Morogrim Tidewalker

[Vand]

I just re-read the Tidewalker strat guide (http://www.bosskillers.com/cgi-bin/bbguild/index.cgi?action=view_guide&guide_id=47&sid=mzhjyxhHKD) on Bosskillers. It's interesting how much more sense things make after you have experienced the fight several times yourself.

If you read that guide, we are basically using Method 2, only without the suggested prot pali. There are two reasons why this is Method 2, and not the preferred Method 1, and we are struggling with both issues. The first issue is that the pali tanking the murlocs is taking a lot of damage, and we have had trouble with Lyre dying. The second issue is that if your single designated murloc tank gets tombed, things get more difficult. And we have certainly had trouble with Lyre getting tombed at awkward moments.

Etri last night insisted that healing problems are what was keeping us from succeeding last night. I cannot comment on why Aoree died a few times, but having Lyre take so much damage from the murlocs only increases the stress our healers find themselves under. I suspect that that may be part of the reason Aoree dies sometimes, as well...too many healing resources being diverted to Lyre (I could be totally wrong here, though).

That brings me to Method 1 from the Bosskillers guide. It seems to address both of the issues that we are struggling with. It also seems to greatly reduce the luck factor in the fight. I am sure that it would introduce its own issues, but given our current struggles, I think it may make sense to try something different.

Method 1 has two or three (I think three would be better to reduce the luck factor) palis standing off to the side, away from the raid. When the murlocs spawn, they are all fighting for healing aggro...it does not matter which one gets it. Right before the two packs of murlocs converge on the palis, the mages frost nova them in place. The AoE then starts. This is a very short summary of the method; I would suggest people look at the guide for full details and diagrams.

This method should reduce the stress on the healers because the aim is to snare the murlocs before they start beating up on the palis. It should also reduce the luck factor because if one or even two palis get tombed, there is still a pali there who should be roughly equal in threat (and quickly become #1 in threat as the tombed palis stop healing) in place.

I know that we have had issues with frost nova snaring murlocs near people not prepared to take a beating from them. That is why this method has the palis standing well off to the side. There should be nobody near the nova spots except the mages, who will quickly move out of melee range.

It is true that we have two kills under our belts using our current method. If we want to continue doing what has brought us our only success so far against Tidewalker, I can certainly understand. The main problem is that our current strategy requires us to keep wiping until all the luck-based factors align our way, and that can take many attempts. Perhaps finding a method not so depentent upon the stars aligning perfectly would leave us with more time to work on the other SSC bosses.

[Aurorawind]

Myself or Haythan could also be over there and drop a frost trap that would slow any that escape from the AOE. I don't know if we have any frost mages for the chill effect on their Blizzard spell or not, but this may help also with Preferred Method 1.

[Wenge]

Zero of our mages are frost right now, and Imp Blizz is probably one of the least taken talents on that tree, especially 3/3.

I'm happy to do the frost novaing - heck I'll even respec frost - but people will HAVE to pay attention to where they are standing if it's going to have any success at all.

[Assault]

Yeah, the main reason we didn't give this strategy much serious thought in the first place was because we thought people would have a hard time watching where they are standing and not getting eaten by the frost nova'd murlocs. And I think that's valid criticism. That said, I'd be willing to try a new, hopefully better, strategy..with reservation. Any new strategy is going to take us at least two hours to work the kinks out of, which is a good long time to retool a kill we've already made. On the other hand, I have no idea why we haven't been able to take out Tidewalker this week, so suggestions are welcome.

[benseac]

Although it's a brief stun, it might help if one of the warlocks respec'd to get shadow fury. It's a shadow AoE does a decent amount of damage and stuns all targets in the spell's radius for 2-3 seconds.

[Etrigana]

We tried the method one from bosskillers for the better part of three weeks. One week we saw a minor amount of progress on the fight, other then that all we did was wipe at 80-85% over and over and over again. If we were to switch back to this strategy, Id look at it as a three week backwards progression to a strategy that we couldnt make work for almost a month. So I am vohemently opposed to the idea. If the majority of people want to switch back to this, I wont deny the raid but I personally view it as a waste of time.

The issues with paladins and Aoree dieing are something I really cant address definitivly. I dont know why they die 15% of the time and are perfectly fine and live through the other 85% of murloc packs. And I dont understand why Aoree dies. Some suggest that Aoree dies to crushings...but there isnt anything we can do about that. Switching to a druid tank was suggested, that didnt work for us; the difference is negligible. It really comes down to a lack of healing I guess. But, again, the majority of the time healers are fine keeping Aoree up so Im very perplexed as to why this happens and all I get for feedback from healers is "I was tombed" or "I had a healed Queued".

The issue we have with paladins being sent to the graves is the simple fact that other paladins arent anywhere near the one who gets initial agro so all the murlocs run after them in the grave. Frost nova'ing them could help, but it seems even then that the other paladins just cant match the healing agro and peel the whole group off of that one graved paladin. We addressed this last night and asked Rolden to spec for imp. righteous fury. Hopefully that will help him pick them up when Lyre is graved. However, having the paladins stand outside of the group would reduce the chances that murlocs will run in to consecrate, which when coupled with avenging wrath seem to always ensure the paladin takes the hits instead of any other class. Often times the murlocs are targeting someone else in the raid and it isnt until the murlocs his consecrate that they switch to the paladin.

Also, if we were to stack the paladins in the middle and frost nova them for this fight then Id like to know a proposed handling of the bubbles at 25%. We cant actively rely on the paladins to stand anywhere that the murlocs can converge at once at that point and FN'ing them seems like it could be a very deadly mix with everyone in such a small area.

