Thanks for the hints ..we got to 34% P1 yesterday and with a bit more consistency despited higher raiddamage and multiple sentinel-tank-deaths, but we'll figure that out somehow

Do u have someone that call out the general sentinel spawn location, or are u the only one to spot and pick it up urself? It will be good to have someone ( best person would be a sentinel dpser situating at the entrance ( south side - based on orientation when facing muru b4 at the entrance ) range group.

Plus, it's also good to have a intervene macro to someone at the north ( hallway ) and south ( entrance) group, thus u can pick up the sentinel that spawn at the east ( ie the north-east, south-east or the east 2/3 o'clock position) side much easily.

I'm the sentinel spawn caller, and using bigwigs timer, call out "sentinel soon" 5 secs b4 the actual portal spawn, and once portal spawn, immediately call out the general direction, ie north-west, west, south-west, north-east, east ( 2 or 3 o'clock ), south-east. This will greatly help the warrior sentinel tank, especially on the intervene target. From the time when portal opens, u have like approx 5 secs b4 the sentinel actually touched down.

Thus ur sentinel dps should optimally kill the the sentinel 1 or 2 secs prior to the portal opening ( we use 3 locks, 2 mages for sentinel dps ), to allow ur sentinel tank to reach the position safely b4 the sentinel actually touches down.

Our sentinel tank is tanking at the west ( 9 o'clock ) side right outside the darkness circle, and the furthest he had to move ( if darkness is covering the center ) is when the next sentinel spawns at 2 or 3 o'clock east. For this, a south-side lock will either deathcoil or immolate that sentinel spawn to ensure it will move towards the south, so that the warrior tank ( since he will be intervening via the south side ) can easily pick up aggro again. This is, of course, provided that there's a slack in dps on the previous sentinel, otherwise he should be picking it up fine. Thus hunter MD is not really needed.

I've a question regarding the fury mages buff and stealing it. We only went to M'uru once post-nerf, expecting the sides to be a lot quicker on DPS, but we found it was the other way around on my side (entranceway). The group composition was the same; glaive-rogue, retri paladin, enh shaman, BM hunter and feral druid (me, as tank), the kill order was the same: zerker - mage - zerker. Also four drummers in the party. The only real difference we had was that we were lacking mages, only one online at times of invites, and he was on the other side. They had no problem with DPS, while we had, having the hunter arcane shot the buff away. I'm wondering what sort of DPS loss that would cause for the hunter; if this really can be the issue of it. Since last night we were there pre-nerf, we had 2-3 seconds to breathe between each wave. Now we just barely managed one wave before the next showed up, a 15% loss in side DPS or so.

I'm thinking it could also be that the mage from the previous night was helping out a bit with the side before going to his own assignment, but he stated he wasn't helping out on the exit side much and they had no issues with DPS. (for the record - that group was BM hunter, glaive warrior, feral druid, enh shaman, rogue).

WWS from that night. On my side: Tanith, Savi, Heng, Hornton, Lysst. At the later tries we also called in Hunululu (surv hunter) to help out since the dps was so lacking. When he helped out the waves were killed with the same amount of breathing room as pre-nerf attempts.

So, basically - is the nerf to hunter DPS so huge when they need to take care of the mage buff that we should drop a hunter for a mage next time if possible; or can you spot anything else that we did wrong? Any and all suggestions welcome, I'm a bit stumped since I can't really believe the nerf would be that great (WWS shows both BM hunters at approximately the same DPS, my hunter with 1% less damage done though).

Another option to bringing a mage would be, as I can see it, to change the kill order to nuking the mage first so the spellstealing wouldn't be necessary. However I'm hesitant to doing so as it's normally the double flurry from zerkers that kill me.

What group setup your using for these people - are they all in one group? Although they all get *some* benefits of being put in one group, its not really an optimal setup. You want to abuse triple FI stacking and agi/lotr totems with more hunters ideally, instead of simply having to use Windfury for a group like that in which only half actually wants it.

On the entrance side we are usually using: Druid/Warrior tank (Either worked fine) with Triple BM hunter and Elemental Shaman. We kill both beserkers first and the mage last. I (mage) spellsteal the Spell Fury and the Elemental Shaman interrupts fireballs. Multishot + Chain lightning are used freely and DPS was easily on track, pre and post nerf.

Heres a WWS for an attempt where we wiped exactly on or very slightly before the transition - making it easy to gauge DPS in phase 1 for respective classes: Wow Web Stats , WWS Loading...

