Sentinel tank Id prefer a druid healer , because it makes for far less issues with moving /range handling darkness. If i tank sentinels one druid just sticks to me and follows me wherever i go. Paladins can heal it too (although they indeed need spriest, druids dont really), but it requires paying much more attention to their positioning.

How many guilds run with less than 3 SPs for "raid healing"? We run 3 SP/6 healers and an odd 4 tank setup (pally/druid on doors, warrior on Sent, pally on voids) and have considered going to 2/7 to save a respec and to be more versatile if we don't have the right raid each week. It would lower our M'uru dps in P1 but the fight gets easier every week anyways.

Pretty much every setup I've seen is 2/6. I'm sure there are others but 2/6 is most common.

2/6, don't see how I can fit in room for a 3rd Spriest nor see the need for a 3rd spriest.

We used to run 2/6 but now we run 3/5. More dps and the healing is still easy in phase1.

Shadowsword Berserker - WWS

I am not sure how much more avoidance to put on, I am sitting around 55% dodge and 32,300 amor~ and those adds are still putting out insane amout of damage on me. I could stack more agi/dodge but I would lose a lot of armor, so I am not too sure where to go from this.

I think it depends on what your assigned duty is. I've never had the luxury of a shadow priest on this fight and my usual choice for KJ side raid healing is CH rank1 with a R4 thrown in on the tank or raid when hp bars are dipping below what CH1 can safely keep up. Couple this with aggressive use of drums, tide, pots, and I usually enter P2 around 50% to 75% mana unless it has been a messy transition when I can be as low as 25%. With our normal speed of P1 I have tide up just after the transition into P2 with a pot around 30 seconds later.

We have a restoration druid and a CoH priest in the odd non shadowpriest group. The druid just hots the Sentinel tank, the Void Spawn tank and the one humanoid tank who is in range and basically never goes out of mana. His Innervate is then given to the CoH priest.

In addition, if you tank one side with a feral druid (which is quite common), you can also give his Innervate to the holy priest who doesn't have a shadowpriest. Usually the first Innervate mid phase 1 and the second mid phase 2.

For illustration, here's a WWS of a M'uru kill using this strategy: Wow Web Stats

We run 2 Shadow Priests and 5 healers. 2 Shaman healing sides. 2 Priests one on each side healing humanoid tank as well as Sentinel tank and Prot pally. One Pally staying on the Sentinel tank full time. The shaman and pally get a shadow priest and the holy priests go without. I usualy use rank 3 gheal and 60% of my healing is done on the prot pally. I will go into phase 2 with 75-90% mana.

Kill using this setup: Wow Web Stats

Shadowsword Berserker - WWS

I couldn't help to notice but one of your tank is taking much more damange the the other, could you explain why? or is one of them is not using complete avoidance set? The difference seems pretty huge.

You need to wear alot more avoidance considering Sunwell Radiance has no effect on this fight... If you look through other WWS's you'll see druids (like mine) at over 70% dodge. One thing you could do is use your dps staff (that has a lot of agi) and pop ironshields. Having different sets of gear (one stam set and one dodge set) also help alot.

Edit: About the Blood Legion wws, if you notice one druid is also tanking Entropius which adds to the dmg taken, he's also has 20% less dodge than Foofter which would make me feel like he's wearing more stam gear instead of dodge.


EDIT 2: Yea I meant avoidance... not mitigation

Curious, how many guilds kill this guy with 1 SP?

You probably meant that you need to wear alot more avoidance on this fight, since Sunwell Radiance has no effect whatsoever on Mitigation; also, correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm quite certain that Ironshields likely don't do a whole lot of anything for druids even if they're stacking the hell out of avoidance, due to the fact that the Armor Cap is lowered considerably seeing as how the mobs are only level 71. As a warrior on the other hand, I can agree that Ironshielding on sides certainly takes alot of oomph out of the mobs. That being said, even without Ironshielding I was still taking less damage than our druid on most of our attempts. (he runs 69% dodge, I'm sitting at 38.5% before agi food / neck proc (which is almost constantly up due to cleave spam) / mongoose / grace of air, and add 23.5% parry and 8.3% added miss to that)

edit: for the lazy, I sit at ~75-76% total avoidance, our druid at ~73-74%, but I get a bit more out of those procs; plus, block value shaves off a tremendous amount of the damage on this fight - consider TC and Disarm as added advantages over druids for this.

Couple of points:

The armor cap is 32000-ish. That usually means either a trinket (assuming BoT up till now... gah), ring or cloak slot going out for expertise gear to help with leaks on run-in. Swapping out to a DPS staff with a boatload of agility usually means that you still need to pop ironshields to maintain the armor cap. (And you'd be insane not to cap armor if you can, unless you're running something ridiculous like 85+% avoidance before procs)

The point with side tanking is, you build a strategy on what that side can handle, not how much damage a tank takes. If a tank dies often, and it's clearly not a healer brainfart, then things need to be done to reduce incoming damage. If a tank doesn't die, and M'uru is getting to 0%, it doesn't matter even if the strat is something bizzare like 2 healers on it, or 2 sheeps, or whatever.

