M’uru Strategy Guide (Sunwell Plateau)

m'uru entropius strategy guide (sunwell plateau) tbc classic

M’uru, the darkened Naaru, is the penultimate boss fight of the Sunwell Plateau raid. Players may remember M’uru, as he was previously locked up underneath the Farstrider’s Square of Silvermoon City. Kil’jaeden’s forces kidnapped M’uru and relocated him to the Sunwell Plateau, wherein they corrupted him, and turned him into this twisted abomination of pure darkness.

M’uru is commonly seen as the hardest boss of the raid and as the true final boss of the Sunwell Plateau. And that’s for good reason — at the time of writing this guide, only 3% of all attempts on M’uru have succeeded in a kill, with the average guild which has a M’uru kill, having wiped 48 times on him beforehand — it cannot be underestimated that M’uru is hard. Your raid will need good tanking, solid coordination, and above all, extremely high damage and healing, in order to make it through this fight.

This guide will offer a detailed, step-by-step tutorial on how to deal with M’uru’s multiple adds and lay the poor Naaru to rest.

Role Summaries

  • Everyone should have potions, elixirs and flasks appropriate for their role in this fight — it is a very tight DPS race
  • Use your Master Healthstone if you ever drop low, specially in Phase 2
  • Make sure you understand how the pull works — read the The Pull section
  • You are going to wipe a LOT while learning this fight — the average is 48 wipes per kill. Stay calm & positive!

Phase 1

Phase 2

  • Stay close to other players of your group, but keep a ~5 yard distance between one another
  • Move out of the black zone spawned by Darkness
  • Every class with an offensive magic dispel needs to use it in order to kill the single Dark Fiends spawned after Darkness

Phase 1

  • Use your cooldowns at the very start of the fight, you have ~40 seconds of nuking time
  • Your kill priority is 1. Shadowsword adds, 2. M’uru
  • Use every chance you can to deal cleave damage to the Shadowsword adds & M’uru at the same time
  • Quickly move away from M’uru & towards ranged DPS when Darkness is coming up
  • Move back in after Darkness is over and resume cleaving adds & M’uru

Phase 2

  • Use your cooldowns when your raid uses Heroism / Bloodlust for maximum damage output
  • There’s nothing special for you in this phase, just stay behind the boss and nuke as hard as you can

Phase 1 – General

  • Use your cooldowns at the very start of the fight, you have ~40 seconds of nuking time
  • Your kill priority is 1. Void Sentinels, 2. Void Spawns, 3. Shadowsword adds, 4. M’uru
  • Use every chance you can to deal cleave damage to the Shadowsword adds & M’uru at the same time
  • The only reason for you to move away from your starting spot is if the tank takes the Void Sentinel too far away, move back afterwards
  • Watch your threat when nuking the Void Sentinel, you can wipe the raid if you over-aggro
  • Use AoE slow effects (Frost Nova, Improved Blizzard, Frost Trap) to help deal with Void Spawns after the Void Sentinel dies

Phase 1 – Warlocks

  • Use Seed of Corruption on Shadowsword adds rather than M’uru so he takes the AoE damage
  • You can help finish off the Shadowsword adds with 1-2 seeds before switching to Void Sentinels
  • Make sure you always have an enslaved Void Spawn
  • Use a macro for Shadow Bolt Volley — see the Abilities – Void Sentinel section

Phase 2

  • Use your cooldowns when your raid uses Heroism / Bloodlust for maximum damage output
  • There’s nothing special for you in this phase, just stay close to your group and nuke as hard as you can
  • Shadow Priests, Warlocks: Be careful with your self-damage during this phase

Phase 1

  • Your assigned tank will not take any damage for some time, then start taking a lot of damage — don’t lose focus and let them die
  • The Void Sentinel tank will be taking a LOT of damage — pump heals on them
  • Restoration Shamans: You may need to use Grounding Totem against the Void Sentinel if the tank isn’t a Protection Warrior
  • Holy Priests: Healer aggro is a major issue during this battle; use Fade if needed, and consider taking the Silent Resolve talent

Phase 2

  • Entropius will deal more and more raid damage the longer the fight goes on — save your +healing use trinkets until later
  • Keep your assigned group alive at all costs!
  • The Singularity will knock you back if they hit you, interrupting your casts — be ready to use instant heals if necessary

