November 13, 2013

Heroic Norushen

Norushen is another relatively straightforward fight with not much changed in terms of fight mechanics between heroic and normal.  Heroic Norushen got nerfed earlier in the raid cycle therefore, a reasonably difficult boss with a tight DPS timer became a fairly simple fight.  As in normal, the raid encounter consists of fighting an add called the Amalgam of Corruption and the raid having a source of energy called corruption.  Several mechanics in the fight force players to gain Corruption and getting to 100 Corruption doesn’t necessarily kill you.  However, any DPS essentially becomes useless as your dps scales with the amount of corruption that you have.  The strategy to the heroic version is very straight forward.

Recommended Talents and Glyphs

Tier 1 – there’s very little movement involved in this fight, perhaps you can use Speed of Light to quickly get around death ray but this tier is relatively inconsequential to the encounter
Fist of the Justice – helping to stun the adds, especially the smaller mobs
Eternal Flame – oldie but goodie
Unbreakable Spirit – would recommend getting Unbreakable Spirit for this fight to quickly heal up NPCs in the “Look Within” phase
Holy Avenger – certain phases of the fight, especially when the larger manifestations come out, have higher raid damage so it would be good to have HA to help you out
Light’s Hammer – would recommend going Light’s Hammer on this fight since stacking up doesn’t really cause harm

Beacon of Light – swapping beacon
Hand of Sacrifice – for whatever
Divinity – because there’s really no other helpful glyphs

Raid Makeup: 2 healers, 2 Tanks, 6 DPS, the fight is no longer a tight DPS race however, the damage on this fight is not too high and it’s more important to kill the adds and boss quickly so I’d recommend taking an extra DPS

General Spells

The fight begins with the spawning of an Amalgam of Corruption and each player’s Corruption Level at 50 in heroic.  To become purified or remove all corruption, player must click on yellow balls which spawn around the room and enter a role-specific test.  Completing that test purifies and removes all the corruption from a player.  On heroic, it’s better to have your tanks and healers gain corruption so that your DPS do not have their DPS penalized by gaining corruption.  Purification also provides a role-specific buff, increasing healing, reducing damage taken and increasing damage done which lasts until you start to gain corruption again.  Certain mechanics of the fight involve spawning of one medium sized mob which should be tanked called the Manifestation of Corruption and a smaller mob called an Essence of Corrupt which is stationary and doesn’t need to be tanked.

Amalgam of Corruption

  • Unleashed Anger – inflicts 400,000 -> 520,000 (Physical) damage to the target
    • Self Doubt – increases damage of next Unleashed Anger by 40% -> 50%
  • Blind Hatred – this is the beam of rotating dark lines which slowly turns around the room, it can choose either directions, players standing in this beam receive 150,000 -> 400,000 (Shadow) damage every second
  • Icy Fear – AOE attack the Amalgam inflicts on everyone in the room for 75,000 -> 100,000 (Frost) damage every 3 seconds for the entire fight, damage increases as the Amalgam loses health
  • At 50% health, and every increment of 10% under that the Amalgam will release a Manifestation of Corruption

Look Within (Test of Reliance, Serenity, and Confidence)

  • Test of Reliance (Healer) – players must heal up allied mowbs defeating a mob called the Greater Corruption, if you fail, a Manifestation of Corruption will enter the normal realm
    • Disheartening Laugh – debuff that lasts 6 seconds inflicting 50,000 -> 75,000 (Shadow) damage every 2 sec for 6 sec
    • Pit of Despair – inflicts 100,000 -> 135,000 (Shadow) damage every second to all enemies within the zone
    • Lingering Corruption – deals 400,000 -> 500,000 (Shadow) damage after 10 seconds if not dispelled
  • Test of Serenity (DPS) – DPS players must kill one large Manifestation of Corruption which follows the player around and 4 small Essences of Corruption
    • Essence of Corruption – repeatedly cast Expel Corruption which fires a ball of shadow in a straight line dealing 100,000 -> 130,000 (Shadow) damage
    • Manifestation of Corruption – repeatedly cast Tear Reality which does 200% -> 300% (Shadow) weapon damage in a cone in front of the mob after 3 seconds
  • Test of Confidence (Tank) – tanks must survive for 60 seconds in this zone against a mob called the Titanic Corruption
    • Titanic Smash – deals 1,000,000 -> 1,500,000 (Shadow) damage in a cone after 2 seconds
    • Corruption – each melee adds a stack which does 17,000 -> 25,000 (Shadow) damage every second each stack for 12 seconds
    • Hurl Corruption – hurls a ball of corruption dealing 750,000 -> 1,000,000 (Shadow) damage, this can be interrupted
    • Burst of Corruption – deals 300,000 -> 500,000 (Shadow) damage to everyone in the area
    • Piercing Corruption – deals 600,000 -> 800,000 (Shadow) damage to ots current target, can not be absorbed, can be dodge/parried

Extra Adds

  • Unleashed Corruption – any Manifestation of Corruption defeated in the Test of Serenity (DPS) is released to the normal realm, all adds in the Test of Serenity share health with the Amalgam
  • Manifestation of Corruption
    • Burst of Anger – inflicts 50,000 -> 75,000 (Shadow) damage to all players in the Amalgam zone
    • Residual Corruption – upon death, the Manifestation drops an orb which pulses for 90,000 -> 120,000 (Shadow) damage to all players every 3 seconds until it is picked up, gives 25 Corruption to the player picking it up, in heroic, this spell inflicts 5 pride each time it pulses
  • Essence of Corruption
    • Expel Corruption – sends out bolts (similar spell to the ones the same mobs use in the Test of Serenity which deal 100,000 -> 130,000 (Shadow) damage to players standing in a line, every Expel Corruption that hits the boss increases his damage by 5% for 15 seconds -> 8% for 20 seconds

Specific Tips

I’ll first talk about some DPS or Tank related issues because I’ve gone Ret for this fight before.  This fight is essentially a DPS race.  There are a few movement related issues such as not standing between the Essences and the Amalgam or moving out of the beam of death, but if you’re raiding heroics those should already be second nature to you.  Other movement related issues occur in the DPS Test of Serenity. Other than this, rest of this fight depends mostly on strategy, DPS and healing.  For tanks it’s vital that you quickly pick up the Residual Corruption after killing the Manifestations before it pulses with the Burst of Anger.  You have 3 seconds to do this.  Any DPS should make sure for the whole fight not to get any extra Corruption.  Ideally, all DPS should be sitting at zero after getting purified.  The two tanks should be mainly in charge of rotating soaking this, using a healer as backup if necessary.  You should begin sending in your DPS as soon as possible.  Also, depending on how much damage your raid can take, you should probably not spawn more than two Manifestations from two DPS going in to the test because the pulsing damage while it is alive is very damaging.  The typical rotation for the first few sets of orbs is to send in Tank + DPS then Tank + DPS then Healer + DPS then Healer + DPS and then the rest of your DPS one by one in.  This limits the Manifestations spawns to 1 from the Test. DPS who have not been purified can opt to focus on the adds until they do get purified.

Apart from those other concerns, healing is slightly strenuous on this fight.  The Manifestation is doing a lot of pulsing damage when it is out and sometimes near the end of the fight you may have more than one to fight.  The good thing is that most of the raid can stack around the same area and only move from the beam.  The raid should not stand near the Manifestations when they die and stand between the Essences.  The tank shouldn’t be taking a huge amount of damage, most of it will be in raid wide AOE and only comes out when the Manifestations are out.  Your raid should save Bloodlust for after 50% or at least until all of your DPS have been purified.  The last 50% will be the hardest part of the fight with a lot of pulsing damage going out.  In addition to this, your tanks and healers must have enough empty Corruption to soak all of the remaining 5 Manifestations (125 Corruption).  I’m not sure as a Holy Paladin how to make the Test of Reliance easier since we have very poor DPS.  You shouldn’t need to help the NPCs kill the add but it will help if nothing needs healing to use some of your DPS skills.  Make sure to continue using holy shock.  Keep up on your dispels and this phase shouldn’t be hard at all.  I can’t really think of any thing else related to healing on this fight but if you guys have any questions, feel free to comment below.  This shouldn’t be a very hard for us in terms of healing.

Common Reasons for Wipes and Solutions

  • Players did not complete their tests and did not get purified – read up and watch videos of how to do these phases, this is literally the hardest part of the fight
  • DPS Race Lost – don’t stand between Essences and the Amalgam, don’t get any extra corruption by soaking residual energy
  • Too many Manifestations out – what is it from? too many DPS doing Test of Serenity? send one less, under 50%? you’ll just have to deal with this, you shouldn’t have DPS going in to the Test during this last phase
  • Die to beam – …

Wish you good luck on getting this guy down!

November 13, 2013

Heroic Fallen Protectors

Heroic Fallen Protectors to healers, is not a drastically different fight from normal.  The fight still consists of 3 bosses with separate health pools who enter special phases at certain percentages of health.  You must still kill the three within 15 seconds of each other.  Apart from everything hitting harder, there are a few mechanics changes and that’s it.  The majority of this fight is heal as much as you can and keep an eye on your mana return spells because this was one fight where I went OOM towards the end.  Currently I’m sitting at around 15,000 spirit with the Shado-Pan trinket and the Spirits of the Sun Heroic upgraded twice so if you have any kind of SoO spirit trinket or Horridon’s Last Gasp, you shouldn’t worry about this.  Anyways, lets move on to the guide!

Recommended Talents and Glyphs

Speed of Light – it’s not imperative to get this on this fight but this will help you get places you want to be or out of brew quicker
Tier 2 – nothing’s going to help you on this tier for this fight
Eternal Flame – no SH not your turn yet
Clemency – would recommend going this for the double sac and double hand of protector for garrote on healers or DPS
Holy Avenger – on-use healing cooldowns are helpful for large damage phases such as Sun’s Desperate Measures
Tier 6 – depending on your raid’s strategy, you can choose either LH or HP, I chose HP for this fight since our raid plans to stack loosely for most of the fight, I could see HP being a viable alternative

Hand of Sacrifice – for a helpful CD
Divinity – because there’s really no other helpful glyphs
I would tend to recommend Beacon for the last slot but you likely won’t be doing too much beacon swapping during this fight, this last glyph is up to you.

Raid Makeup: 3 healers, 2 Tanks, 5 DPS, you can do this of course with 2 healers but 3 makes it more safe and the DPS requirement is not too high

General Spells

In heroic, the two bosses who are not visible continue doing their special attacks, including Desperate Measures if they get pushed.  Special attacks include Clash-Rook, Master Poisoner (2 poison attacks)-He and Calamity-Sun. If you do not kill all three Protectors within 15 seconds of each other, they will heal for 20% -> 30%.

Rook Stonetoe

  • Vengeful Strikes – stuns current target, then influcts 180,000 -> 300,000 (Physical) damage every 0.5 secs for 3 secs
  • Corrupted Brew – targets a random raid member and throws a keg doing 125,000 – 425,000 (Shadow) damage in a 5 yard radius and slows for 50% -> 65% for 15 sec, in heroic, the cast time of this spell decreases by 0.5 seconds every 2 casts, this effect resets when Rook enters his desperate measures
  • Clash – similar to the Brewmaster spell which causes the targetted player to meet him halfway
    • Corruption Kick – after meeting the target, Rook will be rooted in place do a spinning crane kick-like spell that deals 120,000 -> 162,000 (Physical) damage to everyone in 10 yards every 1 sec for 4 sec  and applies a DoT that does 75,000 ->  101,250 (Shadow) damage every 2 seconds for 6 seconds
  • Desperate Measures (occurs at 66% and 33% health)
    3 adds spawn in the room.  In heroic, the three adds have a shared health pool:

    • Embodied Mistery: Does a knockback dealing 350,000 -> 472,499 (Physical) damage and places a void zone on the ground dealing 100,000 -> 150,000 (Shadow) damage every second to enemies in it
    • Embodied Sorrow: Casts Inferno Strike on a random player dealing 1,200,000 (Fire) damage split among all players within 8 yards of the target
    • Embodied Gloom: Deals 150,000 -> 325,000 (Nature) damage to random enemies and anyone within 4 yards of them

He Softfoot

  • Garrote – a bleed that He periodically places on random raid members dealing 80,000 -> 108,000 (Physical) damage every 2 seconds for an unlimited amount of time, all Garrote disappear when He enters his Desperate Measures
  • Gouge – an attack which incapacitates his current target for 6 ->8 secs and switches to a random raid member, by turning your back to He when he does this, you prevent the incapacitate and target switch and simply get knocked back a short distances
  • Master Poisoner: Two self-buffs:
    • Noxious Poison – causes his melee attacks to leave poison pools on the ground dealing 85,000 -> 150,000 (Nature) damage every second to everyone standing in them, 3 second internal cooldown, all pools are removed when He enters Desperate Measures
    • Instant Poison – causes his melee attacks to deal additional 75,000 -> 150,000 (Nature) damage
  • Desperate Measures (occurs at 66% and 33% health)
    An Embodied Anguish add is spawned. This mob casts “Mark of Anguish” on a random player in the raid.  This ability roots them in place and deals ~101,250 shadow damage every second.  The Embodied Anguish will melee players and with every hit applies a stack of “Shadow Weakness”.  As far as I can tell from logs, this additional damage is around 12% per stack.  This of course increases the damage they take from Mark of Anguish.  Players with Mark of Anguish in addition gain a debuff which decreases their armor by 50% for 2 minutes -> 80% for 4 minutes.  Finally, passing the Mark of Anguish will cause 1 stack of Shadow Weakness to be applied to everyone in the raid.

