Eventually, an enterprising young Death Knight decided it was time for a change, and picked ten passably decent players from the two groups. By our powers combined, we knocked down Heroic Morchock in three pulls, which promptly lead to him getting gkicked.

Stompy 2.0. Now with less adds and more crystals to be tanked.

Name: Morchok

Raid: Dragon Soul

Tanks Needed: 2

Phases: 2 phases

Catch: Tank the crystals!

This strategy is for the normal encounter.

This is a very straight forward encounter with easy to understand mechanics, the most important part is that everyone knows what they should be doing.

Phase 1: Stomp, Stomp, Stomp!

Abilities:

Stomp – Morchok performs a massive stomp, splitting damage between all players within 25 yards. The two closest targets take a double share of the damage.In Heroic Difficulty Stomp also increases the Physical damage taken by affected players by 100% for 10 sec.

Crush Armor – Morchok strikes his current target, inflicting 120% normal melee damage and reducing the target's armor by 10% for 20 sec. This effect stacks up to 10 times.

Resonating Crystal – Morchok conjures an explosive crystal onto the battlefield that explodes after 12 sec. for massive Shadow damage. The explosion splits the damage between three random players, and the total damage inflicted increases depending on the distance of each player from the crystal. In 25 Player raids, the damage splits between seven random enemies.

Furious – At 20% remaining health, Morchok becomes furious and increases his attack speed by 30% and his damage inflicted by 20%

Morchok will be tanked where you find him, and your two tanks need to be the two closest to the boss to handle the double damage from Stomp, and they'll taunt off of each other from the Crush Armor.  Your melee will be dpsing the boss further out in the hit box, and your range will be spread around the encounter area.

Morchok will summon Resonating Crystals periodically throughout this phase, which is where your ranged will play a big part.  Ranged DPS need to stack on top of the Resonating Crystal to split the damage it creates.  Just like on Yogg'saron with his mind links, red is too far apart, yellow is better, and blue is close enough.  You will likely never see blue, as you're probably right on top of the crystal at that point.

Phase 2: Duck and Run!

Morchok uses the power of the earth to draw all players to him, inflicting 5% of their total health as Physical damage every sec. for 5 sec. While the power of the earth draws the players to him, Morchok also summons Earth's Vengeance.

Earth's Vengeance – Shards of Earth's Vengeance erupt from the ground, inflicting $%103178s1 Physical damage to nearby players within 2 yards and leaving behind obstacles.

Black Blood of the Earth – Morchok causes the Black Blood of the Earth to erupt outwards from him, inflicting $%103785s1 Nature damage and increasing Nature damage taken by 100% every sec. while a player stands within the blood. This effect stacks up to 20 times.

This is all about execution.  Morchok will draw all players to him and push spikes up around the encounter area.  During this time you cannot move or DPS.  When you're released back on the surface, the goal is to line of sight the boss behind one of the spikes, and stick close so you're not taking damage from the Black Blood of the Earth.  When the Black Blood is gone, phase 1 starts again.

What does a Hunter need to know?

Being ranged DPS, a Hunter's role on this fight is to tank the crystals.  It's critical that enough players get to the crystals before they explode to prevent wiping the raid.  During phase 2, it's possible for Hunters to continue to DPS the boss given the right angle around some of the spikes, but this should not be done if it means you die by standing in bad.  You should be able to use your Rapid Fire DPS cooldowns once at the beginning of the fight, as well as in the last 20% of the boss' health to power through his soft enrage.

Hunter Loot from Morchok

Sporebeard Gauntlets

Vial of Shadows

Still having trouble? Check out Learn to Raid's video.

Good luck!

By: John Perna

My guild in World of Warcraft (Bomb Squad Ysera – Horde) just dropped our first heroic boss for this tier. It was a jubilant time for us as that we had already spent three hours bashing our heads against him the previous weekend.

The boss mechanics for this fight are identical to the normal version with the boss' damage and boss' health being buffed, however there is one glaring difference; there’s two Morchoks.

At 90% Morchok splits into two, revealing his evil twin Kohcrom; that’s right its Morchok spelled backwards, you don’t know Blizzard, they do what they want! At this point, your raid will have to split into two equally viable teams and down each boss on their own, as that each puts its own debuff on the party and if they are too close, the others massive AOE damage will kill the other team and vice versa.

I am not writing here a guide on how to beat the boss, but a review of the boss fight itself. Something I think should be a norm in the MMO world, but appears to be completely untouched soil. So if you want a guide for it, Google that shit, though some helpful hints may pop out here.

