• takari

Can I ask what your swipe's normal hit and crit usually are? My swipes are averaging 250 normal hit and 650 crit. On my side (the near side) I usually have a DPS warrior, a rogue, an enhancement shaman and a hunter. I have been neglecting the the fury mage completely and concentrating on building threat on the 2 zerkers.

Does your DPS go in right away, or do they wait for a few seconds? Are they single targeting only or are they using multi target damage moves also?

Personally, I don't see how my swipe can keep up with the threat our DPS is putting out. For instance, earlier in the week, I swapped my Lacerate and Maul spells on my action bar. My threat was about 50% of previous attempts and as soon as I moved Maul back to its original location, my TPS jumped up considerably.

 

• Falk

Single target DPS on the first mob, then Blade Flurry/whatever the other two. You'll want about 30-32k threat any given mob for DPS to kill it without pulling aggro - once you hit that you probably can swap main targets to another and not have to worry.

The best 'cycle' I've come up with which withstands the mind-numbing repetition of 5-hour nights is basically spam Maul and Swipe while saving Mangle for the mob that needs a threat boost the most - it could be the main target, it could be one of the other targets. Lacerate is a complete waste of an action bar slot. Also /targetlasttarget is king here.

Communication is key, and DPS really does need to get used to the way you build threat and not do anything stupid, either. Aggro pulling is like an argument - it takes two hands to clap, etc.

Edit: Above is assuming you're tanking all 3 mobs at once, or at least two. Swipe vs Lacerate is a no-brainer in those situations.

 

• takari

That is pretty close to what I have been doing, minus my 2-3 pull error of favoring lacerate. That was more muscle memory than me thinking Lacerate was worth a shit. Since I have infinite rage, I have been favoring Maul (and since it doesn't register GCD) and just spamming it and tab targeting. I also have mouse wheel down set to target my last hostile target.

I am hitting 30K threat on the 2 zerker mobs pretty easily, but I am worried about picking up that fury mage, but it seems like it will have to be done.

 

Alexsiss

As far as i know none of our Mages have either of those 2 talents for M'uru but i may be mistaken.

 

Beasty

The majority of the time it is safe to to "taunt tank" the mage; building a little threat now and then and it will stay on you a lot of the time and get rogues to stun/interrupt, i've found the amount of threat I drop on the two beserkers from focusing the mage is not worth it over the previous method although a balance between the two may be best, but we are having no problems with this method, in a 2 rogue, fury warrior ench shaman + me a feral we finish with 15-13 seconds left and more sometimes, some may argue that is too much!

You should still be able to get more than enough threat out on the beskerkers unless things go a bit funny for whatever reason ie. taunt resists and the whatnot meaning you have to spend more time on the mage but a lot of the time it should be the responsibility of the rogues to keep the mage under control, keeping the mage on you just means that you have less chance of a melee getting fisted.


EDIT this is pretty much what afflikted said in more detail, curse my tired brain, i'll leave the post here anyhow

 

Tuhalu

My guild actually uses two pretty different groups to deal with the Shadowsword adds in this encounter. One side uses the classic Feral Druid, Enhancement Shaman, DPS Warrior, Rogue, Rogue group. The other side uses Feral Druid, 3x BM Hunter, Elemental Shaman (the shaman is in a caster group for buffs).

On both sides, the Feral Druid tanks all the adds. One Berserker is marked for initial dps and all mauls and mangles go to that mob. Swipes hold aggro on the 2nd and 3rd mob until the Druid gets enough threat to start working on the 2nd and 3rd mob. The second Berserker is always the second dps target and the mage last. DPS starts on each target only when the Druid has ~10k threat on that target. Flurries on the current dps target are dealt with by stuns from the rogues or the hunter pets (Intimidation). Flurries on the secondary Berserker are handled with Bash or by using a Badge of Tenacity (Bash has a 1 minute cooldown, so gets later and later each round of adds if you use it every time due to human reaction speed). Mages die last as they do the least DPS and their buff can be stolen for massive damage on M'uru.

