Lord Marrowgar is the first boss we will encounter when we enter ICC, by the looks if it he shouldn't pose to much of a threat to us.

Marrowgar Hard Mode (PTR) - can't find normal mode guide

Sorry i don't know how to bold etc sections so this looks a bit messy. Its pretty much a copy and paste job to give a flavour of the fight.

Strategy

Enabling hard mode Marrowgar increases his hitpoints by 7 million for a total of 31.4 million health.

He has a saber lash mechanic so we used three tanks.

He casts fire periodically in radiating lines from his body that hit for about twice what they do on normal mode. Melee can avoid these if they stand inside of melee range (he has a large hit box.)

Every 15-20 seconds or so, he throws out a bone spike that impales up to three players (and can hit in melee range.) The bone spikes he throws also have twice the health on Heroic: about 130k rather than 65k, and deal double the damage to players.

45 seconds after engage he enters a whirlwind phase where he picks a random player and charges them, dealing about 11k damage on cloth every two seconds, and then picking another target. This lasts for 40 seconds on hard mode (it's shorter on normal mode.)

The big "gotcha" of hard mode, however, is that he continues to cast the bone spikes during the whirlwind phase, which immobilizes players and the timing can mean that they can be spiked right when he is charging.

Due to the lag on the PTR and having two bosses available, we were unable to come up with a solution to the "spiked right as a whirlwind heads that way" problem.

General Tips

What we tried

As is often the case with the PTR, the heavy lag limited the number of attempts we could do, but I'll run through the different strats we tried and the problems with them.

(1) Mass chaos

This was the strat of choice for our first couple engages and didn't work too well. Ranged need to be in a pretty tight semicircle in phase 1 so they can reach Bone Spikes.

(2) One clump

This caused problems in phase 1 because everyone had to move from the coldflame. We did it to test whether or not Bone Spikes hit everyone in their path like the tooltip implies (they don't.)

(3) Spread out

This was a phase 2 positioning: we tried everyone spread out to see whether that helped with whirlwind. It was pretty good, but made it hard to handle spikes that were cast.

(4) Three clumps

We split the raid into thirds and assembled about 5 seconds before the whirlwind started. When he moved to a clump, that clump scattered, and then got back together as soon as he left. This was very effective at killing bone spikes and keeping healing up, but Coldflame made it hard to keep static positions and it lead to a lot of spike + whirlwind deaths.

Conclusion?

We only got one pull with each positioning, and further analysis may come up with other ideas, but we may favor the mass-spread option. Failing that, three groups.

Heal Tips

Put the debuff for bone spike on your grid so you can take care of healing those people quickly, even if you had to move around.

Note that BoP will not remove a bone spike, although it does prevent the physical damage.

Melee Tips

You don't need to run out to kill Bone Spikes on ranged but you do need to get anyone near you.

Ranged Tips

Switch immediately to killing Bone Spikes: they deal a lot of damage.

If you try to click to target on them, you may have problems because of the size of Marrowgar's hitbox. Either use your "target nearest hostile" hotkey or a /target macro.

Common Problems

Don't ever let the lines of fire ("Coldflame") hit you: if they do, they apply a debuff. Ranged can stay at a good distance from him and have time to react, and melee can stay within his hitbox (or also far from him during whirlwind) to avoid ever getting hit.

From what i see in tank spot, Bone Spike Graveyard is simply this:

Morrowgar fires 3 spikes from his back, they presumably smash into the ground at random spots, and then surface underneath 3 random raid members - impaling them.

All melee dps should nuke any Spike impaling any melee
All ranged should nuke any Spike impaling a ranged or healer

The impale is a 3 second cast so people should be ready to change to the nearest spike when they see it, they have less than 40k in 25 man (it takes 1 ranged dps <5 seconds to kill a 50k life spark in XT 10 HM) making them very harmless to the raid during phase 1 as long as they are nuked.

In phase 2 this is turned on its head and the spikes become massively important since he can impale 3 people that may all possibly be in his whirlwind path, thus these people need to be freed almost instantly to avoid deaths.

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