Its hard to review the heroic version of this fight with out touching on the basics of the normal version. The mechanics are rock simple, as any good first boss in an instance should be. It forces the raid to coordinate and communicate and has what amount to 'gear checks' for all three roles in your raid.

For healers Morchoks stomp does a good amount of AOE damage (Stomps) spread around the group followed quickly by another mechanic (Resonating Crystals) that will further damage a few members more if not out right kill them if they are not spot healed up after the stomp. This forces your raid to accept if they have not only the throughput to heal in later parts of this instance, but also the triage ability to see what needs to be healed and bring it up to sustainable fast.

For tanks, Morchok forces them to coordinate between each other else a stacking debuff (Crushed Armor) will allow him to one shot them. Furthermore he hits like a freight train and the tanks have to maintain a certain distance from him to make sure his damage on his stomps is split among themselves equally before the remaining damage is then split equally to everyone with in twenty five yards.

For the DPS, he just has a shit ton of health, and to beat his enrage timer you have to be able to push out a good amount of damage, furthermore this fight makes you swivel around and change positions pretty regularly so it makes sure you can do good DPS while on the move.

And it has a 'check' for your whole raid when he does Earthen Vortex, which sucks the whole raid in the ground, brings them to him, then throws up pillars for you to hide behind which you must run to as fast as possible to avoid the ground effect he drops called Blood of the Earth. This also sees if you are able to see ways to take advantage of mechanics since if your ranged DPS does it right they can still give him the beans while behind these walls.

All in and hes a great starting boss for normal Dragon Soul, showing any raid leader worth his salt where his raid needs to improve for later fights. However, this boss falls flat as a raid check in Heroic settings.

Again the difference here is that you have two Morchoks and that is it. So all the above mechanics get split in two, and forces your raid to also split in two. Seems legit, all the checks above but twice as hard since you have half the people to do them in. This seems logical, but its wrong.

This fight, with out insanely geared DPS is impossible to two heal, its mechanics; especially the Resonating Crystal and Stomp combo mechanic of spreading damage around equally means you can not three heal it, as one group will be with out a member to help soak. Which means you four heal it.

Each five man group is a tank, two DPS and two healers. This throws the whole see if we are ready for heroics thing out the window as that each group is rolling with far more heals per capita than you would have in ANY other boss encounter in this instance. Is this what Blizzard wanted or is it just raids like mine being impatient and gaming the system? I do not know, however seeing as that with only four DPS in your raid you can still make the berserk timer I have to assume Blizzard very much felt this was the strat to run.

It is because of this ass backwards design that while over thirty percent of raids that go into Dragon Soul drop Heroic Morchok, that number nose dives to around 14% for the second most accepted progression boss (Yor'sahj) and less than 10% on the next. Raids just are not actually ready to be dropping bosses in here at heroic levels in the majority of cases and this boss is the reason for that.

This all could be made better if Blizzard loaded this guy with weapons or chests or legs, things that when upgraded make a huge difference to a characters ability to perform, making this guy the one you farm to raise your raids ilvl up to a point of being able to tackle the later bosses, but they did not.

Our raid is not terrible, its not uncoordinated, our healers and tanks are some of the best on our server and our DPS are all competent, like I said less than five hours of time was spent dropping this guy, and three hours of that was us trying to not have to four heal him. Once we switched to four healers it was around an hour of time to drop him. However once we moved to the next boss we spent two straight hours of showing no progress. The entire raid when it was felt defeated and we all said, we just don’t have the gear for this fight, period.

The first boss of any raid instance should be one that tests the limits of a raid, showing it the weaknesses it has to overcome, this one does not, it simply forces you to use a raid composition that is completely useless in all other circumstances to faceroll the encounter. Whereas the normal version of this fight does its job perfectly. I simply do not understand why Blizzard did what they did, usually their tactic is to force a raid to run less healers, which is something many fights have you do, not run more healers, which is something no fights have you do.

The flip side of this whole review though is this fight is really fun! You are running around, using all your abilities and constantly; as a healer, my shaman was the number four brought in leaving my Warlock behind, bringing people back from the brink of death and being the hero, which I have a feeling all three roles get a feeling of during this fight. Its just too bad that all this fun is ruined the first time you realize that the next boss is too much to handle for your recently victorious group.

I give this Boss 2 out of 5 stars, and only because of how fun it is to do.

Here's the video of my guild dropping the boss, enjoy!