Didn't see a topic on this, sorry if there's one already.
My guild is working on Morogrim Tidwalker right now, and we are mainly having problems with murlocs. Every time we've gone in, it seems like we're doing the same thing wrong every time and doing nothing to fix it.
We have two paladins healing the MT with Righteous Fury on. The murlocs come and (most of the time) go straight to them. The problem seems to be that once we start unloading AOE, they get all over the place with Seed of Corruption, mages running around AOE'ing and what have you. Hunter traps are set (no entrapment), warriors spamming demo shout and piercing howl, not sure if we had a feral druid last time. Point is, AOE'ers are dying and we can't seem to figure out what else to do.
I thought of the idea a while ago of a druid spamming heals when the murlocs came out and then went into bear form and tanked the adds. It sounds like a good idea, but I don't want to say it would work, because I honestly have no idea. Has anyone tried this?
There's also the protection paladin method of consecration spam, etc. but my guild doesn't really have protection paladins (we're short handed on them as is, with one of them being hacked recently and another not being around) so we haven't tried that method, nor do I know if it works well. How does this method work out?
Basically, what I'm asking is what method works consistently and what things would help to reduce chances of failure?
Hunters with Entrapment?
Druids spamming heals into bear form?
Protection paladin?
Two or three healing paladins with Righteous Fury?
Frost mages?
It sound like you act to fast trying to kill the Murlocs. Normally you should give the Paladins enough time to gain aggro. After that no one should gain aggro. Especially with SoC + Frost Nova perhaps even Dragonbreathe before or while you start bombing.
So give the Paladins the time they need, test it 1-2 times how long they need to gain enough aggro, after that you should work fine.
The only disadvantage of "waiting" too long is, as Praetorian said, that one of your aggro holders comes into water tombs
Blessing of Sacrifice is brilliant. It's so rarely used that I'm sure no one even thinks of it any more. How long do you give the paladin tank to establish aggro? ~3 seconds? Closer to ten?
EDIT: Does your paladin tank spec deep enough for Holy shield, or is that unnecessary?
DOT and rot.
Travian: Phased Weasel, -144 | 61, Damascus.
Well, we all stand by Morogrim, at the entrance to the tunnel leading to Karathress, where he's tanked. That means the pack from that side arrives first. I think the warlocks tend to start seeding as the first pack gets tanked, then other AoE begins as the second pack arrives, and everything blows up.
We AoE them in the middle of a pile consisting of probably 3/4 of the raid, so Frost Nova is a decidedly bad idea and is never used. Dragon's Breath, War Stomp, engineering bombs, and any other sort of pure AoE stun, however, are great.
I haven't done this fight, but seems that everyone overlooked something.
Hurricane has a 25% slow effect debuff.
Why not use a druid as the aoe starter, having him pop barkskin and start hurricane around him.
If he is in tank gear and specced for tanking (or is a moonkin) he shouldn't be to hard to keep up if you can keep a stamina geared mage up (previous poster).
This way when the mages start opening up they will receive 25% less damage, and it might take one or two aoe for them to pull aggro, thats when the druid starts his tranquillity instead, should be a win win situation.
Last edited by Marwel : 04/23/07 at 10:57 AM.
Reason: Hurricane is 25% not 20%
Slightly Offtopic. We do not have a tankadin at this point, getting one will cost us one of our already few holy paladins. I can see having one being usefull here and there, but I much rather use a strategy which does not depend on a tankadin if its doable, then having one standing around half of the time and do ineffective healing. What does your tankadin do at Gruul-Style encounters? Is it effective enough?
Just go with the tactic Gurg described if you don't want your paladins to respec. Use a healing-specced paladin and have him use Righteous Fury and just spam heal a warlock that uses life tap and they'll be on him like glue.
Slightly Offtopic. We do not have a tankadin at this point, getting one will cost us one of our already few holy paladins. I can see having one being usefull here and there, but I much rather use a strategy which does not depend on a tankadin if its doable, then having one standing around half of the time and do ineffective healing. What does your tankadin do at Gruul-Style encounters? Is it effective enough?
I dont think people are using full prot specced paladins here. It's amazing how much tanking a decent hybrid geared 41/20/0 can do, not to mention that alot of paladins will do fine with just 20 holy next patch (unless they change our talents abit more, /pray).
I'd say some decent tank gear, imp RF and maybe redoubt or toughness would be sufficient.
Well, unlike practically everyone else, we use four warriors, thunderclap and piercing howl. It sort of works, but we keep losing AE classes. We won when we cleaned up our act and waited for everything to be seeded before AE'ing.
I wouldn't mind using Paladins tbqh, one of ours tried RF+healing but we stuck with the warrior strat at the time cause it was working fairly well. We made heavy use of seed of corruption and AE'ing mages.
A holy paladin does this (standard 41/20 build) with the appropriate gear. No need for deep prot.
Thanks for the responses. There's another subtle point emerging from this thread I just realized, which isn't often talked about:
Give Seed of Corruption time. When I think back to all the AOE we've ever done, warlocks start seeding about the same time as mages start AOEing. Instead, we can front-load the AOE a lot more cleanly if the warlocks are given ~5 seconds to get seeds into the group. If the AOE targets aren't taking any other damage, the seeds should not pop during this time, and the AOE targets should remain on their tank (paladin, warrior, whatever).
Then a frontloaded simulcast of flamestrikes + shadowfury should be enough to pop and stun them, and all that's left is cleanup ...
DOT and rot.
Travian: Phased Weasel, -144 | 61, Damascus.
Thanks for the responses. There's another subtle point emerging from this thread I just realized, which isn't often talked about:
Give Seed of Corruption time. When I think back to all the AOE we've ever done, warlocks start seeding about the same time as mages start AOEing. Instead, we can front-load the AOE a lot more cleanly if the warlocks are given ~5 seconds to get seeds into the group. If the AOE targets aren't taking any other damage, the seeds should not pop during this time, and the AOE targets should remain on their tank (paladin, warrior, whatever).
Then a frontloaded simulcast of flamestrikes + shadowfury should be enough to pop and stun them, and all that's left is cleanup ...
exactly right. i think we started waiting for the locks to seed on our second or third kill and the difference was pretty big in terms of clean aoe. pally stand in the center and aggro all murlocs, nova when they reach the pally, wait for seed then 3-4 mages blastwaving/db'ing and rotating novas and they die quickly and before they can do any real damage. ezpz.
Slightly Offtopic. We do not have a tankadin at this point, getting one will cost us one of our already few holy paladins. I can see having one being usefull here and there, but I much rather use a strategy which does not depend on a tankadin if its doable, then having one standing around half of the time and do ineffective healing. What does your tankadin do at Gruul-Style encounters? Is it effective enough?
Our strategy doesn't involve a paladin tank at the moment (though we may change).
We use two warriors (north & south) plus a druid in the middle to pick up the loose ones. One paladin keeps righteous fury on to get initial aggro over squishy healers in case a tank is hit with watery grave.
The tanks spam cleave, thunderclap, and piercing howl while pulling them to the center to AE. We moved a shaman into a group with 4 mages that dropped Tranquil air totem at the AE call. I don't think a mage ever pulled aggro afterwards. If the warlocks did, they were using seed of corruption at ranged so it was a non-issue. We would always do a 5-second countdown to let the warlocks pre-load SoC.
I can't stress how insane a fully prot paladin is on these. We use one, he will hold aggro on 100% of the murlocs and not even come close to dying because he has 15k hitpoints and full tank gear on. We tank morogrim way off on the wall (left side if you are coming FROM karathress' room) and catch the murlocs in the middle of the ramp, as that is where they will intercept each other without having to gather them up. The AE'rs out range earthquake so they take no damage, as do a few others, minimizing the amount of raid healing needed. We don't hesitate on the AE everyone just goes nuts as soon as they arrive in the middle and the prot pally doesn't lose agro, murlocs dead in 6-10 seconds max.
Disaster recovery for us. We have a feral druid hot a bunch of people and hop in bear form tanking a couple, and our extra prot warrior demo shout/tclaping the other side. If the prot pally gets graved and can't get back in time one AE taunts, if it happens more than 3 times, well I guess we are screwed, or at least have an awkward AE cycle, but that really shouldn't happen.
Did this with only 5 AErs 2 affliction locks and 3 fire mages.
We use a druid and a warrior (me). I take the inc mobs from Katheress and PH them roughly twice, along with TC and Demo Shout. The druid picks up the mobs from the other direction, and with PH up on mine they roughly arrive at the same time. Once there I spam PH and after 1 or 2 locks start seeding and what not, all the AE starts. With PH on mobs if you see a mob getting close, you can easily run away.
Sometimes 2-3 mobs are at -25% for whatever reason and we end up taunting, and killing. I think PH is the most versatile skill we have and it really shines in any encounter like this.
We use Paladins with Righteous fury up. There are a few things you can do with this strategy to make them about 100% effective. Here's a few tips based on our experience with the fight.
First, If you can muster a 3rd paladin it will make keeping the MT up alot easier after the quake and won't really affect their ability to establish aggro too much if at all.
