Now, for the final part of this guide. Part 4. By now, you should be pretty pumped to defeat the current adversary of LFR. And the final encounters are more or less decent with Lei Shen being mid to hard depending on your group. At this stage, I think most groups can one shot him and it’s all about communication. But let’s start with everything leading towards the conclusion of the Throne of Thunder.
First, you’ll pick up the last area where you’ll face spiders, blobs and lizardmen en route to your first boss. None of these are challenging and some tanks might just try to gather up as many as fast as possible since these mobs don’t pose a great deal of threat to the raid. Once you reach the door, you’ll face a group of stone lions and two mini bosses. Pretty much you can go AoE nuts on these mobs until you face the mini bosses. The mini bosses have a cone ability and knock back. But truthfully they aren’t much of a threat and provide an additional 20 Valor Points.
Iron Qon
Most of this fight will be a tank-n-spank + stay out of shit type of fight. Your tank will pick up Iron Qon and for the first phase, you will be focused on dpsing him. The one mechanic you need to watch out for is his throw spear. When the spear lands, a small maze of fire will spread in various lines. You need to avoid this fire as it will give you a debuff that causes you to burn. If you can’t attack him, don’t try skipping over the fire but try running around. Hopefully, your tank will position him correctly.
After you nuke down his mount, he will mount a new one and take to the sky. You will be sucked into the middle of the room where tornadoes spawn. You’re supposedly to fight your way out of the center. Sometimes, warlocks might create Demonic Gateways to the safe zone. If you’re caught in the tornado, you will be stunned and swirled around. So do what you can to get to the clear end of the room.
At that point, he will continue chucking his spear to create two more sets of lines in lightning and ice. The ice will slow you so you’ll want to avoid it as much as possible. And it will cause a debuff on you as well. During this phase, he will put up two shields. A good tank will position him so that you can move around him and attack his unguarded sides. I believe you can also get “glued” to the floor during this phase if you stand in the ice. So again, you want to avoid the lines on the floor.
Once you destroy his mounts, you face Iron Qon himself. Here’s where you want to blow your cooldowns and bloodlust. It’s very damage intensive so you might want to stack up so your healers and lay their AoE heals down on you.
Next you’ll face another group of adds which aren’t too tough on the way to the Twin Consorts.
Twin Consorts
This fight is another pretty easy fight. There is a mechanic of doing some odd drawing thing but leave that to the experts. Most of this fight you will be facing one add or another. There are two: blue and red. You start off fighting blue and this phase is pretty straight forward as it’s just a tank-n-spank fight. Red is slightly more difficult as the consort ends up being a slight chase type of fight. Your tank will kite this add towards the blue ice crystals around the room. At the same time, the red consort will rush off and return causing the Flames of Passion to spawn in her wake. Just avoid stepping in these. The objective in this fight is to typically get each add to 20% (or whatever low percentage) health then nuking red and finally blue. Not much of a description from me just because this fight is pretty simple overall.
The next group of adds are pretty damage intensive. You’ll face a Lightning Guardian and Thunder Lord twice in two separate rooms. The main issue is that they have an ability called Conductive Shield. When it’s on, you want to avoid attacking the add because you’ll damage yourself in the process. There will be a ton of lightning damage going out, so you’ll want to watch your health as you fight these adds. Again defensive cooldowns and any extra healing helps here.
Defeating the first pack, you’ll go up a stair way en route to the next group. You’ll want to rush up the stairs because it becomes charged. Ranged can stand where the platform is on the outside to avoid the damage. So again you’ll want to just avoid taking too much damage. Once you kill these two off, you’ll face your final encounter.
