How to not fail at Siege of Orgrimmar LFR mode, -or- SOO LFR Cliff Notes.

My hardcore raiding days are behind me and have been since Wrath of the Lich King ended. I never really did much raiding in Cataclysm and my guild’s attempt to recruit for raiding in Mists was met with a dead server that had no interest in.. well, anything.

With that in mind, I’ve spent most of my time “raiding” (and I use that term loosely) the LFR modes of the current raid content in Mists of Pandaria. LFR is basically a dumbed down matchmaking version of the current raid content, made much easier to compensate for 25 strangers working together for the first time. Bosses have less health, hit for less damage and lose out on some of their more demanding mechanics. This is common knowledge for any WoW player, but this is mostly a console-related blog so that’s more an FYI for the newbies.

With the LFR-mode opening up this week for the first wing in Siege of Orgrimmar, I eagerly hopped in with my Moonkin to check it out, pray to Elune for loot ugprades and, as usual, deal with the typical asshole turd-bags in random raid groups. LFR is where internet trolls go to thrive on the emotions of the random passerby, littering chat with their parasitic attitudes, pulling and despawning raid bosses for “the lols” and calling out the undergeared who aren’t performing up to their high standards. In otherwords, a majority of the group are people you would never want to associate with and I typically remove myself from raid chat unless I’m not familiar with the boss we’re killing.

Unfortunately, with SOO being the new raid.. I wasn’t familiar with the bosses we were killing. So far I’ve run the place twice (normal run plus a second round for bonus rolls) and it’s fairly straightforward, but every group has had a shitload of trouble with Norushen. I won’t go in to great detail about each of the fights, but rather give you the TL;DR version so you know what to expect your first time in.

Immerseus

Immerseus is the first boss in SOO and has a similar mechanic to the Megaera fight in Throne of Thunder where each time you “kill” him you remove a portion of his real health bar. He’s a stationary boss, much like Ragnaros or Murmur, and repeats two phases until he’s dead.

Phase 1 – Tank and spank.

During this phase, your group will want to spread out around the circular room surrounding Immerseus. His health will drop like a rock and he’ll eventually get sucked underwater in to some bathtub whirlwind type deal.

Phase 2 – Kill black, heal blue.

When Immerseus submerges, he’ll launch little blobs around the room that will make their way to the center. If they get to the center, they explode for raid-wide damage. Black adds can be damaged by the raid, while the blue adds need to be healed by the healers. Adds can be snared, so as a Moonkin I make good use of Ursol’s Vortex, Typhoon and my Wild Mushrooms while everyone else pew pews them to death.

Each time Immerseus “dies” his primary health bar will reduce further and further and he will despawn much more often until he reaches the Bill Compton “true death”.

The Fallen Protectors

The Fallen Protectors occurs immediately after Immerseus as there is no additional trash to clear on the way. Each of the three protectors need to die within 15 seconds of the others or they will start to regenerate health.

The best general strategy is to get each one of the Protectors (Rook, Hu & Sun) to 66%, then to 33%, then to 10% before stacking them in the center and exploding them to death with Heroism/Bloodlust as and much AoE as possible.

The only things worth noting about the encounter are that any adds summoned take priority over the Protectors and need to die ASAP. Kill adds, go back to Protectors, repeat. There is also a phase which requires all players to stack in the center to avoid a corrupted ground-like ability, quickly G’ing the F O afterwards to avoid getting Panda spin-kicked to death.

Norushen

Ah, Norushen. Dear, sweet, annoying as a multi-boxing Elemental Shaman summoning 4 Fire Elementals at the same time in battlegrounds Norushen. Where do I start with you?

The first thing I want to make clear is that all of your DPS will have a debuff that causes them to deal significantly less damage to the boss. They can, however, damage the bosses health by killing the adds spawned around the room. You can also ignore the enrage timer on DBM as it doesn’t exist in the LFR version.

Adds come in two flavors — stationary casters with smaller health pools and larger, melee-based adds that need to be picked up by the off-tank before they start 2-shotting DPS and healers. The great part about having so many adds as a Moonkin is keeping my Moonfire/Sunfire DoTs up to fish for Starsurge procs ^_^. Anyway, yeah, adds > boss.

While you’re not doing much damage to the boss and dealing with adds, Norushen will shoot a death beam (a la Durumu) around the room. It’s not a buff, so don’t stand in it.

The final mechanic is what makes the encounter go by rather slow *or* rather fast. I’m lying, it’s always slow as fuck. Sorry. In the real raid, there are orbs that you interact with to be taken to another realm for a role-specific “test” — DPS kills adds, healers heal, etc — and once the test is over you are ported back to Norushen, now cleansed of your debuff, thus dealing normal damage to him.

In the LFR version, Blizzard has taken the liberty of randomly selecting players to be ported over to the otherworld. So far I have spent 7 of my 9 attempts never once being ported over to cleanse my debuff so my usual 400k+ crits are widdled down to that of a level 85 in quest greens.

Mix all of these together, overcome with a few Determination buff stacks and move on to the final boss in the first wing of SOO, the Sha of Pride.

Sha of Pride

Sha of Pride is a bit of a pushover considering Norushen is such a pain in my feathery ass.

Have everyone stack behind Sha on top of each other. He’ll buff a random person that, in turn, buffs people around them at random and you want to spread that as much as possible.

Sha will randomly imprison people in the corners of the room and these players need to be released by stepping on the colored buttons around them. Nothing more, nothing less.

Follow the typical rules of “adds > boss” and “that shit on the ground isn’t buffing your DPS, so get out“, Heroism/Bloodlust around 20% and enjoy your possible T16 chest token. I didn’t.

I’m sure I’m missing a few things here and there, but with this basic information you can relay it to your group in such an easy way that even the non-English speaking players on Gallywix can understand. Hopefully.

If you feel I’ve missed something important, let me know and I’ll toss it in here somewhere. Otherwise, enjoy SoO and don’t get too annoyed by the overwhelming supply of assholes in LFR.

-CBA