World of Warcraft: My Ranking of Mist of Pandaria LFR Bosses

After doing all the LFRs for Mist of Pandaria uncountable times, I decided to come up with my own list that ranks from the easiest to most difficult bosses in LFR. This comes strictly as someone who has done every encounter on all classes as a DPS except for the monk.

1. The Stone Guard (Mogu’shan Vaults) – Without question, this is the easiest of bosses in the entire expansion. I encountered two wipes only because of the way the tank couldn’t position the boss and that was early on in the expansion. But this pretty much is the essential tank and spank boss. You can almost ignore the vast majority of mechanics and just nuke this boss down. If you find yourself having issues with this boss on LFR mode, well, you might consider a new game.
2. Feng the Accursed (Mogu’shan Vaults) – The first time I did this boss, it was a little confusing and we wiped. But that was in the first week when this boss came out. Since then, this boss ranks up as one of the “relaxing” bosses.  Most of the mechanics in this fight that can wipe a raid mostly will depend on the tanks’ positioning as well as people getting out of the proverbial fire.
3. Gara’jal the Spiritbinder (Mogu’shan Vaults) – The trash leading up to this encounter is far more difficult than Gara’jal himself sadly (and it’s a recurring theme as you’ll see). Fittingly, this boss ranks up there in terms of simplicity. It’s virtually possible to ignore the add portion of this fight and just nuke the boss down while healers work through the bolts. The only other thing that can screw up this encounter is if some jackoff decides to be funny and make Gara’jal run around the room. In general, he’s pretty stationary and doesn’t do much.
4. Imperial Vizier Zor’lok (Heart of Fear) – Again, the trash leading up to this encounter is far more difficult than this boss. The mechanics for this fight at the LFR level are pretty straight forward though and layered nicely. But I find this encounter to be hard to wipe on these days.
5. Sha of Fear (Terrace of Endless Spring) – For this fight to fail, you pretty much require a really bad tank. I mean, the tank has to be at the bottom of the barrel and perhaps intentionally trying to wipe the raid to make this fight tough. The thing is that all the tank has to do is stand in a little circle and make sure the barrier of light is up when the Sha issues out his fear. That’s it. Oh there’s the little room but that’s a non-issue, unless, again, the tank is wretched. Honestly, I find this fight to be quite boring and there’s been times when I accidentally fell asleep during the encounter. You might even be able to get away with just focusing on the boss and ignoring the adds outside of the light barrier (not recommended)
6. Grand Empress Shek’zeer (Heart of Fear) -This boss sadly ranks only slightly higher than the Sha of Fear and that’s mostly because of the fact that the tanks have to work to position the boss in the correct spot. There’s some healing intense phases but like the Sha of Fear, this fight for the most part is pretty dull. Probably, the only threatening aspects to this fight are the long fears and debuffs you receive. If the healer isn’t paying attention (and it happens), you can die a lonely death. Otherwise, you can probably sleep through most of this fight.
7. Jin’rokh the Breaker (Throne of Thunder) – Bosses that do not move are ones that I tend to rank high on the easy scale. Jin’rokh is another one of those “paralyzed” bosses that just sit in the middle. For a melee DPS, this fight is a sleeper. Ranged DPS (and healers for that matter) face the only difficult mechanic, which is to kite a lightning ball away from the raid. Tanks can fail here if they do not quickly position Jin’rokh into the pool. But other than these elements, it’s a pretty easy fight overall.
8. Protectors of the Endless (Terrace of Endless Spring) – This fight is only slightly annoying because of the occasional movement factor. People with enrage dispelling abilities can fuck up a raid if they fail to remove the healing from the targeted boss. Pretty much that aspect is the only real threat in the LFR version. Some tanks might move the bosses away from the healing waters. If they constantly move the boss around too much, the fight can become really annoying for melee. Beyond that, there really isn’t anything aspect that can threaten a group. I only had a single wipe where the enrage timer was reached and that was due to a combination of low DPS and failing to dispel healing.
9. Twin Consorts (Throne of Thunder) – Surprisingly, for a near end raid encounter, these two bosses are pretty easy. For the most part, it’s a tank driven fight whereas everyone else pretty much needs to stay away from stuff on the ground and keep up with the tank. Again, the only annoying aspect to this fight is having to keep up with the tank and occasionally watching for things on the ground. But it’s more visually chaotic than mechanically chaotic.
