I’m normally a Holy Pally, however we recently lost our Prot Pally and I’ve been asked to fill in. My role is picking up the Void Spawns. Given that I’m not really familiar with Prot Tanking, my guild is making it easy on me and having me AoE tank in place while the Warrior Tank kites the Void Sentinels to me before they die and pop out more adds for me to tank.

My question is on the role of Shadow Resist in my gear. How much should I be aiming for (before Prayer of Shadow Protection, which I will have)? And how much should I be concerned about the impact my SR set has on my other stats? From what I understand all these guys do is a Shadow Bolt Volley spell so things like Shield Block and such probably don’t matter. Should I just be striving to max out my SR and Stam?

Also, any other random insight anyone can give on the technique of this role would be appreciated. It seems pretty straightforward for the most part. Keep up Consecration/Holy Shield and Judge Might and Exorcism as much as possible. Can I try to weave Holy Wrath’s in there too?

I wrote these tips on my guild forums for the backup prot pally on a night where I was on vacation. Maybe they'll help you. Keep in mind they are custom tailored to our strat and how the sentinal tank (warrior) and I worked together. We always kill the sentinals in the same spot and the sentinal tank always brings sent's over to my general area. We have two separate ranged groups, plus the melee group at each door. The ranged are just behind the melee. We kill spawns every other phase. If you're killing one phase at a time then you'll need to do things differently.

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* It's not uncommon for one or two people to stray too far from their groups and take volley damage. Usually it's a lock....I'm not naming names They probably do this because they try to keep seed range on the voids and I have pulled them too far into that nook. Help them out by not going any further from them than is necessary. If everyone is properly positioned you can actually pull the voids all the way to the center circle where the edge of darkness is and be almost completely between the two ranged groups and they won't take any damage. But don't try to do that.

* Don't get greedy with consecrate damage. The more damage you can do the better, but you won't always be taking a lot of damage so you have to pay attention to your mana bar.

* One of the main mistakes you can make is to have your consecrate on cooldown when the sentinal dies. When tanking my spawns, and [The Warrior] is tanking the next sentinal, I only consecrate if his sentinal is at greater than 3/4 health. Anything less and you run into the risk of having your consecrate on cooldown when it dies.

* If you find yourself in the situation where you think the sentinal is going to die while your consecrate is on cooldown all you have to say in Vent is "[The Warrior] get in my consecrate". I explained to him what that means in that situation so he'll know what to do.

* After each sentinal dies, watch where [The Warrior] runs off to and be ready to instantly taunt if he has a spawn on him. Sometimes one sticks to him when he runs off. The sentinals themselves are not tauntable so it's safe to taunt [The Warrior] anytime you want. If you miss the taunt for some reason just ignore it and call out in Vent that there is a loose spawn on [The Warrior]. Chasing it down is a horrible idea....trust me. Grab it when [The Warrior] gets back to you.

* Avoid blast from the sentinal as much as possible by staying out of the blast range (about 6-8 yards) for as long as you are comfortable doing. Often, you can "hop in" just before it dies completely avoiding those 3k hits. Imagine you're playing a game of jump-rope Look for the blast, then look at the sentinals health and decide whether you can wait another 5 seconds or not. Don't get too risky though. If you have to take one blast that's normal....but if you're constantly taking 2 or more then you're taking unnecessary damage.

* It's very important that for the rounds in which the spawns are being seeded that you work with the sentinal tank to ensure that the seeds blowing up on the spawns are also hitting the sentinal. This isn't always possible and it depends on the portal. But be aware that you need to always look for this opportunity and take advantage of it. Usually [The Warrior] does all of the positioning but sometimes I turn the mobs around a bit so that they "clump" better.

* The sentinal tank always comes to YOU. Not you to him. However, on a rare occasion he gets caught up with other things and forgets to move to you. There isn't enough time to to call this out in TS so what I usually do is in the last couple seconds before it looks like the sentinal will die I start taking small 2 yard side steps over to him while also making sure he's not all of a sudden trying to move to me. He usually realizes it at the last second and we kinda meet halfway but neither of us has to say anything. And worst case if he doesn't realize he forgot to move you're only a couple yards away and can quickly nudge over and get off your consecrate.

