Siege of Orgrimmar preview: Norushen

Third in our initial preview series is the fight commonly known as Norushen. You will actually be fighting the "Amalgam of Corruption," but that hardly has a nice ring to it.

Icy Veins already has a guide in place to review some of the basic mechanics and strategy. Note that, as of this writing, the guide is somewhat out of date, as it mentions a mechanic that has been removed: there is no restriction on players reaching or exceeding 75 corruption in the sub-40% phase.

The basic idea is simple (and is actually captured quite well in IV's "Summing things up" section. Rotate tanks, dps, and perhaps healers in the Test Realms to clear their corruption bars. Maintain control of adds in the normal realm, and use tanks first, then dps or healers as needed, to absorb void zones at the cost of increasing the Corruption bar.

One of the most important aspects of managing this fight will be rotating people into the Test Realm. It's unclear to me how many orbs will be available to click, and if they will be in designated positions (I saw one video that indicated 4 orbs at fixed positions, but the date of the video suggested to me that it was actually a heroic 25-man attempt, not not normal 25-man). Still, it looks like either 3 or 4 orbs will be available on 25-man, and 2 on 10-man. A tank will always take one orb, leaving the others for you to cycle dps through.

Videos: Unfortunately, this fight doesn't make very many of the little things needed to organize it very transparent during a fight. I'll only briefly mention a few vids without focusing strongly on any one of them.

Here's a tank-perspective video, which gives some idea of positioning, picking up adds, and the tank test, which involves some dodging of ground-targeted effects.

A healer perspective, from a MW monk who enters the test realm around 3:10. You can see health bars for the npcs that need healing in the boss frame, but it seems this monk decides to focus more on dpsing the add than trying to top off the npcs, which is consistent with the strategy.

And a ranged dps perspective (warlock). See around 2:30 for entering the test realm, which shows a lot of dodging of conal ground effects.

This is a fight that could strain the group in a couple different ways. The additional adds that spawn when the boss reaches 50% and each 10% thereafter will stress both the healers (in the increasing raid damage), the dps in trying to get those adds down, and perhaps the tanks who are trying to soak up void zones to keep the raid clear. Having a healer be purified to help with the additional soaking strikes me as worthwhile, if one can sacrifice dps in the 100%-50% phase.

If raid damage is really intense, one could consider sending more healers into the test realm, but I suspect this will be disfavored. Ending the fight quickly seems preferred, which means sending as many dps as possible into the tests, and in order of best dps to worst, with the worst dps soaking puddles if they must.