MoP LFR Tips: Throne of Thunder - 1st Wing

A new exciting patch brings us a new and exciting way to gear up, and what better way than to traverse the sometimes batshit crazy antics of what we know as LFR!

The Throne of Thunder is the raid of the day and the first wing has been released for all us crazy people to go in and cry over the ilvl 502 loot that won't drop!

The raid provides rep for the Shadow Pan Assault once a week and consists of 3 bosses.

Now in order to ensure everyone has a smooth and non-crazy run here are my critical factors tips for the first three bosses.

Jin'rokh the Breaker

On easy mode he only has 3 mechanics to watch out for:

1. Lightning Storm: Stack and stay out of water and heal hard.
2. Lightning balls, if you see a ball of lightning connected to you, run away and don't let it hit you until you are out of water pools. Also everyone else should try not to touch those balls.
3. Most importantly, the boss will turn and throw the tank at a random statue in the room, flooding 1/4th of the room. STAND IN THIS WATER. It gives you 40% damage and that's pretty much all you need to clear this, if everyone is in it that is.
4. Your goal here is to be doing OVER 90k dps. If you aren't, then something is wrong. I have to be blunt. With relatively high uptime of 40% increased damage, your main goal is to hit 180k+

Horridon

Horridon is fairly simple. Just do the following:

1. Focus adds. They are priority #1.
2. Stay away from his head and tail.
3. If he targets you and charges, don't be around other people.
4. Lust/HeroicAllySpell once he's hit 3 or 4 walls. He takes an additional 50% damage after each time he smashes into a door. Up to 200%. Yes 1,xxx,xxx crits are gigglicious.
5. Someone go tank the last big add and burn Horridon. If this last guy dies first, horridon enrages.
6. Cry that your stupid loot bag STILL only had gold and not even the new useless junk that was implemented.
7. Your goal here is to be at around 150-175k, unless you are doing a superb job at interrupting and burning adds. Or do both and challenge yourself.

Council

The council may seem daunting at first but there's only really three or four (my brain is wanting me to type out seven but that's too much) things to look out for that are crucial:

1. One of the bosses will be "possessed" and look like a shadow priest. Focus him/her. This possessedness moves, so always be burning the shadowy boss.
1-a. Tank the ice guy. All the others just jump around and look crazy.
2. Other than doing that, you MUST kill adds, and MOST importantly are the little sandling adds that Sul the Whatevertheshithisnameis summons. If they live through a sandstorm they heal and do massive damage.
3. Try to kill the priestess' spirits because they heal/damage boss/players. Not TOO crucial but if you have time.

Use your own discretion for the ice troll's abilities and also the thunder one, they don't hit too hard, just burn adds and everyone focus the same boss.
4. Your goal here is to personally kill four sandlings.
5. Leave instance and go do something else.

Truny in the Throne of Thunder

MoP LFR Tips: Heart of Fear

Welcome to my continuing post on LFR tips for the new raid finder encounters in MoP, today I will provide some quick tips for the Heart of Fear.

I am too lazy to open up a new tab to research what the names of the bosses are so just bear with me.

Imperial Vizier Vorlok

It could be Zorlok. He consists of 2 phases, with phase 1 being a "preview" of each of his cool abilities, and the 2nd phase being an amalgamation of all the abilities until he is dead.

• Attenuation: If the boss flies to the left side of the room first, he will cast spirals of DEATH that you must dodge or you will DIE. Well you only take 50k damage in LFR mode but don't touch them for good practise. A nice trick we've noticed is that these shoot out in a spiral so you can just run around the empty spots. Or dodge!
• Verve and Swerve: This may or may not be called that, but if he flies to the RIGHT side of the room, STAND UNDER THE SHELLS that he summons to reduce his yelling ability's damage by 40%. Last time I caught 5/6 healers standing outside on the brink of death. DO NOT wipe the raid and waste everyone's time.
• MC: His last ability occurs when he flies to the top of the room and will MC random people. DPS them to 50%.

Blade Lord Tayak

This boss is much easier than his real counterpart and can be done with a couple healers and five sane DPS left alive. You'll see what I mean.

For this boss you want to spread out around him as he'll throw out tornadoes and also "hit" random person with a debuff that ticks for high damage every 3 seconds. If you get hit and you are near someone, they get debuffed as well.

His most important ability is when he disappears and a magic arrow appears on someone's head. At this point, as this is raid finder I recommend stacking onto the TANK and melee as he'll do a huge cleave that does split damage to everyone in the cleave. Most likely you'll have a lot of people die to this since his cleave is hard to control anyways.

Once he hits 20%, you get to have fun with tornadoes. I recommend that at 11%, most DPS should slip into the slip stream that has formed and blast to the other end of the room to await the boss's demise.

Garalon

This either goes great, or not so great.

1. Assign at least 2 people to be the Pheramone bitches. One person, preferrably ranged will pull the boss, and EVERYONE must be patient. They have to wait for this ranged person, who should run up real close to the boss to receive a debuff, and this person should kite the boss slowly around the outside ring of the room.

