After procrastinating for so long, I decided to finally do the scenario for the Thunder Forge. I might’ve died 3-4 times but I had prepared in advance by purchasing speed potions, watching videos and getting advice from numerous people on how they managed to conquer this scenario. Now, I want to share my experience as a late comer to this part.
After receiving the weapon gem, I hesitated in moving forward much with the legendary quest mostly because of the group quest requirement and two PVP battlegrounds you had to do. Ironically, those proved to be quite easy and I managed to blow through those without any issue. The next two hiccups were getting the Secrets of the Empire and bumping my reputation up to Exalted with Wrathion. I had been partially doing the reputation grind beforehand in killing rares numerous times on the Isle of Thunder as well as occasionally doing the dailies. This part of the quest line was more of a grind since it was just about being persistent. My two motivation points in getting through this were hitting roughly 2k of reputation per day on the Isle of Thunder by doing a combination of dailies, rares and killing everything in my path while going for protection paladin gear in the Throne of Thunder.
Fortunately, that part didn’t take too long neither. I just needed to be persistent and motivated to push through those parts. Once I completed that, I faced the next major hurdle which was the Thunder Forge. Reading wowhead sometimes is bad because people who did those scenarios early on may have encountered a lot of problems. My main advantage at this stage was gear; my plan was to outgear and outprepare the scenario as much as I could in advance. The initial stage was really easy. Once I went into the Thunder Forge area, I had to nuke down all the adds. I screwed up the first time since I didn’t realize I needed to click the anvils after they were prepared. That caused one of the celestial blacksmiths to die and reset that stage; I had thought that the anvils were only to be used on the Amalgam creature.
The second time around, I managed to correctly nuke the creatures down and handled the anvil portion, leaving the Amalgam open. Here’s where overpreparation can also hurt you. Immediately, I ran around and clicked on every single anvil then did a hard burn. That allowed me to nuke the Amalgam to near 20% where the lance dropped down. But my positioning was a little off and I could not grab the lance in time before the last cast of insanity. I think during one pull I managed to handle that part correctly but had problems grabbing the lance and getting the action button to emerge. But the first time where I tried clicking on all the anvils, I ended up dying to insanity since I had no anvils left to interrupt it.
That made me change my strategy and do what probably was intended which was to DPS the boss down and only use the anvil whenever he cast insanity. The issue certainly wasn’t my DPS in this situation; it mostly was re-positioning the Amalgam every time I used an anvil. In the end, I did not use all of the anvils and managed to nuke down the boss (I don’t even remember if I used all my cooldowns either). I probably only used 3-4 anvils total for the kill.
The first 3 times was a little frustrating because of how the situation operates. After dying the first 2 times, I learned that you could use your mount to repair right by the door. People were not specific in saying that the tiny space just inside of the Thunder Forge area where the spirit healer revives you is the area where you can mount up, repair and eat before the fight with the Amalgam starts again. See, it’s the little details these wowhead and forum posts leave out which make encounters like these really frustrating if you try and follow them to the letter.
Either way, the idea for this fight is not to burn those anvils the way others have said and to only use them when he’s about to cast insanity. If you burn those anvils early on but do not have the DPS to get him down to 20% before insanity, you will pretty much die once he gets his insanity off. Leaving the anvils up is a very conservative method to safely downing the boss. You should get speed potions, buff potions, flasks and food buffs since you’ll need as much help as you can. But leaving the anvils up probably will help in the longer term.
Once I completed that scenario, I had to deal with what I felt was a far more challenging part of this quest line at this stage in the game: spearing Nalak. Okay, the actual spearing is easy. Kiting the elemental that appears from Nalak is easy. What’s impossible is finding a group to give you a hand. No one wants to do Nalak. There are ways to solo Nalak in handling this part such as using the vanity item that taunts everything. However, you’ll have to farm the guy in the Valley of the Four Winds for a while since the drop rate is so low (15%). I killed that guy 3 times but never once received the item within that time span.
I tried different tactics as a retribution paladin such as bubbling and running to the guards near the Throne of Thunder instance. While eventually they received aggro, the real issue was that I would die to his dots. I also tried hitting him just once with something like exercism and running. But that didn’t work neither since my exercism’s range is too short to allow me to quickly run back to the guards.
At the end of the day, what ended up happening was that a DK nearby attacked the boss, which allowed me to spear the boss, cause the elemental to appear and I was able to kite the add around the room where Nalak resided. Once the add’s health went to zero, I jumped up and down in joy. I gave the DK 100 gold for his effort and thanked him because that would’ve been impossible otherwise.
So now, I have my legendary meta gem (even though I’m just using it for a Throne of Thunder helmet) and am working on getting the Runestones. Even though this part is a grind, it’s far better than figuring out how to handle Nalak. The next real challenge will be against Wrathion himself. I’ve seen a few videos about how that fight works so I’m hoping by the time I get to it, I can outgear the fight and not worry about certain mechanics that tripped people up prior to patch 5.4. I think it’ll probably take me around a month to finish that leg of the quest chain since I’ve only received one Runestone (which was from Lei Shen). But I plan to continue running old Throne of Thunder LFRs and do Flex raids (with the occasional LFR thrown in) to get my Runestones along the way.