* I have a tad under 600 spell damage fully buffed. This is plenty if you use threat cooldowns. I wear the crescent icon trinket. When it's time to AoE the first pair of spawns, I pop the trinket just before the sentinal dies followed by consecrate. I have health bars turned on. As soon as I'm sure I don't need to taunt off [The Warrior], I immediately start looking for the "full" health bars and try to melee them since they have only a couple ticks of consecrate. When it comes time for the second pair of spawns to kill I blow wings. The third set you won't have any threat abilities unless you want to use a destruction potion. But your icon will be available again just in time for the 4th pair. I've found that if I don't fit in a threat boost that the locks can sometimes pull a spawn off if they start aoe real early.

* Set you focus to [The Warrior], or whoever the sentinal tank is. And make sure your UI can display the target of your focus (or just use main tank->assist windows). In this way, you always know how much health the next sentinal has and therefore when it's about to die. This is almost a requirement in my opinion.

* Sometimes the next portal will spawn right on top of you. There is a valid portal location where we tank the spawns. When this happens, move yourself and especially the mobs away from the portal. If possible, try not to consecrate until [The Warrior] has the sentinal. The reason for this is to reduce the risk that the sentinal agro's onto you before [The Warrior] can get it. It helps [The Warrior] see him easier. You only need to move a couple yards, nothing major.

* Gear for at least 200 buffed shadow resist and 600 spell damage, then focus on stamina. I think I have exactly 490 defense but I wouldn't consider that a requirement. I prefer a chromatic flask over fort flask. I believe I end up with about 230 shadow resist, 600 spell damage, and 18k health fully buffed. Use whichever food buff makes the most sense (stamina or spell damage).

Again, the worst mistake you can make is to have your consecrate on cooldown when the sentinal dies. The locks tend to take it from 15% to nothing in less time than it takes to blink.

The second bad mistake you can make...which just takes getting used to [The Warrior], is to consecrate before [The Warrior] has settled down moving the sentinal. When [The Warrior] comes to you he will eventually stop...but sometimes he starts moving again. Scares me a lot!.

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That's pretty much all the tips I have. After reviewing it all though I realize I've changed my stats quite a bit due to gear upgrades. I now use much less SR gear but have much more stam. So either method works fine. You could do it in holy gear too obviously if you're killing each round.

It's really not hard at all, I was just trying to make sure that my absense didn't require someone to come in and learn everything from scratch.

I just wear a SR Cape and Boots now.

Thank you very much. That was really informative. We did one night of attempts with me as Prot Pally a couple days ago and I learned a few things the hard way (like the occasional one sticky Void Spawn - good to see I'm not the only one that happens to).

One of the things I struggled with was timing the Consecrates properly. A Focus Frame on the warrior tank is a great idea for being able to monitor the Void Sentinel’s health. Also, I'm ashamed to admit that I forgot about Wings too (I'm Holy - Blizz just gave us Wings to look good in Boss Kill Screenshots, right? What? They have actual functionality too? No way!).

Thanks again for the input. The whole thing seems pretty simple. M'uru is a very challenging boss and I just want to make sure I'm not making it harder.

Again, picking individual examples to support your argument is not statistically valid. Here's a counterexample,

23:53'35.609 Void Sentinel #2 Shadow Pulse hits Leavia for 3375 Shadow.
23:53'35.699 Void Sentinel #2 attack was dodged by Leavia.
23:53'36.373 Void Sentinel #2 is afflicted by Demoralizing Shout.
23:53'38.093 Void Sentinel #2 melee swing hits Leavia for 6212 Physical.
23:53'38.419 Void Sentinel #2 Shadow Pulse hits Leavia for 3466 Shadow.
23:53'40.669 Void Sentinel #2 attack was dodged by Leavia.
23:53'41.662 Void Sentinel #2 Shadow Pulse hits Leavia for 3233 Shadow.
23:53'42.962 Void Sentinel #2 melee swing hits Leavia for 8340 Physical. (594 Blocked)
23:53'44.488 Void Sentinel #2 Shadow Pulse hits Leavia for 3518 Shadow.
23:53'45.361 Void Sentinel #2 attack was parried by Leavia.
23:53'47.725 Void Sentinel #2 attack was dodged by Leavia.
23:53'47.921 Void Sentinel #2 Void Blast was reflected by Leavia.
23:53'50.460 Void Sentinel #2 Shadow Pulse hits Leavia for 3457 Shadow.
23:53'50.818 Void Sentinel #2 attack was dodged by Leavia.
23:53'53.688 Void Sentinel #2 Shadow Pulse hits Leavia for 3575 Shadow.
23:53'54.052 Void Sentinel #2 melee swing hits Leavia for 7801 Physical. (594 Blocked)