If an impatient warrior charges in on pull, he will most likely get the debuff and spread it to everyone wiping the raid.

 Everyone else should stay near the middle, away from the person who is kiting. Once this person has 20 stacks of debuff, the 2nd person should pick up the debuff by "touching" the debuffed person. Hence why everyone should be away from the original kiter, in case pheramone jumps. That's peramones, and most likely some people are familiar with this but are too lazy to do the kiting. Though I'm not sure if LFR stacks the debuff any higher than 20. If so, only one person needs to kite unless you really want to reset stacks.

Pheramones do I think 10k damage every 2 seconds to the entire raid, with increasing damage every stack that the kiter has. So if 4 people accidentally get pheramoned, you have 4 x damage going out. Dead.

2. Everyone DPS his legs. If possible, try to stand within the little circle around his leg to get a damage buff against his legs. This does the leg's total health in damage to the boss and slows him down to save the kiters.

3. If all the legs are dead, hit his body.

4. STAY OUT FROM UNDER HIM. This is denoted by a purple circle. If you touch his no-no spot he will cast Crush which does huge damage to the entire raid and stuns everyone.

Wind Lord Mekalajak

Who the hell knows what his name is. This boss is rather simple. Pick up the spears around his room and on the initial pull, CC one of each type of add that he has. 

Now burn down the healer add.

Then burn down the other add.

And burn down the 3rd kind of add.

Do not use any external CC's other than the ones provided by the mechanic.

Burn the boss. Collect your gold and complain.

Amber Shaper Unsok

The reason amber shaper unsok can potentially be a difficult encounter is that it puts the onus of keeping everyone alive, and doing things right to so many people. Here's a quick list of priorities for your success.

1. Ranged focus on amber slime adds. Make sure the entire area is clean of them and kill them when they spawn.

2. Everyone focused on MC'd people. Mind controlled people in this encounter turn into Amber Monsters, you will see these yellow golem like people running around. DPS them to 20% to free them since once they run out of "control", they die.

Now the important part.

Anyone who is transformed has 2 important roles. If you are in Phase 1, stack your "1" ability on Amber Shaper, this does 250k damage to him and stacks a +10% damage taken debuff on the boss so he'll die faster.

Also, pay attention to where your cast bar is. Occasionally the controlled people will "explode" hit your "2" button to stop it.

That's it.

In Phase 2, the boss goes IMMUNE, so anyone who is controlled should stack their "1" button on the giant amber monstrosity. You can't miss it.

Also if you are running out of control and no one is DPSIng you, go use "3" to eat a slime pool. You gain back 2M damage but it may delay your death.

Once the monstrosity is dead, continue to kill adds and stack the "1" button on the boss who is active again.

Grand Empress Shek'zeer

She is quite simple (phew) luckily. Tank and spank. Tank and spank her adds, then dispel anyone who is running in fear in P3. No seriously, that's about it.

For healers if you want to be picky, you can track her wind bombs and prepare any cooldowns for when their energy is running low since they explode for moderately high damage.

Feel free to ask for clarification or additional tips that I have missed.

Truny the Impatient

Looking for Rage

For us over here in Canada (Yes I'm Canadian, sorry to have deceived you all this time), the Fall of Deathwing LFR encounter was released (as with the rest of the world) and I was quite excited to be able to "see this encounter" as I am a "casual" player/raider, we only raid oh wait...we've gone from one day a week to three. Okay so not so casual. But still not heroic content and or completing all encounters within 10 days progression. I am a ranked BM Hunter if that means anything. (LMAO?)

ANYWAYS. I queued up and got thrown into a group on Spine of Deathwing. I was hoping "please please just let me be a replacement for one dps who couldn't finish the encounter". Nope. Corpses all over the airship.

Now what was really lacking was good leadership and also good following-instructions-skills. This is what was going on as I zoned in.

"Okay, get it to 9 and kill 3 corruptions and kill blood". Say what? Get what to 9? What's a corrupted? What blood? Then they started the encounter. Whoa, tentacles. Do I have to latch on? Do I kill 'em? How many do we kill? Whats with this big add, oh these slimes are the bloods, what do we do?

I BELIEVE this group tried to do the encounter a la Regular Mode and tried to trigger barrel rolls. NO WAY LFR will require 25 pugs to execute that properly. I reckon all we had to do was stand in the middle. (Which worked when I ran this again).

This group totally failed and half the group left. By this time I had picked up on pretty much what needed to be done. We needed to single out ONE big add, have a tank hold it near Deathwing's plate (WHICH IS THE AREA CLOSEST TO HIS NECK), then someone else hold the other 2 until we need 'em. Since you only need to blow up his plates 3 times, we only kill 3 tentacles to get 3 big adds. Ideally. Essentially killing slimes buffs the big add, so we want to kill 9 slimes near the big add until it does it's nuclear explosion.

Simple enough?

