Prenerf M'uru

Once you think about it, he's the perfect bossfight from a technical point of view. I want to elaborate why.

Tuning aside (I know he was very tightly tuned, perhaps too much but he was still killable. Therefore he shouldn't have been nerfed 3 times), M'uru has several key points which made him hard.

On a personal note, learning him was fun.

So:

1. 30 second effective threat wipes.
2. Heavy outgoing raid damage.
3. Zero tolerance towards mistakes.
4. Hard enrage timer.
5. Heavy raid requirements.

Elaborating on each point.

Threat wipes: Meaning (obviously) that your tanks had to be on the balls while picking up the adds. Their TPS had to be insane because TotT wasn't in-game and MD had a 2-minute cooldown. (My guild at the time used MD to route big void shits to the paladin tank)

It also meant the DPS had to chill the fuck down but still do very hard DPS to bring down the adds and have ~5-10 seconds to DPS M'uru until the next wave came. It also meant overaggro = death = wipe = try again = more consumables to spend.


Heavy raid damage: Just Negative Energy alone could fuck you over if your healers were asleep. The 6 healers you brought had to be on the balls spamming every single GCD if you had any hope of surviving the fight.

I remember we wiped once because our holy paladin missed 0.1 seconds on a heal and his tank died just as the heal landed. That's how crucial being very focused on healing was.


Zero tolerance: M'uru had even less tolerance towards mistakes than Archimonde. You COULD kill him with a few deaths, assuming you could survive the aoe shit. On M'uru a single DPS death (not to mention tank or healer) instantly meant a wipe.

I don't even need to mention the requirement of 20 leatherworkers for constant drums in the DPS groups, right? I think this was where his tuning went wrong. It should not have required minmaxing this hard, but other requirements such as a fully flasked/well fed raid just to have a chance to succeed is very important to the success of a kill on him.

I admit I misclicked frost and snake traps once and the idiot vipers broke the sheep on one warrior who proceeded to instagib some clothies and we wiped. I can recall at least 30 wipes on M'uru when we were learning him but damn it was fun. Except for idiotic mistakes such as mine, but it was fun nevertheless.


Hard enrage timer: If your raid wasn't 9001% focused during the alotted 10 minutes you had no chance of a kill. Below is a prime example of what happens during the enrage:

Entropius goes in a berserker rage!
Combat against Entropius ended in 10 minutes 1 second.

Hi2u 12k chaining negative energy strikes that hit every second.


Heavy requirements: You needed a full raid in full t6/partial sunwell sets to have the slightest hope of defeating him. SK reported around 500 wipes on M'uru before they got him down. Is it too much? Perhaps, but they DID down him 4 days after his gate was opened.

You also needed 20 LWs and 5 shaman in the raid. This is too much in my personal opinion but everything else is not.


Conclusion: Wotlk needs more fights like M'uru. Sartharion+3 doesn't come anywhere close to this. I really hope the optional "hard mode" Ulduar boss will be like this. He does not necessarily have to be M'uru2.0 in the exact sense of the fight but these 5 requirements should hold, period.

Am I the only person who still wants the challenge in a hard raid boss rather than facerolling through Noxromulus/Uldulolz for easymode epics thus devaluing the word "epic"?

More on "entry level" in a 4-year old game later.