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.