Malygos - The Lord of Magic

coredumperror · 11/25/08, 9:25 AM

My guild recently got our first kill of Malygos 25, but I'm sure we can do much better with some help from all you guys here at EJ.

The main thing I'm wondering about is strats for p3. How do you guys deal with healing? Our DPSers are great, getting huge stacks running (on our kill we had a few 14-stacks), but our heals are lackluster at best. I'm pretty sure this is because we aren't grouping up tightly enough to benefit effectively from Life Burst.

I've read various strats, but the most promising one I've seen is the "keep the whole raid grouped closely together and everyone move together when he casts Static Field" method. This sounds like it would be extremely effective, but I'm wondering if there's some other mechanic that makes this invalid?

As for p1, do you guys use any gimmics to get the denser raid members to always move in the opposite direction of the tank when the raid comes out of Vortex? We had many wipes to that from people following the tank, and any advice would be greatly appreciated.

Illundai · 11/25/08, 9:41 AM

We used the "move around him tactic" and it worked great. I can't think of any reason that would invalidate this strategy, there are no real downsides to it. Even better, you can see who is the dumb one who can't move out of the fire if he gets killed by static field.

That said, for phase 1 we just marks on me (I'm one of the two designated pullers for the power sparks with Death Grip) and since then the deaths due to standing in front of Malygos has significantly decreased. We put up a big skull on the tank too, to indicate where he is so there is really no excuse. Putting up a mark on the drake of someone who knows what he's doing in p3 helps a lot as well.

For the Death Knights out there that have to pull sparks, this macro was extremely useful to me:

#showtooltip
/targetexact Power Spark
/cast Death Grip
/cast Chains of Ice

Just press that twice in quick succession and you will pull the spark and instantly bring it to 0% movement speed for a few moments, so it can be stunned.
Just throwing it out there.

Lgs · 11/25/08, 11:28 AM

You are correct: After 2-3 attempts as a dragon, the majority of people will just pick it up for DPS. Healing is always going to be difficult in a 3D space, then throw in having to move a lot and raid frames not working. But the largest problem we had was shields just plain not working. At first I thought it was just people not knowing how to do the fight, but then it happened to me for several pulls. We still got him easily, but I'm wondering if anyone else is experiencing that broken mechanic.

Kaidman · 11/25/08, 11:39 AM

For phase 1 I am tanking. Every single time when in the Vortex I point north and when we hit the ground I go north, while telling the raid to go south. No matter where the spark is coming from we go in these directions.

I have a question for phase 3. Is there a way to turn off the trippy rainbow colors around him? I have seen some kill videos which look just like the black space which is surrounding the platform in phase 1 during phase 3, but when I go into phase 3 I have rainbow colors around which is a major distraction.

stayclean · 11/25/08, 11:42 AM

In P1 after the tornado thing, we have the raid run to the last spark field, or a bunch of totems on the ground. Then the tank runs the other way.

Also, rogues can use Killing Spree and warlocks can use the demon circle teleport to get out of the tornado. There's probably a few other things that might work, but this is what we've found out so far.

Carebare · 11/25/08, 11:50 AM

Originally Posted by coredumperror

My guild recently got our first kill of Malygos 25, but I'm sure we can do much better with some help from all you guys here at EJ.

The main thing I'm wondering about is strats for p3. How do you guys deal with healing? Our DPSers are great, getting huge stacks running (on our kill we had a few 14-stacks), but our heals are lackluster at best. I'm pretty sure this is because we aren't grouping up tightly enough to benefit effectively from Life Burst.

The main thing is to have each group have 1 designated healer, and then 1 person who dps's but is that group's replacement healer. If your DPS is really good, which it sounds as though it is, 2 healers per group is not unreasonable if healing is your weak spot. You'll still make the timer fine. You should never have to use Life Burst unless your group is mostly brain dead and hugging static fields.

Each group should have a designated area they go to (NW, NE, SW, SE, S works well). The main issue with range is the Z axis. This is combated by having everyone fly "up" until they are level with Malygos. After that I just go down my group stacking the Lifebloom (3).

As for good range indicators, I use Pitbull party pets without a problem. It gives me range checks and an easy way to determine which pets are actually in my party (Grid fails at this).

Since I tend to also float heal/cross-cover other groups, I also enable Pitbull Raid Pets and just keep them vertical on the right side of my screen. If I see someone low, even if they are outside of my group, I'll put some hots on them provided my own group is stable.

As for p1, do you guys use any gimmics to get the denser raid members to always move in the opposite direction of the tank when the raid comes out of Vortex? We had many wipes to that from people following the tank, and any advice would be greatly appreciated.

