Heart of Fear

I actually completed LFR Heart of Fear nearly a week ago, but forgot to talk about it. I just had my first (sadly incomplete, as the raid descended into the kind of LFR crap we all dread) go at Terrace of Endless Spring, which I'll talk about once I've seen/gotten down the Sha of Fear.

Heart of Fear is pretty cool if you like the Mantid aesthetic. As you'd expect, it's somewhat dark and similar in architecture to the various tree interiors you'll find throughout the Dread Wastes. You're also going to find a lot of Mantid here. Really, with the exception of a couple of Yaungol, Kunchongs, and I believe a couple crocolisks, basically everything here is a Mantid. Makes sense, though one could argue it could use a bit more visual variety.

From an LFR perspective, most of the fights are pretty straightforward. There are a lot of add fights n this raid. Of the six fights, three of them revolve around add management, though in fairness, Amber Shaper Unsok (no idea if I'm going to get all the names right here) has a pretty cool twist on the formula, and one that I've always thought would be cool.

In LFR, the raid's divided in two, just like MSV, and the place is a fairly linear progression up to Empress Shek'zeer. The first half is called the Dread Approach, while the second is called the Madness of Shek'zeer.

Boss one is Imperial Vizier Zor'lok. The Vizier will fill the room with damaging and pacifying gas, which requires you to fight him on various platforms, where he will do different abilities. Each of these is pretty easily countered. One aoe ability has him create little shielded areas for you to stand in. There's also an ability that sends out little rings of sound waves, much like Atramedes in BWD, which can be avoided if you're light on your feet. He does do a Mind Control, but damaging the affected players to 50% of their health will break them out of it. Once he's down to a certain percentage, he'll inhale all the gas and go to the center of the room, now able to do all three of these abilities. His "inhale/exhale" mechanic" appears to be pretty negligible on LFR.

The second boss is Blade Lord Ta'yak, which is a pretty cool but also very easily frustrating boss. The first phase is pretty simple: there's a tank swap mechanic and he'll single out random raid members for an attack, so you'll want to spread out when he does that. The second phase, however, is kind of interesting (and frustrating.) He'll take you to one side of the room and fly to the other, then start sending tornados in your way to try to stop you. If a tornado hits you, you get taken all the way back to where you started, so dodging them in order to get some dps on the boss is a top priority. The thing that's frustrating here is that when you get to the end of the path, almost to him, often you will not have enough time between when he spawns a new tornado and it becomes active, so you'll very frequently get to the end of the path only for him to spawn one right beneath your feet. Luckily, at this point he no longer needs to be tanked, and as long as enough people make it to him, you'll get him down. He will do this twice, actually, flying back and changing the direction of the winds.

Garalon, the third boss, is probably the most unusual in the instance. He's an enormous Kunchong. Each of his legs is considered a separate target, and those standing near them will do double damage against them. Killing a leg will cripple him, making him move slower. This is good, because he can't be tanked. Instead, he'll follow a particular player who has a debuff called Pheromones. You basically need two people (preferably mobile ranged dps) to trade off the debuff much as tanks would with a tank-swap debuff. The debuff causes more and more damage to them as time goes on, but can be passed to someone else just by running into them. Meanwhile, the tanks still need to stay in front of him, because if fewer than two people get hit by his cone aoe attack, he gets a stacking damage buff. It's an interesting experience for a tank because you have to worry about positioning without having any control over how the boss is positioned. Dps who aren't kiting him have to keep working on crippling the guy and then dpsing him down while he's slowed enough. The legs will regenerate, so it's a constant struggle. He also has a tendency to crush those directly beneath him, but luckily there is a red circle to warn you.

Once the Dread Approach is done, you'll have unlocked the Madness of Shek'zeer.

The first boss is Wind Lord Mel'jarak. He has what appears to be a bunch of trash in front of him, but is actually a group of nine adds that you have to crowd-control during the fight. This is, of course, a pain in the ass for LFR groups where trolls or simple idiots will not be paying attention and do it wrong. There are three types of adds - Battle-menders, Amber-Trappers, and Blademasters. Each type shares a health pool with its fellows, which is good, because you can CC, for example, two of the Menders and only worry about interrupting one, but not have to worry about the others once the first is down. They also provide Impaling Spears to up to four players, in case your raid is short on CC. The Spears work just like normal crowd control - they've got a short cast time, and any damage will break the CC, but you can use them as much as you want.

The trick, though, is that Mel'jarak only lets you CC a limited number of adds. With all three groups (so nine adds) up, you can CC four of them. Once one of the groups go down (again, shared health pools, so the whole trio will go down at once) you will only be able to CC two. I'm sure there are different philosophies and strategies, but it seems that CCing two healers and one of each of the other groups is the way to go, then CCing two Blademasters once the Menders are down. When all the adds are down, it's time to burn the boss, and deal with some relatively heavy raid damage.

Basically, this is a chaotic fight until your raid learns how to CC.

The next boss here is Amber-Shaper Un'sok. This could be called an add fight, but the twist is that the adds are actually your own raid members, and they still have control of themselves. Periodically, the current tank will be transformed into an Amber monstrosity. The transformed player gets new abilities and has to do a couple things - first they need to make sure their Willpower does not run out or they'll die. Second, they need to use an ability to interrupt an automatically-cast AoE spell on the raid. Then they have to try stacking a debuff on the boss (or the giant add in phase 2,) and finally, they need to break free once the raid has put their health down to 20%. There are three phases, one in which you're hitting the boss, another where you're hitting a non-player Amber Monstrosity, and a third in which Un'sok will target anyone in the raid with his transformation, so you'll wind up with a whole bunch of Amber guys desperately trying to burn the boss before their willpower runs out.

Finally, you come to Shek'zeer herself. Honestly, it's a pretty simple fight. There are two phases, based only on time, that alternate for most of the fight. When Shek'zeer is out, you dps her and the tanks have to swap so that they do not get mind-controlled. There's a bunch of other stuff, but basically after two minutes, she'll retreat and a bunch of adds come in. They have a whole lot of abilities that you can basically ignore on LFR and just AoE them down. Once these guys are dead (or if you take too long,) she'll come back and the fight begins anew. At some point, phase 3 starts and she begins to do cone-AoE fears and such, but overall it's surprisingly simple.

When Shek'zeer is dead, the Sha of Fear flees to the Terrace of Eternal Spring. The Mantid threat (at least the current one) seems to be dealt with, but the Sha is still out there.

While I would have liked some kind of Lorewalker Cho - style narration through Heart of Fear, it's also nice to be fighting toward someone who you've heard about. Heart of Fear isn't the most amazing raid we've ever seen, but it's not bad either.

Hopefully in the next week or so I'll have done Terrace and be able to talk about that. I've actually seen three of the four fights in it, but I figure I'll wait to try to give the complete picture.