Maexxna

Maexxna

Maexxna is the final boss of the Arachnid Quarter, a gigantic spider above an arena made completely of web. This fight is almost completely dependent on how many cooldowns your tanks have, and how well your DPS can cleave her small spiderlings. It is a relatively long fight because her health pool is massive, so consider this a war of attrition between her and your tanks cooldowns.

Before Facing Maexxna

As mentioned, the more defensive cooldowns the better, for DPS and heals, this includes pain suppression that you can throw on your tanks in a pinch. Movement abilities are great if you’re trapped and want to get back into the fight with minimal downtime / want to free someone that has been webbed across the room.

Positioning & Tanking

Maexxna should be tanked at the opposite side of where she starts at, or at the very least, close to. She should be facing towards the wall, with your tanks back against the wall. She occasionally does an acid spit in front of her that reduces the armor of everyone struck, this might not matter much in the long run, as there’s not much raid wide damage, but try to keep avoidable damage to a minimum. The off-tank should never be hit by this, as it greatly reduces their survivability.

Fighting Maexxna

As this fight doesn’t require very many tactics on the DPS side, I’ll go into further depth on what the tanks should do, but the DPS’ job will also be explained briefly.

During the fight, she will spawn spiderlings that will go on the player that is currently tanking her. The spiders’ hits build up a debuff on your tank that reduces their healing received, up to the point where they cannot be healed anymore. Periodically, Maexxna will also web up every person in the raid, this is indicated by a 3 second long debuff after which, you get stunned for a brief while. Tanks will preemptively have to use their defensive cooldowns to survive Maexxnas attacks while webbed. Usually after this point, your main tank has built up too many stacks and cannot continue; this is when the off-tank should taunt the boss and swap places with the main tank.

The job of the DPS is to clear any spiders on the tank that just swapped, so that they can drop their stacks, failing to do this has a high possibility to cause the death of a tank, which might result in a wipe ultimately; but remember, using a combat resurrection on a tank brings them back with no stacks! Cleaving the spiders that are on the current tank is also benefial, as to slow down the stack buildup. You’ll also have to free your teammates that get wrapped separately, they’ll potentially be launched across the room, and you’ll have to cut down the web wrap before they suffocate. While wrapped, you cannot be healed and constantly take damage, albeit quite slowly.

Repeat these steps until you’ve slain Maexxna and cleared the Arachnid Quarter. Now it’s time to make your way over to the other quarters, or potentially Sapphiron!