Phase 1 – Shadowsword Adds

  • You need to pick up your adds ~15 seconds into the fight, and then every 60 seconds afterwards
  • Deal some quick threat on them and then stack them up with M’uru for cleave — this will be really important
  • Mark Skull on your primary target so DPS players know which target to attack
  • Quickly move away from M’uru & towards ranged DPS when Darkness is coming up
  • Move back in after Darkness is over and resume cleaving adds & M’uru

Phase 1 – Void Sentinels

  • You need to pick up your add ~40 seconds into the fight, and then every 30 seconds afterwards
  • A purple-black portal will show up 5 seconds before the Sentinel spawns, so quickly move there
  • Move the Sentinel away from your raid, ideally at max range for ranged DPS players
  • The Sentinel hits very hard — use defensive cooldowns if needed & keep Demoralizing Shout and Thunder Clap up on the Sentinel
  • Protection Warrior: Use Spell Reflection when the Void Sentinel casts Void Blast
  • Move away from the Void Spawns when the Void Sentinel dies
  • Taunt any Void Spawns that get dangerously close to the raid & move them into the stack with other Void Spawns

Phase 2- Entropius Main Tank

  • Keep the boss in the middle of the room at all times, don’t move him at all
  • Use defensive cooldowns later on in the phase, to improve your chances of survival
  • Keep Demoralizing Shout and Thunder Clap up on Entropius at all times

Abilities

Phase 1

The fight starts with your raid fighting M’uru on his own. M’uru does not move, melee attack or have an aggro table — he just randomly attacks players with his Negative Energy. Periodically, he will summon different adds to assist him. This phase is known as Phase 1, and lasts until you get M’uru’s HP down to 0.

M’uru

Every 1 second, M’uru will blast 5 random players in the raid, dealing 943 to 1057 Shadow damage to each of them. This damage cannot be resisted or prevented in any particular way — your healers will simply have to heal through this ability.

M’uru covers a 15 yard radius area around him in pitch black darkness for 20 seconds. Players inside the zone will take 3000 Shadow damage every second and be unable to be healed until they move out of the zone. Melee DPS will simply have to move away from M’uru and stop attacking him when Darkness is coming up, while everyone else should be standing far enough away from him that they aren’t affected by this ability at all.

Cast exactly every 45 seconds. This means that your melee can only have 55% uptime on M’uru, after the first Darkness is cast.

M’uru summons 8 Dark Fiend enemies in a circular pattern around him. These will slow move towards the player with the highest threat on them — typically a healer — and if they ever reach their target, they will cast Dark Fiend, dealing 5,000 Shadow damage to every player within 50 yards, while also applying a damage-over-time effect for 10 seconds, dealing 2000 damage every second, for 20,000 damage-over-time and 25,000 damage in total.

Needless to say, your raid will immediately wipe if a single one of these makes it to their target. Thankfully, there’s an easy way to counter them — they will be instantly killed by any offensive magic dispel ability, and they spawn close enough to each other that a Priest can kill them all instantly with just 1 cast of Mass Dispel, aimed right on top of M’uru.

Cast at the same time as Darkness, so also every 45 seconds.

Shadowsword Berserkers & Fury Mages

Right at the start of the fight, and then every 60 seconds afterwards, M’uru will summon Shadowsword adds to help him. 2 groups of adds will spawn, one by the door you entered M’uru’s room from, and one by the door leading up to Kil’jaeden. These groups will each consist of 3 adds: 2 Shadowsword Berserkers and 1 Shadowsword Fury Mage.

These adds don’t hit very hard, but they have a modest amount of HP. Your raid will need to group them up & cleave them down before you get overwhelmed by the sheer amount of adds spawning in.

Level 71 elite humanoid melee-type mobs with 136k HP. They dual wield, so they do a modest amount of damage to tanks, and they periodically cast their only ability, Flurry, which increases their attack speed and movement speed by 100% for 6 seconds, making them a little bit scarier.

Overall fairly easy to manage, just pull them together and AoE them down — throw out some damage reduction debuffs like Demoralizing Shout and Thunder Clap on them if your tanks are taking too much damage.

Level 71 elite humanoid mage-type mobs with 115k HP. They deal very little melee damage, but they have 2 abilities: Fel Fireball, a 2 second cast which deals 4250 to 5750 Fire damage to the mage’s current target, and Spell Fury, a 30 second magic buff which increases the mage’s magic damage by 50% and causes all of their spells to be instant cast, but rendering them unable to move.

These are also easy to manage, but they’re a bit annoying, as you will have to repeatedly interrupt their Fel Fireball in order to get them to stack up with the other adds so you can cleave them down. Spell Fury can and should be immediately dispelled offensively by Dispel Magic, Purge, Arcane Shot and Spellsteal, with Spellsteal being by far the best option, giving the casting Mage a massive damage boost for 30 seconds.

Void Sentinels & Void Spawns

40 seconds into the fight, and every 30 seconds after that, a black portal will open somewhere in M’uru’s room, and a Void Sentinel will emerge from it soon afterwards. These are level 70 elite demons with ~130k HP who hit VERY hard, hitting armor-capped tanks for 5-7k after debuffs. What’s worse, they have 2 powerful abilities, and spawn a bunch of annoying adds when they die.

These guys will be one of the main challenges of this fight, as their 30 second spawn timer will overwhelm raids without high ranged and particularly ranged AoE DPS. The main way you counter them in, however sad it sounds, is by having a whole bunch of Warlocks.

The sentinel pulses with shadow energy, dealing 3750 to 4250 Shadow damage to all players within 10 yards every 3 seconds. This damage cannot be resisted, necessitating that the sentinel is tanked away from your raid at all times, and that the sentinel’s tank gets a lot of healing.

Deals 9425 to 10,575 Shadow damage to the sentinel’s current target, and reduces their attack speed by 35% for 10 seconds.

This damage sounds absurdly high and it is — your tank has a good chance of dying if you don’t deal with this ability correctly. Thankfully, it can be countered in 2 simple ways: it can be soaked by a Shaman’s Grounding Totem, or reflected by a Warrior’s Spell Reflection. Reflecting it will be really good for your raid as it will help you take sentinels down faster, which can make a big difference, so having a Protection Warrior tank the sentinels is ideal, if your raid has one. However, the 1.5 second cast time means they need to be focused on reflecting, or risk taking 10k damage to the face — the Grounding Totem approach is generally safer, and harder to mess up with.

When the Void Sentinel dies, it will spawn 6 Void Spawns on its corpse. These are level 70 elite demons, have 24.3k HP and deal a pathetic amount of melee damage. However, they will repeatedly cast their Shadow Bolt Volley ability, which deals 1275 to 1725 Shadow damage to every player within 20 yards. This damage can be resisted, but it will still deal a fairly significant damage to your raid — so you’re generally aiming to kill them before they get to you.

The Void Spawns can be slowed, and can be enslaved by a Warlock’s Enslave Demon. Your Warlocks should thus enslave the first set of Void Spawns that spawn, and then enslave again when their enslaved Void Spawn dies. They can replace their regular Shadow Bolt and Seed of Corruption abilities with macros like the ones listed below, and spam them for crazy damage: like the ones listed below to deal crazy damage:

#showtooltip
/cast Shadow Bolt
/petattack
/cast [pet] Shadow Bolt Volley
#showtooltip
/cast Seed of Corruption
/petattack
/cast [pet] Shadow Bolt Volley

Other classes can help by slowing the Void Spawns, preventing them from reaching your raid before your Warlocks can kill them. Good abilities for this include Frost Traps from your Hunters and Frost Nova & Improved Blizzard a from your Mages.

Phase 2

Once you get M’uru down to 0 HP, he will despawn. 10 seconds later, he will re-appear as the demon Entropius. The adds do not despawn — you should finish them off quickly, because the fight is about to get a lot tougher.

Entropius is tanked like a normal boss. He won’t use any of his Phase 1 abilities, and will instead use brand new abilities — though his abilities are generally very similar to his Phase 1 toolkit.

Every 1 second, M’uru will blast a random player in the raid, dealing 1885 to 2115 Shadow damage to them. This spell will then chain to the closest player twice, hitting 3 players in total, dealing 50% reduced damage to the 2nd target and 75% reduced damage to the 3rd target.

The catch here is that every ~12-15 seconds, M’uru will increase the number of primary targets by 1. This means that ~15 seconds in, it will start hitting 6 players at a time, then ~30 seconds in, 9 players at a time, etc, until eventually it’s hitting every single player in your raid, dealing way more damage than your healers can deal with. Thus this ability is essentially a “soft enrage” — you must burn M’uru down before he blasts you into oblivion.

Entropius will target a random player in the raid and spawn a 3-yard radius void zone underneath them, similar to his Phase 1 Darkness ability. Standing in the zone causes players to take 3000 Shadow damage every second.