Ok, so I tried to convince people to listen. We set up markers and all the jazz. First we marked a tentacle as Moon and said "Don't kill Moon". Moon died. Oh well, it's LFR the offtank can handle 3. Then we marked the big add and told people to kill slimes near it until it got 9 stacks of buff. Nope. It died before it hit 5 buffs. Apparently "Stop DPS" means "Keep killing fools". That's okay, we still have 2. We get a big add to 9 buffs, and the tank does not move it to the plates. Failed. We run out of big adds. Wipe it.

I requeued after trying to lead this group a couple more times and one-shot 3/4 of the Deathwing encounter until we magically decided to have a Server Restart just as we were killing Kalecgos' claw on Madness. Oh well. Oh and ranged, PLEASE kill Blistering Tentacles that grow out of Deathwing's claw in case you have no idea what people are yelling about. Thanks!

It still amazes me the amount of not paying attention that goes on and also the amount of rudeness lately. Yes, Pugs are super super excruciating at times, if you had read my GUILD chat complaints you would have been crying from the profanity. However on the raid side I was trying to be calm and organized and shit but alas, that does not work.

Turby Looking for Rage

No Stride

Heh so I had said that I'd take this new patch in stride... that is until we actually strode into Dragon Soul with our regular raid roster. Morchok was easy, but for Yor'sajh and Zonnzonn...we were either lacking in DPS (only 2 of us were over 20k) or heals. Blah. You know what, I'll just have to push out another 2k dps to make up for it!

So anyways, I had said I'd take this new Deathwing stuff slowly, since we're going to be stuck with it until MOP or until secret mini-raid in 4.4 hits. My goal was to get valor capped on my two mains. Oh yes, my Warlock is now my main again now that I've gotten her geared up! It turns out I got valor capped on five toons. The plan is to use two of the toons VP to gear up Turby and Truny first (two are healers, they have quick queues).

LFR = good times. With a semi-organized group, these are pretty much free hand-outs of tier gear and trinkets. My hunter got very lucky and won two pieces of T13 off one boss, my warlock won a shoulder and a nifty trinket, my priest won a robe and a healing trinket, and of course my resto druid...he wins nothing. He hasn't won anything since his first raid in TOC when a nice warlock gave him the Perdition staff.....maybe this week will be different.

So without further ado, here's some quick tips for the current LFR bosses:

Morchok: AOE heal his stomp. Run close to a crystal if it has a beam on you. Run behind a pillar when he uses Black Blood. Too easy.

Yor'sahj the Unsleeping: Also known as "Skittles" due to his slimes. This fight is confusing at first until you get a hang of his slimes. Essentially the priority of the slimes is generally accepted to be:

-Purple > Green > Yellow > (Then I would use) Blue > Red > Black, depends on your heals. But the first three, PURPLE GREEN YELLOW are generally accepted. Sometimes you'll see Purple Yellow Green. But essentially in LFR, if you manage to kill any one you're good, the most important part is communication. Don't have some people run to one slime, and some to the other. I'm not going to explain what each slime does, but rather explain what to expect for some combinations.

So say the boss casts Purple, Yellow, Black. Automatically you should know to kill purple, then aoe down adds. You have to prepare this as you are going to kill the purple slime.

Say the boss casts Red, Green, Blue. What do you do? Kill Red, expect aoe damage from green and all dps have to prepare to kill mana void. This is when I double check lifebloom is up, or even blow tree form for multiple life blooms in anticipation of the void. Depends.

Say the boss casts Purple, Red, Green. Go kill purple, but also prepare to STACK since you see red. Red does damage based on your proximity to the boss, and we've seen a lot of casters who hang back get one shot.

Warlord Zon'ozz: Also known as Ping Pong. Now the LFR version of this boss is severely undertuned as to the actual mechanics of the fight. Essentially have a couple people handle the void ball, or actually it might have just been moving by itself....have the tank face the boss away, then stack when he does his massive AOE phase, rinse and repeat.

Hagara the Stormbinder: Aka the boss where NO ONE listens to tips.

TANKS: The one thing to look out for is "Focused Assault". If she starts doing this. MOVE AWAY FROM IT. It's the same abilities the flayers cast. You can totally strafe or sidestep or move back, or run through the boss to avoid this totally unecessary damage. MOVE AWAY FROM FOCUSED ASSAULT MOVE AWAY MOVE MOVE MOVE. (I tried doing this while healing it and the tanks didn't listen, they lived, but I don't like wasting mana as with most people right?)

Ice Phase: Everyone run to the outside ring, and kill the ice crystals in a clockwise manner. Be wary of ice walls/waves that spawn and also move clockwise. You'll have to be pro-active and run ahead of the waves rather than waiting for it, for it maybe too late. Surprisingly a lot of people die to this, and perhaps they are not [Ready for Raiding].

Lightning Phase: In this phase, Hagara spawns an add that must be killed near one of the lightning conductors around the edge of the platform. Once it dies it will overload the conductor and charge the players around it, it would be best for everyone to gather in one area while lightly spread and run together around the room by maintaining the lightning chain to overload the rest of the conductors.

But most importantly move out of Focused Assault, your healers are trained to be as efficient as possible and if you try to tank it it means they'll have to cast three or four fast-expensive heals!