Imp Demo Shout goes a long way toward keeping your Sentinel tank alive as healers don't have to deal with any large spikes. First thing a warrior sentinel tank should be trying to do when picking one up is to get both Thunderclap and Demo Shout on, then look to move it safely while keeping shield reflect up.

Thanks for the feedback guys. =D

I have a question/enquiry aimed at tanks or anyone with intimate knowledge of add tanking.
We are only on 2nd night attampts of Muru and our biggest issue seems to be keeping adds under control on the close side (where you walk in)
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Let me clarify a few things as far as positioning goes.

Ok so my very basic Diagram above illistrates the obvious i think.
T= tanks
A1&A2 = Add groups
H2 = healer for A2 (there may be two healers there)
Mdps = Main dps + Extra healers
M = Muru

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Firstly a big problem seems that with the A1 adds if they arnt picked up there is no room for forgiveness; someone will die and the problem being that there is hardly any room to move on that side which makes it happen alot.

So one thing i wanted to point out was that Mdps is close to A1.
Where do other people have their Main Ranged DPS group and Healers?

Secondly Feral tank is out of the question, we use a Prot warr. Group make up for A1 is 3xrogue, enhance, Prot tank.
What are most guilds kill order
We are currently utilising the zerker,zerker,mage combo so our mage can spellsteal.

Threat seems to be an issue not allowing us to dps did other guilds have this problem? i'm thinking its more of a familiarity thing and it will get better in time.

Just to clarify i've done adds on both sides and it's only a proble with the close side. (threat and add control)

Any helpful hints and or how your guild overcame these problems would be much appreciated.

thanks in advance.

Healers split to each side that they are healing. DPS split to each side that they are dpsing. Each of the two spots are on the rim of the circle around Muru (a yard or two outside Darkness). Our Void Sentinel dps are on the entrance side (for totems), so that side is slightly more populated.

We use a prot warrior for each side, works great (SUNDERS ARE GOOD). Both sides are mage/zerker/zerker. The melee side stuns+kills the mage while the warrior builds threat on the zerkers, and possibly throws a taunt at the mage. The resto shaman on the melee side does 3 main things: chain heals that side of the room's Negative Energy damage, drops grounding totem (prot paladin tanks Void Sentinels), has NS ready for any melee his that the mage may get off on a melee dps.
The hunter side does a similar thing. One hunter ranged-tanks the mage's fireballs while getting chain-healed. This also tops up that side's Negative Energy damage. The hunters nuke down this mage while the warrior gets threat on the other two.

The close side is the hard one, as you mentioned. Have the ranged on this side. That way you can have a frost trap down (for us that means I get initial aggro and first fireball from the mage, which is good). With a frost trap down, your tank should be able to throw an attack on each of the zerkers before they get too far.

That's just how we do it. There are a hell of a lot of methods and setups, but those may give you some ideas for your problems.

I have a question about Sentinel/Void Spawn tanking and when to use SoC on the adds.

First of all how many warlocks do you bring into the raid? We usually bring 2 who usually do fine but when the pally tanks 3 groups of spawns (I will get into this in more detail later) they say they are AOE capped and can't kill them faster for our pally tank to run across and pick up the sentinel that is about to die on the other side of M'uru.

The pally tank doesn't always run to the sentinel tank warrior, but only does it in situation's where there's Darkness in the middle and the warrior can't get through it to reach the pally tank. We've tried having the warrior run through Darkness and getting him spam healed but he seems to be getting instagibbed everytime he tries to do that. We've also tried having the warrior path around the inner circle past the side ranged dps/healer groups and it seems to be straining raid heals which leads to 1 person dying and then it's usually a wipe not long after that. How can we fix this? Should the warrior just path through the sides and hope our healers/side dps groups skill up and prepare for the possible extra damage? Or is there a way where the warrior can run through Darkness and not get 1 shot?