Sun Tenderheart

  • Sha Sear – the tooltip for this spell is a bit misleading, in heroic, the spell is scaled up from the original 25,650 shadow damage to ~45,000 shadow damage on the first tick, after this each tick increases damage by 75% of the original 25,650 or ~19,200, going by this logic, the damage ticks are 45,000-64,000-83,000-102,600-121,8000-141,000 for a total of 6 ticks, overall this spell does ~600,000 (Shadow) damage, this spell hits a random target in the raid and everyone standing within 5 yards of them
  • Shadow Word: Bane – DoT that Sun places on 2 members at once in 10M, each with a “stack” of 2 meaning it can jump to 2 other players, the debuff will only jump if it ticks so if it can be dispelled within 3 seconds of application, then it wont jump, deals 100,000 -> 135,000 (Shadow) damage every 3 seconds for 18 seconds, if it jumps once, the same theory applies to the 1 “stack”, a total of 6 people can be affected
  • Calamity – periodically cast, does 30 -> 30% + increasing by 10% each cast of everyone’s health, removes all Shadow Word: Bane spells, the +10% resets when Sun enters Desperate Measures
  • Desperate Measures (occurs at 66% and 33% health)
    Spawns two adds, Embodied Despair and Embodied Desperation along with smaller spawns of Despair and Desperation which have a shared health pool with the associated larger mob.  The adds don’t have any abilities but must be killed for Sun to appear.  During this time, a field in the middle of the room called the Meditative Field spawns which reduces damage from Dark Meditation by 50% -> 35%, otherwise outside of this field, players take 44,000 -> 54,000 (Shadow) damage.

Specific Tips

This fight requires less positioning than Heroic Immerseus but it’s still important to designate some things before starting.  First off, your tanks should be tanking far enough away from each other and the raid such that Rook and He’s abilities will not be hitting people in the raid.  He doesn’t have any direct damage abilities to the rest of the raid, but the pools of poison he drops on the ground do a lot of damage and are rather hard to see.  Therefore, he should be tanked outside of the center of the room as much as possible because this is where Sun’s Meditative Field spawns (and really good luck on seeing the poison pools during Dark Meditation).  The raid can be roughly stacked for this fight since most of the abilities don’t hit for that much and have a rather short radius of 5 yards or so.  Don’t clump on each other, but you can roughly stay in the same quarter/third of the room.  Three things you should watch out for on the ground are corrupted brew which looks like a light blue/brown swirling thing, any poison puddles that He might have dropped and sha sear which looks just like the shadow priest version.  The player with sha sear should move slightly out such that they are the only person taking damage from it, remember that this does increasing damage with each tick.  For the rest of the fight, you should basically stick in the conformation in the image below.  In the second image below, on the right, is the positioning during Sun’s Desperate Measures.  If Rook is the skull, then the raid should be stacked in the field closest to the skull.  This is because Rook will continue to do his Clash followed up with Corruption Kick during Sun’ Desperate Measures on Heroic and if you are targeted and standing somewhere on the far side, he will charge to you and do his Corruption Kick in the field which will likely wipe your raid.  Apart from this, there is one other thing you raid will have to watch out for and that’s inferno strike during Rook’s desperate measures. Make sure that you have enough people standing in this orange circle to soak the damage.  You’ll need to watch out for Sha Sear during this and move if you get it so you aren’t hitting all the people stacking for inferno strike.

positioning

In terms of DPS, we actually hit the enrage timer the first time we got to this boss due to whatever reason (bad, no gear qq).  We found that if we let the bosses stack for a few seconds, or at least until He started pooping out the poison, it helped a lot with the DPS since they could be cleaved for a while.  This was also when we popped blood lust.  Since the bosses don’t have a shared health pool, it is beneficial to cleave them whenever you can but it’s important to know the order in which they should be pushed in to their Desperate measures.  The way we did it and probably a common way of doing it is to do Rook -> He -> Sun.  This is so that the Garrotes can be dropped from the raid before Sun’s Dark Meditation which does a lot of AOE raid damage.  You can probably do all kinds of different combinations but I think this is one of the easier sequences.  When any adds have spawned, they should be first priority.  When the Embodied Anguish comes out, we tossed it to the He tank since He is not active during this phase.  Despite the increased potency of the debuff, we didn’t find this to be a problem.  For the last few seconds or so of the debuff or when the tank felt like he was going to die, we passed it to a player with immunities such as a Warlock or Hunter or Paladin.  Finally, push all bosses to near dead together, simple.

As I mentioned above, there’s a a lot of damaging AOE damage going on in this fight.  The tanks are taking moderate damage even when the bosses have their special abilities up.  The raid may be taking spiky damage but most of that damage is avoidable.  In a perfect world, no one would be taking nukes from the Keg Toss or extra people taking damage from Sha Sear.  All of the unavoidable damage in this fight is from DoTs from magical or physical sources.  One thing that you must keep your eye on is Shadow Word: Bane.  You should have a boss timer for this application and assign players to dispel in order.  For example, if I go first, I will immediately dispel one person, then the other person will dispel the person left over.  If you have 3 healers it may be easier to keep this DoT off the raid because if one person is slow and the buff jumps, you can have the backup dispeller dispel the stack of 2 that jumped before it jumps one last time.  If you have two healers, you should have your eye on this very closely since there wont be anyone to back you up.  Also if you don’t get one of the dispels off, make sure you don’t try to dispell it befoer the new Shadow Word: Bane comes out, otherwise your Dispel cooldown won’t be up.  The most damage occurs mainly during two parts of the fight.  The first is the Dark Meditation.  This is mostly due to the increased damage on Heroic, nothing much you can do to avoid it.  It’s not by any means unhealable but will be noticeably higher than normal.  The second part is during Rook’s Desperate Measures.  Especially for the arc between 66% and 33%.  This is because from 100% to 66%, all of the bosses have been whittled down quite a bit from the initial bloodlust. However you will basically be going between 66-33% with regular cooldowns.  During this, there will be one part where Rook does his Desperate Measures and Inferno Strikes are appearing on people while Sun is doing her Calamity.  Especially towards the end of the phase where Sun will be doing harder and harder hitting Calamities, you should pull out your CDs for this.

As a Holy Paladin, I would recommend saving your Devotion Aura for the latter Calamity casts rather than to use during Dark Meditation.  You may also be able to line it up to apply for both an Inferno Strike and a Calamity.  I specced Holy Avenger on this fight and just used it basically on cooldown or if I saw it was coming off cooldown soon before Dark Meditation, I would save it for that.  Otherwise, the raid will be taking consistent damage throughout so it would be useful almost any time.  Your other cooldowns you can use as you see fit.  Keep an eye on your mana return and Divine Plea cooldowns because this is one of the more mana intensive fights, despite not being really hard to heal.  In my experience, the He tank takes more damage than the Rook tank so for the majority of the fight I had my Beacon on him.  If you spec Light’s Hammer, try to line it up at least with the Dark Meditation phase.  Also, you can Hand of Protection players who have Garrote whenever you see the damage going up. On thing I forgot to mention above is another source of damage is when the Mark of Anguish comes out.  Depending on how you have the debuff rotation set up, if you do put it on a tank, they will take a significant amount of damage.  I would highly recommend using a Hand of Sacrifice on him/her for this.

Common Reasons for Wipes and Solutions

  • Shadow Word: Bane damage is killing players – assign a dispel rotation, me first, then you
  • Inferno Strike + Calamity = Death – assign a cooldown for each of these later Inferno Strikes
  • Garrote, too much damage – you can opt to push He before Sun, HoP off the debuff
  • Poison Puddle/Sha Sear/Corrupted Brew death – don’t stand in shit
  • Rook uses Corruption Kick in the middle of the Meditative Field, it is super effective! – stand on the side of the field closest to Rook and run to the other side when he uses it
  • OOM – watch your mana cooldowns

This fight in my opinion was easier than Immerseus.  The whole fight comes down basically to knowing where to stand, knowing what not to stand in and having enough mana for the duration.  A few attempts should be enough for a kill.  Good luck!

November 12, 2013

My Thoughts on Blizzcon…

At the risk of bombarding you with more information today, I just wanted to say a few words on what I saw with the Virtual Ticket.  A lot of sound issues.

All jokes aside, a ton of information was revealed at Blizzcon on a great number of exciting new games and the oldies.  Some of it good, some of it not so good, in relative terms of course.  As an avid Dota 2 player myself, I am super excited for Heroes of the Swarm.  Wow did those character models look awesome.  Blizz made a great move bringing back all those iconic Warcraft characters to the game!  I am super excited to play this game.  Also, as a D3 player, my voice was one in the chorus of jubilation when they announced the closing of the Auction House back a few weeks ago and all of the news at Blizzcon just made it feel like D3: RoS is going to be what the original game should have been.  In my impression, Blizz has always listened to the community however, just like the community differs on certain things, the same occurs within the Blizzard company.  Thus the outcome of their decisions is not always suited to the majority of the players.  In this tho, they certainly made the right move.  How about that costume contest?  I shed a sad tear when the Feral Druid costume didn’t win 😦  a sad and fluffy tear.  All in all, it’s great to see people who have a huge passion for Blizzard games and to see the people behind the games.  A true Blizzcon experience can not be conveyed through the Virtual Ticket.  Here’s to next year!

So on to WoW related news. The level 100 talents were revealed at Blizzcon and can be viewed on Wowhead.  I’ll just list them here for your convenience.

  • The Light Within: Beacon can now be places on two targets.
  • Seal of Faith: Fills you with Holy Light, causing you to gain Faith equal to all damage dealt. Faith acts as spell power toward the next healing spell you cast.  While Seal of Faith is active, all damage dealt is increased by 30%.
  • Divine Conviction: (Saved by the Light) When you or your Beacon of Light target drop below 30% health, you instantly grant the injured target a protective shield, absorbing up to 30% of their maximum health for 10 sec. You cannot shield the same person this way twice within 60 sec.

The Light Within

Despite how overpowered this looks, the spell deserves a second glance.  Lets assume that the placement of these two beacons is similar to that of the mage bomb, Living Bomb, which has a max limit of 3.  With the application of a 4th mage bomb, its always the first one that’s applied which drops off.  My guess is if this spell goes live, this will be how this spell will work.  One way to make this spell not have such a clunky application method is to have two separate spells for applying beacon (Beacon of Light, Anuthabeacon of Light) so that you can always keep one on active tanks while the other one is swapped around to players in the raid who are taking damage.  The other way is to have the spell be able to overlap on each other.  Either way, two beacons sounds nice but the application method must be worked out.
The other thing about this spell is that Beacon has always had a huge amount of overhealing (50+%).  In 25M the situation is most likely worse.  In 10M, the second beacon may be quite powerful if utilized correctly.  Since you don’t have to worry about removing that padding on the active tank, you can swap around the other beacon actively and get a lot of use out of it from placing it on members with DoTs or who are taking consistent damage.  However, in some situations where people are taking large nukes for example, swapping your beacon to them does not really provide a mitigation effect.  It may look better in terms of our HPS if we can swap it intelligently but I think this is a weird method of play especially if the the application method is clumsy.  You shouldn’t think of this second beacon as providing 2x the healing of your current beacon spell but more like 75% if not 50% of it or less.  Unless a majority of the fights in the next raid tier are dual tank fights, which doesn’t so far seem to be the case according to SoO, it may be quite situational when this spell is useful.  I’ve said before that beacon swapping is one aspect of holy paladin play which isn’t talked about enough.  It’s ideal and probably in most cases optimal to leave the beacon on tanks but with this new talent, it will be even more important how well we’re able to predict incoming damage and react to it by swapping our beacon around.

Seal of Faith

I’m not quite sure how the Faith spell will be accrued but basically this spell is a way for holy paladins to do DPS.  Now let me remind you of some ways holy paladins can do DPS because you and I probably don’t even remember.

  • Denounce -9.4% base mana, 1.5 second cast
  • Holy Shock – 8% base mana, instant cast
  • Judgment – 12% base mana, instant cast
  • Crusader Strike – 15% base mana, instant cast
  • Tier 6 talents – 5.4% mana in case of HP, else free, all instant cast
  • Glyph of Denounce – each cast of HS decreases next cast time of Denounce
  • Glyph of Word of Glory – increases your damage by 3% per HP spend on Word of Glory or Eternal Flame healing
  • Glyph of Holy Shock – decreases the healing of Holy Shock 50% but increases its damage by 50%
  • Glyph of Harsh Words – your Word of Glory can now be used on enemies, causing holy damage equal to the amount it would’ve healed

We have a decent amount of DPS spells and probably potential to deal out a lot of damage.  Faith seems like an interesting way to play a holy paladin but at this point, the translation from damage to healing doesn’t seem too great.  What is the purpose of doing a bunch of DPS for a super buff to a spell that will be overhealed?  What is the purpose of doing small increments of damage interspersed with healing unless the scaling of Faith is amazing and what would the purpose of that small 50K dps be when it could’ve been spent doing a lot more healing? This is an interesting concept and I think a lot of paladin community has long awaited the return of the shockadin but in this form, I don’t believe as a holy paladin I will be taking this spell.  I’m interested in seeing where this goes though.