By your own argument, if a sunwell geared tank with ironshield up expects at worst 10k hits, and (apart from shield block) the damage in this case would have been 8936 on the second bolded line, then the mitigation from demo is at best 1k. Yes, that hit could have been 8k, 7k or even 6k, but that doesn't mean that demo shout is responsible for mitigation of 2k, 3k, or 4k. It means that the melee attack of the sentinel itself varies with 3k. I.e. damage range without demo is 7k-10k and with demo it becomes say 6k-9k. This is what I think you guys are misunderstanding.

Go to a WWS for an individual attempt, click on "raid and mobs" (like click on it, don't do the tab breakout -- mobs aren't listed there anymore.) Click on Singularity on the bottom.

If you really can't figure out what to click on, add "?r" to the end of your WWS url. e.g.: Wow Web Stats


Fearing is bad because of the AE shadowbolts. There's 8 of them, you can't just banish/enslave them all (unless you bring 4 locks I guess) and you'll spend more time babysitting the banish (have to get back in range, etc.) than is worth it. Enslave one per lock, yes, but the rest can be easily ignored.

As others have said, even though one of the early videos featured kiting Entropius all the way around the room, that's just generally not a great strat (unless you have a very very melee-heavy raid.) So the odds of the melee taking shadowbolts are low.

And if Entropius needs to cross the room, we just cut across the middle.

Once people get used to "you can't use the back half" it's fine -- and honestly, when Entropius is against the wall, no one has range enough to hit him and be on the void spawns .


(apologies if I mentioned this earlier in this thread, I'm helping a friend's guild with M'uru and I forget which thread I've posted in!)

We do something along the same lines: all our locks SoC, but everyone other than the last lock breaks off early to go do the next sentinal. This works very well (as does your plan) because having 3-4 locks all casting SoC until everything dies is extremely inefficient.

That depends on how you deal with Spawns, unless you AOE every other wave, you only have 3 left to deal with after Enslaves. Shadowbolt Volley range is 30 yd(?) which covers large part of room. Even assuming you don't kite Entropius very far, you limit your space to spread out and run away from Singularities. Besides, with 1% wipe, major changes to tactic aren't needed. It's just 20k hp after all, they could pretty much have Holy Pala(or even that Protadin) bubble and finish him off at the end, without risking people dying to random Shadowbolts.

Firecrest: We have a Holy Paladin tank the Void Spawns in his normal healing spec and equip (with somewhere between 200 and capped Shadow Resistance equipment) and using a spell damage weapon. He heals himself and usually is in no danger of dying - the only time he gets hit a bit more is when the Void Sentinel tank runs over to him so that the Void Spawns spawn right on the Paladin. In his healing equipment he has quite a lot of spell damage making it very easy to keep those Void Spawns on him, and we only very rarely have a Void Spawn get away from him.

In Phase 2, he can equip his healing weapon again and is pretty much 2/3 of a healer for that phase, freeing up one of the MT healers or letting a MT healer be switched with a cross healer.

That's very interesting. I've heard elsewhere of this strat being used, but I have to admit to being somewhat dubious. If I recall, my raid-buffed holy health is around 10k or so. Is that really enough? My other concern would be going oom if the healing is heavy due to the stat loss from the SR gear.

It's definately worth a try though as I see where many of those Prot Pally defensive stats are near worthless when all that's coming in is spell damage.

We don't have a dedicated Prot Paladin (one of the Holy Palis respec Prot for fights where it's needed such as Felmyst/Muru). After seeing this suggested earlier in the thread I can highly recommend using a Holy-spec Paladin in some SR gear and good spell damage.

With a full Prot-spec doing the job we used to need a Holy Paladin healing him nearly full time. Now that we changed to him using Holy spec and mixed tank/SR/spell gear then during Phase 1 our Paladin now only needs HoTs from the Druid to stay up most of the time (he spams-heals himself with FoL/HL). When the Warrior brings the Void Sentinel close to be killed another healer helps out.

You effectively have another 50%+ of a healer in the raid for phase 1 and 75% for phase 2. It made the fight hugely more stable for us (we use 6 healers overall).

