Greedy Goblin

Wednesday, February 1, 2012

Morchok is dead and can't spell his own name




OK, we killed the first boss in HM, pre-nerf, just like 16K other guilds. Why is it so interesting? Because the strategy for this boss is well documented, you read it and practice until perfect execution. Well, we did not. We developed our own strategy which I believe is much easier and strongly recommended to guilds that did not kill the boss yet.

At 90% HP, Morchok summons Kohcrom, a clone of him. They do the same, except an extra debuff that doubles physical damage. This forces players to form separate groups so those who are stomped by one boss is out of reach from the other. The stomp does 750K damage on 10-man, distributed equally between everyone in 25 yards, the 2 closest getting double share. The standard strategy uses 1 tank, 2 healers and 2 DD on each boss. This means 107K damage on everyone, except the two closest who get 214K. Of course it's mitigated by armor and damage reduction skills.

Why is it a disgusting dance boss? Because if just one person is out of range (and he calculates range from his center, and he is big), then the rest will get 125/250K damage, which usually kill someone. Also, among the closest two, one must be a damage dealer who needs to be topped and use a damage reduction CD or he is oneshotted even if everyone is in range. Also, there are crystals for both teams, forcing them to move, making such mistakes likely. Crystal damage combined with stomp kills people even if everything else is done correctly.

Our strategy is much more tolerant to range mistakes: we have 7 players on Kochrom and 3 on Morchok. With 7, the damage is 83/166K, so we survive if the closest damage dealer misses his CD or someone else gets it (unless he is clothie). Also, 1 or eve 2 out of range players doesn't mean death either. This team has 2 healers. The second team contains 2 tanks and a well armored healer. Paladin and shaman with shield or druid who switch bear form fast enough are able to do it. The tanks are preferred to be DKs as most of the damage is not melee, so their low damage reduction is not important while their self-heal is huge here. Of course all of them stack on the crystal. The only player who can wipe the raid by failing is this healer by running too far or coming too close to the tanks. However if you have DK offtank and preferably a DK tank and you drank magic resist elixir, healing is easy.

From the logs you can see that the damage taken is low (as most damage is aimed at high mitigation tanks) and the kill is possible with very new players. Actually two people on the kill hadn't kill anything in normal, this was their first raid kill. A HM firstkill. The strategy is that tolerant. We killed him despite low DPS (380-ish gear on several players), misplaced heroism and 14!!! range fails (each of them would be a wipe with the normal strategy). Also, it doesn't need 4 healers, which can be hard for several guilds. All it needs is a third tank who can be totally undergeared. Actually a DD DK respeccing Blood would do.

Besides it's a good reason to join The PuG,  t proves that raiding is not about executing. Figuring out a better method of killing the boss is not a theoretical possibility, but something that is open to all with brain. We were thinking instead of trying harder and he died. We had 22 tries on him with the new strategy, which is pretty low for a HM boss. If you can't figure out better strategy than the Tankspot guys, it's not the problem of Blizzard, it's a problem of your lack of creativity. Alternatively you don't even try to think as you are on the rail of "I must do as told or I'm a scrub". Stop that, you have a brain for a reason!

Tomorrow comes a very important post. It's strictly WoW and gold related, no philosophies are involved, don't miss it!

16 comments:

chewy said...

Congratulations on an innovative kill your solution is very clever.

Riptor said...

Do the Boss and his Clone have to be killed at the same time or can they be killed one after another?

Anonymous said...

You have to know that the Tankspot guys post the tactic's they used on their first kill.
If they only need a few attempts to kill the boss, this means that the tactic isnt the optimum.

Depending on your progression, its nothing special that you adept the common stratagy to your raid force.

Leit said...

How many healers in your 7/3 split? 2 or 3?

Alvi said...

Ain't you just putting all the work on healer in 3-man group?

Gevlon said...

Boss and clone has shared health.

Text updated to answer the questions. In short: 3 healers, and healing the 3-man group is easy.

Anonymous said...

I have little experience with the 10man version, but in 25man heroic tank DKs shine precisely because of the huge melee damage the boss deals.