Aside from your AOE healers, no one really has anything to do during vortex. While they are in the air they should change their facing to where ever you have the raid congregate and autorun on landing. Works great.

mako · 11/25/08, 12:15 PM

Originally Posted by coredumperror

My guild recently got our first kill of Malygos 25, but I'm sure we can do much better with some help from all you guys here at EJ.

The main thing I'm wondering about is strats for p3. How do you guys deal with healing? Our DPSers are great, getting huge stacks running (on our kill we had a few 14-stacks), but our heals are lackluster at best. I'm pretty sure this is because we aren't grouping up tightly enough to benefit effectively from Life Burst.

I've read various strats, but the most promising one I've seen is the "keep the whole raid grouped closely together and everyone move together when he casts Static Field" method. This sounds like it would be extremely effective, but I'm wondering if there's some other mechanic that makes this invalid?

As for p1, do you guys use any gimmics to get the denser raid members to always move in the opposite direction of the tank when the raid comes out of Vortex? We had many wipes to that from people following the tank, and any advice would be greatly appreciated.

Perhaps my guild goes about this fight in a strange way, but our phase 3 strategy does not assign healers. We had everyone spread out and dps, shielding if targeted by the beam. After taking damage, the individual raid member would heal themself with the hot and finisher if necessary. Keeping 2-3 combo points and 50 energy at all times in order to shield.

To avoid post-vortex deaths due to stupidity (breath, etc), we always have our raid positioned to the south. We instruct our raid members to face their character south and be ready to move forward upon landing, and not stress over doing damage while the vortex is active. Throwing up an engineering flare could help less attentive players.

Vrakk · 11/25/08, 12:49 PM

I was one of 4 healers for phase 3. My strategy was to use the /console command to zoom my camera way out, and turn on friendly nameplates. Heal people with the blue beam obviously, or any dragons you see near the electric clouds. We split the raid into two rotating groups.

Cybelirrae · 11/25/08, 12:49 PM

Maybe we are always looking for the easiest way to do things, but we found that every man for himself didn't work, nor did 6 healers looking to heal people in a spread out mass. Our solution was to have all the dragons clump on top of eachother, have 10 people assigned to mash the AoE heal and 15 dps. If we get a static field, we move left as a group. This strat made phase 3 trivial for us, but lots of other solutions obviously work.

• Snowy · 11/25/08, 12:54 PM

I'll be honest, I really like the elegence of having the whole raid clump up. You would need far less healers, and there's still no excuse for anyone dying to the ball lightning void zone. Nobody is going to be out of range for healing too.

Even if you don't do it this way now, I think this would become almost mandatory to push the DPS as fast as possible for the timed achievement kill.

Vhex · 11/25/08, 1:02 PM

We've been dealing mostly with raid frame issues and shields flat out not working. It's odd because the drake quest outside (aces high) works fine and well and perfectly. But the drakes inside the instance use a different mechanic. We have 2~3 people who simply do not get the drake frame even using the default Blizzard UI even though their pet frame shows up when on the disk and the drake quest outside works perfectly. They also get everyone elses drake frames.

There are several other buggy issues that we managed to work around by doing all sorts of wierd hoodoo (click on your pet frame, then malygos, then yourself again, then malygos again, focus yourself, etc...) but we typically lose 5~6 people in the first few seconds due to frames simply not working. We have people in range of him with a 5 combo point stack and 80 energy mashing fire shield and it doesn't go off.

As for vortex's, after the first one we just have everyone run south except MT until after the breath and then adjust. After that we just have everyone run to wherever the spark buff is and it's up to the MT to point it away from raid people.

Honestly we're finding phase 2 to be the worst. We're having the same issues we used to with KJ shield where people get gibbed by an 18k bolt or whatever while in the shield. I mean clearly in the shield. Like were standing in it for 3+ seconds and it just doesn't pick up.

It's a neat encounter, but the psuedo-bugs really ruin it. Phase 3 just goes on way too long when 1/5th of your raid is crippled by random UI errors. Once we get those ironed out it shouldn't be an issue.

x1tiger1x · 11/25/08, 1:12 PM

Originally Posted by Lgs

You are correct: After 2-3 attempts as a dragon, the majority of people will just pick it up for DPS. Healing is always going to be difficult in a 3D space, then throw in having to move a lot and raid frames not working. But the largest problem we had was shields just plain not working. At first I thought it was just people not knowing how to do the fight, but then it happened to me for several pulls. We still got him easily, but I'm wondering if anyone else is experiencing that broken mechanic.

I've noticed this as well. The best thing I've found is that when you get the emote / Raidwarning that you are being focused, immediately target yourself (your "pet"), spam the HoT a bit, and then hit the shield when you start taking the damage.