-Etri

[Etrigana]

Not to troll but....

Myself or Haythan could also be over there and drop a frost trap that would slow any that escape from the AOE. I don't know if we have any frost mages for the chill effect on their Blizzard spell or not, but this may help also with Preferred Method 1.[/b]

We tried this with the paladins stacked on the stairs mixed with/without FN and with our warriors specced for peircing howl. The slowing didnt save the warlocks who died before the murlocs reached the paladins (this strategy requires us to kill the murlocs BEFORE they hit the paladins or shortly after and any DPS on the murlocs seemed to get there attention). In comparison to the mana costs/effectivness of blizzard in comparison to arcane explosion, mages would be wasting to much mana for to little effect using it. I could be wrong, Ill let a mage chime in on that aspect.

Although it's a brief stun, it might help if one of the warlocks respec'd to get shadow fury. It's a shadow AoE does a decent amount of damage and stuns all targets in the spell's radius for 2-3 seconds.[/b]

We had the warlocks specced this week for our first kill. They werent specced this way for our second kill. It is helpful but entirely not needed.

-Etri

[Aurorawind]

Lemme rephrase...

Dropping a frost trap may help with method 1, Blizzard was another idea that I tossed out as it may have a similar benefit if anybody happens to already be specced that way.

[Nortibiry]

The issues with paladins and Aoree dieing are something I really cant address definitivly. I dont know why they die 15% of the time and are perfectly fine and live through the other 85% of murloc packs. And I dont understand why Aoree dies. Some suggest that Aoree dies to crushings...but there isnt anything we can do about that. Switching to a druid tank was suggested, that didnt work for us; the difference is negligible. It really comes down to a lack of healing I guess. But, again, the majority of the time healers are fine keeping Aoree up so Im very perplexed as to why this happens and all I get for feedback from healers is "I was tombed" or "I had a healed Queued".[/b]

RDX would answer this question, but I understand (and really don't mind) that people don't want to install RDX for various reasons. So here is a low-fi solution I've been using since MC, which needs only the Blizzard UI:

1) Create a new chat window. Right click on the default chat tab, select "Create New Window" from the popup menu, give it a name (it doesn't matter what... perhaps "loldead"?). You'll now have a new tab along side your general & combat log tabs.
2) Adjust what it displays. If you right click on the loldead tab and go through the choices in the filters section of the popup menu you'll see various things are checkmarked. Uncheck all of them. Then go back and add the things you care about. Here is what I have for Nort's:
- Under Combat Messages: Misc Info, Creature Hits vs You, Creature Misses vs You, Faction
- Under Spell Messages: Creature Damage Spells on You, Creature Buff Spells on You, Creature Buff Spells on Others
- Under Other Messages: Creature
3) Head out into the wild and kill a boar or something. Marvel at what you have created.
4) Use it when you die. Since you're dead stuff stops happening to you as quickly and the log should move slowly, figure out what happened and if it can be avoided or mitigated.

I think this is a pretty thorough guide but feel free to hassle me online if you need help setting this up. You don't need any addons and it won't take up any more screen space than normal, unless you raid with no chat displayed, so I can't think of any reason to not do this. More specifically Morogrim doesn't strike me as a fight with a ton of burst damage so if anyone does die it should be a number of hits in a row, this will let you know what they were and if it is something you could work around. I really don't think it should be a mystery when a few people die and we wipe, this information is all easily available and it doesn't strike me as efficient to throw ourselves against the grinder making up theories instead of just reading it off the combat log.

Looking back I guess this applies less to Aoree (everything I've read suggests that he will take crushing blows, other than keeping Morogrim debuffed all we can do is keep Aoree topped off) and more to everyone else. Also this doesn't provide timestamps, I'm not sure the default UI is capable.

[Vand]

If we want to stay with our current strategy, we should address our challenges with it. I am not a strategic expert, but I want to at least get the discussion rolling.

We should make it so that Lyre is not indespensible. Having one person (other than the MT, who is immune from the tombs) being critical to our success leaves us too open to bad luck. If we want to stick with our current positioning, the palis should be fighting for aggro and then we heal whichever one wins the aggro contest. That should keep them close enough that if one of them gets tombed, the others will not have trouble surpassing them in aggro as they keep healing/consecrating. Even if only one other pali is fighting for the top spot, our suseptibility to wiping due to bad luck will be greatly reduced, since the probability that two specific persons will be tombed at one time is much lower than the probability of one particular person being tombed at any given time.

Using frost nova with our current positioning could also be of help. Let's say that the pali who wins the aggro race gets tombed right as the murlocs are arriving. Without the murlocs being rooted, they will start chasing after that pali. If they are rooted, they should be stuck long enough for the other pali fighting for aggro to surpass the tombed pali by the requisite 10%. This will not give us 100% protection from such bad luck, since the pali in the aggro lead may get tombed as the murlocs are closing in, before being rooted. But it should at least give us some protection against this sort of bad luck. Having the murlocs rooted in their AoE position should prevent the FN ganking problem we are trying to avoid.

This suggestion may be nothing that has not been well considered, but I want to make whatever contribution I can. We need to reduce the luck factor in this fight. We may never remove it entirely, but we should at least be able to reduce it to the point where it will take unusually bad luck to wipe us rather than taking unusually good luck to get a kill, as is the case now. It is much like Prince. Before lots of raids had him on farm, it was considered an overly luck-based fight. Now, the good raids can one-shot him most times, only wiping when the luck is especially bad. Let's figure out how to get Tidewalker to that point.

[benseac]

Two solid shots at him last night. Heck, we should've one-shot him! I'm not sure who did what differently but whoever did, it worked! :biggrin: