Dragonking Thordan

There are a couple of details that we should first go over before going into the main mechanics loop.

Mitigations

This phase requires some mitigation planning. To get the most use out of all the party’s cooldowns, you’d do something like the following:

[Click to Expand] Mitigation Notation

Party mitigations
MT 90s, ST 90s	Shake It Off, Dark Missionary, Heart of Light, Divine Veil
H1 120s	Temperance, Neutral Sect
H2 30s	Sacred Soil, Kerachole
H2 90s	Deployment Tactics, Zoe
H2 120s	Expedient, Holos
D1, D2	Feint
D3	Troubadour, Tactician, Shield Samba
D4	Addle

Akh Morn's Edge #1	MT Reprisal, H1 120s, H2 30s, D1 Use H2 30s at the 2nd Trinity after Exaflare's Edge.
Gigaflare's Edge #1	ST Reprisal, H2 30s, D2, D4
Akh Morn's Edge #2	MT Reprisal, MT 90s, ST 90s, H2 30s, D3 Use MT 90s, ST 90s, H2 30s, D3 at the 2nd Trinity after Exaflare's Edge.
Gigaflare's Edge #2	ST Reprisal, H2 30s, H2 120s, D1
Akh Morn's Edge #3	MT Reprisal, MT 90s, ST 90s, H1 120s, H2 30s, D2, D3, D4 Use MT 90s, ST 90s, D3 as soon as they're available.

Note that there is a need to time some mitigation at the second autoattack before Akh Morn’s Edge. This is done to gain additional uses:

H2 30s will be back for Gigaflare’s Edge.
MT 90s, ST 90s, D3 will be back for Akh Morn’s Edge #3.

Basic Mechanics

Dragonking Thordan has two basic mechanics that are worth mentioning.

Fire/Ice of Ascalon

All of Dragonking Thordan’s major mechanics are combined with either Fire or Ice of Ascalon, which resolves together at the beginning of the mechanic.

If Dragonking Thordan's swords glow red, he will use Fire of Ascalon, which is a point-blank AoE.

Players must be outside his targeting circle.

If Dragonking Thordan's swords glow blue, he will use Ice of Ascalon, which is a donut AoE.

Players must be inside his targeting circle.

Trinity

After each mechanic has completed, Dragonking Thordan will auto-attack twice.

Each auto-attack hits three players:

The player with highest aggro will get hit with dark damage, and gain a stack of Dark Resistance Down.
The player with the second-highest aggro will get hit with light damage, and gain a stack of Light Resistance Down.
The closest player will get hit, and gain a stack of Dark Resistance Down, Light Resistance Down, and Physical Vulnerability Up.

Over the course of the fight, the non-tank players will rotate in to take one auto-attack each.

After Exaflare's Edge	D1 → D2
After Akh Morn's Edge	D3 → D4
After Gigaflare's Edge	H1 → H2

Because of the stacking Light/Dark Resistance Down debuffs on the tanks, the tanks will be constantly swapping aggro throughout the fight.

Tip: It's easy for the tanks to lose track of who is supposed to be tanking the boss. To help keep track of things:

Add text to a Provoke macro so the chat log has a record of who last Provoked.
The tank with 0 or 1 stack of Dark Resistance Down should be holding aggro.

With all that setup, we can now go over Dragonking Thordan’s major mechanics.

Mechanics Loop

Dragonking Thordan will execute the following loop three times:

Exaflare’s Edge
Akh Morn’s Edge
Gigaflare’s Edge (this will be replaced with Morn Afah’s Edge on the third loop.)

Exaflare’s Edge

Have the tank with aggro point Dragonking Thordan either North or South before the start of this mechanic.

1. Three Exaflare telegraphs will appear relative to Thordan's orientation.
2. Focus on the bright dot at the center of the Exaflares. This will be your first dodge point. If Dragonking Thordan is facing either north or south, you can also use the floor markings to guide your movement.
3. When the Exaflares resolve, dodge to where the bright dot was.
4. Continue dodging the next set of Exaflare AoEs. Dodging backwards (see the diagram) will always be safe. As you get more experienced with the mechanic, you will notice Exaflare patterns where you can maintain melee uptime (dodging to the left in this case), but this is not necessary.

Thordan will then auto-attack twice, which should be taken by the two tanks, and D1, followed by D2.

The tanks should continue to face Thordan north or south, away from the party.

Akh Morn’s Edge

Thordan will spawn three towers relative to where he is facing:

One red tower at his front-left
One red tower front-right
One blue tower at his rear

The blue tower deals increased damage, and is meant to be taken by the tanks.

All players must be inside Thordan’s hitbox in order to be within healing range of both healers- remember to step inside if Thordan’s swords were originally red.

Akh Morn’s Edge will be resolved with a 3-3-2 split.

Front-left: H1, D1, D3
Front-right: H2, D2, D4
Back: MT, ST

Thordan will then auto-attack twice, which should be taken by the two tanks, and D3, followed by D4.

Where Thordan faces after Akh Morn’s Edge doesn’t matter.