Additionally, a single Dark Fiend will spawn in the middle of the void zone. It will thus be very important that any players close to the zone move away, so your raid can kill them by using Dispel Magic, Purge, Arcane Shot or SpellstealMass Dispel is kind of overkill with just 1 enemy.

Cast every 15 to 30 seconds.

Muru spawns a orb of swirling shadow energy over a random player, which then begins to slowly fly around. Players that touch the orb will take 500 Shadow damage and be knocked back.

This ability is more annoying than anything else as its damage is relatively low. However, the catch here is that orbs last indefinitely, and Entropius will keep summoning 1 more orb every ~20 seconds. So the longer the fight goes on for, the more orbs there will be around, damaging you and interrupting your healers’ casts, thus making things a lot harder. It’s essentially a 2nd “soft enrage”, alongside Negative Energy.

Raid Composition & Preparation

This is one of the few boss fights in Sunwell where you don’t need anything in specific, such as a decurser or a player of a certain class to deal with a certain mechanic. The only thing you will need, is your A game, because M’uru is by far the most challenging encounter of the Sunwell Plateau.

While not strictly speaking required, your raid will benefit tremendously from having at least 1 Priest, as during Phase 1 they can kill all 8 Dark Fiends with just 1 cast of Mass Dispel, which will make things significantly easier.

As usual, it is strongly advised that everyone in your raid has Master Healthstones here. M’uru’s raid damage isn’t as high as other bosses, so you may very well never need to use it, but it’s always a good idea to have one for an emergency, such as being targeted by Negative Energy multiple times in a row.

If you’ve managed to heal through the Eredar Twins and Brutallus, good news, M’uru isn’t as tough to heal as they were. Still, you should bring at least 6 healers for the fight, with 7-8 not being a bad idea at all. Moreover, generally most of M’uru’s damage will be dealt to tanks in Phase 1, while in Phase 2 it will be almost exclusively on your raid, so you’ll need a good balance of healing classes to deal with both phases.

For Phase 1, you’ll have 3 tanks, and the easiest way to go about it is to have 2 healers per tank. Ideally, you want 1 Restoration Shaman or Holy Priest on each tank, granting them the Ancestral Fortitude / Inspiration 25% armor buff, improving the chances they survive an unpredictable damage spike.

Restoration Shamans in specific are best suited for healing the Shadowsword add tanks, as they’ll generally be standing close to the raid, allowing them to Chain Heal the tanks and get some strong raid healing in the process. The Void Sentinel tank will generally be standing a good deal further away, so you should assign healers without proximity-based healing spells, such as Holy Paladins and Restoration Druids. Restoration Druids will be amazing for Phase 1 either way, thanks to their ability to roll healing-over-time spells on all 3 tanks.

It is important to note that healing threat can be a very real issue during this fight, as there’s a good chunk of raid damage coming out constantly and tanks have to quickly pick up 3 adds at the same time. Thus your raid healers, and particularly Holy Priests, will need to be ready to use their Fade if needed, and perhaps consider picking up any threat reduction talents they may have access to, such as Silent Resolve.

For Phase 2, assign 3 of your single-target healers (Holy Paladins / Restoration Druids) to the main tank, while everyone else heals the raid. To maximize healing efficiency, you should give each healer a specific group they’ll need to heal, allowing them to heal as efficiently as possible with AoE healing spells. Note that early on, Entropius will generally not do all of that much raid damage, so your raid healers could help by DPSing him down for a little bit — but later on, they’ll need to heal like crazy, so don’t lose focus.

There’s constant, high raid damage in this fight, and it can also be pretty taxing on your healers’ mana, so there isn’t a clear winner between +healing consumables and +mana regen consumables. We recommend +healing consumables (Elixir of Healing Power, Golden Fish Sticks) supplemented with Super Mana Potions and Dark Runes to keep your mana pool going for as long as possible.

While there’s not a strict requirement for any one DPS class or spec, there’s no way to deny that this fight becomes very, very difficult if your raid doesn’t have a whole lot of Warlocks. The average amount of Warlocks per M’uru kill at the time of writing this article is 6 — yes, 6. It is possible to beat M’uru with fewer, of course, but it is heavily recommended that you have at least 3 to 4. Their incredibly powerful AoE in Seed of Corruption and Enslave DemonVoid Spawns will make or break Phase 1, which is commonly seen as the most difficult part of this fight.