Another issue we have are "unlucky" Sentinel spawn points. Our warlock dps are all at KJ side. We usually SoC every 2nd Sentinel kill. But there's been occassions where the Sentinels spawn at the far KJ side and are hence tanked in between our pally tank and the ranged dps. This is usually fine as we just hold off SoC and just let the pally tank 3 packs. The problem is when the 4th sentinel spawns at the same spot again, in between our pally tank and warlocks. At this time we have a dilemma, either let the pally tank 4 packs (which he says will be a challenge to tank) or try and kill the spawns and risk getting in range of the Sentinels' AOE. How are you guys handling this? Are you guys killing spawns every 2nd wave all the time and just getting the Sentinel tank to move somewhere else?

We've only seen p2 twice so far. Had about 2 weeks of attempts on him. Main issue now is the sentinel/spawn tanking and dpsing. Generally our side DPS groups are fair, with about 10 seconds gap between each wave. But as soon as 1 of the dps dies, the group struggles to clear the waves for the next. We usually don't have time (or not in range) to battle res any dead, the fight is just so intense that any mistake will wipe us. Sentinel dps is very tight, they usually die just as the next portal opens up. When warlocks switch off to SoC adds, we get shadow priests (we bring 2-3) to switch off from M'uru and burn the Sentinel. We've had a few occassions where the warrior is tanking the Sentinel on the other side of M'uru and the pally tank and we've had to yell at dps to stop killing the Sentinel because the pally is no where nearby. I'd prefer to see the Sentinel tanked on the same side as the pally at all times but it is difficult for us because it is usually in the way of warlocks trying to kill the spawns. Or there's issues with the warrior trying to bring the Sentinel to the other side near the pally when Darkness is up.

Finally, when are people calling to finish M'uru off for the phase change? Should we try and get M'uru down to 1-2% and then try and burn the Sentinel asap before another portal opens up then quickly finish off M'uru? What about the humanoid waves? Should the dps priority be Sentinel -> M'uru -> Humanoids -> Entropius?

Thanks

Sure, that's not in question, but the guy I was quoting is claiming that demo shout can account for 2-3k mitigation and I'm trying to call him on that statement.

The "side" of the room with the first spawn determines where the spawns and sentinels will be tanked from that point onwards. Imagine the entry to the room and if the first sentinel spawns on the left then you tank ALL sentinels from that point onwards on the left hand side of the room at 90 degrees from the entry just outside the darkness circle.

The warrior can call for misdirects and use intervene to get around the room more effectively so dps just need to hold off on sentinel dps until its got a solid aggro lock and is close to in position.

So if the sentinel is on the same side of the darkness as the pally then the warrior can pick up the sent himself. If the darkness isn't there and isn't coming for 15 seconds then the warrior can pick up the sent and intervene back to the paladin. Otherwise if the darkness IS there and the sentinel spawn is on the "wrong" side then just have a hunter misdirect the sentinel to the warrior.

Look at your own WWS: Void Sentinel #30 avg melee hit landed with demo: 7238; Void Sentinel #31 avg melee hit landed without demo: 9063:

Total Difference = 1825 per hit landed, without your tank even having improved demo. That's just the first one I found too. Depending on the dmg range on the hits that did land and imp demo shout, this difference can be as high as 3k per hit avg. Seriously just look at your own WWS before accusing people who are trying to help you out.

Darkness - Spell - World of Warcraft prevents you from getting healed for 20 seconds which is why your warrior gets gibbed. That's one of the main reasons why no-one should step on it.

Well, it prevents you from getting heals while you're in it. The timer on the debuff is like Frost Trap. It counts down how long until the Darkness itself goes away, but if at any time you leave the area, the debuff leaves also.

But the point remains,, being in Darkness and having a Sentinel on you isn't good.

Finally killed him tonight. We had a good try at the beginning, then kinda sucked during 40mn because of adjustments misunderstanding, then had a very solid night getting 9 good P2 in 10 tries until the down.

Adjusments looked minor, key was probably getting people some confidence into the raid and focus on their job.


For sheeping, I read somewhere it was just adding another thing than can go wrong. We tried some tries, sure our tank died less often but we has more healers death. I think it is a valuable option as long as you can afford to lose the dps a sheep includes. Not our case as we are a bit short on entry side (4.5 to 5 people needed). Same reason for SoC, I know the extra dps on M'uru shouln't be needed, but well, we need it...

