The Lootsaurok must be laughing his ass off from his grave right now. He knew fully well that the next boss after him wasn’t going to be a cakewalk like he was, lol.
We didn’t have Wok or Zarm Tuesday night, so we started a fresh Throne of Thunder run with me and Tyledres tanking, Van, Slice healing and Pix (Zug), Adoe, Shadeey, Psynite and Ryugan as dps with Sorak flex healing. I brought Caden for the first few fights and even solo’d Council with him, even though it was really shaky (sorry about that healers, lol). I had trouble holding onto the bats on Tortos with Caden, so I switched back to Arv and we finished the night killing the turtle and Megaera.
Wednesday night, we got Wok and Zarm back, but Van wasn’t feeling well, so Sorak went heals in her spot and Tyledres switched to dps. We took Zarm’s lockout from last week, so we started with the Dark Animus. But before we got to deal with the Animus, we had to deal with those stupid Ritualists first.
Give me the snail trash leading up to Ji-Kun any day, because this trash is horrible and annoying. For whatever reason, we had trouble with our interrupts last night, with the short-range Ritualists getting their casts off, wiping the raid. We had lag, DCs and even weird things going on with our AoE interrupts that kept us from killing these guys. After a good 15-20 minutes, we finally took them out and prepared ourselves for real fight in Dark Animus.
We started off similar to our attempts last week, with Wok and I grabbing two of the small Anima Golems and everyone else grabbing one. Because we were tanking two Golems, Wok and I had to position ourselves in between both adds to prevent Acceleration Link from happening. If the two got linked, both adds would gain an attack speed and damage buff that would eventually just smash us.
Instead of activating one of the Massive Anima Golems off the bat like we did last week, we dumped the Anima from some of the small Golems into the disabled Large Anima Golems. The priority was to take one of the two adds from the tanks and the adds attached to Slice, Zarm, Psy and Zug, being careful not to accidentally activate a Large Golem, thus preventing them from using their annoying AoE Crimson Wake on us.
We then took Wok’s add to activate one of the two Massive Anima Golems, leaving the other one alone. The Massive was brought to the middle of the room, where the remaining small Golems attached to the rest of the raid were killed one by one, filling the Massive. Our goal was to get the Massive to 36 Anima, so we used a couple of the small disabled Golems around the room to top it off. Healers had to deal with dispelling Matter Swap, which wasn’t too big of a deal, unless a tank was involved, which would put us out of place from tanking our targets. The Massive Golems also use Explosive Slam, which does damage to anyone in front of them and applies a debuff that stacks, so we would do a tank swap at around 4 to 5 stacks.
Once the Massive Golem reached 36 Anima, we finally activated the Dark Animus, also bringing him to the middle of the room, but not stacked with the Massive. The Dark Animus will then begin to drain the Anima from the other Golems in the room. Every six seconds, the Animus takes one Anima from every Golem, even disabled ones. When it reaches 100 Anima, the Dark Animus will wipe the raid, acting as the enrage. So with the Massive being at 36 Anima, this gave us basically 3 minutes and 36 seconds to kill the Animus.
While tanking the Dark Animus, he will cast an Anima Ring, which will apply a damage debuff when you come into contact with one of the spheres. I had gotten so used to running through them in LFR that it caused a couple wipes while we were working on this fight last week. So instead, we had the melee dps break the spheres, giving me a lane to run through. We did a tank swap between the Massive and the Animus after the second or third Anima Ring, when Wok’s Explosive Slam stacks got high. The other ability the Dark Animus will do is Interrupting Jolt, which does a lot of damage to the raid and interrupts any spell that you’re in the middle of casting.
It took us most of the night, but after everyone got their assignments and positioning straightened out, we finally got our kill. I was so focused on tanking the Massive Golem that I didn’t realize we were done until the Bonus Loot Roll window came up on the screen, lol.
After our kill shot photo-op, Sorak wanted me to grab a screenshot of his emote for his Spirit “Lyss” Totem. I think he just misses having our favorite lock in our raids, lol.
That kill puts SR at 9/12, with one more wing to go, the Pinnacle of Storms. We put some attempts on Iron Qon and got to his second Quillen a couple of times before calling it a night. I have a feeling this fight is going to take a good number of attempts to finish; the tornadoes in phase 2 bring back bad memories of Alysrazor tornado dodging during Firelands, lol. Looks like we better pull out our Jordans again for this fight!
