Panda Steve’s Quick & Dirty LFR Guide: RIFT OF ALN

Well fancy that, Xavius gets his own wing of LFR all to himself. Good for him.

Guides for the first wing and second wing found here and here.

XAVIUS

Horny tentacle goat.

• 3 phase fight. You have a Corruption bar that adds mechanics to the fight the more full it is. At 33%, avoid giant circles on the ground. At 66%, avoid small ones too. At 100% you deal 150% more damage/healing for 20 seconds, then you become mind controlled.
• When Xavius hits 95% health, Ysera puts half the raid to sleep. At 60%, the other half sleep. When asleep, you are affected with Dream Simulacrum. When this debuff is removed (either after 3 minutes, on death, or when mind controlled) your Corruption is reduced to 0 and you awaken from the dream to continue the fight as normal, with all your cooldowns reset.
• There is a tank swap mechanic. At three stacks of Darkening Soul or Blackening Soul, you need to tankswap and move out of the raid. Healers then dispel you.
• Phase one: Two players will be affected by Nightmare Blades which run in a straight line between them. Move yourselves so that it doesn’t hit anyone else. Kill the huge Corruption Horror add asap. If fixated by a Lurking Terror, run away from it if not dreaming. If you ARE dreaming, make sure you touch it before anyone else.
• Phase two: Stack for Corruption Meteor so the damage and Corruption gain is split. A number of Inconceivable Horrors spawn at the side of the room. Kill them before they reach Xavius, and dreaming people soak the pools they leave.
• Phase 3, Nightmare Blades and Corruption Meteor are still a thing. Tentacles spawn when he casts Writhing Deep; frankly you can ignore these and just focus on Xavius. Hero/lust here to end this as fast as possible.

Panda Steve’s Quick & Dirty LFR Guide: TORMENTED GUARDIANS

Another wing of LFR came out apparently, I was expecting it to release in this coming reset, so better late than never here’s a quick guide to killing everything here!

Part one, Darkbough, is located here.

URSOC

I can BEARly believe it.

• Split into two groups. One group stands to his side, the other group stands in front of him.
• If you get targeted by Focused Gaze, move behind the group that is in front of him. He will charge to that player and do a Barreling Impact which deals a large amount of damage, but this damage is reduced based on how many players he runs through to get to his target.
• The soaking players get a debuff called Momentum on them. They’re knocked back and take 300% increased damage if they soak another charge, so when he’s finished charging, the two groups need to swap places.
• Tanks swap immediately after every cast of Overwhelm and Rend Flesh. At 30% health Ursoc will enrage (Blood Frenzy), dealing more damage and attacking faster. Heroism/Bloodust here.
• No, that’s it. Really.

DRAGONS OF NIGHTMARE

Dragons dragons everywhere and not a drop to… drink?

• 4 dragons, shared health pool, but you only ever face two at a time. One is always Ysondre.
• Split the raid into two groups again, and each goes to one side of the room. The dragons will radiate an aura that smacks a DoT (Mark of Ysondre/Emeriss/Taerar/Lethon) on everyone within 45 yards of it that deals increasing shadow damage and puts you to sleep when it reaches 10 stacks. It applies a stack every 10 seconds, and takes 35 seconds to drop off.
• The idea is, the tanks swap dragons when they reach about 7 stacks of the Mark, and drag the new dragon over their end of the room. DPS DO NOT FOLLOW THEM or you’ll keep taking stacks and be CC’d for a long time.
• If you’re ranged and feeling fancy, you can try and plonk yourself in the middle in range of one dragon, and duck in and out of range of the other dragon every so often to multidot. Be wary when doing this though.
• Tanks, don’t point Corrupted Breath at people. Everyone else, this is a typical Dragon fight so stand to the side of it.
• Ysondre periodically fires Nightmare Blast at a player’s location. This deals damage to players standing in the mark, knocks them back, and spawns a flower. STAND IN THE FLOWER, otherwise it spawns adds every 3 seconds. Only one person soaks the flower.
• Healers, dispel the player affected by Defiled Vines. DPS, when dispelled, run out of the Call Defiled Spirit void zone.
• Taerar summons copies of himself and spawns Seeping Fog that float around and put players to sleep. Avoid fog, kill dragons.
• Lethon summons adds that spawn out of players near Ysondre. They will float toward Lethon, and if they reach him, they heal BOTH DRAGONS. This is annoying as they share a health pool but get healed twice. Kill these adds and avoid Gloom void zones.
• Emeriss summons two adds that need to be killed very quickly. Interrupt their Corruption casts. They can also be stunned. If affected by Volatile Infection, move away from other players.

CENARIUS

The hills are alive with the sound of moose-ic.