10. Megaera (Throne of Thunder) – This really is a healing intensive fight more than anything. Most of the failures in this fight occur as a result of tanks not positioning the heads correctly and having the group get sprayed by the heads’ breath. Or someone infected with Burning Cinders either not moving away from the group and/or someone dispelling Burning Cinders directly in the middle of the raid. And of course, there’s the adds in the back. But as with most encounters, the trash aspect leading to this encounter are far more difficult than the encounter itself. And the difficulty is mostly in avoiding the trash.
11. Wind Lord Mel’jarak (Heart of Fear) – This fight isn’t that complex. The hardest part and the area that causes most of the headaches is when groups do not properly CC the healers using the spears on the wall. However, even with all three healers up, this fight can be handled as long as people interrupt their heals. Usually, the issues I’ve seen beyond the CC’ing of adds (or when adds accidentally are “awakened”) is that tanks end up being undergeared and end up dying fast or people are not broken out of the amber traps fast enough. Of course, there’s the odd resetting of the boss but that’s more of someone being an asshole or inadvertently running down the stairs.
12. Elegon (Mogu’shan Vaults) – Sadly, I must rank this fight pretty high because people fail on some of the easiest mechanics. There’s a lot of people who also accuse this boss in creating latency problems since visually it is a very intense fight. But the fight has become a running joke mostly as a result of the falling floor mechanic. You can’t help but palmface as you see numerous people drop to their deaths. I’ve probably been in one encounter with Elegon where the entire group did not drop to their death. That tells you something. Maybe people do this intentionally to get carried during this fight? Either way, this fight has become way harder than it should be for too many groups.
13. Blade Lord Ta’yak (Heart of Fear) – I actually really like this fight. It’s a fun fight. The one mechanic that I thought would be hard ended up being one of the funnest aspects to this fight (i.e. the running part). Again, the fight is very tank dependent as it’s important for tanks to position the boss correctly. Most end up just sticking around in one spot which causes a ton of tornadoes to build up. Then when Unseen Strike happens, it’s occasionally difficult for people to stack up since someone can become inadvertently hidden behind the tornadoes. Usually, you’ll hear frustrated tanks calling out to the other tank to “taunt!” just as they bite the dust. Despite all of this, I don’t find the fight to be that frustrating even though you can go through a few wipes now and then still.
14. Primordius (Throne of Thunder) – This fight again is visually more frustrating than it really is. But it’s actually a pretty reasonable encounter. I do think that the voice acting is pretty awful and annoying. I like Gollum and all, but….this gets ridiculous. That all said, I tend to look forward to this encounter. You can still find failures mostly because the tank again doesn’t move or the DPS fail killing the sludges to transmute. But those situations are pretty rare. I think the difficulty in this encounter is just the high movement and pausing during the fight just to kill more sludges to get back your transformed status.
15. Tsulong (Terrace of Endless Spring) – This encounter can be an absolute nightmare when the tanks do stupid shit either inadvertently or even intentionally. There is a lot going on in this fight and requires you to be on your toes because of the light circle, watching your stacks and dealing with the healing phase. You can still wipe on this encounter and probably will see it more because the good tanks probably aren’t doing this encounter anymore. But it’s not too chaotic where it feels completely out of control.
16. Iron Qon (Throne of Thunder) – This is not a terribly difficult encounter but there are elements that can make it frustrating in an unnecessary way. It’s another one of those “get away from stuff on the ground” encounters, but this one is a tad more difficult. Because of the long lines that randomly sprawl from the thrown spear, the boss can be somewhat of a pain to reach and may force you to cross those lines and incur some damage. The tornado effect in the middle can add frustration if the boss is positioned towards the middle. Once that part is over, the main issue I’ve seen is dealing with the damage at the end of the fight. There’s a huge amount of damage output and I’ve seen occasions where the party drops pretty low. So while the mechanics are not that tough, there is some level of tension during this encounter.
17. Council of Elders (Throne of Thunder) – I don’t mind this fight too much compared to others but it’s not uncommon to see or enter to a wipe with the fail buff. This fight is a priority fight. Although the Cliff Notes version has everyone just doing “Melee on Sul, ranged on Empowered/Purple d00d,” the oversimplification of this fight can cause people either to tunnel in terms of mechanics and forget about important aspects such as adds or allow the Empowered boss to reach 100 Dark Power and cause a raid wipe. Once a wipe happens though, someone with better knowledge tends to explain the fight a little more in detail. But it really shouldn’t take a wipe to get people angry enough to explain the fight in more detail.