Many thanks anyway

Looking over your other (i.e. faster) wipes shows an awful lot of damage being taken by players from the singularities. It seems less likely that your DPS are bad if you're getting through P1, than that you're not handling singularities well.

Make sure your tank is moving Entropius away from singularities, that your ranged are calling to your melee when one is moving towards the melee clump, and that your ranged are watching for it and moving away from it as well.


If you really end up wanting to squeeze a few extra seconds into P2, try not killing the last round of void spawns, just have your locks go directly to Entropius. You have to avoid that section of the room (and the 15' radius of the shadowbolts) but it adds a bunch of DPS to entropius (the time the locks were otherwise spending SoC'ing, and then lifetapping the mana back, since SoC is very mana-intensive.)

Well that's an interesting idea, our prot paladin is useless anyways. How many guilds do it that way I'm wondering. We did have some issues and had to have a little conference in vent on how to handle those spawns better. On one of our better attempts in P2 they stayed up foreeeever and our locks just could not get them down so we had that part of the room wasted + locks not on entropius.

BTW how are you seeing the damage breakdown from Singularities?

Still, claiming Demo Shout makes 30% difference in melee damage is bit far fetched. We use CoW and there are still ocasional high hits. I just assume Sentinels have high damage ranges, so you can get some spikes once in a while, even with full debuffs.
Now, Demo Shout + Ironshield + Inspiration, that could very well be 30% reduction. But not just one of those.

Never tried that one, but you limit your kiting area a lot and if some Shadowbolts hit your melee, it will add up fast. 2 Volleys is 3k damage, combine this with lasers and you risk some early deaths. Hell, try Banishing/fearing them, it would probably be less risky, since your Paladin could always grab them if they break early.

I don't know whose WWS you are looking at, I think you've mistaken me for Junnah whose post you were originally answering. Getting indignant certainly doesn't help anyone.

The difficulty is that for mobs which last a short time where most of their attacks are avoided, the data is sparse. You can't do very much statistical analysis with it since the 'average melee hit' which you are looking at has a very high deviation. I found an example in my logs where a sentinel without demo shout hit for 10k and one with demo debuffed hit for 6k, but that doesn't prove anything either. If you have some way of filtering data on the sentinels over hundreds of attempts then it might go some way to proving this, but you are just picking out one example to support your theory.

According to http://elitistjerks.com/f31/t18771-p...warrior_guide/ demo shout gives a 17.7% damage reduction. So as far as I can see, we're talking about a damage reduction of 2k at best but more likely in the 1300-1500range. Since the tank should have 70% avoidance against the melee hits, and two-thirds of the damage from the sentinels is actually magic damage, how 'huge' is demo shout really for total incoming damage on the tank?

Btw, just sharing some tips with regards to lock's cast rotations and sentinel tanking positions. Our guild is also using the 4 tank strategy, with warrior as the sentinel tank and a pally with some SR gear to tank the spawns.

Even though we usually bring 3 or 4 locks, we only use 2 locks to SoC the adds. 3rd or 4th lock will do only Muru and sentinel dps.

Warrior tank will pick up sentinel and tank it on the west side right outside the darkness circle. He'll need to have the darkness timers cooldown to know when to shield-slam the sentinel and run the hell to position. Range sentinel dps will not touch it until he position it on the west side. And if darkness spawns, he will position it on the east side and call out dps to hit it, then immediately run to the west side after darkness disappear. Thus the pally tank will only need to stay at the west side to throw in a consecrate to grab aggro on the newly spawned packs before pulling it back to tank it by the wall in the west. For sentinel pickups, warrior tank will use intervene on either the person on the north or south camp depending on where the sentinel spawns.

For the 2 locks that do SoC on spawns, what they will be doing is, dps sentinel when it's down, switch to Muru and lob in 2 or 3 sbolts ( reason other than additional muru dps, is to allow time for pally tank to hold sufficient aggro on spawns ), then start chaining 4 or 5 casts of SoCs, then switch back to sentinel - rinse and repeat. Instead of SoCing every 2 waves, the 2 locks SoC every single wave.

