Complete, Detailed Throne of Thunder Guides

[Spiralphoenix]

Apparently not for you. I hope his normal Lei Shen guide helps you kill it :P

Wow, I had just assumed he was just another elitist 13/13 who is unaware of the large population of people who a large majority of these fights are still progression for. But of all the people to criticize the timing of them.......... really...... at 11/12 normal? Nothing wrong with being there, but... being there and saying these are late?!?!? Not to mention many of these have existed for quite some time, the detailed jin'rokh one being march 21.... he just now compiled them in a post to promote them all at once.

People on the internet are just astounding sometimes!

[Deleted]

Used your guides many times in the past and always found them very useful. Thanks very much.

[NRL1515]

Before I stumbled upon your guides, I have always been looking for videos that were very detail oriented and went in depth with each ability and why the boss does what he does at a certain time. I relied upon TankSpot and FatBoss for guides previously, but sometimes they would take certain mechanics for granted, or downplay the importance of certain abilities. For example, when watching TankSpot, whenever I heard Aliena say 'and this is easily healable raidwide damage', I knew our healers would probably need to pop some cooldowns for that phase.

I really appreciate how you try to incorporate other possible strategies as well, and you explain why something didn't work for you guys and how you tried to get around it, it really helps understanding the boss fight as a whole.

My only nit-picky thing would be is to try and enlarge the text a little bit when you math stuff out (and usually put it in the upper left corner or the bottom), it can be hard to read at times.

Like many before me, thank you so much for all the hard work you've put into your videos, it really shows. The length isn't an issue to me at all, actually I'm glad you haven't tried to cut corners or anything just to make them shorter; they're exactly as long as they need to be. I will certainly be watching your videos come 5.4. Thanks again!

[Brael]

Some great in-depth guides you make for some of the fights that people actually need the extra explanation on, myself and my guild including. They help a lot in understanding mechanics better than any other guides out there! Also, aren't you the guild that develops Deus Vox Encounters? Any chance we can get that up to the amazing standard it was at during ICC? Loved it then but it's not been nearly as good since. Hope i'm actually right in assuming the right guild here

[Simplexity]

Best guides on the net. Don't change them - been a subscriber for a while now.

[Deleted]

I do agree with what has been said about the reuse of the same vid. I normally watch them on a second screen while doing something else, but it still makes it a bit more boring than it has to be
That being said I do sometimes watch them just for entertainment value if I am bored, so keep it up even if I may only be able to really use half of them (my progress) ;P

[Othinsson]

I, too, love your guides!

[SinisterAU]

Amazing guides, I cannot reccomend this guy's guides enough.

[Auloria]

I haven't seen this before, so thanks for posting these. These look like great resources for raid leaders.

[Kulldam]

I'd just like to add my thanks for these guides!

I've found them a fantastic resource and used them since DS too.

Please don't let the retardo comments on youtube about the length deter you from making guides, my guildies think they are fantastic too.

Awesome to hear from such a long-time subscriber; really appreciate it for both you and your fellow guildies! <3

Thank you so much for your detailed guides! I love how you cover multiple strats for each encounter. =)

Thanks for the kind words, and glad the multiple strategies are useful at times. =)

First of all I also have to say that these guides are great and the level of detail and breakdown into the various mechanics is very informative. One thing that I have seen in some other guides that I found useful was a link to a video of the whole fight using the tactic in the guide without any commentary so you can see from the beginning to the end how it is executed throughout the fight.

That's a great suggestion as well Delath and I'll definitely add that in the future. Thanks for the feedback and support!

Excellent guides. I'd say to ignore all the people saying they're too long but I think you've got that down.

Thanks Spiral!

Just reemphasizing what's been said here - few people realize that it often takes many, many attempts to recognize the subtleties of different bosses, a process that often takes a few hours. While your guides are lengthy, they fill that knowledge gap that sometimes takes hours to otherwise fill while progressing on an encounter. As an example, I loved fatboss guides, but I could not step into an encounter and perform my role without making mistakes. With your guides, not only can I perform my own role well (I won't claim I play perfectly, but my mistakes become apparent and fixable) but I frequently understand enough of the nuance of the encounter such that I can provide tips for other people. I'm currently progressing on Heroic Lei Shen and your video on the fight, while lengthy, is all good information. Keep up the good work.