• When he casts Forces of Nightmare adds will spawn. You can purify one of these adds by standing next to them as Cenarius channels. Generally, you want to purify Wisps. If none are present, go for the Nightmare Ancient.
• When Malfurion cleanses the add, he also summons a large patch of Cleansed Ground which cleanses a debuff that is constantly stacking throughout the fight. Don’t linger too long in this patch of ground as it shrinks when used. Try to cleanse your stacks when they hit around 30. Purifying the Wisps will spawn more small patches to aid you in stack cleansing. If you always purify the Wisps, you won’t have to deal with their annoying mechanic too.
• Adds always take priority. Interrupt the Twisted Sisters’ cast of Twisted Touch of Life, or dispel it immediately if they actually get a cast off, as this will heal Cenarius quite a large amount. Move away from people if you have Scorned Touch on you.
• Rotten Drakes are the next priority, and need to be pointed away from people as they have a breath attack. When they reach 50% health they pulse a powerful AoE, so KILL IT QUICK.
• Nightmare Ancients periodically do a stomp attack that needs to be soaked by several players. If nobody is in range, then the attack hits the WHOLE RAID.
• These adds must be tanked far away from Cenarius (at least 20 yards apart) or they start reflecting 50% of damage dealt to them.
• If you are fixated on by Nightmare Brambles (and you need to pay attention to this as it seems to be untrackable by bossmods) then kite them away from people and to the edges of the room. Rogues and Hunters can run through the bramble patches with Cloak of Shadows/Aspect of the Turtle active to clear them.
• When Cenarius hits 30% health, he stops summoning adds and the raid should DPS him hard. Pop Hero/Lust here, and feel free to ignore Malfurion if he gets trapped. Nightmare Brambles are still active, so whoever is fixated needs to be mindful, and don’t forget to reset your stacks if they are too high.
• Tanks swap after every cast of Spear of Nightmares. The more damage this ability does, the larger the void zone it spawns, so pop defensive cooldowns before he casts it. Healers may need to step in with their own damage-reducing cooldowns if the tanks run out.  The idea is to kill Cenarius before you run out of space and die.

Just one boss to go and he gets his own wing for some reason. Xavius comes… and he’s actually easier than Cenarius, fnar.

Panda Steve’s Quick & Dirty LFR Guide: DARKBOUGH

LFR is delightfully simple compared to Heroic, or even Normal, but there are still occasions where knowing tactics will help you in a fight. To this end, I have decided to give you a brief primer on the first three bosses. Very brief.

NYTHENDRA

Dragon made of bugs. Has bad breath.

• When affected by Rot, move to the edge of the room and drop the debuff. Try to leave a quarter of the room empty, though. Tanks have a version of this called Volatile Rot. Again, to the edge.
• Don’t stand in Rot, don’t stand next to people with Rot.
• She’ll whirl around to a random raid member and breathe Infested Breath all over them in a frontal cone. Move out of it. This also spawns Rot pools.
• After 2 breaths, she falls to the ground and draws all the pools of Rot into her. This is why you keep an area clear of pools, they damage you as they move in to her.
• Bugs spawn. If one near you grows in size, MOVE AWAY. It pulses AoE.
• Rinse, repeat.

IL’GYNOTH, HEART OF CORRUPTION

Evil tree. Tentacles. The new Elegon?

• Two phases, each occurs twice.
• Phase 1! Adds spawn, and they have a priority. Deathglare Tentacles are highest. Interrupt Mind Flay and kill them quick.
• Corruptor Tentacles are next. Avoid their Spew Corruption. If you get hit, you drop little pools. Drop them on the edge of the room.
• Dominator Tentacles are third. Kill kill.
• Nightmare Horrors are fourth. Tanks, face them away from people. DPS, stand behind it.
• When these adds die they spawn Nightmare Ichor that fixate on a random player. Move these to the big red eye then DPS them down. They will do an AoE on death that damages the eye for 5% of its health.
• When the eye dies, phase 2 begins. Kill any remaining adds, then run into the heart room and burn the fucker down.
• Any Ichors still up that enter the heart room explode.
• When you get Cursed Blood, move to the edge of the room. Don’t hit people with it.
• You have 50 SECONDS in here, then you absolutely MUST LEAVE or you will die instantly. Leave before it finishes casting Dark Reconstitution.
• Phase 1 repeats a second time, then phase 2. This is where you do or die. You now have 90 seconds to kill the eye before it casts Final Torpor, or you will wipe.

ELERETHE RENFERAL

Spiderbird. Spiderbird. Does whatever a druid… heard?

• Boss has two forms, spider and birdy. She starts in Spider.
• When connected to someone through Web of Pain, move close to them.
• Afflicted with Necrotic Venom? Move away from everybody. You pulse damage to people and drop puddles, bit like Nythendra.
• Once per spider phase, she climbs into the web for Feeding Time then does Vile Ambush, so avoid the HUGE green circle.
• She summons adds. Tanks pick them up, everyone DPS them down. They leave a pool when they die, so kill them at the edges, near the other puddles.
• BIRD TIME! She uses Gathering Clouds, which deals damage and pushes everyone back. When completed, she leaves behind feathers which you can use to quickly move to another platform.
• She channels Dark Storm which ends when a player gets close to her. Feather users fly over to her, everyone else walk across the web bridges. Avoid the eggs and tornadoes, please.
• Feather users can slam to the ground to kill Spiderlings that also spawn during this phase.
• She periodically debuffs people with Twisting Shadows. People affected can run over venomous puddles to clear them, and after 10 seconds they leave a tornado. Move these to the edges, as per usual.
• Razor Wing is a frontal cone AoE. Don’t stand in front of it. Raking Talons is your tank swap mechanic.
• After a while she’ll turn back into a spider.