Grayson Carlyle · 11/25/08, 1:25 PM

If you are using the Blizzard buttons and have FuBar with a lower bar, the vehicle UI will not show up while in combat, you'll simply get the message "Interface action failed because of an addon". Disabling FuBar for the fight will probably help a lot of people. I'm sure there are a few dozen other addons that will break it too, but FuBar is a pretty common addon.

Cybelirrae · 11/25/08, 1:43 PM

Originally Posted by Snowy

I'll be honest, I really like the elegence of having the whole raid clump up. You would need far less healers, and there's still no excuse for anyone dying to the ball lightning void zone. Nobody is going to be out of range for healing too.

Even if you don't do it this way now, I think this would become almost mandatory to push the DPS as fast as possible for the timed achievement kill.

I agree completely. We went with 10 healers to ensure the AoE heal worked to keep people up, and with an occasional hot to people that got focused, it did. I think you could really do it with only 5 or 6 healers now that we have the hang of it.

◊ chalon · 11/25/08, 1:55 PM

"Every man for himself" worked really well for us. I could see clumping up and having a few people assigned to AE heal working as well, but I honestly like the individual responsibility of everyone being responsible for their own drake. You also substantially reduce the raid damage from the static fields, because everyone can be spread out around Malygos, so only a couple of people will take a tick or two every time he casts it, as opposed to potentially the entire raid taking damage. Also this way, at any one time only 1-2 people are removed from DPSing as opposed to 5-6 (or more) not DPSing at all.

As for the shield bugged and not working, one trick that ended up working for us was as soon as P3 starts, immediately throw 2 heals on your drake and use the shield. Once you get that initial shield cast off, the shield seems to work 100%.

As for taking random 17k+ bolts while in the shield in P2--I had that happen to me once, not sure what happened exactly.

Amorpheus · 11/25/08, 2:51 PM

Same problems here, sometimes it works with combo points from Malygos, sometimes it doesn't. What worked for me was building CP on myself through the HoT and targetting my own drake to use the shield.

Supa918 · 11/25/08, 3:01 PM

For phase three, grouping up in two big groups and designating two people per group to heal worked well for us. The drawback is obviously a cloud spawning and nailing half the raid with AoE damage. The way we countered that was saying beforehand for everyone to move in the same direction following. The advantage that this strat gave us was allowing the bulk of the raid to focus on getting their Engulf in Flames stacked up as high as possible. We found with everyone healing themselves as well as DPSing, it was much easier for people to drop their stack upon being focused. Applying the shield, then healing the drake up again was usually enough time for the stack to drop. The AoE heal combined with a few on the spot healers made phase three much easier for us.

Hopefully the issue with the shield is fixed soon, because that was a source of a few wipes for us once everyone had a good grasp of how phase 3 worked, the shield just plain not working despite having the energy and CP's was quite frustrating.

On a different note though, the Malygos fight gives me a lot of hope for the future of WotLK raids because it is a very fun and unique fight. I can't wait to see what else Blizz has waiting for future raid encounters. (Any encounter with huge damage buffs and hover boards is ok with me

)

mako · 11/25/08, 3:06 PM

Originally Posted by chalon

As for taking random 17k+ bolts while in the shield in P2--I had that happen to me once, not sure what happened exactly.

A common reason people observe "dying in the shield" is because of latency and jumping. When you jump into the shield (as far as i know) your location isn't updated until landing (server-side), meaning that there's a good chance death will occur despite your character being "safe" on your own screen. My guild resolves this issue by running/walking into shields on Malygos/Kil'Jaeden instead of jumping into them.

◊ chalon · 11/25/08, 3:11 PM

Haha, it's pretty funny if that's the case. It would probably explain it too given how often I instinctively hit spacebar.

Zifna · 11/25/08, 3:31 PM

Taking a slight sidestep once in the safezone may help decrease this problem too, because direction changes will update your position on the server more quickly (i.e. autorunning in will get you much farther before dismounting than running in using arrow keys and changing direction).

Stopokingme · 11/25/08, 3:34 PM

Originally Posted by mako

A common reason people observe "dying in the shield" is because of latency and jumping. When you jump into the shield (as far as i know) your location isn't updated until landing (server-side), meaning that there's a good chance death will occur despite your character being "safe" on your own screen. My guild resolves this issue by running/walking into shields on Malygos/Kil'Jaeden instead of jumping into them.

