M’uru Strategy Guide (Sunwell Plateau)

Sunwell Plateau Raid Guide

Sunwell Plateau Loot

Kalecgos

Brutallus

Felmyst

Eredar Twins

M’uru

Kil’jaeden

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

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

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.

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.

#showtooltip
/cast Shadow Bolt
/petattack
/cast [pet] Shadow Bolt Volley

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

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.

Raid Composition & Preparation

The Pull

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

~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.

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.

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.

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.

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!