A quick comparison between our respective wws's will show that your hunters are doing lower DPS. Some might be gear, some might be group setup, some might be skill, some could be strat. There are a bunch of possible reasons. In this wws attempt, Wow Web Stats for a full phase 1 (no sheeps on druid side, Multishot every cd), our hunters get ~135 000 damage just from multishots. This is one reason I want to leave the mage alive till last for every wave, it acts as a free multishot sponge, in addition to giving free Spell Fury's. Now, many guilds do the opposite and kill the mage of first for stability - which is fine. However, we've never found that leaving the mage till last was a problem, but rather it gave numerous benefits we didn't want to ignore. (With an elemental shaman there to interrupt of course)

No the dps loss isn't huge, but you should have the enh shaman purge the buff instead. He'll have plenty of free GCD's to use instead of lowering the hunter's dps and mana efficiency.

I don't think that your dps warrior is using sunder on the adds, and I don't see expose either. Compare your 5'17 attempt with one of our 4'54 attempts.
Wow Web Stats
Wow Web Stats
We found that with a feral druid, enh shaman, rogue, and dps warrior...we didn't need a 4th full time dpser on that side. An elemental shaman just helps nuke down the first target then goes back to dpsing M'uru + Sentinels. Sunder armor is HUGE! Use it! A dps warrior with a feral druid tank should be fully sundering each target while keeping thunderclap and demo shout going in order to maximize effectiveness.

We were using 3 hunters, feral druid, enh shaman on one side before the nerf and found that switching a hunter for a dps warrior to sunder and tclap not only helped out tank live a lot easier, but brought our dps from getting behind by 2-3s each wave to being 5s ahead of schedule each wave. Sunder armor is huge...I can't stress this enough.

We use those group setups; two melee groups with enh shaman + 2 melee (retri pala/rogue and fury warr/rogue) + hunter + feral druid on both sides. The enh shaman is twisting agi/WF for most dps benefit (and avoidance for the both tanks). The last (surv) hunter is stuffed in a ranged DPS group with warlocks or mages.

The first night we tried one side with resto shaman + feral druid + 3 hunters, however the lack of stuns (for flurry) was a major issue, so since then we've gone with double melee teams.

The fury warrior is on the side the has no issues with DPS, and I'm specced 5/5 imp demo roar just because I'm lacking one on my side. We don't have an additional DPS warrior to bring for sunders on my side, I'm afraid. (We recently recruited an arms warrior but his gear (dps) is not up for M'uru yet) I suppose the rogue on my side should be using expose armor, then?

I'll chalk this up to difference in void sentinel/spawn strats. Again, for us, 3 locks and spriest dots are sufficient for taking a sentinel down; however, the difference I believe is that the locks don't go into seed mode every 2nd sentinel as most guilds seem to do. We seed as soon as they spawn, but only while the sentinel tank is building agro. With 3 locks doing this, by the time the second set of spawns spawn and we start seeding those, the first set will die shortly after. The theory behind this is that the pally tank never has to tank more than a single set of spawns which helps a lot with healing both spawn and sentinel tank (as he's dragging a new one into the pack, fewer bolt volleys).

MDs should be absolute last resort and normally shouldn't be needed at all.

Our pally tank is nested in a corner by the alcove and our tank stands as close to him as possible without being in volley range and places the VS inside the center circle. If the VS appears on the other side, he simply waits there if darkness is up.

Usually we kill a sentinel 2-3 seconds on average before the next one appears.

We use all MD's on the side tanks--our MT has well over 150 pulls under his belt and handles the Sentinel positioning perfectly consistently without them.

The details tend to depend on your group's positioning. We have one spot where every Sentinel is tanked. As soon as each one dies, he goes straight to the next spawn (which he's seen the position of due to the animation). If there's not enough time, you just have to make a DPS change. You really want to be there to whap it with a Shield Slam right as it's spawning in--you can be okay if you're slightly later, but it greatly increases the chance of problems. If Darkness is up, and you have to get to the opposite side, an Intervene to a healer at the edge of Darkness saves time.

Once it's picked up, you either take it to the tank spot right away, or wait for Darkness to drop and then take it across. DPS can start either way. Darkness is shorter than the life of a VS, so there will always be a chance to take it across before it dies.

As for healing range. I'm a Tree responsible for keeping HoTs up, and I'm occasionally forced to drop them, but this is rare. I stand at the edge of Darkness. If the tank is picking up a spawn at the far side, he's very briefly out of range at that point. If Darkness is down, I move right into the middle to follow him. If it's up, I try to run around it, unless that would take me into Void Spawn AoE. If it would, I yell for a far side healer to cover him for ~10 seconds. Clean pickups help here. If he's free and ready to Shield Slam immediately and run right back to the tanking spot, he's only out of range for about 3 seconds.

His primary direct healer moves between spawns so she'll be ready to cover him at all times. After this many pulls, both of us can anticipate his movement based on the spawn position and should never (barring an error) be caught letting him die due to range.

