WotLK Instances: The Nexus
Happy Turkey-Day, American readers, and happy Thursday to everyone else. 
The Nexus is the second Northrend instance, located in the Coldarra in Borean Tundra. To get there, get the dragon flight point at Amber Ledge. This instance is supposed to be for the range 71-73, and offers four very fun boss fights, good rewards, and is definitely a step up from Utgarde Keep. I highly recommend doing all quest chains in the Coldarra to receive all quests, because the whole story behind the final encounter is superb, if tragic.
Quest rewards for tanks:
- Tundra Pauldrons are the reward for Have they no shame? and that’s what I want to say about those shoulders too. Have they no shame to make me replace my awesome Pauldrons of Stone Resolve so early in the expansion?
- Postponing the Inevitable has one pre-req quest and rewards you with Gauntlets of the Disturbed Giant, which are also very nice.
- If you’re looking for nice boots and never got anything better than the Boots of Elusion, make sure to pick up the quest Quickening after you did the pre-req quest, as the reward is Boots of the Unbowed Protector.
Trash:
Each boss has some trash associated with them, so you will fight various mobs. You can go see the bosses in any order. I have usually started with the right hallway, but you can also go left first. In the hallways you will find one lone dragonkin pat, either a female caster or a male melee dragonkin. Nothing to worry about whatsoever.
Ormorok-trash: The halls leading to Ormorok are filled with lots of annoying little flowers. Round them up, burn them down, and then make sure that your healer in particular doesn’t hang around where the flowers died. They leave a pod behind that will pop after one minute and then the flower will be back, to harass your healer and ranged DPS. The rest of the trash are either pathing groups of Crystalline Tenders and their tree buddies, or static Crystalline Protectors. When fighting the pat, make sure to interrupt the Tranquility the tenders cast and take them out first. CC shouldn’t be necessary, but if it makes you feel safer, you can use a warlock’s Banish or a hunter’s trap here. Try to keep moving, to avoid the flower repops.
Ormorok the Tree-Shaper: Standing on a pedestal surrounded by pods is Ormorok. The moment he’s dead, the flowers finally stop respawning, which should be enough to make anyone happy at this point. However, the pods on the pedestal are false alarm, there are no flower adds up there. Ormorok is the most tank-and-spank fight in the Nexus that you’ll find, but be on your toes. Much like Lord Ahune from mid-summer, he will cast spikes that will throw you in the air and cause extra fall damage if you don’t avoid them. Strafe away if they start popping in your area, watch the ground. It’s pretty easy to avoid them. He enrages, so save your survival abilities like Shield Wall for it.
As loot, he drops Chiseled Stalagmite Pauldrons, which are pretty nice DPS shoulders.
Anomalus-trash: Take a turn in the middle of the hallway leading to Ormorok, which will lead you to dragonkin trying to fight Mana Wraiths coming from Chaotic rifts. The dragonkin groups are usually two melee, one caster. Make sure to interrupt the heals of the casters. When you attack a rift, make sure that the DPS is all on the rift and not wasting time on wraiths. Those will spawn endlessly as long as the rift is open. Tank the wraiths, and interrupt their casts as you can. Once you’re getting closer to Anomalus, there will be voidwalker-type mobs. Again, try to interrupt them when they try to mana-burn a mana-class in your party.
Anomalus: Anorexic voidwalkers make their comeback in this very pale version. This fight is a DPS race. Frequently, Anomalus will open a chaos rift, and until the rift is done for, he’s immune to all damage. As tank this means that as soon as he goes immune, you start picking up mana wraiths instead, until your DPS has closed the rift, then you go back to Anomalus. Rinse and repeat. If your DPS is quick with switching targets, this shouldn’t take too long. Again, it’s important that no one wastes time on wraiths when they should be attacking the rifts. I have seen the case that several rifts were open at the same time, not sure what’s up with that.
