Tomb of Sargeras Analysis: Goroth, Inquisition, & Harjatan
With the release of The Tomb of Sargeras, I decided I’d give analyses on each of the nine bosses split into multiple posts. Naturally, I’m going to start with three of the beginning bosses for this week. For reference, I’ll link the Wowhead guides to each boss’s abilities in their titles.
Goroth
Goroth is a very simple entry-level boss, bordering on the line of being a “loot piñata”. His mechanics are all extremely simple, but they can still wipe a raid if enough mistakes are made. All of his abilities are purely positioning-based, making the fight a simple matter of “don’t stand in the wrong spot and heal allies or attack the boss”.
There’s not too much to analyze on this fight due to its straightforwardness. Considering the need for proper positioning, the Heroic addition of “lava puddles” randomly covering 25% of the room does help to shake up the easy, slow-paced rhythm of the fight. Furthermore, on Mythic difficulty, the falling meteors serve to further mess with a raid’s ability to rely on “fallback” positioning. I personally would have preferred to see a mechanic that required some form of target-switching though, as even with these additional mechanics, Goroth effectively remains a loot piñata.
Demonic Inquisition
The Inquisition is another relatively simple fight overall, but much more complex than Goroth. The fight also primarily revolves around positioning, though there are other important mechanics as well. The Torment aspect of the fight is fairly interesting thematically, but “Confessing” causing one to be teleported into a soul cage is a bit of a confusing event story-wise. Overall though, the fight is pretty solid, but I have two main gripes about it:
The timing of the bosses’ “full energy” abilities feels very awkward. While the disjunction does add to the difficulty, positioning Atrigan as a tank feels uncomfortable because by the time you position him next to Belac for cleave-damage, it’s time to move him away from Belac because one of the bosses is about to hit full energy.
My other issue with the Inquisition has to do with the abilities they gain in Heroic difficulty, as I feel that these could have been designed better. Considering Atrigan’s Calcified Quills hits everyone in a cone around the target, the natural counter for this is to just have everyone spread out to begin with. Because Belac’s Suffocating Dark drops “void zones” on a random player, the primary strategy against this is also to have everyone spread out. While this works fine and all, I can’t help but think this could have been done more elegantly. When an encounter has two mechanics that have the same counter, it makes one of the mechanics lose its sense of impact, especially when the counter in question is something passive like “don’t stand right next to someone else”.
If I were to improve upon the Heroic additions, I would keep Suffocating Dark because as its name implies, it can feel suffocating if the arena is filled with numerous void zones, adding to the challenge of the fight. However, instead of Calcified Quills, I feel like there is room for a different torture-themed mechanic. For example, Atrigan could throw down a giant targetable quill/spike that pulls 2–3 players to it and chains them to it such that they can’t move far from it or use the “Confess” ability until the spike is destroyed by DPS. This would synergize with the bosses’ Torment and Suffocating Dark mechanics well, be thematically appropriate, and yet still be a fairly simple mechanic considering that Demonic Inquisition is an early encounter in the raid.
Harjatan
Harjatan is another straightforward, reasonably easy boss whose fight relies more on mechanical execution as opposed to high DPS or healing requirements. The tank healing only gets difficult if they somehow mess up a taunt swap and the raid healing only gets strenuous after 2–3 “Draw In” phases, by which time the boss should be fairly close to dead already.
To me, the most interesting aspect of the fight is the Draw In phase’s mechanic of dropping puddles under the feet of random raiders, including melee DPS. Most noticeably, it serves as a soft enrage for the fight, as it causes each subsequent Draw In phase to last longer than the previous one, causing more sustained raid-wide damage. What’s really interesting about it is that its randomness also prevents a raid from simplifying the fight by dropping “normal phase” puddles on one side of the boss. Granted, a raid group could designate 1–2 areas for nobody to stand in during the Draw In phase, but that still requires strategy and presence of mind from the raid as a whole. Furthermore, if a puddle is randomly spawned under a melee character’s feet, it would require the tanks to quickly react and reposition the boss, which can cause the phase to quickly become hectic.
Mechanic-wise, the fight is solid in that it is unique and allows for strategy while still requiring raiders to be able to react to some random elements appropriately. If I HAD to criticize something for the fight, I would probably just assert that from a story perspective, the minions of the fight should be naga and not murlocs. While there’s a brief story for the murlocs, it’s worth noting that the naga are in the Tomb for an important mission, which makes it feel like they should be having a more notable presence in the area.
