Saturday, October 12, 2013

The Underhold: Tank Perspective

Yes, it took me a while, but I finally got around to running the third wing of Siege of Orgrimmar.

The Underhold is the first half of the massive complex Garrosh has built within Ragefire Chasm. You'll be fighting your way through lots of Kor'kron forces, as well as a number of beasts imported from Pandaria and Northrend.

Mercifully, this wing has 3, rather than 4 bosses, so even with the kinds of wipes you see in the early days of an LFR wing, it will still take less time than Vale or Gates.

Trash Before Malkorok:

The trash before Malkorok is fairly straightforward, but there's a lot of it. You'll need to make your way around to one of the side rooms, and then up the stairs to reach Malkorok.

Malkorok:

Garrosh's #2 and head of the Kor'kron (presumably Saurfang resigned in disgust at some point) volunteered to be dosed with Y'shaarj's essence and has thus become a fearsome dire orc.

This is a fairly simple fight, but puts a serious strain on healers, tanks, and DPS due to some unforgiving mechanics.

The core unusual mechanic to this encounter is Ancient Miasma, which will prevent ALL healing. However, your heals will be converted instead into a buff called Ancient Bulwark, which is a damage absorption shield. Ancient Bulwark cannot be more than 100% of your health, so healers will have to A: front-load a lot of healing on the raid, and B: be careful not to over heal.

During this phase, Malkorok does three things major things. One is that he will create purple void zones. Rather than avoiding these, you want 5 people to soak them, or else they will go off and damage the whole raid.

The other two abilities go hand in hand, and can be a bit of a memory challenge. Malkorok will do Arcing Slams, which deal a bunch of damage to anyone they hit, in a cone. After three of these, he will instead do Breath of Y'Shaarj, which will deal enormous AoE damage in any area that had been hit with the previous three Arcing Slams. So you'll need to remember roughly where those three areas are.

Malkorok gains rage as the fight goes on. When he hits 100, he'll go into a Blood Fury. At this point, the whole raid needs to stack on the tank to share damage, as he does something like 1.8 million per hit on Raid Finder, but it's split between everyone it hits. The good news is that during this time, the Ancient Miasma goes away, allowing you to finally heal up anyone whose health had dropped during phase one.

Blood Fury does not last terribly long, and then you simply go back to phase one. Rinse and repeat.

Trash Before Spoils of Pandaria:

I don't know if this works differently for Horde, but on the Alliance side, after defeating a few of the same kinds of trash mobs from before, High Tinker Mekkatorque will show up and engage the Kor'kron, permanently crowd-controlling everything between you and the next "boss."

Spoils of Pandaria:

Oh, Spoils. This is a weird, weird fight that is mostly about a tank's ability to gauge how much he or she can pull, and the rest of the raid's ability to keep up with the tank.

First, you need to divide the raid in two (which is a pain on LFR for the normal reasons.) Each groups should have one tank and three healers, and as even as you can make the dps (just split your raid as evenly as you can.)

After engaging the Titan chest in the middle of the platform, you'll be able to jump down into two rooms diagonally across from each other.

What you need to do is to shut down the security system. To do that, you need to release the Titan energy stored within the enemies that are shut in the boxes.

One team will deal with Mantid enemies first, and the other will have Mogu. Generally, I've found that the Mantid seem to be harder for whatever reason.

If you find yourself split too unevenly, there are chains you can use to jump out of your room and back to the high walkway where you begin the encounter, so that you can switch sides, but if you've split the raid up well, this shouldn't be necessary.

The smallest boxes have one unit of energy, and fairly simple enemies. The medium ones have, I believe, 6 energy, but are of course tougher. And the biggest boxes have mini-bosses that are considerably more dangerous, but also grant something like 12 energy.

Each side needs to fill the energy bar to 50, which will activate a lever that opens a gate to the next room. If either side wipes, or if the gate is not opened soon enough, the security system will kill the entire raid. In order to open the gate, both sides will need to be at full energy.

Once you've done this the first time, each side will come across a new room that has the other type of enemy, so the Mogu side is now the Mantid side, and vice versa.

As a tip: Tanks should be the ones to open the crates, just to let them have some control (and have an easier time picking up adds.) Try to crack open the next box when the contents of the previous box starts to get low. And remember that you can handle probably 3 or 4 small boxes, or 2 medium ones, or 1 large one, depending on the group. I'd usually try to make sure that there were always some small-enemy boxes open and at least one medium-box one.

Many of these enemies have abilities. As a tank, you'll probably not be super-aware of them. The key for tanks here is to be brave and pull a little more than you think you can, because that timer is pretty strict. And always have some open boxes unless you're certain that you'll have enough energy when the current enemies are down.

Trash before Thok the Bloodthirsty:

The trash before Thok is fairly simple. There are several bats that will lift raid members very high up and then drop them. There's a Yeti who works basically just like Icehowl in Trial of the Crusader (don't be in the way of its charge) and a Mushan that has a frontal-cone and a bleed that stacks.

With the trash cleared, Thok comes out.

Thok the Bloodthirsty

Thok is a giant Devilsaur that the Kor'kron are trying to turn into a beast of war. There are three jail cells surrounding the massive arena here, with Saurok, Jinyu, and Yaungol prisoners.

This fight is actually fairly simple, but requires precision in execution.

Thok will alternate between phases at certain health percentages (in Flex, Normal and Heroic it's more complicated than that, but it's just percentages on LFR.) The abilities in the Main phase will change as the fight goes on, but they're dealt with in largely the same way.

The Main Phase, Thok uses a cone-effect tank-swap, but also has a tail swipe, so tanks should step in when they taunt and step out when they're no longer on the boss. Thok does some periodic AoE, but nothing terribly complicated.

At a certain percentage, Thok goes into a Blood Rage and begins to chase a random raid member, getting faster as he runs and doing massive damage to anyone in his path. The affected raid member should kite him away from the raid and run as fast as he or she can.

At the same time, a Kor'kron Jailer will show up at the entrance to the room. Tanks should pick up this Jailer and drag them to one of the three cells (which roughly make an equilateral triangle around the arena.) DPS should focus down the jailer. When he falls, one player can right-click on him to take his key, getting a minute-long buff that allows them to open a cell.

The released prisoners will attempt to help you fight Thok, but instead, Thok will eventually decide to eat them, gaining new powers based on the guy he just ate. The Saurok gives Thok poison damage (though I honestly am not sure what difference the poison makes.) The Jinyu gives him frost attacks, most notably allowing his cone-attack to freeze enemies at 5 stacks, and requiring dps to break people out. The Yaungol gives him a fire buff, which is most notable in that he will begin to leave Burning Blood on the ground, meaning that the tanks will need to slowly move him around the arena (gradually, and without turning too much, if possible.)

After all three prisoners are dead, it's just a race to kill him.

Conclusion for the Underhold:

The Underhold is two refreshingly conventional fights with a really, really weird one sandwiched in the middle. While the initial trash is a little thick, it's not quite like Gates of Retribution. And given that this is one fewer boss than the previous two wings, it should be relatively quick and easy for those who want to get a wind down quickly - assuming that people get better (and I include myself here) in Spoils of Pandaria.

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