by Byron Mudry on Apr 01, 2013
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.
This is three phase fight against a beholder style creature that was created by Lei Shen's sorcerers.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.