Hey guys I’m Mezzy from WoW Weekly and today we’ll be taking a look at Kormrog in Heroic Hellfire Citadel. These tactics also apply to the normal version.
The boss has only 4 abilities, but their effects will change depending on his empowerment. There are 3 pools in the room and he will use them to empower himself. Before we get to that however, let’s talk about the core abilities.
His first ability is Pound. This deals damage to every player in the raid for 5 seconds. You’ll want to use a healer cooldown for this and you need to spread out. This is because it works like Gruul’s petrify. While Pound is channeling, you will also deal damage to anyone within 4 yards of you.
His next ability is Fel Outpouring with which he will spawn purple waves of goo. You’ll need to dodge these. If you get hit you’ll take a good amount of shadow damage.
The next ability is Explosive Runes with which he will summon multiple explosive runes that will grow over time. If they have not been triggered they will detonate after 15 seconds dealing a huge amount of damage to the entire raid. However if someone walks over it, it deals less damage and just to that person. So you’ll want to have players run over these to prevent them from detonating. They still do a good chunk of damage so you’ll preferably want players with abilities like deterence and cloak of shadows to trigger these. It isn’t required to have the cooldown though. We assigned 5 players in our raid to trigger them so that the rest of the raid could focus on the boss.
His final ability is Grasping Hands which works just like the hands from Kromog, but they spawn on you instead. To deal with this stack up loosely and AoE the hands down quickly, because a Pound could follow and the hands themselves deal damage every second too. I say stack up loosely, because when the hands grab you, they will also deal damage to anyone within 4 yards of you.
During the encounter Kormrog will jump into the 3 different puddles: purple, green and orange. He will always jump to the closest pool that he hasn’t been in yet, until he’s been in all 3 puddles. When he does this he will empower one of his core abilities and gain a special ability to use on the tank. When he uses this ability the tank will also gain the Fel Touch debuff, increasing magic damage taken by 50%. This will require a tank swap.
So when he’s empowered by the purple puddle the Fel Outpouring ability will spawn waves of goo from all of the puddles. To deal with this you’ll want to stand to one of the sides so you’re not in the middle of every single wave. He will also gain Swat. This will deal a fair amount of shadow damage to the tank and knock them back until they reach a wall. This further promotes standing off to one of the sides with your back to the wall. You do not want to be thrown into one of the three pools because this could kill you.
When he’s empowered with the orange pool the Explosive Runes will keep respawning unless they explode near other runes or are the last one. When a rune explodes it will respawn in the direction that your character is facing. So when the original runes spawn you’ll want to face the middle of all the runes and push them towards the middle. That way they will come close to each other and stop spawning.
The tank ability that he gains is called Explosive Burst. He will root the tank and after 10 seconds they will explode dealing a large amount of fire damage to everyone within 40 yards. To deal with this your entire raid will have to move away from the tank. Abilities such as Transcendance Teleport from monks still work, but not all tanks have such abilities.
And then finally when he’s empowered by the green pool, the hands will pick up every raid member and attempt to throw them in the pools. Once again stack up loosely and dps them down before the hands succeed. Slows and stuns do not effect them. The tank ability he gains is Foul Crush, with which the tank will be stuck in a hand. The dps will of course have to get the tank out of it.
We found the easiest order of empowerment to be Orange, Purple and then finally Green.
At 30% Kormrog will enrage, increasing his haste and he will now keep the empowerments. Meaning this is a soft enrage mechanic and you’ll want to use heroism at this point.
So in short, stack loosely for the hands, spread for pound, dodge the waves of goo and use personal cooldowns if you can, to deal with the runes. When the runes are empowered look towards the middle of the runes before standing on it and when purple empowerment is up tank him with your back towards a wall. When a tank gets rooted by explosive burst be sure to move away from them.
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