Son of Grom

Garrosh Hellscream. Hated by 95% of the Warcraft player/fanbase and top baddie of the Mists of Pandaria expansion. As a character full of lore, I love Garrosh. But as a boss in the game? Fuck this guy. He ranks right up there with other bosses I absolutely hated raiding when they were current content. Dastardly folks like Gleuth, C'thun and Lady Vashj. Garry, however, tops them all in my book. This guy has so many different mechanics that the choice between progression raiding through him and slamming your fingertips in the door of a 1984 Ford Bronco is a difficult one. I keep having to tell myself: "I'm an adult. This is just a video game. We have good players. We -can- do this." And then Garry throws out explosive sha that buff each other by 200% when they die and faces start melting....  My point here is that this guy is one tough motherfucker.

All who challenge me will BURN in the fires of my hatred!

So, the in-game encounter is comprised of essentially three phases. Each phase has it's own breakdown and kinda has 'phases' of it's own. The first phase has a couple of main mechanics that are total party-fouls if not managed. The Exploding Iron Star mechanic is mitigated by having a ranged DPS take out one of the engineers on the far flanks of the room to prevent 2 stars from spawning and only 1 cuts through one half of the room. Additionally, the raid has to concern themselves with adds which he will occasionally use a war shout to make them 150% more powerful and his lovely desecrated weapon which is thrown at a random player (usually a ranged) and generates an aura of don't-stand-in-that. He draws the raid into an intermission phase that puts them into one of three different temples of Pandaria where the raid must dispatch sha adds, collect a life-saving 50% dmg reduction buff from the bubbles those adds leave behind then avoid a super-pissed Garrosh as he tries to annihilate the everliving hell out of you and your raiders. Oh, and did I mention? The longer you take with the sha adds during the intermission, the more corruption Garry gains. And the more corruption ol' Garry has, the more of his abilities become 'empowered' increasing the deadliness of them by one metric ass-ton. Next, he moves into Phase2 which consists of him MIND CONTROLLING the fuck out of your companions and also using a lovely ability called whirling corruption which does a pretty good amount of damage to all players but is especially deadly to tanks and melee. Also his big brown ass is still throwing the occasional desecrated weapon out at you which narrows your field of play by making it's big stupid auras. You'll have another intermission phase once you're done with phase 2 where he'll pull you into another temple and you'll conduct yourself accordingly. Y'know, wipe your feet before entering, keep your language polite and murder everyone inside without spilling anything on the carpets. The usual. Next you have Phase3, or, the rage phase. Not called the rage phase because of Garry's rage, but because of how much unfiltered anger you'll hear through your voice communications when your comrades die so close to having slain Garrosh. This phase forces a healthy mix of tunnel-vision, don't tunnel-vision, praying to the WoW gods and a dash of luck. When he goes through this final transformation, he becomes a big ass orc that looks like he got covered in irradiated purple vomit. Seriously,... think Infested Terran from starcraft, only less nightmarish and more Barney the Dinosaur. ALL of his wonderful abilities become empowered by the heart of Y'shaarj so this phase is HELL on your healers. Your DPS need to maintain a decent stack as best they can while your best tank tries like hell to control any sha adds that pop. You hit your heroism/bloodlust here and ALL your cooldowns. Don't be fuckin stingy here, people.

Let me take a moment to stop and let you all know that poor ol' 565 ilvl Vorigeth has yet to make it beyond this point. Garrosh gets to about 5% HP left and suddenly my raid team starts dropping like flies. There's just a helluva lot to manage during this fight, but we'll get him eventually. We've only been stuck on him for 3 weeks now.

Anyway, at this point you should be very, very close to dropping Garry. Keep your Rdps and heals stacked together but always on the move. You don't want those sha adds bursting up beneath 3-4 people and splattering them all over Garrosh's new throne room walls. Melee and Tanks are required to pop as much mitigation as they can during the Empowered Whirling corruption while maintaining as much DPS as humanly possible until Garry finally bits the dirt. Just typing all that in a simplified form makes my brain hurt. I can't imagine what sicko at Blizzard got a jolly from designing it.

"Right when they get within seconds of killing him,.. boom! He'll wipe them all! hahaha!"

But Garrosh is more than just a Raid boss. He's been a staple in the Warcraft world since the Burning Crusade and his family has been around the Warcraft universe for even longer than that. We first meet Garry as a whiny depressed little bitch in Nagrand out in Outland. He was a chief among the Mag'har and through his story, he travels to Orgrimmar, meets with Thrall and, over the course of three expansions, he beefs the hell up and becomes the kind of Orc you don't want to meet in a dark alley. Honestly, he encompasses everything that comes to my mind when the word "orc" is mentioned. Ruthless, bloodthirsty and battle-hardened. We're talking about the guy that led the Horde military to victory over the Scourge threat. The guy that took a rag-tag society of outcasts and rebels and turned them into a military force of reckoning with an iron fist. He's been pivotal in taking the game in an entirely new direction when he killed Cairne Bloodhoof and again when he completely terraformed the Vale of Eternal Blossoms into the Vale of Eternal Sorrows. When Blizzard made the call to have Garrosh take up the mantle of Warchief of the Horde, a lot of players were upset and disappointed. They called for a re-consideration for keeping Thrall as the Warchief or even making Highlord Saurfang the new Warchief of the Horde. Some players even took to voting for silly, inane things like Basic Campfire. Me? I was excited. I was happy that the game had taken a turn from everyone trying to get along and be friends to introducing a war-mongering, power-hungry monster of a leader that would take us back to being in the World of WARcraft. The game needed Garrosh. And still does to continue being the competitive, top-of-the-line MMO we all know and love. Without conflict, we may as well all go play Elmo games together.

    You either die a Hero.....                                       Or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain.      

 Don't agree? Have something to add? Questions? Comments? Concerns? You can always find me at my twitter page, leave a comment in my blogs, or even find me in game at my battletag which is Vorigoth#1349. Feel free to hit me up any time!

Suffer Well
~V