It is possible to have 0 MDs for the sentinel tank as others have mentioned. However, if you are uncomfortable with this or still having issues, you can try our strategy. The MT has 2-3 macros for each of the hunters in raids (H1, H2, H3). Any time darkness is up and the sentinel is spawning on the opposite side of him (MT usually tanks Sentinel on west), he calls out for MD on ventrillo and spams the macro (this is done because we've had 1 hunter not hear any calls with a functioning ventrillo). Our Sentinel dps gives the tank around 5 seconds to run to gather the next sentinel.

With this setup, you have a set MD rotation for the hunters for only when you need it and you also don't waste any MDs or dps time on the humanoids. Even if you do have an MD, it saves searching time for the hunters as they know anytime MD is called the sentinel is going to spawn on the East half of the tank.

We've hit p2 several times (15% best) and we've started to figured out when to burn M'uru to prevent extra humanoid/sentinel spawns. Our problem with p2 is the black hole/fissure. Our melee dps can't see it even though it is under them sometimes. We've gone from tanking Entropius in the center to kiting around the circle but melee still can't see them. Anyone else having this issue or is it a 'max up spell detail/zoom out camera' solution or some other trick?

We've found increasing your gamma 2-3 ticks helps.

In case anyone is wondering the actual effect of the nerf one week later.

Using wowjutsu: As of last Tuesday 158 guilds had killed M'uru out of 756 who had killed twins (21%). One week later, 221 guilds have killed M'uru, which means 30% of the M'uru first kills happened in the last week. There are now 793 guilds who have killed Twins, putting the amount who also have killed M'uru at around 28% (still substantially lower than the 60%+ progression rate prior to that point).

Interestingly, there was a substantial number of Kil'jaeden first kills last week as well, as it increased from 0.06% to 0.10% of the total. Yes, one in every one thousand guilds has now killed Kil'jaeden. One out of every 52 guilds who has killed Illidan has gotten KJ as well.

Using wowprogress: 171 kills as of last Tuesday, 257 as of now. That includes 29 kills since yesterday. That's over 10% of all first kills on a boss that's been out for 11 weeks, in one day. Roughly a third of all the kills in one week. Looks pretty conclusive that the progress wall has been removed. Will be interesting to see what percent of those can get KJ down.

Edited to include wowprogress numbers.

No, you misread my post. I said there was no *reason*, not that you couldn't do it any other way and win. Obviously you can.


There literally is no reason to not have the other dps on the sentinals, it can solve a multitude of problems starting with "not enough casting time if the slightest bump happens" and ending with "having threat issues if the slightest bump happens."

Many guilds mistakenly assume that what matters is killing M'uru so they obsess about putting people full-time on M'uru. I watched a guild's threads in which that was a common theme for *pages*. However, putting people full-time on M'uru has, if anything, the opposite effect, because it can create stresses in getting the sents or voids down, and can make your strategy vulnerable to slight delays depending on how tight your timing is.

My point is you don't gain anything substantial by not having all your central dps help at the start of a sent spawn, but you do incur additional risk.


(AE'ing every wave is numerically inefficient, for what it's worth. So if your reason to not have mages on sents is that it's slightly numerically inefficient, well, so is your AE strat, particularly if you're using two tanks, and it's more numerically inefficient than mages on sents, particularly if your locks are fire. Having your spriests dps'ing heavily on sents can lead to mana issues too, although 1-2 dots is fine.)

Its no secret that the more ArP that you get the more it impacts your damage. Most SWP BM hunters by the time of M'uru should have stacked around 1-1.2k ArP(w/o Madness proc). Combine that with sunder armor and the numbers get ridiculous. Obviously crit is huge for us and I am at work so i cant tell you a exact value for its dps increase but i can tell you that a hunter with 1200 ArP will get about 8% more damage. With a full stack of sunders that is an extra 2600 ArP which according do the ArP calc's leads to an 32% more damage(calculating 3800 ArP assuming 5k base armor) So yes, sunders would be FAR greater than 5% crit. That being said If you're running tri hunter putting them in a warrior group with an enhance shaman would be pretty broken. Also, I am not the best at theory craft and as I stated am at work so my tools to look at these numbers are limited but the figures look pretty staggering.

The entrance group setup we run with is: Protection Warrior, Hunter, Hunter, Hunter, Resto Shaman (Agi totems). The fourth DPS helping on that side is an elemental shaman (whos in another group, usually with the warlocks). Having the 9% FI for the prot warrior was acceptable for his TPS, as usually id be a little apprehensive not being able to slot them into a WF group. But yea, was definetely under-estimating the extent sunder vs LOTP is.