Wasn't the complete opposite the case? Your position updating slower or incorrectly while running in versus immediately when jumping in? At least, that's my guilds experience. Could well be just another myth ofcourse

Aszhalinde · 11/25/08, 4:06 PM

I don't know why you need so many people healing. I could see it being done with 1, with a stacked up raid, just to keep the healing buff up. As long as you aren't taking Malygos's 30 yard aoe, the one aoe heal should keep everybody full from static clouds (unless you stand in them). After that, one of his focuses won't kill you through shield if you're at full health. Stack a couple hots on yourself to help after the shield ends, without letting your stack drop, and the aoe healer will have you back to full pretty quick unless you get focused twice in a row, in which case you might need to do some aoe healing yourself.

coredumperror · 11/25/08, 6:06 PM

Me and some guildies went and did the "Aces High!" daily together outside the Nexus, which lets you practice on dragons just like the p3 drakes and against dragons that are quire similar to Malygos, and we made some really good observations about how the mechanics of the drakes work.

1) ONLY the default UI target frame will show your drake's combo points. As of right now, neither Pitbull nor Xperl know how to show your pet's CPs on a target. My GM reported that his IceHUD's SunderCount display was showing his CPs, though. I then installed and messed with IceHUD, and the ComboPoints display will also show your dragon's CPs. I did some digging in the IceHUD code, and found this choice segment:

	elseif IceHUD.WowVer >= 30000 then
		-- Parnic: apparently some fights have combo points while the player is in a vehicle?
		local isInVehicle = UnitHasVehicleUI("player")
		points = GetComboPoints(isInVehicle and "vehicle" or "player", "target")

I've tried editing that into the xperl target frame code, but I can't get it to work. Any UI coders out there?

2) If you stack up hots on yourself with auto-self cast, you cannot use any finisher unless you target your drake manually. You have CPs on yourself, but you can't do any finisher without CPs on your target. The easiest way I've found to target my pet is Shift-F1, which is the default "target my pet" hotkey. You can also keybind the macro "/tar pet" to target your drake.

3) Unit frames like Xperl and Pitbull show the players, instead of the dragons, which prevents you from properly targeting dragons for heals during p3. With Pitbull, you can have it display "Raid pets" frames, though, which will be the dragons. I don't know how to do this with XPerl. The way that I got this working for myself was by dragging each party's unit frames out of the Blizzard raid UI, as they automatically switch to the dragons during p3.

As for shield deaths in p2, I've found, through repeated attempts to go into flight form while running out of a building, that you must stop moving for the server to register your location correctly. So, deaths in the shield are most likely due to people still being running in from the old shield when they get hit. Be sure to ask your raiders who have issues with this to very briefly stop when their toon has entered the shield graphics, before continuing to their final spot.

KamPa · 11/25/08, 7:31 PM

What I want to know about phase 2, is if double Barrage hits outside shield are intented. It is quite rare, but pretty much kills any non-tank on the spot, both in 10 and 25 man. Can't outheal it, as it does around 30k damage in split second, without any prior warning about who is targeted. Unless you get perfect shields where you never have to run outside, it can and will happen eventually.

Compared to this, I found phase 3 quite trivial. After pointlessly fighting UI couple times, designating group healers, spliting raid and cursing sloppy targetting on pretty much any non-default unit frames, we simply grouped up and spammed AOE heal, while strafing storms clockwise. The UI part is very annoying and would really hurt, if this encounter was tuned on T9 level, not introductory one.

• Intermission · 11/25/08, 8:07 PM

I really dont know why people would be using up to 10 healers in p3. We used 2 healers in the 10-man, and 3 healers in the 25 man. We had no deaths on the kill (3rd p3 attempt), and I dont remember seeing anyone get below 50% (I was one of the healers).

The great thing is, you dont even need raid pet frames to be an effective healer. The 3 healers simply chain cast 5 Revivify's on themselves and then cast Life Burst. Repeat until Malygos is dead. There are advantages of having good pet frames though, so you can yell at people that are slow to move out of Static Field, and you can cast your next x5 HoT + AoE heal on that target instead of yourself... but it's certainly not needed to keep the entire raid alive.

Note: this is done using the group-up and rotate method outlined above. We figured it out in our 10-man and it worked even better in the 25. Without the 10-man experience, the 25-man p3 probably would of taken us a lot longer to learn and figure out how to position ourselves.

edit: I just want to make this clear; I'm not trying to brag/speculate about how little healers it can be done with. I just want to tell people just how brainless it can be done. Target your own drake, cast HoT 5 times, cast Life Burst. Repeat. Even if people fail to use a Flame Shield, the 25% heal that comes from each healer every ~7 seconds would most likely keep you alive. You could even start with 5 or more healers doing the same thing, and then just drop a healer or 2 if you dont meet the DPS requirements.