Gigaflare’s Edge

Gigaflare's Edge is a series of three raid-wide AoEs, each with an epicenter in a triangle going clockwise or anti-clockwise around Dragonking Thordan.

This is not falloff damage- standing inside the marked region (illustrating a South Gigaflare) will one-shot a player, while standing outside just deals heavy damage.

Mitigations for Gigaflare's Edge should be timed as the entire sequence lasts 8 seconds, while several debuffs (Reprisal, Feint, Addle) lasts only 10 seconds.

Thordan will then auto-attack twice, which should be taken by the two tanks, and H1, followed by H2.

After Gigaflare’s Edge, whoever’s tanking the boss should face the boss directly North or South to prepare for Exaflare’s Edge.

The loop then repeats from Exaflare’s Edge.

Morn Afah’s Edge

Dragonking Thordan will put three towers and will continually hit them in quick order.

As each set of towers kills three players, the party can only take two rounds of towers as there aren’t enough players to take the third set.

A general kill order should resemble:

First set of towers	H1, H2, MT
Second set of towers	D3, D4, ST
Third set of towers	Ignore (let the tower failed animation wipe the party instead of having D1 and D2 killed by the towers.)

Morn Afah’s Edge towers will match the Akh Morn’s Edge tower groups.

Note: After the first hit, Morn Afah's Edge will continually hit the towers every 3 seconds- if you're not taking the first set, standby near your tower, and do not wait to enter when it's your turn!

Buff windows

Assuming the party used potions at the start of P6, the buff/pot window timings are:

First buff window	After Gigaflare's Edge #1
Second buff window	During Akh Morn's Edge #3

Potions can be used at either burst window.

Frequently Asked Questions

[Akh Morn's Edge] Why do we do 3-3-2 instead of 1-1-6?

1-1-6 at Akh Morn's Edge is a strat for two of the Akh Morn's Edges that is easier to heal compared to 3-3-2 by having:

One tank invuln the tank tower.
The other tank take one DPS tower solo with mitigation.
All six non-tanks take the remaining DPS tower.

By doing so, the players in the DPS tower take roughly half the damage they would take compared to 3-3-2, while the solo tank in the DPS tower takes about the same amount of damage as they would take from sharing the tank tower.

This looks like all-upside, however it does not come for free.

The biggest obstacle to 1-1-6 is having to mitigate Wyrmsbreath 2 and Cauterize with the same 30% at the end of P6.

The tank with a single-target tankbuster needs to time their 30% mitigation at the last second before Wyrmsbreath 2.
The healers need to top up the tanks (and potentially give targeted mitigation)- remember, the tanks are on the other side of the arena during Wyrmsbreath.

While this is doable, it's much tighter in execution than simply invulning Cauterize, and makes P6 even less forgiving.

Prog groups especially should aim to get more practice at P7, and it's difficult to justify potentially spending more time in P6 for both tanks to consistently (and independently!) get the timing down.

Even if Cauterize is properly mitigated, executing 1-1-6 still has some intangible tradeoffs. While it is easier to mitigate and heal through, you open up different lines of error:

Either H2, D2, or D4 forgets and goes to the wrong tower at the wrong Akh Morn's Edge.
The wrong tank goes to the wrong tower at the wrong Akh Morn's Edge.
"Less healing" does not mean "no healing", especially given 1-1-6's reputation of "letting healers parse". It's also easy for healers to forget that the tank in the DPS tower still takes a good amount of damage and needs healing as if they were doing 3-3-2.

[Gigaflare's Edge] Is Gigaflare's Edge really a point-blank AoE, or is it proximity-based damage?

Gigaflare's Edge is actually proximity-based, but the falloff is very steep, making it act like an AoE.

Here's a graph plotting the damage vs distance (in centiyalms).

(Credit: radrauser)

[Mitigation] Is there a reason D2 is paired with D4? What happens with double caster parties? Wouldn't that overlap Addles?

Pairing D1 with D4 is something I considered, but decided against as "D2 Feint first" breaks the usual pattern of D1 > D2.

That being said, the important part of the mitigation plan is establishing the baseline for where D4 uses their Addle. That way, the second caster knows where not to Addle (regardless of whether they're D2 or D1).

The same reasoning applies to double-ranged parties.

[Burst windows] Why is the first burst window after Gigaflare's Edge #1, instead of the P7 opener?

P7 lasts about 3:45 in total, so there's no way to fit in a third 2-minute burst window, even if a reopener was used at the start.

In addition:

Some players may have opted to use their burst at the end of P6, after Touchdown.
Both dragons can also be downed immediately after Touchdown if the party's DPS is high.

In either scenario, the 2-minute burst abilities may not necessarily be available at P7's opener, so setting the first burst after Gigaflare's Edge #1 guarantees everyone has their burst abilities ready.

Troubleshooting

[Akh Morn's Edge] How did my WAR die?

Check that the WAR did not use Shake It Off after Vengeance, as Shake It Off removes a WAR's buffs (except for Rampart) if used later.

This is something to pay attention to in the second Akh Morn's Edge in particular, as Shake It Off comes back off cooldown there after using it at Alternative End.