Tobold's Blog: The Black Morass

Sunday, March 04, 2007

The Black Morass

The Black Morass is the second dungeon in the Caverns of Time, and you need to have completed the first dungeon there to even start it. The Black Morass isn't a dungeon in the classical sense, but a big event, The Opening of the Dark Portal. Besides being the best way to get your Keepers of Time reputation up, you need to successfully finish this event as the last step of the quest series to get the key to Karazhan. Unfortunately the event is very, very hard, and more often than not a group attempting it will fail.

Before you begin the event every member of the group should get a chrono-beacon from Sa'at, a Keeper of Time stationed inside the instance, right behind the entrance. This chrono-beacon will summon a dragon to help in the defence of Medivh, and should best be used during the second boss wave. After getting the beacon,your group has the boring task of clearing out the isles around Medivh from trash mobs. Profitable for skinners, but otherwise not very exciting.

When this is done, somebody can start the event by getting close to Medivh. At this point Medivh will start a ritual to open the dark portal, with a defensive shield around him, and your task is to defend him. If you fail the dark portal never opens and the history of Azeroth changes ... , unless you just try it again, and again, and again. How you can change history *and* go back to the same event repeatedly is a mystery to me, but hey, all time-travel stories suffer from being illogical.

Once you started the event there will be 18, eighteen portals opening one after another. Each portal releases one elite mob, and a constant stream of dragonkin and dragon whelps as long as it is open. They all head for Medivh's shield and try to destroy it, which ends the event in failure. Your task is to kill the elites to close the portals and then kill all the mobs before they do much damage to the shield. The key here is to kill the elite quickly, because how long the portal is open determines how many mobs you get, and the next portal will open soon after. If you are slow, you get overwhelmed.

As an added difficulty the 6th, the 12th, and the 18th portal have a harder boss mob as elite. That has the advantage that these drop blue loot items and give lots of Keeper of Time reputation. But they are harder, so take longer to defeat, and thus are likely to cause problems. Especially the second boss has a nasty debuff that makes healing less effective, and stacks on your tank until healing spells just heal him for 0 points. Unless you can kill that one very quickly, or find a way to switch to an offtank until the debuff resets, that second boss is responsible for most of the wipes in this place. But make no mistake, even if you have that second boss down pat, it is perfectly possible to just get overwhelmed by the 18 portals, because you don't get much time between portals. If you wipe, the event continues without you, and by the time you're back, Medivh will be dead and you'll have to restart.

The only good thing is that you don't have to leave the instance to restart and get all the trash mobs back. If you just wait inside, Medivh will respawn, but not the trash mobs. Once he respawned, Sa'at will hand out fresh chrono-beacons, and you can start over. Or you just forget about the Black Morass and Karazhan and go adventuring elsewhere, because this place can be really, really frustrating when you failed it for the umpteenth time.
- posted by Tobold @ 7:36 AM Permanent Link

Comments:

Take a Mage (AOE adds and spellsteal 2nd boss) and a Shadow Priest (well, duh), and it's a piece of cake.

- Cosmik

# posted by

Anonymous : 4/3/07 10:13

Tobold, Tobold. After seeing Nefarian's or Onyxia's head on a pike time after time, you shouldn't be troupled by leaps of logic anymore. :)

As for Black Morass, well, it isn't PUGable, but quite doable. For a priest, here's a tip for the 2nd boss. You can dispell his enrage, which is good since he really likes to ably his debuff while enraging. Swtiching tank doesn't really work, since he is immune to taunt.

# posted by

Ikuturso : 4/3/07 14:42

We had an affliction lock take care of literally all of the adds... we used beacons on the second boss, but otherwise didn't use them. I don't think Morass is hard, it's just that it requires a more specific group composition than most instances.

# posted by

soop : 4/3/07 16:01

Yes, The Black Morass very much sucks. When I first went there, every time we wiped, I was reminded of how much Baron 45 sucked when we were trying to get that done.

I was wondering if Blizzard made this instance intentionally hard to prepare people for Karazhan. However, while I have only been two the first two bosses there, I would have to disagree - Karazhan's difficulty is no where near as hard as The Black Morass (for my guild, the hardest part is just getting a group together, since not many players are attuned yet). Granted, that might change as we progress farther, but I don't know for sure.

