We have both a feral druid and prot pally in our raids normally. So how we control the adds is two phases:

1.) Right as they spawn, a holy spec paladin spams max rank heals with RF and no salv to draw them on top of morogrim. Sometimes the RL will say "don't heal earthquake in group 3" so the pally knows where he has some room to heal.

2.) A prot pally and feral druid are waiting on top of moro to aoe tank them. They gather and build aoe threat for ~5 seconds, at which point the feral calls for aoe. The key is focused burst of aoe. We SoC on morogrim, mages AE, and they all die very very quickly. The key here is unlike solarian, there is no real rush to AoE, so just continue single dps on moro til the aoe tanks are ready, then burn them down in a focused way.

We use this tactic, but, like on monday/tuesday, we had our paladin Watery Graved constantly so ran out of Challening Shouts and Bubbles, ergo all of our AoE started to become the target of the Murlocs. I'm currently look for a work-around rather than change to the other option of having the Paladin out-range of WG.

Your "phase 2" prot pally? Or your "phase 1" healing pally?

If our RF pally gets graved, the murlocs usually run over to him in the grave. If phase 2 pally/feral get graved, a handful of murlocs follow them, too.

If RF pally gets graved, shadow priests fade, hold aoe, and aoe tanks pick them up as best they can. There's no reason for aoe to go on while a key aoe tank is graved.

If one but not both of the other tanks gets graved, it's usually just wait an extra 5 seconds then go AoE.

If you only have one "phase 2" aoe tank, I could see them getting graved being a very bad thing. Who do you use to tank hydross adds? Couldn't both those aoe tanks also aoe tank morogrim?

I find the only time that being graved is problematic is if it happens right in that time when the murlocs spawn/get to me. If it happens in that 10-15 second window it's a pain, but it's not a huge deal, as getting graved doesn't mean you lose aggro.

Every paladin tanking the murlocs in grave range should have the Divine Shield/cancel bubble macro. Basically, only use this if you get graved while the murlocs are up, and then spam the hell out of it. This will bubble to get you out of the grave, then cancel the bubble so you can get aggro back. Run back to TW, and while the murloc phase will take longer, like someone earlier said it's not really necessary to have them down especially fast. AoE people do need to be aware though, or they will grab aggro and die.

Basically though, the "random" factor of getting graved really isn't that huge of a deal. I've had one bad sequence of gravings (basically 3 in a row) in the last 10 or so fights on this guy. Tidewalker has to choose to grave during the murlocs, he has to target you as one of the 3 (4?) people he wants to grave, and it has to be less than 4 min since the previous time he did it. We generally have more problems with MT healers getting graved and not being adequately covered for than the murloc tank getting graved and causing havoc.

There are two main schools of thought for the OOR strat.

1) Facing the tunnel to Fathom-Lord's room, tank Morogrim either in the far right corner or the far left corner. Set up the murloc tank, his healer, and all of your AOE (or enough of it that you're sure the murlocs will die) in the opposite corner (far right or far left). Your AOE'ers are not allowed to get near Tidewalker when a watery grave cooldown is anywhere near happening. One of them getting Watery Graved is hard, two or three can wipe you. (It takes too long to run back from there.) Losing those DPS'ers on Morogrim tends to make for a slow kill. You want a frost trap between the door and the tanking position to try and make the north and south murlocs arrive around the same time.

2) Tank Morogrim in the tunnel to Fathom-Lord's room, ranged DPS roughly at the top of the ramp, murloc tank at the base of the ramp. His healer should be somewhere around there, preferably a little closer to the Watery Graves. The Warlocks he's healing need to be right on the top of the ramp, which shouldn't stop them from dps'ing Tidewalker, and all your AOE'ers can continue to DPS Tidewalker.

With #1, there's no need for any adjustment when Tidewalker switches to globules, with #2, you need to have your Paladin dodging bubbles or you need to switch to tanking the murlocs on Tidewalker. On the other hand, with #1, having 4-6 DPS also outranging the graves makes the kill considerably longer.

We've actually one-shotted him every week since the kill. We didn't one-shot Lurker the week after the kill. Very, very consistent fight with OOR'ing.

Most people make their Paladin spec prot if they use that strat, but I am thoroughly unconvinced that one is necessary. A Holy Paladin with Imp. Righteous Fury and a tanking set should be quite capable of tanking them - especially if he's rolling with tanking talents instead of Guardian's Favour, Precision, etc.

We use #2 in Jebralter's post, and in the beginning I thought the globules would be a problem, but it turned out even with all of our AoE, grave healer, pally tank, and pally tank healer very close to the graves, the globules touched noone. If you are really worried about it, just briefly stop DPS at about 26%, kill that set of murlocs, then push him over. The spawning water bubbles are one of the least threatening fight mechanics out there.

Last night while tanking Morogrim I was graved (as the MT) about 3 minutes in. I've been looking all over and can't find any posts anywhere referring to an MT being graved. My first guess was some sort of aggro issue akin to a tank being enfeebled on Prince, but Omen had me clearly out in front, and we've never had a threat issue on him before. Looking at the WWS parse afterward, I had an abnormally high miss rate on most abilities, but the threat output didn't look excessively diminished. After I was graved, he followed me over and kept pounding away like normal. He never so much as looked at another person, even though they continued dpsing for a few seconds in confusion.