Unexpectedly, Mages make a comeback in this fight! First and foremost, they can do some very solid AoE damage to the Shadowsword adds with their Arcane Explosion. More importantly, they offer a lot of utility. They can help your raid deal with the otherwise extremely annoying Shadowsword Fury Mage adds, by using Counterspell on their Fel Fireball, thus forcing them to stack up with the other adds, and Spellstealing their Spell Fury. Additionally, they can help deal with the Void Spawns, using Improved Blizzard and Frost Nova.

Besides that, having a good balance of melee / ranged & single-target / AoE DPS players will be crucial for this fight. You need to take M’uru down as you kill the adds, and on the flipside, you need to kill the adds before they start overwhelming you — so you can’t really go heavy on melee and ignore your AoE damage, for example.

The longer this fight drags on for, the more painful mechanics you have to deal with, such as having more and more Curse of Boundless Agony on your raid. Thus it is almost a must for your DPS players to come prepared with appropriate DPS consumables for this fight, to end it as quickly as possible. Note that Kalecgos is classified as Dragonkin while Sathrovarr is a Demon, so physical DPS players could alternative between using Elixir of Demonslaying and regular DPS consumables if they feel like going the extra mile.

Both phases of this fight are pretty steep DPS checks. Thus, there is absolutely not excuse — every single DPS player in your raid should be using appropriate DPS consumables, such as flasks and elixirs. Entropius is classified as a Demon, so physical damage deals can use Elixir of Demonslaying against him, but M’uru is not, so you could either use a regular flask for the entire fight, or switch when you get him down to Phase 2.

You will need 3 tanks for this fight: 1 for each of the 2 groups of Shadowsword elf adds that spawn every minute, and 1 for the Void Sentinel add that spawns every 30 seconds.

Tank classes matter a little bit here. Protection Paladins will generally have the easiest time picking up the Shadowsword adds, while Feral Druids will do okay with them thanks to their Swipe hitting 3 targets. Protection Warriors will be miserable at this task, but thankfully, there’s a silver lining: they make really good Void Sentinel tanks, thanks to their ability to reflect their Void Blast back at them with Spell Reflection. If you don’t have a Protection Warriors who can take the Void Sentinels, then you’ll need to have a Shaman in the same group as that tank, keeping up Grounding Totem. Do not use a Feral Druid tank for the Void Sentinels if you can avoid it — they can’t reflect and their AoE threat is meh, so there’s really no reason to.

Classes also matter slightly for Phase 2. Your tanks will be in heavy mitigation gear for this fight, so their threat will slightly suffer as a result — thus Feral Druids make the best Phase 2 tanks, as they can generally keep a decent amount of threat generation in mitigation gear.

Damage isn’t extremely high compared to Brutallus for instance, but it’s high nonetheless, and can be particularly spikey. Therefore it is generally recommended that all of your tanks use mitigation gear & consumables here, giving them a slightly better chance of surviving

The Pull

There’s a good chunk of trash before M’uru, including 2 Apocalypse Guards right outside his room.

muru 0

Pulling M’uru is very different to other bosses, as he does not have an aggro table per se, and he will not be auto-attacking, moving or even turning. For that reason, the optimal way to pull M’uru is as follows:

Once your raid is fully buffed up and ready to go, start a 20 to 30 second pull timer using the /pull command of raid addons like DeadlyBossMods. Your stealth players can safely move next to M’uru at this point, as he has an incredibly small aggro range versus stealthed players. Then, when there’s 5-8 seconds on the pull timer, have a Rogue use Distract on M’uru, forcing him to look away from the raid, towards the door leading up to Kil’jaeden’s room.

Finally, your ranged DPS players should start “pre-casting” their strongest nuke spell at the right time. For instance, a Warlock’s Shadow Bolt has a 2.5 second cast time, so they should start casting when there’s 2.5 seconds left on the pull timer, so the cast finishes at 0. Then, the stealth users open, while everyone else runs in.

The Distract part isn’t really mandatory, but M’uru cannot turn, so using it on him shortly before the pull forces him to look that way for the rest of the fight. Him looking away from the raid means melee have to run a shorter distance in order to get to M’uru’s back, and then a shorter distance to get out during Darkness, maximizing their DPS. It’s not really the biggest deal if you don’t have a Rogue, but it does mean your melee will need to move to the opposite side in order to avoid getting parried.