Both times that I've successfully finished the instance, we had myself (a Protection paladin) and a Holy/Prot paladin tank the 2nd boss. While it was tough switching aggro between the two of us, we usually managed by using either our Divine Shield if it was up, or Blessing of Protection - while it doesn't wipe aggro, that is enough to get him to attack the the other tank, and let the debuffs wear off on the first one.

But I do have to agree with you that this instance is much harder than it should be. It would be nice if you got a "save point" after each boss (like how at certain points in Durnholde, if Thrall dies, you don't have to go all the way back to his cell in the barracks). But hey, more blues can drop this way, or something (granted, they always seem to drop the same items for us, which no one in the group needs, but that is beside the point).

# posted by

Andy : 4/3/07 16:48

I have found the most successful way to deal with the debuffs from the second boss is to have huge dodge. As a bear tank, as soon as the 11th rift lord has been defeated i change out of my tanking gear and into my catform DPS gear. My AC drops a huge amount, but my dodge also goes up to almost 31%, making it much more likely that the debuffs will drop before stacking too high.

Other than that yeah, a shadow priest can make the place fairly straight forward as your main healer can focus fully on the main tank.

# posted by

Anonymous : 4/3/07 18:13

Temporus is the usual stumbling block here. He can be defeated as the previous posted noted with high Dodge. He can also be defeated with a Prot Warrior with Shield Wall. Or two tanks swapping aggro. A Mage can spell-steal his haste, get on top of the threat list, and kite him around. A non-Druid tank can drink a potion of invulnerability, although this isn't quite enough time by itself.

Removing his Haste is key, though. You have to keep that off or the debuffs stack up too quickly for most strategies.

Inexperienced groups tend to overreact when one of the adds escapes. Don't worry about them. Keep DPS on the elite/boss. Especially during Temporus, I'd set up a rotation among your DPS types to use the chrono-beacons right on top of Medivh (they won't get despawned there as long as you tank the boss near the portal), and otherwise ignore the spawns until the end.

It seems like most groups, especially if some members are new to the instance, wipe once or twice. But persistence and a little strategy discussion seems to pay off and the second or third run is generally a success.

In that way it reminds me of the 45-minute Baron run or Valathak. Most groups try it once, fail, and then split up to try it with a completely different group and fail again... You need to attempt it 2-3 times in quick succession in order to have a good chance of success. Unless you can just out-gear it or everyone in the group has done it five times before.

# posted by

AFFA : 4/3/07 21:04

The beacons are also more effective to keep adds from banging on Medivh's shield. The bosses can purge one add right away, so if you need to use a beacon on a boss, use 2 at least.

# posted by

dahut : 4/3/07 21:56

After doing this once it is pretty easy from then on, just need to get the trick to it.

Warlock using a felhunter's consume magic skill also gets rid of the haste buff on temporus, he is pretty easy as long as everyone focuses dps on him.

Aeonus can be a bit of a joke for an end boss I thought.

# posted by

Anonymous : 4/3/07 22:07

Closing in on Exalted with these Keepers of Time after doing this event so many times to attune a lot of people. Me as tank and a resto shaman and then we took in 3 random people. Have gone with all classes and specs and group configurations and generally its not a big problem. We use teamspeak and the resto shaman is a kickass healer so never worried about healing.

2nd boss I get like 5stacks at most then I manage to resist/dodge/whatever and get them to fade away. This is only wave we ignore the adds. Other waves you can have a hunter or warlock deal with the adds solo, last time we had a rogue running around dealing with the non-elites coz the warlock wasn't up to the task.

Most of the times we have like 4 beacons left to waste on the last boss even though he oneshots them.

The key for us have been to balance dps so each elite takes about a minute to kill and have as few trash alive as possible after that minute. So if like yesterday the dps group was 2 rogues and 1 warlock. The warlock refresh all dots at 20% on the elite and then help the rogue finish of the trash.

and btw, the healer yesterday was another, more inexperienced, shaman, if you keep dps high enough that will still work.

# posted by

Anonymous : 5/3/07 10:18