So when my guild came upon Horridon, second boss of Throne of Thunder, something interesting happened. We read up the fight, saw kill videos, but when it came to executing the fight, we just fell apart. This happened first on normal, then again on Heroic. We’ve since killed him, and after a while I deciphered why this fight was so uniquely difficult for us.

Tank:

Tanking is a very important aspect of raiding. If your tank can’t generate threat, your DPS can’t do damage. If your tank doesn’t pick up mobs, your healers can’t heal properly. As far as add fights like Horridon goes, the situation is best put into a little list of the priorities for the tanks:

Pick up the adds Corral the adds. Do not move them unnecessarily.

The tank’s first job is to make sure mobs don’t hit healers or DPS. Second, they have to make sure the adds are in a position where dps can do their job properly. For example, a Death Knight could hold threat on 3 mobs that are spread out via diseases ticking, but that doesn’t actually help DPS that require them to be stacked, like Monks, Elemental Shamans, Hunters, etc. Sure, tab dotters can damage those just fine, but unless you have no one in your raid that requires clustered mobs, that’s probably not okay. Lastly, consider how certain classes AoE. Destruction Warlocks put down Rin of Fre, Monkins Hrricane, etc. If you’re just moving the adds everywhere while you pick up more, they can’t use those abilities. Also consider fire on the ground. Melee may not be able to move through the fire with you, and will lose globals if they can’t keep up.

So what happened in our case? Since the tanks weren’t able to corral the adds after picking them up, the DPS couldn’t AoE/multi-target properly. The DPS sees that nothing is clumped, so they begin single targeting. Because the tank is using AoE abilities to pick up adds, and probably not able to commit too much damage to individual targets. Once DPS start single targeting one target rather than distributing their damage (and thus their threat) throughout targets, they start pulling aggro. Most tanks’ first reaction when they see their threat plates turn colour is to instinctively taunt it back. Now taunt is down for 8 seconds and more adds are rushing out of the door. Since the tank no longer has taunt, he has to walk over there to pick up the adds, further dragging everything along. The vicious cycle may repeat again, where another single mob gets pulled. The outcome is that not only did DPS/healers get hit unnecessarily (which we’ll put aside for now), but that the adds were never in a position to be AoE’ed.

Knowing that Dinomancers are the first priority, people probably dropped everything to go kill it, rather than being able to cleave it down in the clump. Interrupters either have to give up an interrupt target (which is okay sometimes), or give up damaging the Dinomancer. In the former case, stuns, fireballs, and venom bolt volleys may go out. In the latter, there may be an extra set of adds that spawns because you failed to kill the Dinomancer fast enough for the gate to be destroyed.

By giving up overall damage, you’ll begin to be overwhelmed. The worst thing to happen on Horridon is to be overwhelmed. Every door has mobs that don’t do much alone, but in numbers are incredibly powerful. It’s mostly the little adds from Drakkari door. When everyone in your raid has a little add beating on them, the disease stacks go up faster than you can cleanse. Depending on your composition, you may not even have the luxury of cleansing the raid, since the tank is also overwhelmed by the disease + mortal strike. Things get out of hand quickly from there. The big adds living longer means more fire: Sand traps, Living Poisons, Frozen Orbs,and Lightning Totems. While it is possible for you to be so overwhelmed that you run out of places to stand in the arena, it’s much more likely that you’ll be dead from incidental ticks, or inability to move freely to dodge other abilities.

This situation is best handled via communication. Establish beforehand what mobs you’re going to pick up and how. For example, on each of the doors, the adds that come out of the gate are much less dangerous than the ones that jump into the arena. In a perfect world, a tank would be able to pick up and hold everything, keep them corralled, not stand in fire, and not have unnecessary movement. However, since nobody plays perfectly, alternative solutions have to be explored.

Consider that the gate adds don’t melee for much. It’s okay for them to be on healers/DPS for a short time. If you are ahead on damage, it is acceptable to move extra amounts or not have adds corralled all the time. What if an add spawned 30 yards away and you have no taunt/ranged abilities to grab it? Depending on what the add is, you may be forced to drag adds with you to pick up the new one, or you may be able to just wait a few seconds for taunt to come back up. This could be further improved by planning your taunts.

What I often observe is a tank expending taunt and threat abilities without planning. A mob lands next to him, he taunts and proceeds to build threat. Did he really need to taunt? Couldn’t he have just hit it once? What if two adds spawn like that? If he taunts the one next to him, the other one is now most likely running loose. Same could be said when someone pulls off the tank, and they taunt back. The tank could just as well hit it once and grab threat back, and save taunt for something more important.

A decision also has to be made in terms of how important it is for you to pick up an add. Generally, the only adds that are absolutely imperative to pick up are just the ones that hit hard. There are other factors like interrupts and kill priority, but the tank isn’t always needed for those. Picking up a mob doesn’t necessarily mean to drag all your mobs to it. You compare the loose add to the adds you picked up previously, and decide which one is more important to pick up. Maybe it’s better to let one of the Bloodlords run loose, just to make sure you will be able to pick up the Venom Priests that spawn right after.

Admittedly, the above isn’t a very graceful or elegant way of handling everything, since in the ideal scenario, you’re never put in that situation. However, there are still ways you can do the fight cleanly without perfect execution from the tank. This involves lots of planning and communication.

