I would have to agree with you here. I think that it is kind of silly to keep full time prot paladins and other specialty classes on your guild's roster. What is NOT stupid, however, is keeping a solid group of players in each class that are capable of playing any of the roles within that class. Even your top DPS warrior should know how to (and be ready to) tank whatever he needs to. That's how these things should work, imo. We have a Holy paladin respec prot whenever we need to use one, and we found ourselves going to that option quickly when we were learning Felmyst and M'uru. Just keep those players geared in their offspec and you will be fine!

As for "perfect" groups for M'uru, I think that notion is ridiculous. Guilds should play to their strengths. I think I would have preferred to run the way SK did for the fight, but we don't have the hunters to do that really. They used 3 and MD'd the Sentinels to their tank if I'm not mistaken. What happened to work for us when we were just trying to make sense of the fight was that just about two melee groups could kind of "lock down" their respective sides while we determined if that left us enough raid slots to handle the rest of the room. Low and behold it started to work and we began to piece together our strat. Every guild should do what works for them the best, in my opinion!

You only need to use misdirect if you are running 3 tanks.

If you have 4 tanks and your sentinel tank cannot get to the next sentinel spawn in time then you simply aren't killing the sentinels quick enough. Hope that helps.

And yes the shaman are for phase 2. 4 shaman is 100% heroism uptime on 2 DPS groups. You can't argue with the power of that.

True, but you also have 7 weeks of sunwell gear that SK didn't when they first beat M'uru (not to mention it was a harder fight). You don't get the full duration of the 2nd heroism anyway.

We beat him without a single warglaive in our raid. There are multiple ways to meet the dps checks.

Hi All,

I have been the Sentinel Tank for our guild (Same guild as Grapess [scroll two posts up]) for the past two weeks, I seem to be having a little trouble with the Sentinel on the far side of the room. Majority of the time I can get to the sentinel without trouble and pull it back to our paly tank.

The only time I do face trouble is when it spawns on the far side from where we are tanking and darkness spawns in the center. If I drag it from the north side (considering where we enter from is the south) my dps and healers have issues, if I drag it from the south side I am worried about aoe in the raid. I was looking to get the an md only in situations like this, where darkness spawns and the Sentinel spawns on the wrong side.

20 leatherworkers?

I can't wait until they nerf those damn drums.

Amen.

To better get to a Void Sentinel thats across the room, Intervene a person or totem to help get around Darkness. If you intervene through a small part of Darkness you'll have the debuff for a second only even if it says 10 or 13seconds - you have to stand in Darkness to keep that debuff.

I'd like to reiterate the fact that if you can't get to a Void Sentinel and you're not tanking Void Spawns, then your DPS on Sentinels is slow, thats all there is to it. If my Sentinel dies with 1 second or less before the next one spawns I state it on vent, saying either a little slow or way too slow if it died after the next started up, thus they know they need to burn harder and faster, or another person knows to jump in and help.

Just a comment on the tank/healer ratios and the complaining going on, specifically the difference between various Sunwell fights.

M'uru generally is done with 6 healers, some guilds use 5. Most guilds take 4 tanks, some make due with a well-geared (read: full-time) Prot Paladin tanking Spawns + Sents and a few MD's. Most guilds quickly realize that you don't need a decked out Prot Paladin to tank adds that hit for ~300. Having a Paladin who normally raids holy works just fine. After the first 2 weeks of attempts, my guild just stopped having the paladin respec at all. We killed M'uru last reset after 268 pulls (according to a quick wc -l of the WWS history). Last night we only had time for a few attempts on him but got to P2 each time. Our holy paladin just puts on some SR and a bunch of healing gear. We essentially have a 7th healer. With the +Healing to +dmg conversion, he puts out a LOT of threat. While he lacks some of the cooldowns Protadins enjoy, our warlocks haven't had issues with threat. We've run with 2 warlocks (due to disconnects) and threat was tight but manageable. We have 3 warlocks in when we can and the kill happened with 3. Once the last set of spawns are dead, this paladin is now able to provide a decent bit of MT healing for P2 while our Shaman and Priests can focus on raid damage (87% of Entropius' P2 dmg was Negative Energy in P2 for a kill). For reference, we had 3 Resto Shaman, 2 CoH priests, 1 Druid and 1 Tanking Holy Paladin. All 3 Shaman and 1 of the priests gets a Shadow priest. The other priest is given an extra inervate and swapped in for Mana tides.

When comparing to other fights..
First off, for reference we have 2 Feral tanks and 1 Prot warrior tank. 1 of the Ferals MT's, the other is more of a "swing-spec" and will kitty dps or tree-heal when required

We do Felmyst each week with 7 healers. We have one of our tanks switch over to his alt paladin to tank. This paladin has basically ZA gear + a Felmyst shield (we've had a lot) I don't think he's ever stepped foot into Hyjal or BT on that character. On twins we have one of our ferals go tree, an ele shaman go resto and either a shadow priest go holy or someone swap over to their (T6-geared) alt healer. Going to M'uru the feral is back to bear, elemental shaman back to ele and a holy paladin puts on some SR gear. Sure, for the first kills we went from 8 to 10 to 6 on those fights, but you aren't getting your first kills all in the same week. By time we had our first M'uru kill we were taking 9 healers to Twins and could likely drop to 8 if we were forced to do so (no point now, 9 is safer and we're waaay ahead of the relaxed enrage timer).

Point being, you don't need a prot paladin for any of these fights. If you have one, have him tank something meaningful and use a Holydin on the adds which CRIT for 600 and do ~80% shadow damage. You also don't need to sit people and swap others in on every other fight. Sunwell has taught us how people need to learn to play a CLASS, not a spec.

That pretty much hits the nail right on the head. The best players are the ones who can swap from spec to spec and barely miss a beat. Sunwell somewhat forces that to happen with its drastic differences in raid requirements from one fight to the next. This instance was very well designed and balanced, people saying it should be more like the shitholes that are BT/Hyjal is just ridiculous.

Darkness isn't really some sorta evil horrible thing that will instagib you the moment you touch it, anyway. It's CAN be a bit risky, but you can run through it with a sentinel on you; especially if you can wait for it to start a void blast cast and get out of his range into the darkness while it's casting - that way you won't even take any swings while you're in the darkness itself, and by the time it catches up with you you're out of darkness already. Moroes' pocket watch works wonders also if you find yourself running through the darkness with the sentinel bashing on you, or if worst comes to worst you could pop last stand or something.

We haven't killed M'uru yet (whee summer slack) but on our last tries on him, I've been cruising through the darkness so many times and I haven't died a single time because of it, just have to make sure you're smart about it ie wait until you're topped before going in, be ready to use cooldowns, try to time it around a void blast etc. Definitely no need to waste misdirects and DPS time due to that.

What these guys said.

To add to that, one of our shamans respecced 4 times in last nights Sunwell raid from Kalec to Muru, which I found pretty funny. I think he usually does 3, but I guess some last minute raid changes/DC's happened.

We do have a "main" prot paladin, but he is holy for Brut+Felmyst+Twins anyway! Which is half the instance. Our MT goes Arms on Brut many raids. Our locks are always taking turns at Affliction when needed. Our main (and only) holy priest is often shadow. Even one of our BM's goes survival if I cant make the raid.

You really don't need to make many massive raid substitutions when BC throws so much gear at you. Every player should have their offspec gear ready, and offspec knowledge/experience to go with it.