Divine Conviction

This spell feels like something that belongs in the tier of talents with damage reduction purposes (lvl 60).  The spell kind of serves like a weird form of Ardent Defender.  With the Beacon of Light glyph, granted that you are quick enough, you can basically use it to put an Ardent Defender on anyone who is about to die.  With a 1 minute cooldown, this places this spell in a better position than Ardent Defender which has a 3 minute cooldown.  In its form this is a pretty powerful cooldown if someone in your raid is about to die all the the time.  Realistically, this spell may come in use around 1-2 times per fight if someone falls that low (and in those cases, a number of other classes have simple cooldowns which don’t take up the 100th tier of talents).  I think this spell could be buffed to something like putting a 30% absorb on a player once every minute rather than if they die.  This would be more preemptive and also serve practically the same purpose in addition to being useful for other hard hitting attacks.  I think this spell needs to be adjusted to be useful but in terms of choosing the lesser of three evils, this would probably be my choice.

After taking player input, the talents that the expansion releases will likely be very different from the current form but those are my thoughts on the current spells.  All three of these level 100 talents fall kind of in to a different class.  The first one being more of a healing throughput increase, the second being god knows what, and the third being a damage mitigation ability.  That fact is interesting to me because it provides different routes that all may be viable depending on the fight.  It’s a good idea but the spells need to be tweaked, especially compared to the tier 7 spells of other healing classes.

10M Heroic Raiding GONE

Well I think a large part of the community knew that this change was going to happen.  It does make sense from several points.
1. Blizzard has always spent a portion of its resources on providing as balanced a setting as they can between 25 and 10 man raids. By taking the portion spent on 10 man and applying it to make a 20 man raid better for all heroic raiders seems like a good thing to do.  Making 20 man raids easier to tune also allows developers to put their extra time in to bettering other areas of the game.
2. This also helps with class balance since 10 vs 25 man settings also affect this.  It’s easier to balance classes around one heroic setting.  Especially in the case of healers or tanks who in a 10 vs 25 man setting may have widely different spell and stat priorities due to the damage.
3. 10 man raids still have the opportunity to raid, just not do heroics.  It may seem like a quick and easy solution to just join up two 10 man raids at around the same progression for a 20 man heroic raid.
That’s all understandable.  But this 10 man change is a really large charge, and that’s an understatement.
It’s not so easy to join together two 10 man groups and make them work together. Hell I tried to do this back in BC for the same exact reason, Tempest Keep was 25 man only and most guilds were raiding Zul’Aman as 10 man.  That move was one of the main reasons I quit the game.  The two groups would just not cooperate and it’s even worse when it’s a one sided thing.  Here you are trying to work things out and one side or a group of people just don’t stand for it either because of skill difference or attitudes clashing.  The thing about 10 man groups, and maybe this is just my perspective, but the 10 mans I’ve been in are all close knit groups.  Not to say that in 25 mans there is no sense of companionship but it’s just not likely that you will connect on a higher level with 20 other people in your group.  By breaking 10 mans apart or forcing them in to  larger groups, it’s like breaking apart bonds that have been forged over months or even years, forcing them to socialize with players who they don’t know and don’t understand.  Of course the perfect scenario can occur where both guilds have highly tolerant attitudes and they just meld together perfectly.  To the 10 man groups out there, I hope that’s how it will go.  But if you’ve played this game long enough, you know that enjoyment from this game does not come purely out of the game itself, but the social networks that the game gives the opportunity to form.  People need to feel that they aren’t being forced to rip and reform those connections.  I personally have nothing against the 20 man form although it may likely mean that my guild will break apart since many members of our 10 man don’t enjoy raiding with people they don’t know.  But I felt that Blizzard handled this situation kind of poorly.  In the many questions that were asked at Blizzon, the answer was “we realize it’s a problem but you’ll just have to deal with it.”  How about a solution or an answer with more clarity of the reasons behind the change?  This is the thing, I’m betting a lot of Heroic raiders are intelligent people and realize that the change is for the better.  A part of them with the response at Blizzcon to the inquiries will simply see this as an act of screwing up WoW to be blunt.
Anyways, enough rambling.  For the 10 mans out there, I encourage you right now to start looking for those 10 mans out there looking to merge and run some practice 25 mans with them if you’ve got enough people.  You want to do trials before you sign on with it.  Just because the two groups are at the same skill level does not mean their guilds are at the same maturity level or have the same attitude.  I’m guessing more than a few members who raid 10 man heroics will simply quit the game.  Many people who raid 10 man aren’t extremely hard core players, they have other things they enjoy doing outside of the game more and sometimes raiding, is purely for enjoying the time with friends.  They will see this in effect as taking that away.  Warlords of Draenor has a lot of new content to give.  If you can look past the change to the raiding scene and the lack of a new class or race, then I’m sure you will find interesting things to do. New challenge modes? Yes please! New raid to kill Grommash Hellscream?  Don’t tell me you’re not interested in how that plays out.  A chance to see what Durotan was like?  Every expansion is not perfect and this is not an exception.  But my advice is don’t give up just because your raiding situation doesn’t work out.  Find a new group of people to tag along with that you like and you will make new friends.  You never know until you try it out 🙂
What do you guys think of the new changes?
November 11, 2013

Heroic Immerseus

Heroic Immerseus is a relatively simple fight if your group has good planning on where players stand and knowledge of the boss’s few simple additional mechanics.  On Heroic, Immerseus’s spells hit a great deal harder and there are a few mechanics which make the phases where Immerseus is active slightly different from normal.

Recommended Talents and Glyphs

Speed of Light – the room’s quite large, at times you may need to run quickly from one end of the room to another during split phases and this will help you get there quickly; also, moving away from an incoming swirl
Fist of the Justice – helping to stun the adds especially towards the earlier split phases is helpful to DPS
Eternal Flame – there are a few fights where Selfless Healer may now be taken over EF but this is not one of them
Unbreakable Spirit – would recommend this for a double use of LoH on a Contaminated Puddle
Holy Avenger – on-use healing cooldowns are especially helpful towards the later split phases
Holy Prism – since the room is quite large, and Immerseus’s hitbox is enormous, this spell will basically hit any 5 people in the room no matter where they’re spread, alternatively you could take Light’s Hammer for 25M since a majority of the raid will still be in once place and also Light’s Hammer has a snare which could be helpful in the early split phases

Beacon of Light – swapping beacon to puddles is helpful to get HP stacks from tower of radiance
Hand of Sacrifice – for Corrosive Blasts
Divinity – because there’s really no other helpful glyphs

Raid Makeup: 3 healers, 2 Tanks, 5 DPS, fight is not a DPS race and towards the end of the fight, more healing increases the speed at which the boss dies

General Spells
The Immerseus fight consists of alternating phases between Immerseus being active and when he splits in to many smaller puddles that slowly combine to form him again.

Immerseus Active Phase

  • Sha Bolt – fires a bolt at everyone in the raid inflicting 75,000 -> 120,000 (Shadow) damage in a 5 yard radius and forming a Sha Pool (damage from bolt is called Sha Splash)
    • Sha Pool – inflicts 15,000 -> 20,000 (Shadow) damage every second
  • Erupting Waters – torrents on the ground (pre-indicated by blue swirling circles) emerge throwing players on top of them in the air and doing 30,000 -> 45,000 (Frost) damage
  • Swirl – combination of two mechanics
    • Swirl – Immerseus begins to channel and rotate a large torrent of water in front of him knowing back anyone it comes in to contact with and dealing 200,000 -> 300,000 (Frost) damage
    • Swirl #2 – Smaller damage spell dealing 30,000 -> 45,000 (Shadow) damage which damages players close to the larger rotating stream of water
      *Note: There appears to be a little bit of confusion about the damage from this spell since there are two types of swirl damage on the logs. I believe that after the blue circles become the black gaseous torrents, there is damage from getting thrown up by these (Erupting Waters).  The lower damage Swirl is from players being next to the larger Swirl and the high damage Swirl is from getting hit by the stream.  Regardless, lots of damage is coming out during this Swirl phase.
  • Corrosive Blast – inflicts 600,000 -> 900,000 (Shadow) damage in a cone and increases Shadow damage taken by 300% for 45 seconds
  • Seeping Sha – walking in to the pool that Immerseus is immersed in inflicts 100,000 -> 150,000 (Shadow) damage
  • Swelling Corruption – gains stacks of swelling corruption proportional to corruption level (1 stack per 2 points), any player who uses single target abilities spawns a creature and puts a debuff on the player called Sha Corruption which stacks
    • Sha Corruption – inflicts Shadow damage for the following amounts every 1 second for 6 seconds (these are rough numbers)
      1. 2,500
      2. 8,750
      3. 23,000
      4. 54,000
      5. 120,000
      6. 250,000

Split Phase

  • Sha Pool – the central pool grows over time during split inflicting 4,000 (Shadow) damage to enemies who touch it, the damage stacks the longer the player stands in the pool, touching the pool shrinks its size
  • Sha Puddle (DPS) – 1 forms for every 4 points of corruption remaining, these puddles slowly move towards the center pool, each puddle killed removes 1 point of corruption
    • Sha Residue – killing a Sha Puddle applies a 25% damage buff to killing other Sha Puddles in a 10 yard range
  • Contaminated Puddle (Healing) – 1 forms for every 4 points of corruption removed (for the first split he appears to spawn at least a few healing puddles), these puddles slowly move towards the center pool, each puddle healed to full removes 1 point of corruption
    • Congealing – Contaminated puddle’s speed slows increasingly with heath gained
    • Purified Residue – healing a puddle to full applies a 75% healing buff and returns 25% mana to all players within 12 yards of it
  • Erupting Sha – puddles that reach the central Sha Pool inflict 75,000 -> 95,000 (Shadow) damage per Sha Puddle and 30,000 -> 40,000 (Frost) damage per Frost Puddle
  • Seeping Sha – walking in to the pool that Immerseus is immersed in inflicts 100,000 -> 150,000 (Shadow) damage

Specific Tips

My guild wiped a bit on this boss due to poor planning so I’ll go over what we eventually worked out.  Position is first off key. Coming in to the room with Immerseus and facing him, you will see that the room is divided in to 6 smaller cone areas and one larger cone area directly behind the boss the size of 2 smaller cone areas.  I would recommend that your raid position itself in this larger cone area (marked with a blue square in the picture below).  We found that if we stood on one of the smaller triangular areas, we would need to move as a raid to the next triangular area near the end of the first phase 1 due to losing room to the puddles so the larger triangular area was just enough space.  Also, the Sha Pools are hard to see in the interspersing water areas.  All of your dps/healers should be standing here.  Your main tank will stand either to the left of the group (this is obviously switchable with to the right) and move towards the left as they run out of room to drop the pools.  Your add tank will run in to the raid when the adds come out and tank the adds in the area where the raid is standing.  They will then taunt back Immerseus after they get out of this area back to their original spot.  I saw somewhere mentioned that as a holy paladin, you can turn on Righteous Fury and heal during this phase to aggro most of the adds to you making it much easier for the add tank to grab the adds.  You should however be extremely careful doing this since while the adds don’t hit hard, a lot of them will hit hard and along with other damage during this phase, you may be in some danger.

For the split phase, you should have your healers divided roughly in a triangle around the map and you should stay true to this.  Especially towards the last split phases, it will be very tempting to want to stand in the original blue area but stay true to your planning while adjusting intelligently to see where the puddles are going.  You should be able to see a few seconds ahead of time where the most healing puddles are going if you angle your camera to the ceiling.  Your DPS and tanks should be roughly spread as such at least for the first phase due to all of the DPS puddles so you can cover most of the map.  Towards the later phases, it would be helpful to have hybrid healer classes for example cover some area between the healers with the rest of your DPS watching to see where the remaining DPS puddles are going.

raidpos

Damage-wise, once swelling corruption is active in Phase 1, the raid damage begins ramping up since people are getting hit randomly by adds, standing in pools, etc.  Therefore, for the first few Immerseus Active phases, I popped my Holy Avenger to deal with this part and it was pretty much up every time for the first 3.  Other than that, have your other heals help mass dispel people and dispel any players you see with high stacks immediately (5 or above) or just in general.  It’s helpful to coordinate a loose stacking point for the mass dispel.  Make sure that you continue moving out of puddles and gas cracks on the ground.  The main thing you as a healer should watch for on your boss mods is Swirl.  As others have pointed out, Immerseus begins Swirl at one of the 4 cardinal directions in the room.  (Note that according to the map, this means he could likely start his swirl in the middle of the triangular platform.  Your raid should be to the right of the blue marker facing the boss when this happens.  I believe he will swirl for about half of the room and he will always circle in a clockwise direction.)  You can avoid swirl by either moving to the back of the room where it doesn’t touch you, or if you want to just take it to the face, you must watch out for a number of things.  A lot of our random deaths were from people getting ping-ponged around by swirl.  It’s my guess that you can get ping ponged in to one of the puddles which throws up you and then get hit by swirl again.  I once got hit 4 times in a row (bad!).  If you want to try to take the puddle to the face, make sure you do not get ping ponged in to one of the gas fissures on the ground behind you.  It’s best regardless to pop a damage reduction cooldown for the swirl.  The safest path however is to simply outrange the spell by running to the edges of the room.  In the split phase, there will be very little damage going out until the pools reach the center. DPS puddle, if killed, do not inflict any damage however Healing puddle damage is inescapable.  Regardless of how many puddles you heal up, once the Healing puddle reaches the center pool, it will explode for the damage regardless.  Your raid should save their own personal cooldowns for when this happens, especially towards later phases.  Also, you must heal the healing puddle to full to remove one point of corruption.  Make sure that you make your way back to your phase 1 position when phase 2 is over avoiding the Corrosive Blast which comes around 7-8 seconds after the end of the split phase.