Analyze what causes tanks to die. Is it a spike from an instant cast fireball? Is it the amount of hits landed being too numerous and too heavy for the healers to keep up with throughputwise? The entire group on that side can often help prevent spike deaths by playing defensively every time it happens. Kidney Shots, Bash, more attention to interruping fireballs (Assuming mage is tanked) all can help a tank recover if health dips low. Not to mention Commendation proccing.

Edit: Even though it's been said a million times, I'll just chip in again. Avoidance is king. Going from 50 to 60 alone is already 1/5th physical damage completely cut out of the picture. Going up to 75% makes Berserkers a joke, even if they dip you low enough to proc an additional 8% from Commendation.

Few issues.
How are people assigning their healers to the void sentinel tank + spawn tank? We had a DS priest + tree druid (who also stacks a row of HoTs on the corridor-side tank) assigned to both last night who said that it was very uncomfortable at times.
However, the void sentinel tank was not wearing any shadow resistance so could've been eating unnecessary volley damage from stacking the sentinel ontop of the paladin tank for spawns. Both tanks in ~200 buffed resist or so?

Also we use 4 dps per humanoid side, who had aggro issues with the tank but bearly made the adds dead before the next wave. Can we afford to put another dps per side to make it easier or will we just run dry of mana/maybe even hit the enrage without all excess dps to M'uru?

How are you tanking the adds, and is the kill order single target or AE? Also, if everyone is capable of watching Omen, tanks only need to build ~25k threat on each mob for 4 dps to kill it before pulling aggro. You can swap to a different target to build threat on after 25k. That may help - threat that's not needed is as good as no threat at all.

It's not been mentioned yet, but Dampen Magic reduces the shadowbolt damage the Spawns do and is worth putting on your Spawn and (strat depending) on your Sentinel tank as well. Speaking from experience, Amp is not a good choice on the Spawn tank.

I think a more interesting discussion would be: how many guilds this boss has destroyed, why, and how soon will Entropius be nerfed?

The majority of guilds have figured out the strat by watching countless videos and forum posts, but are still smashing their heads on phase 2. It's not like Eredar Twins where once the easy strat was publicized, guilds were downing it within a week. Many have been on M'uru for over a month, and it's probably the most frustrating boss in all of WoW (save for perhaps 4 horsemen if you didn't have 8+ warriors)

When do you guys switch to P2 ?

The way we try to do it, is as follow:
We take M'uru to 3% by the end of the 5th humanoid pop.
Then we start the 6th pop, the mages and shadow priests help on the humanoids and the Void sentinel as they can.
T=0 6th pop
T=5 Darkness
T=20 Sentinelle Pop
T=25 Darkness fade
T=38 Dps M'uru
between T=42 and T=45 P2.
T= 50 sentinel die
T=55 remaining humanoid should be dead
Between T=50 and T=60, we have our mage and warlock AoE the void spawn while the tank is building some aggro.

As P2 is really a dps race, having a clean transition is really hard to do.
If we do too much dps on m'uru, we loose some time to finish the Void sentinell/spawn and humanoid.
Too late and we have another pop to handle ( and of course it's game over).

Do you do anything special for your transition? Do you crowd controle the remaining Humanoid? Do you get to P2 during another Humanoid Pop (technicaly we could do it during the 5th pop but the syncro with the darkness is really bad and if the sentinel pops to the wrong side of the room it's hard to finish it in time).

Wouldnt you wana kill the Fury Mage first? I mean a druid tank tanking 1 or 2 rogues with 75% dodge is pretty safe but I remember the mage doing 8-9k fireballs, which can result in a dead tank so she can be an issue.

Considering there are mages sheeping on that side, they can spell steal the buff that they gain which actually makes mages do decent dmg on this fight. Yay a fight where mages can actually do decent damage. Also we use 3 hunters and an ele shaman dps on my side which the ele shamans earth shocks some of the fireballs which reduces the damage alot.

Edit: The fire balls only do 7k+ dmg when they have the buff up... make sure its not up for long

It will be a sad day when M'uru is nerfed, because the encounter is perfect, unfortunatly Blizzard fucked up the past year of content, and it's affects are being amplified with M'uru. Top guilds faced huge attrition, during the 9 month farmfest, forcing them to recruit some less skilled players. They get into Sunwell, and are for the most part able to brute force there way through the first 3-4 bosses, with the only sort of challenge being Twins. Then they hit M'uru, debatably the hardest boss Blizzard has ever created, and people who aren't used to working hard to beat a boss, start jumping ship, stripping guilds to there core, and once that core starts to give up hope due to not wanting to gear up recruits, they fall apart.

M'uru is tuned PERFECTLY for its place in progression as the 2nd to last boss in the expansion. Unfortunatly Blizzard fucked up for the past 12+ monthes, and made everything WAY to easy. No one was truly challenged with T6 content, even when BT was harder then its current form, it was still a joke compared to M'uru. People were babied with a year of easy content, and now that a brutal, challenging encounter is released, it is beating them into the ground.