Ahead of the Curve: Antorus! - Part 1

It took us two weeks, and we went the long way around, but Argus fell!


Just thought I would do a quick review of the bosses on Heroic and give my opinions on the raid so far.

Garothi Worldbreaker

Despite his rather ominous title he didn't prove much of a challenge on any difficulty level.  Standard opening boss fare easing us in gently, barely more than a check to see if you are awake until you get to Mythic. 
On Heroic, we 1-shot it from a ninja pull with no tactics discussion which should give you an idea of the tuning.  It only took us 4 attempts to kill it on Mythic!


A couple of mechanics we've seen before but the tanking one seemed the most interesting... it was a re-hash of Iron Reaver's mechanics but with a series of missiles targeting the tank forcing them to keep running to avoid them.
We had some fun with our BM Monk laughing at the Prot Pala's poor attempts at running :-)

Felhounds of Sargeras

These two dogs look amazing!  Apparently, you can get them as mounts too!
One fire and one shadow, they would make great pets for Tolkein's Balrog, their abilities follow suit.  Most of the Fire abilities need you to spread out while the Shadow abilities force you to stack so the difficulty, and the fun, comes when the abilities overlap.

Antoran High Command

aka The Chain Lightning boss!
Three different bosses fought in sequence which have more of an impact when they aren't on the battlefield than when they are...
One of them summons reinforcements to die to my Chain Lightning (or more accurately, the Warriors and Boomkins)
One throws mines all over the field for us to avoid
One calls down a volley from the Paraxis to devastate the battlefield!


Thankfully, as each ones leaves their pod to engage us hand to hand, we can jump in to use their own weapons against them!
If you think back to Amber-Shaper Unsok from Heart of Fear in MoP, the 'vehicle' mechanics were quite tough and killed a lot of pug runs.  Well, Blizzard have made sure that doesn't happen this time!  :-)
You only get two buttons, 1 to spam on the boss and 2 to hit on cooldown to counter the specific boss abilities I mentioned.


All in all, the fight ends up being a little lacklustre.  Do the basics (dodge mines, interrupt one of the adds) and it is incredibly easy to kill, I'm hoping for more on Mythic.

Portal Keeper Hasabel

Another AoE fight??
Indeed, Chain Lightning gets another good runout here as there are even more adds than on High Command.


I really like the thinking behind this fight... There is a main platform where you fight the boss and the adds she summons. 
In addition, there are three 'themed' platforms you can access via portals (Fel, Fire and Shadow)
Each of these portals has a miniboss to kill and, more interestingly, different debuffs you can pick up to help you on the other minibosses.
On Heroic, you use the Fire debuff to light up the Shadow platform and can only damage or heal things that are in the 'light'.


Each debuff has it's own drawbacks and I'm really looking forward to Mythic where you need to use them all, and use them properly.
Alas, on Heroic, the most difficult part of the fight has been keeping our tank alive.  He has a tendency to get knocked off the platform by one of the abilities.

Eonar the Lifebinder

Killed this three times now and still haven't got a clue what's going on!  :-)
In some strange homage to Tower Defence games, trash walks along three rather convoluted paths trying to reach and kill Eonar in the centre.


Some of the trash have abilities, I looked up what they were at some point but they haven't proven to be particularly relevant as yet with everything dying in seconds to the ridiculous mass AoE we bring with 2 Warlocks, 2 Boomkins, 2 Ele Shaman and a Warrior amongst others.


This goes on for a while then you collect the loot.


I have had some fun on this fight though... you get a special ability (which works like the feathers on Elerethe) to help navigate the vast arena and using it with Stormkeeper allows you to fly through the air casting Chain Lightning everywhere!  Great fun :-)


More to come soon...