Second, We have a Piercing Howl warrior only piercing howl on the North side (because of our tanking position if we only have one warrior piercing howl a frost trap on the ramp ensures that all the murlocs reach the AoE area at the same time.
Third, Nova Rotations make the AoE Significantly easier to manage and generally safer. Have your mages space them out 3 seconds apart or so. Also, we don't wait for Seeds to open up AoE they just spam seed after the first nova but the mages open up immediately. However, i can see the benefit of waiting a second or two to make sure the AoE is even cleaner than it already is.
Fourth, We use 1 ToL druid on the watery graves solo healing. It leads me to believe that you should never need more than one healer by the graves or assigned to them for that matter. Even if he gets puts in a watery grave we have not lost anyone to one in a long time.
Fifth, and most importantly i think, have your piercing howl warrior call out in vent when the paladin gets aggro. Once aggro is achieved it will be nearly impossible for the paladin to lose aggro to other healers. We have our PH warrior targett he murlocs while he PH's then he says on vent "Ok, Heal the raid" and our other healers begin topping off everyone for the next watery grave.
Also, this might not be a huge deal to your guild, but consider what type of MT you are using for tidewalker. Is he, a high stamina-lower avoidance tank? Is he avoidance based? The closer your tank leans to avoidance the less effective the heal aggro strategy will be. If its enough to make a difference, i'm not sure. I Have gone the stamina Route and am at about 21k HP pre-2.1 and its just plain better for a fight like THIS. That said, I usually assign another person to Tank Karathress, someone with more avoidance to help avoid crazy burst damage after he starts dropping spitfires and enrages. Make sure you have the right guy for the job.
Thanks for all of the suggestions everyone. My guild has been trying different strats and have been improving on the boss. But by all means, if you have another suggestion, keep them coming.
We too were having an issue with loosing AE during the murloc phases, more specifically mages. We use the RF paladin healing aggro method but we don't actually let them tank it. We also use a 3 mage frost nova rotation but its in targeted areas. We position our paladins/shadow priest/shaman on the left side of the ramp and place our warlocks on the right side. The first mage will frost nova the Murlocs just before they reach the paladin. (This usually roots the entire north spawn and most of the south spawn) Before the mage actually nova's the murlocs our warlocks have seeded 2-3 mobs while the murlocs are in transit so that by the time frost nova is laid down SoC is going off. Then we have the 2nd mage come up and root the remainder of the south spawns. By this time our warlocks have a significant amount of aggro and the murlocs start to path towards them across the ramp and are usually clumped up together. This is when the 3rd mage comes in and roots the remainder of the murlocs and we dragon's breath the clump and by that time they are dead.
All of this happens while we have warriors/druids ph/demo and hunters trap. For as rediculous as it may sound it worked extremely well tonight and our AE takes significantly less damage. If we get water tombs on mages we just have the 2 who aren't move up in the rotation, if we get double mage tombed then we have challenging shout between the druid/warrior while the mages get back up the ramp.
Again as noted previously in this thread, blessing of sacrifice is something we neglected to think of. From reading prior posts using a paladin in gladiator gear with BoSac would make this alot easier to deal with. But then again the idea of a mage tank does seem interesting.
Never done the fight before so this is just an idea I've come up with based on some of the suggestions thrown around.
I like the idea of a mage tank with defensive gear on as well as potions to survive. My question is, wouldn't a Destruction Warlock specced intensity w/Concentration Aura spamming hellfire be a lot easier to keep up? Sure he's taking extra damage from the hellfire themselves, but extra healing would be nice, no?
Demonic Embrace means that Warlock will typically have quite a bit more health then the mage as well. No idea how well this would do on threat but I assume it would be quite similiar? Arcane Explosion and blastwave is what I assume a mage tank would be using (if specced heavy fire) to hold aggro right? I don't recall how much damage hellfire and arcane explosion do, but I assume the damage from both would be similiar (comparing say 3 ticks of hellfire to 2 arcane explosions *assuming there is very little error). The other advantage would be that an uninterupted hellfire is very efficient, but I guess it wouldn't matter that much if the mage had a Shadow Priest in his group.
No idea about the threat generated by both abilities, but I'd think that a Warlock tank would be a better choice. Far easier to heal and higher health compared to taking less damage with probably higher threat.
I tank the murlocs for my guild. I have done it as both holy and prot spec, and being prot spec definately makes it easier but is by no means mandatory. The trade off is that as holy spec you can chain more Holy Lights via Light's Grace before the monsters get to, so they are more likely to be stuck to you the second they get there, while as prot you basically can't die because of Ardent Defender, but AOE has to wait 1-2 more seconds to start. 5-6 ticks of consecration should have them locked on you.