I Don’t Want Your Number

Hello. I’ve been all flowery and frivolous with my fun lists and whatnot recently. It’s time to get down to business, people.

There are all sorts of people who play World of Warcraft, there are all sorts of people who play ANY game, but there’s a definite “worst type” of person to play with. In fighting games like Street Fighter, it’s people with the “scrub mentality.”

Now, when the word scrub comes into play, a lot of people bristle because in Warcraft, it tends to mean the same as “casual,” at least when the latter is used as an insult. Inferior for whatever reason, whether it’s they raid the “wrong” level (“you’re not Mythic? Fucking casual.”), or they do something that’s not seen as direct betterment of their character (“you do pet battles? Fucking casual.”). In fighting game parlance, it means thus:

A Scrub is a player of a competitive video game who adamantly believes that his or her “house rules” should apply to everyone to promote his or her view of “fair play”. If a scrub sees a move or strategy he doesn’t like (or can’t beat), he bans it (if only in his own mind), and complains that anyone who uses it is cheap.

TV Tropes article on Scrub

The “scrub mentality” is one of not playing to win (as one would when playing a competitive game) but playing “fair” or “with honour,” whatever the hell that means. The thing is, an individual’s definition of “fair and honourable” can differ from someone else’s. You beat Mr Scrub with a lot of fireballs? You’re a fireball spammer and fireballs are cheap and you shouldn’t use them. You beat Mr Scrub after you throw them five times in a row? Ugh can’t you DO anything ELSE? Do you even know any moves or combos?

Instead of learning from their mistakes and growing and figuring out ways to counter these moves, the scrub will “ban” them. In the old days, this might mean switching off the machine and saying something like “well I’m not playing with some cheap arsehole like YOU” whereas in this modern age of online play, they may kick you out their lobbies or disconnect from you, usually with accompanying hate mail. There’s a lovely Twitter account dedicated to documenting things like this.

Playing characters because they're stronger or give you an advantage in a matchup is a disgrace.

— ❤️ Scrubquotes ❤️ (also on bsky!) (@ScrubQuotesX) January 14, 2016

If you main a character for any reason other than enjoying their aesthetic or feel then you shouldn't play at all.

— ❤️ Scrubquotes ❤️ (also on bsky!) (@ScrubQuotesX) January 14, 2016

It’s people setting rules that they believe others HAVE to live by, but they can’t see that these regulations of theirs ultimately handicaps THEM as well. How do you get better if you can’t overcome something that beats you? Answer: you can’t, idiot.

I strongly dislike E. Honda in Street Fighter 4. Nine times out of ten, when my boyfriend plays as him, I lose, and this is despite the fact my main characters Gouken and Poison have distinct and numerous advantages over El Sumo. Now, I could say to him “okay you can’t pick him any more, he’s banned” and the boyfriend has even said “I can just not play as him if you like?” but I’ve strongly refused. Why? Because how will I improve if I just ban everything I lose against? Shit, I’ve even ENCOURAGED him to play as that sumo bastard because I want to learn TO beat him, because in the long run it WILL make me a better player.

If you don’t face your fear, you can’t overcome it.

What’s this got to do with World of Warcraft?

Well, there’s a worst type of player in WoW too. It’s not a scrub though, it’s the “Just LFR” person.

“hey what are the tactics for this fight?”
“WHO CARES IT’S JUST LFR”

These are the sort of people who spam GOGOGO when a tank takes more than 10 seconds to pull a boss. They’re the sort of people who stand in the fire and complain that it’s too hot. They trash talk anyone below them on the Skada while also trash talking those ABOVE them too (“fucking casuals” and “fucking no-lifers” respectively, of course). They either don’t know the tactics (because it’s just LFR) or don’t respect them (because it’s JUST LFR DAMMIT) and then get surprised when they fall in the hole on Elegon, or Durumu’s maze obliterates them, or the Doomfire on Archimonde incinerates them.

If you're the person who stands in fire because it's "just lfr" and then shouts at healers when you die, YOU ARE PART OF THE FUCKING PROBLEM

— 🐼💛Infernoble Knight Panda Steve💛🐼 (@ItsPandaSteve) January 15, 2016

When there’s a wipe, they spend all their time bashing everyone else for failing while not recognizing their own failures. They demand resurrection despite the fact that when they release spirit, they appear RIGHT THERE (particularly glaring on Iron Reaver or Archimonde, and yes I’ve seen a LOT of LFR groups wipe on the 2nd boss). They criticize the healers for not healing them despite them standing in crap, the other DPS for not pressing buttons hard enough even though their own DPS is decidedly mediocre, and the tanks for letting a newly spawned enemy kill them despite them not giving the tank any time to establish any sort of threat level on it.