Stomp damage is relatively low, but given the debuff the first melee which connects afterwads does around 180k damage. The DK should be full health and full-runes and take it without shield mitigation. This allows the DK to do a DS immediately after being hit which nets a huge cure and even bigger shield. This removes any danger from the next melee hit from the boss. Healers basically need to make sure the tank is full only every odd hit, and the DK will self-heald and shield before any even hit.

The only danger comes from a very bad streak of hits leaving the DK without runes to land DS, but this is easily handled with the other CDs.

Orosei said...

Yeah, it was quite a fun fight. Resolving buffs, switching to heroism pets, juggling Armor Aura for the stomps, and Resist Aura for the crystals... Really felt good to make progression like that.

Though I still wonder, why didn't both of them die at the same time?

Anonymous said...

Your intellectual triumph here illustrates one of the reason's why I don't support your earlier assertions that WoW bosses should solely challenge your ability to execute your rotations.

"Dance" bosses give you an opportunity to think; and thinking is fun!

Anonymous said...

@Orosei, because the shared health is actually implemented with separate health pools which get re-balanced every few seconds (Ryholit shares the same implementation). The remaining boss can stay alive with the other already dead until this syncronization takes place.

There was actually a bug about this: if you managed to wipe in this intermediate period with the original dead and the copy still alive the boss would despawn and remain in an inconsistent state, never respawning again and not unlocking the rest of the instance. Pretty nasty...

Armond said...

If you have one, a subtlety rogue with points in enveloping shadows also makes an effective stomp tank.

Espoire said...

We did something similar, in that we used healers with shields to soak the second double-stomp instead of a DPS. This helps in that a sufficiently-armored healer doesn't need a cooldown to survive the double-stomp, and by being the stomp soaker, the healer gets to move less. Other than that, it was the standard strategy.

Some other specs that don't need a cooldown to soak the second double-stomp: shadow priest (with Glyph of Inner Fire), subtlety rogue, fire mage, all warlocks.

...but really, 22 attempts? It took us two. Five, if you include doing it with a 2/2/6 comp before we switched to 2/4/4. (And two of those healers were offspecs; terribly geared, and with little to no practice healing anything, much less heroic.)

Anonymous said...

Dance should be consider part of rotation. It is the mitigating damage part of rotation versus the damaging enemy part. Remember that buffs and other support is useless without the ability to properly mitigate damage. Mitigating damage by player skills, aka dodging enemy attack, tends to be an element that cannot be measure with the current system. If taken into account the amount of damage a player dodged, then we can create a strong sense of how well a player play.

Anonymous said...

This boss is easier than spine or deathwing and very flexiable.

Also, the first week available all you had to do was get all the dps outside the stomp range for the tank to take it because it was bugged. And for a few weeks after you could /run tank for the last 10% again with the bug present. Hardly a feather in the cap.

*vlad* said...

"This boss is easier than spine or deathwing and very flexiable."

Wow! Great post! Any more tips you got for us?

Stacking tanks can be just as difficult for a small guild as stacking healers.

The game is supposed to be about 'bring the player, not the class', but so often in 10s the opposite is true, particularly in heroic mode.

Anonymous said...

@ Orosei why would you switch to heroism pets? Heroism is a gimmick in this fight. Output DPS matters not much (neither does it matter on Shannox HC, nor much on Halfus HC). Also, if you insist on heroism you have Glotan who provides heroism. He just has to be in range before he pops it, or he runs inbetween the 2 groups. So when you near Furious stage you make sure the heroism buffer is near the rest. We accomplished this by moving the 2 groups more near each other after 2nd black phase.

Mumble should be excellent for this fight because it allows easy management of 2 vchat groups. BigWigs also has excellent support for showing or hiding the information you don't need (who cares what Kochrom does when you are assigned on Morchok).

Also, Morchok had a few bugs which were recently fixed. For example, the stomp wouldn't always be shared with the nearest soaker, or people who were clearly in range (25 yd) were not sharing dmg. Both are fixed now.