Unfortunately I don't have any other logs but we had logs with warlocks doing >200k dmg to Entropius. I think it's even more playing the RNG for warlocks than for any other class in phase 2 but yes I agree, they didn't deal great damage in this specific kill. Enslaving a voidspawn won't let you lose your +15% shadow-damage buff. It's a 3second cast and it will definitely be worth it as they deal about 30k+ dmg to Entropius.

I would recommend killing them. If you enslave the voidspawns, they can even help to kill the remaining voidspawns faster with their shadowbolt volley. Additionally your warlocks won't pull aggro if they get a string of crits at the beginning of the fight in phase 2 and can usually go all out after the voids are dead. If you just offtank them, you can get unlucky and get kicked into all the voidspawns and they will kill you really fast.

But many roads lead to Rome. In the end it just comes down to what works best for you.

You don't mention if you're already doing this or not, but the exact timing of the phase transition is very important. If you just nuke m'uru down to get into phase 2, you will have too many adds up and quickly fall behind on entropius.

We always try to kill m'uru when the BigWigs "Next humanoid spawn" counter is on 16-18 seconds. While you could wait as long as 8-10 seconds left on the timer and still be sure to not get another wave, this will give you an additional void sentinel spawn since one spawns when the timer is on 15 seconds or so.

Also, as someone else mentioned, if you have to order extra dps on m'uru from people that are normally dpsing adds, you are probably doing the wrong thing. Better to wait another minute with the transition and have your m'uru dps help on the sides to get even further ahead. When all of our best dpsers are present we have done the transition before the 5 minute mark, but the most common is before the 6 minute mark. Some other guild on our server had their first kill on a 7 minute transition. As long as your healers pot properly they should be able to last that long.

Lastly, keeping one add sheeped through phase 2 will help a lot. If your melee, even with all of the above, are still not starting dps on entropius within 5 seconds after his spawn, you might want to consider skipping killing the last add.

EDIT: You only use 2 paladins in your raid setup. I assume you log an alt for a third blessing, right?

We've been dabbling in phase 2 a bit just to get a better feel and was curious if anyone has a 'bare minimum' number for bloodlusts in phase 2.

We have always been a shaman heavy guild (which has been pretty good for us) and wondering if we could stand to use a lust in phase 1 just to get muru down faster (similar to farming guilds who are doing earlier transitions.)

Our problems lie in the fight carrying out too long and just unlucky things happening. We feel using some lusts in phase 1 atleast for now will speed up our ability to get used to phase 2 long term and gauge our progress there.

Seeing that you'll probably have 3 full DPS groups - make that 3 bloodlusts. You could Lust twice, but that might lead to threat problems, plus it's unlikely you'd use entire 1:20(+ few seconds for initial agro) without deaths anyway.
But, if the issue is in phase 1, better to figure out what's wrong and improve it, rather than skip it with lusts and hope nothing goes wrong. "Unlucky things happening" doesn't really cut it - with exception of DCs, that is.

Hi,
My guild has been having issues with getting the void spawns down with enough time to kill the sentinel. We are running three locks on the sentinels and spawns that are in a spriest and elemental shaman group. I cant quite find out why we cant kill them in time. For those who use the 3 locks on sentinel dps and spawns about how long does it take you guys to kill sentinels? spanws?

Do you seed 1 round of spawns or 2? We had issues sometimes keeping up with the spawns and killing the sentinel in time, but it was really just a matter of practice. Few suggestions would be to make sure the shadow priests throw up a dot on the sentinels to give you misery/shadow weaving. On adds make sure you are seeding right away after the sentinel dies (we do every other sentinel so total of 12 spawns per seed round). It only takes 5-6 seeds per lock to kill a round of spawns so don't go overboard, switch immediately to the sentinel afterwards. You should generally have 13-15 seconds on the sentinel timer in order to kill the Sentinels in time after seeding. It's important all your locks are pulling their weight and switching to the sentinels immediately after seeding (so make sure you go into the seed round with enough mana to get a few shadow bolts off afterwards, generally 6-7k, plenty of time to tap afterwards.) If you feel you won't make the timer, it's always easy to call out for help in vent, given that you have a few full time muru dps they can switch off easily.

A Similar thing happened to us. One week Player X was capped, next week Player Y was unavailable, next week Player Z quits etc.