They are not the try-hards of WoW. The TRUE try-hards are good players, whether they are the “filthy casuals” that actually respect LFR mechanics that can and WILL kill you, or the people who regularly raid above LFR level that still respect the mechanics because they just want to get the fights over and done with for their Valor Points. They are good players BECAUSE they try their hardest.

These people are the do-nothings. The don’t-try-at-alls. They are the problem, for which I see no solution. They are a plague that I fully believe are driving a lot of people from this game, because who wants to play a game with a bunch of arseholes? They may be a minority of people, but they are the ones that shout the loudest because NOBODY seems to want to tell them to shut the fuck up and start playing the game properly. When all you see is a wall of abusive text from whatever group you’re in and NOBODY telling them to stop? It’s disheartening, and makes the game, one that’s meant to be a social multiplayer experience, seem like the most toxic place to be.

AHH OH GOD HE’S HERE

Most scrubs criticize a “play to win” attitude, because it’s supposedly “at the expense of fun” for some nebulous reason. But what if you derive fun FROM winning? The game itself is great, but winning makes it taste sweeter.

Play WoW like you want to win. Treat each encounter, no matter the difficulty, no matter the place, with respect, even if that means you get flasks and food for dungeon runs and establish everyone knows the tactics for fights. I’m sure you don’t queue for LFR because you WANT to wipe over and over again? Learn the fights, know how the bosses work. Help others who may not know.

Instead of criticizing everyone else, look at yourself. Instead of having a hissy fit when people throw fireballs at you, learn what your character can do to overcome them. Instead of being a whirlwind of toxicity and abuse, be level-headed and treat people the way you want to be treated. Call out people who are acting like blowholes, instead of ignoring it. Trust me, you’ll make someone’s experience better for doing it.

Be the change you want to see in the game.

 

Looking For RUBBISH

LFR has been the hot little topic the past couple days, and while the furore has died down, I figured I’d throw my two pennies into the pile, because dammit this is ostensibly a WoW blog so this is a prime topic for me.

LFR can be awful. Half your group AFK’s and auto-attacks. People are either abusive to one-another (the amount of horrific slurs I’ve seen thrown at people is disgusting) or silent, which pretty much defeats the object of a game that’s supposed to have a social element to it. I mean, you’re in a group with up to 24 other people and NOBODY is talking? That’s not healthy.

People feel obligated to run it. Maybe someone’s raid group is extending the lockout from the previous week, meaning they’re skipping x amount of bosses. Raiders who want to maximise their legendary quest item gain will end up having to queue for LFR for a shot at the earlier bosses. Maybe you’re only raiding normal, which is a step above LFR, but there’s equipment slots with items lower than LFR item levels. Raiders who want to fish for interim upgrades will again probably end up queuing for LFR and resenting having to do so.

It’s not even real raiding, if we’re 100% honest. The mechanics are (for the most part) so watered down from even Normal mode that they might as well be non-existent, and that ends up teaching bad habits. “Oh I can stand in this fire in LFR and I’m fine,” people think when they get into a Normal PuG group, then end up wiping the raid and getting kicked when they die repeatedly, or trigger some instawipe mechanic. Someone I have a lot of respect for on Twitter said this a couple days ago:

Its easier to teach someone the fights properly when they have a fresh perspective instead of reteaching someone with LFR on the brain.

— Kate // Malkarii 🇨🇦🇦🇺 (@Malkarii_) October 7, 2015

And frankly I agree. When you’re so used to something not being dangerous, it’s tough to change your mentality when it suddenly becomes a massive threat. Having a fresh head to teach is a lot easier than getting someone to change their bad habits.

HOWEVER

https://twitter.com/MattFossen/status/651811471509164032

For some people, LFR IS their endgame. Perhaps they don’t have a schedule that allows them to join an organised raid team, or the “mentality” of a raider, whatever that might be. Perhaps people just wanna see the bosses once or twice because it rounds off the story in their heads,  and they can then concentrate on other things in-game that are more important. It even gives people transmog options; I know a number of people that ran LFR week-in, week-out, because they liked the colour of the gear way more than the colours of other difficulties, and more choice is NEVER a bad thing when it comes to looking good.

It simply gives people another option, another thing to do at max level besides sit around on sparkledragons in capital cities and troll trade.

(seriously you people with Elegon’s mount annoy me so much because I WANT IT SO BADLY)

I’m strongly, strongly against the removal of options for things to do at 100 for any reason, whether it’s toxicity of people (which is not a fault of LFR, but of the arseholes running it), raider obligation (unless you’re chasing world first or like top 50 or whatever, you’re not as hardcore as you think so settle the fuck down), or just plain “I hate it, because it sucks.”

