Karazhan: Moroes

This is #2 in a series of posts covering a full Karazhan clear – mostly from a Main Tank’s Point of View. This entry covers Moroes, and his trash.

So, Attumen and Midnight are down. Head back out to the entrance, and to the flight of stairs. You will want to park most of your group on the landing, halfway up the stairs, with one person heading up the stairs to mark the pulls.

Up in the ballroom you will see several large groups of mobs, along with several PATs. There are four mobs moving through the ballroom – give each of these a mark, so that you don’t loose track of them while pulling. There is a Valet on the left that will be pulled, so feel free to mark him, and a waiter that will occastionally roam out past him should be marked too, if you see him (long patrol time though).

With all of the single pulls of interest marked, it is time to look at the groups. For now, just two of the groups need be dealt with. At the top of the stairs, just ahead on the left and right are pulls or 7 or 8 mobs. You will pull these, and then run down the stairs to your group – hide behind a column to get them all grouped up, and simply AoE them down. If there is a Pally tank available, you are golden. If you have 3 healers, and one is a Pally with some tanking gear, use them here. Otherwise, think happy thoughts for your cloth-wearing dps. This is a dangerous pull for anyone pouring out the AoE damage.

With the two AoE pulls done, start pulling the other marked mobs. The four mobs roaming in the ballroom are 70/71 elites, and don’t hit very hard. The Valet on the left is a 72, and does require slightly more attention. If the tank is mostly is blues, he will need a lot of healing.

With that taken care of, the group can move to the top of the stairs. Here, we implement a no carpet rule. There is a carpet covering most of the ballroom. No one should be on it. Ever.

The tank can carefully walk into the next room on the left. If you walk up through the two columns in the doorway, there is room to get in there and start marking. There are four waiters roaming around (or perhaps back in the kitchen) – get them marked. Be careful, since two of them PAT close to the door. There are double Steward pulls on the right and left walls. Additionally there are four AoE pulls of diners – Each side of the main table, and the two smaller tables.

To start, you will pull the main table, and the waiters that PAT around each side of it. The AoE groups can be pulled out of the room, just around the corner, letting your AoE team burn them down. The waiters should be pulled out of the room as well. They have a nasty debuff that will occasionally turn the player into a Skeleton, loosing all armor. If the tank gets this, you may as well take a 2 minute break. It can be spell-reflected, and the waiters are vulnerable to stuns – so I simply ask everyone to keep the mob stunned as much as possible, reducing the risk of getting hit with it.

After the main table is cleared, I pull the two stewards on the right side. Have an off-tank pick up one, since these can hit hard. They have a nasty skull crack, which will seriously increase the incoming damage, so watch for that and call it out. It shows up in chat as the normal “getting drunk” messages, and lasts just a couple of seconds. However, if your healers are slow on picking it up, you can easily loose a tank. No taunts here either.

With them down, the rest of the room is simple. Finish up the AoE pulls, and the waiters, then move into the room and take out the other double Steward pull – leaving only Moroes, and his guests. The Moroes fight involved not just Moroes himself, but four adds. They are chosen at random from a pool of six, and can be changed by a soft-reset.

**Neat Trick** Before starting the run, form up a raid and have a Priest run in and use Mind Vision to check out the adds. If you don’t like what you have, then simply leave and reform the raid with a different leader. So long as you haven’t killed any bosses yet, you can get a new grouping each time. If you are already saved to the instance, then having everyone leave for 30 minutes will reset them as well (along with the trash). No priest? No problem – get an engineer to make you a steam tonk. They can drive right in and check it out.

So, who are the adds?

• Crispin – A protection warrior. Doesn’t hit hard. I don’t do a run without him.
• Millstipe – Shadow Priest, has an obnoxious mana burn
• Catriona – Holy Priest
• Berrybuck – Holy Pally, can dispel CC
• Drueger – Ret Pally, has a nasty stun and serious damage
• Daris – MS Warrior. Has a nasty Whirlwind, and can take down healers in a few short seconds

So, which adds do you want? Crispin is a must in my opinion. Otherwise, I prefer not having both Drueger and Daris, as they tend to bother the healers, and I prefer to leave just one mob chain-shackled.

This fight is mainly about control.

Drueger and Daris are incredibly dangerous to healers, and take a long time to kill. Either chain trap, or better yet, chain Shackle them. Shackles break early and often, so remind your non-shadow priests that every 3rd or 4th cast should be a shackle. Once they are freed up, hunters can lay traps near priests to buy them time, and mages should be ready to frost nova a free mob.

Millstipe, Cariona and Berrybuck can all be tanked by a dps warrior or hunter pets. If you have enough CC, then keep them locked down till you are ready to kill them – starting with Millstipe, then Catriona, and finally Berrybuck.

Crispin is picked up by the Moroes tanks (yes, tanks) – one of them will grab him on the pull and hold him during the fight. Druids and Warriors can use him to generate rage as the off-tank. Having him there actually helps the off-tank, so I never do this fight without him. Simply taunt-swap him a few times to make sure both have plenty of threat on him for when Moroes causes trouble.

Two tanks of Moroes? Yes. While the raid is working on killing at least 1 or 2 of the adds, the tanks are working on Moroes (and Crispin.) Moroes will use both Blind and Gouge on the tanks, so if they are not the top two on threat, Moroes will go running around. Pallies can dispell the Blind, and should be careful to do so quickly – if one tank gets Gouged while the other is Blinded… well, it isn’t pretty.

Moroes’ other trick is that he will ocasionlly vanish and Garrote a random person. This puts a ticking DoT on them that lasts, basically, the entire fight. Ticking for several hundred damage, as they add up your healers will feel the strain. Mages can Iceblock out of this, and Pallies can Divine Shield themselves, or BoP another member. Dwarves have a free-out as well. Don’t bother removing it from tanks, as they are getting heals anyway. Try to save BoPs for healers or other low health members. When Moroes vanishes, you will have 2 to 10 seconds to work on Crispin – in all likelihood he will be down before Moroes.

If your off-tank is a Pally, consider having them main tank Moroes, unless they have a lot of +spell damage. Building threat from the #2 spot is very hard for Tankadins, and Crispin doesn’t help them. Otherwise, misdirects are a must.

Once Moroes is down, you can either clean up any mobs that have been CC’d, or simply drag them out of the room. With Moroes down, they will simply despawn at the point. Also, dragging an of the mobs out of the room will reset the fight, so it is an easy escape if this go bad.

Moroes was the first stumbling block in Karazhan for my guild. It took us several weeks to get him the first time, mainly due to the fight last so too long, allowing garrotes to stack up too high. Or healers getting taken out by broken CC. If you get stuck, try mixing things up. Different combinations of CC can be very effective. Having a voidwalker tormet an add will buy your CC a few extra moments. Pallies can fear the adds. A frost mage can kite one around. The tanks can even pick the whole group up, though this probably requires over-gearing the instance by a wide margin.

With low dps, this fight can take nearly ten minutes (9’51” was the longest we ever took). With higher dps we can shorten the fight down to just over 3 minutes (3’12” is our recent record)

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Tags: Karazhan, Moroes, Raiding, world of warcraft

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