On the hunter side, aoe is limited to Chain Lightning and Multi-shot and as long as they start on it late enough, this will never outaggro swipe threat. On the rogue side, aoe is limited to Blade Flurry on rounds 2 (gives a little time to dps M'uru between Darknesses) and 5 (the final round before M'uru dies and Entropius spawns) and Whirlwind from the Warrior. The rogue side is a little harder to handle threat on, since Blade Flurry can be tricky to keep ahead of if a bunch of your attacks get dodged or parried early on, but still completely doable.

The crucial element here is not so much allowing your dps to do massive amounts of AOE damage as it is to gain initial aggro and then build threat on the main target fast. Spreading your mauls and mangles around early on just forces the dps to hold back, making adds stay up longer and hurting your healers ability to keep everyone healed.

 

Pentamorfi

You're forgetting that your tooltip crit only applies against level 70 targets. All bosses are considered 73, therefore your actual crit value will always be lower than tooltip.

I too have noticed an abnormal amount of partial resists, so I wouln't be surprised if M'uru had a higher than average (for a boss) shadow resistance. He is, after all, a shadowy creature! Sometimes I can't buy a crit, sometimes I can't stop critting... maybe it's just the RNG.

Our tactic relies on having 3 warlocks on sentinel and aoe duty, throwing a few sb's at M'uru when time allows (every odd Sentinel, that is). We also use 3 shadowpriests permanently on the boss, 2 of them Vampiric Touch/SW: Pain the Sentinels for Shadow weaving and Misery. Other than that, 2 melee groups consisting of Druid tank/fury warrior/rogue/enh shaman/hunter are taking care of the adds on the doorways. As far as I know, they're trying to lock down and burst the mage first and as long as he doesn't crit anyone of them it goes fine.

 

Flamingcloud

I've never in the 3 1/2 years of raiding ever heard someone say that before. Can someone confirm this? I am highly skeptical. Fairly certain level has nothing to do with crit. Regardless I have also never seen crits varying as wildly in any fight as they have in m'uru, I've shot millions of shadowbolts and never before on the same night(not sure if its ever happened at all before) have I not crit twenty in a row twice especially when I had over 36% crit.

 

• Falk

I'm wearing Brutallus neck and T6 Boots for 3% expertise. That goes a long way to eliminating them, since they aren't 73 with an absurd parry rate. If no one needs the Twins cloak I'll probably grab that too and make up the armor difference elsewhere.

 

◊ Praetorian

We use 3x Hunter + Elemental Shaman as DPS on the corridor side as well, but we use a prot warrior to tank, and sheep one berserker immediately. (And yes, goddamn did the pushback fix help us out.) Multishot and CL would be more efficient with a feral, but we've found that this overall approach works very well for us. We kill one Berserker, the tank breaks sheep on the second when the first is low, and finally the mages gets finished off. The warrior can focus on tanking a single berserker while reflect spam gives him unbeatable aggro on the Mage, he doesn't take too much damage (easily solo-healable with no HoTs), and the mage stays up to be spellstolen, as you note. The shaman can start using CL once the sheep is broken, and between CL hops, multishot, and spell reflected fireballs on cooldown, the mage usually ends up near death by the time the other humanoids are dead. And if we ever fall behind, we have the added convenience of the last surviving mob being a ranged nuker with locked-in aggro thanks to all the Reflects, so the tank can basically ignore it and go about picking up the new wave as though the leftover Mage didn't exist.

 

skromzor

we fight everything at the starting door with the whole raid there, apart from sentinels of course. Apparently drow do something similar with 2 prot pally's, but we use a prot pally/prot war on humans.

 

Cranberry

It most decidedly does affect incoming crit. That's why tanks need 5.6% crit reduction when mobs only have 5% base crit - the three extra boss mob levels grant more. Same applies for melee dps. I would be stunned if it did not apply to spells as well.