Note to the DPS for the first phase.  Stop for heaven’s sake when you get 3-4 stacks.  5 stacks as I mentioned above is around 120,000 damage per second which is very dangerous considering all the other damage that’s going on.  DPS classes which have extra direct damage procs need to stop on 3.  The raid should be coordinated in when they are attacking the boss and when they are killing the adds.  This way, the tank can easily pick up adds.   The adds melee for a very insignificant amount. One other thing to note is his swelling corruption can only stack so much (1 for every 2 points of energy).  The first one is 50, and typically every DPS including Tanks in your raid will get around 3-5, get dispelled and then gain another few so that the boss will be DPSable during Swirl without gaining the debuff.  We were able to push the boss in one Swelling Corruption phase but it’s not a problem to hold off DPS and make the add phase cleaner if you want to spawn less adds.  Towards the end of the fight, his stacks of swelling corruption decrease by quite a bit because his energy is lower.

As a healer, it’s vital especially towards the later split phases to heal enough globs up.  You can calculate yourself an ending scenario.  Immerseus going in to a split with 28 energy will spawn 7 DPS puddles and 18 healing puddles.  For 3 healers to heal 18 healing puddles is quite a chore.  Position your camera up around where you’re designated to stand to see where the healing blobs will land.  Start the phase off with 5 holy power and dump your heals in to one while standing next to it to get the buff and then go for the other puddles.  You can LoH a puddle to immediately get the buff twice during this fight.  You should at the end be popping your healing cooldowns since a majority of them will be healing puddles and it is healing these that speeds up the boss kill.  For Phase 1, you should keep in mind the corrosive blast hit with be a very heavy damage nuke.  Also, your main tank on the boss will additionally have a few adds on him which should be killed as well and will therefore be taking quite a bit of damage.  For the most part however, the healing requirements on this boss are very manageable.  The highest damage times are the first swelling corruption and the end of the split phases where people could potentially die out-of-range (use healthstones!).  The only reason to use 3 healers on this fight is to deal with the split phases and the fact that the DPS requirement of this boss is very low.  For healers the fight essentially progresses from a heal your fellow raid members to heal the puddles fight.

Common Reasons for Wipes and Solutions

  • Swirl is instakilling people -> either be prepared with a damage reduction or avoid it by outranging it
  • Adds are overwhelming the raid -> don’t go all out on the boss, coordinate damage from adds to boss or designate adds as first priority as soon as they are out
  • First phase damage is insane -> it will be you’ll just have to deal with it, use your healing cooldowns during Immerseus’ active phase towards the beginning of the fight, don’t stand in the puddles
  • Split phase damage is insane because too many puddles are reaching him -> coordinate your raid’s positioning and your healer cooldowns, yes you will need to use them on puddles
  • People are getting gimped when Immerseus is pulling the puddles to him before he splits -> GTFO out of the middle of the puddles before split

Good luck!

November 11, 2013

Prismatic Prison of Pride: Haste Breakpoints

If you’ve had any contact with finding haste breakpoints then you’ve probably seen the healer breakpoint cards at Totemspot which help you find what haste rating to get when going for extra ticks of healing spells.  Eternal Flame functions at a base level of one tick per 3 seconds for 30 seconds.  With haste, the time between ticks decreases as the total duration of the HoT stays the same.  Therefore haste increases the number of ticks.  Sacred Shield functions similarly however the time between ticks is 6 seconds.

The Prismatic Prison of Pride (drops off Sha of Pride) is Siege of Orgrimmar healer specific trinket which increases our haste and mastery rating, critical strike healing and damage, and spirit by a certain percentage depending on the ilvl.  The tooltip displayed is a rounded version of the true multiplier.  Since many reforge programs don’t consider PPP in to their calculations, what you must do is to remove the trinket and calculate the haste needed before the multiplier and reforge to that.

I’m gonna try to make your life more simple and give you a table of the necessary breakpoints with any of PPP version out there.  The massive table below is composed of 6 mini-tables for each un-upgraded version of the trinket (LFR, Flex, Normal, Normal WF, Heroic, Heroic WF).  In each table, there are 3 major columns for un-upgraded (0), upgraded (1) and upgraded (2) versions.

hastebkpt_PPP

Thanks to Totemspot and Keldion‘s work in making this!

October 17, 2013

Website Update In Progress

Hello fellow paladins, time for a website update.  Theme feels much cleaner and easier to see.  I have cleaned up the menu for the site finally.  You can find all my previous challenge mode, ToT, and holy paladin guide under the dropdown at the top of the page.  Some idea of what’s coming in the next few weeks:

  • I will soon be getting in to SoO heroics and hopefully progressing quickly…so those should be coming…
  • I am planning to do some serious Proving Grounds madness and will probably write up a guide on that if I can get to at least Endless 30
  • I have been collecting data for both the multistrike and cleave trinkets as well as probably doing a comparison between Horridons and the DSD trinket and will write up some reports on those
  • Finally, I will be updating the Holy Paladin Guide in the next week or so to 5.4.  This will include changes in spells, gearing strategies, BIS lists, etc

In the spirit of that last point, for paladins who are wondering what to reforge and gem in 5.4, I’d advise you to check out these two links to a website called World of Wowgraphs.
Gems: http://www.worldofwargraphs.com/statspve-gem-2-1-0-0-0-0-0-0.html
Reforging: http://www.worldofwargraphs.com/statspve-items-2-1-0-0-0-0-0-0.html
This website compiles information from holy paladins who have killed 6/14 heroic bosses at least and their items, reforges, and gems.  It may give you an idea of what the better gearing strategies are out there now.  As always, the results from websites like this which don’t consider raid makeup, 10 vs 25 man, play skill, and a hundred other factors should be taken with a grain of salt.  All I’m saying is maybe take this one with a few grains 🙂

October 17, 2013

Heroic Lei Shen

Well it’s 5.4 and why did I decide to release this guide?  There may be someone who can get some use out of it…

Anyways, there’s already a lot of great heroic Lei Shen guides out there.  Here are some links:

Getsu’s Holy Paladin Heroic Lei Shen Guide

MMO-Champion Forum 10M Heroic Lei Shen Guide

Youtube Videos (Holy Paladin Perspective)

Unlike my other guides, I won’t go in to the details of each spell from Lei Shen but provide some more in-depth tips that you may not be able to grasp from videos or general guides.

The Heroic Lei Shen fight is broke up in to 3 phases with 2 intermissions one between each phase.

  1. Lei Shen active, Decapitate, Thunderstruck, Crashing Thunder, conduit active near Lei Shen, phases at 66%, highest energy conduit becomes disabled however Lei Shen retains this ability for the duration of the fight
    Intermission 1, Lei Shen unattackable, all conduits active, 5 different abilities x2
  2. Lei Shen active, Fusion Slash, Ball Lightning, Lightning Whip, conduit active near Lei Shen, phases at 33%, highest energy conduit becomes disabled however Lei Shen retains this ability for the duration of the fight
    Intermission 2, Lei Shen unattackable, 3 conduits active but all 4 abilities retained, once again 5 different abilities x2
  3. Lei Shen active till death, Overwhelming Power, Violent Gale Winds, Thunderstruck, Ball Lightning, Lightning Whip in addition to the 2 abilities he retains from phase 1 and 3

Don’t be too daunted by the amount of abilities Lei Shen retains in the last phase, the phase of this fight you will be wiping on the most is phase 2, the first intermission.  Lets go in detail a bit for each of the phases.

Phase 1: Lei Shen active, Decapitate, Thunderstruck, Crashing Thunder, conduit active near Lei Shen, phases at 66%, highest energy conduit becomes disabled however Lei Shen retains this ability for the duration of the fight

Assuming you’ve read some of the guides out there on how to position for this fight, the first phase doesn’t provide a lot of healing conerns.  Everything hits for a lot harder.  Thunderstruck is basically a one shot if you’re anywhere within 10-15 yards of it.  But these things shouldn’t be making your life a lot harder.  Since your raid is already stacked for a majority of the fight, it’s easy to stack up your shields with Holy Radiance and Light of Dawn and using more EFs on the melee/tanks as well as yourself.  The Crashing Thunder damage can be healed up quickly with Holy Prism.  Definitely go Speed of Light for this fight.  You will need this to move from platform to platform as well as for the Helm of Command ability.  The one main source of damage occurs when your raid transitions between pillars.  In Heroic, when Lei Shen is not latched to a conduit he will cast discharged energy on the whole raid.  This debuff is permanent for the rest of the phase (it will drop off during intermission).  On the last movement to the pillar, your discharged lightning stacks may be above 15 or so making the transition extremely damage.  One of your healers should pop a healing cooldown for this transition.  You can optionally also pop individual 1 minute reduction cooldowns for it.  This last movement will be the main and only source of large raidwide damage to watch out for.  MAKE SURE that for the last pillar you go to, you do not pop your Speed of Light.  You need to save it for the Helm of Command during intermission.  Instead, just pop your Divine Protection (so good for this fight). Chances are if you figure out which conduits you want to disable first (which is actually enabling them for the rest of the fight) and getting the power of the conduits right then this first phase won’t be too hard.

Intermission 1, Lei Shen unattackable, all conduits active, 5 different abilities x2

My goal here is to make this phase a little less confusing for you.  The order of spells in this phase goes like this:

[23:20:38.900] Lei Shen casts Supercharge Conduits
[23:20:38.987] Lei Shen casts Diffusion Chain
[23:20:39.168] Lei Shen casts Overcharged
[23:20:46.904] Lei Shen casts Helm of Command
[23:20:52.114] Lei Shen casts Static Shock
[23:20:52.948] Lei Shen Bouncing Bolt (Hits Ground)
[23:21:02.173] Lei Shen casts Overcharged
[23:21:04.181] Lei Shen casts Diffusion Chain
[23:21:11.030] Lei Shen casts Helm of Command
[23:21:12.233] Lei Shen casts Static Shock
[23:21:17.067] Lei Shen Bouncing Bolt (Hits Ground)

Basically he will toss out Diffusion Chain + Overcharged at the same time first.  Make sure that you’re spread apart for this.  Right after the overcharged goes out (6 seconds), one person in your raid (and only one person will get hit by Helm of Command.  He will also around the same time send out his Bouncing Bolts (~2 per platform).  The people who does have Helm of Command should be in charge of handling the Bouncing Bolts.  If you get an extra add it’s not the end of the world.  You can ask your tank to come over and taunt it if possible or just DPS it down.  Just continue to get in the bolts if you miss them.  Helm of Command lasts approximately 8 seconds therefore you should be able to stand in any Static Shock that comes up but you’ll have to move quick.
The order of the second set of spells should be for people primarily to stand in the Bouncing Bolt.  If you get Static Shock and you can solo soak, get the bolt and then wait 2-3 seconds and pop your immunity.  Don’t panic.  The Helm of Command person should only worry about staying on the platform.  If your Static Shock player can not solo soak, also don’t panic.  Soak the Bolt and then run to the other people in the group (especially if it’s the Helm of Command in your platform you will want to stay somewhere close to them so after it ends, and it will end before your static shock goes off, they can quickly stack on top of you.

For the second set of spell, it’s the same thing.  You have around 4 seconds after the Static Shock goes out to get in position so after you’ve soaked your bolts it’s probably better just to move back in to position to maintain that you’re still far enough from each other.  The first two spells once again come close to each othee BUT note here that the chain comes a few seconds AFTER overcharged.  What this means is on the second overcharged you must wait for Diffusion Chain to go out before stacking.  Otherwise you can say Hello to 3 adds.
The second set of spells for this last group is a little bit different as the Static Shock comes a bit early.  For this one, if you have Helm of Command and Static Shock on the same platform you must either try to stack up with the Helm of Command person or if you can 2 person soak it then you should do that as the Helm of Command player will be taking a lot of damage.  In my tries, the first static shock was hitting for ~1.5M so it’s possible to soak it with two players if you toss some absorbs and hit Devotion Aura and some personal cooldowns.  Granted it’s probably better to save Devotion Aura for the next phase.  In some cases, you can just have that person die and get ressed.  Killing 1 person with a res is better than killing 3 people with a res.  Finally, it’s very likely that if your platform gets Helm then the other two people will be in charge of getting the Bouncing Bolts as well and then quickly stacking up for Static Shock.

It’s important to plan out your groups accordingly.  You want to separate melee into different groups and people who can solo soak with Tanks, etc. For example, you don’t want to have a platform with 3 casters who all can’t solo soak or only 1 can solo soak.  You should place your Tanks with Ranged DPS so that the Tanks can help out with some of the Bolts. It will be highly variable depending on your composition.  Anyways, all of this information may help in clearing up what’s going on during this phase but much of it will come down to practice.  The most important thing is to avoid stacking for Diffusion Chain.  Many guides have recommended using a separate Weakaura to track this which I find extremely helpful.