The Fight

There are 2 phases to this fight: Phase 1, which involves fighting M’uru and a constant flow of adds, and Phase 2, which is a strict DPS race against Entropius, M’uru’s fallen form.

Phase 1

muru 1 2

Your raid will want to position as shown in the picture above for Phase 1. The melee are behind him (though this picture assumes you used the Distract to have him face away) while the rest of your raid all stack up in a single spot, just past the yellow outer ring in M’uru’s arena.

M’uru has no aggro table in Phase 1, and you won’t have to deal with most of his mechanics for the first ~45 seconds, making this a great time to nuke M’uru as hard as possible. Every DPS player should use their DPS cooldowns here, and if your raid has more than 3-4 Shamans, you could choose to use 1-2 Heroism / Bloodlust here. You will practically need to have at least 3 Heroism / Bloodlust for Phase 2, however, so keep that in mind.

You will see M’uru’s first ability, Negative Energy, the moment you pull and every 1 second afterwards. It simply deals ~1k Shadow damage to 5 random players. It’s honestly more annoying than scary — there’s so much damage coming out from other sources that you barely even notice this ability here.

M’uru will spawn the first set of Shadowsword adds right away, though it will actually take them ~15 seconds to get to your raid. They will come in 2 groups, each consisting consist of 2 Shadowsword Berserkers and 1 Shadowsword Fury Mage. 1 group will be spawning by the entrance to M’uru’s room, while the other group will be spawning by the opposite side, the door leading up to Kil’jaeden. A new set of adds will be spawned every 60 seconds.

muru 2 2

You will thus need to have 2 tanks, 1 on each side, move towards those adds and quickly pick them up and take them to M’uru, so your raid can cleave them down. Note that the Shadowsword Fury Mages are casters and will need to be interrupted in order to follow their respective tank. On top of that, they will be annoying and frequently cast Spell Fury on themselves, which causes all of their casts to be instant and deal 50% more damage, but also rooting them in place, making it harder to stack them.

The easiest way to deal with the Fury Mages is to have a Mage interrupting the Fury Mage spawning by the entrance & Spellstealing their Spell Fury. Meanwhile, the tank picking up the adds coming from the opposite side will be moving out of healer range, so you could have a Restoration Shaman follow him for heals, interrupting the Fury Mage there & using Purge to counter Spell Fury. Alternatively, an Enhancement Shaman located close to M’uru could move slightly in order to interrupt / Purge. In any case, the assigned interrupt / dispel players should pay attention and react quickly, as you really want these adds stacked up.

muru 3 2

With the Shadowsword adds stacked up on M’uru, you are basically going to experience the main challenge of this fight: cleaving adds down before you start getting overwhelmed by their sheer amount. Melee players & Hunters will do some very solid cleave damage, but your Warlocks will be the stars of this show, as their Seed of Corruption does an absurd amount of damage. Make sure you are casting Seed of Corruption on one of the adds rather than M’uru himself however, as the primary target doesn’t take the Seed’s AoE damage, and you really want M’uru to take that damage.

Then, 35-40 seconds you’re going to see one more add: the Void Sentinels. We will get to those in a little bit, but your designated Void Sentinel will need to remember this timing, that they come before the first Darkness, and pay attention.

45 seconds into the fight, M’uru will cast Darkness, covering a 15 yard arena around him (so up the orange, central ring) in a black substance, which deals 3000 Shadow damage per second to anyone in it, while also reducing the amount of healing they take by 100%. Your melee & tanks will need to have a raid boss addon like DBM, warning them that they need to move out 2-3 seconds before it is cast — you really don’t want to take this extra damage.

muru 4 2

Quickly move out of the black stuff and continue DPSing the Shadowsword adds. The Shadowsword Fury Mages will of course be annoying and stay in the black stuff, casting their spells, and occasionally just stand there due to their Spell Fury, so they will need to be dispelled & interrupted.

There’s one more component to Darkness — a few seconds after M’uru uses it, he will summon 8 Dark Fiends in a circle around him. The Fiends will begin to move slowly towards the highest threat target, typically a healer. If they reach their current target, they will explode, wiping your raid. They cannot be killed normally — the only way to kill them is by using an offensive magic dispel ability, such as Purge, which will kill them instantly. The best way to do so is to have a Priest assigned to using as Mass Dispel right on top of M’uru, instantly killing all of them — but they need to be quick.

muru 5 2

Back to the Void Sentinels. About ~35 seconds in, a purple / black portal will open at a random spot inside M’uru’s arena.

muru 6 0

~5 seconds after the portal appears, a Void Sentinel add will emerge from it. These hit VERY hard (hitting tanks for 6-10k) and have a nasty AoE in Shadow Pulse, which causes it to deal 4k Shadow damage to every player within 10 yards every 3 seconds — so it is vital that your tank picks these up and moves them away from your raid, with 30-36 yards away from the raid being ideal.