18. The Spirit Kings (Mogu’shan Vaults) – This is one of those fights I end up dreading because it’s long, tedious and people fuck it up really easily. And yet the fight has been around for some time. It always annoys me how tanks easily die in one shot to this encounter then scream right afterward for the rest of the team to “stack up!” But this fight can get really chaotic and probably is one of the more challenging fights in this expansion because of the layered mechanics. In reality, the fight is nicely layered in terms of the mechanics as each boss adds one mechanic from the previous boss. However, without fail, the mechanics of Qiang and Meng are what end up screwing the group up on average. Qiang will probably kill the tank immediately, forcing the group to use up a battle rez unnecessarily while Meng will cause the group to do too much DPS on themselves, which will wipe the group.
19. Will of the Emperor (Mogu’shan Vaults) – Some people found this fight to be anti-climatical for as the end boss encounter for Mogu’shan Vaults. Yet it remains one of the encounters that still causes LFR groups to be griefed, cause turmoil and have people yell at each other. That has to be worth something in terms of difficulty. The fight itself is another layered fight in a gauntlet style. Although the fight primarily is an add fight, the lack of communication aspect in LFR is what makes this fight harder than it appears. For instance, the Strength adds can be CC’d, but people will break the CC since no one communicates which one should be CC’d. Bad tanks might position the bosses in spots that make avoiding the Devastating Arc even tougher to evade. Yet there are some really good mechanics such as avoiding the Devastating Arcs five times to receive a bonus action, which sadly might get ignored because people don’t understand how to handle the basics of this fight.
20. Tortos (Throne of Thunder) – This is a fight that visually is a clusterfuck which causes it to be a play style clusterfuck. There’s so many things that can go wrong in this fight and it can be a challenge for a range DPS since the fight pretty much makes range DPS classes the stars in this encounter. Yet given the history of how most ranged DPS end up acting like turrets, the heavy movement aspect forces them to be in for a real shock. Some classes can really suffer in this type of environment like mages where long cast times might end up penalizing them. Arcane mages might have it the roughest with their stupid Rune of Power that they have constantly position. Also, bad tanks can often times mis-position the bats or even completely forget about the bats, leading to numerous wipes.
21. Horridon (Throne of Thunder) – This fight feels really chaotic and can be rough. But the dynamics of the fight make it challenging in that there are numerous phases to this and understanding the priority of adds can make it tough for some groups. Everyone needs to be on their game in this fight. Healers have to be conscious of dealing with poisons. Tanks must wrestle in positioning Horridon correctly as well as grouping up the adds. DPS need to kill the correct adds and avoid all the crap on the ground. But it’s not an impossible fight and I think the large arena setting gives people good breathing room compared to other encounters which are claustrophobic.
22. Ji-Kun (Throne of Thunder) – I think down the road this encounter will still be difficult for most people. The nest aspect (which I admittedly haven’t done nor will do) trip up a lot of groups. Unlike other fights which are layered, this one bombards you with different mechanics. And it’s not just a simple “GTFO of the shit on the ground!” type of encounter. The tiny platform doesn’t afford much room for movement and that aspect becomes precious as it slowly fills up with green puke. Then you have to deal with the Caw where being close to others causes additional damage. This fight can be pretty unforgiving and has some of the most infamous adds leading up to a boss.
23. Lei Shi (Terrace of Endless Spring) – I might’ve stated this before but when this encounter first came out, I felt it was a warm welcome compared to most of the encounters in the Heart of Fear. Over time, I began despising this boss with a passion. Lei Shi has to be one of the most frustrating bosses in Mist of Pandaria. The add fight leading to Lei Shi is such a horrible waste of time. But this fight earns my ire because of how I really believe the game internally cheats in examining when people blow their cooldowns. The phases themselves are not tough. The adds within the phases are not tough. The mechanics of the phases are not tough. But the transitions between these phases make you want to strangle Lei Shi and the designer like Jack Torrance choking Danny Torrance in The Shining. For instance, you might be a Retribution Paladin who has his major burst cooldowns ready. Just after blowing them, she’ll transition into the hiding phase where you just wasted all your cooldowns. Yes, this fight is a cooldown management fight but add the stupid voice acting and the lack of communication from tanks from doing a simple task like marking her protectors….Oh and let’s not forget the horrible loot table. As if this encounter wasn’t one of the worst things on this planet, the fact that you would have to farm this boss for a giant loot table and more often than not receive double gold make you go from wanting to choke the designer, to dropkicking him off the Empire State Building. Also, WTF is this stupid anime boss doing right before a major encounter like the Sha of Anger? This fight reeks of retardedness on multiple levels.