Thus, we find this to be a good rotation to push in sufficient dps on spawns, Muru and Sentinel without over-aggroing.

If you wish, you can download our Muru kill video, from the lock POV, which shows the SoC lock's cast rotation, sentinel tank and pally tank positions etc to give you a rough idea on what was explained above.

Eternity_vs_Muru.wmv - FileFront.com

You're right, 1'57", even 1'45" is incredibly long. We can barely stay alive past 1'30"-1'35" - I don't know how you guys managed, but props to your healers. At around 80 seconds in is where we start losing people uncontrollably (deaths before that are usually caused by idiocy such as eating singularities and standing in void zones.) Afterward, raid damage is just way too absurd.

As I said a few posts down from my initial post, this was more of a coincidence thing, we tried out our mages being frost for a few attempts and happened to get the kill in. It definitely didn't hand us the kill on a platter but it has some advantages that are undeniable: primarily, your mages have way more survivability this way, secondly, two Water Elementals, one of which gets heroism per mage put out some considerable damage even if that mage has to move all over the place. And yeah, they don't get hit by Negative Energy or Singularities it seems. They do get hit by the Void Zones I believe.

That being said, we got our followup kill with our mages being Fire. It's really just a matter of being comfortable with Singularities and reacting to them as an automatism, rather than having to think for a second and then still getting hit. It's just practise really.


As Kyth pointed out, Singularities are probably the biggest problem you're having. How are you moving Entropius around? We found we had little to no success with permanently moving him because it destroyed our Ranged DPS' ability to keep damage on Entropius going steadily and hard - we ended up just tanking him in the center and calling out Singularity spawns so our tank would move in the appropriate direction. Your overall DPS time on Entropius is much higher that way and you avoid getting punted around for the most part. The really crippling part is when a Singularity hits your melee stack so that's what we try to avoid mainly - our ranged just spread out with healers in sort of a circle around the room.

About the last set of Void Spawns: initially, we began enslaving a few and letting our Prot Paladin tank then up against the far entrance glass wall thing, but had issues with having a healer having to keep an eye on him. Once we killed them we stopped having any issues. Also, we have our resto druid assigned to rolling HoTs on healers in P2, so they can freeheal the raid without having to worry about themselves. We noticed most of our deaths occurred after a healer was being chain targeted by negative energy, so we figured that was the best solution for it.

Wow Web Stats
Basically, find a player that you know got hit by Singularity, look at his Damage Breakdown page and click on Singularity, then go on Breakdowns on that and you'll see whom it hit, and how often.

Going from 10k to 6k, even over a small sample size is obviously outside of variance for their swing damage so you can still deduct that demo shout has an incredibly high effect on their melee damage. Not to mention, it's not exactly like sample size is exactly "small" - look at any WWS where Demo shout wasn't up 100% of the time and you'll see very similar numbers. The difference is actually that big.

I'm tempted to say that the 17.7% damage reduction you read about is *generally* true, but I have a feeling that some mobs have a different base weapon damage to damage from AP ratio, which seems to be the case for this particular mob. An explanation could be the slower swing speed on these mobs than on most others. In any case, that's neither here nor there, the damage does irrefutably go down by a LOT if you apply Demo Shout, given all the data you can get just by browsing through different WWS logs.

Also, you're right, most of the Sentinels damage is magic. Add to that the random magic damage thrown around in the fight, and the melee output seems rather minimal. However, it's the burst potential that you should be worried about here. Imagine this, 4-5 shadowbolts hitting you for a total of 5k damage at the same time, a shadow pulse for another 3k, and now a melee swing for 10k. Add an unlucky streak of two negative energies before a heal lands and you're probably going to be running back and rebuffing in a couple of seconds. By reducing *any* of the potential damage elements' impact, you're considerably increasing the tank's time to live. Especially considering that most of the other damage sources are rather constant and not as chunky as the melee swings, those can generally be buffered decently well by HoTs and such. Those big melee swings, if they happen to coincide with other damage landing at the same time, are what is going to gib your tank.