The Void Sentinel has 1 more scary ability: Void Blast, a single-target nuke ability with a 1.5 second cast time, dealing 10k Shadow damage to the Sentinel’s current target. You read that right, that’s 10k damage, which will threaten even the beefiest tanks. Thankfully, a Protection Warrior tank can reflect it back to the Sentinel using Spell Reflection, making them the ideal tank for Sentinels. If you don’t have a Protection Warrior, then a Shaman should be in the Sentinel tank’s group, using Grounding Totem on cooldown to soak the Void Blast.

muru 6 2

Your ranged players should immediately switch their attention to the Void Sentinel, as from this point on a new Sentinel will spawn every 30 seconds, and having 2 of them up at once will… complicate things, to put it mildly. Your Warlocks could cast 1-2 more Seed of Corruption on the Shadowsword adds if all 6 of them are still up, but everyone else should start burning the Sentinel.

Unfortunately, the Sentinel has 1 last ability: upon death, it will spawn 6 Void Spawn adds, which will be one of the most difficult parts of this fight for groups that don’t have a whole lot of Warlocks. They have about 24k HP and only one ability, so they may not seem that bad, but they are nasty; their Shadow Bolt Volley ability will deal ~1500 Shadow damage to every player within 20 yards, so if more than 1-2 of them make it to your raid, you’ll likely wipe.

muru 7 2

There are 2 ways to deal with the Void Spawns:

  • Have a Protection Paladin tank pick them all up with Consecration while casters wait a few seconds with their AoE. This is the easier solution, but it forces you to have a Shaman in their group, using Grounding Totem in order to counter Void Blast.
  • Don’t bother tanking them, just AoE them down right away, using AoE slows (Frost Nova, Improved Blizzard, Frost Trap being the best options) to prevent them from reaching your raid. The Protection Warrior can help a little by taunting any of the Spawns that resist slows and taking them back to the stack. This strategy is slightly more difficult to execute, but will generally result in them dying faster, which makes the fight overall slightly easier.

Additionally, your Warlocks can use Enslave Demon to enslave the Spawns, which makes having up to 6 of them amazing for this fight. Their Shadow Bolt Volley has no cooldown, so your Warlocks can even use macros (see the Abilities – Void Sentinel section for more information) in order to spam the Volley like no tomorrow, doing an absolutely crazy amount of AoE damage in the process. On top of the crazy DPS though, it obviously helps that you’re completely eliminating those Void Spawns by enslaving them, and you can let them go in and die on the next Void Spawns, enslaving on the wave after that and repeating this process.

And that is all of the mechanics that you will see in Phase 1. There aren’t that many of them, and they aren’t particularly complicated, but they’re still a lot to deal with. Your raid will need very good DPS in order to take down the adds in time, your tanks will have very little time to build threat on the adds before your DPS need to start blasting, there’ll be a lot of stuff to heal… it’s just a really hectic Phase, with lots of stuff constantly happening.

Here are some of the main thing that will typically go wrong in this phase:

  • You get overwhelmed by adds, simply put. It will be VERY important that your Shadowsword add tanks move them to M’uru when they get a chance to do so, so your raid cleaves them down. This will often be the difference between killing them before the next add wave spawns, or getting overwhelmed. If you find that you’re getting overwhelmed anyway, you could use 1-2 of your Heroism / Bloodlust casts once you feel like you’re starting to get overwhelmed.
  • Your raid is a bit too slow with killing the Void Spawns, thus they reach your raid and wipe you.
  • Healers don’t pay attention to the Void Sentinel tank because something else needs healing, and they get 2-shot. It hits HARD.
  • The Shadowsword Fury Mages are not dispelled / interrupted in time, and thus kill random healers, or don’t get cleaved down with the other adds.
  • The healer responsible for healing the Kil’jaeden side add tank doesn’t follow their tank, and thus they die due to no healing.
  • The Dark Fiends get Mass Dispeled too late, or 1 of the Dark Fiends isn’t inside the Mass Dispel‘s radius, thus reaching your raid.

