Gothik the Harvester

Gothik the Harvester is a necromancer of the Scourge and the second boss of the Deathknight Wing (the Military Quarter) of Naxxramas. His room is split in two by a gate. On one side, the "living" side, he raises waves of death knight trainees, knights and riders; every one the raid kills there rises again as a spectral version on the "undead" side. The raid has to split, balance the two halves and hold out until Gothik himself comes down, which made his fight one of the trickiest in the raid.

Background

Gothik is the Scourge's harvester of souls, a necromancer who raises the dead of the Military Quarter and sends them back into battle. In the necropolis he works between Instructor Razuvious, who trains the death knights, and The Four Horsemen, the death knight champions at the end of the wing. The game gives him little more story in Classic. In Wrath of the Lich King he returns as a quest giver for new death knights in the Scarlet Enclave, raising ghouls from the corpses of the Scarlet Crusade.

Abilities

Phase one: the waves

For the first four and a half minutes, Gothik is invulnerable and watches from above while the gate in the middle of his room is shut. Adds appear on the living side in fixed, timed waves:

• [[forever:npc:16124]] from 24 seconds in, every 20 seconds. They're weak.
• [[forever:npc:16125]] from 74 seconds in, every 25 seconds. They whirlwind with [[forever:spell:27825]], marking players for the riders.
• [[forever:npc:16126]] from 134 seconds in, every 30 seconds. Their [[forever:spell:27831]] strikes marked players, and their aura deals shadow damage across the room.

When a living add dies, its soul crosses to the undead side and rises as a [[forever:npc:16127]], [[forever:npc:16148]], or, for each rider, a [[forever:npc:16150]] and a [[forever:npc:16149]]. The spectral adds are immune to most magic and crowd control, and they hit harder.

Phase two: Gothik

• At 4:34 Gothik lands on the living side, then teleports between the two sides every 15 to 20 seconds.
• [[forever:spell:28679]]: every 15 to 20 seconds he lowers all of the raid's stats by 10%, stacking, for a minute. It can't be removed.
• [[forever:spell:29317]]: he fires instant shadow bolts every second, even through the gate.
• At 30% health he stops teleporting and the gate opens.

Strategy

Raids divided themselves by what each side needed. The undead side's adds are immune to magic, so it was mostly warriors, rogues and paladins. The living side was mostly casters, with priests, mages and hunters for crowd control.

Everything depends on the pace of killing. Killing the living adds as fast as possible floods the undead side with stronger spectral copies, while holding back too long lets the living side pile up. Raid leaders called out each kill and watched which bone pile each soul flew to, so the undead team knew where the next spectral add would appear. Riders were the highest priority on the living side. Near the end of the phase, adds that couldn't be killed in time were shackled, trapped or polymorphed and kept that way.

Once Gothik lands, it's a damage race. Harvest Soul keeps stacking, and before long the raid's damage and healing are too low and his shadow bolts kill players outright. Each team attacks him while he's on its side, and when the gate opens at 30%, everyone rushes in to finish him. If one side ever has no living players left, the gate opens early and everything on that side runs at the rest of the raid.

Loot

From our database (patch 1.12):

Gothik drops the Tier 3 boot tokens (see Tier Sets). The [[forever:item:23073]] are leather boots with 33 agility that also improve stealth, built for rogues. [[forever:item:23021]] are caster bracers, and the [[forever:item:23023]] a melee necklace. The [[forever:item:23020]] and [[forever:item:23032]] are frost resistance helmets for the Sapphiron fight. The [[forever:item:22726]] is a piece of Atiesh.

Quests

• [[forever:quest:9229]]: he has a small chance to drop [[forever:item:22708]], which starts a quest at Light's Hope Chapel.
• Tier 3: his tokens go into quests such as [[forever:quest:9081]] for rogues and [[forever:quest:9090]] for druids.

Sources

• Gothik the Harvester (Classic), Warcraft Wiki
• Gothik the Harvester, Warcraft Wiki