For a few weeks now, the SSC run that I’ve been going on has been downing Hydross and Lurker. We’ve been having some trouble performing consistently, so it often takes a few shots – and therefore we don’t have enough time in our raiding schedule to move on to Morogrim or any of the other bosses.

This weekend we got our first real shot at Morogrim. We cleared Hydross and Lurker fairly quickly last night, giving us an hour or two to attempt Morogrim. We went back this morning, and after a painful wipe at 1%, we managed to down Morogrim.

This is another fight where a Paladin has a huge role to play, and so I thought I’d share some of my first impressions on tanking the murlocs.

Murlocs? I Hate Murlocs!

We all hate Murlocs. Unfortunately, if you’ve made it to Morogrim, you’ll have to deal with a lot of them.

One of the main problems that needs to be dealt with during the Morogrim Tidewalker fight is Murloc adds. Every 45-60 seconds, Tidewalker creates an Earthquake. This hits every raid member in LoS for about 3-4k, and it also summons a dozen Murlocs. One pack of six enter from the North end of the room, and one pack of six enter from the South end.

As a Paladin tank, it is your job to make all of the Murlocs hate you… and then tank them until the AoE (Mages/Warlocks) can finish them off.

Heal-Tanking the Murlocs

The standard way to attract the Murlocs seems to be with Healing Aggro and Righteous Fury. As soon as the Murlocs enter the main room, they start to attract healing aggro on members of the raid. If nothing special is done to attract the Murlocs, a raid healer could easily generate 10-15k threat spread out over the dozen Murlocs.

This is a lot for you to overcome. By the time you’ve done enough threat to all the Murlocs… at least one healer will probably be dead.

Instead, you pre-empt the raid healers by doing your own healing. Cast Righteous Fury. Find a good target. Spam three Holy Lights for about 15k-20k threat. If all goes well, the twelve Murlocs will run straight for you.

At that point, it becomes a simple AoE tank and spank. Spam Consecration and Holy Shield. With some good healing, you shouldn’t die. The healing should have generated a decent amount of threat for you, so the AoE damage dealers can open up early. Once the Murlocs are dead, you wait another 20-30 seconds and do it all over again.

Tips, Problems, and Random Thoughts

This is one of the trickiest parts of the fight. If you screw up – or if one of the other raid members screw it up for you – the entire raid will likely wipe. Here are a few observations I’ve made or read about.

A lot of strategies tell you to heal a life-tapping Warlock. This is possible. However, you will always have an entire raid full of Earthquake-damaged players to heal. I found it easiest to use a single warlock as a heal target. She took the Earthquake damage (4k), and then continuously lifetapped. This gave me enough to heal through without pulling her out of the entire fight to sit at the bottom of the ramp.

Other healers need to wait after an earthquake. The entire raid will be down 3-4k hitpoints. If a healer starts topping everyone off, they’ll easily top your gimped Protection Heals (even with Righteous Fury) and attract the Murlocs. Healers should wait about 3-4 seconds, and then start healing up the raid. In the meantime, everyone should split duty on the main tank and throw up small heals to avoid any huge aggro spikes.

The toughest part of this fight is at the end. The entire raid usually runs into the hallway to avoid the globules – big water bombs. When you’re in the hallway, you’re much closer to the northern pack of Murlocs. At that point, I could barely get off 2 Holy Lights – and I often didn’t get enough threat on the southern pack of Murlocs. Next time, I’m going to experiment with staying in the middle of the room and avoiding the globules… at least until the Murlocs get to me.

Love the shadowpriest. At first, I was having some mana issues. If everything went perfectly according to plan, I’d end up with 80-90% mana, which would be enough mana to complete the next round of Murlocs.

If things went wrong, I’d expend a lot of extra mana tanking. In that case, I wouldn’t have enough mana 20 seconds later to tank the next pack of Murlocs. I could use a pot to last through one round of this, but the next time I’d still be OOM. We solved this problem by putting me in a shadow priests group for the mana regeneration. Mmm, mmm, good.

It took us five or six attempts to get this right, and most of the failures were because something went wrong with the heal-tanking of the Murlocs. This is definitely the toughest part of the fight – at least coordinating the other healers to help you do your job. After I’ve had another crack at it next week, I’ll post some more thoughts.