Wednesday, November 28, 2007

Tidewalker Down!

I forgot to take a picture, but my guild killed Morogrim Tidewalker tonight. I got to be the pally tank for the murlocs, and even got to respec Protection.

We've been bouncing around from boss to boss for the last few months, so I'm really happy to see my guild buckle down and just work on a new boss. Hopefully this trend will continue, and we can get back to serious progression.

As for Tidewalker, I think the vast majority of the wipes were my fault, until I evolved tactics that reliably dragged the murlocs to me. We had some issues sorting out healing and positioning, but I think it finally clicked and we just took him down. We did stack the raid with an excessive amount of healing (11 healers!), so we have to learn to do the fight with a normal raid group. However, as I think I have nailed down tanking the murlocs, we should be able to do it with a more normal 7-8 healers.

It was really awesome to be able to do something other than spam heals in a raid. I've really missed just doing different things in a raid. We're probably still too healer-light for me to go Prot full time, but I hopefully that will change soon.

13 comments:

  1. Are you using the stand 50yds away out of Watery Grave strategy? You take a Warlock who Lifetaps down, and as soon as they spawn, you heal him with RF on and he continues to Lifetap.

    Grats, BTW.

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  2. Hehe, ive been reading your blog since you were prot before and wondering when you would return. Since the patch it is a truly awesome spec which im sure you will rediscover. I recently respecced to help my guild on morogrim and have not looked back. I am now my guilds MT2 and deal with the Murlocs on morogrim, MT Leotheras (avengers shield FTW) ,OT the Hunter & Pet on Fathom Lord and also deal with the adds on Hydross. My next assignment are Al'ar's embers in TK. Convince your GM to experiment with you as prot and im sure he will let you stay that way. They wont know how they used to get past the murloc packs and phoenix hatchlings before once youv'e aoe tanked em all. Also make sure you go run some heroics as Shattered halls especially is cake with a prot pala.

    The other comment was bang on about morogrim though. Take a lock(lifetap/fel armour/Amp magic) and a holy pala out of watery grave range, tell your raid healers to back off on the raid until you have the murlocs. Use you healing mace,shield,trinket and spam 3 big heals on the lock when they are incoming, Voila you have them and give the signal for the raid to be healed. Once you get this down its the easiest fight in SSC.

    Lazenby Arathor Euro

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  3. Grats Rohan!

    I recently was with our guild when we downed Tidewalker its such a long fight! Well it seemed to me to be that way!!

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  4. Honestly a warlock is not required :) Tell your fellow paladins to not heal themselves immediately after the earthquake. I had 3 healadins to drop a holy light on (which is actually useful rather than healing a lock). Aggro every time except from the shadow priests who needed to fade reasonably often. Everyone had salvation except the tanks and the other paladins didn't use RF.

    We have the entire raid grouped up just behind Morogrim except a couple of hunters to drop slowing traps as the murlocs walk in.

    If you have some nice spell damage gear don't worry about the healing stuff. I had around 400 spell damage buffed when we got our first kill last weekend :) It's not like you have time or mana to heal between murloc packs anyway except your aggro-heals. Wisdom should be up all the time to keep your mana high and you can actually just continue to melee the boss for JoW while you tank the murlocs.

    Gwayne @ Neptulon-EU

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  5. lol quite difficult to mellee the boss if your out of watery grave range

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  6. Grats on the kill! My guild only had 1 night of attempts before various roster changes happened and we couldn't run SSC anymore (drat!). It looked like a fun fight, I mean who doesn't like killing murlocs?

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  7. Yeah, we use a holy paladin to tank the murlocs. All of our warlocks stand near the paladin. We have two simple rules:

    1) After an earthquake, all the other healers heal NOBODY except for the main tank.
    2) No one heals warlocks other than the holy paladin.

    We combine that with mages and hunters to slow down the murlocs to give the locks time to SoC them. It is now, a pretty easy fight and we're constantly doing it with 7 healers now. Six seems out of reach, due to Morogrim's massive spike damage and the unpredictability of watery grave.

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  8. Gratz on progression and being able to tank and have some fun with a boss kill at that.

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  9. Gratz on the Kill!

    My guild got Kaelthas down last night and I think my guild is finally sold on retribution after I came in #1 on DPS (not damage)

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  10. Well, initially my warlock didn't realize that overhealing caused zero threat, which caused problems. Also I was worried about mana, so I was trying to draw murlocs with Flash of Light, which didn't work out so well. Once I switched to HL11, and found 3 people I could heal reliably for nearly all of it, it worked well.

    I was just out of graves range, and the raid was inbetween me and tidewalker. They would just rotate in place and nuke the murlocs.

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  11. Gratz, Gratz, and more Gratz! :)

    We had our first night of wiping on him, but we got him down to 45% one time. It seems like an easy fight, though our strategy needs a bit of fine-tuning. We were using the Warlock-Lifetap strategy, but our pally tank wasn't standing out of the watery grave range.

    Now that I know how far it is, it shouldn't be hard to fix that. Other than that he's very easy. We should definitely get him down Sunday, if we don't take a massive detour to kill Solarian first. <_<

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  12. It has been a while since we did an SSC run, but i somehow never knew you could actually "outrange" the watery greave... thats what kept me from using the Protection Paladin method for all this time.
    Right now i specced prot for a few tests and i really like it since the stamina boost with 2.3. I would love to try and tank all them Murlocs :)
    How is the range on the watery greave calculated? Is it 50 yards away from Morogrim or is it 50 yards away from the greaves?
    If that works, the fight seems easymode to me, we always used the "holy Paladins aggro, Mages Frostnova, Warlocks seed - aggro - run" method and it had it problems if "important" people went to the greave ;)

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  13. Grats on the kill.

    The Watery Grave can be outranged by standing 50 yards away from Tidewalker himself. Basically if you tank him at the top of the ramp ad you stand down in the pool where he starts you'll be alright.

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