I keep saying they should make LFR more difficult.
Make bosses more like Durumu, less like Butcher.

— 🐼💛Infernoble Knight Panda Steve💛🐼 (@ItsPandaSteve) October 7, 2015

I don't care if groups have 10 stacks of determination. IT MEANS YOU ARE FUCKING UP. STOP FUCKING UP INSTEAD OF BITCHING IT'S TOO HARD.

— 🐼💛Infernoble Knight Panda Steve💛🐼 (@ItsPandaSteve) October 7, 2015

I firmly believe that LFR should have an element of difficulty to it. I think you should have to work for your pretty pretty purples, not just show up and win without trying. People saying “Archimonde is too hard waah LFR is bad get rid of it” make bile rise into my throat. It’s MEANT to be a tough fight; it’s the final fight of the expansion! Were you expecting a Patchwerk fight here or something?

Similarly, I get that you have to cater for the fact that you have 25 random people, some of which may well be deliberate wankers who will AFK the whole fight, so if it’s TOO difficult, bosses will never die. The wipes I’ve experienced in LFR, however, throughout the ENTIRE expansion (and the last one!) were due to people not doing mechanics properly. They’d attack Nazgrim in defensive stance, they’d fall in Elegon’s pit, they stepped under Garalon, they’d ignore turrets and not move from mines on the Iron Maidens or get hit by Thogar’s trains.

Do the fights correctly, and you’ll win them. 99% of the time, you kill the damn adds THEN hit the boss.

“KILL THE ADDS” should be one of the messages you see when you’re on a loading screen.

In other news:

I’m working on getting the Predator title on my hunter, and apparently that means I need to grind rep on her.

Such fun.

Also, when I get paid I’m transferring my Warlock to Sylvanas, to raid with a pretty awesome bunch of people I know from Twitter, so isn’t that cool?

Why not join us?

What would raiding in @UsualSuspectsEU mean?
✔ Fun atmosphere
✔ Life-friendly raiding hours (5/week)
✔ Friendly guildies
✔ Me
Sylvanas EU!

— Mark (@Rel_Games) October 5, 2015

Warlocks of Draenor: Halls of Blood LFR

So the next wing is open. More chances to get evil books.

Hellfire High Council

Ah, a council fight. Our favourite. The best strategy is to get them all to about 50% as fast as you can (multidot as Affliction, make use of Havoc as Destro), then burn them down one at a time. Generally, you want to kill off Gurtogg Bloodboil first, then Jubei’thos, then Dia Darkwhisper.

Abilities of note:

• Dia Darkwhisper: Dia periodically casts Mark of the Necromancer, and her ability Reap interacts with it. If you have the debuff and she’s about to cast this, run as fast as you can to the outskirts of the room as she’ll plonk a big void zone beneath you. Wailing Horror hurts rather a lot. Avoid the ghosts!
• Gurtogg: Fel Rage sees him fixate on a player, increase their health, and pummel them. In difficulties OTHER than LFR, each time he hits you his attack speed increases. Healers beware! When he hits 30% health, he periodically casts Tainted Blood, which reduces your maximum health by 10%, which persists until you wipe or beat the encounter.. Smash him to bits before your health drops too low!
• Jubei’thos: Windwalk sees him vanish, replaced by numerous mirror images that periodically throw their swords around. It’s indicated by an arrow which way they will throw, so try not to stand in front of them. They vanish after 45 seconds, but killing them is probably quicker. The lower Jubei’thos’s health, the lower the health of the images. Avoid Felstorm when he spins around. He lugs his Fel Blade around a bit too, indicated by a yellow arrow again.

Recommended spec: Affliction SHINES in 3 target council fights, and this is a 3 target council fight.

Kilrogg Deadeye

It’s an add fight! Here’s the add priority!

• Blood Globule: These spawn from players hit by Heart Seeker. They move to Kilrogg, and if they reach him, they heal him and deal raid-wide damage.
• Salivating Bloodthirster: These run to pools of fel blood. Kill them before they get there, or they turn into…
• Hulking Terror: These should not face the raid.
• Kilrogg

Here’s where to stand. When you have Heart Seeker aimed at you, use the demonic gateway. Small adds spawn where the ranged stand, so DPS them down as soon as you can.

Notable abilities!

• Heart Seeker: The player affected by this should run like buggery as far away from everyone as they can, aided by a Demonic Gateway if possible. Melee, don’t stand where the arrow is pointing. Players hit by this spawn an add that is of the highest priority.
• Visions of Death: He places 3 circles on the ground that a healer and 2 DPS need to stand in. This whisks them away to THE DEATH REALM. Here, you kill things, interrupt Imps, avoid void zones left by dead Fiends, and don’t stand in front of the Mistresses! When you exit THE DEATH REALM, DPS get a large DPS buff, and healers get an ability that cleanses Fel Corruption. Oh! While we’re at it…
• Fel Corruption: Less an ability, more a consequence of. Hulking Terrors inflict you with this, it’s cleansed by healers who leave THE REALM OF DEATH, and at 100 it mind controls you.
• Death Throes: Avoid the spots on the ground. Don’t stop moving.