Raid:

Tanking and threat doesn’t have to solely be the responsibility of the tank. There are many things individual players, and even the raid as a whole can do to help, like utility abilities (which include Threat, Reposition, CC), and positioning as a whole.

Imagine the scenario that your raid is now 20 wipes into Horridon, and you seem to always fall apart on the double spawn Frozen Warlords on the Drakkari door. You’re able to pick up one, but the other is just out of your reach. This is where the raid comes in. There are so many abilities between 10 people, just at your disposal. Consider that the Frozen Warlord is completely immune to all forms of CC (I’ll have to verify). You could have someone taunt it to you (Monks, Paladins), have someone redirect threat (Hunters, Rogues), or have whoever it is targeting use a threat drop (Fade, Vanish, Hand of Salvation). Alternatively, you could also utilize the raid’s positioning to your advantage.

This may look like a pretty standard way of positioning everything, but notice where the healers are relative to the tanks, and the spawn point. The idea is to always place the tanks between where the adds spawn and where the healers are, so regardless of whether the tank actively tries to pick up the add, the add itself always has to run through the tank. The ranged DPS can float anywhere they want, but they have to keep in mind that some ground AoE can only be placed on ranged, and thus they don’t have to hinder melee. The healers’ position should always be as far towards where you’re headed, which on this fight means they should be further clockwise along the circle than everyone else. They will still need to position such that they can reach both tanks. Also worth mentioning is that this style of positioning is applicable to a lot of bosses. You may not be positioned exactly the same way, but just keep in mind that healers are most often the ones to have initial threat on adds, and position tanks accordingly.

DPS:

The tanking problem can have a lot to do with DPS as well. Reckless or selfish DPS will often make your tanks dislike you. Remember that personal damage and overall raid damage are two different things. Each individual person doing their own maximum damage might yield worse results than if everyone played raid-centric.

The prime example, which I’m guilty of, is dotting up adds right as they spawn. As a moonkin, getting all my dots up as soon as I can means more damage for me. However, this means that the initial threat the tank needs to do to pick up an add is now however damage I did, instead of the miniscule amount of threat the healers had. The result is that adds are now bouncing between tanks and DPS, they are never corralled for AoE, which doesn’t actually affect me as a moonkin. In the end, I get to do my maximum DPS, but in turn the raid loses DPS as a whole.

The proper way to approach this is to use as many utility abilities as possible to make sure that I can deal a reasonable amount of damage while making sure the tank is able to pick up adds. This could mean using threat drops, or slows/stun/knockbacks to make sure the tank can regain threat. Remember though, the worst thing you can do is to run away from the tank with an add chasing you. If there are no other options, simply pop a defensive cooldown and walk next to the tank while he picks it back up.

A separate point that is most applicable to DPS on this fight is orb management. Horridon doesn’t actually break the gate until you finish the channel on the orb. If the DPS delays picking up the orb by, say, 10 seconds in favour of doing more damage, there might be another set of adds! No one does enough damage on this fight to warrant extra add spawns. Let us compare two dps:

-Bob, who picks up the orb right away regardless of the situation

-Joe, who decides to continue DPS’ing, and picks up the orb 10 seconds later

On the meters, you’ll see that Bob does less dps than Joe. However, because Bob picked up the orb right away, he prevented two adds from spawning, effectively doing the adds’ health combined in the 10 seconds that Joe decided to continue DPS’ing. The amount of damage Bob prevented the raid from having to do is far beyond what anyone could’ve done in those 10 seconds of not clicking the orb. More adds also means more strain on the tanks. Moral of the story: don’t be Joe.

Healer:

Healers are often considered to have the easiest job, since regardless of fight mechanics, they really just have to keep the raid alive. However, it’s important for the healers to point out and for the raid to ask how much can they handle. Like mentioned above, the tank may opt to forfeit picking up some of less dangerous mobs in favour of managing the more dangerous ones cleaner. In this case, like the healers have to assess whether or not the damage hitting non-tanks is too severe, and notify the raid. For example, the Amani Protectors on the 4th door really don’t hit hard, or do anything at all. It just takes a couple of HoTs to keep their target alive, whereas the Amani Warbears are a completely different story. The DPS and tanks need to know what’s okay and what isn’t.

Lastly, the healers and tanks need to constantly discuss how much damage they are taking. There are few cases where the tank takes so much damage on an add fight that they need to play super defensively all the time. On Horridon, tanks can afford to sacrifice survivability in favour of better add pick up. For example, Brewmaster Monks can spam SCK, sometimes even in favour of Keg Smash to pick up adds. The pulsing nature of SCK allows them to pick up adds that are spread out while maintaining threat on their current targets. However, while spamming SCK, you do not gain Elusive Brew charges, and thus lose some survivability. The healers may need to spend more mana, or even cooldowns, but in return the adds die faster, and healers will have more time to regen between doors.

Conclusion

Every raid will eventually work out their own version of the strategy. There’s not one place you can go that tells you exactly what every person needs to do. Try the fight, figure out where your strengths and weakness are. Adjust, communicate, and utilize every aspect of your raid to ensure that you help your tank as much as you can, as they are the key to defeating Horridon successfully.