Eh, you're right, and if one DPS is outperforming, there's no reason why he couldn't swap targets a little early. It's just a tiny bit of undebuffed dps.

32k is indeed a bit overdone, but I wouldn't build up to 20k and then just figure noone's going to pull aggro because they shouldn't, on paper, either. Mainly because of lucky crits, gear differences, people starting sooner and whatnot.

I tank on our melee dps side with 3 rogues and an enhancement shaman - I'm in their group for wf/bs - so my threat is barely ever a problem; so I can "allow" them to start dps instantly and blade flurry fairly soon as well.

What I usely do is I run up to the pack and thunderclap (paying attention to resists), while I have the first dps target targeted (the marked one), after I thunderclapp'ed I move the pack to either the left or right so I can basicly "place the sheep". Then after the sheep lands I move my two remaining mobs (one berserker, one mage) back to the middle (since I don't want to tank near a possible voidspawn-location obviously). If the caster decided to go melee from the start I luckily have an aware resto shaman that spares me an earth shock to bring it back to me. Other than that I make sure I get at least 2 spell reflects in on the mage, while I fully focus on the berserker. I made the rogues use simple "/use Blade Flurry /say BF UP!" macro's so I can be more aware of when I need to pay attention to threat on both targets. "We" manage to clear our sides before the new pack has reached us pretty much all the time.

After about 10-12k threat on the berserker (while spell reflecting on every cooldown) I target the mage and get a shield slam and one or two devastates on him. After that I basicly keep switching between both targets and checking Omen making sure I build more threat on the target that... requires more threat. After a while your rogues, or warriors, have figured out how fast they can pop BF, or SS.

Even without windfury you should have plenty of rage to go mental, I wouldn't use cleave (too low tps) or TC (too risky) in any other situation that the initial pick-up though.

We have lost a good amount of our core raiders, and have a bunch of recruits to work with. We have seen p2 a couple of times but I can't quite figure out if we have the DPS or not to do it. Is P2 DPS a strict requirement on gear/stacking, or is it just a matter of maximizing your DPS time not moving? I guess i'm asking if a guild that has pretty much fallen back on relying on people who are not very SW geared can do it.

Pre-nerf I would say it was impossible, but now that theres no pushback on negative energy I'd say its definitely doable. Theres a guild on my server with no glaive sets that killed him with 23 alive (25 alive at 1%), and they are pretty far behind on gear (took like 3 weeks to kill felmyst iirc). Telling all your warlocks to enslave a demon right as you're entering phase2 is a pretty big dps increase as well. You could also drop down to 5 healers to get another dps in if needed.

Being behind on gear is definitely going to handicap you, phase 2 is a very tough dps race. That said, there are optimizations you can do for positioning and dps time to increase your odds of winning. You won't know if it's possible until you try and try a lot.

I remain skeptical about this... P2 is basically a soft enrage of how long you can cope with the raid damage, which scales up almost linearly as time goes by. Considering the tank needs to be healed, that leaves 4 healers more or less to deal with Negative Energy - is the DPS gain of one additional DPS enough to offset the amount of time a P2 attempt could have been prolonged comparing 4 raid healers healers vs 5?

I guess I just don't understand. I tend to be, or at least I try to, balanced about raid encounters. I never believe the solution is "lawl bring 10 of class", however, after some 200+ attempts on M'uru I firmly believe you do need to "stack" the raid in multiple ways. There is a min\max of every class along specific lines of group buffs, a shadow priest is amazing for each caster\mana group and frankly any dps group without a shaman in phase 2 is less than optimal.

The point I was trying to make was that having 8 warriors on 4hm ( at least I dont remember seeing a full kill with 7, or 7 wars + 1 druid ) was roughly the same idea and then culmination in the tougher technical near the end raid encounter. You could argue, at least I would, that this was the genesis of making other classes viable tanks, and with just cause.