The hardest part of M'uru is dealing with attrition - at a point in the expansions life-cycle where alot of people are just getting sick of raiding/TBC in general and lose the desire to push on, especially with WOTLK/beta/WAR/christmas edging closer. Everyone would like to kill M'uru, but nobody can make people enjoy raiding when they lose the desire for it, regardless of whether raid leaders knock on their door and force them to log online or not.

Yep, although we clear Sunwell up to Muru easily, we rarely have the raid composition for more than one night a week to stand a realistic chance.

As you say there's always some key class busy/not available which makes it almost impossible. In our case it's Shadow Priest and Enh Shaman.

Muru is definitely painful if your key people are missing. The paladin requirement for tanking the void spawns is actually very easy--you don't need a protection paladin. Our paladin uses a funky ret spec (for P2 judgement) and picks up extra +holy threat from sanc aura, 300 SR, and as much spell damage as possible. Three warlocks seems to be the minimum number for us, but if are ever stuck with two we've had a couple decently ZA/badge geared warlock alts come in to do the job. It's not perfect but it's certainly feasible. So if those are your weakest links, (paladin, warlocks) I would look for alternative solutions to fill the attendance gaps.

Ditto, exactly the same here. So don't feel alone!

After some heartbreaking wipes (2% on Entropius was our best), everything has started to go downhill. People aren't showing up to raids which means we run with a not-so-perfect setup (3 tanks, less than 3 warlocks, etc), leading to bad results, which makes moral even worse.

I don't like having to rely on nerfs, but with the incoming patch, I'm hoping it will make M'uru killable for the guilds in our position.

About Transitions:

Reading back, using Dooms as a failsafe is a great plan; timing them to go off at 4:55 into the fight as constantly theorised as the perfect transition time.

Thing is, we dont use dooms, and a couple of times we have been too slow switching back to M'uru to finish him off for transition, ending up killing him as late as 4:59 into the fight.

We thought we were screwed, emo ensues over vent etc. However no new sentinel or humanoid pack spawns, and we go on to kill entropius as usual. This has happened every time we missed the 4:55 timer.

So if you are looking for a first kill, and find yourself struggling to finish off the humanoids in time to get melee started on Entropius asap, the 4:55 timer is not exact at all. You can gain an extra couple of seconds here, to aid you in p2.


Anyone else found this out and can confirm before people start trying this?

gl with it



Edit:

Why you should kite Entropius around the room imo

While im here, ill add a voice for kiting entropius around the room. If you are at M'uru, you have the dps for p2. Dodging gravity balls will increase raid dps by 15-20%, so we tried to find ways to reduce no. of hits taken.

What i found from kill vids, is that Entropius targets very briefly each person who gets a gravity ball or void zone spawned on them. Each of these take ~5secs to open up.

If Entropius is kited around the room, half of (on average) these all target melee/tank. Therefore when kited, once they spawn they end up against the wall 10yds behind. This stops anyone getting remotely close to a gravity ball, or standing in/near a Dark Fiend as it spawns.

I understand that everyone should avoid gravity balls regardless, but reality is, if your guild still hasnt killed M'uru then you probably have some players that arent fantastic and will faceroll w/e you do.

Although i agree kiting around the outside will reduce the maximum potential raid dps on Entropius...kiting also creates a much larger margin of error for the average guild.....you hardly get hit by gravity balls, it's easier to dispel, and less random deaths of bads standing in void zones. Overall the raid dps of an average guild will go up.

Maybe before the old 10% hp nerf kiting around the room made the dps requirements too tight, but now every guild at muru has the dps, and this method is much safer and easier to execute.


p.s with this kiting method, it is important that ppl dont stand infront of entropius in the kite path, or they risk a ball/zone opening up ontop of the melee/tank. If this happens, we call on vent to switch direction asap.

We killed M'uru before 3.0, but that's our basic strategy. We misdirect the far-side warriors to a tank, keep the far-side mage penguined and blow up M'uru (using Heroism on M'uru with an 8 healer setup). If you can kill M'uru before the second Sentinel, the only real thing to learn is how to dodge Gravity Balls and Black Holes. Oh, and making sure to remind the melee to back out before the first Darkness.

If you just got to Muru now, I would not suggest attempting to zerg him down. It's a lot easier to just tank and kill a couple of waves. There is no need to rush dps on the humanoids/sentinels, there wont be any sloppy aggro pulls or the like.

