Throne of Thunder - Tortos

[Lore]

10-man:

Complete Dungeon Journal on Wowhead.com

TURTLE KICK MACRO:

/targetexact Whirl Turtle
/click ExtraActionButton1
/targetlasttarget

This will allow you to kick turtles without having to target them first.

What's up guys, and welcome back to the Throne of Thunder raid guide. My name is Lore, and this video will cover Tortos, the 4th boss in the Throne of Thunder raid instance. Tortos is a much-needed breather after Horridon and Council of Elders, at least in terms of mechanics. There's only a few things to keep track of here.

Tortos himself doesn't move. He does need to be tanked, but only uses one ability on that tank: Snapping Bite. This deals a fairly large amount of Physical damage, but it does have a cast time, so the tank on Tortos should try to use cooldowns to mitigate it whenever possible. Otherwise, he'll just stand there and melee, so that's pretty much all the Tortos tank needs to worry about.

He will, however, use a few other abilities on the raid. Rockfall is pretty simple -- they're some stalactites that will fall from the ceiling and deal a pretty massive amount of Nature damage to anyone they hit. You can tell where they're going to land by the blue circles on the ground. Just move out of those. Now, they will still deal a little bit of damage to everyone within 20 yards when they land, but that's not really something you should worry about avoiding. Just go ahead and heal through it.

He'll also use an ability called Quake Stomp. This one is a bit more dangerous. After a short cast time, he'll stun everyone in the raid for 1 second and deal 65% of their maximum health in physical damage. On top of that, he'll summon an extra several Rockfalls for a few seconds, which means there'll be a little bit of extra raid damage going out afterward. This is a good time to use raid cooldowns. Note that, although Quake Stomp itself deals physical damage, the Rockfalls afterwards still deal Nature, so abilities like Devotion Aura and Anti-Magic Zone are still very useful here.

Tortos's last ability is a Furious Stone Breath. If he casts this, he'll deal just over a million damage to the entire raid over 4 1/2 seconds. Not the sort of thing you tend to live through. So, you need to find a way to keep him from casting this. That's where the turtles come in.

See, from time to time, a wave of three Whirl Turtles will enter the room. They'll come sliding in from underneath Tortos, and start to spin around the room, dealing damage to and knocking back anyone they collide with. These should be DPS'ed down quickly, but they can't be killed. Once they're low on health, they'll hide inside their shells and become immune to damage. However, you can kick them. Everyone in Tortos's room has access to an extra action button ability that will kick one of these hiding turtles directly away from them. When a kicked turtle collides with Tortos, it will interrupt him and cause him to take an extra 25% damage for 20 seconds.

So, the strategy here is simple. DPS the turtles down as quickly as possible when they spawn. Since they move all over the place and knock people back, this will be pretty much up to your ranged DPS, and it's worth noting that we found it best to burn them down individually instead of spending too much time multidotting. That's both to make sure we have at least one ready to be kicked, and also to try to keep their numbers down so we have less time spent with 2 or 3 turtles knocking everyone all over the place. And on that note, try to have ranged DPS and heals position themselves to the sides of the room. It makes it much easier to dodge the turtles when they're not coming from every direction.

Once you've gotten a turtle to go into its shell, it's best to have one person set up as the designated punter, preferably someone with the ability to move around quickly. So for example, in our kill, I was doing it as a Warlock with Burning Rush. Once Tortos is about to use Furious Stone Breath, kick that thing right at him. It can take a bit of practice to get the timing down, but when done properly, you'll interrupt the breath before it starts casting and the raid takes no damage at all. I also highly recommend using a macro to target the Whirl Turtle, kick it, and go back to your last target, and I'll be sure to include the macro I used in both the movie details on Youtube and the full writeup on Tankspot.com.

As a quick side note, there's two ways to tell when he's going to cast Furious Stone Breath. The ability technically casts whenever he reaches 100 fury, which he slowly gains over time and is shown on his unit frame as an energy bar. However, the only time he'll gain any extra fury is if the tank on him, for whatever reason, decides to wander off out of melee range. That really shouldn't happen, so for all intents and purposes it's cast pretty much immediately on a timer.

The only other thing to manage on this fight are the Vampiric Cave Bats. You'll get waves of these from time to time, usually about halfway between waves of turtles. It'll be your second tank's job to pick these up and bring them over by Tortos where melee can AOE and cleave them down. They only have one ability - Drain the Weak. Basically, the way this works is that if the tank on them is ever below 350,000 health, they'll start to heal themselves. Normally that shouldn't be a big deal, as they don't hit too hard, but you will want to be sure to keep that tank topped off as much as possible and heal them up quickly after Quake Stomp.

You'll also need to make sure the bats are actually being killed off, as getting more than one wave will mean the tank will be dipping lower on health more, and thus they'll heal themselves more regularly and eventually just become impossible to kill. For the most part, that'll be up to your melee DPS. Ranged can and should help out when possible, but they'll have their hands full most of the time with the Whirl Turtles, which are more important.

Also, for every wave of three Whirl Turtles, you'll need to interrupt two Furious Stone Breaths. That leaves you with one extra turtle. You can kick this at Tortos for the extra damage if you want, but we chose to use it on the cave bats. It will still apply the 25% damage increase debuff to them, and we found that getting those down quicker made the fight feel a lot cleaner overall.

One last thing: when you get him down to about 20% health, he'll start summoning turtles a lot more frequently. At this point, you need to just burn him down before you get overwhelmed. You will still need to interrupt Furious Stone Breath, so make sure to have a couple turtles ready to kick, but otherwise, just nuke Tortos.

Overall, Tortos is a relatively simple and very fun encounter. As long as you've got a kicker who knows what they're doing, there really isn't too much else to keep track of. Dodge turtles and the stuff on the ground, kill the different adds that spawn, heal through the AOE's, and burn down Tortos whenever you can.

[BLSTMASTER]

Our group noticed something interesting for the fight.

When the OT taunts off the MT as soon as tortos starts casting Snapping Bite, neither of them took damage.

We found out by accident because the bites did a lot of damage and I tried to taunt off the other tank as soon as the bite landed to prevent unlucky gibs.

I suspect it may be an unintended behavior due to the nature of the spell (according to its tooltip), Tortos snaps his jaws shut around the target,
Did you guys every notice this during your attempts?



Awesome, informative guide as always Love looking at the ranged POV for this fight.. so much getting knocked around lol

[jacobwx77]

i would not agree to call this a breather after horridon and council. that might be because we're doign 10 man and not 25. The Quake stomps take the majority of our health and the AoE from falling rocks kill us off. playing with a paladin healer makes sure that we have a limited amount of AoE defensive and healing cooldowns...

[Airowird]

i would not agree to call this a breather after horridon and council. that might be because we're doign 10 man and not 25. The Quake stomps take the majority of our health and the AoE from falling rocks kill us off. playing with a paladin healer makes sure that we have a limited amount of AoE defensive and healing cooldowns...

We 2-shot this after roughly 10+ attempts each on the previous bosses, with a Paladin as one of our 3 healers. Between the Paladin saving up HoPo for Light of Dawn straight after the Quake, a minor healing CD should bring everyone back to acceptable health, assuming they know how to not stand in the circles on the floor. The only thing that ever killed us was the designated kicker being thrown in the air halfway through the channel, missing his interrupt.