In the same way you had fury warriors tanking or specing prot to tank on 4hm, I believe if you had a raid consisting of 2 resto, 1 enhance, and 1 elemental shaman, and you were short healers that day, you could have them all respec Resto ( assuming they had decent gear ) and your raid would barely lose anything. I do not believe the reverse is true, were you short 2 shaman you couldn't have your Ret Paladin and shadow priest respec and achieve the same results. I realize this is a given at this point in raiding, but that doesn't make it have any less of an impact on the stacking issue.

I believe fights like this one can help to highlight certain issues that need balancing and that is my only objective in raising them. For instance the issue near and dear to my heart is raid wide damage on DPS classes. Currently as an arms warrior in phase 2, I take negative energy strikes at a high of around 2800 when others take about 2050. This is an average of 25 M'uru phase 2s, so pretty accurate. I don't believe it is the end of the world, but if you had the choice of an additional warrior, or say a hunter that brought comparable group\raid buffs if considering an arms warrior, then I would take that hunter everytime. Regardless of the ways to do phase 1, phase 2 is the fight everything else is just execution.

We killed 4HM with 7 warriors, its about adjusting tactics usually. We also managed some training with 6 warriors, although it didnt leave any room for error, but it was technically possible with t3, fishboss trinket and speed potions.

The same thing was happening for reliquary of souls. We went from early kills with arcane resistance tanks, random interrupts, curse of tongues and spellstealing shields to aggro racing offtanks, interrupt rotations, mind numbing poison and felhunter dispels.

What im trying to say is, sometimes adjusting tactics and getting more routine can give you enough room to counter randomness or subpar setups. I'm pretty sure some of the top 10 guilds on M'uru didnt fully understand how Negative Energy worked on their first kill and just "lucked" through it or single performances were that few % better in average than in other guilds.

But yeah, raidstacking always was an option to trivialize some encounters, Naxx was the best example instance for that (Mage, Priest, Warrior, Shaman stacking). We never had the perfect stacking on all kills though and still beat the content.

For M'uru i think the frustrating part is that after you got a very hard and technical phase 1 you are not just rewarded by a token phase 2 "alive check" but also have to learn this up to a point, which means a bit of headroom for phase 1 makes the whole phase 2 learning a lot faster.

Having near constant wipes at 20% on p2, i'm trying to figure out a way to increase our DPS. Just wondering how often it took most guilds of seeing p2 before hitting the 5-10% plateau and finally killing him? It doesn't seem like we can pull anymore dps out from anywhere, though dropping to 5 healers sounds interesting to say the least.

In my experience....

20% wipes mean you are getting knocked around too much and need to fix it.

5% wipes mean you got knocked around a little bit or someone died early.

On a different note...

What are people doing to reliably pick up zerkers with warrior tanks?
We've had some pretty bad experiences with zerkers....
- resisting tclap and killing a healer instantly.
- Sheep breaking 5 seconds after being casted (no dps broke it, we've checked) killing a healer or just turning on flurry and ending up on the other side of the room in 2 seconds killing someone there.

After a bunch of failed attempts at that we basically said "screw the sheeps" and basically ended up using mage -> zerker -> zerker for both sides just taking it easy on Bf/cleave/SS for the warrior side.

We have a mage at the enterance using nova on the mobs as they enter. Bit of dps waste but eliminates alot of problems.

It depends on what strategy you're using for the door adds. From what I've seen some guilds kill the mage first while others prefer to leave it up and let the tank spellreflect. Some guilds use CC and some let the tank pickup both berserkers and doorside dps can destroy the mage while waiting.

My guild poly's one berserker and the tank picks up the other while the dps go to town on the mage. An enhancement shaman dropping earthbind helps alot. I'm healing this warrior and when I get free moments (there aren't many) I drop an earthbind to help out.

Basically this is one of the difficulties with phase 1 and it takes alot of practice for everyone involved to learn exactly what they should be doing and how their abilities can compliment each other. We've had alot of early p1 wipes where the zerker runs right past the tank and mashes me in the face.