Lei Shen
I think at this point many groups are one shotting this boss. You’ll have your occasional rotter group with the poisonous jerks who’ll do things to grief parties. But mechanics-wise this fight is actually pretty easy. The first thing is that the raid leader needs to set up signals around the room on the four corners with separate colors. At that point, someone (preferably the raid leader) needs to define the groups who will be assigned per corner. Because LFR is 25 man, you’ll have 4 main groups with the 5th group spreading. Each corner should have at minimal one healer. To figure out which group you belong to, look at your toon’s portrait. Above it you’ll see a small “Group #” denotation. So if the group says purple group #3, then during the intermission phase, you need to run over to the purple signal that your raid leader has set up.
Once the tank pulls, you’ll essentially run around the room to each corner. For the first phase, you need be wary of the lightning whip (which looks like a giant grayish mark on the ground) and the Thunderstruck abilities. When you see these, stand on the opposite side so you don’t get hit.
After moving to each corner of the room, you’ll enter into the Intermission phase. This is where the setup that I mentioned earlier plays a key part. Once you group up, you’ll face 1-4 mechanics. First, you might see someone turned into a giant (Overcharged). Everyone needs to stack up on that person in the group. Second, you’ll see someone with a blue arrow above their head, which is the Static Charged mechanic. Again stack up with that person. Next, you’ll see a pool of blue on the ground (Diffused Lightning). Make sure each person covers them in your area and cover spots that are empty. If you miss, an add will spawn.
Eventually, the intermission phase ends and you will face Lei Shen again. This time, one section of the room will be charged up so most people will avoid it during the second intermission phase. Some of the key differences in this phase while you’re fighting Lei Shen is that you may encounter more bouncing balls and tons of adds. DPS adds if they appear and make sure you cover the bouncing balls area before they hit the ground. This will repeat until you reach the intermission phase where you repeat the tactics from the previous paragraph again.
Once that phase is over, Lei Shen will be in the middle and most tanks end up tanking him there. This part will be a semi-movement heavy phase, combining different aspects of the previous phases into this one. You have to watch out for the conductive ground and will need to once again watch out for both the lightning whip and the Thunderstruck mechanics. This time, you’ll be put into a pushback type of mechanic similar to Lei Shi. So you need to move behind him asap. Again at this phase, blow all your cooldowns, bloodlust and nuke him down while avoiding the whip and other mechanics.
At any rate, that’s my little LFR guide to Throne of Thunder. I hope you enjoyed it. It’s probably not the best guide out there by a long shot but I hope to give you enough of an overview of what to look out for just to get you started. Some small pieces of advice in addition to all of this:
- Focus on mechanics for boss fights above all else. Don’t worry about being a turret and tunnel vision on a single monster. Worry about the environment and get a feeling for how an encounter is structured.
- Focus on survival next. That means always be wary of mechanics in a fight like watching out for stuff on the ground or watch out when you’re health rapidly drops. Always be mindful of debuffs you have and avoid situations where your stacks grow too high.
- Always let the tanks pick up the threat. I’ve been in too many situations where I became overly enthusiastic, started attacking a boss then would get one shot because I ended up becoming #1 on the threat meter. If you need it, get something like Omen to help you monitor your threat. Fights like Ji-Kun can inst-kill you if you’re not careful.
- Learn the environment. Study it. Get a feeling for it. Ask questions if necessary. But don’t be a dunce head and dive in head first before everyone. Let people guide you so you don’t make the mistake of others. In short, try following and not leading.
- Be patient. For myself, it takes roughly 3 tries before I feel comfortable on these encounters. With 10 90s, I have a lot of opportunities throughout the week to master these encounters. It’s all about patterns and learning where to be and what to do at the right moment. But you need to give yourself the chance to learn and master these encounters.
- Communicate with your group. Never forget the Golden Rule. Be respectful and if things go really well, mention it to people. LFR has a horrible reputation because people with negative attitudes contribute their mental damage to others and this disease spreads like AIDS. However, you should give praise to help mitigate this damage and compliment your group when things do go well. I believe that LFR is a great tool but a lot of the damage can be reversed through proper communication and having a positive attitude.
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