You can either single tank or two-tank this fight. I’ll cover both scenarios to the best of my knowledge. Single tanking is fun, and useful if you need to increase your raid’s dps to beat the fight, but it is difficult and it requires quick reflexes and defensive play. Two tanking is much more stable, and allows both tanks to play offensively, but you won’t get as much total raid dps.
Brewmaster and Gearing Stuff
- Talents:
- Tiger’s Lust – Helps with picking up the jailer and helping other raid members escape Thok’s fixate.
- Chi Wave – Burst healing is really important to surviving at high damage and vengeance levels.
- Ring of Peace – The silence works on the bats (necessary to keep them from healing) while the disarm works on the jailer.
- Dampen Harm – The scariest part of this fight will be breaths. Dampen Harm can cover quite a few breaths and works great on that first breath that happens while you still have low vengeance.
- Xuen – Very good dps on the bats that spawn, and useful later for single target dps on the boss.
- Glyphs:
- Glyph of Guard (optional) – There isn’t any magic damage to absorb in the first phase, so Glyph of Guard is a bad idea if you struggle there. But if you struggle during one of the later phases, having a shield nearly devoted to the magical breath attacks is incredibly powerful.
- Gear:
- Rook’s Unlucky Talisman – The AoE damage reduction works on Thok’s breath attacks. It’s ridiculously powerful here, especially for single tanking.
- Vial of Living Corruption – Not quite so potent as Rook’s, but more frequent usage of Guard is valuable.
Fixate
Single Tank
- Cooldown usage – You want to plan your cooldowns well for this fight. The most dangerous times are: high stacks of Fearsome Roar (the tank debuff), high stacks of Deafening Screech (the raid debuff that will make it very hard for healers to do their job), right after picking him up, and the bats. Here’s an example of what I did, though it will vary based on trinkets and available cooldowns:
- Phase 1 with glyphed Guard: @4 or 5 stacks of Roar, Rook’s -> Dampen Harm -> Fortifying Brew (phase should end)
- Phase 1 with unglyphed Guard: @3 or 4 stacks of Roar, Guard -> Rook’s -> Dampen Harm -> Guard -> Fortifying Brew (phase should end)
- Phase 2 w/ bats, Dampen Harm the opening -> Rook’s -> Guard -> Ring of Peace/Xuen as they come in range.
- Gear
- Play defensively, at least before you have a good handle on the fight. You’ll do plenty of dps just with your vengeance. Try a mastery build and the tanking legendary cloak.
- Frost phase: As the only tank, you’ll have to get 5 stacks of Freezing Breath and be frozen solid until your raid breaks you out. Save your big cooldowns like Fortifying Brew or a high vengeance Guard for these times, since you’ll have a few seconds of no avoidance or active mitigation.
Two Tank
- You have much more room to play offensively here, so a crit build is fine, with dps trinkets and cloak.
- Taunt swap the same as you would on normal, at about 3 or 4 stacks of each debuff.
Both
- The Jailer can be disarmed; try to do that while he’s affected with Enrage to avoid sudden damage increases.
- Tanks can’t be targeted by Thok’s fixate, so try to do your best on supporting the rest of the raid and maybe dpsing Thok if you feel comfortable. (Or unlocking doors if that’s your job.)
- If you’re in charge of unlocking doors, remember that it will take a few seconds before Thok responds. Try to unlock the cages while Thok is at the same point in his path so that your raid won’t be surprised by his positioning.