If you can get a Paladin in the realm of 14k hp potted in full tank gear you should be able to do it this way no problem. Last kill I had 17k hp and I never felt remotely close to dying.
About being ported with the murlocs out: we have a couple warriors ready to challenging shout and if necessary shield wall if I get ported after Earthquake but before the murlocs are there. If they had already started to eat consecrate, the murlocs run to whereever I'm bubbled and are typically picked apart by the time they get to me.
I am sorry if this is doesn't belong here, just didn't want to start a new thread on it:
We had a few runs at Morogrim yesterday but spent more time on trash than on the boss himself - "hey respawns are cool, deal with it" (to cite Quigon: Assembly line still working ).
At least 3 of our wipes were simply due to trash:
a) one of the murloc packs in his room just respawned midfight.
b) the Naga pack respawned midfight - about 45 minutes after we killed it
c) the Naga pack respawned midfight - even though we just killed it 5 minutes before
I suppose the first one of those could have been prevented by simply waiting 10 minutes for trash respawns (didn't we learn at Mag that those are not fun?) - but I have no idea on the nagas: Bug or feature?
Are they on a 2 hour respawn timer as the rest of the zone or is their timer different?
If that was already answered before, sorry I did a search for it, but didn't find anything.
OT anecdote about having fun with trash: On our first kill of Hydross (with the "normal" tactic, killed him before on our first pull with "that other" tactic) one of the last poison elementals got feared into the respawned naga pack which added on us - of course, because that's so much fun - at 2%, we still got him down nevertheless. Problem was that recovery was not possible, since one of his adds didn't despawn - and they do have a huge aggro range..
[Rambling] I simply have a deep sitting hatred for respawning, (mind numbing) trash - and still wonder where that idea went:
"You have to think about every aspect of the game and ask: "Is that fun?" If it's not, then it has to go". [rambling off]
As for Morogrim... that fight is amazing for tankadins. We had our positioning set up so that all the healers were clumped up in one group, with a mage on either side to frost nova the murlocs as they came through. There's about 10 murlocs that come from either side. I was tanking all of them on one side myself, and we had a couple druids picking them up from the other side.
My mage and I had it down to a science. They come out in more or less a straight line, so I'd Avenger's Shield the first 3 to slow them down and clump the group up a bit more. He'd frost nova them all in place, then I'd run up, drop a consecrate, and play in the frost nova a bit. If any of them got through the frost nova I'd just RD and get them all back. After the nova broke all the tanks would group them up and we'd AOE them all down. None of our AOE died to murlocs the whole night. It was pretty awesome.
The only times it got really hairy was occasionally for whatever reason they'd aggro onto different healers who were spread around the room (usually because of watery graves). One time in particular they separated into 3 groups. One group got frost nova'ed, I AS'ed another, and RD'ed the rest. One of the druid tanks from the other side (I'm assuming he was coming over to help) said "Jesus Christ, Lore, how'd you get all those?" It made me feel pretty damn good about myself
There are two naga packs patrolling the corridor between Morogrim and Karathress. One patrols the Morogrim side mainly, to the bend. The other patrols the Karathress side.
The naga pack on the Morogrim side will despawn instantly the first time Morogrim is aggro'd. It will, however, respawn on a 2hr timer from that moment. So if your puller accidentally aggros Morogrim as you're starting to clear the murloc packs, you leash him or wipe, and then you slowly clear the room for your first time, you may end up far closer to the respawn time on that near naga pack than you realize or desire.
The naga pack on the Karathress side doesn't despawn. If, however, it happens to be right next to the bend in the hallway at the precise moment that a Lurker pack spawns in, they will social, and wipe you. We had a would-be first kill turn into "Sweet, 6%, this is easy... one more AOE wave and we've got this... wait, wtf is that?" Since then, we kill that Karathress-side naga pack before engaging.
Uhm, I don't know how to say this. Are you guys having bad luck? I mean, this is just insane. Last night we had a paladin pulled to the watery graves FIVE times in a row on two separate tries. What are the odds of that? Really?
We're back tonight, and what happens. The same two mages get pulled FOUR times in a row THREE tries in a row. Really, what are the odds of something like this happening? It just doesn't make sense... This actually happened to anyone else?
I'd like to say thanks to everyone who's posted in this thread, there's a lot of really good information here that my guild is finding very helpful. We're currently working on Morogrim and are trying to refine our murloc strategy.
Right now we're racking our brains trying to come up with a good list of stuns that work on the murlocs. One of our shamans inquired about the stun effect of stoneclaw totems and I'm wondering if anyone has found them to be useful in this fight.
04/23/07, 10:15 AM
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