Recommended spec: Short-lived adds you can Havoc and Shadowburn? On-demand burst requirements? HELLO DESTRUCTION.

Gorefiend

Look at that stunner. 2 phase fight with occasional being eaten. What to watch out for?

Phase 1

• ADDS. Kill them. Gorebound Spirit is the highest priority, then Gorebound Essence, then Gorebound Construct. Big’un, lit’lun, skelly.
• Touch of Doom: You get affected by this? Get AWAY from everyone. You explode for big damage at the end of the debuff, which is reduced the further away from people you are, and leaves behind a void zone.
• Shared Fate: 3 players are linked. One of them is rooted. The other 2 need to run to the rooted player, or they all take massive damage.
• Hunger for Life: A Gorebound Construct will fixate on you. Run away from it.
• Shadow of Death: Gorefiend kill you and eats you. Now you get to run around his stomach, DPS Gorebound Constructs, heal Tortured Essences, avoid void zones, and interrupt and prioritise killing Enraged Spirits. If you’re in the stomach for longer than 40 seconds, he digests you. To avoid this, go to the pillar in the middle. Adds in this room are doing the same, and will appear in the main room if they reach it. Avoid void zones.
• Crushing Darkness: Spawns void zones that explode after a few seconds. Don’t stand in them.

Phase 2

• Feast of Souls: His energy has hit 0, and he wants to refill it. Raid-wide damage every couple seconds. Yawn. He also spawns Unstable Souls which float toward him and refill his energy when they get to him. You can intercept these to extend the phase, which ends when his energy is filled, or after 1 minute. During this phase, he takes DOUBLE DAMAGE, so save your DPS cooldowns for now! Everyone should stack near Gorefiend with the melee to help the healers. Yay AoE healing.

Recommended Spec:  Short-lived adds you can Havoc and Shadowburn? On-demand burst requirements? HELLO DESTRUCTION.

Whoa deja vu. Plonk a Demonic Circle down to aid you in running out the raid for Mark of Doom, and use the Glyph of Conflagration to assist you in slowing adds down.

Warlocks of Draenor: Hellbreach LFR

On Tuesday in NA realms, and Wednesday on EU realms, the first wing of LFR opened, the Hellbreach! This sees you tackle the first 3 bosses of Hellfire Citadel, and let’s have a little overview of the bosses.

Hellfire Assault

This is basically an add fight. You defend two cannons, while defeating enemies that try to destroy it. When the fight starts, your first priority is to get Siegemaster Mar’tak to 50% health, whereupon she leaves the fight. Try and cleave other adds down at the same time to not get overwhelmed.

The rest of the fight is then you avoiding ground crap, and DPSing the correct targets, according to a priority:

• Siege vehicles: When defeated, they drop Felfire Munitions, which a DPS or a healer should pick up and take up the ramp to one of the cannons. This is how you beat the encounter: feeding the cannons enough ammo!
• Gorebound Felcaster/Gorebound Terror: These are probably the most damaging of the adds. Try and interrupt as many casts of Felfire Volley as you can. At some point, the Felcaster will cast Metamorphosis and turn into the Terror, you NEED to focus these down ASAP before they get too many (or any!) casts of Felfire Volley off.
• Hulking Berserkers: These focus on the tanks, but need to be killed relatively quickly lest they smash them to bits.
• Contracted Engineers/Iron Dragoons: Just AoE and cleave these down, maybe as you’re DPSing the other, higher priority, adds.

Recommended spec: Destruction with Grimoire of Sacrifice and Charred Remains. This is your strongest AoE spec, and also has the strongest on-demand single target burst needed for the vehicles and Felcasters.

Iron Reaver

Big robot. Mostly single target. Takes to the skies when her energy is full. What to watch out for?

• Blitz: When she starts casting this, move the hell out her way! She faces a random member of the raid, moves towards them, and takes anyone in her path with her. This silences, pacifies and deals a lot of damage. She then repeats the attack back to her tank (usually). When charging, she pushes the fire patches left by Barrage out her way.
• Barrage: Hits in a rather wide cone in front of her. Again, move. Leaves little fire patches on the ground.
• Pounding: This one’s unavoidable. Use Unending Resolve, Sacrificial Pact, or other damage-reducing cooldowns to limit the work your healers have to do. This ability moves the fire patches from Barrage away from her, so be wary of moving fire.
• Unstable Orb: Plonks a DoT on random raid members. If it’s on you, don’t be within 8 yards of anyone.

Over time, her energy bar charges, and once it’s full, she flies into the sky (obviously got the Draenor Pathfinder achievement). She reduces any damage dealt to her by 95% while she’s in the sky, and you have new things to avoid/kill.