He drops nothing of interest to any prot warrior. Or any other tanking class, at that.
Grand Magus Telestra trash: Once you’ve cleared up the ramp and dealt with some more dragonkin/rift trash, you end up in Grand Magus Telestra’s area of the instance. There are several mage hunter pats here, so you might end up getting adds. One pat comes right to the end of Anomalus’ area, the other pat patrols up to where you go to Telestra’s room. The mage hunters come with doggies that silence. All other trash is humanoid, so if you want to use CC, you know your options. Mage Hunter Ascendants have a huge array of annoying mage skills. Spell reflect and interrupts are your friend here. The Initiates use Renew, but Shield Slam should take care of that. As long as you can keep the pull bunched up to use AoE tanking on them, you shouldn’t have a problem. I recommend killing Ascendants first.
Grand Magus Telestra: In this fun fight you get to deal with one annoying mage, and three copies. Good times! When you go in, make sure that all ranged DPS and the healer stay away, as she will use a spell called Firebomb that will damage all in her vicinity. She will also cast a spell called Gravity Lapse that picks everyone up with like tentacles and flings them about. Once everyone is dumped on the ground, charge back to her and hopefully all ranged people are back at range as soon as they can. At 50% Telestra disappears, as she splits into three copies: arcane, frost and fire mage. Neat trick. All three copies can be tanked and have normal aggro tables. The kill order largely depends on your group make-up. If you have a mage, sheep the frost mage, kill arcane and fire, then frost. No mage, but someone who can dispel magic? Kill the frost mage, then arcane, then fire. No dispeller? Arcane, frost, fire. Once the copies are down, Telestra comes back, and you finish her off.
Again, no tank loot here.
The Alliance/Horde Hallway: As you head back to the instance entrance for Keristrasza’s chamber, you will find a hallway with 2-3 frozen mobs in groups. If you’re horde, they will be alliance, if you’re alliance, they will be horde mobs. The abilities and unit names are all the same. Rangers are hunters and they will always try to get away from you to shoot at you. The berserkers probably pose the highest risk, as they have a knockback attack that can throw you into the next frozen group. Make sure you’re never standing with your back towards the next group. The commanders are your average whirlwinding warrior. Kill the clerics first, then the berserkers, and either commanders or rangers next. If you didn’t kill one of the the mage hunter pats as mentioned earlier, it might add here as it paths through this hallway.
Keristrasza: As you approach her chamber, make sure that all dragonkin pats in the area are dead. She is surrounded by three orbs, one for each boss you downed. Position yourself facing her, while everyone else lines up by her side, but never behind her. Have someone else use the three orbs and voila, welcome to the fight where mobility is everything. Keristrasza applies a debuff called Intense Cold. It stacks, is a DoT effect and slows down. If people don’t respond to it by moving, they’re dead faster than they can say ‘Huh, what?’ The debuff is removed by moving. Either strafing or jumping in place. This is of course tricky for all casters. Whatever your DPS and healer are doing, make sure they don’t move in front of her or behind her, to avoid both her breath attack and the tail-swipe. The tricky part here really is the moving. As tank, you got it easy, so do it like I did, giggle while you jump like a maniac.
Again, nothing for tanks as drop, but that’s alright.
I highly recommend running the Nexus at least once, I thought the instance was beautiful and full of fun encounters.
For more instance guides (though I will continue writing my own as well), check out not coding’s blog.
How did you like that instance? I’ve ran it so many times now
I’ve been trying for the achievment on heroic *dont stand in one place and get 2 debuff stacks* its hard the last boss does so many things to trap you (Frost nova) and that cage thing that keeps you still… My gnome talent only does so much 
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Cwmagain Reply:
December 30th, 2009 at 12:13 am
I got the achievement by dying on the boss event, just when it started, or a bit before. It’s hard as a tank, of course.
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I really enjoy reading about how other tanks approach things – as I rarely run five man instances with other tanks.
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