World of Warcraft Patch 5.2 brought with it the release of the Throne of Thunder raid which is the third tier of raiding in Mists of Pandaria. While it is considered one raid for normal and heroic mode, for LFR players it is broken up into four sections. Each of these sections are available to queue for separately and are covered by a separate guide on this side.

This guide covers the third section of the Throne of Thunder LFR and the three bosses you will encounter in it. The bosses found here are Durumu the Forgotten, Primordius, and Dark Animus. This guide is meant for LFR players only, as it covers to most critical elements of the LFR version of each encounter. The full versions of these fights are more complicated and demanding and require more in depth knowledge than provided here.

Similarly, tanks are covered here briefly and it is possible to get through the LFR version with what is listed, but really if you are a tank you should do some more research and know the fights in more depth.

As an added bonus each boss also has a really short version of the essentials that can simply be pasted into raid chat to ensure that everyone knows the 25 words or less version of the fight.

If you haven't checked out Part 1 or 2 of this guide you can find them here: Throne of Thunder LFR Guide - Part 1, or Throne of Thunder LFR Guide - Part 2.

Durumu the Forgotten

This is three phase fight against a beholder style creature that was created by Lei Shen's sorcerers.

Durumu - Phase 1

This is the main phase of the fight and is active whenever one of the other two more specialty phases is not active.

  • Durumu has two abilities that combine to force a repeating tank swap. They are Arterial Cut and Serious Wounds. The first applies a bleed that is only removed once the tank is healed to full health, the second is a stacking debuff that lowers all healing on the tank by 10% per stack.
  • Lingering Gaze marks two random players that must then get away from the raid before it clears, as they will drop a void zone that causes damage when it does.
  • Force of Will is an AOE cone that will push you away and potentially off the platform to your death, make sure you avoid this area.
  • Lastly and maybe most importantly is Life Drain, luckily this will not show up until you have cleared the other phases once. This ability stuns a random target and starts draining life from them and to Durumu. Players must move in front of the affected player to intercept the beam as the longer it deals damage to a single player the more damage it does (and therefore the more healing as well). Swap players in progressively closer to the boss until this effect ends.

Durumu - Phase 2

  • This phase happens roughly 40 seconds into the fight and then on a repeating timer afterwards of about 3 minutes.
  • Several red clouds and a blue cloud will appear and then 3 beams to connect players which are yellow, red, and blue.
  • The yellow beam is where the tanks should stay, moving with it.
  • The red beam deals damage to everyone in it while you are killing the Crimson Fog.
  • The blue beam needs to avoid the blue cloud and stay still.
  • Kill the all red clouds to move to the next phase.

Durumu - Phase 3

  • This is an avoidance phase that takes place about 2 minutes after a phase 2, in it Durumu will start channelling a beam on the floor. This beam will create a patch of death that must be avoided or you will be killed. In addition throughout this phase he will deal raid wide damage from his Mind Dagger ability that needs to be healed through.
  • It is critical to survive this phase by making your way through the beams path. If you have time to continue to DPS go ahead, but otherwise just focus on making it through alive.

Durumu Macro
/raid Get away from raid when marked, block Life Drain as far from boss as you can. Phase 2: tanks in yellow, healers in blue, dps in red. Phase 3: LIVE.

Primordius

This is a cool fight that has some different strategy elements to it that can be a real issue in the normal mode fight. In a LFR group it is a bit simpler due to the lower damage levels and can be done in a simpler manner than the full normal mode fight. This is the method described here.