• Artillery: Targets 3 people. Move!
• Fuel Streak: She jets across the field, leaving a large streak of fuel that she then ignites a couple seconds later. Don’t be in it when it ignites, it HURTS. Sticks around a little bit.
• Firebomb: Targets random raid members. Plonks a circle around them, which you have to move out of before she blows you up. Leaves a bomb behind which you NEED to destroy. After 25 seconds, the bombs explode dealing a LOT of damage.
• Falling Slam: Another targeted AoE. Easily avoidable, and heralds the end of the air phase.

So it’s basically avoid fire and DPS bombs. Simple.

Recommended Spec: Any, really. They’re all passable on single target. I prefer Affliction at the moment, due to all the bloody Haste gear I keep getting.

Kormrok

Single target. Single phase. Boss leaps around into pools of crap that make him stronger. Don’t go in the pools yourself, they hurt!

• Pound: Spread out 4 yards apart.
• Explosive Energy: If he has this, he leapt into the orange pool. He’ll place Explosive Runes onto the ground, which someone needs to stand on. If someone DOESN’T, the whole raid takes damage. Use a personal cooldown to mitigate the damage if you’re the activator. When empowered by the orange pool, the runes spawn in a circle, then respawn when triggered, in front of who triggered it. You need make it so the runes respawn on top of each-other in 1 big rune, which you then trigger and it vanishes.
• Foul Energy: He’s leapt into the green pool, and it powers up his Grasping Hands. This attack normally summons little hands that grab everyone bar the tanks. Kill the hands to free yourselves and others before the hands crush you to death! When empowered, the hands not only grab you, but drag you to the nearest pool of hurty gunk. Kill them even quicker! It also summons a hand that grabs the player currently tanking Kormrok, which needs to be killed ASAP.
• Shadow Energy: The purple pool, which powers up Fel Outpouring. Ordinarily, this ability makes large blobs spawn from the purple pool, which move across the room then disappear. Avoid them, lest you suffer heavy damage. When empowered, he summons blobs from all 3 pools, which move in lots of directions. Avoid them, lest you suffer heavy damage again.

Recommended Spec: Having attempted this fight on Normal, I’d definitely take Destruction with Grimoire of Sacrifice and Charred Remains again. Being able to DPS the Grasping/Dragging hands down ASAP is very very important, and with AoE Chaos Bolt that becomes a lot easier. Demonology has very good burst AoE too, so it’s viable here.

WoD Raiding: A Personal Story!

Going into Warlords, we’re getting a new raiding structure. I think the popular image from the Blizzcon slide can explain it better than I can. 1000 words and all that.

Everything’s going flex bar the hardest difficulty, and various modes are consolidating into 4 types of raid. LFR, Normal, Heroic and Mythic. Each of these will be on a separate lockout, blah blah, this is stuff we already know. What has been revealed recently is that while LFR has higher item level loot than heroic 5-man dungeons, it won’t have tier set pieces or the same trinkets as the higher difficulties. What it WILL have is unique-looking loot with no set bonuses, and trinkets more akin to basic dungeon ones, as opposed to game-changers like the Purified Bindings of Immerseus and its amplifying brethren.

5.4 introduced to us the new Flexible difficulty. A step up from LFR, but not as punishing as normal, it was a way for guilds who may never have raided before (like mine!) to organise a group, chat rubbish on Mumble (which has now spilled to outside of raid times, which is fantastic for us!) and just generally be more social. The fact it was flexible difficulty meant you didn’t have to exclude people if you were a 10-man guild and 15 of you showed up, and if you were 25-man but only 22 showed up, you didn’t have to cancel.

Why do I bring up what is common knowledge? Well, in terms of myself and my relationship with raiding, I was exclusively an LFR raider. LFR Hero, I think we were called (disparagingly, like we weren’t as worthy as the hardcore heroic raiders and whanot). I’ve been in the same guild since the end of Wrath of the Lich King. We’ve always been a social, casual guild. We first raided together as a guild in the first week of patch 5.2 (when Throne of Thunder was introduced), and even then it was only Mogu’shan Vaults.

We got stuck hopelessly on Elegon. Stupid see-through dragon.

The next time we raided together, it was in 5.4. The introduction of flex raids excited us! It pushed us out of just doing LFR alone, seperately, into doing this awesome new content together, as a guild. It also created a fairly good PUG mentality on my server (at the time, a low-medium population one called Nagrand. We’ve since been connected to Runetotem and Kilrogg, and if anything the PUG scene has exploded into life), so if we were short a player or 6 (we were always short!), we could always grab one off /2, or even through OQ.