Phase 2: Lei Shen active, Fusion Slash, Ball Lightning, Lightning Whip, conduit active near Lei Shen, phases at 30%, Lei Shen retains level 1 Static Shock along with performing whichever ability he is next to  the conduit of.

This phase is fairly easy to handle.  Designate 3 people with 1 backup person to stand on the outside.  It is possible to get Lei Shen to spawn only 3 ball lightnings if you have 3 ranged out and everyone else grouped up on the boss.  The backup person is because Lei Shen does static shock some time before ball lightning.  If this happens to one of the 3 designated people, the backup person will take their place and the person with static shock should run in to the stacked group to soak.  Make sure this person who runs in stays in until the balls go out.  The balls do a large amount of damage each time they bounce so it’s important to have your death knights mass grip/single grip them to kill them.  Also, it’s important not to stack with each other while stacked on the boss.  Maintain a small area around you so that a bouncing ball doesn’t hit more than one person.  You can also just run back out a bit because the balls should be killed fairly quickly.  Other than this, the only thing your ranged need to do is to stand in such a way that Lei Shen’s Lightning Whip targets an area where your raid is not running. This means standing to the left of the conduit since you are moving East to South to West.  On the last platform, position the Lightning Whip on the right of the conduit since everyone will be running left.  Healing requirement is really low except for ramping up slightly running between conduits.

Intermission 2: Similarly to Intermission 1, the conduits are increased by one level.  Depending on how much time you spent at each conduit, you may be able to decrease the levels during this phase.  This is why Phase 2 DPS is quite important.  With one platform empty, there will be more people on each platform.  For my guild, the formation 3/3/4 worked.  It will highly depend on your raid makeup.  What you want is for example to have people who can oh shit hit a button and immune static shocks on a platform with less people.  Players who can’t live through Static Shock by themselves should group with 4.  It’s vital that you stun the add from Diffusion Chain since it hit likes an absolute truck.  Since this targets only ranged, it’s also good to have ranged with a tank or other CC who can control this add.  The order of the spells is the same. On average, this phase is easier than Phase 1 simply because there are more people on each platform.  For holy paladins, make sure you help stun the add.  Healing will be spikey and change fast so be prepared to use your Flash Heals.

Phase 3: Ball Lightning, Lightning Whip, Thunderstruck, Winds, Level 1 Static Shock and Diffusion Chain
People were proposing very exact plans to deal with this phase and for us it turned out to be unnecessary. The one thing to maintain is the 3 people on the outside plus one backup.  It’s more important this phase to spread out for a majority, only stacking for ball lightning and static shock.  One note for holy paladins, You can pop your bubble for the static shock such that it will immune you through static shock AND a thunderstruck.  This greatly reduces the amount you will need to run during this phase.  The damage during this phase is quite high.  As soon as the winds come, get ready to  pop your cooldowns.  Set up a cooldown rotation for the thunderstrucks and make sure you move away from Thunderstruck.  As a Holy Paladin, I found it easier to be one of the people on the outside because I could bubble when things were going to shit.  So make sure you continue standing on the outside while moving away for Ball Lightning since it come very quickly after Thunderstruck.  Everyone who normally stacks should also spread out to place the Thunderstruck farther away from melee. Other guides recommend moving from one quadrant to the other but we found that it just was too much movement for very little gain.  Better to remain relatively spread while in range of healers.

Finally good luck!

October 16, 2013

Throne of Thunder ‘Glory of the Thundering Raider’ for Dummies

So you’re bored in SoO and want to do achievements for that HOT skyscreamer mount?!  Well I’ve got the guide for you.

  • I’m assuming you have ABSOLUTELY no ToT experience.
  • I’m assuming that your gear is around SoO normal level for these.  If it’s lower you may have to be a bit more careful about mechanics. As per common sense, the more damage you can do, the easier the fights will be.

Lets get started!

armored skyscreamer

Guide Layout
Heroic Mode: The first section under a boss details fight mechanics which will wipe your raid and other information about the fight itself.  Note this is specific for the Heroic modes.  I will go in to less detail about simple damage spells. You should follow the usual rules of avoid standing in things or touching things which don’t look familiar.
Meta-Achievement: The second details information on how to get each boss’s special achievement.

Going in…
First piece of advice: Enabled boss mod timers.
Second piece of advice: Track any achievements you can by shift clicking on it.
Third piece of advice: Several achievements are doable with under 10 players but as usual, it will be easier to have a group of 10 competent players.  Many fights are doable with just 1 or 2 at most healers.

As the guide nears the end of the instances, the bosses become more difficult and thus the explanations more lengthy.  It would be wise for several end bosses to know the fight to prevent a slew of unnecessary wipes. I have marked these with a star(*).

Jin’rokh the Breaker
Heroic Mode: Alternating two-phase fight, one with Jin’rokh active, one with Jin’rokh casting raid-wide damaging ability. Phase 1,around half a minute into the fight, Jin’rokh will pick up his active tank and throw it at one of the quadrants of the room which stuns the tank and slowly releases a grey pool of water on the ground.  Stand in this when it appears to get a DPS/healing increase. IONIZATION, raid-wide magic debuff that goes out a few seconds after the puddle appears, can be dispelled but do not dispel this in the grey pool of water.  If you pop an immunity after getting it while standing in the water, it will also trigger the damage.  Only way is to immune BEFORE debuff goes out or for the rest of the raid, run outside of the puddle to get dispelled.  Phase 2, dodge the lightning bolts that come out, focusing on keeping yourself alive.  The lightning strikes then breaks in to 4 lightning bolts going in 4 cardinal directions.  After 15 seconds, Jin’rokh returns to Phase 1 state, choosing another quadrant to throw the tank.
Lightning Overload: Do this on normal as you’ll get it when the event happens not when the boss dies.  Then you can switch to Heroic if you need that.  Helpful to have holy paladins as they’re the only class with a mounted movement speed that’s ranged, warlocks and priests for obvious movement reasons.  Everyone start off on mount, the ball targets a random ranged and follows them about as fast as regular mounted speed.  Ball will chase person around for 10 or so seconds before next ball spawns.  First person run around, then have the rest of the raid go to another far position.  When the second ball comes out, have the two players run towards each other at an angle avoiding touching the balls (kind of like those globs on Heroic Ambershaper, criss-cross like formation).

Horridon
Heroic Mode: Four doors then final mini-boss, Nalak, along with Horridon the whole time being active. Boss occasionally charges random raid members in addition to regularly using this ability on the tank and does two cone cleaves in front of him.  Getting hit by both cleave hits will likely kill you.  Main mechanic of death is a pink dino (spawns on ranged dps -> ranged healers -> melee -> tanks in that order every 30 seconds or so) which if it gets to you will insta-kill you.  Any direct hits (not dots) on this will push it back.  Pop cooldowns for raid-wide nuke regularly done by Horridon and Nalak.  For doors focus on killing adds rather than Horridon.  One tank on Horridon, one on adds.  For third door, stack on add tank.  Fight starts at door directly to left upon coming in to the arena.  When Nalak comes down, second tank needs to grab him.  Focus him down then return to Horridon.
Cretaceous Collector: Get either a 3rd tank or a ranged dps with a taunt-like spell like a elemental shaman.  This person should just get aggro on the dinomancer, get it to 50% as well as interrupting any heals before it gets to that point(it will drop a ball then, have someone else click on it). Assign one healer to this guy, they don’t really hit hard but there are other fight mechanics which hit hard.  They should have 1 dinomancer for each door.  Just have these people stand away to prevent people from accidentally killing the dinos.  Also whole raid needs to watch these to make sure they don’t get DoTed.  Watch for passive damage such as legendary cloak effects, lightning shield, etc on the dinomancer tank.

Council of Elders
Heroic Mode: Follow killing order of Sul, Frost King, last two are variable depending on phase.  Frostbite will come out at the beginning of fight, ignore this person and just let them die, focus on DPS.  You can immune this debuff by popping your immunity as soon as the blue arrow indicating who’s about to get it appears above you.  You can heal this person up but in my opinion it’s just easier to focus on DPS.  Don’t stand in shit on the ground it will eventually kill you.  On empowered Marli, make sure one person is standing farther away from the raid.  Everyone else stack on Marli.  Kill shadows that spawn during Marli’s empowerment from this one far person and one in the rest of the raid.  Otherwise focus on bosses.  Try to kill the yellow spirit that spawns from Marli when she’s not empowered as this will heal bosses for 10%.  If it hits it’s not a big deal.
Cage Match: This meta-achievement is easy unless someone’s a noob.  Don’t run out of the circle, enuff said.

Tortos
Heroic Mode: Click on the crystals to maintain your health buff, otherwise don’t stand directly under the circles which appear.  Kill turtles till 30% or so then focus boss. 1 designated person needs to watch the boss mods for his breath.  Before it goes out, that person needs to kill one of the disabled turtles (they become disabled and stop moving once they get to 1 health) at the boss to interrupt it.  This is a raid wipe if it goes off.  Still have your tanks grab the bats.  You can pretty much kill them unintentionally with higher level gear if you put them in front of the boss.  One person in your raid with an AOE slow needs to hit the turtles as they periodically spawn from Tortos.
One-Up: 3 turtles come out each time.  You have to kill the boss to see this achievement if you get it, so you’ll need to keep an eye on how many you kick it through.  Easiest way is to slow down on boss at the end of the fight as he’ll start spawning a lot of turtles.  Kill these turtles in a centralized area and find a turtle in the back to kick through them while a group of 3 turtles is coming out.  This way you should get 5 easily.

Megaera
Heroic Mode: Fight is simple with higher level gear.  4 heads each with a unique ability. After heads are killed, boss gets mad and rampages for 15 seconds.  Raid stack up during this for healing NEAR the next head you want to kill.  Otherwise, ranged stack in a location at range from heads. Kill Blue Red Purple Blue Red Purple in that order.  Blue head does ice beam that follows you.  Targetted member run towards the back of the room. Fire head puts debuff on player that leaves a pool of fire when dispelled.  Run out of stacked group and dispell.  Otherwise, you can’t really die.  Your DPS should be enough to basically kill each head soon after rampage is over.
Head Case: You’ll need to do this boss 3 times to get this unfortunately. Fortunately the achievement is easy to get.  Do achievement for not killing green head on heroic as this is the normal kill rotation.  For red and blue, do these on normal as they will be much easier.

Ji-kun
Heroic Mode: If you’re just doing this fight for heroic, all you need to do is zerg and tank swap.  Only way you will wipe is when Ji-kun does a spell which players players off the platform.  You can stay on if you have enough movement speed.  But if you get blown off, you will get blown back on in around 10 minutes.  However if for example a tank gets blown off and the other tank is not near, Ji-kun will proceed to hit and probably one shot any players that are near him as he is stationary.  This is a wide shot however and it’s very hard to wipe on this boss.
Soft Hands: For meta, have 1 person grab the egg.  I’m really not sure how to do this without 1 priest and 1 resto-druid.  Perhaps you can do it with just one priest if the person who jumps off places himself correctly.  The golden egg spawns above the top of platform on the very first nest that spawns.  The person carrying the egg needs to go to the first nest for the feather then fly up to the nest above it (not the main platform) and grab the egg.  From this point on, any damage they taken other than quills (including cheeps and falling) will destroy the egg.  Then they will need to jump off in a way that they can be gripped to the lower nest.  The person gripping will need to either sit on this nest or you can have two people with grip and have one stand on the main platform and grip them first before the egg person runs, jumps and gets gripped to the nest below.  This person just stands there the whole fight.  People will need to fly to the nests to kill the eggs regularly so the group which killed the first nest make sure to pick up feathers.  Nests spawns are indicated with a red light and goes lower 3, then upper 3 then repeat with the 10th one spawning two nests.  The person holding the egg will need to be healed through quills by 1 healer who grabs a feather on the first nest or any subsequent nest.  They shouldn’t however be in any danger from dying to this.

Durumu*
Heroic Mode: Durumu is slightly more difficult as he has a few mechanics which will raid wipe but still fairly easy if you can zerg him down.

  1. Purple cone on the ground.  If you stand in this you will get punted off the platform and instadie.  You can get ressed.  He also does a stun which won’t kill you in itself but if you get targeted by the cone while on it, then you will die because you can’t move.
  2. Boss will start to do color spectrum in phase 1 where he puts 3 beams out targeted at 3 random players.  If people don’t stand in these beams he will pulse a raid-wide damage that will become unhealable.  Assign at least 2 people in each beam.  There are hidden monsters that spawn during this phase.  If you put a beam on a monster it will be revealed.  There are 3 red and I believe 2 yellow and 1 blue monster.  You can not reveal the blue monster as when you do he will do a raid-wide nuke unless killed before it goes off, and he likely won’t be able to be killed on heroic before it happens.  Otherwise, the blue person should just stand still with one other guy (for soaking). The yellow will target someone then slowly rotate automatically, you should kill a yellow add if it is revealed immediately before the beam passes it otherwise it will do its own raid nuke.  The red beam is player controlled.  If you reveal a monster, do not move unless it dies otherwise it will do a raid-wide nuke (won’t instadie but will be a lot of damage).
  3. After his first phase, he will send out a disintegration beam directed at the entrance of the room along with a maze of purple smoke.  For a while it will be harmless.  He will also spawn 3 ice walls in a peace sign orientation that should all be AOEd down.  This wall acts like a movement impair.  If you don’t kill it, the rotating beam and maze will kill you.  He will then start rotating either left or right (you can see which one because there are purple snake like lights in the direction) and you should to where the snakes are, furthest away from the beam near the maze.  This beam goes through immunities and will kill you if it hits you.  Your raid must navigate through the purple maze.  If you stand in the smoke you will take a lot of damage.  You won’t die immediately but you will if you keep standing in it.  There are 3 areas where the smoke clears as the beam rotates, one really far at the end, one in the middle and one next to the boss.  Take the middle one it’s much more easier to see.