A completely different question, which maybe is common knowledge, but I couldn't find anything here or on google:

Can you use a [Flask of Relentless Assault] and an [Elixir of Demonslaying] simultaneously?
I know they don't stack AP wise, but does a flask prevent the effect from demonslaying from applying, or does demonslaying delete the flask buff?

We recently acquired a new melee who is lacking behind in gear, and if you could simply use a flask for the adds and a then pop a demonlsaying for Entropius, it would help in easing the stress on the adds.

Last I checked you cannot use the elixir if you already have the flask on you. You'll need to click off the flask in order to use the elixir. However you can use the flask if you have elixirs on you and the elixirs will be wiped out.

EDIT: Might as well post my consumable related question here itself: Does [Earthen Elixir] work in P2 and will it make a substantial difference in case we're using Elixir of Demonslaying as the Battle Elixir?

Has anyone got any further advice on controlling/dealing with Sentinels?

Like many guilds we're really pushing to get Muru down and have at least a chance at KJ before the patch hits, and at present it all seems down to VS control.

- We can reliably control the doorways - DPS Warr/Rogue/Enh Shaman/Hunter/Feral group on each doorway assisted by 1 Mage each (spellsteal). No Sheeps. The Hunter in each Feral group assists the MT with MD when needed (if the VS is a long way from the MT) and dps Muru in place of the Mage.

- Holy pali in tank/SR/spell gear tanks the VS spawns

- 3-4 Warlocks on the VS and spawns.

Nearly all our attempts tend to fall apart due to the VS. As I have my back to the fight all the time tanking doorway, I can't watch what's going on. It seems however that either the MT can't get to the VS before it gibs a group, or some other random VS-related crap happens while he is dragging it to the Paladin.

Unfortunately that's not terribly useful diagnostic information. The most common problems:
- DPS on the Sentinels is too slow for the tank to get there in time
- Tank isn't using all of the tools available to close the distance
- Tank doesn't know how to get across Darkness or times it poorly
- Failure to spell reflect / grounding totem
- Healers out of range
- Healers getting shadowbolted
- DPS pulling aggro

If it's a combination of DPS pulling aggro and them not dying fast enough, most likely you need another person dedicated to killing them. If it's something to do with healer positioning they need to work it out and the void spawn tank needs to make sure he's positioning correctly. If it's related to timing, well, that just needs to be worked out through practice.

You can always attempt to switch to 3 tank strat, as long as you have 2+ Hunters. 1 is doable, but can be real pain while learning. That way, being slightly behind on Sentinel DPS will not wipe you immediately, since Hunters can MD new one even if the old one is still standing. Granted, 2 VS will rip any tank apart, but usually it gives you enough time to assist with DPS to catch up. If not, you really should review your Sentinel DPS team. With 4 Locks, there's just no way you couldn't keep up.

Main problem is, that it requires well geared Protadin, not just your usual Holydin dressed in random offspec pieces.

My suspicions are that:

(1) The VS tank just doesnt get to the new one fast enough. I'll can get more VS dps, but of course there's always the possibility that he just needs more practice. As fas as I know he has mouseover intervene macros to help him and the Hunters are helping out with MD if the new spawn is a long way away.

(2) He gets to the VS in time, but has issues getting back to the Paladin with it. I suspect that the key here is for the dps to know what's going on and hold up until it's in place and for groups that may be in the way if Darkness cuts off the direct route to move out of the way.

It's just really frustrating to lead the raid with your back to it all the time and not know what's going wrong. I think I might just take one of the ranged dps out of the fight for a few tries and ask them to just watch and see if they can tell me what's up.

We're having a P2 problem at the moment.

We have P1 more or less down. 7 or 8 fairly clean P2 transitions out of 20 pulls. Not bad. Could be better, but, dc's, etc. Annoying.

Anyways, we had several P2s where we live for 90s or so, however, Entropius is at 30-35% when we hit the 90s mark.

So, EJ, WWS critique.

Wow Web Stats

We have a bunch of ok attempts-I'm linking the "best" attempts. Other good ones are obvious by the time.

Group setup on sides:

Rogue
Rogue
Rogue
Prot War
Resto Shaman (for WF)
Mage is doing damage here but not in this group. Has a shadow priest. Sheep one berserker, spell reflect/spellsteal the other.

Other side:
BM Hunter
BM Hunter
Fury War
Enh Shaman
Feral Druid (Tank)

4 warlocks, 2 shadow priests, 1 mage is the rest of the DPS.