One important note: this phase ends when you get M’uru down to 0% HP, after which there’s a ~10 second transition to phase 2. Adds will stop spawning the moment you get him down to 0%, but any adds currently alive will not despawn. Thus you should aim to get M’uru down to 0% HP the moment after you finish off living adds, and stop DPSing him if adds (particularly Shadowsword ones) just spawned; you do NOT want to fight his Phase 2 with adds still alive.

Phase 2

After the ~10 second transition, M’uru will transform into Entropius, his demonic form. Entropius functions like a regular boss, with an aggro table and proper melee attacks — which hit pretty hard, if I may add. This phase is a lot simpler than Phase 1, and in many ways a lot easier, but you shouldn’t underestimate it.

muru 8 2

You will want to position as shown in the picture above. Melee are behind the boss as normal, while ranged players take a specific side with their group, keeping ~5 yards distance between each other. Each group will need a dedicated healer, and it doesn’t hurt to have a single MT healer standing slightly further away from others.

Entropius only has 3 abilities in this phase, and 2 of them are a slightly modified version of a Phase 1 ability. The first one you’ll see is Negative Energy. Instead of hitting 5 random players for 1k Shadow damage every second, it deals 2k Shadow damage and chains to the 2 nearest players, dealing 50% reduced damage with every chain. The fact that it chains to the nearest players makes its damage very predictable, and simply to address with AoE heals, so just make sure every group has 1 Restoration Shaman or Holy Priest topping them off.

The catch here is that every 12-15 seconds, Entropius will increase the number of initial targets by 1, thus hitting 6, 9, 12, 15 … etc players, until your entire raid is getting hit, which is simply unhealable. This is commonly known as a “soft enrage” — you must kill him before he starts zapping too many targets at once. For that reason, your Hunters should use Misdirection on the main tank right away, and when they have a healthy threat, your raid should use Heroism / Bloodlust along with personal DPS cooldowns. You really have no time to waste here, this is a DPS race. Your healers will have to heal like crazy in order to deal with this ability near the end of the fight.

Entropius’ 2nd ability will also be familiar — Darkness, which is now cast every 15 to 30 seconds throughout the fight, rather than every 45. Instead of putting the black AoE around him, he’ll instead place it underneath a random player. Its radius goes from 15 yards down to 3, which makes it very easy to avoid, similar to Lady Blaumeux’s Void Zone from the Four Horsemen fight in Naxxramas — it doesn’t even stop healing taken anymore, just deals 3k Shadow damage per second. Additionally, only 1 Dark Fiend will spawn this time around. Countering Darkness is thus super simple — keep a ~5 yard distance from other players, move away from the black AoE, and ensure every group has a player capable of dispelling the Dark Fiend.

muru 9 2

Entropius’ last ability, Singularity, is completely new to this phase, and it’s honestly a bizarre one. Every 20 seconds, he will summon a purple swirly orb that flies around the room, going after random players. Players that touch the orb will take 500 Shadow damage and get knocked back a small distance. The damage isn’t a big deal or anything, it’s just annoying to have your casts interrupted… And therein lies the issue. These orbs last indefinitely, so eventually there’ll be a whole lot of them flying around, causing their damage to add up, and more importantly, interrupting your healers’ casts, thus likely causing players to die in conjunction with Negative Energy‘s super high damage. What a sinister ability.

In all honesty, if you’ve managed to get through Phase 1, Phase 2 is just not a big deal. The only things that matter is that you didn’t lose more than a couple of players during Phase 1, you finished adds off during the phase transition or shortly afterwards, and that you had 3+ Heroism / Bloodlust available, so you can kill Entropius before he zaps you with his negativity. If you met all of these criteria, you’re likely coming out of Phase 2 with a kill.

Congratulations on defeating M’uru! With the fallen Naaru laid to rest, nothing stands between you and Kil’jaeden, the Deceiver. Go forth and save Azeroth from the Burning Legion’s evil plans!

 

About the Author

Pride

Classic WoW is my jam, with a passion for PvP. Most know me as Baranor, the ret paladin guy, but I'm secretly a druid main, don't tell anyone. In my free time I play Switch games, particularly JRPGs. Some day I'll be making my own games and I humbly hope you play those too!
Subscribe
Notify of
guest

0 Comments
Inline Feedbacks
View all comments
Scroll to Top