Has anyone else experienced this?

The only thing I can come up with is an anecdote I'd read, probably in the "Stupid Things" thread. A hunter sent their pet in, didn't turn off Growl, the pet managed to pull aggro right before a grave, and Moro picked the tank. That doesn't explain your having aggro the whole time, unless it's possible for a pet to pull for a split second (cower macro?).

I'm actually leaning more toward a combination of someone with an outdated Omen, and their getting into your 100-110% window. We seem to have threatmeter glitches a lot of the time. Nothing more fun than having a warrior known for low TPS tank a mob, and he doesn't even show on the meter.

Definitely someone with an old version, or no version, of omen who passed you as highest threat.

After an absurdly long time on this boss using other strats which had us stacking on Morogrim, we switched to the strat below, and 2-shotted the boss last night (the first wipe due to tank dying due to mis-timed heals).

There is virtually *NO* randomness in this strat. Its easy, repeatable, and took us ~10 minutes to kill the boss. Any guild that has the tank, and main tank healing to last 10 minutes on Morogrim can do this. (this strat was mentioned earlier in this thread)

Special roles:
-> AoE Tank (Holy Paladin speced 40/21 or 41/20, doesn't really matter, wearing healing gear, preferrably high stam plate i.e. gladiator/PvP gear)
-> Life Tapping Warlock (LTW) (Any Warlock with decently high +dmg and hp)
-> AoE Healers (1-2 Paladins preferred due to lower healing threat, but not necessary at all, can be any healing class really except Tree Druid)
-> (optional) Improved Blizzard Mage
-> (optional) Hunter for Frost Trap

1) Morogrim tanked in Northeast Corner.
2) Ranged DPS and Main Group Healers stand on the east side of the north hallway entrance, against the wall.
3) AoE Tank stands at the bottom of the north ramp.
4) AoE group (2 mages /2-3 locks/2 AoE Healers) stands ~30 yards south of the AoE Tank, towards the centre of the room.

Note: AoE group/tank are never hit by Earthquake and are never Watery Graved the whole fight.

Pre-pull buff the LT Warlock and AoE Tank with Amp Magic.

Morogrim is misdirected to the Main Tank who is standing in the northeast corner. AoE group/tank run to position. LTW life taps himself to ~1k hp and waits. AoE Tank targets warlock.

When Morogrim casts Earthquake, AoE Tank casts 2x Holy Light and 1x Flash of Light on the LTW, then targets himself. At this time he will have all the murlocs on him and can heal himself through the damage, along with the AoE healers. Imp Blizzard mage casts Blizzard, and Warlocks begin seeding. About 3 seconds later, the other mage runs in and spams Arcane Explosion. Murlocs will die extremely quickly and even if AoE pull aggro, no one will die thanks to Imp Blizzard.

At the last pack before 30% (waiting till 25% to move is risky), AoE group moves to northwest corner of room, and Hunter drops Frost trap in north hallway to slow the north pack.

Continue until Morogrim dies.

The beauty of this strat is there is no confusion with raid roles. Everyone does essentially the exact same thing the whole fight. Also your AoE group/healers/tank never get Watery Graved or hit by earthquake so there is a lot less stress on raid healing. (9 people not getting hit by earthquake means about 36000 damage less to be healed every minute)

If your raid is dying because of murlocs (as opposed to burst damage on the main tank), I strongly suggest this or a similar strat, so that you can get this guy over with and move on.

Hi guys,

We got a little problemm with this boss.
And it is not with the murlocs :P
But the MT.

We are always low on healers so we killed Hydross/lurker/void with 6 healers.
Then we were at tidewalker and big healing problemms. So we let a druid respecc to resto.
So we got 7 healers and still we got some problemms. Not really a big one now.
We managed to get him to 37% on the 4th try.

But the problemm is that the MT gets crushable hits and then die...
Im the MT for this fight. I got 20,9K HP buffed. And as a warrior I got more for stamina/armor then avoidance.
He hits faster then I can put shieldblock on, so I get like 4 uncrushables in the last try. the last one killed me and whiped the raid.
I can try to get more avoidance items, that wouldn't be a problemm.
But I never read that a druid tanks this boss.
Why not?

So why do alot of guilds prefer a warrior for the MT instead of a druid?

Im the only one in front off morogrim. And I don't get hits by Murlocs.
But when I die I mostly die because I get a normal for like 4,5K, and in the same second I get a crushhit for 8,5K.
BTW I use Grimreaper to see which Damage I get when I die.

I've tanked all our morogrim kills so far - mainly because I was the most geared out tank we had when we reached him and we dont change a strategy that mostly gives us oneshots if we can avoid it. - that said, the optimal morogrim tank is a passively crushimmune warrior, and if you dont have that, go with your best geared tank and stack the hell out of the tank group. Bloodpact, commanding, devotion, Grace of Air is the group buffs I usually have, and recommend.

