I’m going to continue my Update 5 instance guide this week by heading into the Tower of Orthanc (ToO) raid. My raid group is currently only two bosses into T2, so I’ll be writing these guides from the perspective of T1. Feel free to discuss and ask questions about T2 in the comments though. If you want to check out my previous Update 5 instance guides, here’s the links:

If your playing group is considering heading into ToO for the first time then I have one piece of advice – do it! Raiding seems to be intimidating for a lot of people, but T1 ToO is absolutely content that can be completed by a wide variety of groups with just a bit of preparation and coordination. You don’t need to be fully geared to do this content, you don’t need to be super hardcore raider, if you have a even a couple of hours a couple of nights then this content is well within your reach. And I can promise that if your current end game activities involve facerolling skirmish raids or mindlessly farming medallions/seals in smaller group instances or Draigoch, then you’ll find it much more enjoyable and rewarding to tackle this raid than playing around in those other spaces. The fights in ToO are genuinely varied and fun, will require people to use skills that they don’t have to in the other end game content (particularly lore-masters) and you’ll get a much greater sense of satisfaction from doing this content than facerolling through random skirmish raid #85 for another 6 seals and a teal shiny.

With that plug out of the way, I’ll head on into the guide.

Fire and Frost Tier 1

The structure of the ToO raid is that it’s a five boss instance with the first three bosses being in different wings that are accessible as soon as you enter and the final two wings (which are located within and on top of the Tower itself) open up after you defeat those first three wings. The raid is on a weekly lock (resets early Thursday morning USEST). If you’re heading into ToO for the first time, Fire and Frost (which is directly behind you as you enter the instance) is the first wing you should look to tackle. It’s the most manageable of the first three wings and is a good way to ease yourself into the raid. There are three trash pulls of fairly easy difficulty leading up to the boss, which is a two-boss fight slightly reminicient of the Ost Dunhoth disease wing.

ToO T1 isn’t generally that strict on class makeup but most wings will be easier if you have two main tanks and, for the trash, 3 classes capable of doing a perma-mez (LMs, burgs, yellow hunters). If you do have to use a hunter for cc on the trash, they should generally retrait for DPS for the boss fight. You will also obviously need two full healers (RKs or minis) and everything is easier if you have at least one and preferably 2 captains.

Trash

As mentioned, there are three trash pulls leading up to the boss. All of the mobs come pre-marked with symbols, as was the case in OD. This raid also introduces a new crowd-control mechanic called adaptation. Mobs with adaptaion will typically gain immunity to a particular type of cc for the rest of the fight once that type of cc has been applied to it once. The types of cc which are counted by adapted mobs are – daze, stun, fear, root and FM stun. The three trash pulls in F&F consist of the following mobs:

  • Trash pull 1: 4 Ruffians, 2 trolls
  • Trash pull 2: 5 Warriors, 3 ruffians
  • Trash pull 3: 3 warriors, 3 ruffians, 2 trolls

Here’s an overview of these mobs, along with quick strategy for dealing with them:

  • White-Hand ruffians (80k). Abilities: Leadership aura buffs nearby allies, can apply a disease to random fellowship members (after a /say callout) which causes an AOE stun on expiration (6s duration). Strategy: Generally these will be your CC targets – have your raid keep as many as you can permanently locked down while you kill everything else (other than trolls). They don’t hit that hard and do not necessarily need a main tank to target them, but they must be kept off healers of course. The disease that these mobs cast is the only thing likely to wipe a raid in this trash, make sure everyone is watching their debuff bars for diseases and potting appropriately (buffbars is recommended!). As a lore-master you can obviously cure some of these, but they typically come out two at a time so with the cooldown on PAAI you won’t be able to cure everything.
  • White-Hand trolls (160k). Abilities: Adaptation buff, stacking healing corruptions. Strategy: Have your tank or tanks deal with these and kill them last. Don’t bother removing their corruptions until you are killing them. Either have one tank pick up both and kite them around (with your other tank picking up other mobs), or put one tank on each one and just offtank anything else.
  • Twisted Warriors (35k). Abilities: Temporary morale bubbles will absorb most incoming damage, bloodlust makes kiting/cc-ing them very risky (+50% damage if they don’t hit something regularly). These are weak mobs and can generally be AOE-ed down at the start of a pull along with any ruffians that aren’t cc-ed. For pull 2 you should assign one tank to the group of warriors on each side of the room and for pull 3 you should ideally have one tank gathering up all three warriors and the other kiting the two trolls.

