Holy Pally Guide: Heroic Morchok 10 Man
This guide doesn’t attempt to cover the entire heroic Morchok encounter, but rather to provide useful tips to the Holy Paladin preparing to begin progression within his guild on Heroic Morchok. I do assume you have a working knowledge of the Heroic Morchok encounter already, and are here seeking a few pointers to assist you in pulling off the fight with grater success. Whenever my guild decides to start progressing on a new boss I often like to look at the strategies we intend to use and then look at my personal setup in order to maximize my ability to get our first kill. Now i do have a specific spec and talents that I generally use and feel is great to use in most encounters which I usually return to after we have killed a boss. This guide is just a few notes I took from Heroic Morchok which I thought may help a few people out.
I would like to start out with giving you what I feel is the optimal setup for a Holy Paladin in the Morchok encounter. This is not my normal spec, and I will explain why I feel this is optimal for getting your first Initial Heroic Morchok kill.
Spec and Glyphs Calculator
Holy Paladin Spec and Glyphs for Heroic Morchok
Glyphs
Prime Glyphs
- Word of Glory – Increases the healing done by Word of Glory by 10%.
- Divine Favor – Increases the duration of Divine Favor by 10 sec.
- Seal of Insight – While Seal of Insight is active, the effect of your healing spells is increased by 5%.
For Prime Glyphs I stick with my normal setup which could be varied from player to player. You could possibly shuffle in the glyph of Holy Shock if you like for 5% increased crit on Holy Shock however you will probably be finding use for Word of Glory quite a bit in the Heroic Morchok Encounter and if you are favoring Word of Glory over Light of Dawn its probably because a player is in trouble. Glyph of Holy Shock doesn’t give you any guaranteed benefit in a time of need quite like Word of Glory will, and stacked with Seal of Insight gives you a total of 15% additional healing with Word of Glory.
Divine Favor will certainly help you quite a bit especially around the 3rd or 4th stomp right before the Black Blood Phase. Your basically trying to make it to the Black Blood Phase each time as a healer. If you can hit the next Black Blood Phase you have time to breath and heal your group back up before the next round of stomps and crystals.
Seal of Insight is simply put as the must have Prime Glyph for any setup, a 5% increase to all healing is an obviously solid choice across the board.
Major Glyphs
- Light of Dawn – Light of Dawn affects 2 fewer targets, but heals each target for 25% more.
- Divinity – When you use Lay on Hands, you also gain 10% of your maximum mana.
- Divine Plea - Your Divine Plea provides an additional 6% of your total mana.
As far as Major Glyphs go I think the big one here in 10 man is Light of Dawn. Your 10 man raid will be required to split into 2 for this encounter leaving you with only 4 possible targets for your Light of Dawn. It only makes sense to maximize the healing you can put out with Light of Dawn by using this glyph to reduce the number of targets but increase its healing.
Divinity I choose to assist with Mana since Heroic Morchok is probably your first heroic encounter in the Dragon Soul Instance. and Divine plea will definitely be getting used in this encounter as you will certainly see some high healing output in this fight especially if you are 2 healing it like my guild did.
Minor Glyphs
For your minor glyphs it is really pretty arbitrary here. Feel free to use whatever you like as none of the glyphs will really provide much assistance in heroic Morchok other than possibly Beacon of Light if you are for some reason switching around your Beacon in the encounter which I see no use for.
Talents
For the talent selection I am just going to point out a few key points of the spec rather than go line by line. Remember this is a spec that you will use specifically for Heroic Morchok so put it in your secondary spec slot so you can quickly revert back to your normal spec once he is downed, and can continue on through the Dragon Soul. This is an optimized spec for the Heroic Morchok encounter.
The first thing you may notice is that I opted to only go 1 point in Enlightened Judgements from the Holy tree and 0 points in Improved Judgement from the Retribution tree. My reasoning is that you will be required to stay fairly close to Morchok during this encounter and you only need 1 point in Enlightened Judgements which will put you way over the hit cap at this point in Cataclysm. The extended range on judgements is a waste of a talent in this encounter.
I have removed Sacred Cleansing since there is nothing to dispel.
Blessed Life is actually a talent I have reintroduced to my spec in patch 4.3 as there are a ton of places for Holy Paladins to gain from it within the Dragon Soul. Specifically on Morchok his Stomp and the explosion from the Resonating Crystal both can allow you to benefit from Blessed Life, and get those Word of Glory casts out there much quicker. If you are missing Blessed Life I highly suggest taking another look at it for even your normal spec.
Toughness vs. Crusade
The last major thing you may notice is optional, and really depends on whether or not you may be soaking the stomp with the tank. In my case I was asked to take the 2nd largest hit from Morchoks stomp with the tank since I was a plate wearer and had defensive cool downs such as Divine Protection and Aura Mastery. By gaining Toughness to increase my armor over Crusade I was able to run Devotion Aura and pop Aura Mastery during a stomp to significantly increase my armor value, and reduce the amount of damage I was taking from Morchok’s stomp. If you are however not soaking the stomp then I recommend you to take Crusade.