I'm not sure if it makes that much of a difference or not but we only have one pally doing the RF healing and tanks them. He's also full prot, and I don't know if that makes a difference at all or not.

Just make sure that your pally keeps healing himself to hold the aggro. We have zero murlocs drop off him at all when he does that and has consenctration down.

Because he hits quite fast, at your gear level crushes will get through shield block quite often. A druid is much easier to heal on this fight. Try one; your healers should see a large difference in burst damage and overall damage taken.

The usual cause of spike damage on Tidewalker is earthquakes eating up your shield block charges. Make sure healers know to focus extra hard on the MT in the few seconds after it hits.

Yes, at that gear level being passively crush immune sacrifices far too much. However, if MT death is the main problem, stamina and armor are the single best ways to increase your chances of survival. With 50% avoidance and 25% block you'll get crushed...exactly the same amount as someone with 0% avoidance and block (barring use of Shield Block).

Also, prot warrior dps isn't terrible, as long as you've geared yourself right (think: fury).

Four things really got us over the hump when we were working on Morogrim a few months back.

1) A druid tank is generally superior. Morogrim is going to get huge spikes out there -- generally prot warriors will absorb most of them but some will get through. Druids at an equal gear level, when you're progressed to Morogrim, tend to be better at being able to take those spikes. Make sure to put an imp down, have some healers of each speed (big/slow vs. quick/fast) dedicated to the tank, devotion aura, agi totem, everything you can do to maximize the druid's armor and dodge. Have an NS rotation so that shamans and druids know who is supposed to burn their NS in the event of a major scare.

2) Morogrim has a gigantic parry rate. Mobs, when they parry, are briefly hasted for their next few attacks. So it's paramount that nobody except the tank be in front of the boss at any time -- not only because they'll get wrecked by Tidal Wave, but because they'll trigger more parry and the tank will get a flurry beatdown. If the tank feels pressured and is low hp, stopping attacking for a few seconds until the healers can catch up can be beneficial.

3) The OOR strat is the winner. The fight appears to be at first glance about doing huge amounts of damage, but that's not right. The fight is about control. The more controlled, reliable, and repeatable you can get, the sooner you'll get the upper hand in the fight. We used the Karathress corridor opening for positioning. There's a couple of key tricks there:

a) there's mobs that patrol that corridor; you can despawn them by, after killing all the murloc packs in the room, sending in a rogue to aggro Morogrim and vanish, resetting him.

b) the tank tanks Morogrim about 5 feet deep into the corridor, facing into the corridor. When it comes time for globules, he retreats to about 40 feet deep and everyone piles up on the back of Morogrim's heels for murloc AOE and defensive purposes.

c) The aggro paladin stands at the bottom of the ramp with a druid graves healer; both are out of range so neither will ever get graved unless they walk up the ramp.

d) The warlocks are never healed by any raid healers; they stand at the top of the ramp so the paladin can pick them out after earthquakes and max-rank angry-heal them to build aggro on the murlocs.

e) Seed AoE is called in when the north murlocs hit the very top of the ramp. Warriors and druids try to keep the paladin alive for a few seconds before the seeds blow. As soon as they do, frost novas and everyone else pours in all of the AoEs. With 4 warlocks and 2 mages the murlocs go in about 5-6 seconds. No frost traps except at the bottom of the ramp, to prevent two murloc groups from forming in different places.

4) It's not a sin to bring more healers or more AoE. We're pretty geared now (starting on Hyjal), but when we first did the fight our healing wasn't insane and we brought 0-2 mages. Fortunately we've always had 5 warlocks. So for Morogrim and Karathress, we used to switch mid-instance to a 4-tank, 8-healer, caster-heavy setup, which was quite a change from our usual 5-tank, 7-healer blended setup. It can be a bit of a culture shift to ask people to stand outside the instance for their turn to come in, given that you don't have to do it up until that point. But you will have to do it again for Vashj and in Black Temple, so might as well start now.

Just to echo previous sentiments, I also usually MT Morogrim on most of our kills and have done for a few months. Last time I took a really in-depth look at it and compared my WWS with our similarly geared MT, I think I took about 10% more damage over the course of the fight (more crushes, slightly less avoidance), however the nasty spike damage was about 20% lower; max crush on me was ~6500 vs ~8000 on the Warrior for example.

If healer mana isn't an issue and you have a well geared Druid tank then that's probably your best option for Morogrim.

Double post :S

That is misleading.
It is true that the chance to be crushed is always 15% in both cases without shield block up but the tank with the higher avoidance will still get bursted less than the latter. For one because shield block charges will last longer since you get hit less during SB uptime. For two because you have a higher chance to avoid attacks right after a spike - say, 2-3 hits that were blocked (2 would-be crushes and a 3rd regular block) - so the hit after that does not kill you.

Just looking to get a quick answer on self healing threat in this fight. We have a prot pally tanking the murlocks, healing a lock with the +30% healing armor on. Because of this his total healing done to the lock was much higher than to any other class. Now while I know that healing others causes .5 threat for every point of healing done, there is some confusion about if self healing does .5, 1 or 2 pts of threat for every point of self healing done.