Mogu'shan Vaults: Act One

I finally got a fresh Mogu'shan Vaults run on LFR today, and was able to experience the first half of the LFR version of the raid.

Overall, I love the Mogu aesthetic, and Vaults fits that quite well. It looks like a fairly linear raid so far (though it might open up after Gara'jal,) which is fine by me, especially in a PUG group. We also get Lorewalker Cho to follow us around, giving a little insight into the history of the place. Again, something I'm totally fine with. I always wish we'd gotten a little more lore on some of the various raid bosses in previous raids.

The first boss in there is the Stone Guard, which is a council-type fight with three of four potential stone quilen enemies with a shared health pool. The two major mechanics of the fight are petrification and overload. When any of the Quilen are near another, they gain energy. Upon hitting 100% energy, they do overload, which causes a bunch of raid damage. The benefit, however, is that it interrupts Petrification, which one Quilen will be casting at any given time. If they succeed in casting it, it will wipe the raid. On normal, I'm given to understand that you have to juggle the bosses, making sure they don't all overload at once, but that the Petrification-enabled one does. On LFR, the strategy appears to be to zerg it, tanking them all together and eating the damage (I bet this is part of the reason healers always seem to be in high demand for LFR.)

I tend to enjoy these types of fights. I loved Four Horsemen in Wrath's Naxxramas (not remotely the type to have done Naxx 40 back in the day) and Omnitron Council was probably my favorite fight in Blackwing Descent. I look forward to doing this on normal.

Oh, and I got the belt off these guys, so I like them more.

Next up is Feng the Accursed, which is one of those fights where I wasn't sure if I was doing things wrong or if the dps were just being thoughtless. We did beat him on the second go.

This is a deceptively complicated fight. There appears to be a tank-swap mechanic on each phase (which made me feel very squishy, though it might have been because the healers were distracted by dps dropping crap everywhere. Also I am just barely geared for the place.) There are also two essence crystals that give very different sort of abilities. One is Nullification Barrier, which lets you channel a little zone that prevents AoE damage. The cooldown is timed to be used with all of his AoE attacks, so this proved quite useful, at least for the people who were willing to get inside. The other is Shroud of Replication, which is either bugged or I was using it wrong. It allows you to duplicate one of his attacks to use against him, but for whatever reason, it always seemed to get the wrong attack. Perhaps you have to use it preemptively, like Dark Simulacrum. I don't know.

Anyway, the rest of the fight is a big "don't stand in the fire," "stack up," "move away if you have the debuff" kind of ordeal that changes as he grabs different weapons.

This was of course one of those fights where I probably will enjoy it when I don't have 25-man lag.

Note to Blizzard if by some odd chance they read this: If you guys want to make LFR the new way for casuals to progress, you've got to do something about the lag and graphics horror. If it takes making every other player's spells invisible, I'll take it. It's just barely playable, but I certainly can't be at my best with the amount of lag I get in these many-person instances. Love the new loot system (lots more goodwill between puggers that way) but dear god, let me turn my graphics back to Naxxramas-level or something.

Ok, moving on. We next get the Zandalari segment of the dungeon. (Actually, I kind of wish ICC had had a similar Scarlet Onslaught interlude.) Gara'jal is a relatively simple fight from a tank perspective, but a fun one. Essentially, he's going to be summoning dudes in to the spirit world to make life painful for you. At certain intervals, a five-man team of four dps and a healer will use totems to go in there and kill the spirits. For tanks, he'll eventually banish his current target, and the tank will have to kill a "Severer of Souls" to be released from the spirit world and not get insta-killed after 30 seconds or so. It's not too hard to dps him down. I love this because I was always annoyed that I didn't get to go inside Frostmourne during the Lich King fight (which I've only ever tanked.)

With Gara'jal the Spirit Binder dead, act one is complete.

One thing I really appreciate is that at least for this first tier, there's a clear progression between the raids. Tier 11 had the right number of bosses, but it was never clear if we were supposed to do BWD or BoT, and going a week without raiding one of those would make us a bit rusty on the fights (our guild does one raiding night a week.) In tier 14, the obvious first step is Mogu'shan Vaults, then Heart of Fear, then Terrace of Eternal Spring. Sure, one could argue that it's more like three mini-raid tiers, but assuming they keep up with the raids as the expansion goes on, I'm totally fine with that.

Ooh! Ooh! And I got the first little token for my Legendary quest! It's one of 20, but progress is progress.