  • The boss is immune to DPS until players are "Fully Evolved".
  • Adds called Living Fluid will spawn around the room that move to the boss, DPS them down before they reach him or they grant buffs to him.
  • Once killed the adds drop pools that continue to move towards Primordius There are two kinds: Volatile (purple) and Mutagenic (red). Players should collect the red pools and the tanks should kite the boss away from the purple ones.
  • The mutagenic pools grant random 2 minute stacking buffs to those that collect them until they get five buffs. the buffs are are: +5 stats, +10% mastery, +10% haste, or +10% crit.
  • Once you have 5 buffs you become fully evolved and can damage the boss, however any further mutagenic pool you collect will apply a random stacking debuff that lasts 5 minutes and is 2x stronger than the buffs you where collecting.
  • Any volatile pool that reaches the boss heals him by 10%
  • Whenever an add reaches the boss he will gain energy, whenever his energy reaches 100 he will gain a stack of Evolution which grants 10% more damage and an ability. There are 6 different abilities that he can gain, and he can have up to 3 at a time (any newly gained one replaces the oldest he already had). Most of these are AOE or raid wide damage abilities.
  • Primordius also has a frontal cone that requires tanks to keep him faced away from the raid and a stacking debuff that requires tank swaps to keep in check.

In the LFR version of this fight is is usually enough to allow a few DPS to quickly stack the 5 buffs to become fully evolved and then have the tanks kite the boss around the outside of the room away from the first few volatile pools so as to not allow him to heal from them. Other players make sure they keep focusing on the adds until they get buffed as well. Once you have enough DPS chasing him you can either continue to manage the buff / debuff mechanic or simply allow the living fluid to reach him and deal with the increased damage and buffs while DPSing him down.

Primordius Macro
/raid Kill adds, collect red pools until mutated then DPS boss and avoid red pools, keep boss kiting away from purple pools.

Dark Animus

This is a rather complicated fight that takes most groups a while to figure out correctly. Luckily it is not a rushed fight so you have time to work through it to complete it correctly. Once learned it is not that hard, its all about positioning and planning. You will not even fight the boss until at least a minute into the fight and likely much later.

Anima

  • Anima is the main mechanic in this fight, as it activates the various golems around the room. At the start of the fight you activate the central orb in the room which sends 100 anima around the room to several of the 25 golems.
  • There are several sizes of golems and each can hold different amounts of anima. The golems hold 8, the large golems 16, and the massive golems hold 32 anima.
  • The various golems have different abilities however a key one to keep in mind is the Acceleration Link, which boosts all damage golems deal if they are together (within about 5 yards) by 250%. This means you need to keep them apart at all times. Generally you want the anima to move from the regular golems to the massive golems, the large have an annoying ability called Crimson Wake which deals damage to players in its path and chases a random player making positioning them for an anima transfer to the next golem difficult.
  • When a golem is killed the anima will move to the next nearest golem that is either not yet active or has room to hold the inbound anima.
  • Once anima is allowed to reach the main boss he will become active as well. If he ever has all 100 anima he will wipe the raid.

Dark Animus Abilities

  • Syphon Anima draws 1 anima from each active golem every 5 seconds until they die.
  • Touch of Animus is cast when the boss becomes active and throughout the fight. He will select a random target and place a DOT on them that deals damage every 4 seconds until the end of the fight.
  • Once the boss has 10 anima he gains Anima Ring. This ability puts a debuff on a target causing them to take 50% more damage for 15 seconds
  • Once at 25 Anima he gains Anima Font. This causes a target that is affected by the Touch of Animus to deal AOE damage to those around them.
  • Once at 75 Anima he will gain Interrupting Jolt. This deals significant raid damage and silences anyone that is caught casting for 8 seconds. It does have a long cast time though so can be seen with plenty of time to stop casting.
  • If allowed to reach 100 Anima, he will become fully powered and start almost one shooting players every second leading to a fast wipe.

The key strategy here is to try to stack anima into as few golems as possible before activating the boss. Once activated he draws anima from all active golems over time and therefore he draws less if fewer golems are active.

Dark Animus Macro
/raid Pick up golems, keep separate, kill marked one near massive. Stack anima to 3 massive golems. Once boss active DPS down quickly.


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Last Updated: Mar 18, 2016

About The Author

Byron has been playing and writing about World of Warcraft for the past ten years. He also plays pretty much ever other Blizzard game, currently focusing on Heroes of the Storm and Hearthstone, while still finding time to jump into Diablo III with his son.

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