After this, he will return to his first phase mechanics.
You Said Crossing the Streams Was Bad: For the meta, you don’t need to kill the boss so once again I’d recommend doing this on normal.  In the color phase, have your whole raid watch out around 10 seconds before on the ground.  While the monsters are hidden, their positions are marked with a periodic circular flash on the ground at this time.  One of these bursts of light is white.  You need to find this one and stack everyone on it.  This will reveal one of the orange, purple or green adds.  The beams will then start rotating as normal and you will need to have the 2 people who soak each to go with it. You need to do this 2 more times.  Each time have everyone stack.  The hardest part about this achievement is not seeing this white light as you only have 1 chance.  The lights will flash a few seconds before the beams come out so keep your eyes peeled.  You do not need to worry which monster you’ve revealed as it will automatically pick one you’ve not revealed.

Primordius
Heroic Mode: The fight revolves around kiting the boss around the room to minimize the number of red blobs which are always walking towards him and at the same time keeping the boss away from the large black blob that spawns periodically from one of the pools aroun the room. If the black blob touches the boss you will instawipe.  The fight requires a tank swap due to boss debuffs as well.  As long as these two never touch you shouldn’t have to worry about dying to mechanics so focus on doing this for the whole fight above anything else.  Typically, tanks will take 2 large blobs and after killing the second swap with the tank on Primordius.  Make sure that your dps kill small red blobs before killing the boss.  These spawn a red lighting-like pool on the ground which you should stand in.  If it spawns a purple don’t stand in it as you will get a harmful debuff.  After getting 5 of these DPS will be transformed and able to hit the boss for 100% damage.  If they are not transformed they only hit for 25% damage.  There is one boss debuff that will hit kind of hard called volatile pathogen.
Genetically Unmodified Organism: The achievement for this fight is much easier on normal.  It may be doable on heroic but I wouldn’t recommend it.  Full on dps the boss.  This also requires you to stop ANY AOE spells.  The boss takes 75% damage but at SoO ilvl, it will be easy to kill him in a few minutes.
Dark Animus*** (I gave this 3 because I really x3 recommend reading a simple guide on the fight.)
Heroic Mode: This boss was a nightmare last patch and killing him on heroic now is difficult if you’re not overgeared for content meaning around normal SoO level or if you don’t know how the fight works.  The fight revolves around management of a resource known as anima. Having anima activates golems, having zero deactivates them.  Also some golems are naturally inactive and can not be activated by getting anima. This is what you do to win.  You bring two healers, 1 hopefully semi-dps ike a discipline priest or monk.  On activating the boss, the 12 smallest anima golems around the room will activate.  Your tank should grab 3 of these, hopefully closest to the boss and together for easy aggro and the boss.  He will be taking a shitload of damage. Use all your possible cooldowns to get them through this.  Alternatively, he can grab 2 if one person in your raid has a pet which can taunt a mob without killing it.  For the rest of the 9 golems, each person in the raid grabs 1.  Designate 1 melee dps to kill his/her anima golem near a medium sized anima golem which is electrified.  Have your ranged help him out.  Immediately after this, he needs to go near the tank to be ready for the next mechanic.  Everyone else in the raid should get aggro on his/her mob and maintain aggro on it for the rest of the fight without killing it.  The tank should kill one of his small anima golems around when most of his cooldowns have been used and then focus on the boss.  Periodically, the boss will immobilize the tank inside a ring of red orbs.  Remember that designated melee dps?  He/she should run in to 1-2 of these orbs to make them disappear so the tank can run through the opening.  They come quite frequently so keep a look out.  This melee dps is responsible for popping his/her damage reduction cooldowns because absorbing the orbs causes damage stacking based on how many you absorbed.  The other mechanic for the fight is that every so often, red circles of smoke will puff on the ground.  Everyone in the raid must move out of these as they will repeatedly target you at times and will 2-3 shot you if you aren’t healed. Note: If you see a spell of red puffing smoke that repeatedly pulses and follows you, you’ve done something wrong because you’ve activated one of the medium anima golems who was no electrified.  Finally, at 75 energy, the boss will do a raid-wide AOE nuke.  Make sure to use a cooldown for this.  The boss should die in under 2:30 minutes else he will berserk.  With SoO gear this shouldn’t be near to a problem.  The hard part about this fight is the survival of the tank.  If he/she gets the anima ring debuff by touching one of the orbs, they will die.  If they lose some kind of damage reduction for a few seconds they will die.  Get past the first 30 seconds of the fight and you should be fine.  Now my guild has practiced the zerg strat last patch for a good few days and we wiped 5-6 times doing this achievement with SoO gear. A guild which has never gone in to ToT before may find this boss frustrating.  My only advice if you get frustrated is to keep going at it.  You’ll get the hang of it eventually.

Ritualist Who?: This boss was so hard that the meta-achievement isn’t even related to killing him lolz. Kill all of the different ritualists before the boss.  I can’t give any advice on this as they’re random.  Maybe find some friends who will tell you if they get one you need?

Iron Qon
Heroic Mode: Fight is extremely easy to learn.  You fight 3 lions and Iron Qon.  In heroic, there will be one lion on the ground, and one lion doing random abilities in the air.  Start fight out with group of 3 melee spread and group of 3 ranged stacked.  The first lion on the ground, lets call it Fire Lion, places a fire debuff on the ranged group.  After 2 stacks, have melee soak it.  Each lion should die really quick.  Throughout the fight the boss will throw spears at a location which explode out in 5 pentagon directed lines.  Just don’t stand in these.  The one mechanic you need to watch out for is when he stuns a random player.  Another player should click the cogwheel on these guys to get them out.  Other abilities are going on during this time but they aren’t important really.  The second lion also called Wind Lion after some time will pull everyone to the center of the room and spawn a circular area of tornados around them.  It’s kind of like a Frogger game to dodge these rotating tornados (warlock portals from the center of the room out towards the entrance help).  You may die if you get sucked up by one (it will stun you in the tornado for a while) so this part may require some practice.  Otherwise, avoid all of the things on the ground and click each other when they get stunned.  The tank should watch for a boss debuff if you’re 1 tanking (completely possible with a paladin and with higher level gear probably without one as well).  If it gets too high like 7-8 then they should find some way to remove it either through Hand of Protection or running away or a taunt swap.  Third lion, Frost Lion after he gets low, all 3 lions will come back along with now attackable Iron Qon and you must kill them all fast. Last phase group up for heals.
Can’t Touch This: Meta-achievement is based on individual ability.  5 spells you will need to avoid are the lines coming from each of the 3 types of spears for the 3 lions, getting hit by the tornado in the second phase with the storm, and finally in the last phase where Iron Qon empowers the residual tornados with ice, by one of these ice tornadoes.  The last two are easier, the first 3 you will need to watch where the spears out and get out of the way accordingly  You don’t have to achieve not getting hit by all of these in one fight but if you do your epeen will grow.

Twin Consorts
Heroic Mode: Doable with 1 tank easier with 2.  Spread the raid out and tank in the center.  One tank primarily on Lu’lin.  Periodically Suen will appear.  Sometimes she quickly disappears, otherwise, she spins around.  When she appears spinning, one tank needs to taunt her and bring her around the room to reveal invisible mobs that are hitting the rest of the raid (she will run after you as quick as you run).  These mobs can be seen but not attacked if they aren’t revealed, and look like shadowy banshees.  You should shoot for revealing 3 each time.  The tank on Lu’lin will periodically get a debuff from a mob called the Beast of Nightmares.  Note to healers, this will kill you.  Healing this person with a direct healing spell will put a debuff on you each time you heal them.  This ticks for damage.  Do not heal the person with Beast of Nightmares.  Alternatively, you can have the tank taunting Suen taunt the boss to get the beast of nightmares debuff and kill it so healers can still heal the tank on Lu’lin. Neither Lu’lin nor the Beast hits hard so choose whatever you feel comfortable doing.  Make sure you DO NOT kill Lu’lin before her phase is over.  Suen is a bit harder.  You should have a tank swap on Suen after 3 or so stacks of her tank debuff.  She will also do a spell periodically called nuclear inferno.  During this whole phase, Lu’lin puts comets on the ground.  Next to these, there will be a purple spot on the ground.  During nuclear inferno, the raid needs to stack in one of the purple areas which will reduce a large amount of damage from it.  Even last patch, it was possible to heal the nuclear inferno without the comet so if you can plan for it, you can do this.  Also, Suen does a raid wide tick damage which is reduced if she is pulled close to comets.  Do not stand her or yourself on top of the comets as there’s another spell which will make it disappear.  Slowly, comets will lose their health from being next to Suen.  So pull Suen next to comets EVERY OTHER time.  The times in between, you will need to stand in the purple area for nuclear inferno so tank her away from it as you don’t want the comet to disappear.  In the final phase, both Lu’lin and Suen will come out.  They both should be really low but focus Suen down quickly then Lu’lin.  It’s possible you may not focus Suen down before Lu’lin does her phase 3 specific spell.  If so, pull Suen far far away from Lu’lin.  Lu’lin’s spell is called Tidal Force and acts similarly to the healer buff you get in Spoils of Pandaria in SoO which shoots a tidal wave out in random directions.  It doesn’t heal but does a fair amount of damage and may two shot you.  Avoid this.
From Dusk ’til Dawn: The meta-achievement may be done on heroic.  Hold off on killing Lu’lin in phase 1 still but get her to around 10%.  In phase 2, don’t push Suen below 30%.  Live through the phase and once Lu’lin comes out, zerg her down quickly then kill Suen.  The issue that makes this hard is Suen still does nuclear inferno in phase 3.  With Lu’lin dead she will be doing this without the raid having a comet.  Obviously this is easier done on normal but it is possible on heroic with good DPS.  You may have to end up doing 2 nuclear infernos without comets so if you’re capable of doing this by all means do it on heroic.
Lei Shen*** (I realize that you don’t need this on Heroic but chances are you may want it for the ‘Storm’s End’ title.)
Heroic Mode: The Lei Shen fight is probably one of the most complicated fights in the instance.  For heroic I highly suggest that you read a guide.  Furthermore, this is one fight where DPS will not make the fight significantly easier, just shorter as you will still need to go through each phase. I will do my best to give you a paragraph guide but you will save much time and energy by knowing the fight.  The platform is divided in to 4 sections:
1. North – Static Shock, similar to the Fallen Protectors debuff, more people stacked in the light blue circle less damage done to everyone.  Immunity takes the split on that person out of the picture so do not pop immunity.
2. East – Diffusion Chain, lighting that jumps between people within 8 yards, remain spread for this.  If you get hit, an add will spawn along with everyone person who gets chained.
3. South – Overcharge, immobilizes a person and after a few seconds, sends a circular wave out that does damage and stuns.
4. West – Bouncing Bolt, spawns 3 swirling circles on the ground which must be stood on, if you don’t, an add spawns and another swirling bolt will appear somewhere else.
These conduits are charged by having Lei Shen next to them.  They can be charged up to 100% after which they will level and be able to be charged again.  Leveling the conduits increases the potency of each conduit’s spell and can be leveled to a maximum of 3. The boss goes from an active phase to an intermission phase which lasts roughly half a minute.  This occurs twice, once at 66% health and once at 30%.
Phase 1 (Boss Active): Start the boss off on the North conduit as in the normal strat and push this energy level to as high as you can before leveling it. In between pillars, have your fastest movement tank pull him to the next pillar.  All ranged start off at the center of each side of the platform as far away from the boss as possible but still in range of deeps.  For Phase 1, he will perform a spell called Thunderstruck which requires you to run away after it drops.  The closer you are to where it was dropped, the more damage it will do to you.  You will get one shot if you are within 10 yards of it or so.  Just run away, it looks like a swirling blue lightning circle of death.  For tanks, he will place a debuff on you (near when he gets around 70-80 energy called “Decapitate”.  This will do more damage to you when it goes off the closer you are to him.  Some tanks may require at tank swap, other tanks can brute force through this by popping a cooldown.  Change as fits your raid.  Apart from these Phase 1 specific mechanics, while charging each pillar, a specific spell will happen as above so you will need to deal with these.  For the overcharged pillar, the raid should stack on the tank otherwise, spread roughly and ranged stay further away from the tank.

Intermission 1: After he reaches 66% he will go into an intermission phase and won’t be attackable.  Spread the raid out in a 2/2/3/3 formation with the formation Tank+Immunity DPS/Tank +Immunity DPS/1 healer + 2 DPS/1 healer + 2 DPS.  It helps if the groups of 3 have at least 1 person with immunity or if the groups which don’t have a melee DPS.  Lei Shen will unleash a sequence of spells which you need to deal with.  Have everyone in your raid with some kind of movement boost or be in a group with other people who can provide a movement boost.