I built a taunt macro to pick up the mage on my side:

#Showcooldown Taunt
/targetexact Shardowsword Fury Mage
/cast Taunt

I focus on picking up the two Zerkers w/ tclap and a cleave. Spam my macro so the mage focuses on me and spam shield reflect. The damage from shield reflect should keep the mage on you w/ no issues. We're killing Zerker > Zerker > Mage. Just having our two mages SS the buff and dpsing M'uru full time. If you have prot wars who can manage to hold one side its an advantage over Ferals who take considerable more damage from the adds.

Question for the spriests; will the MD macro work for P1?

/targetexact M'uru
/cast Dispel Magic
/targetexact M'uru

And still be able to MD all of the skulls?

nonono, thats for single dispel only, and works great for dispels on dark fiends in p2 without having to search and manually target them.

You cant macro the MD target area anymore since they disabled minimap ping.

If you're wiping at 20%, use your logs to see how long you're spending in P2. Ideally you're not going to be passing much over ~80 seconds or so when he hits 0. If you have a 20% wipe and the bulk of the deaths were at ~80-90 seconds or later, you need to increase dps. If you're having a lot of people die earlier, you need to assign healing better.

For DPS you need people to be more aware of orbs: they're avoidable. And Entropius is movable, which can help.

We start with Entropius in the middle, and don't move him until we need to. When we do need to, we take him directly to a side and move him along it if we need to for the remainder of the fight. Ranged starts in two clumps with healers assigned to them.

One tip:

A lot of people may have watched Exodus's initial video. Kiting Entropius around the room makes sense if you have a very large amount of melee DPS. We found that it's a pretty bad idea if you just have one melee group.

So after a night of attempts where we saw Entropius at ~35% about 5-6 times, I tried to find a few WWS reports of kills, but haven't found any so far. What I was looking for was to see how exactly the dispels/purges for P2 were handled. We have been using 2 shadow priests and myself (the only enhancement shaman) for this task. If i'm near the center and our priests are standing near opposite doorways, is this enough? The only other potential sources we have for purge/dispel are 4 resto shaman, but it seems they already have their hands full with chain heal during this phase. Any input or advice from those who have successfully killed M'uru and are clear on this part of the fight would be greatly appreciated.

It's been discussed above. Mainly you want DPS priests/shamans to be handling dispelling, ideally via macro (as discussed above). Spread out as you described and the coverage should be fine. But beyond that of course it's still everyone's responsibility to stay away from any Void Zones / Dark Fiends.

People standing too near (or on) void zones can make it look like your dispellers are failing, since the fiends don't do damage until they reach someone.

Emphasize that just outside of the effect radius isn't enough, people need to steer clear of them. This includes ones under Entropius himself.

It's just a case of dodging more balls, as the guys above me said. Generally, keep in mind that p2 simply can't be prolonged for more than 70-75 seconds. If you've spent that much time in p2, he simply needs to be dead by then.

Since we're using the Exodus setup, we have our tank kite him around the sides of the room - but don't overdo it, you only need to move if a ball spawns near the melee, otherwise just stand still and nuke. We keep casters in the middle of the room, so we only need to adjust our line of sight to the path the tank is using to kite him in, we only move if a void zone or a ball spawns under/near us.

It's just that; EVERYONE just HAS to dodge the balls. Have someone who has a good overview of the fight call for their spawning on vent and be ready to adjust your position and return to burning asap. Giving your MT windfury helps immensely.

Two questions:

In P1, is anybody using 3 hunters for a misdirect rotation on the void sentinels? We've only had one night on M'uru, but we want to use 2 locks dpsing the sentinel and it gets tight at times when the sentinel spawns on the opposite side of the room from where the locks are standing. We tank the sentinels off to the right hand side when you walk in - - and kiting the mob across the room has caused a-lot of issues. Sometimes the tank would die when turning to run while kiting it, not to mention ranged dps and healers getting clipped by the aoe pulse.

Can the ranged dps group dps the mage un-tanked, or possibly tanked by a warlock? Or have the warrior simply taunt tank the mage?