Who said summer raiding progression was dead? =)
With our success with downing Megaera last week, we went back into Throne, hoping to get a new boss kill under our belts. Tuesday night went by quick, clearing everything through Tortos, leaving Megaera for us to kill Wednesday. We had some trouble placing/clearing the frost patches on the hydra, but we were able to get the monster down again to set up the stage for the flying avian.
I’ve only done this fight as a tank in LFR, so all my experience has been on the main platform. I tried to listen to Adoe explain the mechanics and strat for the “Nests” team, but I got lost and just left it for them to handle, lol.
The main platform mechanics were simple: avoid the slime puddles and Caw, pop cooldowns during Quills, try to stay on the platform for Down Draft and tank swap after two stacks of Talon Rake. We split the platform into four quadrants and had the ranged and healers keep the slime within a single quadrant as much as possible before moving as a group to the next one. We had the dps soak up the puddles to keep the platform clear, but not more than one or the debuff would be too much for the healers to handle. For Quills, I used Devotion Aura as well as my own CDs to mitigate the AoE damage going out.
Down Draft is where things get a little tricky. Ji-Kun will attempt to blow you off the platform during this ability, but if you fall off, you’ll get carried back to the top. Immediately after Down Draft, Ji-Kun will Talon Rake the player closest to her. So as a tank, you cannot fall off the platform and need to stay as close to her as possible. This is where speed boosts come in handy. Speed of Light is great for paladins to have; it’s not enough to run through Down Draft and inch back towards Ji-Kun, but it holds you in place and keeps you from getting blown off. Just make sure to warn the other dps that can actually get through Draft with faster abilities, like Warriors *cough*Zug*cough* and Rogues *cough*Psynite*cough*, lest they get one-shotted by Talon Rake.
We made good progress on Ji-Kun all night and had a 7% wipe as we hit our raid time of 11:30 pm. We decided to go for one more pull since we came so close and as with most infamous last pulls of the night, the big bird finally went down.
After the raid, we talked a little bit about what we wanted to do, now that we are halfway through Throne of Thunder. One suggestion was to extend the lockout and make the push through the next half of the raid, but some said that they could still use drops off the earlier bosses. So we’ll probably start fresh again next week, hopefully get through or up to Ji-Kun in one night, leaving Wednesday for more progression.
Next up, Durmoomoo and his annoying beam and purple badz. I thought this fight was already bad on LFR, we’ll see how really bad it is on normal mode, lol.
