After only a few normal spider pulls, the raid got to the first boss, Anub'Rekhan, who yells as you open the door to his chamber:

Anub'Rekhan yells: Closer now.  Tasty morsels.  I've been too long without food, without blood to drink.