In short, Demo Shout is absolutely worth it. At any given time. It's not a huge investment to put it up (unless you get a lot of resists) and it's a huge benefit in terms of survivability. Not using it is as if you weren't Ironshielding, basically.

That wasn't under dispute, the question is 'how much?' Raiste said it's 3k and I asked if he is serious, because if I can see 9k+ hits on my guild's tank when demo *is* up, then I have a hard time believing that figure.

Both you and Raiste seem to think it's easy to prove from the WWS, and since there is no prior art here (Quigon's 17.7% number came from a Lurker fight), then I'd like to see it demonstrated. Yes I'm being pendantic, but it gets on my nerves when people just make up numbers for the sake of supporting their position.

I didn't pull those numbers out of a hat. That is what we saw in our own WWS's over about 100 M'uru attempts and probably close to 500 sentinels. The ones that did get debuffed had avg melee hit of 2-3k less than the ones that did not. You are right in that the standard deviation with a mob that lands such small number of hits over it's life is fairly wide, but the raw data over that many attempts is still more than enough evidence for us to be religious about keeping Demo up. Anyways I'll let it rest here as it isn't contributing to the thread. We all agree and yet are arguing over nothing. You can PM me if you want to continue the discussion.

We bring 3 locks. I've had the locks throw 2-3 seeds at every fresh pack of Spawns since first learning the fight and it hasn't been a problem yet (pally survival and DPS). This brings down the pack to around 50% (not a goal) and then we switch to Sentinels assuming the tank has gained enough agro, otherwise we throw a couple purple skulls at M'uru until he's ready. When the next spawns appear and we seed, the first pack die almost immediately, so essentially the Pally tank only tanks 1 set of spawns at a time.
Our Sentinel tank waits for darkness to disappear before moving across. We also make sure to hold DPS so it doesn't die in the middle of the room. Our pally then meets the warrior half way, throws down a consecrate, then picks up the new spawns and drags them back. One thing I noticed our warrior doing was that he's able to start moving across the darkness when there's about 1-2 seconds left on the timer. I'm guessing the debuff is a tick and he never gets it doing this.
Our sentinel tank always tries to move to the same spot after picking up new Sentinels, which is about the center of the room, on the darkness rim. I think I understand what you're saying here, where because of the Sentinel's aoe, the locks can't get in range to AOE spawns. The more random factors you take out of this fight, the better and easier it becomes.
lol one of the hardest things for me personally on this fight was to maintain composure and not over-nuke Sentinels around the 5% mark. Like you said, this fight is really intense.
Our DPS priority has always been M'uru -> Sentinels -> etc. If a new sentinel appears the moment before M'uru dies, p2 is pretty much lost.

If it's any help, here's a video from my POV on this fight: murucleanfinal.avi - FileFront.com

Demo alone isn't worth 3k, but Demo+Ironshields is. I simply cannot believe that your tank got hit for 9k with Demo up, since the base hit of the Sentinels against a Sunwell-geared warrior tank with zero armor buffs is ~9.5-10k. Here's some examples for you then, taken from recent WWS logs on an attempt where I was trying Thunderclap before Demo (bad idea), and had no Ironshields running (new side tank learning).

Example #1:
18:26'38.286 Ehandel Demoralizing Shout was fully resisted by Void Sentinel #1.
18:26'53.494 Void Sentinel #1 melee swing hits Ehandel for 8734 Physical. (454 Blocked)

Example #2:
18:27'09.419 Void Sentinel #2 melee swing hits Ehandel for 9444 Physical.
18:27'10.918 Void Sentinel #2 is afflicted by Demoralizing Shout.
18:27'11.824 Void Sentinel #2 melee swing hits Ehandel for 7279 Physical. (454 Blocked)

Example #3:
18:27'39.449 Void Sentinel #3 melee swing hits Ehandel for 9454 Physical. (454 Blocked)
18:27'39.859 Void Sentinel #3 is afflicted by Demoralizing Shout.
18:27'55.341 Void Sentinel #3 melee swing hits Ehandel for 7789 Physical. (454 Blocked)