You make some an excellent point Simetrik and I cannot tell you how pleased it makes me to read this sort of insightful feedback and usage of even a single guide! <3

[marklar]

excellent guides and already a subscriber. imo, by far the most informative guides on the net.

one thing i would point out, since you make normal mode guides and obviously many of your viewers raid in guilds with a much lower skill level than vox. you tend to say a lot of fights are "easily 2-healed", which is probably true if you have 2 amazing healers. since "easily" is subjective, it would be nice to have some kind of objective way to decide between 2 and 3 healing encounters. perhaps a certain level of raid dps (which is quantifiable) makes the encounter much easier and so therefore two healing is preferred. or the opposite case where the extra dps is nice, but really doesn't make the encounter significantly easier (like heroic IQ).

for instance, we've 2 and 3 healed both of the first two heroics. i'd say jin'rohk is clearly easier to 2 heal because you will have fewer storms to deal with and the damage outside of storms is quite low. horridon i would say the opposite IF your dps is able to easily down the first balcony add before the 2nd/3rd ones drop. yes, additional dps at that point makes the adds die faster, but the extra healer gives your raid a lot more room for error which is going to be more likely to help a guild get their first kill.

i used to read Icy Veins, but one of the (many) reasons i stopped is that every single guide lists "Healers: 2-3".

this is from the point of view of a casual (3/12H) raider; hope what i'm saying makes sense.

[Kulldam]

It's not like youtube lacks a fast-forward button. If the video is getting too long for me I just slide it forward to where something looks like the part of the fight we're having issues with.

I adore your guides. I like to watch them after our group has a night on the encounter, I find that I get the most out of them when I have a vague notion of what I'm watching. "Oh, so THAT'S what that timer meant!"

Thanks for the kind words and views! And glad you find the sections/table of contents useful to skip around where you'd like. =)

Haha nice burn.

He has only just promoted himself, check the upload dates to most of the videos.

Never seen any of your videos before but you have some nice replies so I will check them out after work.

When do you plan to have SoO videos out? In beta or after release?

Thank you for checkin em out, hope they are up your alley. =) As for SoO, I'm not hardcore enough to really dedicate time to raiding on the PTR and I don't expect that to change for SoO, so instead those guides will be out at the appropriate time after release.

Used your guides many times in the past and always found them very useful. Thanks very much.

Thank you!

Before I stumbled upon your guides, I have always been looking for videos that were very detail oriented and went in depth with each ability and why the boss does what he does at a certain time. I relied upon TankSpot and FatBoss for guides previously, but sometimes they would take certain mechanics for granted, or downplay the importance of certain abilities. For example, when watching TankSpot, whenever I heard Aliena say 'and this is easily healable raidwide damage', I knew our healers would probably need to pop some cooldowns for that phase.

I really appreciate how you try to incorporate other possible strategies as well, and you explain why something didn't work for you guys and how you tried to get around it, it really helps understanding the boss fight as a whole.

My only nit-picky thing would be is to try and enlarge the text a little bit when you math stuff out (and usually put it in the upper left corner or the bottom), it can be hard to read at times.

Like many before me, thank you so much for all the hard work you've put into your videos, it really shows. The length isn't an issue to me at all, actually I'm glad you haven't tried to cut corners or anything just to make them shorter; they're exactly as long as they need to be. I will certainly be watching your videos come 5.4. Thanks again!

Such awesome feedback, thanks for taking the time to share! Exactly the type of comment that is useful to me, so I really appreciate it.

I'm very pleased that you find the detail and accuracy of my guides to be useful, since as you say, I too find many other guides to be lacking in terms of proper emphasis or detail, which can be problematic at best and downright disastrous for the raid at worst.

That's also a great suggestion on the text size as well; I can definitely make all that stuff larger in future videos. I had been attempting to avoid covering much of the game screen with the text in the past, but I can see your very valid point and since text is meant to be displayed only when relevant, it should take precedence over the background footage at the time. I'll take that to heart in the future, thanks again!

[Deleted]

Hey, I have been watching your guides since DS also, and the level of detail your guides provide are really excellent for a raid leader. I agree that the way you talk about the multiple possible strategies is really useful, the only negative I hear people mention about your guides are the length. The quick guides are good to address that and also the 'breakdown' you have in the info for each video, but my (hopefully constructive) feedback for your full guides to make them more appealing to the masses rather than just raid leaders is here:

- Have you thought about adding some music to the background of your videos? I wonder if this would help make them more 'engaging' as most strat videos use music, not anything overpowering/distracting/loud, but say thinking back to the old tankspot videos back in the day.
- It may help to cut out references to describing things from normal mode (unless you need to highlight that say, that aspect of the fight needs to be dealt with differently on heroic), as people doing a fight on heroic should know normal, and when it's not new information it is not as easy to pay attention.
- I think a reason they can feel tiring is that the pace of the speech is a bit slow (does that make sense?) I don't know if you plan out a script beforehand or wing it but if not then that could pick up the pace/avoid repeating info.

Don't get me wrong your guides are very good but you just seemed to be taking feedback so I thought I would chip in Keep up the good work, your guides have been really helpful for me as a raid leader.

[Kulldam]

Some great in-depth guides you make for some of the fights that people actually need the extra explanation on, myself and my guild including. They help a lot in understanding mechanics better than any other guides out there! Also, aren't you the guild that develops Deus Vox Encounters? Any chance we can get that up to the amazing standard it was at during ICC? Loved it then but it's not been nearly as good since. Hope i'm actually right in assuming the right guild here

Thanks so much! And no I'm afraid Deus Vox Encounters isn't our creation, we just have Vox as part of our guild name as well is all. ><

Best guides on the net. Don't change them - been a subscriber for a while now.