24. Lei Shen (Throne of Thunder) – This fight has a lot to it and it has been nerfed. But it’s completely doable and that’s the main reason why I haven’t ranked it higher. It’s actually a pretty weird fight since you have that bizarre intermission phase. I think in the scheme of things this fight will become easier over time in that there’s really not much to the fight beyond setting up the four corners and assigning people to groups. Usually, failures that occur here result from improper position by tanks, failures in tank swapping, too many people dying from easy standing around stuff on the ground (most likely because it might be the first time they’ve seen this boss) or letting adds overwhelm them. But I don’t think this fight really is that tough; just that people will remember it as the fight where tanks drop out.
25. Dark Animus (Throne of Thunder) – Ah, Dark Anus. I actually think this fight is slightly more challenging than Lei Shen. Mostly, my reasoning is that the add portion at the beginning is just so chaotic. Worse yet, people never listen when it comes to the “NO AOE!” policy. Yet once Dark Animus appears, the fight’s difficulty reduces to that of the Stone Guards at worst. It’s just once the Large Golems appear, everything goes to shit since people run around with their heads cut off and end up wiping the raid with so much shit on the ground. I have a feeling that because of the Large Golem portion, this fight never will get any easier and that people will continue to have problems.
26. Garalon (Heart of Fear) – One of the major roadblocks in Mist of Pandaria, this boss was so infamous at the beginning because of the poor design that Blizzard nerfed it into the ground. And yet with the nerfs, Garalon still presents groups with numerous wipes. Everything that can go wrong will go wrong with this fight. I made a pretty large rant about this fight before. But just to recap, you start off by something simple like some idiot sitting like a goof where Garalon will appear, thus starting a fight like premature ejaculation. Then you have the morons who for whatever reason stand above the stairs rather than below it, EVEN AFTER YOU WARNED THEM. On those occasions, it gives me great pleasure bringing my priest along just so I can forcibly move them off the stairs. Then you have people who don’t know how to kite the boss or people stepping in shit on the ground and grabbing the pheromones from the kiter. And tanks never stand in front of the boss where they should. Then the best part that happens all the time: people constantly entering the little purple circle despite all the warnings from people. There’s nothing more frustrating than watching the same people touch that circle and cause Garalon to crush everyone. Even as someone who understands the mechanics, the fight is a bitch because of how you have to focus on the legs. Sure, it’s a simple concept but it all depends on where Garalon is. If a new leg spawns on the opposite side, either over the wall or near where Garalon does his frontal cone, then you really can’t do much. Or trying to avoid all the puddles on the ground without grabbing pheromones. It’s just not a very fun fight overall and the person who designed it should be fed to Garalon as fitting punishment.
27. Durumu the Forgotten (Throne of Thunder) – I think Garalon in the long run will become the boss that people will remember infamy the most. But Durumu will definitely rank side by side against Garalon. Honestly, after doing this fight on multiple toons, I’ve found that it’s not so bad. But there’s that one mechanic that will always present issues: the maze. I’ve gotten significantly better at that aspect but it’s something that really should never have existed and makes this encounter fairly difficult. Sure there are other aspects to this encounter which are moderately challenging (meaning dropping off Lingering Gaze away from the raid, which apparently is quite challenging for most people), but the maze itself was the LFR killer for a short period. You can one shot Durumu these days, but the design of the maze aspect was pretty nefarious and more than likely will cause groups to continue to wipe for quite a while.
28. Amber-Shaper Un’sok (Heart of Fear) – I written constantly how much I hate this encounter and so my view on why this is the most difficult encounter might seem extremely partial. Maybe Garalon or Durumu deserve a higher ranking but I will hate this encounter no matter what. Like I’ve stated in the past, this encounter is terrible as a result of horrible UI. I’m not talking about plain mechanics, but it’s an issue with the abrupt change from just using your character’s interface to something that gives you little warning nor preparation. The fact that you have no choice and that you are randomly selected make me hate this mechanic with a passion. And invariably when you get selected, you will die at the end, even if your group does not wipe. It’s a horribly unfair mechanic and the designer should have his nuts put into a blender at slow speed so that he can witness the agony of all the players having to deal with this retarded engineer’s idea of UI.

I hope you enjoyed my little evaluation of the bosses from Mist of Pandaria’s LFRs. Please feel free to add comments and debate my selection.

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