I actually downed this boss a long time ago, but as this is one of the more challenging fights in Throne of Thunder, I thought other people might want some insight.
Glyphs
- Guard. The most dangerous damage here is magical and you will only be using Guard against magical damage, so might as well buff it.
- Enduring Healing Sphere. You’ll have lots of relatively calm periods where you can place healing spheres or save up on Gift of the Ox spheres. It’s nice if they stay up for a long time.
- Transcendence. This glyph is changing in the next patch, but while you have access to the range-increasing version you should use it so you can make greater use of this skill.
Talents
- Tiger’s Lust. Useful for quickly moving to heads after transitions.
- Chi Burst or Chi Wave. I personally found Chi Wave more useful because in 10 man the smart heal was more effective raid healing, plus I could use it on myself while tanking. Chi Burst is really good if your raid frequently drops low during the transitions. When casting it, make sure your raid is between you and your target to maximize its effect.
- Optional
- Ring of Peace if your raid team has lots of AoE stuns, Leg Sweep if your raid team has lots of AoE silences. The adds spawned from the arcane head’s special can be silenced. Since they often channel a stun on your friends, this is a good idea. Your stun talents are also good here, but AoE stuns are a bit more common than silences so you risk running into diminishing returns with the rest of your raid.
- Diffuse Magic. Really powerful against the magical breath attacks.
- Chi Torpedo or Rushing Jade Wind. Xuen is bugged here and spends most of his time leaping around (should be fixed in 5.4), so you have to use something else. Chi Torpedo is good for raid healing during the transitions. If your raid doesn’t need additional healing, then use RJW for the single target damage or damage on the arcane adds.
Gear
If your raid has trouble killing each heads before the fourth breath, you will probably need to use an offensive crit build, with the DPS legendary meta gem, offensive trinkets, and offensive consumables. If your raid hits that dps check, you can be safe gearing defensively, like using the tank legendary meta gem, stamina trinkets, and stamina consumables. Since the majority of the dangerous damage you take here is magical, most of your stats will not contribute much. High health and relatively high haste (for frequent Expel Harms and Healing Orbs) will be your best bet, defensively.
Tank Swaps
We swapped during the transition phases. You could swap during the attack phases, but that risks a magic breath on the raid and getting smushed by their special no-one-in-range skill. Swapping during the transition requires that you kill each head before the fourth breath, especially if the blue head is active (because the fourth stack will freeze you).
To know what to swap to, you need to keep track of each others stacks. For example,
- Tank A starts on green, tank B starts on blue. Raid kills blue.
- Blue dies and transition begins with tank A having 3 green stacks and tank B having 3 blue stacks.
- After the transition, the two active heads will be green and red. Tank A has green stacks, so tank B has to go on green and tank A has to go on red.
Once your kill order is established, the spawn order will always be the same so you can just memorize where to go.
Cooldown Rotation on Breaths
- Guard
- Diffuse Magic or Healing Orbs or Fortifying Brew or Zen Meditation
- Guard
- Hopefully you never get a fourth breath since that means your raid’s dps is too low, but if it should happen, a cooldown left over from # 2.
Breath 2 is the most complicated and depends on what head you’re on and how much you can depend on your healers.
- Diffuse Magic is best saved for the red head because it also negates the DoT applied by that head. Remember to cast it right before or immediately during the cast (as opposed to the damaging channel), as it’s on the global cooldown. You should be able to use Diffuse Magic on every other head (depending on your raid’s dps)
- Healing Orbs (both from Gift of the Ox and self-cast) are best for the less hectic heads and if you have a dedicated healer. Prepare them ahead of time and step over them as the breath progresses. It’s always a good idea to prepare orbs ahead of time, even if you’re not sure you’ll use them, just in case you take more damage than expected.
- Fortifying Brew and Zen Meditation should be used for the most hectic heads, like those later in the pull. Note that the poison novas consume Zen Meditation (I know, a raid spell that actually uses the raid utility aspect of ZM, what were they thinking), so it might drop early if your strategy includes killing multiple green heads. Things will get really crazy on the final two heads, so try to save these two cooldowns for those.
Transcendence
Your use of this will depend on your raid’s kill order, but it can be very useful. For example, I use it on the first head I tank, green. Then use the transfer to get back to green next time I need to tank him. Pay attention to where you use the transfer, because your next transfer will be to that location. You can often use just the transfer without recasting it.
My Raid’s Strategy
Nearly every raid group has a different strategy for this fight, so I wrote this guide in the most general sense possible so it would apply to most. Following this section isn’t important, but I put it here for context.
Our kill order was:
- Blue (with Green and Blue active)
- Red (with Green and Red active)
- Purple (with Green and Purple active)
- Blue (with Green and Blue active)
- Red (with Green and Red active)
- Green (with Green and Purple active)
- Blue (with Purple and Blue active)
Our tank order was:
- Tank A on Green, Tank B on Blue
- Tank A on Red, Tank B on Green
- Tank A on Green, Tank B on Purple
- Tank A on Blue, Tank B on Green
- Tank A on Green, Tank B on Red
- Tank A on Purple, Tank B on Green
- Tank A on Blue, Tank B on Purple
We assigned two or three raid cooldowns per transition (depending on the effect and potency), and chained them as opposed to using them all at once. Avert Harm is pretty useful here.
If a tank was able to (in range), they tried to pick up all the arcane adds as they spawned. If a tank couldn’t easily pick them up (as was more often the case), we had damage dealers focus on blowing them up ASAP.