ToT - Heroic Jin'rokh the Breaker

We have the possibility of fighting this guy again on Heroic tomorrow. Thus here is a post!

The hardest part of the fight is the Lightning Storm. Everything else, even the new Ionization, is very easy. The DPS check is very light, there's no chance he'll enrage. I'm more worried about hitting a third Storm than the enrage. As we know from our first run, the Storm is deadly. One interesting note for the healers: The unavoidable AoE damage from the Storm itself is LESS than in Normal mode! I verified this through several sources, including our own logs. It's not a LOT less, but enough that healers shouldn't have to be panicked over it.

IF raid health is high going into the Storm AND raiders don't get hit with the Strikes and Sparks then the AoE damage is fine.

The trick then is to not get hit by Strikes and Sparks. Unfortunately, I haven't found any real "trick" to that. It's mostly just watching the ground and dodging. You should NEVER get hit with an actual Strike. Make sure you move out of those circles on the ground! I HOPE you never get hit with a Spark (a Diffusion), but that's less deadly. Still very bad. A Strike hits for about 400k and a Spark hits for 200k. This part of the fight is not at all about DPS, it's all about Survival.

Actually, if you have some sort of CD that will reduce the damage you take in this phase, but you are using it for Ionization, you might want to change that.

Here is a WoW forums thread about the Lightning Strike with a lot of discussion. Mostly it's just "dodge balls, don't be bad." There are a couple suggestions for hanging out at the grates like we tried, but there are also suggestions that doesn't work. At least one person thinks the Strikes hit close to players, which means that if all of us group up, we're likely to get more Strikes closer together. A better suggestion I saw was to have two loose groups to spread the Strikes and healing out more.

Some other general tips: Zoom your camera out and point it down so you can see more of the area. Don't move too much, just enough to dodge Sparks. Look around to see if any are coming from far away and prepare. Four Sparks come out of each Strike in an X or + pattern. There's always a 90 degree angle between the Sparks and they go in straight lines. There's just a lot of them.

Also here is another guide I found with a few suggestions. It's a paladin focused guide (Aanvil and Kulgarr!) but most of it is very general. Here is the relevant quote:

• They travel quite fast, if you have any movement boost, use it at this time, along with any magic damage reduction spells
• Devotion aura if everyone’s getting low
• Divine protection can be used every time
• Divine shield can be used either once or twice (unbreakable spirit) and should be saved for this phase rather than avoiding the application of ionization
• Speed of Light is a good talent for this
• They do A LOT of damage and if you get unlucky, you can get hit multiple times by one beam
• Move to right or left, not backwards or forwards
• Watch far away so you know if you need to move and can gauge how much time you have to cast
• Don’t move if you don’t need to (kind of obvious but keep it in mind)
• The hardest part of this is, even if your raid is completely perfect, they will still be taking ticking damage from lightning storm. Remember how I pointed out why it was less on heroic than normal? As a healer you will need to heal and run. My advice is your raid needs to loosely stack, either two groups or one group. If you’re in the melee range of the boss, get holy prism for the instant heal. If you’re in range, get light’s hammer and put it on the ground a few seconds into the lightning storm.
• I’d get holy avenger because we can essentially run and heal with this for a long period of time. The other use for holy avenger is to put an EF on everyone right before lightning storm when you’re still standing in conductive water so you get the 40% boost.
• You’ll need to be able to watch for incoming bolts and people’s health bars. Don’t panic about people dying. If people don’t get hit by bolts, they will not die and if they do die to the bolts its not your fault. the regular ticking damage is manageable.

Hopefully that's useful. Overall, I don't think there's much fancy strategy we can come up with to make this easier. Each individual player needs to learn to dodge Sparks and do whatever it takes to stay alive. We'll likely get two Storms, but maybe three. Even if we lose some people to a third, he'll be almost dead so we can kill him anyway.

If anyone has other thoughts, please share them! If you can think of any similar encounters you can go practice on, please do so. Brawler's Guild has a couple bosses that may help. Deeken, a rank 4 boss, has lightning all over the floor you have to dodge. Disruptron, a special card boss at rank 8 also has lazers and stuff to dodge. If you have access to either, try the fights and see how long you can last. Don't worry about killing the boss, just see if you can take zero damage from the environment for 2 minutes.

Every place says this is a very easy boss (I even see PuGs doing him) so we should be able to kill him! Just gotta learn to dodge some Sparks.

You beat me to it! I agree, it's just about to that point where Normal mode is boring. Lei Shen can still be a killer, obviously. Sign-ups currently look very good, so I'd like to try Jin'rokh again. If the Storm is just driving us too insane, Ji-kun looks fairly easy.

How much time do we want to spend on a Heroic mode? How much do we care about re-clearing everything every week? We blew through 9 bosses in one night last week, so we could probably get pretty far on a Monday.

Almost everyone is at a fairly high ilevel, 520 is pretty much the "floor" for us. I'm sure there are still an upgrade or three for nearly everyone too, but it's also possible RNG will never give them to us. :) For ME, re-clearing each week isn't important. Runestones I can just get from LFR anyway. Loaffy's shield comes from Primordius or Lei Shen, hah! ;)

One thing I would like to do is get everyone a Lei Shen kill. Mal and Bluepea (and Rom) are the only ones missing it. There is still time for that, a good month plus.

Hitting Heroics hard this week sounds great to me! Our Monday raid makes pugging very difficult unless we're doing the last part of the raid. So long as we can dodge Lightning, we can kill Jin. Otherwise, I'm very curious to try Ji-kun.

For Jin, I could save my Deterrence and use it during the Storm. That will reduce the healing load a little bit at that point, but I will need to be dispelled of Ionization instead.

Exactly what Kul said. Your gear is fine, Loaffy, even if your shield sucks. :)

We even know the strategy and have mostly executed it, but we constantly had one silly thing or other killing us. Like kiting an orb over a fissure, which everyone should know means death. Or not getting out of the water fast enough or someone standing just out of it, thinking they were out, but not really even though that's wiped us at least a dozen times even in Normal mode. It wasn't just one person, several of us (as we joked) came up with a variety of ways to wipe.

Our best attempt, the 1% wipe is when we almost did it all right. All the silly stuff didn't happen, but we ended up with four deaths to the Lightning Storm. Even so we almost pulled it off anyway, ONE more person living through would have gotten us the kill. We CAN do it, we just need to avoid those silly mistakes and we'll get it.

As for the Storm, there's not much more I can add that this thread doesn't go over. So I'll just say what I do. When the Storm is starting up, I move away from the boss towards a grate. Not all the way into it, I want some room to move. I have my camera zoomed way out and pointed mostly down. Then I watch for Sparks and I move out of their way. Essentially, that's it. I look for where the Strikes are going to hit and get a little distance from them, then I can dodge the Sparks from them and move to where that Strike was, since there shouldn't be another there right away.

Also key is looking out in the distance, getting the Big Picture. If you just react to Sparks close to you, it's easy to get cornered by a bunch. But if you look ahead and see all those coming, you can make a big adjustment early on, finding a whole new location if necessary. Yeah, it's tricky, but look at this. That's all Diffusion (Spark) hits for all Jin'rokh wipes. I can't separate out how many were intentional hits after a wipe, but it's still interesting. You CAN dodge the hits, though I'm fully aware that it's going to be harder for the healers than anyone else.

We can kill this guy and I'd really like to so we can kill something else. :)