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Thok the Bloodthirsty 10 Man Normal

Thok The Bloodthirsty 10 Man Fidelity

Thok is indeed quite bloodthirsty, and the animation when you explode under his feet is adorable. I didn’t realise I was made up of that many sizeable chunks.

We pretty quickly decided to one tank the fight, because Paladin. However, I did omit to discuss with our man mountain Hagrim about using Divine Shield for the stacking Freezing Breath debuff. It is a testament to the success of active mitigation that when you have a tank encased in a block of ice, they tend to die with alacrity. Aside from the freezing breath, the other mechanics designed to encourage a tanks swap, “just require more healing”. Probably a phrase that shouldn’t be in any raid leaders vocabulary, but it does make up for lack of nuance with brevity.

For each static phase we would stack up next to Thok’s feet, and burn him down. We use a Hand of Protection at about three (or five) stacks of Acceleration followed by Tranquility, followed later by Aura Mastery. Throw in a Spirit Link Totem or a Healing Tide Totem as well as healer’s personal cooldowns, and the static phase can last quite a while.

When Thok is on the move, we use just Hagrim and melee to burn down the jailer, and Hagrim controls the transition back into the static phase by opening the gate for the prisoners.

We let a prisoner out, only to watch him get eaten. That seems cruel. What is awesome however (note how restrained I’ve been with that word on the blog) is that as the prisoner is quickly digested, they literally change how the boss behaves. Thok eats a saurok… and he starts spewing ACID. He eats a Jinyu and starts turning our raiders blood to ice. He eats… (what IS this guy?) a fire dude, and this dinosaur starts BREATHING FIRE, and setting people alight….

For the last static phase, we spread out, only stacking up to force a final phase change to finish off Thok. The art to managing this transition before you have the DPS required to avoid it, is to wait long enough in the phase while dodging the fire so that the overall health of the raid has dropped to near 50% without anyone dying and then stack quickly to force the phase. It’s also a good idea to pick a direction the whole group moves for when you inevitably have a fire patch spawn underneath you all. After the phase is forced, melee can taunt the boss with as vulgar expressions as your raiding culture allows while the ranged DPS finish him off.

That’s not a dinosaur…

 

Dinosaur

Bosses have been dying pretty quickly over the last couple of weeks, so while we catch up on our posts from Sha of Pride to Spoils of Pandaria, we’ll leave you with our first impression of Thok.