The gear we got through Flex allowed us to attempt to tackle Normal Siege, and we’re so far 4/14N! For all of us, on our mains at least, we saw LFR not as a method of gearing this time around, like we had done previously, but as a sort of training ground. Our tanks learnt the mechanics for the fights there, the tank swaps and whatnot, our healers learnt the best ways to heal fights, when the heavy damage was coming in, and when they could ease off and conserve their mana. Us DPS learnt not to stand in fire, and that’s pretty much it. Any gear we got in LFR was a small bonus, quickly replaced by superior gear in Flex or Normal (and as we gradually acquired our legendary cloaks, from Ordos too).

I suppose my point is this. You can see the removal of tier gear and uber trinkets as gutting LFR if you wish, a slap in the face to those who can only do that. I personally feel it’s Blizzard trying to get people into doing what will soon become Normal and Heroic raids instead, if not as a guild, then as a PUG through OQ (or their new spangly group finder, which personally I cannot wait to see), or even through trade chat. The introduction of flex raiding in 5.4 was the catalyst my guild needed to get into raiding together, beforehand we had thought it impossible! We all kept different schedules, we were free different times, but splitting the raid into several wings meant we could do it as bite-size chunks when we all had an hour or two to spare.

Now, the raids of Warlords are supposedly going to be less linear than the raids of Mists.

If, say, you get stuck hopelessly on boss #2 of the Iron Assembly, then there’s always bosses in the Slag Works or The Black Forge for you to go and try. Currently, if you get stuck on, say, Norushen in Siege, you’re there bashing your head against him for hours until you beat him. Sure, if you’re Flexing it, you can just go onto wing 2 and Galakras, but really, if you’re struggling with Norushen, it’s doubtful Galakras will give you much more joy.

I’d imagine at first, we’d be able to do a wing a night. As we gradually gear up, maybe we’ll do two wings, then eventually we’ll get the whole place done in a few hours. Currently, we can get to Malkorok on Flex in under 3 hours. When we first did Flex, we couldn’t get past the Protectors!

People who want to raid only LFR, they’ll probably stay there. That’s fine, that’s their endgame. It used to be mine. People who want to go on to do the more difficult content will have a multitude of ways to do it. The fact that Normal and Heroic’ll be cross-realm will mean that you’re not restricted to only grouping with people on your server, meaning more opportunities to raid those difficulties in times that suit you. Yes, random PUGs can sometimes be horrendously painful, but honestly, for every time I’ve had a bad group, I’ve had about four brilliant ones.

I am still a little miffed that they’re not including tier sets in LFR. While I still believe it’s intended as a push for people to do the harder stuff, for the people that don’t WANT to, it basically means “you see all this cool-looking armor? You can’t have it. Have this rubbish-looking LFR armor instead.”

Like, seriously, have you SEEN the LFR sets? Here’s a link to (hopefully) the Wowhead preview of the LFR Plate. Look at it, then look at the warrior tier set above it. The LFR set is crap compared to that! That warrior tier set is goddamn BEAUTIFUL, whereas the LFR set elicited a “meh” response from me. The only LFR set I like is the red/blue cloth one.

On the whole though, I feel that this change to the loot system can be the push for even more people to move into “organised” (or in the case of my guild, disorganised!) raiding. Not only that, but for people like me, who don’t see themselves as LFR heroes anymore, but nor as an organised raider (is Flex Hero a thing? Let’s make it a thing), it’ll be more incentive to get into PUGs, maybe even make new friends! There are naturally some downsides; the people who only ever want to run LFR may see the removal of tier pieces as being treated as second-class citizens by Blizzard itself, who can’t have the nice-looking armors. In the first tier, the “hardcore” people will still feel obligated to run LFR, as well as Normal, Heroic and Mythic for upgrades, though this “obligation” will lessen as the expansion wears on (Watcher stated that the first tier’s Mythic items will be of a higher item level than the following tier’s Normal items, therefore people who will be raiding Mythic won’t ever need to do LFR or Normal as it won’t drop ANYTHING worthwhile for them once they’re Mythic geared).

That does bring up another interesting point though. When LFR Siege or Throne first opened, how many of us read the tactics beforehand? I did, though there really is a massive difference between reading about a fight, and actually experiencing it! The first time I did Durumu? Lei Shen? Garrosh? Galakras? Nazgrim? Heck, Garalon way back when? I, and many others in my group, were dependent on those who had already run it on Normal modes to help us through. Now, in the first tier, we’ll get those people. They’ll be looking for upgrades to their quest/dungeon gear that they haven’t replaced doing the other modes. In later tiers? Well, they won’t need to run it. Why would they? No tier sets, no broken-ass trinkets, they’ll be Mythic geared from the previous tier, and won’t see the need to run LFR, so you won’t get that contingent of people who know the tactics inside-out because they’re run it several times already. You’ll have a split of people who have read up a little bit, and the people who haven’t looked at a thing, both running it for the first time.

I predict those first couple weeks of LFR, just like the first couple weeks of Durumu, Garalon, Elegon, et al, to be rather painful, as people get used to the fights.

But hey, isn’t the struggle what it’s all about? If we struggle together, we can get through it together, and next time, we’ll be stronger, and we’ll be ready for it.