[23:20:38.900] Lei Shen casts Supercharge Conduits
[23:20:38.987] Lei Shen casts Diffusion Chain
[23:20:39.168] Lei Shen casts Overcharged
[23:20:46.904] Lei Shen casts Helm of Command
[23:20:52.114] Lei Shen casts Static Shock
[23:20:52.948] Lei Shen Bouncing Bolt (Hits Ground)
[23:21:02.173] Lei Shen casts Overcharged
[23:21:04.181] Lei Shen casts Diffusion Chain
[23:21:11.030] Lei Shen casts Helm of Command
[23:21:12.233] Lei Shen casts Static Shock
[23:21:17.067] Lei Shen Bouncing Bolt (Hits Ground)
These are all spells which you’ve had to deal with in Phase 1 apart from Helm of Command.  For the phase, spread apart around the center circle of the platform.  Deal with Bouncing Bolt as normal. Stack up for static shock and overcharged (for the second overcharged, count to 4 before stacking when it goes out).  People who have less movement boosts should be closer towards the center for Helm of Command.  The hardest part about this phase is juggling the abilities.  Static Shock will one shot anyone without an immunity so if this happens, the raid must stack.  While this happens, things that may screw you up is either the person with static shock may have Helm of Command or someone who must stack has it, or Bouncing Bolts is coming out and it needs to be soaked.  Regardless, your static shock person must not be afraid to move especially so other people can stack easier on them.  This phase will take some time getting used to and will be the hardest phase to get through.
Phase 2 (Boss Active): Similarly to phase 1, the boss will have new innate abilities along with the 4 pylons with their own abilities.  For the whole phase, have 3 designated ranged healers/DPS stay out.  Everyone else must stack for a spell Lei Shen does called Ball Lightning where he spawns a ball on ranged players.  This insures only a certain number of balls will spawn.  Even in SoO gear if you have 7 or 8 balls spawning during this phase your raid will probably get one shot since every time these balls jump they do 200,000 damage in an AOE.  The boss still does Diffusion Chain so the raid must be spread for that but that’s it.  Also the boss will do a large annihilate attack like Garrosh’s which will leave an area that does damage.  Try to position the raid to an area where you’re not planning to run to for this.  Continue swapping between pylons, leveling the first pylon you should be at. EAST to the highest level.
Intermission 2: Same thing but his abilities do more damage.  The good thing is you have an extra person on each platform now to help with stacking.  Would recommend doing a 3/3/4 split with one 3 group being the same as in Intermission 1 having 2 immunities, the rest being split up.
Final Phase: Depending on what health Lei Shen’s at this phase may go by very quickly.  The goal is to be roughly in the position you were in for phase 2 but focus on spreading out for the majority of the time, only stacking for Ball Lightning.  He will do Thunderstrucks on ranged which must be placed out of the group, diffusion chains and static shocks.  For this phase, have your immunity people pop their immunities for static shock.  This phase should go by quick with SoO gear level.
A Completed Circuit: So you do Lei Shen 4 times.  Do him on Heroic one of these times following the same strat listed above to get the Static Shock Conduit Disabled first achievement.  Then do 3 boring runs on normal.
Ra-Den (Including Ra-den for shits and giggles. Also not part of meta, but has it’s own meta-achievement.)
Heroic Mode: Mechanics related, your raid will need to figure out a rotation between 2 groups.  Each group should have their own priority rotation beginning with ranged healers -> ranged dps -> melee dps with 3 people in each group.  In the room with Ra-den there is a gigantic circle in the center. Mark two areas to the left and right in the circumference of the circle such that if you drew a point from the left point, to the center of the circle, to the right point, you would see a carrot ^ sign.  Group 1 should go to the left point, group 2 should go to the right point.  Suppose you have this combination.
Group 1 (Left): Holy Paladin, Elemental Shaman, Shadow Priest
Group 2 (Right): Discipline Priest, Hunter, Warlock, Rogue
Leave 1 person out of the rotation who is someone you can rely on to execute mechanics perfectly and memorize the rotation, suppose in our case it is a Mage.  Also, make it so the first person who gets the debuff mechanic always goes to left or right regardless of their group.  Now during the fight, Ra-den will randomly select 1 person and debuff them with a spell called Unstable Vita.  This does a large amount of damage to them and inflicts them with a debuff for a few seconds.  After the time is up, this debuff will jump to the player furthest from this player. So suppose the Hunter gets this debuff.  He is in group 2 BUT he is the first player.  This means he should go to the left.  Remember your great Mage, they will now take the place of that ranged in the rotation meaning the altered rotation group will be:
Group 1 (Left): Holy Paladin, Elemental Shaman, Shadow Priest

Group 2 (Right): Discipline Priest, Mage, Warlock

Begin the rotation each time the same, with the first person going left, then the first Group 2 person going right.  Once the debuff is passed (make sure it gets passed before you run, you should see a bright blue line) the first person in Group 1 will go to the left point, in our case it is the Holy Paladin.  In this way, alternate between the groups until the debuff disappears (I will explain how this happens).  This sounds dumb, but do a few practice runs to get used to the rotation before the fight.  It will spare you some time of learning how things work on the first pull and wiping hard and fast.  For the tanks there is also a fatal mechanic.  When Ra-den’s energy gets to 100 he will perform a spell on the tank which will one shot you if you do not have your active mitigation ability up.  This means things like blood shields for DKs, Stagger for Monks, etc.  The easiest way to tank this boss is a monk as their active mitigation requirement is actually more or less a passive one.  The other tank can either go DPS or stay tank and tank an add that periodically spawns far away from the raid as it chain lightnings.  The fight progresses as such.  Every few seconds, two balls of blue and red energy comes from the outside of the room from opposite directions towards Ra-den.  Focus the red orb down for the first THREE orbs.  On the 4th orb, the tank with Ra-den must drag the boss towards the Red, then towards the Blue orb.  This ‘resets’ the debuff I mentioned above.  The next two sets of orbs, kill the red orb again then repeat the reset for the 7th orb.  Kill the red orb on the remaining sets of orbs.  When Ra-den gets to 40% health, he will go in to his last phase.  At this point, it’s simply a zerg fest.  Pop all cooldowns and ignore the orbs and just kill him.  Phase 2 is a cinch.
I Thought He Was Supposed to be Hard?: The achievement here is simply not to let anyone die.
Final Notes
Especially on the fights listed with stars* I may have missed things.  Please let me know if you have some easier way of doing things or if I’ve missed or written something incorrectly.  I hope you all enjoyed this guide and good luck on getting that awesome mount!
October 8, 2013

Siege of Orgimmar 5.4 Normal Mode Quick Guide (Boss 13-14)

After a nasty bought of appendicitis, I have successfully delayed my guild in being anywhere close to competitive this patch.  Along with roster issues and other things, my guides this patch will unfortunately be rather behind the flow of things.  Nevertheless, better late than never so let me give you guys a few hints on Paragons of Klaxxi and Garrosh.

Paragons of Klaxxi
You fight against the 9 Klaxxi Paragons you freed while questing in Dread Wastes (good going).  Originally thought the order they came is random however the order for my guild has not changed in the past three weeks.  The order appears to be the following:

Hisek, Rik’kal, Skeer (at beginning), Ka’roz, Korven, Iyyokuk, Xaril, Kaz’tik, Kil’ruk

Some Klaxxi Paragons affect other Klaxxi Paragons so you just need to know the combinations.  You also know who’s next by a buff they gain while they’re standing there waiting.  All the paragons have their own abilities as well in addition to a helpful ability they give by click on their corpse.  The buffs aren’t really going to make a difference in normal.  Also, the bosses gain damage when another one of them is killed.  For example for the first three, if you kill Rik’kal, Skeer and Hisek will gain damage.  This kind of means that you will need to kill the bosses after a certain number of rounds.  I’ll tell you my guild’s successful kill order at the end. First general boss abilities…

Skeer the Bloodseeker
– Affects other Paragons: Causes tank to take 10% more damage from Rik’kal the Dissector’s melee attacks per stack
– Bloodletting, summons bloods which move towards a damaged Paragon and heal him, 2 spawns in 10 man
– Helpful buff: DPS buff, allows attacks to have a chance to summon blood orbs which heal (like healing spheres)

Rik’kal the Dissector
– Affects other Paragons: Causes tank to take 10% more damage from Skeer the Bloodseeker’s melee attacks per stack
– Applies stacking debuff, when expired spawns Amber Parasites which fixate on random players dealing high damage, healed to full every 10 seconds, not applied to tanks under active mitigation
– Turns random players in to Amber Scorpions who have their own attacks, one useful one can instantly kill the Amber Parasites, also causes player transformed to take damage
– Helpful buff: DPS buff, turns them in to an amber scorpion for 30 seconds

Hisek the Swarmkeeper
– Multishot to random members
– Aim, targets random raid members and stusn for 5 seconds, should be at least a few yards away from the boss, fires a damaging beam between them and himself, split by players who stand in between, each player who stands in between takes some physical damage and also spawns a zone on the ground that deals damage
– Helpful buff: Ranged DPS buff, first damage shot at player, deals more damage farther away, increases its damage taken by 15%

Ka’roz the Locust
– Charge random players around room who take damage and are disoriented for a while
– Jumps to platform and hurls amber down to form void sons
– Helpful buff: DPS buff, allows them to do the same thing and jump on the platform to hurl down amber, in addition, hurling amber at bosses encased instantly shatters it

Korven the Prime
– Shield Bash->Vicious Assault, knockdown followed by series of high physical damage attacks in front of him
– Helpful Buff: Tank buff allows them to encase other players in amber making them immune from damage for 5 seconds

Iyyoukuk the Lucid
– Deals 1/3 of a players health, instantly kills players below 25% health
– Assigns a series of colors (5 possible), shapes (5 possible) and numbers (5 possible) to players, he will then target a random player and all players who have that players color/shape/number and link them, anyone who comes in contact with the link will take damage, deals less damage if you are further away (think opposite of Stone Guards fire chain)
– Helpful Buff: Healer buff, target a player and heals all players of that race or class

Xaril the Poisoned Mind
– Affects other Paragons: Causes tank to take 10% more damage from Kil’ruk’s melee attacks per stack
– Caustic Blood, tank debuff, explodes fro massive raid damage at 10 stacks, application can be prevented by having an active mitigation ability up, also tank swap
– Toxic Injections, assigns raid members to either red, blue, or yellow
– Red: Spread
– Blue: Clump (only 2 in 10 man)
– Yellow: Move away from poison cloud
– Helpful Buff: Healing buff from corpse, 10 second duration, healing to target is stored then released when target takes damage

Kaz’tik the Manipulator
– 4 initially unattackable bugsaround room
– Mesmerize causes players to walk towards one of them, dealing physical damage each second, the bug gains energy for each tick, if the player reaches the bug they die and the bug becomes active, DPS the bug that is causing the players to break the fixate, they will also do this at 100 energy
– Fires beam at random player, everyone else should get out of the beam
– Helpful Buff: Any role buff summon a mob to help you DPS

Kil’ruk the Wind-Reaver
– Affects other Paragons: Causes tank to take 10% more damage from Xaril the Poisoned Mind’s melee attacks per stack
– Gouge->Mutilate, heavy tank hitting attack
– Death from Above, leaps in air and lands on random member dealing damage in a small AOE
– Helpful Buff: DPS buff from his corpse

Summary

Raid Buffs
Any Roll: Kaz’tik the Manipulator
Tank: Korven the Prime
Healer: Iyyoukuk the Lucid, Xaril the Poisoned Mind
DPS: Rik’kal the Dissector, Skeer the Bloodseeker, Ka’roz the Locust, Kil’ruk the Wind-Reaver, Hisek the Swarmkeeper (Ranged)

Interactions: Just means when these two are out at the same time, they should not be on the same tank
Kil’ruk the Wind-Reaver <-> Xaril the Poisoned Mind
Skeer the Bloodseeker <-> Rik’kal the Dissector

Recommended Talents: Speed of Light (for getting into the arrow from Hisek and avoiding other things), Holy Prism (raid is generally spread out)
Recommended Glyphs: Hand of Sacrifice, Beacon of Light and Divinity are basically the 3 standard glyphs now

Tank Damage: Moderate, can be kind of spikey when the bosses come out with the interactive tank debuffs but otherwise not too bad
Raid Damage: Low-Moderate, only dangerous times were when the bosses with color related mechanics came out

– Don’t pad, any dps on the target that doesn’t die will be healed when another paragon dies
– Kill Order

Beginning 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
Hisek 4
Rik’kal 1
Skeer 2
Ka’roz 5
Korven 3
Iyyokuk 6
Xaril 7
Kaz’tik 8
Kil’ruk 9

– While you’re killing Hisek, Rik’kal will spawn his first set of bloods which will move towards Hisek because he has the lowest health.  You should be able to kill Hisek before these bloods reach him.  Once the blood’s target disappears the bloods will not heal another target so you don’t need to worry about the first set.  You will need to kill the second set.
– After Hisek is killed, it’s generally a good idea to stay spread apart.  Watch for the orange crap on the ground as well as the boss who sents out sonic waves which do quite a lot of damage.  When the Kunchongs come out, have the raid move away from them so they aren’t too close when they become targeted for the mesmerize.
– We kill Hisek and Ka’roz before killing Iyyokuk and Xaril even though they’re out because they were left up for too long and their abilities were beginning to do a lot of damage.
– Just make sure you know what you’re doing for Iyyokuk and Xaril.  For the red/blue/yellow on Xaril, the blue people need to go find 1 yellow person to stand next to.  The red people need to spread out and the yellow people need to spread out but be aware if they’re soaking with a blue person.  For Iyyokuk, you have a fairly long amount of time to spread out and reduce the damage.

