Karazhan - Attumen the Huntsmen

How to kill Attumen the Huntsmen (Karazhan)

Overall this is not a complicated fight. The horse trash at the beginning of the instance respawns every twenty-five minutes or so, so you do need to get through the pulls in a steady pace. When you reach the boss encounter, you want to do a full rebuff and make sure everyone is ready for the pull. Ideally you will have two decently geared tanks (one of them preferably a protection warrior—more on this later.)

The boss fight has three stages. Each of them is straightforward. You will need two people to tank for this encounter. The best tank (or the one with the quickest reaction time) should pick up Attumen. The other tank spends the entire encounter fighting Midnight. The tank on Midnight pulls the horse into the corner near the wooden cart. Make sure the horse is facing away from the raid group.

Stage 1—100-95% Midnight

There are a lot of ways to start this encounter. The one I will describe is the “safest.” The Midnight tank begins the encounter and pulls the horse back into the corner. For the first thirty seconds of this fight, only the two tanks should be hitting Midnight. The horse tank uses this time to build 5-10k threat minimum. While this is going on, the second tank is doing white damage on the horse. While the transfer from stage 1 to stage 2 is not always perfect, I do suspect that when Attumen appears he aggros to the person with the second highest threat. Now, between the two tanks there should be enough damage to take Midnight to 95% without any trouble. Be very sure that healers are not above either tank at 95%. If you do not pay attention to this, you will lose a healer early on.

Stage 2—Dual Tank

At 95% Attumen will appear somewhere near Midnight. If you have managed the threat correctly the transfer will go fairly smooth. He “almost always” spawns on Midnight’s left. If the second tank has enemy life bars enabled (by pressing the “v” key), he will immediately see where the guy is. The key at this point is to have the warrior pop his bloodrage as soon as he sees Attumen spawn. This will cause additional threat and get Attumen’s attention. Now, it is very important that the warrior picks Attumen up and moves him away from the first tank. Attumen will cleave anything near him if you let him. Don’t let him do this. It is important to have a protection warrior on Attumen because you can disarm him. This reduces his damage per second tremendously. When both Midnight and Attumen are tanked and separated, the raid can start to dps with moderate to heavy damage.

There are several ways to make this stage easier. The ideal raid should have three healers. Designate one healer for each tank. The remaining healer should spot heal both tanks and keep the rest of the raid at full health. In addition, anyone who can disarm Attumen should do so whenever the cooldown is available. Also, warlocks can put curse of weakness on him. This gimps him a lot. While dpsing the horse (and only the horse), Attumen will occasionally curse the tanks. A mage or druid needs to remove this asap. It makes tanking much harder. Other than that, the stage does not last too long. Just burn the horse down. At 27-26%, dps should stop.

Stage 3—Horse and Rider

At 25% Attumen will mount up on Midnight. By 27% all dps should stop because all aggro resets in stage three. In other words, the first person to do any damage at 25% will pull aggro and probably die. In this phase, tanks should continue to disarm the rider. Note that Attumen will now also charge what seems like random targets in the raid. The healer dedicated to the raid as a whole should keep an eye out for this and is ready to cover a major hit on clothies. It is possible to somewhat plan where Attumen charges by putting a plate or mail healer behind everyone else in the raid group. The rest of the dps should step forward. Continue to remove curses and pop curse of weakness again on the boss. That’s really all there is to the encounter. The only real difficult parts are the transfers between stage 1, 2, and 3.

Handy tips to know:

Attumen hits for 1-2k on a geared tank. This is much, much higher against cloth.

Anyone in melee ranged with get cleaved for shadow damage. Keep up prayer of shadow protection and/or shadow aura.

Midnight hits very consistently for 1.5-2k dmg on a tank.

Both bosses are immune to taunt. The raid should have KTM, because if you pull aggro—you will die.

Finally, if you have a paladin, make sure a BoP any target that accidentally pulls aggro. This can often save a priest. Good luck and enjoy the loots.