 

Roywyn

Um, crit depression has been mentioned quite often in caster threads.
There was a test of ~3k arcane missiles of a level 64/65 character against Dr. Boom who then was 3 levels above him.
Thread - Quick question about 1 roll or 2 roll system for casters

The test confirmed that spells are on a 2-roll, and that there seems to be some crit depression of 2% points.
Another indication: Rogue poisons have 0% crits against mobs that are yellow to you, but you will get crits against mobs 3 levels below you in solo play (no aura/buffs/judgements). So crit does interact with levels at least in this way.

Back on topic - in the linked WWS reports, there seems to be no indication of partial resists beyond the inevitable level-based partials.

The Blue Bar and you - the complete Fire Mage 2.4 mana compendium: http://elitistjerks.com/658230-post3191.html

DPS spec and class comparison in Naxxramas gear: http://code.google.com/p/simulationc...i/SampleOutput

And [Timbal's Focusing Crystal] doesn't proc on AM.
Neither does [The Egg of Mortal Essence] since 3.1.

 

• Krish

I would like some input from those shaman (especially enhancement) or priests who have helped on dispel duty to kill Dark Fiends during phase two. I was thinking that a macro could be extremely helpful for this, and would ideally like it to not stop my auto attacks or shift my target away from Entropius. Here is what I was thinking would work well for this:

#showtooltip Purge
/focus Dark Fiend
/cast [target=focus,exists] Purge

Anyone have any thoughts as to how well this might work?

 

• Snowy

I use the following macro:

/targetexact Dark Fiend
/cast Dispel Magic
/targetexact Entropius

I just hit that any time a new void zone is spawned and generally just hit it a lot during all of phase 2 inbetween every spell I cast.

 

Amonra

Maybe I'm missing something, but wouldn't that mean you end up casting dispel magic on Entropius a lot (i.e. any time a Dark Fiend isn't up, or someone beat you to the dispel)?

 

Dollar

You can't dispel something that has nothing to dispel so it would just do nothing unless Priest's dispel is different somehow.

"Oh he's a sad little man? He's thrown a kettle over a pub, what have you done?"

 

• Snowy

Correct, if there isn't a Dark Fiend, the macro will do nothing.

 

• Krish

Since it turns out you can't focus a different target without leaving your current one, this turns out to be the best solution for me. Obviously I just substitute Purge for Dispel Magic. Thanks!

 

Bjork

As a healer, I use the following macro that makes me keep my current target:

/target Dark Fiend
/cast Dispel Magic
/targetlasttarget

I guess it's possible to write it a bit more elegant, but it works at least.

Regarding healing in p2, we run a 6 healer setup, 2 priests, 2 shamans, 1 druid, 1 pala. Both priests are CoH and basically keep all ranged and healers up with PoH/CoH. Shamans CH melee, with pala fulltime on tank supported by a stack of LB. This setup works very well for us and p2 is very controllable with "only" two shamans.

 

Feji

I find 30-32k threat is way too much on one mob, especially if you're fighting the TPS a rogue/warrior can put out via their blade flurry, sweeping strikes, cleave, whirlwinds can put out. If there are 4 DPS on a side, you can say each one will need to do about 32.5k damage to a berserker since they have 130k hp. Factor in salv, and other threat reduction stuff...this will be ~20k in threat. So you should only be needing about 23-25k threat on a mob.

The faster you get off one mob and start building threat on the second and third mobs, the faster dps can open up with their splash damage abilities. Although if you have one DPS vastly outperforming the rest, you may need to indeed put out ~30k threat on a mob to ensure he doesnt pull it off you.

 

Cranberry

Could a dps shammy do:

/targetexact Dark Fiend
/cast Purge
/targetlasttarget
/cast Stormstrike/Lightning Bolt/Whatever

Would that work, or would the attempt to cast Purge block casting SS/LB?

 

Renew

You should just remove the last line and cast whatever you need to on your own. Don't over do it!

Confidence is not Arrogance.

 

Kammy

Hi I was just wondering we are still learning M'uru and was wondering what do people recommend to put on M'uru on Phase1? I've heard warlocks and SP stay on him throughout Phase 1, but how many? It really quite hard to tell from some videoes

 

Krazen

Shadow priests on them almost full time (can throw a couple dots on other mobs), and your locks/mages after they do their respective jobs on other mobs.