Castle Nathria LFR Wing Two Tank First Impressions

 The second wing of Castle Nathira is now open, and once again, we haven't actually faced Shriekwing, the first boss of the raid on other difficulties.

Instead, we have Sun King's Salvation, Artificer Xy'mox, and the Court of Blood.

There are all fights with about three million things going on, but we can boil them down to the essentials:

Sun King's Salvation:

This is a Valithria Dreamwalker-like fight in which the healers are the DPS - at least for most of it. DPS is mostly there to make sure that the adds go down quickly enough, and tanks will need to focus on some Stoneborn adds that require a tank swap. Periodically, a Shade of Kael'thas will show up, which does a frontal cone fire attack that needs to be dodged and has its own tank-swap debuff - the tanks will just trade him and the stoneborn. The Shade prevents Kael'thas from getting any healing, but DPS against it will heal him. This one's the easiest of the wing.

Artificer Xy'mox:

In the long run, probably the hardest, as it requires coordination and personal responsibility - both banes of LFR. The key mechanic is that two players will be singled out, given a few seconds before they take some damage and then drop a wormhole gateway where they are. Stepping into the gate will let anyone transport to the other one. You then use these wormholes to escape various deadly mechanics. Tanks will need to swap periodically as the active tank will get a debuff that explodes, damaging everyone around them.

There are some big line attacks similar to the boss in De Other Side to dodge. One phase two, the boss will start spawning exploding wild seeds, which can be picked up and moved (and should be moved to the opposite end of the room,) later exploding for massive damage in a huge radius.

The third phase is the real killer - there's a sword in the floor that will sometimes start to suck people toward it and then explode for massive damage. You want to have one portal entrance near the sword and one outside its radius so that you can allow yourself to be sucked in and then jump out before the detonation.

Court of Blood:

This fight is bonkers - there are three bosses, which you'll kill sequentially (we found doing Niklaus first was easiest.) Tanks will need to swap two of them (the two male Venthyr) as they have stacking debuffs they put on the tanks. DPS needs to kill adds asap.

Periodically, the bosses will retreat and the raid needs to find their spot on the dance floor, then move to the glowing red tiles to do the proper moves of their dance. You get a stacking haste buff when you succeed, or lose that buff and take some damage if you fail.

Each time one boss dies, the others heal to full and get a new ability.

Overall, this wing feels like a whole lot, but we did have three weeks of practice on the last wing, so I imagine we'll get the hang of this one eventually.