Garothi Worldbreaker: Tank Perspective

I know what you're saying: "What? You're doing your raid overview before LFR is even out?" Yes, it turns out that my guild, who I often affectionately call the "clean-up crew," actually managed to beat the first boss of a new raid the very first week it came out. This might be the first time the guild has been so current in our raiding.

We even got the next boss (we did Hounds of Sargeras) down to 10% on our first attempt before we had to call it.

So let's talk Garothi Worldbreaker.

This guy is a huge Fel Reaver who peers over the edge of a cliff at the raid. It's a relatively simple fight, but the damage ramps up significantly as the fight goes on.

First, let's talk about the arena: it's a relatively rectangular room with a kind of blob of to the left as you face the boss (I can't remember how it orients regarding compass directions, so I'm going to act as if the boss is the audience in a play and refer to the boss as being Downstage, the cliff you jump from Upstage, and Stage Left and Stage Right referring to the way you'll be facing during the fight.

Tanks will need to swap pretty frequently due to Fel Bombardment: he'll mark the current tank and after about five seconds, they'll start getting bombarded for about 4 million fire damage, which hits three or four times. The good news is that if you keep moving, you can avoid most if not all of this damage. Remember the blob I mentioned? You want to run back upstage, stage left, and let the bombardments follow behind you before turning around and heading back to the boss. Tell your DPS and healers not to go into that area and you'll be fine.

There are two major abilities that the boss uses over the course of the fight: Decimation and Annihilation.

Annihilation places green circles on the ground that need to be soaked or they'll do raidwide damage. Thankfully, soaking the damage can be split between players, making the damage easily survivable.

Decimation marks individual players with a large circle, dropping a painful barrage at their location after it expires. Players with decimation should get away from other raid members, let the circle drop, and then get out of its radius. Just reserve that little blob stage left for tanks to drop their Fel Bombardments.

At 60% and then 20% health, the boss will lean forward and begin charging a nasty attack that I believe pretty much one-shots the raid. However, his two cannons - the Decimator and the Annihilator - are exposed. Pick one of them to attack (whichever ability you least wish to deal with) and kill it. This will interrupt the cast and also prevent the boss from using that ability for the rest of the fight.

After breaking the cannon, a few seconds later it'll cast Exterminate, deals more damage the closer you are to the boss. Everyone should run away from it asap until it goes off, then tanks should run in and pick the boss up again. While it loses an ability based on the destroyed cannon, it also gains a permanent 20% damage buff, meaning tanks are going to have a somewhat tougher time.

There's a decent amount of time to burn the cannons, so I recommend saving Time Warp and its ilk (my guild has a lot of mages and very few shamans) for later in the fight, when the damage gets more intense.

I'll probably have the first raid finder wing write up next week, but I'm also relatively confident we can take down the Felhounds on Normal next weekend. We'll see if there's much different in mechanics.