Built on an epic scale like Ulduar, the
Throne of Thunder taunts us and draws us in. Wary, we approached,
fearing the worst. Again like Ulduar, the first boss in the Throne
of Thunder is nothing but a loot pinata.
This troll, perhaps from waking up
grumpy over sleeping for too long, hurls around lightning like a Zeus
wanna-be. Jin'Rohk is no Zeus, I assure you. (Elvis Zeus has LEFT THE
BUILDING.)
The mechanics of this fight are pretty
simple, as is their execution.
Focused Lightning / Lightning Fissures
/ Implosion
If everyone is doing their job right,
this portion is a breeze to heal through.
Focused Lightning spawns
an orb that fixates on a random player and follows them around like a
lost puppy until it hits them. When they player is hit, they take a
fair amount of damage from it, as does anyone standing near them.
Also, when the ball is being kited around, it is consistently doing
damage to the entire raid. So long story short, GTFO when you have
the orb chasing after you, don't get hit in the water (see next
section for why...)
When the orb explodes, it creates a
Lightning Fissure. Don't drag an orb through one of these. If
someone DOES drag an orb through a Fissure, it triggers an
Implosion.
If this happens, be prepared to either use every possible and heal
your branches off, or wipe, or both. It HURTS. It
is
possible to heal through one, if it doesn't occur right before a
Lightning Storm. We had some glorious wipes from Implosions.
GLORIOUS I tell you! (Don't let anyone say a wipe can't be
glorious).
Conductive Water / Fluidity
Know it, love it, use it and abuse it.
At set points during the fight, Jin'Rohk throws his target at a
statue in one of the four corners of the room, triggering a pool of
Conductive Water to form. Standing in the water gives everyone a
delicious buff,
Fluidity. It bumps people's damage done up, and
(more importantly for us) increases their healing taken. Oh right.
And it increases damage taken. If everyone is paying attention to
what's going on, the “extra damage” is actually very easy to deal
with, simply because the vast majority of that “extra damage” is
avoidable. When people DO take the extra damage, it's much easier to
heal them through it when they're standing in the water rather than
outside of it. The damage going out during this portion of the fight
is light to moderate, though fairly consistent. When the Lightning
Storm is getting close, it's a good time to top people off so there
are no accidental deaths at the very beginning of the storm.
Lightning Storm
From a healing perspective, the most
difficult portion of the fight is the
Lightning Storm. The easiest
way to handle this is to stack up so that AOE healing can do its
dirty work. As you'd expect, Tranquility, Wild Growth,
Swiftmend/Efflorescence are all incredibly helpful during this
fifteen seconds. I'll add that mushrooms could be helpful here, but
to be honest my personal jury is still out on them. Top people off
before the Lightning Storm, rotate CDs with the other healers, and
make use of your Barkskin, Ironbark, potions, or Symbiosis (obviously
dependent on its target) will make you feel less at risk of dying
during this phase.
We wiped on the fight over and over
again for an entire night....and then realized that we were seriously
over-complicating it. The next evening, we got him in three tries.
Take our mistakes and try to learn from them. Our two biggest
mistakes were (essentially) over kiting the orbs and trying to stack
in the dead center of the room during each Lightning Storm. How this
hurt us (and what you can avoid!):
Orbs: Those damn orbs and
Lightning Fissures. First of all, we were kiting the orbs too far,
increasing the overall damage done to the raid by their aura, which
in turn was draining our healers' mana unnecessarily. Now the
reason we were kiting the orbs too far was because we were trying to
make absolutely certain that the Lightning Fissures would never
touch the Conductive Water. In theory, this isn't such a bad idea –
however, overall we determined that the DPS/HPS loss from running
all over hell and back to drop the fissure in the absolute corners
of the room was dragging the fight out way too long, and was causing
us to wipe, especially when someone key would die trying to make
their way back to the stack point for the Lightning Storm.
Stacking: Yes, stacking in the
center of the room during the fourth Lightning Storm is essential –
you'll die if even the tip of your pinkie toe is touching the
Conductive Water (our OT proved this point by going from full health
to dead in the blink of an eye). However, during the first three
Lightning Storms, it is so much easier to stand in one of the blocks
not occupied with water. Moving to the stack point faster helped
with AOE healing, as well as helped stop stragglers' deaths. It is
much easier for a group to stack up in a quarter of a room as
opposed to a very small center point.
As is becoming the norm, smart use of
cooldowns, mana conservation and strategic use of self mitigation
cooldowns continue to be important in this fight. Some days (ok most
days) I really long for the days of a mana pool that increases with
intellect. It saddens me that the days of reforging spirit to
mastery or haste are nothing more than a memory. But I'm adapting.
Until next time, long days, pleasant
nights & happy Raiding.
