Tanking: 3 tanks (2 on 10-man). This boss is tauntable.

Healing: Go slightly healing-heavy on heroic, although you can go healing light on normal mode if you have versatile healers who can cover tank healing and raid healing with ease. We take 5 for normal and 6 on heroic (2 and 3 on 10-man).

• Phase 1: The majority of the damage is on the tanks, with the occasional heal on ranged who get Coldflamed (should be few or no people, perhaps slow-moving hunters).
• Phase 2: All of the damage is on the raid. AoE heals and HoTs will shine here. On heroic mode the damage on the raid will be pretty extreme and concentrated on a few people. On heroic mode it is important to assign healers to focus specifically on healing the people on Bone Spikes, and to use defensive cooldowns for Bone Spike + Coldflame combinations.

Key Buffs: Frost Resistance Aura may mitigate some Coldflame damage. Armour buffs will help to mitigate the physical damage from Bone Storm.

Key Debuffs: Impaled

Video(s): Marrowgar Heroic (Tankspot)

Phase 1

Everyone should stand within Marrowgar’s rear hitbox and DPS or heal as applicable.

Every few seconds Marrowgar will target a random player at range and will shoot a line of Coldflame in their direction which moves outwards in a straight line. Anyone standing in the Coldflame takes 8k damage per second. However, if everyone else is within his hitbox he will target the tanks, who should simply step aside slightly to avoid it. It’s best to either have a pre-determined direction to move in or a marked tank to follow.

Every 20 seconds he will cast Bone Spike Graveyard, impaling 3 (1 on 10-man) players on a bone spike, incapacitating them and causing 10% of their health as physical damage per second until the spike is killed. All DPS should nuke these down quickly. This debuff on the player is Impaled.

Phase 2

Every 30 seconds Marrowgar will cast Bone Storm, whirling quickly. He will pick a random target, zoom over to them, whirlwind on their location for a couple of seconds, dispatch four lines of coldflame at 90 degrees to each other (in a + shape) and then pick a different player to charge. He will do this 4 times over 20 seconds.

The Bone Storm deals physical damage to the whole raid, although the amount of damage you take depends strongly on how close you are to him. If he is spinning on top of you you will take approximately four times the damage of someone 20 yards away from his hitbox, so it is important to scatter from him when he charges towards you. (This is easily healable on normal, but very much not on heroic, so learn to do it now).

The raid need to be careful not to get trapped by the Coldflame, which will cover a moderate proportion of the floor in this phase.

After 4 charges Marrowgar will stop whirling and return to Phase 1. All of the tanks must be ready to move back in fairly quickly to share the first Saber Lash or you risk losing a tank.

Heroic

• Bone Spike Graveyard will be cast during Bone Storm
• Coldflame trails remain up for 8 seconds, compared to 3 seconds on normal
• Marrowgar charges one extra time during Bone Storm
• Bone Storm deals significantly increased damage, as high as 11,000 per second at minimum range

Phase 1 proceeds as normal, bearing in mind that the Bone Spikes have slightly increased HP, so grouping up under the boss is vital to kill them quickly enough. This also allows the Coldflames to be controlled, since they will almost always go towards the tanks who will have their backs to a wall. This is important when they last so much longer, to prevent the floor being covered and leaving players with little room to spread out and run away.

A few seconds before Phase 2 begins the raid should run away from Marrowgar, spreading out within the central circular pattern on the floor. Moving away helps to reduce the damage from the first couple of ticks of Bone Storm which Marrowgar will do on his tanking spot, while remaining in a fairly close grouping helps with multi-target and AoE heals. If Marrowgar charges to your position you should run away quickly.

Have your tank(s) and any ranged pets (for example Imps) stand well outside the rest of the raid for Bone Storm. Marrowgar will happily, perhaps preferentially, target more distant players and pets, and any time where he’s whirlwinding outside the bulk of the raid is valuable recovery time.

When Bone Spikes get applied, healers should be assigned to watching for this and heal their target as quickly as possible. Deadly Boss Mods assigns raid marks.

On 10-man I would recommend assigning a specific healer to Spikes and a backup as well, and having that healer remain most central.
On 25-man assigning 2-3 healers to Bone Spike victims and spreading them out around the group should suffice.
The other healers need to be alert in case the Spike healers get Impaled themselves.

The ranged DPS should prioritise killing Bone Spikes as quickly as possible. If the player on the Bone Spike is also in Coldflame then a defensive cooldown may be needed to keep them alive through the damage.

It may be helpful to assign raid groups to areas or halves of the room and to assign healers to each. In the event that the raid is forced to move by Marrowgar or the Coldflame this should ensure that healers do not get too separated from the raid.