Throne of Thunder - Sippin' on Jin'rokh and Juice

Patch 5.2 has arrived and along with it a new raid, the Throne of Thunder, featuring the first king of the Mogu, Lei Shen.  We decided to skip on killing the Sha of Fear and finishing off the Terrace of Endless Spring to get a taste for and our feet wet in ToT.

Jin’rokh the Breaker is the first boss you’ll encounter in the Throne of Thunder.  He kinda looks similar to the first boss in the Drak’Tharon Keep instance back in Wrath, Trollgore, but much more ‘roided up and packing lots of lightning abilities.  The fight is a single phase fight with no adds to deal with, requiring two tanks and 2 to 3 healers.  After putting in a handful of attempts to learn the mechanics of the fight, we took down Jin’rokh with only a few of us alive at the end, thus defending our default spot at the top of Drak’s raiding progression list, lol.

One of Jin’rokh’s first abilities is Static Wound, which he will use on the current aggro tank.  You’ll need to do a tank swap for this; if Jin’rokh melees a tank with the Static Wound debuff, he will also do additional lightning damage to players around that tank.

Jin’rokh will then use Thundering Throw on the second tank, where he will pick you up and throw you against one of the four giant mogu statues in the room.  When you land from the fall, you will be stunned for 6 seconds.  I tried using Hand of Freedom to break this, but it doesn’t work, so this stun cannot be cancelled.

A small pool called Conductive Water will form under the stunned tank and will periodically grow and fill a quarter of the room.  This pool is beneficial to the raid as it will grant you Fluidity, which increases damage done and healing received while standing it in.  The tanks will want to try to drag Jin’rokh to the edges of the pool, so that the melee can benefit from Fluidity too.

Jin’rokh will then negate the Fluidity buffs by casting Lightning Storm, which will turn the Conductive Water in Electrified Water.  You definitely don’t want to stand in this as you will take massive damage and eventually kill you if you’re in it too long.

Jin’rokh will also cast Focused Lightning on a random raid member throughout the fight.  This will attach a lightning orb to the affected player and when the orb reaches that player, it will detonate and leave a Lightning Fissure on the ground.  You want to avoid leaving the Fissure around any of the Conductive Waters as it will deal damage to those standing in the pool.

From here it’s rinse and repeat. The four Conductive Waters act as the enrage timer, once the last pool becomes Electrified, then it’s pretty much game over as there will be no safe spot to stand in.  One thing we did notice is that when Jin’rokh picks up a tank for Thundering Throw, he will randomly choose a pillar to throw them against.  Most guildes said that this can be controlled based on the positioning of the tank; whatever statue was behind them, Jin’rokh would throw them against it.  Hopefully this is a bug and be fixed later; this will allow us to get Jin’rokh to create the pools in clockwise fashion.

As exciting as it was getting our first Throne of Thunder boss kill last night, I think the most memorable part of the night (at least for me) was the trash leading up to the next boss, Horridon.  I think this trash takes the cake, candles and all, as the most annoying and hilarious trash ever.  This definitely puts the Frogger trash in Naxxramas to shame.

There are these mobs called Spirit Flayers that slowly patrol the area and cannot be attacked due to their Spirit Lantern shields. But if you come in contact with their shields, you will be blasted off in the opposite direction.

This wouldn’t be so bad…if the room wasn’t consisted of platforms and bridges, lol.  I’m not sure if anyone else found it funny, but seeing people getting blasted off to their deaths literally put me to tears and made my sides and stomach hurt, lmao.  I know I saw Sorak and Zarm and Zug and even myself get knocked off several times.  Even Slice Leap of Faithed Sorak a couple of times into the path of incoming Spirit Flayers, trying to get him blasted and I even saw Wok panda roll off the edge of the bridge too.  =D

This won’t be as funny later when we’re finally farming and trying to quickly progress through ToT, but I know I had a really good laugh about it.  Epic trash is Epic. =)