Appreciate you saying so!

I do agree with what has been said about the reuse of the same vid. I normally watch them on a second screen while doing something else, but it still makes it a bit more boring than it has to be
That being said I do sometimes watch them just for entertainment value if I am bored, so keep it up even if I may only be able to really use half of them (my progress) ;P

Awesome to hear, thanks so much!

I, too, love your guides!

<3s

Amazing guides, I cannot reccomend this guy's guides enough.

Even you it appears you are now banned and may not see this response, thanks for the kind words. =)

I haven't seen this before, so thanks for posting these. These look like great resources for raid leaders.

Hope you can find some use in them.

[Kulldam]

excellent guides and already a subscriber. imo, by far the most informative guides on the net.

one thing i would point out, since you make normal mode guides and obviously many of your viewers raid in guilds with a much lower skill level than vox. you tend to say a lot of fights are "easily 2-healed", which is probably true if you have 2 amazing healers. since "easily" is subjective, it would be nice to have some kind of objective way to decide between 2 and 3 healing encounters. perhaps a certain level of raid dps (which is quantifiable) makes the encounter much easier and so therefore two healing is preferred. or the opposite case where the extra dps is nice, but really doesn't make the encounter significantly easier (like heroic IQ).

for instance, we've 2 and 3 healed both of the first two heroics. i'd say jin'rohk is clearly easier to 2 heal because you will have fewer storms to deal with and the damage outside of storms is quite low. horridon i would say the opposite IF your dps is able to easily down the first balcony add before the 2nd/3rd ones drop. yes, additional dps at that point makes the adds die faster, but the extra healer gives your raid a lot more room for error which is going to be more likely to help a guild get their first kill.

i used to read Icy Veins, but one of the (many) reasons i stopped is that every single guide lists "Healers: 2-3".

this is from the point of view of a casual (3/12H) raider; hope what i'm saying makes sense.

Thanks for the subscription and feedback Marklar! I certainly do understand what you're saying about the healer count, but as you say the entire concept is very subjective. That said, I do try my best to be objective when describing healer numbers or just raid composition in general to take into account the pros and cons for each possible raid setup. For example, typically when I discuss healer numbers for an encounter I'll give the usual spiel of 2-3, but then talk about what our group found to work best and more importantly why that was the case. Then I'll go into detail about how that might differ for other groups and what the pros/cons are for making those changes for that particular encounter.

Ultimately though, it would be very tough to give an objective numerical statistic that dictates whether a raid group should 2 heal or 3 heal a fight, since calculating all those minute differences is next-to impossible. For example, with DPS output, I only get to experience the range of DPS that exists within my own raid group, so extrapolating how significant changes (up or down) to just the DPS numbers would impact the fight as a whole and therefore further impact healing is difficult. Instead, again, I try to focus on the overall "goals" of DPS or healing for a fight, that are then explained to have a direct correlation to the other opposite role. For example, I talk a lot in fights like Council or Megaera about the "soft DPS checks" of killing Sul before Empowerment or Megaera heads quickly enough not because they're necessary for success, but it's one of those measurable requirements that will greatly reduce the healing necessary. That still doesn't necessarily mean I can tell another group whether they should 2 or 3 heal, but when I have a strong sense of what is likely to be a good fit for another group I do my best to mention or illustrate that.

Anyway, I really appreciate the feedback, and I will continue to try to find tangible, subjective measurements by which to illustrate raid compositions in future videos, but certainly let me know if you feel that isn't happening in a proper fashion!

[Zabuzan]

Hi there,

I've got to say, with the demise of Fatboss, I switched to your guides pretty early on this tier. I'm the raid leader and usually prepare written guides for my guild, with player specific jobs and such; but it's often hard to get a complete overview of the fight in advance. You provide that - I actually really like the long guides, highly informative and take it slowly enough to cover every aspect of a fight in depth.

The only issue we had was that after a slow start to the tier, with lack of raiders, we finally got up to speed again and (with the help of your guides!) caught you up by the time we were progressing on Animus so had to do our own thing from there

I also ended up writing a Lei Shen guide, which I've put on the forums (if you could give it some critique as a broad overview I'd really appreciate it by the way! :P), but before we actually started on it a couple of days ago, I noticed you had your guide sorted too which was a nice addition.

Typically, I watch the detailed guide, as I'm the raid leader. The quick guide option is great for the lazy raiders in my team I always post both for reference on our guild forum.

Keep up the good work, look forward to seeing some SoO guides in the near future!!! Though, with a bit of luck, we won't be far enough behind to need them this time round

[Hunter Extraordinaire]

Nice guides...just gotta try and get my guild to watch them now :/

[Glaziola]

Few months late aren't ya?

It is still helpful to new raiders who are looking forward to start now.

[jdfrost]

Thank you for the guides, I have been following you on youtube. Love how you break down the fights so people at least know whats going on in them, other then just saying stand over there. Hope to see more for SoO