Garrosh Hellscream
The Garrosh encounter is a multiphase encounter with a transition phase that occurs between phases.  He starts off with abilities which are empowered and more abilities are added as the phases go on.
In Phase 1 which lasts until he’s at 10% health, he has two innate abilities.  Desecrate targets ranged players and throws a weapon greating a zone at the location.  This weapon can be killed in its unempowered form and the size of the zone decreases with its life.  He also does a buff on any adds that are up increasing their damage and health by 150%. There are three adds in addition to Garrosh.  The first is a typical tank and spank add which slows tanks with hamstring.  The second is a farseer who heals, casts chain lightning and a gains a buff each time you interrupt his casts.  You want to interrupt his chain heal so gaining buffs is inevitable.  You shouldn’t be interrupting chain lightning though so make sure the raid stands apart.  The third add is a siege engineer which spawns at opposite sides of the room and channels to free a wheel from the side of the room.  The wheels roll in opposite directions and each of them take up one half of the room so you can potentially avoid both of them.  The recommendation is to kill one of these and let the other one go. This should be done by 1 DPS in the case of 2 healers and a DPS healer such as a Disc priest or HotW Resto druid when 3 healing.
At 10% he will go in to his first transition phase.  This phase stays the same throughout the fight and lasts for 1 minute.  You have a chance to get transported to either Terrace of the Endless Spring, Temple of the Jade Serpent or Temple of the Red Crane.  You will have to defeat an add and stand in the buff it gives upon death which reduces damage by 50%.  After you kill the add, Garrosh becomes active and starts casting Annihilates which yoru raid must dodge.  You have a chance to DPS Garrosh now before he enters the next phase.  In the two Temples, you should split your raid into two groups.
After the first transition, Phase two will start.  Garrosh will be at full health, minus the damage you did to him during the transition.  Garrosh now has four abilities, 1 of which is the same from Phase 1.  These spells become empowered when Garrosh gains energy and remain empowered during the Phase.
– Whirling Corruption, AOE raid damage attack, corrupted at 25 energy, shoots missle at random raid members doing AOE damage in a small region and summoning an add, when these adds die, any other nearby adds get super buffed
– Touch of Y’Shaarj, mind controls random players who then try to mind control other players, the mind control is broken at 20% and the mind control they cast can be interrupted, corrupted at 50 energy, mind controlled people are empowered and can no longer be stunned, can still be interrupted
– Desecrate, same as Phase 1, corrupted at 75 energy, these weapons can no longer be killed, but still have a smaller zone radius when they have less health
– Gripping Despair, stacking DoT and requires tank switch, corrpted at 100 energy, when the buff disappears, it deals damage to the player equal to the value of the debuff and also causes the player to take 10% increased damage from it pr stack
In addition to these 4 abilities, every 2 minutes your raid will be taken to the transition phase again.
In the third and final phase, Garrosh will be at 100% again.  During this, he will use only the empowered abilities.

Recommended Talents: Speed of Light, Light’s Hammer (most of the time raid is clumped)
Recommended Glyphs: Hand of Sacrifice, Beacon of Light and Divinity are basically the 3 standard glyphs now

Tank Damage: Moderate-Heavy, boss hits hard bro, the first phase when the adds are out is one of the more intense tank damage phases, along with the last phase with the tank debuff
Raid Damage: Morderate-Heavy, raid damage is more or less moderate apart from heavy damage phases, this includes the whirling corruptions and the intermission phases where he annihilates

– Raid DPS is an important consideration on when you’re bloodlusting.  If you’re three healing, likely you will get to bloodlust twice, once in phase 1 for adds and once in phase 3.  If you’re 2 healing, your bloodlust will likely not be up again for phase 3 and you should save it for phase 3.  – The key part of this phase is phase 2.  If you’re three healing, you will likely end up going in to intermission before phase 3 and have an empowered whirling corruption right before that.  It’s important that you kill the adds in phase 2 and apart from each other. If you’re two healing, it’s very important to push the boss to phase 3 before he goes in to a second intermission.  You should pop your blood lusts and other things to get him to this point.
– I can’t stress enough the importance of an interrupt order for mind controls.  This needs to be spickety clean through the whole fight.  Forget about mind controls in phase 3 and zerg boss? It will be a wipe.
– For phase 3, I would advise killing the first set of corrupted adds. then kiting the second one around as your other tank takes Garrosh.  Be mindful of mind controls, they must be interrupted and broken out.  The last phase is kind of a clusterfuck so try not to get separated from the group.

September 17, 2013

Siege of Orgimmar 5.4 Normal Mode Quick Guide (Boss 11-12)

Poops, didn’t get to Garrosh this week.  Laid-back raiding FTW!  Did manage to kill Thok and pretty much kill Siegecrafter Blackfuse before one of our players needed to go so here’s the guides for these two dudes.

Thok the Bloodthirsty
The fight is composed of Phase One, Phase Two and modified versions of Phase One depending on what happens in Phase Two.  In Phase One you fight the boss with his innate set of abilities including a frontal cone attack that applies a stacking damage increase debuff (tank swap), a tail lash, a blast that his random members of the raid, and a screech which interrupts spell casting when he gains 100 power.  In addition, when players drop below 50% health they recieve a debuff called ‘Bloodied’.  To enter Phase Two, 5 raid members with ‘Bloodied’ (10 man) should stack together.  The timing of this pretty much coincides when the damage from Phase One gets high enough to warrant a phase swap.  In Phase Two, he fixates on random players for a few seconds who should kite Thok for the duration.  Thok will do a frontal cleave attack during this time so other raid members should be careful to avoid him and the fixated raid member should avoid kiting him in to the raid.  You can set up raid markers for people fixated to kit Thok and have everyone else stand away from the boss. Also during this phase, you will be able to free one of the NPCs in the room with a key that drops from the Kor’kron Jailer that also spawns at the beginning of Phase Two.  The order of freeing the mobs (because this affects Thok’s abilities in Phase One should be Akolik, Gorai, Montak (easily remembered as they are in alphabetical order).  After he devours the NPC you free, he returns to a modified Phase One.

Akolik
– His frontal cleave turns into an acidic frontal cone attack applied a stacking armor debuff (tank swap), this goes on around 2 players and has quite a fast reapplication
– His random blast damage to the raid changes magic type and also applies a DoT
Gorai
– His frontal cleave turns into  a frost damage frontal con attack which applies a stacking debuff, at 5 stacks the player becomes frozen and starts losing 5% health every 2 seconds, they must be broken down (this shouldn’t happen to tanks)
– His random blast damage changes magic types and applies the same frost debuff that freezes the player at 5 stacks
Montak
– His frontal cleave turns into a fire frontal cone attack and applies a stacking DoT
– His random blast changes magic types and also leaves a void zone on players hit, move out of these

Recommended Talents:
Speed of Light (Jurassic Park style running away)
Would recommend going Light’s Hammer for this fight even though the area is quite large as for a good period of the time your raid will be stacked.  It will help you get through more of his screeches.
Probably clemency is also a must have for this fight although with the change to unbreakable spirit, bubble will be best for yourself, clemency is to help out raid members. I was told that Hand of Protection blocks the interrupt on the screech since it’s raid damage but I don’t believe it does.  It definitely does block the physical damage though.
Recommended Glyphs:
Hand of Sacrifice to place on a few members once the damage gets too high.  Divinity is Nice I guess…Beacon of Light.

Tank Damage: Moderate, one of the harder hitting bosses up to this point but still nothing really to worry about.
Raid Damage: Moderate-High, the screech, oh god the screech

– The raid stacks together in Phase One to the side of the boss, except for when the person you  kill is Montak. For this everyone needs to spread roughly apart to avoid setting fire zones on top of other people.
– The screech starts coming very fast, like you can’t get a holy radiance off in time fast.  I’d recommend using holy avenger (hell SH/heavy haste might actually be better than EF for this fight) near the 7th or 8th screech so you can continue to LoD the raid.  (This is on 10 man, in 25 EF is still probably better.)  Pop your devotion aura around maybe the 10th or so screech so your healers can heal without fear for the 6 second duration.  Make sure you call this out.  Optionally you can bubble near the end but you should probably time this with at least Guardian possibly Avenging Wrath or Divine Favor because you will need to be healing the raid up by yourself basically.
– After the first transition, be ready for the poison debuff.  Thok continues to apply this to around 2 people in the raid through the phase where you need to kite him around again.  This means people who are kiting might be out of your range and will be taking ticking damage from it.
– The position of Thok is in my opinion the key to success.  In my raid, we tanked Thok near the edge of the room.  When the transition came, the raid moves the add to the center of the room and the fixated raid member simply begins to kite the boss around the side of the room either way.  The ice phase and fire phase weren’t that bad but on the fire phase you should have him pretty low going in to it otherwise reconsider your DPS.
– We 3 healed this fight because one of our healer’s gear was pretty low ilvl.
– The jailer hits the tank for a moderate amount, if your tank thinks he can take the hits you don’t need to place your beacon on him.  The good thing about beacon is that the range of the heal is 60 yards.  You can place it on farther away members and heal members around you to help them out.
– Get your healers dispell guns ready.  Also fel imp helps.  The debuff is magic despite doing poison damage.

Siegecrafter Blackfuse
The room is set up with a center platform and two conveyer belts running northwest and northeast.  The northwest belt is the one you enter.  The two pipes to enter are located at the bottom close to the entrance of the room.  Siegecrafter is on the platform with the adds being assembled on the belts and the finished adds coming out on to the platform from the northeast conveyer belt.

Platform Mechanics
Siegecrafter has his own abilities including a tank swap, a buff gained whenever his adds are killed which buffs his attack speed by 100%, a launch sawblade ability at a random member which rotate in place dealing damage to anything that touches to it.  It lasts indefinitely until either the fight ends, or it is magnetically pulled in my one of the adds that spawn.  Any adds which come within 35 yards of the boss are healed by a percentage every few seconds so all adds should be tanks far away.  He also gains a buff if the wave of adds is not killed.  Additionally, there are several adds in the fight.
Automated Shredders are mobs (unrelated to the belt) which spawn every 2 minutes after 30 seconds.  They have a buff, Reactive Armor which reduces their damage taken by 80%.  Note that the tanks who gain the debuff from the boss (which required the tank swap) can tank these and hit them at 200% damage.  They also have a ability which causes them to leap in the air and land dealing damage in an AOE.  It is stunned for 5 seconds after this and takes 200% damage.  Finally, it gradually accumulates stacks of a damage buff.  These adds can be damaged by a lot of the boss and other add’s abilities.
Conveyer Belt Mobs are mobs which have been assembled on the belt.  3/4 possible adds will spawn each wave.  Once these are assembled on the northwest belt, they will fire 1 ability on the northeast belt when they come out and then disappear.  Note that all of these abilities affect the Shredders.
– Missle Turrets strike in rings around the center of the platform for massive damage
– Laser Turrest send a laser beam that follows raid members around, periodically spawning void zones on the ground (think Amber Shaper Un’sok), people who stand in these gain a DoT
– Electromagnets pull all players towards it for 10 seconds, all sawblades will move towards it, players should get out of the way of these and run against the pull
– Crawler mines jump off the platform and fixate random players, when it reaches the target it explodeson all raid members and knocks them in the air, for the first minute, they can be stunned and killed, after that they move faster and can not be killed
Conveyer Mechanics
– Beams of fire are located along the belt but can be avoided
– Assign two groups (2 dps) to enter these as entering one will incur a debuff which does not let you enter again for 1 minute

Recommended Talents: Speed of Light, get away from the laser.  Fist of Justice for stunning the crawler mines. Holy Prism better for this fight as people are spread out.  Would recommend getting clemency to help any non-dps healers out, otherwise get Unbreakable Spirit to prevent the Overload damage.
Recommended Glyphs: Would recommend getting Hand of Sacrifice and the Divine Protection glyph to transfer 20% of the damage reduction to physical for the Overload.  Mana’s not that big of a problem on this fight.

Tank Damage: Moderate, sometimes the tank can get lower due to the adds dying and the boss gaining the buff.  Also, the debuff application of the boss hits for quite a bit.
Raid Damage: Moderate-High, depending on how many overcharges you get.

– My raid was having a bit of trouble getting the shredders down.  We ended up resetting each electro-charge stage by bring around 1-2 sawblades near the northeastern platform where the adds come out so that the tank had an easier time positioning the add in it.  It’s important that the ranged DPS turn to the shredder when it is stunned to help it out.  I think that other guilds had less problems with this so you may not need it for your raid.  We were getting 4 overcharges sometimes (come in intervales of 10%) which was hitting for 380,000 on all raid members.
– Something to note about the sawblades, they have some kind of delay on where they end up going to so you can avoid all damage most of the time.
– Be very very careful when the electromagnetic add comes out.  If a blade flys through you, you will get hit with the 200k damage which will be bad with all the overcharges coming in.  Position yourself so that you aren’t between a blade and the northeastern platform.
– The fight is very much rinse and repeat, he isn’t doing any more damage at the end of the fight vs the beginning of the fight.