With the new tank changes, reduction of HP of mobs, etc, the humanoid waves and the sentinels/spawns only require a few seconds of your time anyway. Just dps the adds and Muru until he is at 5%. Stop dps on Muru, and focus all dps on the humanoids/sentinels for the next wave. When the first sentinel for this wave comes out, kill it. Have a look at the sentinel timer now. When the next one is due to arrive in 15 seconds, push Muru over (so the second one doesnt spawn). You'll likely only need around 5 seconds for the last 5% of his HP anyway, provided everyone turns and throws an attack at him.

Then clean up whatever is left (most likely nothing at all), and you have all the time in the world to kill Entropious.

Also posting to say NOT to zerg if you're learning from scratch. We nuke Mu'ru until the first darkness. At that point I have 3 people(melee/hunters) assigned to each door and they kill door adds only until we switch. Three casters (mages/locks) are assigned void sentinel duty/void spawn cleanup. The rest of the DPS stays on Mu'ru. We transition Mu'ru before Sentinel 3 with 6 healers, cleanup all reamaining adds and then burn heroism on Entrop.

We did this last night with five tanks, and 7 or 8 healers, with around 10 people in Kara gear and blues (and generally loot from the earlier bosses that they'd picked up rather than let it rot). It is still very easily doable provided you don't rush or panic. With the vastly reduced mob HP, there is far less damage taken by tanks in P1 even with lower DPS (especially with Sunwell Radiance no longer present).

There were at least 5-6 people in the raid who'd never seen the fight before, but we still killed it on our 1st pull of the evening, I would say this is probably the most drastically changed fight by the nerfs, simply due to the 30% health loss from so many mobs - some of which already had their HP reduced, changing it from incredibly tightly tuned to massively undertuned.

I would recommend any new guild going in there to try and do it 'the normal way' rather than zerging it. It'll give you a much better feel for what the fight was all about in its former glory, as well as making it much more controlled.

We did this last night because we only had 2 tanks. Total fight time was under 2 min, only had 1 Sent pop right around the time of the first darkness, Entrop poped before the sent was dead and we kept at least 1 side add sheeped/chain feared in P2 simply because it didn’t matter.

Er, now you mention it I'm not sure.

None the less, looking at the WWS from last night (can't link as i'm using a proxy to browse this site from work I'm afraid, so links all come out as gobbledegook) the tanks took significantly less damage over the same time interval. My point was that your healers will come out of P1 with full or nearly full mana if you don't use the zerg tactic.

You're probably seeing reduced damage on your tanks thanks to drastically increased block values (pallies/warriors) and more mob control (more stuns for warriors in particular). Sunwell radiance was definitely not in effect on these mobs even prior to 3.0. That being said the class changes resulted in us being able to tank all of the humanoids with one tank (via misdirects), when pre-patch, even two berserkers plus a fireball were extremely risky.

Tanks will take less damage from the berserkers because:
1. They aren't alive as long
2. They aren't doing as much damage per swing (all melee damage was nerfed along with the 30% HP reduction)
3. More stunning effects
4. Increased block value
5. Better benefits from things like blessing of sanctuary

Sunwell radiance was not in effect for M'uru, so if you were going high avoidance you'll not be dodging as much. But the rest of the nerfs even that out a bit.

Anyone ever encounter Muru bugging out after a wipe and lightening anyone who ports up/runs up to the Twins room? We just had this happen, and it looks like the only way to fix it is going to be a soft reset. Curious if anyone knows if there's a cause, or if we just got unlucky >>

We've had it happen twice, both cases it was linked to someone having had Divine Intervention cast on them and them still being in the room, while under the effect of Divine Intervention, when M'uru respawned after the encounter reset.

It was fixed by having everyone leave the instance or die.

We only got to M'uru after the patch and our first kill was using the zerg strategy. You have to have enough DPS to kill him before the second wave of elfs spawn, otherwise you need a conventional approach.

We go all out DPS until the first darkness, then shift the melee over to killing all the elves while the range finish off M'uru. We try not to kill sentinels, but if one pops we aoe down the adds and go back to Entropius/M'uru (usually Entropius). As long as you have the DPS to drop M'uru fast enough this is a pretty easy strat.