Anub'arak

We downed the last boss (Anub'arak, a.k.a. Anoob'arak) in Trial of the Crusader already last Wednesday, but I haven't had the motivation to write about the fight until now. I guess I was disappointed in how darn easy he turned out to be.

The way I see it, Faction Champions is the only encounter in normal mode that is even close to challenging. I can see raids getting stuck on the PvP encounter due to it being just that: a PvP encounter.

Anyways, back to Anoob'arak.

Anoob'arak is a big bug that you probably already met once in Azjol-Nerub. The tactics to kill him in the Coliseum are very simple:

Pull boss -> stand on ice -> loot boss.

But you probably want me to tell you more, so here goes...

The fight has three phases. The third phase starts when he reaches 30% of his health. Before that, phase one and two can occur several times.

Phase One:
Have ranged dps shoot down as many frost orbs as possible. When these orbs hit the ground, they turn into Permafrost. Permafrost is a thick layer of ice which a) slows movement speed by 80% (good for kiting, see phase 2), and b) stops mobs from burrowing down underground and heal.
Have one or two offtanks to pick up the two Nerubian Burrowers that spawn. Make sure to tank them on Permafrost so that they cannot submerge, since they heal to full health if they do. These bugs put a stacking armor-reducing debuff on the tanks. It's up to the raid leader if you want to kill off these adds in phase 1, or if you focus your dps on Anoob'arak until he submerges and then switch to the adds.
Annob'arak has a frontal cone attack, so only the main tank should stand in front of him.

Phase Two:
Every now and then (if he isn't tanked on Permafost), Anoob'arak will submerge. While underground, he will pursue a random player. If people are standing outside of Permafrost, Anoob'arak will be impaling targets around the person who is pursued. This is very unecessary damage, since it can be easily avoided by standing on Permafrost, where no spikes will hit you.
Loads of small adds are also spawns. These should be kited through Permafrost and killed off by ranged dps, since they put a stacking nature damage debuff on people they hit.

When Anoob'arak is resurfacing, he goes back to Phase 1. At 30% health, phase 3 starts.

Phase Three:
This is a dps race. The big bug puts up Leeching Swarm, which leeches 10% of people's current health and heals him.
Best advice to give here is: do not keep people's health at 100%, since that means he leeches more and thus heals more. Keep health bars at about 50% (except the main tank, who of course should be topped off).
Blow cooldowns. Kill him. Get achievement. Loot. Be happy.

We wiped once because some people decided that standing on ice when being pursued by giant spikes was a bad idea, which resulted in half the raid being killed in phase 2. Second attempt was an easy kill with no deaths.

We cleared Trial of the Crusader (25 player) in less than 90 minutes. Instead of starting the heroic version of it, we went to Ulduar to get the legendary mace to one of our druid healers. He has the fragments, and all we need is a Yogg+3 kill.

The Trial of the Grand Crusader raid scheduled for Thursday was cancelled due to too few signups, so I still haven't experienced Coliseum on heroic. But I've heard it's hard, so I look forward to the challenge.