We're currently on our 4th night of attempts and have seen the startings of p2 but we're having serious problems in our transition. Trying to decide if we should hold off for 30 more seconds or 15 more seconds depending on Sent/Humanoid spawns. Our groups so far have been Enhance/Feral/Arms/Surv/BM KJ side and a split group scenario on the entrance side where we have a Fury/Rogue/Mage/Elemental doing dps with a warrior tank. Neither side has any actual issue with damage but sometimes our Fury warrior entrance side gets gibbed. Either way most of the time we're well ahead on spawn timers and our only pitfall thus far has been warlocks pulling threat. Reading some of what others have had to say in the last two pages we may create a situation where we dont dps a sent until the warrior has it in place then throw all three locks + 2 mages at him instead of putting the whole load on the shoulders of the 3 locks.

For transitions, it was posted a few pages back; basically you want to transition at around x:05 left on the Enrage timer. New sets of humanoid-adds as well as new Sentinel spawns come at the minute mark, so transitioning a few seconds before the minute mark is ideal. What we do is get M'uru to about 4-5%, stopping all DPS except DoTs until a x:15 mark, where we call DPS. This usually gives enough time for each side to finish off their humanoids as well as the ranged to finish the last Sentinel as Entropius is coming out, leaving the Locks to Enslave the spawns.

Threat wise, have your Locks use their GCDs on other things while waiting for the Void Blast Spell Reflect. Our strat has the Locks use their 2-3 GCDs on Seeds while the Warrior builds threat, who then calls for DPS once the Void Blast starts casting. Once the Blast is reflected, its almost impossible to pull aggro. Just make sure your Locks are using every GCD they have. If they're not DPSing sents, they should be laying Seeds or Shadowbolting M'uru.

No, we kill the mage last on all sides. The elemental shaman handles interrupts and I spellsteal the buff. We want to kill it last to keep acting as a free multishot/blade flurry/shield reflect sponge and give us the extra spell furys. Other guilds prefer to kill it first, its just your players' preferences.

And we kill it first on all sides no matter whether it's a warrior or feral tanking. Basically for the reasons others have covered: overall threat management is easier that way, and it's less risky. We didn't need the dps boost from the spellsteal to kill him before the nerf and we definitely don't need it now.

We reasonably frequently choose safety/repeatability as cornerstones of our strats, however. It's just a general guild preference.

For tonight we switched out our glaives rogue for a hunter to be full-time on my side, brought a second mage for spellstealing and we had no issues whatsoever with the dps. Group setup now is (wf/agi twisting) enh shaman, retri pala, bm hunter, bm hunter, feral druid. I guess the FI buff was huge enough to gap the personal dps of the glaives rogue and the hunter, but it's still pretty weird to see how much better dps turned out by not bringing that other set of glaives. I suppose it's mainly due to the mage spellstealing instead of the hunter, and the dps time lost by the hunter really is bigger than what most people believe? Or maybe it's due to something else - WWS from tonight for comparison.

Weird group maybe, but it worked for us. M'uru night 4, Entropius 15%.

We also kill the mage last now - due to the fact we do need the dps boost.

We kill mages first and we have issues with insta gibs on the side where the mages and ele shaman are doing damage.... Interesting. On our side with no mage we NEVER have an insta gib unless a multi shot goes off before the bear gets threat but we have no spell steal on our side and we have had ZERO issues with the DPS benchmark on the sides pre and post nerf. Our problems are stricktly in "random" sent tank deaths or warlocks pullin agro.

I got a question about phase 2 which you guys might be able to help me with. I have read the entire thread but not really found a conclusion as to what is most effective. Our p1 is fine, we are doing the transitions almost flawless, (loosing about 5 sec of dps on entropius max) Our current problem is that we consistantly get entropius down to around 20% and then we wipe due to too heavy raid damage. Last night we had 2 resto shamans, 1 resto druid, 1 pally and 2 coh priests. We survive around 70 sec or so in p2. The idea behind using 3 ranged groups is to make coh more effective and to make it easier to see whats going on in the room (where darkness/balls spawns)
We ran quite melee heavy yesterday, using 1 dps war, 1 rogue 1 enh shamans on one side and 1 bm hunter, 1 rogue+1enh shaman and 1 retri on the other side.

Now too my question: I gathered that you can survive for longer than 70 sec in p2 even if its hard. But is our dps too low? Should our mt preferably be kiting entropius around the room, or just react to close spawns and move? It feels like our dps is abit on the low side depending on what tactic we choose to use. If we move around all the time the melee has some issues dodging balls while beeing close enough to damage entropius all the time. But when we were standing still we had a much harder time seeing where the balls are actually coming from. Or would it simply be better to use more ranged dps?

Any tips would be very appreciated.

Edit: fixed some spelling.

Use intervene to get to sentinels faster, as long as it hasn't already spawned (as in targetable) by the time yours dies you should be able to get to it with intervene+intercept before it kills anything.