Healers:
2 COH Priests
2 Shaman
1 Holy Pal
1 Resto Druid

Tanks:
2 Prot War
1 Feral
1 Protadin for spawns.

We're ahead of the next waves, we're transitioning on time (4:55 into the encounter). Seem to be having trouble cleaning up the adds and getting on Entropius on time (I'd say 15-20s from the time M'uru dies until all the melee are on Entropius.)

What are we doing wrong? Is the sides setup wrong? We're close. We can survive for 90s. Are we moving too much? Look at our casts, etc from warlocks, mages, hunters. We really don't know what's wrong. We're WAY short looking at our RDPS on Entropius on P2 compared to kills.

So,. suggestions? Gravity balls don't seem to be an issue (At the very least, one DPS player getting hit with one isn't 35% of Entropius' health)

Would really appreciate some help as we'd really like to kill M'uru before 3.0 and Wrath, given all the time we've put in on this boss.

Thanks.

EDIT: I'm thinking we need to add an enhancement shaman and remove a caster, lock or mage. I just am not feeling the group comp on that side right now.

That's an awful, awful group, if not so much for P1, definitely for P2.

You can time exactly when you want to kill M'uru. You need to do it when the melee groups have 1 and a half, tops 2 adds left, and while a Sentinel is already up being killed by the Warlocks. Take M'uru down to 2% (tell your shadowpriests to plan their dots so they don't refresh them late), and when the situation I described occurs, call for nuking. Your mages and shadowpriests should take at most 10 seconds to kill him off. While Entropius is spawning you have a few seconds during which the side groups need to finish off their adds, a hunter misdirects Entropius to your tank while the Warlocks finish off the last sentinel, freeing up your MT, and enslave a void spawn each.

We swap the fury warrior and the prot warrior, the enhancement shaman and the resto shaman right when P2 starts, so the resto shaman can drop GoA for feral druid and hunters, and we have our usual melee group.

We usually transition right at 4:55 into the fight on the dot by timing Dooms.

Gofa-thanks for the WWS parse-really helped us figure out what we're doing wrong.

So-looking at our group setup-can we be successful with this or should we switch a mage or warlock for another melee?

I think we're getting closer to our answer.

I have conflicting information on the spawn frequency of the humanoid groups. Do they run in every 30 oder 60 seconds?

Not only can this information be quickly sought, but a single attempt would resolve it for you.

They spawn once a minute.

I am sorry Exiliad - searching for the information gave me the two different timers. Also, we are going there on Sunday, I'm planning our strategy for Sunday.

this post is related to gofa's wws-log. we killed entropius for the first time on august 12. the next 3 weeks we had just small problems killing him - maybe luck in p2? afterwards some players quit raiding as wotlk is so close for beeing released and many items will get replaced with less efford within maybe a week or 2. so we recruited some new players (our luck the 2nd best horde guild on our server stopped sunwell raiding at all). so after a chilling week without stressing to kill muru - just did the farm stuff including kalec till twins - we returned the next two weeks and couldn't down muru. it was strange as we seemed to lack in dps (only in p2) but could kill brutalus 40 seconds before enrage. the transition was quit perfect. so yesterday we managed to kill him again after 2 nights of frustrating whipeing in p2.

here is our wws-log (WWS Loading...). compared to the log of celestial dawn our raid seems to do quit more dmg on entropius herself but at the end there have been only 2 players alive. some seconds more and it would have resulted in a further whipe. on our firstkill, we only had 2 or 3 people down.

I've read in this thread that locks could enslave voidspawns which do quit alot of dmg in p2 - but our warlocks claim, that they will loose dps (and maybe theire sacrificed succubus-buff). I've showed my guild the wws-log breakdown of celestial dawn to improve dps in p2 and some of us are quit shocked about how "little" dmg those locks do compared to ours. and so our locks complain that if they will enslave those voidspawns the damage delt to entropius may be like those of celestial dawn. so, how much dmg will a lock maybe loose if he/she enslaves a spawn compared to nuking all out on entropius herself?

and as someone of fusion stated (quit early in the thread) they ignore the rest of the voidspawns and avoid the side they are tanked, a bulk of players in our raid mean, that the incoming dmg through those bolts will not be healable as entropius does quit a lot of dmg after one minute. and moreover the singularity forces to move the raid and therefore there isn't enough place to tank them off. so, what would you recommend us? bomb the spawns? enslave them and ignore the rest or bomb the rest?