Heroic Morchok Down: Where Next?

Managed to score Heroic Morchok on Tuesday. Ended up using 6 healers. Another classic 22% wipe, then a 16% wipe, then a 13% followed by an 8% then a kill. Actually, the numbers aren’t precise. But that’s what it seemed like anyway.

How to Land 3 Healing Spells in Under 2 Seconds

It seems impossible, doesn’t it?

Note that I didn’t quite say I would cast 3 spells only that I would land them. You have to be precise when it comes to timing and you need to be ready to pounce on the next spell the moment the other one is finished.

We were working on heroic Morchok for a total of 6 – 8 hours (over 4 weeks, with raid hours lost due to a healer shortage). Our longest attempt was just under 6 minutes. Most of the wipes occurred between 2 – 3 minutes. The trickiest part for me was maintaining tank health right after a stomp. A common occurrence I noticed is that after Kohcrom stomped, he would attack the tank around 2 seconds later. If I timed it right, I could land a Flash Heal and a quick Holy Word: Serenity. But sometimes that wasn’t enough. I needed another way because those two spells just weren’t consistent enough. Sometimes the tank lived, sometimes he died. I wanted a better (and consistent) way in keeping that tank alive.

It all revolved around the Stomp.

After a few wipes, I realized the consistency of his melee swing following the stomp. I didn’t want to focus exclusively on the tank to the detriment of the group. But at the same time, if the tank dropped it was game over.

Timers from DBM gave me a 5 second count down on approximately when the stomp would land.

I ended up watching the animation of the stomp. The moment the foot start rising up, I’d target the tank and hit Prayer of Healing ensuring it would land just after Stomp connected with the group. This gave me time for a quick Flash Heal (Or Binding Heal) followed up with Serenity (or a Circle of Healing if the tank was sufficiently high enough.

Credits to

Lodur for gemming all strength reforging to Mastery giving him the ability to really stabilize players and allowing me to spike them back  up.

The DPS warriors on my side who picked up on the fact that when I frantically called their name, it meant I wanted a Rallying Cry (and giving us that buffer after a fumbled heal).

Logan of the LeetSauced podcast (and soon-to-be host of the Matticast) for remaining calm, collected and patient after enduring hours of frustrating incidents beyond his control.

Tanks with 4 piece bonuses. Seriously. More bonuses like this in the future.

Old Spice. I smelled awesome that raid.

Now what?

What’s the next hard mode boss that you went to after Morchok (25 man as I understand 10 man has different priorities)?

Hagara?

Ping pong guy?

Ooze boss?

Seems like we’re going to take a hard look at Hagara. Pointers?

8 thoughts on “Heroic Morchok Down: Where Next?”

  1. Grats on a fantastic takedown! That is what raiding is all about; the painful and fulfilling drudge of cleaning up a fight to completion. Almost wish I had enough time to raid like that again. 😉 I hope you took a souvenir.

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  2. Hagara is the next on the list I would say (for 25s anyways). Some pro tips if you didnt know, you can tell by the weapon effect on Hagara at the beginning which ability she’ll cast first. This is good because you will want to work on each phase individually until you get it right. So have your rogue pull and cloak to reset her until she has the effect that represents the phase you wanna work on 🙂

    We’re currently working on this ourselves 🙂

    Lightning Phase – we are lining up along the red lines that spawn evenly, the idea being within 1-2 pulses all the points should be down. You’ll want your plate wearers and people with short life saving cooldowns between the first (we mark it red) and center, they will take the most damage.

    The other phases we’re still working on so not much help there sorry :S

    Upy

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  3. definitely do hagara, my guild has been smashing our head against zonozz for last 4 or so weeks (before the changes to ooze boss), it is brutal towards the healers and our dps is not even close to what it should be but it all gets laid on healers anyway because they need to make up for lack of dps (adds taking too long=more damage in black, taking more bounces for more dps, not dispelling so no dps downtime, etc). maybe its just our strat fails but it seems most people are having issues.

    to make the next part make sense we do lightening phase as 3 sides of a square, healers in center, and for frost we have healers and ranged in the center.

    k, hagara is now on farm for us so these are the things which made the biggest difference while progressing. set up groups, when you do it consider both lightning AND frost, that usually means ranged have to be at end of chain even if a ranged has good resist(hunters should stand in center and let their pets do the chain). make sure people in center are far enough from outside they don’t chain it into the middle. work out dps targets for frost(keep melee uptime high).

    good luck, another reason to do hagara is it only uses 6 healers

    @Upy why plate wearers, it is nature magic damage plate wont do anything, i checked our logs and if anything leather players have the better cds.

    edit:removed something upy beat me to, my bad

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  4. It depends on your raid really.

    Hagara is by far the easiest in terms of healing and DPS requirements but needs good movement and awareness during the lightning phase and ice phases.
    Zon’ozz is the strictest in terms of DPS checks, but is fairly easy to heal (although we use 7 healers to get us through the black phases)
    Yorsahj is not too tricky as long as you have healers who can pick up the puple ooze gimmick quickly and are good at communicating cooldown usage. Again though, it has a tight enrage.

    We went Zon’ozz -> Hagara -> Yorsahj but all wished we’d done Hagara first. We had 38 attempts on Zonozz, 4 pulls on Hagara and 18 pulls on Yorsahj for reference. Should have Ultraxion down on Sunday before the nerfs (2% wipe on Wednesday!)

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  5. Our group moved onto H: Hagara, skipping ping pong and skittles.

    I highly recommend the strategy used by Derevka (his guide on the fight: http://talesofapriest.com/2012/01/02/healers-addendum-healing-hagara-the-stormbinder-heroic/) — my group initially attempted to have all of us run around the edge during frost phase, with certain groups ‘dipping in and out’ to walk around the incoming ice waves, in order to stick to a mob. If/when we master this technique, I strongly feel it’s not going to give the best DPS output and thus stacking your heals and ranged in the center seems to be the best bet, due to frostflake getting rather out of hand with too many people running together.

    Best of luck!

    Reply
    • We’re getting boned right now in the frost phase. Need a little more DPS on the outer ring. Perhaps less melee and more ranged.

      We’ve got the lightning phase down (in theory, at least).

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