Boss Fight – Crisiant & Usgarren (Giants, 605,000 morale each)

Recommended virtues: The boss fight has a lot of AOE tactical damage, so I recomment Tolerance, Fidelity, Zeal for all classes. I I use Valour and Wisdom as my final two traits.

On T1 at least, this is a fight which involves you splitting the raid into two groups of 6 and tanking the bosses on opposite sides of the room. The general nature of this fight is that it is a control fight. Once you figure out the general strategy and positioning, there is no strong DPS element to this fight and all incoming healing is manageable. So tell your DPS classes to take it slow at first, let the tanks set up positioning and have everyone focus on their jobs and not panic. If you do that, you’ll find that it’s actually quite an easy fight.

The two giants, Crisiant & Usgarren, are aligned with frost and fire respectively. They will periodically summon grims and do 360 degree AOE attack corresponding with their element. The reason for splitting the group into two fellowships is that as you attack one of the giants you will gain a stacking debuff making you more vulnerable to attacks corresponding to the other giant’s element. At the start of the fight, have your fellowships each head to their side of the room and when the giant’s become active, have the tank position him near the corner of that side of the room with the tank’s back to the wall. The rest of the fellowship must stay outside of the giant’s 180 degree frontal arc at all times; if you get punted, re-establish this initial position as soon as possible to avoid any confusion.

The specific mechanics of the fight are as follows:

  • Grims: The main mechanic in the fight is that each of the giants will periodically spawn grims associated with their element (there is a callout associated with this – “The frost courses through my veins” and “the fire burns within me”). I believe that this is on a timer, but it could be morale based I’m not 100% sure. To summon the grims, the giant does a “clap” attack – one grim will spawn for everyone in the giant’s 180 degree frontal arc when this attack goes off. If you want to avoid wiping, make sure that only the tank gets hit by the clap! When the grims are spawned, they should immediately be pulled off the boss by a melee character and dragged over to the healer/ranged group which should be standing ~20m behind the boss. Have everyone except the tank DPS the 30k grims down as quickly as possible. The trick is that the grims gain a special buff (a red question mark on a white background, it’s very obvious) at every 33% morale which makes them immune to damage until any form of cc (stun, root, mez) is applied. This is a great place for lore-masters to shine, as long as you save up your LoTRD cooldown for grims you will be able to remove all of these buffs with short or zero induction skills (blinding flash and LoTRD). The grims do some AOE damage and if allowed to stay around for long enough will do a fairly damaging distributed AOE attack.
  • Corruptions: The giants each have a big AOE knockback special attack which is preceeded by a callout “My Power Builds!”. Luckily this can be avoided by removing the corruption that appears on the boss at that time. On T1 this is a two-tier corruption, so at least two corruption removal skills need to be used within about 5sec before the attack goes off. Have your tanks call this out if it happens during a grim phase.
  • Shatter/Burn: The bosses will each periodically do an attack to a random character (“Freeze and shatter”, “You will all burn”), turning around if the target is behind them. Nothing you can do about it.
  • Morale bubble: The giants will also announce, at about 20% morale, “The ancients shield me” and get a 150,000 morale bubble which lasts for 30s. On T1 this is nothing to worry about, either try to DPS though it (which will require very good DPS, 5,000dps in each fellowship) or just ignore it and resume hitting when it goes away.

And that’s it! If it sounds like a pretty simple fight, you’d be right. The only trick is letting the tanks get the positioning right, making sure you only get one grim spawn with each clap and then killing the grims quickly enough (using cc to remov the immunity buff as necessary). There’s not much of note to think about as a lore-master particularly. Given that you will only be able to debuff one of the bosses, you should have a careful think about your group makeup to decide which boss you will debuff with fire/frost lore. If your two fellowships are perfectly balanced then it doesn’t really matter, but if one of your groups has a weaker tank (perhaps a champ that doesn’t have such high mitigations as your guardian), or if one group doesn’t have a captain for off-heals or something, then put your fire/frost lore debuffs on the boss where you thihnk they’ll be most needed. Apart from that, just do your normal debuff rotation, spot heal/share power as needed and then DPS in the gaps. If you have decent tactical mitigation and morale you should feel free to stand in melee range of the boss for extra damage, but if you’re finding that you are in danger of dying then stay at >20m range to avoid the worst of his AOE attacks.

 

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